But since there is an enormous amount of myth and hype about tablets/larger readers from both technophiles and technophobes, maybe a little realism is in order. After watching the January 27 unveiling video (and tremendously enjoying the Doritos Canada parody--it shows you how far Lorne Michaels has fallen that something like this didn't appear on Saturday Night Live January 30), I've been thinking about what tablet-sized readers could do and what they cannot do.

First, some genres will do well with little additional effort or reworking of production systems. Comics are likely to be successful on at least one tablet/large reader, as is anything that is already produced for a large-ish page size. Some magazines will survive in this way, and I can easily imagine museums producing electronic catalogues. In general, image-intensive texts will benefit. All of this is easily encompassed within any ebook distribution system, but the more visually luscious books and magazines that will benefit from the iPad and other tablets are also resource-intensive to produce, either by artists or the publisher.

With some tinkering (and yelling and screaming), students will get what they repeatedly complain is lacking in ebooks: easy ways to highlight and annotate texts. The lack of annotation capacity in the EPUB ebook standard is a fixable problem, since EPUB uses xml. The ability to share annotations would be even better. I've written about my use of Diigo in teaching, but that's a workaround, and it's awkward every year that passes, with new versions of Diigo and new problems in sharing annotations.

Apart from annotations, it is not clear what interactive systems will work well on a large tablet that doesn't exist already on websites. There are some good tools for interactive exhibits, such as the Omeka package for museums (see its use in the Inventing Europe exhibit) or the WordPress Digress.It plug-in, which allows reader annotation of any paragraph. Omeka is interactive in a navigational sense. Digress.It is interactive with the content, but the paucity of comments on the Digress.It port of Ivan Illich's Deschooling suggests that it is largely theoretical. 

Craig Mod's essay this month on the infinite canvas (a la Scott McCloud) is interesting, but I'm not sure how that might translate into reality. There's an interesting alpha-level website called the infinite canvas that is infinite in the horizontal dimension. Its showcase includes a cute short comic by Neil Gaiman and Jouni Koponen, The Day the Saucers Came, but the interaction consists of clicking on forward/back buttons with simple PowerPoint-style slide transitions.

And then there will be plenty of resource-intensive development efforts that create one-off apps, many of which will be interesting pedagogically and culturally but will be one-time-only projects. If I were interested in managing the creation of an interactive project, I'd probably create it on a website using tools that I know the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad could read -- that is, no Flash and no Java. I know there's an App Gold Rush on, but the non-Flash, non-Java, smartly-designed website is going to be useful no matter what's in people's hands or on their laps or desks.

In other words, the iPad has one very obvious tool that's more than an ebook reader (anything that is visually intense), and there will be an obvious extension for tablets and readers in general (annotations), but the rest is not yet clear.

I'll write more about ESEA reauthorization later in the week.

The "safe" and thus ineffective way of changing treatment is to give the advice, "ask your doctor." Yeah, right: practicing physicians who see patients 40-60 hours a week are always up on the latest studies published in obscure journals every week or two, and everyone knows that a doctor's advice is always followed. Consider three effective changes in health behavior prompted by research: smoking reductions, switching how parents put their babies to sleep (in terms of positioning), and a reduction in the proportion of older women taking hormone-replacement therapy. 

If there is a case for research's changing behavior directly, it may be the reduction in hormone-replacement therapy as a result of studies such as the Women's Health Initiative 2002 report on relative risks of using hormone replacement. Even here, I suspect that the drop in use was both from changing recommendations of doctors (the first link in this paragraph is to an article that suggests that the drop in HRT was primarily among those at risk of cardiovascular disease) and possibly also older women's thinking of themselves as savvy consumers--and that can work both in favor of and against cost-effective medical treatment. Fortunately, there is some evidence that the drop in HRT use is leading to a decline in breast cancer. This is a substantial victory for large-scale public-health research.

Why then focus policy on comparative-effectiveness studies rather than rely on the existing hodgepodge system? Insurance companies already try to limit treatment, and they often rely on existing research to justify their decisions. Well, I've got first-hand experience of why bureaucratic mechanisms based in private industry are no more rational than public bureaucracies; though I have a family history justifying early colonoscopies, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Florida spent several months denying claims. More importantly, the evolution of private decision-making about treatment has led to a lengthy cat-and-mouse game that has not changed the basic tendency of American medicine to overtest and overtreat those with coverage while we fail to cover those who need preventive care and treatment. Then there's the problem with hodgepodge anything: there needs to be balance between investigator-initiated studies and a systematic program of research.

