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According to a leaked advance copy of President Obama’s State of the Union speech, the president will, with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell on the way out, ask America’s colleges and universities to let ROTC back in:

Our troops come from every corner of this country – they are black, white, Latino, Asian and Native American. They are Christian and Hindu, Jewish and Muslim. And, yes, we know that some of them are gay. Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love. And with that change, I call on all of our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and the ROTC. It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past. It is time to move forward as one nation.

There’s one problem with that call, though — the doors aren’t closed now.

As Professor Diane Mazur noted in the New York Times three months ago, no college or university currently bars ROTC from campus. Not one. Some faculty and students are opposed to such programs, and some universities choose not to grant course credit for ROTC, but the ban is entirely a myth.

Update | It should be noted that the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the federal government can withhold funds from any campus that bars military recruiters, and that many campuses have allowed recruiters to return since that ruling was issued. I don’t know whether any are currently still keeping them off.

It should also be noted that the DADT policy still remains in effect, and that the military is thus still discriminating against lesbian, gay, and bisexual servicemembers. Congressional repeal of DADT was a step toward ending that discrimination, but it wasn’t the final step.

(I stole the headline for this post from one by Boyce Watkins, who has a thorough and well-worth-reading rundown of the story.)

Kelly Williams-Bolar, a black single mom in Akron, Ohio, was convicted of felony records-tampering charges and sentenced to ten days in jail for registering her kids for school at her father’s residence rather than her own. She lives in the projects, her dad lives in a good district, and he’s facing a felony grand theft charge for “stealing” two years of public school for his grandkids. Oh, and her felony conviction means that she’s going to have to give up her plans to become a teacher.

Yeah. Incredible. Disgusting.

And there’s one thing in Watkins’ piece that I’d like to respond to specifically. He writes:

It’s interesting how courts find it convenient to make someone into an example when they happen to be poor and black. I’d love to see how they prosecute wealthy white women who commit the same offense. Oh, I forgot: Most wealthy white women don’t have to send their kids to the schools located near the projects.

I live in New York City, where school placement is a bit of an obsession. This kind of gaming of the system is rampant among well-off white families here, and I’ve never heard of anyone being jailed for it — much less convicted of a felony.

There’s a new book out called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses that got a lot of ink last week. It claims that only 55% of American college students improve their scores on a standardized test of critical thinking in their first two years of college, and that only 64% of students improve on that test during their entire time as undergrads.

I haven’t read the book yet, so I can’t speak in too much detail about its contents, but a few things leap out from the coverage.

First, there’s the fact of what the study doesn’t measure. Because it’s based solely on performance on a generalized test, it tells us nothing about what students have learned in their own fields of study, a fact that many news stories on the book have failed to mention, or buried. (That misrepresentation began with the study’s authors — Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa — who titled a Chronicle essay on their work “Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything?” — a question which even their own work would lead them to answer with “Yes, definitely. At least 64% of them, and probably a lot more.”)

The study’s value is also, obviously, dependent on the value of the test itself. Very little of the book’s press coverage has explored the question of what, exactly, the test measures, and what counts as improvement under the authors’ interpretation of the results.

A third issue is what pollsters call “the internals” of the study — the breakdown of how the results differ across communities. Are the least-prepared students learning the most, or the least? Which kinds of campuses, which kinds of students, which majors, are most successful? These kinds of questions are essential to making sense of the study’s findings, and with the exception of some meager ethnic data, they’re absent from the coverage I’ve seen.

It’s also important to note that the study fails to situate its findings in a historical context. The test the authors rely on was first used in 2004, so it tells us nothing about whether today’s students are learning more than previous generations, less, or about the same amount. This is particularly important given the incredibly widespread (though largely ungrounded) belief in college students’ intellectual and moral decline: Anytime anyone says “today’s college students suck,” a lot of listeners are going to hear “…compared to those who came before.”

There are other problems with the study. More than half of the students who took the test as first-years, for instance, weren’t tracked down for the follow-up. The authors’ methodology in assessing how much time students spend studying has been criticized as well. But my point here isn’t so much to criticize the study — which, again, I haven’t read — as it is to point out the perils of relying too uncritically on its representation in the media.

Offline life has been hectic the last couple of days, but I’ll be back with a bunch of really cool stuff starting Monday.

At least fifty protesters — Twitter reports say as many as eighty — were arrested this morning at the University of Puerto Rico as new student fees went into effect. (article | translation)

Student activists shut down UPR for two months last spring in protest against fee hikes and other initiatives, and won reversals of many proposals. But officials brought back the fee hikes in the fall, and both the government and the university have suppressed student protests much more aggressively in recent weeks than they had in the past.

Today’s arrestees included student activists, at least one faculty union leader, and — according to one news report — “some nuns.”