>> next, "q &a" then nick clegg at the party conference. you say it's a con game made to suit the interests of the tenured faculty who would

prefer to write obscure tomes rather than teach broad introductry classes to freshmen. >> it occurred to me in researching this book that the professors have very different interests than students do and parents do. what gets rewarded is publicication, publicication and more publicication. and it's actually, not your imagination in case you've read an academic book lately, it's supposed to be obscure because you as an academic have to basically blaze new trails. you have to always be saying something new. for instance last year there were 100 new academic works published on shakes sphere. now, love shake speer, studied shake speer in college but have to wondor whether there is actually worth professors' time to be writing new kind of theatrical twists on shake spear as opposed to teaching a broad are introductry class on hamlet. >> where did this start?

>> it started with the progressives in the 1920s. there was this whole idea of a research university which came over from germany and sort of planted itself on our shores in the early part of the 20th century and it was really sort of kind of two things. one was with the scientific research, especially in the physical and biological sciences people really were blazing new trails and there was a lot of new ground broken and the whole idea was that nobody really could judge the quality of the work unless you were really truly familiar with the sort of new complex scientific system that was being employed. and i think i get that on some level. but what happened was the standards for the physical sciences then shifted over to the social sciences and humanities and suddenly those professors always hah to be saying something new and could only be judged again by people inside their field. there was also another progressive idea which was that the sort of form the experts in

society. they were supposed to be what we now call the public intellectuals and supposed to be kind of adding to society's store of knowledge. and again, i think this is what one result that you see of this today is that professors kind of stand apart and we are not supposed to in the broader society kind of really question what it is that they're doing when they're engaged in their research. >> the title of your book is the faculty lounges and other reasons why you won't get the college education you paid for. where did you get the idea? why is this necsa americans lov education. i talked to one pollster who said it's like mom and am pie. but i think right now the costs have gotten to the point where people are questioning higher education's value. so in my opinion, this is actually a very good time to look at kind of where we've come and not to say that we need to scrap the whole system whether college education isn't worth it but to say that we the

need to build more accountability into the system and for students and parents paying those tuition bills we need to have a good sense of what kind of undergraduate education they are getting. >> how many schools are there in the united states that grant four-year degrees? >> there are about 5,000 or 6,000 accredited colleges and so it's obviously hard to write kind of a broad book that kind of covers what all of them are doing because they're engaged in many kinds of activities. some of them consider themselves more vocational, some consider themselves liberal arts, some want to be research universities. but there are some thing that is they seem to have in common. and one of them is this sort of drive to research. i was very surprised to find that even at community colleges in so-called teaching universities, not research universities, the drive to publish is what is always rewarded at these schools.

>> what kind of a home did you grow up in? >> an academic one, of course. >> where was it? >> in massachusetts. my parents met getting their phds in the university of chicago and now my sister has her own. so i'm the last member of my family that has one. but i grew up very, with a deep sense that higher education can be extraordinarily worthwhile and that it can really change your character, it can change your life, it can change your career, it can change everything if it's done right. but what i worry about is that the many of the faculty -- and it's not just the faculty individually making decisions. but the incentives that are put in place in the system i think are what are undermining the undergraduate education. wrr did you get your degree? >> i got my degree from harvard. >> in what? >> english and government. >> was it worth the money? >> well, you have to ask my parents.

it was their money. i think it was. but i had an advantage. i mean, i had parents who actually were insiders and who were able to advise me about what kind of classes to take and which professors were actually interested in teaching. and i knew what to look for. and i really think so few people have that going into college and their parents are just thinking, well, this is the next logical step. i want junior to be a member of the middle class or the upper middle class and i want them to have a good job and i want them to get something out of college educationly. so let's just send them here because this is what u.s. news and world report says. >> what do your parents teach? >> my father teaches at holy cross in worcester and my mother doesn't teach any more. she taught at a number of different colleges before founding her own think tank at worcester that tells the city what it does wrong. >> what do they think about

