The Green Police, They Live Inside My Head

A Super Bowl commercial prompts confusion as to whether the sustainabullies are good or bad.

Last night, 106.5 million people watched the New Orleans Saints win the Super Bowl. They also watched an Audi commercial advertising its A3 TDI® which won the Green Car of the Year award for 2010. 

Set to the tune of “Dream Police,” the commercial is a series of “green police” crackdowns on bewildered citizens who request plastic bags at the grocery store (“You picked the wrong day to mess with the eco system plastic boy”), throw away a battery, soak in a hot tub set at 105 degrees, and are caught in possession of incandescent light bulbs. A helicopter turns a spotlight on a man, alone in his kitchen, who has begun to dispose of an orange peel. Two guilty-looking teenage boys hang their heads as a green cop pours out their water bottles: “What do you guys think about plastic bottles now?” The climactic moment comes during an “eco check” stopping up the highway, when the Segway-riding green police (accompanied by a special anteater unit to sniff out eco infractions) identify the Audi TDI: “Clean diesel—you’re good to go sir!” As the smiling driver zips away from the gridlock, the screen reads, “Green has never felt so right.”  

While Audi’s commercial clearly ridicules the coercive tactics of the environmental movement, in the end the good feeling comes, not from overthrowing the tyrannical green police (we also call them sustainabullies), but from satisfying their demands. Seemingly there’s a mixed message. The popular website Treehugger.com asked, “Is this all a fun way to get the message across or a cynical poke at environmentalists?” 

Audi’s website calls their green police “caricatures of today’s ‘green movement’” and “a humorous group of individuals that have joined forces in an effort to collectively help guide consumers to make the right decision when it comes to the environment.” Audi says, “They’re not here to judge, merely to guide these decisions.”  

Hmm...not here to judge? Just to arrest, browbeat, invade privacy, and impede personal choice? Oh, ok, well as long as they’re not here to judge. See for yourself: 

Ivy League Sex Education...No Comment

It's Sex Week at Yale.

From time to time we cite without comment various items from articles, books, websites, and other sources. We don't comment on these items (at least in words), but our readers may have something to add.

Yale University is devoting this week – its fifth annual such occasion – to the examination of sexuality. It’s appropriately called “Sex Week,” and you can read the latest about today’s events, lectures and research topics on the front page of the Yale Daily News. 

Radio Segment on 'The Death of Manliness'

NAS communications director appeared on a radio broadcast to speak about the latest efforts to discredit men on college campuses.

Last Thursday, I appeared on a radio broadcast to speak about my article, "The Death of Manliness at the University of Wyoming." I talked about the bias against men evinced by UW's refusal to accept the transfer of a course called "Literature By and About Men," and how this is representative of a larger trend at colleges and universities across America to discredit men. The program, University Talk, reaches Eastern North Carolina. 

To listen to the segment, click here. 

Hookup Ink

A review of three books on the hookup culture on campus.

In order not to lose sight of some of NAS's best articles and the ones that have received the most attention, we decided to re-post one or two pieces from the same month a year ago. Today we offer "Hookup Ink," written by Wendy Shalit as a review of three new books on the hookup culture on campus. Her essay was published in last year's spring issue of Academic Questions, the issue on Liberal Education and the Family (all articles in this issue are available for free at springerlink.com). This piece was originally posted here. 

REVIEW ESSAY                                                                                  

Are Diversity Discussions Useful?

Should diversity skeptics bother to participate in diversity discussions? Forums conducive to full and fair discussion would seem to be quite scarce. Is it better to contribute as possible or ignore such events entirely?

At the University of Missouri, the Chancellor's Diversity Initiative sponsors a series of discussions entitled "You at Mizzou," focusing on diversity issues at the state university system's flagship campus. The events are arranged as dialogue sessions in a small group setting, with a facilitator introducing the topic in the form of a question. 

The monthly forum challenges participants to "discuss your differences and discover your similarities in a safe environment." Students, faculty and staff are enticed by tantalizing possibilities of "breaking down the barriers so we can foster a more inclusive campus community, which in turn yields a richer academic environment." 

In other words, it’s a textbook diversity seminar experience. 

I attended the opening dialogue in the series, in which students were asked whether we "are there yet?" when it comes to diversity at MU. What "there" means was not precisely spelled out, but in general the question seemed to beg a reply in the negative: "No, we're not there yet." If we were, presumably administrators wouldn't have scheduled another half dozen dialogues on the subject! 

My modest contribution that night was that while the university may not be as diverse as some would like, opportunities to encounter and interact with individuals of widely varying backgrounds are abundantly available - if one chooses to do so. I shared of my own such experiences, and thought aloud about the values of cross-cultural connections on campus. I suggested that perhaps simply making a point to share life with people of different backgrounds might be individually and collectively more beneficial than diversity programming itself. 

While the observation sparked a positive reaction from much of the group, a couple participants (a student co-facilitator and a faculty participant) consistently endeavored to redirect our attention to real or perceived shortcomings of the campus community. While past and present racial failures at MU or any institution should be understood and appreciated, a recriminatory spirit investing disproportionate energy to the awareness, attention and analysis of such features eventually comes at the cost of a more forward-looking and productive discussion. 

I debated on whether or not to attend tonight's discussion. While I'm always interested in assessing the current state of the campus diversity movement, at some point you have to ask yourself whether it's really worth the time to attend a two-hour discussion for which you can readily anticipate in advance what the essential lines of thought will be. Already in the same building for an earlier commitment, I decided to attend, to shape things where I could and take the temperature of the discussion series. 

At some point I entered into a lively exchange with an English professor, with the discussion becoming heated after she repeatedly interrupted as I attempted to pose a question. She objected to a comment I offered in my premise, and I objected to the fact that she refused to yield the floor to allow me to simply complete the question before she responded. After all, we were promised a dialogue, which I like to think means something other than a lecture. 

I sought to ask whether consideration of race in awarding scholarships or hiring faculty might prompt some to wonder, in any given case, whether consideration of race was in fact present in that particular decision. Pretty simple stuff, I thought, and at the minimum, a fair question. One of the worst potential outcomes of preference-based affirmative action programs is a "profound stigmatizing effect" (a phrase I borrow from the last administration's Justice Department) of the class of intended beneficiaries; a broad if generally subtle impression or concern that minority group members might not be completely qualified for the positions they hold. Eventually my question was at least acknowledged, if not taken entirely seriously. 

Beyond the entertainment of a few fireworks and the challenge of serving as the minority opinion spokesperson, I don't know that there was anything particularly revealing, meaningful or productive about tonight's discussion. At least, I don't know that I learned anything new or was able to seriously and positively influence a discussion that was totally loaded from the start. 

The facilitators I think wanted to be fair-minded, but were not nearly as well-versed or aggressive as the faculty and staff member who showed up to unofficially direct the discussion. A few students seemed to be attending as part of a class requirement, and another few seemed to be diversiphiles in training: they could spout the movement's clichés but were relatively unsophisticated in terms of knowledge or rhetoric. (Which is not to say that their opinion or personal experiences are not valid).

Now, I find myself wondering once again whether such exercises are even worth my time. That's merely the myopic formulation of another, more important question: Are diversity discussions beyond redemption? Should skeptics bother to attempt to influence the discussion? Or just pay as little attention as possible and hope that not too many people are listening to the diversity dogmatists? 

Avoidance seems like an easy answer, but sensible society has lost too many battles by shying away from unpleasant political conversations in the past. At the same time, participation does not seem particularly fruitful when confronted with rules of the game that are so stubbornly skewed. I don't yet have a fully satisfying answer, but perhaps the following ideas make a good starting point: 

• Understand the unique language of the movement. Diversity vernacular tends to be surreptitious and supple, with a heavy emphasis on subjective personal experience, emotion and perception.
• Bring at least one fellow skeptic to any diversity discussion.
• Organize your own diversity discussion, designed with better balance for a more full and fair discussion. Invite intellectually honest participants of divergent viewpoints to attend.
• Educate others - outside formal discussion environments - about the larger goals and philosophical underpinnings of the diversity movement. The lay observer may simply need some friendly confirmation that it is indeed acceptable to think critically about what a confident, politically-correct movement like the Diversity movement hands down as gospel. 

These are just some ideas, but as you now know, I'm (usually) open to a good discussion.

Brian T. Johnson is an undergraduate student of political science at the University of Missouri and publisher of PrincipallyPolitical.com.

 

The Death of Manliness at the University of Wyoming

There's bias against "Literature By and About Men" in the Equality State.

Wyoming is one of only five states in America with more men than women. Apparently, however, the University of Wyoming is biased against men.  

As a student at Monterey Peninsula College, Marine Lance Corporal Aaron Graham took a course called “Literature By and About Men,” taught by English professor and NAS member David Clemens. The course, on “depictions of maleness, manhood, and masculinity in essays, films, short stories, and poetry either by men or about men,” focused on a variety of topics, such as “theories of sex or gender difference, the nature of boyhood, the experience of fatherhood and the experience of sons, men and war, male codes, misandry and machismo, competition and teamwork, the man of letters, love and marriage, and manly aging, manly death.” 

“Manly” is a lonely word on college campuses today. Although recovering the lost art of manliness is gaining interest in the nation at large, colleges and universities do their best to stifle it. Most institutions offer degrees in women’s studies but not men’s studies, and they have women’s centers but not men’s centers. The University of Wyoming is an example. Its women’s center website answers a frequently asked question, “Why isn’t there a men’s center?”: 

Few schools have men's centers because it's generally recognized that men already have full access to educational and employment opportunities as required by law. A large body of research exists which clearly documents gender-based discrimination against women. Traditionally, American and world history have focused primarily on the achievements and contributions of men and have largely excluded those of women. 

The argument is that the men have had their day and it’s now the women’s turn to dominate. But the phrase “men already have full access to educational and employment opportunities as required by law” is disingenuous. Women do not yet have full access to education and employment as required by law? Really? Last year, women comprised 46.5% of the workforce and 57.2% of higher education enrollment in the United States. 

Colleges seem to want to keep women back, to make them retain victim and minority status when they are no longer a minority. Ironically, in doing so, they victimize and invite discrimination against men. This idea appears to have been the reason behind one category of U Wyoming’s required courses for English majors. Students pursuing an English degree must earn three credit hours in “Emerging fields and approaches” courses. These courses include “Non-Western Women Writers,” “Gender: Humanities Focus,” “African American Novel,” “American Indian Literature,” Studies in Chicano Folklore,” “Studies in Ethnic Literature,” and “Women’s Studies.”  

When Aaron Graham, an English major, transferred to the University of Wyoming this year, he requested to transfer credit from the “Literature By and About Men” course at Monterey Peninsula College to fulfill the English department requirement. A few days later he received the petition back. The faculty committee representative, Leslie Rush, denied the request. In the space given for her to provide a reason, she wrote simply, “List II courses should be on literature by and about women, not men” (see refused petition). 

The common procedure for such requests is that colleges with degree requirements bend them to suit the spirit of the requirement, not the exact letter. UW wanted English students to take a gender-focused literature course, and that was just what Graham had to offer. It hoped to empower minorities facing discrimination, but by making this closed-minded, set-in-its-ways decision, UW ended up positioning men as a minority facing discrimination. Graham is currently planning to appeal the rejection. 

