History repeats itself in Afghan war folly

This story originally ran on cleveland.com and in The Plain Dealer on Dec. 15, 2019.

America just learned what nearly everyone who has spent time in Afghanistan already knew. The war has been an 18-year, $2 trillion folly.

On Monday, The Washington Post published documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that are much like The Pentagon Papers of the Vietnam era. The trove comes from a “Lessons Learned” investigation by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. It includes thousands of pages of interviews with government officials.

The Lessons Learned report is meant to prevent the military from repeating the mistakes of history. The irony is that we already have.

I read Barbara Tuchman’s 1985 classic The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam on a broken mattress in my Kabul bedroom, huddled near a wood stove in the mountain winter in 2013, during the year I spent as a war correspondent for Stars and Stripes.

Tuchman’s book examined how governments have started wars that every reasonable observer could see would lead to ruin. She described how halls of power become echo chambers, where admission depends on agreeing, at least outwardly, with the party line.

Her observations about America’s occupation of Vietnam were so directly applicable to everything I saw in Afghanistan that they made me want to scream.

Tuchman wrote, “The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable.”

In Afghanistan, it wasn’t just that the goal was unattainable. Nobody even knew what the goal was.

“What are we trying to do here?” wondered Douglas Lute in one interview.

Lute ran the Afghanistan war effort for President George W. Bush starting in 2007, then served as the Obama administration’s Senior Coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan until 2010. If he couldn’t tell what we were trying to do, who could?

Story after story in international media came out around the time I was in Afghanistan that made it impossible to believe we were defending the “good guys.” Afghan government judges put women fleeing domestic violence and forced marriages in jail. Government-allied commanders raped girls and boys with impunity, some on U.S. military bases. Afghan Local Police shook down frightened villagers for funds. A general accused of war crimes became vice president after an election riddled with fraud.

American support for those rigged elections recall the 1963 U.S.-backed overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.

“For the defenders of democracy to conspire with plotters of a coup d’état, no matter how cogent the reasons, could not be hailed in the history books as the American way,” Tuchman wrote. “It was a step in the folly of self-betrayal.”

Meanwhile, the American government dissembled, manipulating metrics and trying to keep negative stories out of the press.

Military minders attempted to block me from visiting Kajaki Dam, a magnet for Taliban attacks, because they said it was too dangerous, and skirmishes were occurring in the area daily. But the military publicly classified less than 4% of Afghanistan’s 325 districts as having “high insurgent activity.” Kajaki wasn’t one of them.

Retired general Michael Flynn (of Mueller Report fame), told interviewers that “every single operational commander … came in [to Afghanistan] and said the situation was not like they thought it, and when they left that they had defeated the enemy; we have convinced the population and helped the population.”

“Really?” Flynn asked the interviewers rhetorically. “So if we are doing such a great job, why does it feel like we are losing?”

One Army colonel described how rosy representations meant to boost careers fed into a collective disconnection from reality. “[W]e became a self-licking ice cream cone,” he told investigators.

“Each of the services and major commands manipulated the news in the interests of ‘national security,’ or to make itself look good, or to win a round in the ongoing interservice contest, or to cover up mistakes or glamorize a commander,” Tuchman wrote.

An American Stryker vehicle and an Afghan with a machine gun during an American patrol in Panjwai district, 2013. (Cid Standifer)

On one assignment, an American officer stormed into the office where I sat with my U.S. military minder, venting his frustrations about the Afghan military. When the public affairs officer cut him off to tell him I was a journalist, he pleaded with me not to quote him. “Our” goal, he told me, was to portray the alliance in a positive light to boost morale. I reminded him that my goal as a journalist was to tell the truth.

The American military’s blinkered optimism in press statements was a punchline to most reporters. When we talked about rampant corruption or successful Taliban assaults, someone might throw his fists in the air and shout, “We’re winning!”

I don’t take lightly the American lives that have been lost, or the additional Afghan lives that will be lost when we leave. After NATO pulls out, the country could fall into a brutal civil war like the one that followed Soviet withdrawal in the 1990s. Good people will be caught in the middle – including Afghans who worked for America.

I hope we do a better job keeping our promises to them than we did the Vietnamese allies left on the roof of the Saigon embassy.