this book? >> i joke about my father. the book could have been confessions of an ungrateful child. but i think he takes some of the criticisms of the book very seriously and i think he feels as if being in a small liberal arts college is some of the criticisms are not as applicable. but in a great deal of ways smaller colleges are not really representative of what most experience in higher education. but i emphasize that the most important thing i learned was that for er additional hour a professor spends in the classroom he or she will get paid less. and that is true not only at the big universities but at the small liberal arts colleges. >> what are you saying? that if you're a teacher and you're in the classroom, the more you spend in there the less you make? >> basically, any time spent in

the classroom is time not spent writing. so depending on how you divide your time will determine what level you will reach in the professor. >> who are they writing for? >> each other. i don't know w4e7b the last time you picked up a kind of an academic publicication was. but even harvard university press recently said that the average circulation of one of their academic publicications is 250 book. so when you consider that a lot of those books are actually just purchased automatically by libraries and that's harvard university press. when you think about all of the smaller university presses out there that are having a circulation even smaller than that -- and by the way, the expense of those books. i mean, academic librarians complain about this to me but students complain too. so to me somebody wrote a paper recently where they said that the academic publicication industry was driven by the

producers and not the consumers. and i think that that says it all. >> was this book your idea or the publisher's idea? >> it was my idea. >> now owned by rowland littlefield? >> yes. >> define the word -- not define it. but explain how someone gets tenure and what is it. >> so when you go to a university you could be offered something called a tenured-track position. about, i don't know, maybe 40 to 50% of academic positions out there are either tenure or tenure-track now. so if you are on the tenure-track, what happens is when you arrive at the university they start a clock and the clock goes for about seven years although it gets lengthened, at the university of michigan they lengthened it to ten years. and during that time you have to show why the university should keep you on permanently.

and what you do during that time, the university -- most claim that three things matter. what matters is your publicication record, your teaching record, and your service to the university. so serving on a variety of committees. they call this the three-legged stool of academia. so during that time, which by the way coin sides with a lot of other things going on in your life. people pointed out, for instance, that this is usually between 30 and 40, say, when women are maybe wanting to have children, start families. this is when the most intensive part of your career is going on when it's kind of an all or nothing. so at the end of that clock a committee, usually basically of your own department members, will look at that at your record and say up or down. >> so your fellows professors. >> exactly. and most of them in your own discipline. not like some professor in another department. it will be the people who you

have basically been with every day for the last 7 or 8 years will be sitting in secret judgment of you to decide whether or not you get to stay or leave. >> secret judgment. >> absolutely. the proceedings are not made public. and there's actually recently an interesting piece by a guy named daniel dress never who is a professor now who talked about how he did not get tenure a number of years ago and he was talking about kind of -- and his wife even contributed to the piece, too, about how it feels to sort of be judged in this way by the people who you thought were closest to you and who you had worked with cliegely and then they go into this back room and decide about your future. so what happens with that vote, the tenure vote is you either get to stay on permanently or you get out. >> immediately? >> i mean, by the next, by the following academic year. there's no in between. it's not like, oh, well, we'll give you oods couple years and see if your publicication record improves or why don't

you stay on a part time or temporary basis. >> what's the percentage of professors teaching on the tenure track to get tenure? >> i'm not sure. i mean, i think what -- you know, if you're on a tenure track, that means that they have a tenured position available at some point in the future. so some universities have started to cut down on the number of tenure tracks. that is, when somebody retires, you know, they will say, ok, sthats going to be now an adjunct position which we can get to in a minute. but getting turned down for tenure is a very common thing and i think a lot of people feel like they've been led on, like they do this certain number of years at university. and once you've been turned down at one university, it's very hard to start over at a new university. >> do they give you any warning during those seven years, or in the university of michigan's case ten years? >> some give you updates along