Back in 2004, the University of California rejected the transferability of the same course, saying that it had a “narrow focus” and that there was “no comparable course in lower division” at any of the University of California’s campuses. At the time, Professor Clemens noted on the NAS online forum: 

While I don't question U.C.'s woeful admission that not even one campus offers a course in literature by and about men, U.C. does accept, for lower division transfer from community colleges, such English courses as "Images of Women in Western Literature" from Saddleback...and "Literature By and About Women" from Shasta, among dozens of other clearly gender specific literature surveys. 

By what process can U.C. analysts find "Literature By and About Men" not comparable to "Literature By and About Women"? Apparently, U.C. sees comparability as defined only by gender, not by level or type of course, thereby applying a standard of gender discrimination that produces an inequitable, politicized curriculum and differential treatment based solely on sex. 

Clemens’ appeals to the UC administration were ignored, but after NAS and NoIndoctrination.org drew blogosphere attention to the situation, the university voluntarily reversed its decision. Clemens’ course was then and may still be the only one in California higher education to focus on literature by and about men.  

When held up to the light of common sense, the University of California couldn’t justify its biased rejection of the course. Let’s help the University of Wyoming to reach the same conclusion. After all, if you can’t find manliness in Wyoming, where can you find it? 

* * *

Correction: This article originally stated in error that Leslie Rush is the University of Wyoming English Department Chair. Professor Rush is in fact a Professor of English Education Adolescent Literacy.

Blacklisting a Christian University

The AAUP's Canadian counterpart, the CAUT, has declared that Trinity Western University's statement of faith deprives faculty members of academic freedom. We disagree.

According to the Langley Advance, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the Canadian version of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has issued a report stating that Christian universities fail to provide faculty members with academic freedom. Specifically the report places Trinity Western University in British Columbia on its list of universities and colleges that have a faith or ideological test as a condition of employment. This list is mysteriously unavailable online; perhaps it is still being created. We do know that Crandall University is also at risk of being listed. 

The report on Trinity Western University begins: 

In 2006, the Canadian Association of University Teachers [CAUT] adopted “Procedures in Academic Freedom Cases Involving Allegations of Requirement of an Ideological or Faith Test as a Condition of Employment” [Appendix A]. The CAUT considered that academic freedom is violated at universities in Canada that seek to ensure an ideologically or religiously homogeneous academic staff. 

Indeed, Trinity’s statement of faith says that the university “openly espouses a unifying philosophical framework to which all faculty and staff are committed without reservation.” The statement declares that university employees believe in a triune God who created the world and offers salvation through the death of Jesus Christ. CAUT officials say such a statement of faith is equivalent to an ideological litmus test that deprives faculty members of academic freedom. The Advance quotes James Turk, executive director of CAUT, saying, “A university is meant as a place to explore ideas, not to create disciples of Christ.”  

Actually, Mr. Turk, the university was originally a place to create disciples of Christ. Queen’s University, the first degree-granting institution in Canada, was established by the Church of Scotland and affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in Canada. It was founded mainly for the education of local ministers. Another early institution, the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface, has been robustly Catholic since its 1818 founding as a school for boys. 

It is strange that the CAUT would take such a strong stance against religious schools when its American counterpart the AAUP has clearly acknowledged the academic freedom of such schools in its 1915 Declaration of Principles:  

If a church or religious denomination establishes a college to be governed by a board of trustees, with the express understanding that the college will be used as an instrument of propaganda in the interests of the religious faith professed by the church or denomination creating it, the trustees have a right to demand that everything be subordinated to that end. 

Again, in its 1940 Statement of Principles, the AAUP declared: 

Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment. 

Trinity has made its mission unambiguous, and the statement of faith is clearly a criterion for employment. Many schools make “demonstrated commitment to diversity” a must for job candidates, and leaders of the campus sustainability movement are currently urging colleges to “insist that the selection process for new campus leaders include a climate action ‘litmus test.’” Requiring commitments to ideologies such as diversity and climate action is not protected by the AAUP provisions for religious aims, yet neither the AAUP nor the CAUT believe it poses a threat to academic freedom.   

Many colleges and universities profess a commitment to academic freedom but at the same time espouse social and political doctrines that subvert it. Trinity Western U takes a stand for academic freedom in a thoughtful statement that rightly places truth-seeking as the goal of academic freedom. The CAUT report reproduces it in its entirety, and so do I:   

 

The authors of the report remark that “Although there are in Canada religiously affiliated universities, many with a mission tied in some manner to their religious affiliation, most do not require a commitment to the faith of the affiliate(s) nor do they place academic freedom within the limits of their ‘stated perspective.’” 

The Advance quotes TWU President Jonathan Raymond, who says that the attack is a cheap attempt to discredit the academically serious Christian university. He said, “There is no topic under the sun that can't be raised. We assume faculty will have their thinking informed by their Christian faith, but we don't influence it. They can raise all perspectives but we expect they'll also raise the Christian perspective.” President Raymond also wrote a letter officially responding to the CAUT report welcoming “normal academic dialogue” and noting that Canada’s highest laws, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Human Rights Code, “has already determined that TWU has a legitimate place in the academic landscape of Canada.”  

Christian colleges in general are worried by the clash between CAUT and TWU. Al Hiebert, executive director of Christian Higher Education Canada, an umbrella group for Christian universities and colleges, calls the investigative report “sinister” and a form of harassment. “It's putting the education of those schools and the research of their faculty under the heading of, ‘We don't need to take them seriously.’” 

Will the Christian universities in Canada that espouse a statement of faith find a way to overturn CAUT’s efforts to blacklist them? Or will the Association’s list idea spread to the United States and other countries? 

We at NAS are considering an investigation to see whether we should put the CAUT on our list of organizations that misappropriate the notion of academic freedom and endanger true freedom of inquiry.

 

 

 

 

Early Vacations and Entitled Students

Has self-esteem education gone way too far?

A piece in last Thursday’s Inside Higher Ed provides a miniscule blip of hope for the future of American higher education.  I suppose it’s a measure of that dismal landscape’s usual bleakness that I’m feeling almost elated:  The Faculty Senate at Pennsylvania State University, in response to the initiative of President Graham Spanier, has endorsed a resolution urging faculty colleagues not to cancel classes a day or two ahead of scheduled vacations.  

And I do mean vacations.  At Penn State and a number of other schools, the Thanksgiving holiday break is now a full week, not simply Thursday and Friday as it was back in the day.  And this is often in addition to an October Fall break of Tuesday through Friday - as I learned when my oldest daughter was in College – followed variously by a mid-winter break, Spring break or Easter break during the Spring semester, as well as a number of the regular federal Monday holidays.  The student response to all of these extra breaks seems to be, “Give us a break!”  Despite the longer and more frequent vacations, there’s apparently a regular cacophony of griping and caterwauling in student newspapers and governance associations about meanie professors who refuse to cancel classes on the day or so prior to the actual vacation.  Look, they say, we’ve already made plans: travel reservations, parties, hotels, family get-togethers, etc., etc., and it’s not fair (That is, as you can possibly imagine, it’s not fai-ai-ai-ai-air).  Anyway, no one’s going to show up, so what’s the point?  C’mon, can’t we just face reality?  Needless to say, lots of professors are happy to oblige, and everyone gets a couple of extra days tacked on to an already-lengthened vacation.  Adjunct or untenured faculty, hoping for positive student evaluations, may well be unwilling accomplices, as part of the same process that moves them to award disproportionately large numbers of A grades.  Of course, some recalcitrant professors, rare martinets and men of steel, don’t cancel classes and – mirabile dictu – some students attend.  When Spanier learned of this informal extension of the Thanksgiving holiday, he brought the matter to the Faculty Senate, who went on record as condemning it.  There are no enforcement mechanisms – I’m not sure what they could be – and some professors will no doubt ignore or resent the resolution.  But as far as symbolic gestures go, this one is certainly on the money.  I’m positively exuberant, and heartily commend President Spanier and the Faculty Senate for going on record against faculty truancy and student self-indulgence, in vivid contrast to the usual weekly enactments about increasing diversity or building a “sustainable” campus.  Good show there, Penn State. 

But as suggested by one of the commenters at IHE – Old Fashioned Prof. - there’s a larger context to which this is but the proverbial tip: 

I applaud this resolution, although I despair about the university culture on the parts of both faculty and students that even makes it necessary. I write this as an old-fashioned professor who has held class even at 3:30 pm on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving—now there's an exercise in futility! Whenever students ask me if I will be holding a class before a vacation, I fix them with a steely look and ask "Is the university officially in session?" Looking abashed, they mumble and admit that it is. "Well, then, I will be here to teach you."

Sometimes I think that faculty and students are lurching toward a pact of apathy where the students fork over a wad of tuition money and the university forks over a degree in exchange, and both parties merely pretend to care about what goes on in between. Maybe it's time to retire.

What “university culture” would that be?  Let’s make that “academic culture” since, as Professor John Chalberg’s recent piece on this page illustrated, something of the kind is also quite familiar to those of us teaching at community colleges.  That “culture” has many familiar facets, of course.  There are the exponentially increasing numbers of students who come to college lacking sufficient academic preparation or direction in their lives; there is the rampant grade inflation; there are large numbers of “student centered” institutions whose senior administrators are more than willing to do back flips in response to grievances that likely reflect simple negligence or petulant immaturity.  

But if there is a single over-arching theme that encompasses and reinforces all of these factors, it’s the one that sees students as customers who are entitled to satisfaction, flexibility, comfort and convenience.  Look, for example, at the expensive new dormitories going up at four-year schools everywhere these days, which resemble five-star hotels.  And not only at four year schools: a significant number of community colleges are also constructing dorms, in hopes of emulating their senior cousins more closely. Given the prevalent realities of dorm life these days, you might have expected serious students to flee to a community college where they wouldn’t have to reside, but that hasn’t seemed to dissuade many eager community college presidents from going for the big leagues.  And while the promotional literature used by many schools to court prospective students does actually mention education, this stuff also appeals powerfully to the lure of how much fun it will be to go to Xburg state college. [Disclaimer:  I have nothing against fun.  In fact, I’m in favor of it.  But, as a former 18-year old, I recall that I managed to have more than a bit of fun without any extra encouragement from the college I attended.  There were no early class cancellations or extended Thanksgiving holidays in those less leisured academic groves, needless to say.]     

It can’t be surprising, therefore, that students expect—no, demand—accommodation.  I need this, this, this and this: give it to me.  If they’re going to miss a week or two of classes due to – yes, really – a vacation in the middle of a semester, they take for granted that their instructors will see to it that they don’t fall behind.  “I’m graduating and I really need this course.”  If they miss half or more of the class sessions in a course that happens to meet on a Friday or Monday – “I like my weekends” – they’re often genuinely bewildered that their grade takes a big hit as a result.  “Can’t we work something out? I really need this course.” If your requirements are beyond their ken, interest or available study time, they see nothing amiss with requesting a custom-made version more to their liking.  “This is what works for me, and I really need this course.”  If they disappear without a trace for several weeks and then suddenly show up again, they might well ask, “What did I miss? Oh, an exam? And the term paper, too? But I didn’t even know when it was due. It’s in the syllabus? But I never read the syllabus! Well, how about just grading me on whatever I got done, then.  Hey, I really need this course.”   And email has made many students’ consumerism positively peremptory.  Just Friday, for instance, I received this message from one who’d been absent:  

I missed class today.  I will need today’s lecture notes and any assignments that are do [sic!] for next week. 