More broadly, there are several benefits of comparative-effectiveness research. First, it provides a level of transparency that industry-generated decisionmaking never can. This is highly dependent on how resistant a comparative-effectiveness program is to corruption, but the private-insurance cat-and-mouse game is a structure guaranteed to lead to distrust and extra costs of operating a system of benefits. The Women's Health Initiative study publication is a case study of why comparative-effectiveness research is not only important in controlling costs but also in saving lives. The WHI study was large and credible, and the reports were published broadly in the general press. Second, the results of comparative-effectiveness research can be the foundations of more secure efforts to change behavior. We're always going to have bad medical-research reporting (quick: is there a research consensus on the effects of coffee drinking?), but it is going to be easier to write guidelines, communicate a message, and gain funding for publicity efforts if it is clear and credible. (Small aside: that's an obvious and appropriate role for foundations, not to fund marginal research but to fund public education efforts based on a solid research consensus.)

Third, a comparative-effectiveness research program can lead to professional standards of care that are less susceptible to manipulation based on context. Yes, doctors will sometimes grump about that. But Atul Gawande might have a few things to say about the value of checklists and the dangers of assuming professionals can just "wing it" when in an examination room. In doing so, health-care reform will move us one step away from thinking about professionals as a hero-artiste, and in turn that will move us in the right direction on talking about teaching.

So, to teaching: Having professional standards of care/practice based on research is a reasonable alternative to either laissez-faire approaches to teaching or assuming that the black box of incentives will magically improve results. That doesn't mean that it's easy. Larry Cuban's response to the story Elizabeth Green wrote for the New York Times is correct: the history of micro-teaching advice is long and not particularly successful. And I have no illusions that just because you say you're in favor of professional standards of care and practice means that there will suddenly be a body of rigorous research.

But anyone who believes in the hero-artiste model of teaching in the public schools needs both a political and ethical reality check. If you're paid by the public purse, you have an obligation to the public. Public school teachers need protection from corruption, unreasonable demands, and retaliation in response to whistleblowing. But that protection doesn't mean that an elementary school teacher should be able to teach what he or she wants, when he or she wants, how he or she wants. The practical and political tradeoff for some autonomy in the classroom is the adherence to recognized norms of professional behavior. That includes how teachers treat students, how they respond to a formal curriculum, and the instructional tactics used.

It's the latter that Green's article addressed. My guess is that teachers can argue either that they should be evaluated based on results or based on professional standards of care/practice tied to research, including research in the future. But you cannot argue that there should be no professional standards, or that a good chunk of them should not be tied to research. The "incentives" focus of much current accountability puts instruction in a black box. I think that's inappropriate public policy, but there has to be an alternative for at least political purposes. Changing the talk about doctors, checklists, and comparative-effectiveness research is a way to show that professionals do not have to be hero-artistes, and that's a healthy direction for the country.

Politically, the packaging is a good move for multiple reasons. Matthew Yglesias argues that putting SAFRA in with the health-care bill changes will reassure House progressives that one of their priorities will get a vote in the Senate, and it might get SAFRA over the hump of the small number of Senate Democratic naysayers who are siding with lenders over students. Last night, Sara Goldrick-Rab explained the shame of the anti-student bank subsidies, and it sort of burns me that one of the Democrats signing the protect-the-poor-bankers letter to Harry Reid is Florida's Bill Nelson. 

To be honest, I expect the package is more likely to attract support from the Nebraska Senator Nelson than Florida's Senator Nelson, because Ben Nelson (NE) now wants his embarrassing Cornhusker Deal for health-care off the table. But both Senator Nelsons are on the wrong side of the issue with SAFRA. I e-mailed Bill Nelson to that effect early this morning, but each time I've called his Washington office today, it's been busy and the voicemail is full. Time to call his local office on Monday...

Yes, there are alternatives, but they're all bad: Many colleges offer a very high-premium plan for students because the pool they can compose out of their students (or a fraction of their students) is tiny. Together with the option to stay on their parents' plans until 26, an individual mandate would give college students more choice by letting them enter the exchange markets instead of having one horrid option for health insurance in college. An individual mandate would make sure that our public investment in higher education is not wasted by a spurious event that no one can control.