the way. but again, it's a very personality-driven process. and some schools grade you based on your collegiality which, you know, depends how well you play with others which i think is kind of insulting to a professional. but they also -- they'll give you some sense in terms of how big your stack of publications is, how they think you're doing relative to other candidates. but from what i've read and a lot of people find it to be a surprise. >> is there any appeal process if you did not get tenure? >> some schools have them. and again, there's a lot of -- there's not a lot of transparency in the process and i think that that should bother more people than it does, particularly universities. but so some schools do have this kind of back-aly way of finding your way into maybe the president's office or the provost's office and saying you want to be reconsidered and

maybe then the provost will suggest to the department it's time to reconsider. some schools have more formalized procedures. but a lot of them, it's hard to discern. >> help me out here. the professors don't have a transparent process, but if you listen to what comes out of a professor over years they're demanding all the time of openness. >> well, the professor yat is not among the more self-reflective bodies in my opinion in this country and there's not a lot of examination at what goes on. they want to talk about bioethics, they want to talk about government ethics but there's not a lot of talk about what goes on in the academy and the ethics of that. so i think the lack of transparency in the tenure process is one of the biggest problems that i see there. >> if you were to point out the person that you know that hates this book the most, who would it be? >> boy. let's see. well, i think the head of the

american association of university professors was asked to comment on my book by inside higher ed a few weeks ago and he said it left him speechless. so i was happy to take credit for that but i think he was very, very angry and particularly i think what most professors disagree with in that book is my argument about tenure's connection to academic freedom. that's sort of the first thing that comes out of professors' mouth when you say why do you need tenure? and they will automatically just thinking say to protect academic freedom. so i have a chapter in there, the first chapters, and i talk about what is acdem freedom and why does it need protecting? one of the argue wrments i make is about the rise of vocational education. tenure was originally this idea that professors should be able to be protected when they go out on the limb and say something controversial about their discipline.

and i say, ok, well maybe on the margins you can see how this would be important in the case of a couple of humanities professors, maybe a couple of cutting-edge physical science professors. but professors of business administration? and then i sort of also talk about some of the new discipline that is have talked about, security studies. there are basically professors of cooking who now have -- professors of nutritional studies who have tenure now. and when pressed, someone at the aup or a professor who is toing the party line will say, oh, well, we need someone who -- to have tenure in security studies so they can talk about immigration, even though it's controversial, and someone in nutritional studies needs to be able to say something controversial about obesity. this could go on indefinitely. there's no limit to the number of controversial thing that is need protection. but in my opinion, i think that the bounds of academic freedom

have just gotten -- have just been pushed too far. >> you wrote in that first chapter the american people themselves are directly responsible for what she sees as the oppressive atmosphere on campus, and you're referring back to a woman named bernsthreen. what are you talking about there? directly -- why are the american people responsible? >> elizabeth bernstein is a vice president at the ford foundation. and i went to hear her talk on a conference on academic freedom in new york a couple of years ago. and the ford foundation gives so much money to higher education that the audience is enthraled to hear her talk. and she began to list the threats that she saw in the american academy to academic freedom. and she listed, oh, conservative religious groups, she listed anti-evolution groups, she listed republicans. it just sort of went on and on. and at the end she said one of the biggest problems she saw

were cable news networks like fox, for instance, that were telling the american people about professors like the man at columbia who wished upon america a million mogea dishus or telling people about churchill telling people about the outrageous of american universities. and to her, what the problem was not the outrage. the problems was that now the american people was interested in the outrages. and the idea again, we get back to this question about, you think that university professors and the people who are interested in higher education want transparency. you would think that's sort of one of their buzz words. but, no. they look at transparency as, oh, now all these sort of, you know, the little people are now looking over my shoulder. and they couldn't possibly understand the scholarship that i'm engaged in. >> you and the next paragraph say, just to be clear here was a representative of the ford foundation, the sugar daddy of

modern liberalism complaining that innovation -- on and on. the sugar daddy? is that what they are? a liberal foundation? >> sure. ford foundation basically was responsible for sort of funding the great society before it was funded by the government. i mean, and even now if you look on campus, what are the programs the ford foundation funds? they fund something called the difficult dialogue program where at the college they will give you, if you're a college administration they will give you $100,000 to promote a dialogue on your campus about race, about sexual orientation, about all these things. but for ford, you know, the answers are already clear. i mean, the problem with race is that minorities are oppressed and they're still oppressed to this day and they're still suffering from the legacies of slavery. you know, sexual orientations are all good. it's just a matter of choice. they're not dialogues.