Now  if you happen to have my old-fashioned hang-up about classroom decorum, make sure that you have tenure and don’t need to apply for any more promotions.  I was angrily denounced to the dean by one student who was apoplectic that I had told her repeatedly to stop sending text messages during lectures.  I was “persecuting” her, she informed him.  Fortunately, he and I are old friends and share a similar outlook in such matters.  As John Chalberg acknowledges, this certainly isn’t characteristic of all students, especially – in my own experience – of those who’ve been homeschooled or who hail from somewhere outside of the United States.  He and I agree, however, that such encounters are vastly more common than they would have been at one time, and bear out the impressions recorded in this piece which appeared several years ago in the New York Times (I stumbled onto it at the web page of a delightfully crusty, retired political science professor at Rutgers, New Brunswick. Apparently, he’d also had a belly full).   

And for once, I think we’ve got a problem here that you can’t blame exclusively or even mainly on higher education.  I think it’s certainly true that the “college experience” these days often intensifies and prolongs adolescence.  The fact is, however, that not all, but many students come to college already spoiled far beyond rotten, and are used to getting whatever they want.  They’ve cut their teeth in a popular TV and music culture that’s drenched in narcissistic individualism and nihilism, and which extols in-your-face rudeness (See for example Diana West’s book, The Death of the Grownup for a depressing but compelling analysis of what’s wrong with schools and much else as well). 

Multiculturalism, diversity and “tolerance” begin at the beginning of course, and kids are much more likely to color pictures of “inclusive” rainbows than study phonics as I had to do. To this, you can often add frequent large doses of “self-esteem” education, starting in kindergarten and reinforced by “progressive” educational pedagogy which allows them to get satisfactory grades simply for doing homework assignments or occupying a seat in the classroom.  Many students also get a big assist from their legendary “helicopter” parents, who alternate between threatening litigation against the school district or announcing that they and their kids will be away on vacation for two weeks in October and they expect that things will be kept up to speed for them by the teachers.  I don’t exaggerate.  One of my daughters is a middle school teacher, and provides me with a fresh round of jaw-dropping stories almost every time we speak.  One of her colleagues, as a new teacher several years ago, got in big trouble simply for doing the right thing and flunking a couple of kids she caught red-handed, cheating on an exam.  Unfortunately, the banana-spined administration caved immediately when their parents threatened to sue the school district, and they promptly reversed the failing grades.  Untenured, she was thus hung out to dry, and had to endure the gloating presence of these conceited little miscreants in her classroom for the rest of the school year.  Bad as things are at the college level, the real damage is inflicted much earlier, and not only by the schools. 

So what shall we do about all of this when these expectant students arrive in our classrooms?  We’ve been discussing it at my own community college, and some of my colleagues have stated with bland confidence that this is simply a “new reality” that requires our adjustment: if students aren’t ready for college-work as it was once understood, then we need to give them whatever they can handle.  If they skip classes, then it’s our responsibility to see that they get caught up, etc., etc. 

For myself, I’m not ready to throw in the towel, not by a long shot.  Maybe I’ve been fortified by the Faculty Senate’s action at Penn State, and maybe I’m simply unable to change in any case.  At the moment though, I’m feeling like Horatius at the Tiber, and I’m not going to budge. What do you think?

Peter Wood on Anger Today

NAS President Peter Wood speaks on anger and civility in the public square.

Last week, NAS President Peter Wood appeared as a guest on the Albert Mohler Radio Program. As the author of the book A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, he spoke on anger and civility in the public square, especially as it pertains to the current political administration. To listen to the program, click here and click either “play” or “download.” Dr. Wood’s segment is roughly between 14:15 and 19:35.

 

 

 

 

 

Kaleidoscope or Rubik's Cube? The AAUP's Academic Freedom Scholarship

NAS congratulates the AAUP on the launch of its new Journal of Academic Freedom.

The American Association of University Professors has launched a new online Journal of Academic Freedom edited by AAUP President Cary Nelson. Access to the journal is free and issues will focus on academic freedom and “its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining.”

NAS congratulates the AAUP on this publication. We hold the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles as a kind of canon. The Declaration set forth with great moral clarity the meaning of academic freedom as both a privilege and a responsibility for professors. It defined academic freedom for teachers as comprising three elements: “freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and action.” The Declaration acknowledged that academic freedom applies to students as well, and it made clear that a professor “should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.” 

In recent decades, however, the AAUP has embraced a version of academic freedom in which it becomes a license to teach all sorts of ready-made conclusions and to politicize course material. NAS has responded to this misdirection in a number of articles and in a debate between Peter Wood and Cary Nelson at the most recent NAS national conference. The NAS and the AAUP differ in our definitions of academic freedom, but we see much to be gained by the Association’s new journal. 

Looking at the first issue, there seems to be a theme, presented most explicitly in “The Demise of Shared Governance at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute” by Nancy D. Campbell and Jane Koretz and in “Hidden (and Not-So-Hidden) New Threats to Faculty Governance by Jan H. Blits. The theme is that corporate-style management is hostile to shared governance, and that administrators must not be allowed to usurp the role of the faculty. 

Blits, who is president of NAS’s Delaware affiliate, describes the ideological reeducation agenda of the University of Delaware’s infamous residence life program.  In his article, a revised version of a paper he delivered at the 2009 NAS conference, Blits notes (as NAS did in our statement Rebuilding Campus Community: The Wrong Imperative) that such so-called “educational” programs “erode faculty governance and transfer academic control to service units that answer directly to the administration, not to faculty.” Blits calls the residence life program’s avoidance of faculty review “a dangerous precedent for an administration’s usurpation of the faculty’s essential responsibility and prerogative.  

Some of the journal’s articles are broad conceptual treatises, such as “Professionalization as the Basis for Academic Freedom and Faculty Governance” by Larry Gerber and “Paranoia and Professionalization: The Importance of Graduate Student Academic Freedom” by Dan Colson, a graduate student of English at the University of Illinois. Colson pleads for acknowledgment for graduate students: 

All I really ask is that you recognize that we are you! A few years younger, a great deal less experienced, but still dedicated individuals who share the same rights, responsibilities, and passions. Graduate student academic freedom is the freedom to learn, because learning requires freedom.  

He does not discuss the academic freedom of the undergraduate student, although he does mention “the rights of current undergraduates who will soon join us in our programs.” 

Most of the articles in this issue are story-driven. Jean Gregorek, formerly an Antioch College Associate Professor of Literature, romantically recounts the rise and fall of the short-lived Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute, born out of the death of AntiochCollege. The one-year failed experiment in “community-driven education,” fell apart over divisions concerning governance, she writes. 

Cary Nelson himself has an essay in the journal, “The Last Indian Standing: Shared Governance in the Shadow of History,” which mourns the treatment of faculty members who were dismissed from Bacone College, historically an institution for educating Native Americans. Nelson cites as his sources a resolution issued by the now-defunct Bacone College AAUP chapter, an unsigned and undated leaflet “Where Are the Indians at Bacone College,” and his personal communication with Bacone faculty and staff members. 

An article by Yeshiva University Professor of History Ellen Schrecker focuses on “attacks” on Ward Churchill. Her essay paints Churchill as the victim of “right-wing commentators” such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Schrecker venerates Churchill: 

A lanky, long-haired fifty-eight-year old with movie-star good looks who affected a modified Native American style of dress with a beaded headband and dark glasses, Churchill was a prolific public intellectual whose thirty-seven page (now about fifty) C.V. listed two dozen books and hundreds of articles. Many, like his “little Eichmanns” essay, are highly polemical attacks on the past and present policies of the federal government, published by small presses and obscure journals far outside the academic mainstream.  

She concludes: 

Will the current, and, no doubt, future fiscal cutbacks force American faculty members into a defensive stance where they flee from all controversy; or will the passing of the Bush administration and advent of the Obama one encourage them to fight more vigorously for their own freedom of expression and that of their colleagues? Let us hope it is the latter. 

The AAUP’s biases show through in articles like this one. Schrecker deplores “politically motivated exclusions of individual scholars,” but disregards politically motivated exclusions of students whom such professors seek to indoctrinate. We do agree with the idea projected by the journal that the faculty must reclaim its teaching responsibility and that universities must invest academic power in those who are intellectually competent to exercise it. 

Academic freedom is a complex, multifaceted concept that deserves deep and thoughtful study. To that end, the AAUP journal has the potential to be an important resource and guide for academia as it faces controversies and considers its role in preserving academic freedom. Because universities struggle every day to understand this principle, the AAUP should have no trouble coming up with material for each issue. 

The AAUP’s version of academic freedom, however, is a kaleidoscope, with shifting shapes that form a different image every time you look. We at NAS understood it as a Rubik’s Cube, which can be either a scrambled puzzle or a solved one. Scrambled, it appears inscrutable, yet it has an attainable—albeit elusive—solution. 

NAS would like to see more scholarly writing on academic freedom as a puzzle with an objective solution. Our own journal, Academic Questions, is published as a forum for asking and answering serious questions about the academy. We may not find all the answers, but we are looking. The Journal of Academic Freedom won’t have all the answers either, but as it seriously seeks to examine academic freedom, we welcome it.  

The State of the University

What President Obama's State of the Union address means for the future of higher education.

Last night President Obama delivered his first State of the Union address. He spoke for 71 minutes and devoted about a minute and a half to higher education. Here’s what he had to say:

Howard Zinn, Silent

Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, has died.

Howard Zinn, who passed away yesterday at age 87, was a fixture at Boston University during much of my time there.  I did not know him personally and looking back I have a hard time recalling hearing him speak. Though I attended events where he spoke, he has somehow stuck in my memory as a figure from the era of silent film—all gesture and expression.  

Four Rented Rooms and a Big Idea: Shimer College at the Crossroads

A tiny Great Books college in Chicago encounters a clash of ideas.

In May 1853, an express train on the Southern Michigan Line collided with an emigrant train on the Michigan Central ten miles outside Chicago, killing sixteen, mostly German and Irish immigrants headed west. A local paper described it as a scene of “indiscriminate ruin.” Perhaps it was especially so given the hopes that had led these travelers to the American heartland. We ran across this story while looking for material on a small Illinois college founded that same year. Shimer College is in the news because campus activists opposed to its traditionalist president are predicting another train wreck. 

As readers of this website know, we have a soft spot for intellectually ambitious small colleges, and the quiddities of their curricula. In today’s Chicago Tribune comes a report, “Shimer College in Power Struggle,” that quickens our interest.  

Shimer is among America’s smallest colleges (102 students, 11 professors) and is devoted entirely to a Great Books curriculum. In recent years it has flickered on the edges of extinction. It gave up its old bucolic campus in Mount Carroll, Illinois in 1979 and moved downscale to Waukegan, and moved again in 2006 to four rented rooms on Chicago’s South Side at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the last three years it has had three presidents.  

The current president, Thomas Lindsay, is exactly the sort of person that American colleges and universities ought to thirst for as their campus executive. He is a University of Chicago Ph.D. who had a long and successful academic career before his appointment as Deputy Chairman for the National Endowment for the Humanities. In that position he led the We the People Project—which carried forward his long dedication to the links between democracy and education. His becoming president of tiny Shimer can only be understood as an act of public service. His last academic position was as provost of Seton Hall University and before that, as provost of the University of Dallas.  