The report makes it clear we are only delaying that day, not averting it. And everyone running the show knows it.

 

Reckoning with reparations: How do I repay my ancestors’ slaves?

This op-ed ran on cleveland.com and in The Plain Dealer on Sept. 18, 2019.

I owe my new house to slavery.

In July, I put a large down payment on a duplex, using money I inherited. I’m thrilled to be buying my first house, but it’s tied to an incalculable moral debt.

I don’t know the names of the people who made my purchase possible. I know only their gender, race, and age in 1850:

• Jesse Marshall Standifer, my third-great-grandfather, owned two grown women, a 14-year-old girl, and a 12-year-old boy.

JESSE MARSHALL STANDIFER’S SLAVES (p. 1)

 

This entry in the 1850 slave census indicates my third-great-grandfather owned four slaves: a 45-year-old man, a 30-year-old woman, a 12-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl.

View the entire document with DocumentCloud

• Lemuel Hall Bethell, my fourth-great-grandfather, owned an adult man and woman, two teenage boys, and two girls, ages 13 and 10.

LEMUEL HALL BETHELL’S SLAVES (p. 1)

The 1850 slave schedule indicates my fourth-great-grandfather owned six slaves. The “B” next to their genders stands for black, and the “M” stands for mulatto.

View the entire document with DocumentCloud

• William Eagleton, my fourth-great-grandfather, owned two 18-year-old girls.

WILLIAM EAGLETON’S SLAVES (p. 1)

My grandmother’s great-grandfather owned two teenage girls, one black and one mulatto.

View the entire document with DocumentCloud

Those are the creditors I could find. I almost certainly have more.

Until last year, the question of reparations was abstract to me. It took on new moral urgency after my grandmother — Pauline Standifer, née Eagleton — left me about $90,000.

It feels crass to broadcast the sum so publicly, but cowardly not to. This is, after all, a question of money: who has it, who doesn’t, and why.

Black Americans earn 75 cents on the dollar compared to white people, but that racial income gap pales compared to the wealth gap. According to the Economic Policy Institute, assets held by the median white family total about $171,000, versus $17,600 for the median black family.

Much of the wealth floating around the white American community is inherited. Slave-owners and their descendants invested and reinvested profits from stolen labor. That gave them myriad of advantages that were compounded as white supremacists found new ways of robbing black Americans after the Civil War.

Jesse Marshall Standifer left some his slaves to tend his farm while he worked as a physician, including a stint treating Confederate soldiers. Family legend holds that he took one of his slaves with him. I can only imagine how he felt helping his owner fight against his own freedom.

Jesse was first in a line of doctors on my grandfather’s side. Medical school is costly, and for generations students relied on their families to pay their way. In 1960, family contributions accounted for 83% of the average medical student’s income. Insufficient funds prevented many black Americans from getting such an education, as did policies that kept blacks out of most universities.

My grandfather followed in his father’s, grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s footsteps, becoming a doctor.

My great-grandfather moved his family from Texas to Elk City, Oklahoma. This was a generation or two after the Civil War, but white Americans outside the South still fought to keep blacks from getting ahead.

In 1921, whites in nearby Tulsa, Oklahoma obliterated the prosperous Greenwood area, widely known as “black Wall Street.” Mobs burned 35 city blocks and killed between 100 and 300 black people. They might have killed more, had the National Guard not arrested virtually every black citizen of Tulsa.

Decades later, while blacks marched for equal rights, my grandparents quietly multiplied their inheritance by investing in real estate. This was smart – and impossible for many black Americans. Segregation, red-lining, and mortgage discrimination prevented them from buying houses, since few lenders would invest in black neighborhoods.

Today, more than three-quarters of white families own their homes, compared to just 44% of black families.

I’m following in my ancestors’ footsteps by sinking my inheritance into housing. As I earn returns, the moral debt on my ledger will increase. But who can I pay?

I had hoped to find the descendants of my ancestors’ slaves. But Jesse Standifer’s slaves probably didn’t have descendants. Several years after the Civil War, family lore says, his neighbors complained about the presence of black people on his farm. He sent them to Fort Belknap about 80 miles away, presumably on foot. They died of measles crossing the Texas desert.