they're just sort of one-sided propaganda campaigns. >> where do you come from on the political scale? >> on the right. >> how did you get there? >> i came by it honestly. i think my parents were both qualified conserve -- would qualify themselves as conservatives. i think that i thought about it enough to -- i mean, i used to work for the "wall street journal" editorial page and i largely agree with that sort of philosophy on free markets, economically, but i'm also something of a social conservative too. >> your father teaches at holy cross. how does a -- the implication is that there aren't many conservatives in academia. >> there are not. one of the things that people like to say about tenure -- and i interviewed a lot of conservatives who defended tenure because they said i would lose my job tomorrow if i didn't have tenure. but the idea that tenure has really protected dissent on

campus is one that i think we have had enough experience with to examine a little bit more carefully. you know, just to give you an example, you know, when barack obama was running in the last election, american professors gave eight times as much money to him as to john mccain. now, obviously john mccain lost but it wasn't quite by that margin. you know, but it's not just politically that dissent is not protected. i talk to people who were familiar with arguments in physics departments and they said if you come out with the wrong view of theory, you will also be sort of pushed out. it's not an environment that toll rates dissent as any sort very well. there was a story recently about a professor at ohio university who actually got tenure. he was -- he had been a journalist before.

he got tenure and then he wrote a piece for the chronical about how he had resolved to act from now on, now that he has tenure. basically, he just said, i just -- i'm done. i'm not going to rock the boat any more. i'm not going to stand up any more. you know, it was just, like someone who had been beaten down. and i think that process that we were talking about, that seven-to ten-year process where you're with these people every day and you're trying so hard to please them because you want that job for life, i think what it just promotes is an atmosphere in which everyone keeps their head down and their mouth shut. >> have you ever ran into anybody who is conservative in a college atmosphere and who keeps their head down on their politics until they get tenure? >> i guess i sort of hear these stories. this was sort of the famous line of my former professor who sort of jokingly advises people who ask his advice to first get

tenure and then hoist the jolly roger. >> he sat right there one day and he said he was only one of six professors in harvard. >> who was a conservative? >> yes. >> see, i probably come to a similar tally. so, yeah. i mean, i think -- but it is a rare person, i think, who can control themselves for that long and then suddenly at the age of 40 basically wake up and start speaking their mind. i mean, if you can do it, if you can kind of sneak under the radar for that long, fool people into thinking this is somebody who will really get along well with the liberal atmosphere at the university and then all of a sudden wake up and say, ah haw, i have tenure and now i'm going to outmyself to everyone, good for you. but i don't know how many of us can keep it to ourselves for that long or once we have, really want to offend all the people that we've befriended. >> you went to harvard and

you're a conservative and there aren't many conservatives teaching at harvard. but they didn't change your mind. >> no. i mean, look, i -- i mean, he was talking about political conservatives. i took a number of apolitical classes at harvard. first, i was majoring in english and government. so i took government classes with harvey mansfield, with peter berkwiths and with a couple of other number of professors who i think would classify themselves as conservatives. but what i really liked about the professors that i had was that they left politics at the door. i mean, i took classes on spakespeer and plato and even harvey, who was a well-known conservative outside of the classroom, we didn't sit around discussing republican talking points or something like that. in fact, i remember his last sort of popular book was on