(Obviously, someone in the White House reads my blog because they're emulating thought of the same idea as they echo my uninsured-death-every-24 21-minutes entry in their final push, highlighting key numbers on the issue:  625 Americans who lose health insurance every hour, 8 health special-interest lobbyists for every member of Congress, 8 Americans denied coverage every minute either by loss of insurance or other means, and $1115 paid every month on average for a family premium.)

Barone's point is not really about Kristof's central argument, which is more about how young Americans need to experience more of the world. Kristof is right about that, though maybe they should also see more of their own country? Nor is it about the side benefit of TFA participation in terms of giving a broader group of young adults experience in the public sector.

I think the last is the lasting impact of TFA. I look more favorably on TFA than a lot of other education researchers, not because I think there's significant evidence of great results but because a backfilling role in urban systems is acceptable and because social movements need well-off and well-positioned allies, people who had formative experiences that led them to empathize with others. In Inventing the Feeble Mind, for example, James Trent documents how WW2 conscientious objectors' experiences in state institutions helped lay the groundwork for a postwar change in attitudes towards cognitive disabilities. That's not a pre-law internship, as some accuse TFA of becoming; regardless of naivete, two or three years represents a serious commitment for someone who's 22. I don't know where TFA alums are going to be, but few of them are like Michelle Rhee either in temperament or future careers. Somewhere in 10 years, a TFA alum far outside public education is going to make a difference in a different sphere of life because of those two or three years.

Last year we kept reminding ourselves that we weren't in California. And this year, Georgia's picture is worse. Plus a few other states I could mention. But that's cold comfort: Schadenfreude doesn't pay the bills.

Updated (5:45 pm): Yes, today's Florida state revenue estimates are almost identical to the last round.

There's a related issue here, which is Ravitch's position outside traditional faculty. As far as I'm aware, she's never had a tenure-track or tenured faculty position, and she's one of the few historians who can say that they published their dissertation commercially before receiving the Ph.D. (The Great School Wars was published in 1974; Ravitch received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1975). For the most part, her books are far more widely read than those of us who have full-time faculty positions, and I think she and Graham are the only historians of education to have held political appointments in the federal government. That's an interesting combination of insider and outsider positions. 

When Meier and Ravitch started their joint blog/conversation three years ago, I briefly referred to this history in writing, "Regardless of various professional views of her scholarship, Ravitch is a recognized voice on education policy. There are plenty of people I correspond with who have fewer claims to expertise, so I can either have a snit-fit about that or deal, and at this point, having a snit-fit is darned close to sexism and uber-testosterone in education policy studies." I'm sorry Olneck and Sacks, and especially Sacks, have made a different choice.

For the record, Sacks is factually wrong when he states, "Dr. Ravitch fashioned herself into the Ayn Rand of educational policy and rose to fame as a result of a free-market ideology that came into fashion in George W. Bush's administration." Ravitch's appointment was during the first Bush administration, and whatever you might think of Ravitch's historical arguments in different books, she's a much better writer than Rand.

For a number of reasons, MACOS flopped as a curriculum project, but the central question raised at the 1959 Woods Hole conference remains: what's necessary for students to be successful at learning disciplinary thinking? Several of my colleagues at USF (Will Tyson, Kathy Borman, and others) have been involved in NSF-funded work studying recruitment to and success in undergraduate STEM education, including preparatory math and science work in high school. In lower grades, the National Math Advisory Panel made some suggestions about curriculum in primary and intermediate elementary grades that would be prerequisite for success in algebra, including work with fractions. (Speaking of which, check out this very cool Java Spirograph simulation. Yes, it's connected to fractions... or rather the nature of reciprocal relationships between frequency and wavelength.)

And somewhere along here, along with debates about the purposes of various proposed curricula, we generally get debates about which is more important, procedural fluidity or conceptual understanding. My answer: yes. They are. You need both "content" and "process" (and we'll get to the problem with those terms shortly), and I am generally sympathetic to arguments that getting to the point of automaticity with core skills is a part of getting ahead in conceptual understanding and also needs to be matched by teaching of concepts. (See my entry a few years ago on how to explain the more recent and reasonable NCTM curriculum framework materials.)