How much were four lives worth? What if you add interest?

As to the fate of William Eagleton and Lemuel Hall Bethell’s slaves, I have no idea.

That doesn’t let me off the hook. I’m the beneficiary of a centuries-old system designed to exploit black Americans, and conscience demands that I work to break that system. I can vote and volunteer, but this is America, where cash is king.

Should I give the money to charities? Most ostensibly help people regardless of their skin color. That’s great, but it doesn’t address the question of race I’ve inherited. Someone suggested I start a scholarship, but it feels unfair to make recipients prove their worth, since I wasn’t asked to. Perhaps the beneficiaries should be randomly selected, as I was. But how?

I don’t have a plan yet, but I need to decide. White Americans all do. Our debt has been accumulating for 169 years, and we haven’t even begun to pay the interest

Open letter to Emory grad students

Dear former colleagues,

I was in the Emory University History Department PhD. program from fall of 2014 until I finished my Master’s degree in winter 2017. I’m writing to you because my experience with Emory University’s grievance process convinces me that there is in fact no protection for graduate students who have suffered abusive advisors, discrimination, or retaliation. I also strongly suspect similar situations exist at other universities, and all graduate students should be aware of the ways their institutions’ grievance processes may be designed to fail.

In spring 2016 I was hospitalized for depression. It seemed prudent to disclose my condition to my advisor, Dr. Clifton Crais. At first he was sympathetic, so I was surprised when, early that summer, he said he was concerned about my ability to finish my PhD because of my mental illness, and seemed to discourage me from continuing in the program.

In the following months, he told me I was not allowed to use other students’ notes or book reviews to study for comprehensive exams, then suddenly revoked his permission for me to take exams and told me to leave with a Master’s. When I refused, he told me I could take exams if I  completely revised the exam list for which he had given me verbal approval, and gave me an unsatisfactory grade on a pass-fail course with no explanation. I ultimately failed exams, and my committee members refused to let me retake them.

The History Department’s current director of graduate studies, Dr. Thomas Rogers, was aware of the actions Dr. Crais took against me, and I told him that I believed Dr. Crais was attempting to force me out of the program because of my mental illness. I had hoped the department would think twice about giving Dr. Crais more students, but in spring 2018 I learned they had admitted two more Africanists who would presumably be Dr. Crais’ advisees.

That summer, I sent the department a detailed account of the ways I thought Dr. Crais abused his authority, including his comments about my mental health. After several weeks, the chair of the department, Dr. Joseph Crespino, told me the department could not take action on my grievance because the department’s policy is narrowly tailored to handle complaints from students who are still enrolled.

A day after I received Crespino’s email, I received an email from my former advisor, accusing me of entirely fabricating my account and demanding that I “retract [my] complaint, with apology,” or else he would “initiate a series of legal actions against [me], including defamation.”

I forwarded Dr. Crais’ threat to Dr. Crespino and wrote complaints to the deans of Laney Graduate School, Emory’s ombudsperson Dana Yarbrough, and the Office of Equity and Inclusion reiterating my original complaint, and including Dr. Crais’ retaliatory email.

Laney Graduate School and the ombudsperson’s office told me that OEI was the only proper channel to submit complaints involving discrimination and retaliation. In subsequent conversations, representatives of both offices expressed aspirations for policy change, but said they could not affect my individual case.

The Office of Equity and Inclusion’s representative spoke to me about the case, and said that, due to their 180-day statute of limitations, the only part of my “inquiry” that was relevant was Crais’ threat to pursue a defamation case against me. That threat, they determined, did not rise to OEI’s (publicly unspecified) standard of “retaliation” because “anybody has the right to pursue legal action against anybody else at any time,” and further that the lawsuit had not actually materialized.

This seems to be in direct contradiction to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s definition of retaliation, which explicitly includes filing a civil lawsuit against the complainant. The EEOC has also ruled that “a threat does not have to be carried out to violate” EEOC protections.

I pointed out these guidelines in an email to OEI. In response, the OEI representative wrote simply, “There is no appeal process under OEI’s guiding Policy.” In a later email, she said it was “tenuous” whether Emory’s policies barring retaliation protected former students.