manliness. and i took a grad wult seminar with him, i think it was my senior year, and a number of kind of let's call them radical feminists showed up. i think they wanted to disrupt the class and get their views heard and protest, you know, the idea that we would even have such a class. and harvey sits down and he's a very sort of mild-manrd guy and he just sort of talking about plato and courage. and i think these women were just sort of like, where do we go from here? i thought we were going to talk about gloria steinham or about some sexist pigs that we could start harassing. and i think my point is that so many of the professors that i had, i appreciated the fact that their politics were not part of the curriculum. >> you say that in 1994, that there was, they could not restrict the age at -- well,

which you had to retire. we used to have to retire in this country at 65. it was originally passed back in the 80s. but schools got to, what, 94. and what has that done to the universities? well, it's exass baiting the tenure problem. people say why not just reinstitute mandatory retirement? what you have on campus now is a lot of aging baby boomer professors who are not really doing their job very well and they're just kind of waiting until their 401(k) gets big enough that they feel comfortable retiring and every time the market takes a hit they're like, one more year. so it's a problem. and i certainly see how mandatory retirement could solve that in some sense. but i'm very reluctant to go that way. i mean, i had some great professors who were 70 years old. i shouldn't say but i certainly, you know harvey is well over 70 now and many of my

professors that i had at the time were certainly well over 65. they had great experience teaching and they happened to be good teachers after that. so why should we arbitrarily kick them out just because some people at that age decide that they're not going to do their job any more? >> if i had tenure at a school does that mean they couldn't fire me? >> it's technically not supposed to mean that. but turf say i have talked to so many administrators who have just said it is almost never worth it to fight that battle. i mean, we mentioned ward churchill a minute ago. when i started this book i kind of resolved, ok, i'm not going to mention him on every page. he's kind of an outliar and people are sick of him and by the time this book comes out he will be old news. the week the book was published the colorado supreme court decided to hear his case. six years after he was fired is still fighting this battle.

so you're the president of colorado university hank broun who has stepped down. he must wake up everything morning and think this man will not give up. it cost the university so much money to get rid of these people. and even when they have a great case. majorism, shoddy scholarship, there was so much wrong. but yet it will continue going through the court. so to me, the lesson that i've gotten, if you look at the chronical part of our education or inside higher ed, one of these news letters they periodically run advice about how administrators can gently push these people out. and one of them i was sort of shocked to read was how an administrator can say to a professor for whom it's time to go, well, you could still teach one class. ok? so one guy wrote in saying that they had tried this at his school but so they had hired a new young professor dynamic professor to take the place of

this aging professor that everybody agreed was incompetent and then they had to fight over who was going to teach this one class because -- well you promised i could stay. and so the compromise was they would each teach a section of the class. the article by the way was called you'll pry this course from my cold dead hands. so they had this fight over who was going to teach the class. they each decided they were going to teach half of it. and there's no mention about this article about how the students are going to get someone utterly incompetent. to me it demonstrated that tenure was just -- it has nothing to do with the student. the teaching is the last thing on these administrator's and factties' minds. >> define the -- faculty's minds. >> define the difference a state school versus a private school. >> as a student? >> what are some of the overall differences about unions and tenure and costs. >> so the tenure system is not

much different. people go back and forth between public and private universities and they largely have the same system. it's still sen years. there's some different rules about what is protected speech and different kinds of senses of academic freedom because with the public schools the courts are more involved because of taxpayer funded. so the tenure system is not much different. unions are certainly somewhat different but so what happened was in 1990 i think there was a ruling by the supreme court that said if private universities did not want to recognize faculty union they did not have to. the ruling was called the nrlb versus yowsheesha university and what it said was that faculty are like management. so they cannot -- they need not be recognized at the union.