But there is something about the term automaticity that itches inside my head, because it sort of gets the idea right but is not entirely persuasive... and the places where it is not persuasive are troubling in a subtle but very important way. Let me explain why I can fluidly pull out material from my memory that looks remarkably like the standard definition of automaticity and yet really isn't like that at all. 

First, a digression: with apologies to Douglas Adams, the process of doing history is almost but not quite entirely unlike what Sam Wineburg describes in his research. Wineburg's writing is appealing to historians because it focuses on precisely the discipline-based processes that Bruner discussed 50 years ago in his book, and Wineburg's message is flattering: "academic historians, you have interesting ways of thinking, and here is what I see as a cognitive researcher and why high school history teachers need to pay much closer attention to what you do." And to be honest, there is some part of his work that has all sorts of interesting detail on the level of nuance and sophistication with which people try to commit history (such as the research on how people from different fields read primary sources about Abraham Lincoln and slavery). But Wineburg is enormously popular because his intended audience has a confirmation bias that leads them (us) to agree with someone who comes along and tells us we're special and intellectual. Wineburg weaves a story of historical thinking's exceptionalism... and there's the rub. As an historian, I'm supposed to be wary of anyone talking about American exceptionalism, and here comes this cognitive psychologist trying to seduce me with glorious tales of my discipline's exceptionalism, how difficult it is to be an historian, and so forth.

Pardon me, but I'll take the interesting cognitive questions without the side dish of (probably unintentional) pandering. A good bit of Wineburg's efforts have been to parse out how people read primary sources, and they generally focus on the level of ambiguity people read into primary sources: ambiguity about intent, background, effect, and so forth. And that's all fine and good except for two problems: Wineburg's work in this vein has generally been with adults, and they generally ignore the process participants use to put the primary source in context. The second is the part that troubles me most as a teacher, because the place where students in my undergrad history of education class first fall down is typically in putting a primary source in a broader context. It's not the most difficult task I put before students: usually the most difficult task in the semester is asking students to provide historical perspectives on a contemporary issue. But the difficulty of putting material in a broader context is a fundamental barrier to success in my class.

That sounds remarkably like students who are not yet at the level of history automaticity, whatever that might mean, and one would be tempted to refer to Checker Finn and Diane Ravitch's argument from the late 1980s, that American teenagers don't know enough history. But focusing on factual recall is begging the question: what does it mean to have sufficiently fluid mastery of history to put a primary document in context? Something about factual recall is helpful, but is that enough, and is that what successful students do? 

It might be helpful to explain the type of task that is not hard for students: confronting people whose glib brutality stands out of the page. That characterizes the very first primary source I use in my undergrad history class (printed in Jim Fraser's education history primary-source collection), instructions from the London Virginia Council to the colony's governor in 1636. It reads in part,

And if you find it convenient, we think it reasonable you first remove... [Native American children] from their ... priests by a surprise of them all and detain their prisoners... [and] we pronounce it not cruelty nor breach of charity to deal more sharply with [the priests] and to proceed even to dash with these murderers of souls and sacrificers of gods' images to the devil...

With 17th century texts, the first challenge is simply to understand what the source says, and that's a bit of skill in language, but the students usually figure out this passage soon enough, and their eyes open a bit wider: the official supervisors of the colony sitting in England were telling the colonial governor to kidnap Native American children and beat (or kill) the elders. That type of detail sticks with students, because it engages their emotions and sense of what a society is supposed to be doing (as well as what colonists did). It's not that any student is exactly surprised that English colonists in Virginia were patronizing and occasionally brutal, but there is something that takes them aback in the casual way which which colonists and English elite discussed their goals. 

I wish that all of history was that engaging, but that's just not true, and there is a good bit of background context that students need to pull out to put any primary source in context, and when you get to material whose explicit text is boring but is still important, students cannot rely on the immediately-engaging story to "get it." Instead, most primary sources require a student to identify at least one salient context that is not immediately apparent, and they need to be able to identify a relevant context (or more than one) without a huge amount of effort. If there is an "automaticity" to a professional historian's thinking, it is that: where does this primary source or other detail fit in a large scheme?

That larger scheme can start with "issues of the day," whatever the time and place. To be successful, you need to know what was happening at about the time of the primary source/event. You start with the year, go back and forth a few years, and think about possible connections. So when you look at the last of Horace Mann's annual reports on the state of education in Massachusetts (in 1848) and read the following passage, what pops out as contemporary and possibly relevant?