Since then, another potential student has been admitted to study African history at Emory.

I filed a charge against Emory University for retaliation with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but the investigator assigned to my complaint said graduate students aren’t considered employees by the EEOC, despite the National Labor Relations Board’s 2016 ruling that they are.

I’ve also filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, but since Betsy Devos’ administration has been dismantling protections against discrimination, I have low expectations.

Given the endemic mental illness among graduate students, Emory’s failure to protect me from discrimination, or even to investigate the truth of my allegations, threatens the welfare of countless others. If students do not feel they can seek treatment or ask for accommodation without having their careers destroyed, they may sacrifice their sanity to stay in academia.

Emory’s refusal to sanction Dr. Crais for retaliation has even more widespread implications. It means students put their future at risk if they complain about any kind of discrimination or harassment. If students are afraid to speak up, there is simply no limit to the abuses advisors can get away with.

I hope that you will push Emory to improve its grievance procedures, to protect both yourselves and the next generation of scholars.

You can find the documents I have collected regarding my case here. I wish you all of the best in your academic careers.

Sincerely,

A former historian

“If there were just these two of them, then no one will care about it.”

It’s a chilling discovery. Imagine it at any college: workers are installing a fiber-optical cable, and they stumble upon two bodies buried under the university. It’s deeply unsettling, and reminiscent, perhaps, of Annie Le, the Yale graduate student buried in a wall of her laboratory in 2009. That story made national news, horrifying anyone who thought of institutions of learning as safe places.

But this wasn’t Yale. It was Nangarhar University in eastern Afghanistan, near the city of Jalalabad.

Having just returned from an embed near Jalalabad, I received a tip that a “mass grave” had been discovered at the university there around noon today.

I set my fixer on the case and started shooting out emails to any English-speaking sources I could think of. Soon enough, Zubair had the few details available.

But six hours later, the school’s public affairs office still didn’t know anything about it until they received a call from us. The university says they alerted local officials, but, far from calling press conferences, the school’s deputy director just said the police had what they needed to follow up on the case if they felt like it.

“We did not try to dig more if there are more bodies or not, because we wanted to just build a small drain for the optical fiber,” he said.

I pressed Zubair for more details. How old were the bodies? Were they fresh, or perhaps left over from Afghanistan’s civil war?

The official said they looked old, though he couldn’t say quite how old.

Zubair adds, “If there were just these two of them, then no one will care about it.”

And he seems to be right. When I offer the story to my editors, they say it might be worth looking into later, but the simple fact of two bodies under a school isn’t yet “newsworthy.”

Of course it’s harder to get worked up about a murder in Afghanistan than in the US — even a double murder. People here seem to drop like flies, whether from hypothermia or IEDs. Who’s to say which ones matter?

But something makes me care more about these two bodies. Maybe it’s just that I heard about this story first and want to break news. Maybe it’s that I feel like schools should be safe places, even if you’re in a war zone. Or maybe it’s that I’ve never been a farmer or a villager or an insurgent, but not too terribly long ago, I was a college student. Maybe it’s that back then, these two kids murdered and buried on campus — whether in 1979 or 2009 — could have been just like my friends.

Which Missing Kids are Worth Looking For?

On Oct. 1, a teenager named Bryan Glenn went missing in Fairfax County.

His disappearance was not reported in the media. Even as his family launched a Facebook campaign to search for him, his picture was not sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which would have not only posted it on the Internet for anyone to find, but splashed it on posters in government offices and highway rest stops.

A week later, Glenn’s body was found, a possible suicide.

Glenn was only one of hundreds of children from the tri-state area alone who disappear each year and are never reported to the NCMEC, or never have their photographs posted. This is despite the fact that, according to national statistics, posting a photograph is the single most important thing family or law enforcement can do to track down a kid.

In Virginia, local law enforcement agencies are legally required to send information on every kid who goes missing to the Virginia State Police Department Missing Children’s Clearinghouse. The clearinghouse posts every one of those files on NCMEC’s website, missingkids.com. But only 24 percent included photographs. How is anyone supposed to recognize a missing child with no picture?

Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the Virginia State Police, pointed out that the clearinghouse is totally dependent on local agencies to send photographs. “We work as best we can with the local agencies and strongly encourage them to provide a photograph,” she added.