President Lindsay is now focusing his considerable talents on bringing Shimer College out of its hospital ward condition. One might think this could only prompt joy among the College’s faculty members and students. But as the Chicago Tribune headline announces, many of them see his efforts as an intrusion. It’s hard not to think of Antioch College in its final days when, faced with results of decades of leftist mismanagement, a vociferous group of faculty, students, and alumni demanded yet more mismanagement. Antioch, of course, gave up the ghost. But President Lindsay and his board are determined to keep Shimer afloat.  

What is the fight at Shimer all about? According to the Tribune article, it is a dispute between campus egalitarians who want the students to remain involved in the college’s governance and President Lindsay who favors a more top-down approach. Or as Ron Grossman, the Trib reporter, puts it, “The communal democracy of which Marx dreamed [vs.] the enlightened despotism that Hobbes advocated.” Well, that probably exaggerates things a bit. Marx may have his acolytes at Shimer, but the democratic Tom Lindsay is no follower of Tom Hobbes.  

A better explanation is that Lindsay is disturbing the leftist complacency of a college campus. It doesn’t really matter whether an American college is large, medium, or small; nor does it matter that much whether its curriculum is vocational, free-form, or liberal arts core; nor does it matter what its official mission is—these days the default disposition is the same. The American college is an institution of and for the Left. It propagates the view that America is an unjust society dominated by the privileged few at the expense of the oppressed many. It assumes that the project of education consists of cultivating resentments and guilt, and ideally, instilling lifelong animus against the West in general and America in particular.  

In that light, it is no great surprise that, left to drift during its years of decline, Shimer College has drifted left. Small as it is, Shimer has developed the same ideological reflexes as the University of Michigan or the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  

Can Tom Lindsay teach Shimer a new and better disposition? He has his work cut out for him. He does, however, have some puissant allies. The Shimer curriculum, after all, features Sophocles, Cicero, Shakespeare, Pascal, and Locke. It’s hard to read writers like this and conclude that the Western tradition is wholly bankrupt.  

Putting aside the current contretemps, the presence of Shimer College among the three thousand eight hundred some colleges and universities in the United States warrants a little bit of celebratory reflection. The higher education establishment in the U.S. never tires of lauding the great diversity of colleges and universities that dot the national landscape. In principle, the variety is nearly endless, and there is something for everyone. In reality, the vast majority of colleges and universities in this country present a dreary sameness. The same smorgasbord of banal, watered-down, one-sided courses is taught nearly everywhere. Political correctness seeps in at every pore. Remediation (official or unacknowledged) is built into introductory courses. Grade inflation is institutionalized to carry forward the unmotivated. The hard work of conveying to students comprehensive surveys of subjects is displaced by boutique courses lacking intellectual context. And the faculty members are largely interchangeable from one campus to the next. They all have the same python-like graduate education: long and narrow, except for that bulge of specialization, where they swallow the pig.  

That overmuch of a sameness has a few small exceptions. Shimer could be one of them. How did Shimer escape the mold?  

We’re not sure. Shimer began as a preparatory school for young women, founded in 1853—a year after Antioch, and much in the same spirit. Two young women from New York State, Frances Shimer and Cinderella Gregory, set out for the “frontier” as they saw it to bring education to the West. Their school offered courses in “home economics and etiquette classes alongside ‘intellectual mathematics’ and the study of electricity.” This sounds some distance from a Homer to Hamilton curriculum—not that we undervalue etiquette or electricity.  

Northwestern Illinois in 1853 may not have been the Wild West, but it was a land filling up with footloose immigrants who were striving to acquire some culture in the old sense. Frances and Cinderella were effectively missionaries to an educational frontier, though early on they insisted that the College be non-denominational. It was nearly a century later that Shimer began admitting men and swung into orbit around Robert Hutchins’ enthusiasm for the Great Books.  

The Great Books focus cannot be said to have been a brilliant marketing move, but it did add a distinct richness to the education alternatives for American students. In a way, Shimer remained a college for immigrants, the more so as Americans became increasingly outsiders to their own intellectual heritage and civilization. That this experiment has lasted sixty years seems nearly a miracle. We hope that Tom Lindsay can take inspiration from the name of the College’s co-founder and once again rescue it from the ashes. 

Baggage Claim at Williams

Williams College will cancel classes to engage in "pomosexual" poetry performances, politicized art discussions, a "queering communities" panel, and "reclaiming New England's aboriginal history."

A little over a year ago Peter Wood wrote “Williams Chokes Up” about a bias reporting system at WilliamsCollege in Massachusetts. At the time, the six-month-old system had just been noted in the student newspaper for having received only one incident report. The system, Williams Speaks Up, is still in operation as a login-required web portal where members of the campus community can anonymously report incidents of unwanted, abusive, or harassing behavior. There has been, however, no recent news about the volume of complaints entertained. 

In the NAS article about the bias portal, Dr. Wood observed a related campus event, Claiming Williams Day, which had been established that year after someone wrote the “n-word” on a freshman student’s dorm room door. A group of 120 students formed Stand With Us in response to the graffiti. The group, whose mission is “beginning to change the culture of apathy and foster the real respect that we know is possible” at Williams, organized a rally and drafted a “Pact Against Indifference and Hate.” A student who helped lead the rally told the Williams Record, “When people don’t react, silence can be read as acceptance.” 

Claiming Williams grew out of Stand With Us, with the goal to “address issues of privilege on our campus and in our world.” Not everyone was on board with the idea. Robert Bell, a professor of English, said at a faculty meeting, “The quickest way to transform a deplorable incident into a disaster is to declare officially that there exists a culture of hate at Williams College.” 

But the day of canceled classes and “claiming” turned out to be such a hit that Williams decided to make it an annual event. The next one will take place on February 4, 2010. Claiming Williams now has a steering committee composed of students, alumni, administrators (representing health services, dining services, campus life, the multicultural center, the library, and the chaplain’s office), and one faculty member, a professor of biology. The project describes its mission in “diversity” era terms: 

Claiming Williams invites the community to acknowledge and understand the uncomfortable reality that not all students, staff, and faculty can equally “claim” Williams. By challenging the effects of the College’s history of inequality that are based on privileges of class, race, gender, sexuality and religion, we will provoke individual, institutional, and cultural change. 

What does it mean to be able to “equally ‘claim’ Williams”? Is it like “claiming” unemployment or claiming luggage at the airport? Are students, staff, and faculty entitled to claim some kind of possessive right over the College? In the context of this mission statement, to “claim” Williams seems to mean to know that you belong and are treated as an equal. Apparently students who fall into unprivileged class, races, genders, sexualities, and religions do not feel that they can “claim” a rightful place on campus or feel at home there.  

Last year’s advertising slogan “Examining privilege, building community” drew significant criticism. According to Wendy Raymond, the sole faculty member on the Claiming Williams committee, some people felt accused by the emphasis on the word “privilege.” So the group adopted stealth tactics: “The steering committee is working to develop new and creative ways to entice people to participate in conversations around issues of unexamined privilege and think about the differences in our privilege levels,” Raymond told the Williams Record last October. 

Hence, this year’s enticements promotions focus on one segment of the schedule, a small-group dialogue with a Puerto Rican artist named Pepón Osorio. One of Osorio’s sculptures is a huge anatomical heart made of paper, glue, and fiberglass, resembling a piñata (it features heartbeat sound effects). His creations often have political messages, which likely played a part in his invitation to Claiming Williams Day: 

Artist Pepón Osorio will host a dialogue that will engage twenty students, staff, and faculty in a process of self-reflection and examination of personal boundaries. Osorio will present and discuss his artistic projects in the community—a working process that unearths issues of identity, class, and race. This forum will create a space where people are able to reflect and consider ways in which they can take responsibility for effecting change. 

Other items on the schedule continue this theme. Psychology professor Steve Fein will deliver the keynote address to consider such questions as:  

Why are there such different opinions on how much discrimination really exists today? What is “stereotype threat” and how can it have strong effects on academic performance? What can Seinfeld, Bruce Springsteen, and MTV’s The Real World teach us about stereotypes or racism? 

Before lunch there will be a “Radical Voice and Movement” performance workshop by Lenelle Moise, who calls herself a “culturally hyphenated pomosexual poet.” Pomosexual was a new word to me. According to Wikipedia, the term is used to describe a person who avoids sexual orientation labels such as heterosexual and homosexual. “Culturally hyphenated” was also a new term to me, but its meaning—mixed nationality—is more intuitive. Chinese-American, Afro-German, and Anglo-Welsh are some examples.  

A panel discussion with mysterious brackets in the title, “Queer(in[g]) Communities,” will talk about “how our individual identities, particularly LGBTQQAAI identities, influence (or don’t influence) our experiences of identifying with, navigating, and building various kinds of communities at Williams.”  

LGBTQQAAI?? The last time I saw a reference to the non-heterosexual world, it was abbreviated simply LGBT, although I have begun to notice a Q sometimes appended there. I looked up the extended acronym and found that it stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer, Questioning, Ally, and Intersexed. I still haven’t figured out what the other A stands for.  

Williams has the first A, “Ally,” covered. CW Day offers two sessions on how to become one. I usually see “ally” used to mean a heterosexual person who supports gay people. I first encountered this when learning about the Safe Zone movement on college campuses. Faculty members and students can become “allies” by attending a workshop and signing a pledge to affirm LGBT people. The term “ally” implies an enemy, and a “Safe Zone” implies a danger zone. College campuses on the whole are not especially dangerous places for sexual minorities, but Williams would have people believe that they are dangerous for all kinds of people. The “How to Become an Ally” session helpfully provides a definition: 

An ally is a person who advocates for and supports members of a community that suffers from prejudice and discrimination. To become an ally, one begins with an open mind and a willingness to talk about issues that often seem taboo at Williams, including differences in race, socioeconomic class background, or religion.   

Additional session titles include “Reclaiming New England’s Aboriginal History” and “The Alcohol Culture at Williams.” The latter sounded encouraging; I thought “at least one part of the day will be spent on a topic worth addressing.” Then I read the synopsis: “we will discuss how this culture relates to issues of sexism, classism, racism and homophobia on campus.” Why must sexism, classism, racism, and homophobia enter a conversation about alcohol in the first place? Binge drinking on campus is a serious issue that should be addressed in its own right, not as a lead-in for identity group politics. 

The stated purpose of Claiming Williams Day is to pause from classes to consider, as a whole campus, a broad theme “aligned with our mission statement.” It isn’t clear whether the mission statement in question is that of Claiming Williams or of the College in general. In any case, the College’s mission is worth examining. Lengthier than most statements, the mission names “academic excellence” as the “central endeavor,” and tells how Williams seeks to foster “academic and civic virtues” in students.  

Does a day of immersion in “privilege” discussions advance academic excellence? Does it instill academic virtues? Presumably it falls under citizenship training. But mainly it emphasizes that Williams has a fixed outlook to impose on its students—contrary to the “free inquiry” espoused in the mission statement. It confers victim status on certain people and oppressor status on others. Ultimately, events like Claiming Williams Day serve to reinforce division between identity groups by insisting that whites, males, and heterosexuals propagate such division. Instead of “breaking down barriers,” these events construct their own walls of separation.  