public university campuses. unionization is one of the fastest growing areas of organized labor in the country. you have a situation in where the unions have recognized that obviously the manufacturing base is shrinking and the private union base is shrinking so public sector white collar jobs are where the growth is going to happen. so you saw actually some of this, i think people were a little surprised during the fight about wisconsin a few months ago to hear that there actually were unions of professors at the university of wisconsin. i mean, unions are generally something we think of as for people who are in jobs where they can really be exploited, where maybe they're not as educated. and yet it's really growing in higher education. so that's one big difference. and i think you're seeing the effects of that. i mean, unions at the bargaining table will mean less

distinctions in terms of merit pay. it will -- pay will be based more on your level of seniority. and a lot of professors and administrators i talk to will say that unions have been a force for mediocrity on public university campuses. >> so i guess i have to have a phd if i'm going to get tenure. >> yes. >> which takes me how many years? >> well, that's lengthning too. it used to be five, six, seven years. now the median time to do a phd in english is 11 years. >> what do you do teach while you're going through that? >> you do. but it's not because you're working on your phd part time that it takes 11 years. in fact, one had a piece who said one of the reasons it's taking so long is this whole

mandate to find some new twist on things that people have written about so many thousands of times that you'll finally find the topic and then realize that somebody else has written that five years ago in some obscure journal and have to start from scratch. >> can you characterize how much money people make that are professors? >> not a lot. this is a full professor, you know, is -- >> you're at the top of your game. >> yes. you have tenure and you can't be promoted any more. so you're probably by that time, let's say in your late 40's maybe. and you could be making -- depending on the university, depending on the area, 60, 70, 80,000. i mean, the salaries of professors don't outrage me. i don't think that's the

problem. >> that's not the reason i ask. i wanted to go on and they have tenure and they're full professors and they make, say 70,000. how much actual teaching do they have to do? >> well, let's start with the public research universities. >> you've got tenure now. >> sure. >> you're home free. >> so you have tenure now. and at a research university, you could be teaching probably as little as two classes a semester. >> three hours a week each? >> yeah. yeah. pretty much. >> six hours in the classroom? >> so what happens is the assumption is that you will be spending approximately half of your time doing research. so if you ask a state lor for instance how much are you subsidizing research at your state university they'll say well not that much. the answer is a lot. because you are paying people a full salary to only be teaching half the time. >> do you by chance know who

gets the most amount of money in, of all the universities for research? >> you mean? >> from federal grants. >> no, i don't. there are about a hundred universities in america that make up something called -- part of a club called the american association of universities. and the only way you get into that very prestigious club is by getting a lot of federal grant money. and there was actually just a couple of schools recently got kicked out of it. well, syracuse decided it was about to get kicked out so they left voluntarily and the university of nebraska just left, too. what was interesting is they were getting private money for some of the research but that doesn't count for the aau. you have to be getting federal money. so the prestige is all wrapped up in this must be public government funds. so at a time when we are trying to figure out how to cut back and how to reduce the cost of higher education, they're thinking, how can we get more

out of the federal dollars. >> can they make money outside the classroom outside the university when they are tenured professors making 70,000 a year and teaching two classes a smest center >> sure. >> how much of their time -- who holds them accountable for research? >> you mean could they be making money doing research like for a private company? >> well, in other words, again i'm -- i've been at school for 15 years, i've got full professorship, i'm teaching my two classes but i really find myself capable of making lots of money over here and i don't want to do research for the school. can you just blow the school off? >> it would be hard to just blow the school off. i mean, usually what happens with research with real research grants is that the research, the application has to come from the university. so you're applying as part of a university program. it's hard for one single professor to just go up on his own and say i want to get research from the national --

funding from the national science foundation by myself. but it would be a different story if you have like a drug company. and this is where some of the controversy has happened recently, where you have professors who have kind of reached their own private agreement either with biotech companies or drug companies where they're making money and it's possible that they're their research is actually in some ways coming into conflict with their job. because the private companies obviously have particular ideas about the dome main that they're in and who owns this information. where as the university again this comes back a little bit to the transparency question. the university is supposed to be this free exchange of ideas and everything is out in the open and we're all supposed to be able to understand what's going on in these labs. so a professor, there was actually recently a story about i think in the "wall street journal," a student who had turned in a paper maybe it had