Of the 16 children listed in early October  as disappeared from Henrico County within the past year and still missing, only three had accompanying photographs posted on missingkids.com. The rest come with a caption saying that local law enforcement agents did not submit a photograph.

Lt. Christopher Eley, who works in special investigations at the Henrico County Police Department (one of the few that responded to questions for this story), said the police department received reports of 657 missing people (adults and children) in 2011.

“Based upon my experience I would estimate that 95 percent of the missing juveniles are runaways and return home within three to five days,” he said. “What is most shocking is that we are provided pictures by the reporting person in approximately 5 percent of missing juvenile reports taken.”

Eley said he has sent photographs to the Virginia Missing Children’s Clearinghouse for abduction cases, especially if he believes the child may have been taken outside the state, but for non-abductions, sending information to the local media tends to get the message out to people most likely to run into the child.

Of the 14 kids from Henrico County listed on missingkids.com as of Nov. 5, all but two were runaways, including the three posted with accompanying photographs. The two kids listed as family abduction victims did not have photographs posted.

While it’s true that most runaways quickly return home on their own, runaway teens, especially girls (but also some boys), are at high risk of being recruited by sex traffickers, who frequently move them between cities and states.

Richmond City, which did not respond to questions emailed to their public affairs department, only had one photo posted among 19 children missing in the past year as of early October — though since I sent an email inquiry about their dearth of photographs, two pictures have been posted for more recently disappeared kids.

At least one of the missing children without an accompanying picture, Starr Nicole Mongold, has a Facebook page including dozens of publicly accessible, up-to-date pictures that clearly show her face. The page identifies Mongold by her full name and provides her hometown, making it unlikely that it belongs to a homonymous Starr Mongold.

Mongold is 17. Some of the pictures show her with her little sister, who, according to online obituaries, passed away last year at the age of 7. According to missingkids.com, Mongold has not been seen since Aug. 31. Her most recent “wall” activity is dated July 30, 2012.

In Virginia, it’s obvious which kids have photos sent in and which ones don’t because the state police post every file, picture or no. But it’s not just Virginia police departments deciding not to post missing kid photographs.

The Maryland State Police also have a missing children’s clearinghouse that posts information on missingkids.com. Unlike Virginia, however, Maryland doesn’t create a post unless local law enforcement agencies send in a photo.

According to Carla Proudfoot, director of the Maryland State Center for Missing Children, Maryland’s clearinghouse accepts requests for a post and information from both law enforcement agencies and family members of the missing child. When she posts a kid on missingkids.com, she makes sure the automatically generated poster ends up in government buildings and at rests stops, the modern-day equivalent of milk cartons that end up in front of thousands of eyes.

She said the posters have generated all kinds of leads, including parents who recognize the missing child as one of their kids’ schoolmates, and a landlord who reported that someone who had kidnapped a family member just leased an apartment from him.

But Proudfoot estimates that she only gets photos in 10 percent of cases. Asked why agencies might not send in a photo, she said, “I can’t speak for them. I don’t know what their reasonings are.”

If a case makes local headlines, she’ll initiate contact with the investigating agency and ask if they want a poster. But she said, “That doesn’t mean that they’re going to accept our offer.”

“We try not to make those decisions because it’s not our investigation or our child,” she added.

While the District of Columbia has a missing children’s information clearinghouse, according to the NCMEC webpage, they do not appear to post any information on missingkids.com. Three children are listed as having disappeared from the district in the past year, and all of those pictures are labeled as posted by NCMEC itself.

 

A DC police spokeswoman, Gwendolyn Crump, said the department has found that press releases are an effective way to track down missing kids. While they cooperate with NCMEC, she said, “Only our most critical cases are referred.”

Who’s Taking MOOCs?

Higher education soothsayers are eying MOOCs — massive open online courses, like those provided by Coursera and MIT and Harvard’s edX — with equal parts fascination and wariness. Proponents have argued that MOOCs will bring upon us a new golden age of education, where Tuvan goat herders can take literature courses from Ivy League professors. Pessimists foretell that MOOCs will end up as a cost-cutting measure that replaces valuable class time with cut-rate video lectures at financially strained public universities.