My alma mater, The King’s College, had an annual event similar in structure to Claiming Williams Day. There it was called “Interregnum,” as in an interruption in the reign of the king. For several days in the spring, classes were canceled and all students attended student-run debates, lectures, and performances based on a broad theme. A memorable year for me was the one focused on “difficulty,” a theme chosen in response to students’ chagrin when the College upped the level of academic rigor across the curriculum.  

In preparation for the event, the entire student body read the book The Pilgrim’s Progress, wherein a traveler on his lifelong journey to the Celestial City weathers many challenges in his path, including a treacherous climb up the Hill of Difficulty. At the beginning of his journey the traveler was encumbered by a heavy burden that he could not, by himself, remove from his back. 

It seems the folks at Williams are burdened as well, by the thought that someone on campus may feel ostracized from the community. Perhaps they possess a genuine sense of compassion for marginalized people and simply want to make them feel welcome. That’s the idea behind “multicultural welcome receptions” sponsored by diversity offices and held separately for new black, Native American, GLBT, Asian, and Hispanic students. That’s also the idea behind segregated black and Hispanic graduation ceremonies. These events serve to foster racial solidarity but fail to unify a campus community as a whole. Ultimately they make the burden of cultural disengagement even bulkier than it was before.   

Likewise, Claiming Williams Day, with its angry proclamations about privilege, class, race, and sexuality, will serve only to claim additional baggage.

Reflections of a Community College Professor

We present the reflections of John C. “Chuck” Chalberg, professor of American history for more than thirty years at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Editor’s note: Last summer, we began an occasional series on community colleges, where a significant number of NAS members are teachers.  Ever larger numbers of students have been opting to attend community colleges for at least part of their baccalaureate education, and President Barack Obama indicated that community colleges would constitute a key component in his economic recovery strategies.  In this light, we asked our members to share their thoughts and experiences as community college faculty members.  Today, we present the reflections of John C. “Chuck” Chalberg, professor of American history for more than thirty years at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota.  (We overhear him addressing his colleagues.)  Professor Chalberg has written widely in periodicals such as National Review, Crisis, The American Scholar, Commentary, Academic Questions, The Journal of Sports History and The Weekly Standard.  He has also published a biography of the anarchist Emma Goldman, a dual biography of Dodgers owner Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson, and edited a documentary history of American isolationism.  He is a professional actor and has offered one-man presentations of Teddy Roosevelt, George Orwell, Huey Long, Patrick Henry, and H.L. Mencken.  He is currently portraying G.K. Chesterton.  

 

 

 Thoughts for Your Consideration 

In recent years I’ve now and again thought of sending out a campus-wide email of this sort, but I’ve never done so.  At least not until now.  So why now?  Maybe it’s because I’m nearing the end of my time here.  Maybe it’s because the results of my efforts this term have been worse than is usually the case.  Why is that, I keep asking myself?  Am I finally at long last losing it?  After all, when you get to be my age you do begin to wonder if it’s you or the world—or both—that are going to hell in that proverbial hand basket.

So what’s up?  Or down—besides me?  Numbers, for starters.  I’m about to finish this semester with just over half of the students I had at the outset.  That’s never happened before.  My unofficial “guesstimate” is that I usually lose somewhere around a fourth of my students between Day One and The End.  And my unofficial response to such an attrition rate has generally been along these lines: such is the teaching life at the community college level.  Many of our students come to us less than fully prepared for college work.  Many have less than enough time for their school work.  Many have sets of priorities in which school work may rank no higher than third.  And many of our students are dabblers.

Dabblers?  I don’t mean to be critical or demeaning.  Actually, I think dabbling is a good thing.  It certainly is an important thing.  Students are trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.  They’re trying to determine what they’re interested in and good at.  (Apologies for those prepositions at the end, but they do seem to work here.  I suppose I could also say that they’re trying to get an idea as to which end is up.)  In any case, all of these dabbling activities are, in my mind, good things.

I also don’t mean to be critical of community colleges.  These are good institutions.  They are also important institutions.  And they are surely very American institutions—in the best sense of that term.

But in my mind some things in this institution aren’t as good as they could be.  And in my mind they’re not as good as they used to be.  Or maybe I’m not as good as I used to be.  That’s certainly, and perhaps increasingly (!), a possibility.

Please understand, what follows is not meant to be an opening shot at another campus-wide discussion/debate/battle over grade inflation.  I’m too old for that.  I’m also too tired.  Besides, I have other things I’d rather be doing.  I suppose all of that amounts to a copout of sorts, because I remain convinced that grade inflation is both very real and a very real problem.  To be sure, it’s not just a Normandale problem; it’s a national problem.

But there are other problems as well.  If grades are up, so is the level of indifference on the part of too many students.  At the same time, the level of hostility on the part of others is up as well.  How to account for such trends?  That’s what I’d like to know.  Speaking of like, I’d like to think that I’m not losing students because I’m losing IT.  And we all know what that means.  But who can know for sure.

Here’s what I do know.  I know that I’m not the tough teacher that I used to be.  At least I’m not nearly as tough—or as demanding as I once was.  I assign less reading.  I now permit what I once dismissed as an unfortunate carryover from high school: extra credit.  I give free points for simply turning in work, not all work, mind you, but a not insignificant chunk of work (and, therefore, points).  And yet, when all is said and graded, I have the aforementioned drop rate.  And I’ll likely wind up with nothing smaller than the usual small handful of A’s and a somewhat larger handful of B’s.  In other words, I know I have gotten easier in recent years and yet the percentage of A’s and B’s has stayed about the same.

But something else has dramatically changed.  There has been a marked decline in the percentage of C’s.  One other thing that I have noticed (as opposed to that which I know) is that many students do not want C’s on their transcripts.  C’s!!  There once was a time when only D’s and F’s were frowned upon (as they should be).  But C’s??  This shift has been and remains stunning to me.  I thought a C was supposed to mean satisfactory work, or certainly average work.  The last time I checked it still officially does mean that right here at NCC. 

So what else do I know?  I know that I still give tough exams.  Or at least I know that some students think that I give tough exams.  One of the reasons I know this is because students have told me as much.  Others tell me this less directly by writing me notes at the end of exams.  In fact, sometimes their notes are a good deal longer than their essays.  I won’t go so far as to state that I have experienced an epidemic of such communications, but there certainly has been a trend.  Sometimes these notes are actually apologizes for their poor performance.  More often than not, they are not so veiled attacks on yours truly. 

I’m not mentioning this, because I’m searching for sympathy.  Not at all.  I’m a big boy.  I’m simply mentioning this as part of my larger search for answers.  I’ve always thought that exams were supposed to test a student’s mastery of a body of material.  I still think that way.  And I still give exams that try to determine this.  I also still believe that such exams should not be preceded by another practice that I think should have ended sometime in high school: study guides.  Sample questions?  Of course.  Topics to focus on?  To be sure.  Key terms?  Yes.  But none of those seem to have been enough—or close to enough.

Yes, I still do have students who will do very well on my exams.  But in recent years I have had far too many who do—let’s be honest—abysmally.  They simply don’t have a clue.  And there are many more in this category than in my A category.  What’s almost worse is that I also don’t have what was once that critical mass of average students, those good old-fashioned C students, those decent, if less than fully committed/engaged students who did a middling amount of work, maybe even a less than average amount of work, and who nonetheless got that average (but now disdained) “C” grade.

When I came here, a bare eon or two ago, I asked a veteran teacher to assess the students.  I’ll never forget his response.  The good ones, he told me, are as good as you’ll find anywhere; the bad ones, he went on, are as bad as anywhere else, but the bag kind of sags in the middle.  Well, I fear that the bottom has fallen out of the bag.  At least it has for me.

Believe me, I’ve tried to adjust to this new reality.  OK, I’ve said to myself, I’ll give weekly writing assignments.  More than that, I’ll give full credit if students simply follow through with the assignment.  That means handing the piece in on time, wrestling with the question that has been asked, and coming at least close to the required word limit.  The same thing for discussions (both online and on-campus).  Do what’s asked and the points are yours.

So what’s happened?  When all is said and graded, the good ones do even better, and too many of the rest do even worse.  Why?  They simply refuse, for whatever reason, to do the work—even though they know that they will be rewarded with free points.  Either way, I’m effectively being told that too much work is involved.  Either it’s too much work to bother mastering the material in order to do well on the exams or it’s too much work to bother submitting writing assignments or contribute to discussions (on-campus or online), thereby earning those “free” points that can help counteract poor exam performances.

What to do?  One of my heroes, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once mused that every society, no matter when and no matter where, has to be “mostly organized around the problem of how to get people from 14 to 24.”  Well, we Americans have decided that the best way to accomplish this is get as many of these folks as we can into schools not unlike this one and then do our level best to keep them there.  I wonder.  I really do wonder.

So what to do?  In my case, I think it comes down to three options.  I can persist with the classic definition of insanity by continuing to do what I’ve been doing, or a variation thereof, while continuing to expect a different result.  Or I could follow the Harvey Mansfield model.  (If Moynihan is one of my political heroes, Mansfield is one of my scholarly heroes.)  OK, he teaches at Harvard.  Let me be clear.  I’ve never aspired to teach at such a place, or any place close to such a place, and I certainly don’t now.  For that matter, I’ll take Normandale over any other Minnesota college. 

I’ve liked it here for a long while.  And there’s still much to like.  More than that, I believe in community colleges.  But back to Prof. Mansfield.  Admittedly a grade inflation hawk, he finally decided to surrender.  He now tells his students at the start of the term that his grade distribution will be as close to the campus average as possible.  BUT at the end of the semester he will hand each of his students a slip of paper.  On it will be the grade that, in his estimation, they actually earned and deserve.  Such a solution is tempting.  But I don’t think I’ll opt for it.

That’s two solutions.  What’s the third?  I could simply cash in my chips.  That’s tempting as well.  I ain’t young, and there are still other things I’d like to do.  But insane fellow that I am, I still like doing this.  I just don’t like the results, and not just the results of this fall, but the results of far too many recent semesters. 

So, colleagues, which option might you recommend?  Are any of you, whether new to this college or not so new, whether you’re older, old, or young, experiencing thinks differently or similarly?  If your results are better, what am I doing wrong?  I’m always open to a fourth option or even a fifth.  Or maybe it’s time to kick back, open a different sort of fifth, and cheer from the sidelines.    

 

 

 

Politics of Scarcity at Penn State...No Comment

"The class does not claim to present an evenly balanced assessment."

From time to time we cite without comment various items from articles, books, websites, and other sources. We don't comment on these items (at least in words), but our readers may have something to add.

Political Science departments usually offer a broad range of courses, from political theory to elections, to the presidency, to international relations.  They also give their students an increasing number of entries that focus on contemporary issues.  Here’s an example of how they’re doing the latter, from the undergraduate listings in the department at PennState’s main campus at University Park:

"The Politics of Scarcity" examines some "big" questions about the prospects for humans in general and democracy in the United States in particular. Much of the reading assumes that our civilization faces the twin problems of increasingly serious shortages of resources and a growing ecological crisis that threatens the basis of life. Further, it argues that these "twin crises" feed upon each other, and that together they pose serious short and long run challenges to survival. Some readings attribute these problems to the dominant values that characterize modern Western society. The course does consider some dissents from this perspective, arguments that things will be just fine. However, it concentrates on problems and predictions of trouble. Thus, the class does not claim to present an evenly balanced assessment. Rather, it recognizes that most of what we learn, read, and see supports the status quo and assumes our civilization and energy-dependent way of life will continue. Consequently it makes sense to emphasize the less frequently argued position that we may be headed for disaster.