to do with biotech or a computer coding or something like that and the student was actually working for the company and felt like he couldn't complete this assignment without somehow violating his contract with this outside company. so there was a lot of i think conflicts of interest that are going on. >> what's an adjunct professor? >> is by very definition a temporary position. now, there are adjuncts who could be teaching for 25 years in the same place but their contract reentrepreneurials generally happen on a year to year or even semester to semester basis. they don't get tenure and they are not on the tenure track. so they will never come up. >> and they don't have to have a phd. >> no. many of them do. and so what happens is that adjuncts actually do the bulk of the teaching.

because -- >> in all the schools? >> not in all schools but in large universities. where you have a senior tenured professor who kind of opt out of life in the classroom after a certain point except for maybe graduate seminars or perhaps upper level undergraduate seminars. so they're basically brought in to kind of teach political science 101. >> how much are they paid? >> very little. in some cases significantly less than minimum wage. they're working conditions are -- there was a film that i watched when i was doing research that compared them to migrant workers and i have to say i thought the comparison might have gone a little bit far but it's pretty disturbing. i mean, they find out the week before the semester begins whether they have a job at all. they get paid next to nothing. >> give me an idea what they get paid. >> there was a professor i

talked to

it has a lot to do with the size of the university and to what extent. >> how many courses a eurydice teach? year does he teach?

>> why is it at holy cross? in? does he get 3 in >> harvard is a research university. >> it is considered a teaching college. >> be mentioned you were at the wall street journal. when did you work there? >> i worked there for five years. >> what did you do? >> i wrote about higher education. >> shouted to get that job? how did you get that job? >> i worked at magazines. i wrote another book prior to joining it about religious colleges in america. >> why did you do that? >> i had visited two schools

that had just opened up. i wrote a piece in a magazine about the two of them. i wanted to look into why they were growing so rapidly. >> patrick henry is down here. >> the other move to florida. >> wanted to find out about those two schools? >> they were attracting some extremely smart kids even though at the time neither one was accredited yet. they were attracting kids who did not want to stay in a religious ghetto but bring their ideas to bear. >> how were you there? >> two years. >> what did you take away? >> i was in charge of editing

the letters there. i kind of became familiar with the intricacies of a lot about foreign policy and domestic politics. i became more familiar with the way the magazine works and how it gets produced. >> and who thought of the title? >> that was me. >> where did you get the interest in that? was that at the journal when you started decks what triggered -- started? what triggered it? >> i tried to sell it to other publishers. it was about three years ago. i've been covering higher education for a long time. the driving force behind this was this sense that i have this

advantage of other people did not. i did not understand what was going on behind of the scenes there is all of the reporting i had done on higher education. what happens when a student walks onto campus. someone hands you a guide. they say pick anything. say what you like. administrators tout it as an adventure game. it is not. 18 year olds do not know what they do not know. to me, pretending that they will be able to crack for themselves education,ant people like to talk about this. they think people who are wrapped up in the idea of a core curriculum just one their

attachment to western civilization. i want a core curriculum because i think people need a basic foundation. the education and 18 year old will craft is haphazard. introduction of psychology on tuesday. french literature on wednesday. at the end of four years, can you really say what this broad education you're supposed to have what it turned into? professors are doing this to. professors want to spend time researching their narrow subject. no one is saying to them, no. you may prefer to teach a tiny seminar on an obscure topic but what these kids need is a broad introduction to your subject. >> use a there are no jobs. you say your sister is there. if she teaching?