But those visions both make presumptions about who is taking MOOCs. Utopians hope that MOOCs can reach new audiences that have never before had access to quality higher education, while MOOCs’ detractors assume they’ll draw traditional students away from current major players, particularly public schools. While MOOCs are still young and user data is sparse, initial surveys don’t seem to bear out either vision.

I don’t doubt that there are anecdotal tales of MOOCs reaching people across the globe who always wanted a college education but were too geographically isolated to get it. I’m sure it would be possible to pull IP address locations for Coursera users, but since I don’t have access to that data, I took a somewhat sloppier approach: pulling and analyzing stats from the “study groups” forum from Statistics One, Coursera’s largest class to date. When the class started, it had 75,000 users signed up, according to emails from professor Andrew Conway, so I believe its a good sample case.

By the end of the class, there were nearly 90 threads about starting study groups, featuring 844 individual posts. I used these replies as a proxy for how many users might be interested in joining groups, presumably indicating they were in the geographic area where the starting user wanted to set up a group. I realize this is not a very reliable approach, given that users could respond multiple times, and many of these posts were in languages I didn’t understand, so I haven’t a foggy what they were actually saying. I’m assuming, however, that they can give us meaningful reads of user interest in certain groups.

At 157, the plurality of thread posts were for groups scattered across the US, from Washington DC to Texas and Seattle. The second runner up was for a single post for a Spanish-language online study group that garnered 135 replies. After that, online study groups (for example, Google + hangouts and Facebook groups) were the most popular, followed by posts in India and Russia. Of course, India already has a reputation for churning out a technologically savvy workforce, at least in urban areas, and Russia is still riding the legacy of free science-heavy education from the Cold War. I’m skeptical that the MOOC users in those countries would not have had access to these kinds of courses otherwise.

There were several other posts from Western Europe and former Eastern-bloc countries, as well as Australia, Canada and Vietnam. And then one lonely little post from Khartoum. It received no replies.

There are obvious reasons why villagers in rural Mongolia are not MOOCs’ primary users. For one, users must speak English fluently to get anything out of the course. That might not be a high bar to leap in Western Europe or the former Soviet Union, where nearly everyone gets through primary and secondary education, and that education nearly always includes at least some instruction and English. But in developing countries with wide income disparities, there is a massive gap between the urban elite who usually send their kids abroad for college and the largely illiterate poor. The latter often don’t even speak the official colonial language, let alone speak and read a second one fluently.
Add onto that the need for an internet connection and basic math and study skills, and your average villager’s chances of learning from a MOOC become infinitesimal.

So what about American students? Are MOOCs really a threat to US public universities?

In some public systems like the University of Texas, professors are looking to MOOCs to replace undergraduate courses are are already massive and provide little individualized support for students. But that’s not the demographic that’s voluntarily taking MOOCs right now.

Coursera’s Computing for Data Analysis class sent out a survey at the beginning of the course a month ago and published the results. Of more than 6,000 survey respondents, 76 percent already had their bachelors degree. Forty-seven percent had done some graduate studies. About three quarters of the respondents also said they were already familiar with at least one other programming language besides R, which was the focus of the course. Coursera’s “Learn to Program” introductory course also, perhaps surprisingly, found through a survey of 12,000 registered users that only about a third described themselves as true beginners with no prior experience in programming. Twenty-two percent had already taken some kind of programming course, and an additional 15 percent described themselves as experienced programmers.

I would argue this demonstrates that the self-guided learning demanded by MOOCs is difficult for people who have never been in a college setting before. Speaking from personal experience, I could also speculate that the kind of skills and certifications provided by MOOCs are most useful for people at a point in their career where demonstrated capacities are more important than certifications, and if they say they know how to do something, they’ll be believed. I don’t think most people can reach that stage without a college degree or a lot of experience.

MOOCs may offer the most competition for high-cost low-quality online for-profit schools, particularly those offering graduate degrees. I know that the lure of completing a graduate degree online is tempting for many people who are too busy to attend classes in person. But, for now at least, schools like University of Phoenix and Capella do offer one thing that MOOCs don’t: a degree. In many fields, particularly the military and other federal employment, having a master’s degree from any university is more important than any palpable skills gained, since that degree automatically qualifies you for raises or promotions.