The class aspires to appeal to students regardless of major or college -- to scientists, engineers, students of the humanities, and even economists and political scientists. It fulfills the University-wide general education requirement in Social Science. Although it discusses the role of politics in general and the role of the American political system in particular in discussing the "twin crises," it mostly grapples with fundamental questions of value that underlie and guide the play of power in our political system and with how the massive changes now taking place globally both affect and are affected by politics. 

Social Role of the University...No Comment

A 1962 newspaper clipping recaps the message of a campus speaker who asked, "What is the university's fundamental social obligation?"

From time to time we cite without comment various items from articles, books, websites, and other sources. We don't comment on these items (at least in words), but our readers may have something to add. Today's No Comment item is a newspaper clipping from 1962, entitled "Social Role of the University Discussed." The newspaper is a publication of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and it refers to St. Dunstan's University, a Roman Catholic institution which closed its campus in 1967. 

Excerpts:

What is the university's fundamental social obligation? The university's obligation, he said, is to see that the individual has the opportunity to develop himself by providing a suitable climate for academic freedom which entacts the ability to choose what is good between alternatives.

[...]

The university, he said, has the obligation to set high academic standards and it does not have the obligation to educate all men of society. The fact that knowledge has increased in an unprecedented way requires excellence from its students and teachers, and a lowering of standards to educate all men is but a Marxist Utopian attitude. 

 

Typecasting: Why Nurses are Women, Cops are Conservatives, and Professors are Liberals

A new study concludes that a stereotype keeps conservatives from becoming professors.

Patricia Cohen reports in the New York Times on yet another study that asks why college professors are overwhelmingly liberal. The working paper, authored by sociologists Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, concludes that the main reason for the disparity is occupation typecasting. Fewer conservatives want to go into academia, just as fewer liberals become police officers and few boys dream of becoming nurses when they grow up. Such stereotyped professions tend to maintain social homogeneity. 

But stereotypes exist for a reason. According to Gross and Fosse, professors are more likely to have fewer children, advanced degrees, “higher levels of tolerance for controversial ideas,” non-conservative religious beliefs, and a disparity between their education levels and their income. These qualities are more compatible with a liberal political outlook.  

Gross has been cranking out volumes of research on this theme. NAS has commented on his 2007 report, The Social and Political Views of American Professors, as well as his 2009 paper “American Academe and the Knowledge-Politics Problem” (see NAS’s response). His work is generally hailed as proof for debunking conservative-group-propagated myths about the problem of politics in higher education. Gross, however, tends to confirm what NAS and other organizations decry.  

This is evident in his new report with Fosse, which concludes: 

our findings contravene an explanation for professorial liberalism commonly given by liberals—that professors tend to be liberal because liberals are smarter than conservatives. If anything, our theory of occupational reputation and aspirations suggests that American society is increasingly selecting professors not on the basis of intelligence or insight alone, but rather on the basis of a conjunction of perceived academic potential and liberal politics—a development long in the making that might, depending on one’s point of view, be seen as having positive or negative consequences for scientific and scholarly creativity. 

In other words, the issue is not that conservatives have low IQs. The issue is that universities like to hire liberals. Thus, conservatives are kept out because their politics don’t match up with dominant views. Gross and Fosse conjecture that such bias could “be seen as having positive or negative consequences for scientific and scholarly inquiry.” But it seems a stretch to imagine it as being beneficial for scholarship. Title IX exists because of the fear that women were being kept out of athletics due to typecasting. No one considered that selection of athletes on the basis of maleness could “be seen as having positive or negative consequences for scientific and scholarly inquiry.” 

Title IX mandates “gender equity” (equal numbers of male and female participation) in every educational program that receives federal funding, undermining freedom of choice. In the same way, an affirmative action program to mandate hiring quotas for conservative faculty members would harm the integrity of our colleges and universities. It would be wrong to force conservatives in; it is also wrong to force them out.  

The New York Times article portrays the study as proof that conservatives simply are less interested in the scholarly life. Cohen’s tone echoes that of Title IX critics who say, “Maybe women just aren’t as into wrestling as men are. Why should we force an unnatural equality?” But conservatives are wary of becoming professors, not because they care little for academia, but because academia cares little for them. Thus Cohen and others writing about the report (i.e., the Chronicle of Higher Education and Scott Jaschik for Inside Higher Ed) subtly distort the facts.  

Cohen quotes Gross saying, “The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism, the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.” A fortified bastion is the university indeed. Will tongue-holding break it down? Learning from the Left, the only way to break down stereotypes is to scowl enthusiastically at those who slur the “underrepresented” group. But as we often see, that approach usually results in deepening the divide between identity groups instead of bridging it. Political diversity among college professors thus remains an elusive ideal.

 

 

 

 

 

The Roots of Sustainability

This major piece by Glenn Ricketts chronicling the history of the sustainability movement will appear in the forthcoming "Sustainability" issue of Academic Questions (vol. 23, no. 1).

Glenn M. Ricketts is professor of political science at Raritan Valley Community College, North Branch, NJ 08876, and public affairs director of the National Association of Scholars, One Airport Place, Suite 7 & 8, Princeton, NJ 08540–1532; nas@nas.org.  

 

 

Sustainability: Roots in the 1960s   

 

For many of its proponents, the sustainability movement continues a long American tradition encompassing the simple rural virtues extolled by Thomas Jefferson, the romance of nature sung by Henry David Thoreau, the wilderness movement inspired by John Muir’s walks into the High Sierras, the national forestry policies crafted by Gifford Pinchot, and the robust outdoorsmanship exemplified by Teddy Roosevelt and the Boy Scouts.    

 

“Sustainability” connects to these antecedents, but has more direct roots in the turbulence of the 1960s and early 1970s, when middle-class reform mingled with upper middle-class radicalism. Moderate initiatives such as the civil rights movement, mainstream environmentalism, and the Great Society clashed or combined with the anti-Vietnam War movement and the campus-based New Left and revolutionary student movements. All of these in turn blended with the nihilistic, antinomian popular youth culture of the Woodstock generation.  

 

Conservationism began long before the 1960s, but its modern environmentalist incarnation arose with the publication of Rachel Carson’s polemical bestseller Silent Spring in 1962.[1] Carson was a matronly and evidently apolitical marine biologist who had enjoyed considerable previous success as a popular writer on wildlife and nature. In Silent Spring, she assessed how DDT and other pesticides harmed wildlife—especially birds, whose springtime chorus she claimed was going to go mute. The pesticides, said Carson, were unmonitored and indiscriminately spread, and would ultimately poison humanity as well by causing cancer and neurological disorders. Carson assailed the pesticide firms, accusing them of intentionally concealing DDT’s harmful effects. In her view the profiteering companies were abetted by negligent government officials, who credulously accepted the industry’s self-serving assurances. Silent Spring precipitated a national uproar, and prompted congressional inquiries that led to the banning of DDT a decade later.[2]   

 

Doomsday Is Nigh    

 

Carson set the mold for a new genre of writing that conjured fear of impending calamity.  An echo of Silent Spring can be found in such subsequent episodes as the protests over the Seabrook, New Hampshire, Nuclear Power Plant, the depletion of atmospheric ozone over the Antarctic, or the current controversy over global warming. Sentimental regard for threatened wildlife was part of the picture, but it was the public’s fear of slow, undetected poisoning through pollution of water resources and what would subsequently be dubbed “contamination of the food chain” that propelled the reaction to Silent Spring. Such fears were soon fed and intensified by a series of ecological incidents that, while not wholly unprecedented, had not previously been sensationalized by the national media. These included the major oil spills near the coast of Great Britain in 1967 and Santa Barbara, California, in 1969; the mercury poisoning of fishing waters near the Japanese factory town of Minamata from 1932 to 1968; the iconic Love Canal episode involving toxic waste dumping in the late 1970s; and the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant incident in 1979.    

 

The “fear factor,” spurred by the mainstream reformist environmental movement, accelerated to the point of panic by 1970, when the first nationwide Earth Day was observed, with broad bipartisan political endorsement. In their 1982 book Risk and Culture, anthropologist Mary Douglas and political scientist Aaron Wildavsky viewed this chain of events with perplexity:   
 

We begin with a sense of wonder. Try to read a newspaper or news magazine, listen to radio or watch television; on any day, some alarm bells will be ringing. What are Americans afraid of? Nothing much, really, except the food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe, the land they live on and the energy they use. In the amazingly short space of fifteen to twenty years, confidence about the physical world has turned into doubt. Once the source of safety, science and technology have become the source of risk. What could have happened in so short a time to bring forth so severe a reaction? How can we explain the sudden, widespread, across-the-board concern about environmental pollution and personal contamination that has arisen in the Western world in general and with particular force in the United States?[3]   

 

Douglas, who had previously written books about fears of mystical pollution and rituals in various cultures that aimed at “purifying” people of imaginary contaminants, was primed to capture the oddity of the sudden American hysteria about invisible dangers lurking all around. The environmentalist movement was emerging as a modern American purity cult, perhaps as Douglas and Wildavsky suggest, connected to rising uncertainties about our shared national identity.    

 

They argue that the environmentalist movement arose among people who saw themselves as anti-hierarchical, opposed to the prevailing structures of society and drawn to voluntaristic associations with weak internal authority, which they liken to “sects.” These groups externalize their inner problems by projecting them onto nature:   
 

Global issues, not local ones, will serve their purpose best…Sects need to speak on behalf of the whole of mankind, not for a few millions. Physical nature is their best substitute for God, not only because nature is powerful and unpredictable. The bias against elaborate institutional forms makes nature the appropriate good counterpart to defend against bad central society.[4]   

 

In Douglas and Wildavsky’s view, the environmentalist movement gained its grip because of the weakening of America’s “integrative” institutions—political parties, trade unions, and churches that mediated between citizen and state—beginning in the 1960s. Environmentalist sectarians exploited but also accelerated this weakening by using “government to impose restrictive regulations on their enemies.” The odd position of environmentalist advocates is that they are constantly “invoking government [but] are not inclined to respect it.” Thus the environmentalist movement testifies to a diffuse, even “global” concern for the world, while eroding the capacity of Americans to feel part of an actual nation.[5]   

 

But this runs a bit ahead. We return to Carson.    

 

Bad Business 

 

            Many strident social critiques that followed Silent Spring also picked up Carson’s theme that environmental degradation should be attributed to “systemic” factors, not simply to random neglect or misconceived public policies. Carson excoriated a profit-driven business culture that compromised the critical judgment of entomologists, who suppressed their apprehensions about environmental destruction rather than jeopardize prospects for corporate research funding. Although she advocated closer regulation of the chemical industry and the use of pesticides, Carson also emphasized the need for a fundamental reorientation of the public understanding of nature and humanity’s place within it. She insisted that the natural world was to be appreciated, respected, and preserved, rather than simply harnessed to the needs of an ever-expanding industrial economy. 