Now surely nothing but universal education can counterwork this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called: the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former. But, if education be equally diffused, it will draw property after it by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor. Property and labor in different classes are essentially antagonistic; but property and labor in the same class are essentially fraternal.

That's from the middle of the 19th century in the U.S. So when I ask a class about the relevant context, some students look at servility and suggest slavery as an issue, point out that Mann was writing for an audience in the North, or ask whether Mann was anti-slavery. (No one in my classes has mentioned the compromise of 1850, but that would fit with this tentative reach for context.) Few of them would have heard of Eric Foner's book on free-labor ideology, but I can probe a bit: slavery's part of the picture, at least in rhetoric, but there's something else there. What were some of the concepts used in the North to discuss slavery? I wish that probe worked more frequently than it does, so I usually point out the "different classes" phrase and ask what else was happening in the U.S. in the 19th century. At least one student usually mentions industrialization. So what's Mann arguing, I follow up? More faces light up at that point.

Part of the problem here is that Mann's argument is too familiar, a little too close to a human-capital argument for students to realize how new this was. (Maris Vinovkis credits Mann with that early human-capital argument.) Part of it is also that students don't have a visceral sense of the simmering conflicts in Northern cities, even after hearing about the religious conflicts in Boston in 1836 or Philadelphia in 1844 (the latter so-called "Bible riot"). Because all of that was also related to social class, industrialization, and immigration, I can almost feel Mann's sense of urgency here in promoting mass education ("common schools") as a cure-all for social conflict. But most students usually can't. The prose is too prosaic and the context insufficiently emotional to engage students in the same way that happens in response to the "kidnap the kids and eliminate the elders" instructions from the 17th century.

There's an additional layer to this context, because 1848 is a signal year in European history: revolutions galore and the publication of the Communist Manifesto. To a literate, well-connected American, Europe was dissolving in chaos in 1847 and 1848. What could prevent the U.S. from doing the same? There is no evidence I am aware of that Mann was explicitly referring to European events, but it would have been in the air in the same way that natural disasters are "in the air" around the globe today after the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Even if he was not consciously constructing the passage above to respond to European events, it would have resonated more for someone concerned about social stability in 1848. 

There is nothing special about what I do in class: I take a simple question of context to push students about the importance of something Horace Mann wrote. And there is nothing particularly hard about asking what else was happening at the time. But while it's an easy task for me, this task flummoxes a lot of students. That task of pulling relevant context out of one's memory is the closest thing I can think of for the historian's automaticity, and looking for contemporary events and issues is the most obvious (but not the only) way to cut the issue. One might want to call this type of context affinity in time. I can think of other affinities which I might explore in other entries, but the key thing here is that this task is extraordinarily difficult for students. 

Why this is difficult is an interesting, substantive question beyond the usual "fact-process" dualism. You need a mastery of chronology to pull context out of your head, but to build that mastery you need a way to put the details into your head in a way that's not "one damned thing after another"--i.e., a mental scheme. And while I wish I could look inside my head to see what my internal schemes are, I suspect any attempt at reflection is going to fall far short. I suppose one metaphor might be a "thick" timeline of issues and events and trends inside my head, so that when someone says, "1848," I can think of a bunch of things (as described above). Or if someone tells you that the Little Rock crisis was in fall of 1957, you just might think of Sputnik and ask whether there might be a Cold War context to Eisenhower's decision to nationalize the Arkansas National Guard and send in the 101st Airborne.

In addition, you need to be able to filter out nonsalient issues. What else was going on in 1957? Let's see: the Ford Thunderbird that year was a particularly popular "muscle" car. And the Dodgers were planning to move away from Brooklyn. The Communist party won elections in the Indian state of Kerala. ABC started national broadcast distribution of American Bandstand. On the Road was published. You can find more details at the 1957 Wikipedia page, but going to an almanac-style "here's what happened" listing is an incredibly inefficient way to put something in context. But to be honest, I wish I had the problem of students who found too many potential contexts where I had to suggest filtering. Usually the problem is a lack of candidate hypotheses about context.

Every time that a Republican talks about "starting over," think of how many 24-minute chunks of time that would involve. Every 24 minutes of delay = one more excess death. Every time that an overly-righteous proponent of the public option talks about "being slapped in the face by the White House" and (again) starting the debate over, think of how many 24-minute chunks that would involve. Think of how many 24-minute chunks have passed since 1993 (the last time a major health-care initiative died). 