None of this is meant to denigrate MOOCs. I have taken several myself, starting with Stanford’s database course, which has been a great career booster. They are at least as rigorous as some of the courses I took at Grinnell College, which is a solid academic institution by any measure, and I believe there are many people like me who stand to gain much from MOOCs. But I don’t think, sadly, that they are the beginning of a revolution in education.

DoD Vol Ed Plans to Adopt Gainful Employment Rules

Politicians have announced and debated with much fanfare in the last few years measures to protect active-duty and veteran students from schools that gobble up money without improving grads’ lives. So it’s surprising that some potentially transformative Defense Department Voluntary Education and Veterans Affairs policies have been in the works for month without so much as a whisper.

In May, President Obama signed an executive order filled with jargon about deceptive practices and Principles of Excellence that didn’t appear to have much substance. But the way the Pentagon is interpreting it, it means colleges that flunk gainful employment measures set by the Department of Education for Title IV civilian financial aid will also be cut off from TA dollars. Carolyn Baker, head of DoD’s voluntary education programs, says the VA will follow suit, potentially cutting off for-profit giants like University of Phoenix, Kaplan College and the Art Institutes from millions of dollars in revenue.

The critical passages require the secretaries of defense, the VA and the Department of Education to work together to create and generate standard outcome measures. The order specifically says that information should be given to students prior to enrollment and posted on the Education Department’s College Navigator website, which is home to a wealth of data on individual institutions. Baker takes it a step farther, saying the Pentagon, under the executive order, is required to cut off schools that don’t meet benchmarks set by the Education Department. The situation is complicated by a recent lawsuit saying the Education Department has to rewrite part of its gainful employment rules, and the results have yet to be seen.

“If you’re going to say, OK, gainful employment — we’ll just make this up — 50 percent of all your [former] students must have a job, and then if they fall below that then we’re not going to give TA — DOD’s not saying that, because that’s not in our area of expertise,” she said in an exclusive interview in August.  “We’re going to be using what the Department of Education classifies as gainful employment and what is a quality level of gainful employment.”

And according to that logic, she said, the VA will follow suit.

Baker said the changes will be implemented in a future draft of the Memorandums of Understanding schools receiving TA are being asked to sign. Those changes will probably come out next year.

GI Bill and TA funds are important to many colleges, especially large for-profits, because they currently fall outside of the so-called “90-10” rule requiring schools to get at least 10 percent of their money from somewhere besides Title IV funds. While that could be a moot point for schools failing gainful employment standards since they would be disqualified from Title IV funds anyway, it would cut of thousands more students and millions more dollars for some of them.

For example, the Art Institutes had eight different programs at various locations flunk the Department of Education’s draft gainful employment data measures. Between the implementation of the Post 9/11 GI Bill in 2009 and June 2011, the Art Institutes had 6,709 students using VA money. Another 390 students used Tuition Assistance.

The University of Phoenix, America’s largest for-profit college and a top GI Bill and TA funding recipient, only had one program fail the gainful employment measure, but they have educated nearly 30,000 students using Post-9/11 GI Bill money, and another 14,000 using TA. According to a recent report by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, the Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, earned $144 million from TA and the GI Bill in 2010.

In July, a federal district judge sent the Education Department back to the drawing board on its gainful employment measure. As originally drafted, it would have disqualified programs flunking three measures: former students paying more than 12 percent of their total incomes on repaying student loans; former students paying more than 30 percent of their discretionary income on payments; and less than 35 percent of former students successfully working on paying down their debt. The judge struck down the latter part, saying the cutoff was too arbitrary.

That means the future of school payments for Title IV, GI Bill and TA funds are all uncertain. And I’m sure there are some college presidents and CEOs watching developments very, very closely.

Hello world!

Until two months ago, I was a journalist both in my heart and on my business card. Like many reporters these days, I have lost the business card title, but I still have story ideas I want to bring to life. My goal is to update this blog at least once a week. Right now I plan to focus on news — real news, not just ranting — on higher education, the military, human trafficking and all things data-journalism related. I admit, however, that I can’t predict how this blog will evolve. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.