 

Ironically, banning DDT, for which Carson’s work was directly responsible, probably caused millions of needless deaths—especially in poorer tropical nations where it had effectively controlled the malaria-transmitting mosquito populations. Sustainability advocates, who insist that policies must always be implemented with a view to their ecological consequences, seem not to have entertained second thoughts, and Carson’s glowing legacy stands untarnished. She is memorialized in the Rachel Carson Trails Conservancy, a ship used for marine research, a scholarship program for high school seniors, and a series of National Audubon Society awards. 

 

Carson’s time in the sun was bright but brief; she died of cancer in April 1964. Environmentalism, however, emerged as a powerful, popular, politically bipartisan reform movement. Over the next decade, Congress enacted a steady stream of conservationist and remedial measures with no significant opposition: the 1964 Wilderness Act, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act both in 1970, the 1972 Clean Water Act, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. [6] When the first Earth Day was observed on April 22, 1970, it drew mass participation rather than simply the usual college students, illustrating the extent to which environmentalism—the reformist, correctional variety, at least—had achieved legitimacy among the larger public. International approbation came in 1972, when the United Nations convened the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the first of numerous similar gatherings, including the World Commission on Environment and Development, whose canonical 1987 report, Our Common Future, made the now-ubiquitous term “sustainability” familiar to the international cognoscenti.[7]Environmental crisis fired the imaginations of obscure and popular writers alike and an avalanche of new books appeared after Silent Spring. Expanding on themes adumbrated by Carson, these works often developed comprehensive macro-theories, linking environmental pollution to a continuum of interrelated social crises and long-term historical trends—“The System,” as it was subsequently dubbed in the ideological shorthand of the 1960s.   

 

The Fringe  

 

            But one figure slightly anticipated Carson. About six months before Silent Spring appeared, Murray Bookchin, a fringe-left author and political activist writing under the pseudonym Lewis Herber, published Our Synthetic Environment.[8] The book was little noted at the time. The former Marxist/Stalinist/anarchist/communitarian writer argued that the despoliation of the environment was inevitably connected to other social maladies. Impressively prolific, Bookchin stuck with this theme for decades, and achieved some notice in radical circles for his 1964 essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in which he coined the term “social ecology.”[9]  

 

            Bookchin’s intellectual footprints are hard to trace. His actual influence seems to have been marginal, notwithstanding his own claims and those of a remnant of tenacious admirers, who view him as the conceptual founder of the environmentalist movement.  

 

A self-proclaimed “utopian,” Bookchin attributed environmental destruction, as he did all other social ills, to the existence of “hierarchy” at every level of society, whether between governments and citizens, employers and employees, men and women, students and teachers, or parents and children. Bookchin dismissed the mainstream environmental movement, with its reliance on centrally administered bureaucratic regulation, as elitist and authoritarian. Late in life, he also moved away from anarchism, troubled by what he considered excessive individualism at the expense of community. A reflexively contrarian disposition seems to have kept Bookchin preoccupied with recondite doctrinal disputations on the fringes of the American Left, including such radical environmentalists as Earth First! whom he denounced as misanthropist primitives.[10] Although Bookchin wrote extensively and in advance of many others about “social ecology,” he is chiefly useful as a barometer for gauging sectarian strife on the Left.  

 

His indirect influence, however, cannot be dismissed. The sustainability movement today has deep affinity for the Bookchinite logic of treating “ecology” as a rubric for pursuing radical forms of “social justice.” Possibly this is just a case of parallel intellectual evolution, but Bookchin’s notion of social ecology is now common currency. “What literally defines social ecology as ‘social,’” he explained in a 1993 essay,  

 

is its recognition of the often overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems. Conversely, present ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within society. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those produced by natural catastrophes.[11] 
 

Whether Bookchin has a more secure place in this history of an idea is hard to say.   

 

Blaming Christianity, Re-feeling Destiny

 

A much more direct influence on the emerging movement was UCLA historian of science Lynn White, whose striking and widely influential thesis, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” was published in 1967. White saw the ultimate wellsprings of the environmental crisis in Western Latin Christianity and, by implication, in Western civilization itself:  

 

We would seem to be headed toward conclusions unpalatable to many Christians. Since both science and technology are blessed words in our contemporary vocabulary, some may be happy at the notions, first, that viewed historically, modern technology is at least partly to be explained as an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature. But, as we now recognize, somewhat over a century ago science and technology—hitherto quite separate activities—joined to give mankind powers which, to judge by many of the ecological effects, are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a heavy burden of guilt.[12] 

 

Like Carson, White called for a reorientation of the public worldview, albeit far grander: nothing less than the drastic reformulation of the foundational doctrines of Christianity, which, White believed, provided the intellectual impetus and theological justification for the subjugation and abuse of the natural world by mankind:  

 

Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel [sic] our nature and destiny.[13] 

 

Still others—especially Barry Commoner, a biologist and long-time anti-nuclear political activist, and Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford entomologist who had previously made a career studying butterflies—emulated Rachel Carson’s popular success and amplified the fear and alarmism conveyed by Silent Spring. Ehrlich’s 1968 neo-Malthusian tract, The Population Bomb, was frantically shrill and apocalyptic, attributing environmental destruction to worldwide overpopulation and forecasting horrific consequences for the near future, especially mass starvation:  

 

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…population control is the only answer. [14] 

 

Ehrlich placed the “population bomb” at the core of every aspect of the environmental crisis, which, beyond his anticipated food shortages, augured widespread mortality and suffering:  

[I]n the long view, the progressive deterioration of our environment may cause more death and misery than any conceivable food-population gap. And it is just this factor, environmental deterioration, that is universally ignored by those most concerned with closing the food gap…the causal chain of the deterioration is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide—all can easily be traced to too many people.[15] (emphasis in original)  

 

It’s All Interconnected  

 

Barry Commoner’s 1971 bestseller, The Closing Circle, also expressed a sense of mounting urgency, if not quite of the imminent catastrophe forecast by Ehrlich:

 

To survive on Earth, human beings require the stable, continuing existence of a suitable environment. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that the way in which we now live on Earth is driving its thin, life-supporting skin, and ourselves with it, to destruction.[16]  

 

Reflecting what would become a recurrent theme among later writers, the environment in Commoner’s depiction was infinitely delicate and complex, easily “unbalanced” due to the human activity now threatening it. In the first of his famous “four laws of ecology,” he asserted that “everything is connected to everything else”: pollution of one sector of the environment inevitably affects all other sectors.[17]

 

            It doesn’t take much to realize that Commoner’s first law of ecology is trivially true if it is true at all. It skirts the hard work of determining what particular things most importantly influence other things. The “interconnectedness” mantra is one of those pseudo-profound ideas; it seems to say something important, but dissolves under scrutiny. 

  

            Unlike many of his fellow environmentalists, Commoner did not reject technology outright. Technology per se, he argued, did not automatically lead to environmental disaster and might be useful in correcting the effects of past industrial pollution. Unfortunately, new agricultural and industrial technologies developed since World War II were both highly productive—and profitable—and also immensely harmful to nature. For Commoner, like Rachel Carson and many social critics not immediately concerned with environmental issues, unless strong external pressure were brought to bear on corporate America’s immovable fixation on short-term profits the environmental emergency would remain unaddressed. 

 

            Both Ehrlich and Commoner proposed comprehensive, even coercive policy responses. Ehrlich, for example, asserted:  

 

Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control. And while this is being done we must take action to reverse the deterioration of our environment before population pressure permanently ruins our planet.[18] 

 

Making the case for the absolute emergency necessity of population control would require harnessing the mass media and educational institutions to the Herculean task of transforming public perception. This meant a crucial advocacy role for higher education:  

 

[A college professor] should immediately use his influence in every way possible within and outside of the university to get the fire crews on the line. The population crisis must be an integral part of his teaching—it is pertinent to every subject. He must use the prestige of his position in writing letters to whomever he thinks he can influence most. If he is in English or drama, he may be able to write novels or plays emphasizing near-future worlds in which famines or plagues are changing the very nature of mankind and his societies.[19]  

 

The attempt to make higher education into an engine of political advocacy, of course, had begun earlier with the New Left’s 1962 Port Huron Statement and the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, [20] but the attempt to merge hijacking the curriculum with radical environmentalism was new. Interestingly, Ehrlich’s call to make “the population crisis…integral...to every subject” closely resembles the position of today’s sustainability advocates.  

 

            Although his tone was less frenzied than Ehrlich’s, Commoner also insisted that drastic changes in life habits—especially consumption levels and, indeed, the whole orientation of economic production—were imperative. He called for the creation of extensive regulatory and planning policies that would focus on environmental necessities, irrespective of corporate ambitions. It is interesting, if not quite logical, that Commoner also linked the redress of the overwhelming environmental emergency with the concomitant elimination of other long-standing social ills: 

   

To resolve the environmental crisis, we shall need to forgo, at last, the luxury of tolerating poverty, racial discrimination, and war. In our unwitting march toward ecological suicide, we have run out of options. Now that the bill for the environmental debt has been presented, our options have been reduced to two: either the rational, social organization of the use and distribution of the earth’s resources, or a new barbarism.[21] 

 

Celebrity Environmentalism  

 

            Both The Closing Circle and The Population Bomb provoked sensational responses and their authors became lecture circuit celebrities. Commoner continued his political activism and eventually ran for president as the candidate of the Citizens’ Party in 1980; Ehrlich was feted on The Tonight Show. The media attention illustrates the sheer star power that environmentalism has always commanded, beginning with the publication of Silent Spring. Academics would not ordinarily appear as Tonight Show guests—except possibly to stand in as foils—but Paul Ehrlich rated forty-five minutes of uninterrupted advocacy on the program.  

 

Hollywood soon began to turn out cinematic depictions, often of dubious scientific or historical reliability, that vividly amplified the nightmarish visions of the environmentalists. Soylent Green (1973) imagines food shortages so severe that the government recycles corpses as comestibles. A self-enclosed utopian community executes people on their thirtieth birthdays to keep the population within Ehrlichian boundaries in Logan’s Run (1976). In The China Syndrome (1979), evil capitalists build a nuclear power plant on an active fault zone, while a lone citizen blows the whistle on Pacific Gas and Electric for contaminating the water supply with hexavalent chromium in Erin Brockovich (2000). And the Northern Hemisphere is plunged into a full-scale ice age overnight as the consequence of human heedlessness in The Day After Tomorrow (2004).  

 

            The public was also treated to the purportedly documentary productions of former vice-president and recent Nobel Prize laureate Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth, 2006) and actor Leonardo Di Caprio (The 11^th Hour, 2007), as well as the regular environmental advocacy programming of Public Television. Since 1989, the Environmental Media Association has sponsored high-profile, celebrity-oriented activism, complete with an annual awards ceremony:  

 

The Environmental Media Association believes that through television, film and music, the entertainment community has the power to influence the environmental awareness of millions of people….EMA mobilizes the entertainment industry in educating people about environmental issues, which in turn, inspires them to take action.[22]

 

An ominous and prescient note sed contra was sounded in 1971 by an isolated reviewer of The Closing Circle in Life magazine:  

 

The ecological crisis which Commoner so lucidly outlines is, in the end, less concerned with biology than with the politics of regulation. To satisfy his demands for a self-perpetuating society, we apparently need a bureaucratic control mechanism that doesn’t sound much like a democracy. Almost all the things that make our machine civilization work—even the construction of universities and hospitals—are inimical to the environment in one way or another.[23] 

 

Environmentalism as a reform movement enjoyed broad public and congressional support, and doubtless addressed some ecological realities caused by industrial pollution, even if popular fears were also significantly exaggerated, as Douglas and Wildavsky concluded. But more significantly, it also embodied the conceptual seeds of imperial overreach, authoritarianism (a frequent complaint of the tenaciously querulous Murray Bookchin), and the insistence on wholesale social transformation—tendencies in full bloom among the intellectual and social movements dominating the academy.  