>> she teaches about a conservatory. >> is to do that on purpose? >> no. . >> you also write for the higher education. it is so broken. not to mention the strike zone. it is so broke. >> how come? why are the other schools listing to get n? >> >> there are a couple of ways in which people try to measure the quality. but they say we're the envy of the world. they say you are talking about a very small percentage of kids. you're talking about graduate

students who are coming here for our hard science class is. it is not all of american higher education. the second thing i think that people seem to forget is that higher education has a monopoly. people want to get into college because college right now is the ticket to the middle class. i do not begrudge people that. i do not say you should find another way. right now we do not have much in the way. we do not have this. college has become the catchall for every different kind of career you want to pursue. i think we could do better.

they're creating their own kind of start up insidtead. there are working for ibm at the age of 13. the point he is trying to make is that there is a price for this. you could spend four years and this amount of money on something. you better understand what the value of it is. some people it is thought have much value. you can get a job out there without it. can employers find a way of measuring qualifications for a job with that using the college degree? i think we need to think more creatively. >> to have you talked about that has tenure the most convincing? >> the thing to do.

it is right. >> let's see. that is interesting. there are a number of concerns a professor's that i have talked to. i do not think john silver is in favor of getting rid of tenure but is in need of serious reform. >> 85 years old. he is very strong opinions about the form of higher education. he things we need to keep tenure in. i think it has protected some very smart people who have said some things that needed to be set. i understand that my arguments are a -- sort of throws them under a bus.

he sort of sums up what i did as my position. he's saving the jobs of 400 conservatives. he said the situation is so completely unbalanced the idea that we will keep the system because of the few professors that are out there seems silly. >> what is the cherry award? >> is a teaching awards. i think you get maybe $200,000 for being the best professor and america. i did a story about the three finalists. it was given out by baylor university. students can nominate you. there is a committee that judges the finalists and judges who will win this award based on

their ability to convey information to the students. >> ken starr is the president now. but is in waco taxes. you heard about the three that were the contestants. two other gentlemen. >> he was eventually the winner. i actually went to see them in person. they are very different styles of teaching. he is not dry. he was telling a story. he has been telling the story for many years. they're not a lot of fireworks going on in his classroom. i was sitting in the audience. the only visual aid he is putting up was the historical

photos. everywoman's listening to him. he knew how to tell this story. he was not reading. he is engaging with the audience. not a lot of fireworks. he did a speech he's the best professor in america. he is teaching kids who are not

necessarily interested in these subjects. >> let me ask about the best teacher in america. he said that when people are talking about why we judge professors by their publications and not by teaching, the first response is that you cannot measure teaching. this is all subjective. you know good teaching when you see it. i do not think that is true. these are professors. there are ways of measuring.

is that all marked up? >> do you think by the time they're old enough that they will think it is a good idea to go to college? one school is $65,000 a year. >> i think it is possible to get a decent college education. you have to be really careful. it again to the process of choosing the college. they're visiting colleges with their high school juniors. there is in a teaching going on.

do not sit on the class is that they say. though this is an intro class in a subject that you're interested in. >> did you do that before you went to harvard? >> appears to me three choices of college. >> y? >> no. they knew those places where i would get the education. carver was not one. -- harvard was not one. >> it was to isolate it for me. -- isolated for me. >> where did you meet has been chastened tax cuts at the wall street journal. >> you live where?

what does he do? >> he still works there. >> do you have another book in mind already? when did you finish this that >> it came out in june. >> i finished last fall. >> it is a different topic. >> is this what your situation is? >> my husband is of no faith. it is a subject that interests me. higher education is religion. >> this one is due in june. >> i think the next one will be bigger. i got funding to do a national survey. i spent about four months

traveling to do interviews of people across the country. this is a summary of a lot of things that i have learned about higher education over the last number of years. >> the name of the book is the faculty lounges. we thank you very much. thank you. >> for a dvd, call this number. q-and-a.com.www.-q

also available as a podcast. >> the tonight a speech from nick leg. after that, remarks from residential -- presidential candidates. later, another chance to see this. >> tomorrow, training afghan security forces. it is live at 10:30 a.m.. it is live at 10:30 a.m..