It's time for the Senate to vote on amendments to its bill using reconciliation, and it's time for the House to pass both the Senate bill and amendments.

Updated: Families USA has calculated that it's now a preventable death every 21 minutes.

And their reporting of my remarks when called by the reporter on the story is similarly Mostly True. (For the record, that's the way I'd rate most good reporting.) The ruling says in part, "Dorn says the state should not count students who received a diploma even after failing the FCAT three times." It is true that I pointed out that the number of students who receive an academic diploma using the SAT/ACT exemption path has ballooned in the last five years and corresponds very neatly to the rise in high school graduation over that time. However, I never said that the state should not count those graduates, and if I remember correctly reporter Lee Logan never asked me that directly in the phone interview.

On Tuesday evening, Logan e-mailed me, and after I replied with my cell phone, I pulled up the spreadsheet I'd downloaded from the FLDOE site in the fall. The state reported three different measures: the official Florida graduation rate it's used for a decade, the measure used for NCLB purposes, and a measure defined by the National Governors Association in 2005. The last addresses the concerns I and others raised 4-5 years ago about the exclusion of the dropout-to-GED path from the cohort base and the inclusion of GEDs with regular diplomas.

The SAT/ACT exemption is different. On the one hand, the idea of an SAT/ACT exemption flies in the face of the point of a graduation exam, since college admissions exams do not test what a student has learned from the high school curriculum. On the other hand, it's a political and practical safety valve since it gives students more opportunities to qualify for an academic diploma. I wish that the state had chosen other options because of the SAT/ACT-curriculum disconnect, but when faced with education policy problems legislators tend to reach for tests, some test, any test.

Trying to look at the NGA rate with/without the exemption category (WFT) is also trickier than with the GED data, since there could be a number of reasons why the use of that exemption has ballooned. Maybe there are now 9,000 high school students each year who are directed towards the SAT/ACT who really would not have graduated without the exemption, and if so the rise in the NGA represents students who would have been on the margin of receiving a standard diploma without that option. But maybe the rise is a consequence of more Florida districts paying for students to take the SAT, where students would have taken the FCAT but didn't because they had qualified through the SAT. From a student perspective, if you've failed to pass the diploma threshold in prior FCAT tries and suddenly you have an SAT score that qualifies, why take the FCAT again in your senior year? Or why try hard at it when you do take it? 

Then there's the more important question: where should we be with high school graduation? If you agree that we should include the students who qualified with an SAT or ACT score rather than a curriculum-based test, about three quarters of Florida ninth graders are graduating within four years. Using the NGA rate, of the African American students entering ninth grade in the fall of 2005, about 65% of them had graduated with a standard academic diploma by the summer of 2009. Even if you are skeptical about the inherent value of a credential, high school diplomas do serve as credentials for the job market and colleges, and someone without that credential faces significant institutional barriers to doing well as an adult. 

Update: The PolitiFact page has changed to reflect what I said more accurately. Thanks!

My response will appear in tomorrow morning's paper, and my thanks to the Times editorial staff for printing the rebuttal.

Given the constraints of an op-ed column, some material was left out. For example, William McKeen's own department has 42 classes listed on the University of Florida course schedule for the spring, and of those classes, only 22 are being taught by full-time faculty. From spreadsheets colleagues at UF sent me, I know that as chair McKeen hired 12 adjuncts to teach classes in the fall and 15 adjuncts for the spring, generally paying each of them $3,000 per course. I guess that when he wrote the column he forgot about all the adjuncts he hires every semester.

And nowhere do I see McKeen (the chair of UF's Department of Grandstanding) volunteering to be the first to give up his tenure in Gainesville. Maybe that has to do with the layoff notices issued to faculty around the state and country?

What's particularly scurrilous in McKeen's column on Sunday is the attempt to link a singular incident with a pet cause: "Has tenure become so important that someone would kill when it was denied?" As many others from Margaret Soltan to "Dean Dad" have pointed out, Amy Bishop is not your typical disappointed academic. She's killed before, she was apparently a suspect in an attempted letter-bombing, and as far as I'm aware, she is the only faculty member known to have killed peers after being denied tenure.

In the anonymous Dean Dad's words, "Let's not use a deranged shooter to make points. The crime is awful enough as it is."