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In an election year, it came as no surprise that President Barack Obama’s State of the Union (SoU) address contained the now-familiar soaring rhetoric, as well as announcements designed to please students and recent graduates — voters who proved vital to his victory in 2008. However, with the power of the executive office to enact policy being limited, and with Republicans looking to oust him in November’s election, there are doubts about how many of his lofty ambitions will be realised in the months ahead.
In particular, the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act cited by Obama in his SoU address in mid-January may prove a sticking point. Despite pledging soon after taking office to implement the Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who entered the US as minors, allowing them to receive in-state tuition-fee rates or federal loans, Obama has found it difficult to garner enough bipartisan support to do so.
The legislation was filibustered and voted down in late 2010, and since then has lost the support of several high-profile Republicans, including the former presidential candidate John McCain, who do not want the Act passed without increased immigration enforcement. Nafsa, an Association of International Educators, released a policy document in November last year, urging the Obama administration to press ahead and not allow conservative factions in Congress to keep delaying the legislation. “This situation can continue because we have become all too willing to play on the anti-immigration side’s turf,” the organisation said.
Also highlighted by Obama in his address to Congress was the rising cost of college education. At an event at the University of Michigan on January 27, he expanded on his comments, which included the assertion that “higher education can’t be a luxury — it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford”. To this end, the president said that federal funds for campus-based aid programmes would be linked with “responsible campus tuition (fee) policies”.
However, while the Obama administration has said that the measure is necessary to keep tuition fees from “spiralling too high”, the move has prompted some concerns. Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, believes the policy is effectively introducing “price controls” at a time when universities are struggling with budget cuts and increased demand from students for financial aid.
President Obama also announced a new ‘Race to the Top’ scheme for college affordability, under which a $1 billion (Rs.4,800 crore) pot will be available for states “willing to drive systemic change in their higher education policies”. In addition to this, $55 million (Rs.275 crore) will be invested in a ‘First in the World’ competition, which the president hopes would find the “next breakthrough strategy that will boost higher education attainment and student outcomes”.
Academic stereotypes study
When dr. brent harger watched Henry Walton ‘Indiana’ Jones Jr, Ph D, leave his archaeology class in the middle of a lecture and set out to find the Holy Grail, he did not react with excitement, recoil at the close calls and inevitable snake pits, or laugh at the one-liners. Instead, he reflected that Prof. Jones made a pretty bad lecturer.
“He never pays attention to his students, as in: ‘Maybe I should have graded their papers before I left,’” said Dr. Harger, who was a postgraduate student when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was released in 1989. He now teaches sociology at Albright College, Pennsylvania.
“If that’s the image students are getting, they might think professors don’t care about them.” With this concern in mind, Dr. Harger and a colleague set about looking in more depth at depictions of academic faculty in film, from Sherman Klump in The Nutty Professor to Jurassic Park palaeontologist Alan Grant.
The resulting study, published in the journal Teaching Sociology, concludes that portrayals of professors in popular films are typically rife with racial and gender stereotypes, and that many are shown emphasising research over teaching and ethics. Female academics, for instance, are depicted by Hollywood studios as nurturing and often sexualised. Black professors often wear bow ties, beards and glasses — to mark them out, say the study’s authors, as intellectuals.
Professors were primary or secondary characters in 48 films that grossed at least $10 million (Rs.48 crore) in the US since 1985, the study found, and their ranks have grown noticeably since 2000. Most are comedies and dramas, with a few action, horror and romance titles thrown in.
Many feature “the romanticised image of the academic who’s really focused on his research”, says Harger. “Academics also make for good foils, in horror movies for instance. Then there’s the depiction of professors as being detached or socially awkward and unable to carry on a conversation.”
All of these projections affect how university students come to see lecturers — preconceptions that faculty members must respond to. “As a white male, I don’t have to deal with a lot of things in the classroom that my female friends have to deal with,” says Harger. “But women and African Americans have to do a lot of work to overcome these preconceptions.”
In the films that were the subject of Dr. Harger’s study — including Spider-Man II, The Day after Tomorrow, A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, Legally Blonde and Wonder Boys — 88 percent of the academics are white, 9.6 percent black, and most are male and middle-aged.
The study also found that black faculty are usually shown as being different from their white colleagues even in the way they dress. For example, nearly 90 percent of black academics are shown with facial hair, compared with fewer than a third of white males, while two-thirds wear glasses, against less than half of their white counterparts.
Academia is also a hotbed of sexual liaisons between academics and students if Hollywood is to be believed, with one in four films featuring such relationships, almost always between a male tutor and a female student. Other common cliches include breaches of research ethics, including scholars impatiently experimenting on themselves, and faculty members complaining about having to teach.
Dr. Harger plans to revisit the topic at a later date. “Will professors be seen as the heroes (in the future), or will they continue to be seen as socially awkward?” he asks.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)