 

            Today’s sustainability movement incorporates virtually all of the major conceptual apparatus of the environmentalist movement from Carson to Commoner: the sense of impending doom from largely invisible sources, the call for immediate action, the finger of blame pointed at corporate capitalism, the desire to “reeducate” the public and change tastes and patterns of consumption, the metaphysical postulate that “everything is connected  to everything else,” the gripping fear of overpopulation and limited resources, and the success in giving this whole gestalt a celebrity glow. But if all this was part of environmentalism as far back as the 1960s, what makes today’s movement different?  

 

            Is sustainability just repackaged environmentalism?  

 

Environmentalism and the New Left 

 

            Environmentalism quickly secured permanent residence on many campuses. Colleges and universities were already teeming with student activism; it was a small step to link the activist spirit to a new “urgent and altruistic” cause. The University of Colorado Boulder established an environmental affairs office in 1970. The same year, the University of California, Irvine, established the nation’s first “School of Social Ecology”—deploying Bookchin’s term without explicitly acknowledging its radical source—and Dartmouth College created its “Environmental Studies Program.” In fact, dozens of colleges and universities embraced the new vogue in 1970 and shortly after.  

 

            Sometimes the activist spirit was manifest in self-dramatizing theatrics. Right after Earth Day in 1970, students at San Jose State University purchased a brand new Ford Maverick, put a box of grapes in the back seat to enunciate their solidarity with migrant farm workers, and interred both car and grapes in a campus grave—thus accentuating their opposition to automotive air pollution.   

 

            Student activism in the 1960s culminated in widespread violence. The movement had taken an angry, often irrational tone; Vietnam protests had turned to burning ROTC buildings, bombing research laboratories on some campuses, occasional murders, the riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the emergence of the terrorist Weather Underground Organization.[24] Campus environmentalism, by contrast, was far tamer. It induced symbolic protests, not riots, and quickly proved amenable to institutionalization. Protesters no sooner hoisted their placards than they were invited inside to develop new degree programs. Universities were nevertheless in a curiously ambivalent position. They were bases for, but also sometimes targets of, student radicals and their faculty allies, who still accused them of complicity in the Vietnam War, of serving as the educational adjunct for corporate rapacity, and of callous indifference to racism, sexism, classism, and any number of other social ills.  

 

            Recall Commoner’s first law of ecology: “Everything is connected to everything else.” It may not have been obvious that concerns about air and water pollution connected to opposition to Richard Nixon’s Southeast Asia policies. After all, Nixon too supported strong environmental regulations. But in late-night dorm room chats or at faculty colloquia, it all made woozy sense that the structures of authority that served the interests of corporate greed wrapped together exploitation of the earth and exploitation of mankind.   

 

            But this was not yet the “sustainability movement.” Most of the ingredients of the sustainability concept were present, but not the idea. Environmentalism still focused on repairing and protecting the environment from wrongful and harmful forms of exploitation. It had not yet seized the notion of an all-encompassing preventative regime in which present-day consumption had to be judged, moment by moment, against an imagined and imaginary future.  

 

            The widespread abandonment of even minimal strictures respecting the free speech rights of others in favor of full-throated advocacy was a crucial element in the campus absorption of environmentalism. For the first time, forces within academic precincts imperiled academic freedom and free speech, as classes were regularly disrupted, visiting speakers shouted down or even physically assaulted, and corporate recruiters and ROTC programs driven from many campuses.[25] Political advocacy became a permanent aspect of classroom instruction, especially in the humanities and social sciences, as student activists and sympathetic professors in courses on Shakespeare, foreign policy, or statistics held forth on Vietnam, urban racial tensions, and, of course, environmental issues—all part of “the System,” in the idiom of the time.  

 

Demands for “relevance” in the classroom led to the swift collapse of traditional curricula and the equally swift adoption of new offerings—some actually devised by committees of undergraduates—that focused exclusively on contemporary social controversies, and sometimes even offered academic credit for political activism. All of this was soon followed by the emergence of women’s studies, black studies, Chicano studies, peace studies, Native American studies, and eventually the enveloping doctrine of multiculturalism, all of which openly touted their ideological orientations. Where did one situate environmentalism within this crucible?  

 

            For some contemporaries within The Movement, environmental degradation blended easily as an obvious and “interconnected” component of the manifold evils of American capitalism, as propounded in The Greening of America, Charles A. Reich’s bestselling notional paean to the era: 

 

The impact of technology, market and capitalism is written on our landscape, our culture, our faces. Perhaps the landscape shows it most vividly. In all societies prior to the modern, no matter how diverse in other ways, there existed an essential harmony between the people and the land, a harmony in which nature was not violently altered or violated. Modern society makes war on nature. A competitive market uses nature as a commodity to be exploited—turned into profit. Technology sees nature as an element to be conquered, regulated, controlled.[26]

 

Elsewhere, the reception of environmentalism was lukewarm, if not hostile. Journalist William Tucker dismissed the movement as a fetish of latter-day aristocrats chiefly concerned with the preservation of their country retreats.[27] In 1971, the late Richard John Neuhaus, then a Lutheran minister and civil rights activist (a major manifestation of “social justice” in the early 1970s), accused environmentalists of sacralizing nature and of a narcissistic conservationism toward their cherished wilderness habitats at once inaccessible and useless to the urban poor with whom he associated daily.[28] The environmental movement, Neuhaus complained, had been co-opted by the very corporations most directly responsible for despoiling nature, and further enjoyed the support of the “reactionary” Nixon administration. Population controllers like Ehrlich, moreover, were simply a re-packaged version of the early twentieth-century eugenics movement, camouflaged by the noble mission of saving the world from overpopulation. Neuhaus issued a fervent plea that the mainstream leftist and liberal reform groups resist the lure of an elitist, self-absorbed environmentalism, lest they be unconscionably diverted from the pressing civil rights and anti-poverty reforms that had far superior claim on their efforts.  

 

            Neuhaus’s critique is good evidence that environmentalism had not yet become “sustainability.” When it did emerge, the sustainability doctrine offered a way to synthesize environmentalism with civil rights themes and anti-poverty programs. But in 1971, these themes appeared to Neuhaus to be pulling in opposite directions.  

 

            New Left activists—who also took a “systemic” view of the ills of American society—seemed unsure of how to react to the surging environmental movement. They had common ground if they wanted it: Rachel Carson and especially Barry Commoner had indicted profit-driven American corporations, as did the New Left’s foundational ideological manifesto, the 1962 Port Huron statement. Likewise, environmentalists and New Leftists conjured a web of “interconnected” social ills. They also shared an often vehement disdain for Western civilization: inspired by such authors as Frantz Fanon, the New Left despised the West for its imperialism and plunder of the third world; environmentalists, reflecting the ideas of Lynn White, charged Western Christianity with providing theological cover for the exploitation and ruin of nature by mankind. With so much in common, why did the movements not immediately coalesce? Perhaps because the New Left generally rejected piecemeal “liberal” reformist measures and advocated a frontal “revolutionary” assault on The System. Environmentalism was, by contrast, an ameliorating movement. 

 

 Even so, a number of such self-proclaimed New Leftists as journalist James Ridgeway saw environmentalism as a potentially valuable ally that offered

 

different ways of attacking concentrated corporate power, the source of pollution, thereby opening up the possibilities of revolutionary change, and for reorganizing society and communities on different principles.[29] 

A major obstacle for others, however, was that environmentalists were frequently blinkered by narrow, locally-oriented conservationism, and lacked the conceptual “big idea” through which the destruction of natural habitats could ultimately be explained. As a result, they often acted  

 

in the most fragmentary ways, attacking isolated problems and not complex patterns of social and political behavior. They save a nature area and fail to address the entire land use patterns of that region. They save a seashore from development when that seashore is threatened with the biological destruction of wildlife. As such, their victories are at best stop gaps, always provisional….Most important, the “new breed of young conservationists” fail to see that the crisis of the environment truly is but a reflective of the crisis of this culture itself, of the values, institutions, and procedures which have for some 200 years systematically guided the slaughter of human and all other forms of life at home and abroad.[30]

 

The same author, however, also chastised his colleagues as “equally derelict” for failing to appreciate the revolutionary potential in environmentalism:  

 

The New Left has at this point made little serious effort to understand or relate to the politics of ecology. While the battles in the streets appear more pressing and more direct, it ought to be understood that unless something very basic and very revolutionary is done about the continued destruction of our life support system, there may well be no wind to weather in the near future….[T]he task of ecological radicals is to continually raise those issues which seek to patch up the status quo from those who struggle for basic transformation.[31] 

 

The New Left in the 1970s splintered, and its splinter groups argued endlessly over what to do next.  Some of those groups attached themselves to environmentalism, others to ACORN-style urban activism, others to electoral politics, and still others to revolutionary agitation. 

 

The “Kaleidoscopic Lens”  

 

There seems to have been no precise moment at which the diverse strands of sixties social activism melded into the “sustainability” movement, no masterwork of intellectual synthesis that united its concurrent but distinct themes. Obviously, environmentalism was “present at the creation” and gathered momentum in company with the other social currents comprising The Movement. The works of Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, but especially Barry Commoner and Charles A. Reich—like the low-profile Murray Bookchin—stressed the notion that environmental degradation and other persistent social problems were “interconnected”: it was indeed necessary to “clean up,” but far-reaching measures involving comprehensive social reform and the basic reorientation of public beliefs were also deemed indispensable.  

 

Whatever the “revolutionary” potential of environmentalism, activists seized on its capacity for frightening the public and mobilizing broad political support. In 1977, for example, the newly organized Mobilization for Survival consciously sought to link public fear of radioactive contamination by nuclear power plants and the cold war nuclear arms competition.[32]  The combination proved successful, thanks in part to the propagandistic magnification of the relatively minor Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in 1979. The attempt to harness public anxieties over nuclear power to build support for nuclear disarmament made no substantive sense. The “nukes” in both cases employed nuclear fission, but there the resemblance stopped, except in leftist imagery. As one activist publication put it in 1980:  

 

The best handle we have to date for focusing public attention on the larger question of the nuclear arms race is with the apparently more immediate and visible issue of nuclear power.[33] 

 

The psychology of fear generated by apprehensions regarding nuclear power plants was supposed to be transferrable to nuclear weapons because both threatened “survival.” As Amory Lovins, a long-time environmentalist and current chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, [34] argued in 1981:  

 

We cannot embrace one, while abhorring the other; we must learn, if we want to live at all, to live without both.[35] 

 

Environmentalism also spawned numerous variants. “Ecofeminism,” first elaborated in 1974 by Francoise d’Eaubonne, argued that ecological destruction grew out of male oppression of women. Just as men had exploited and dominated women throughout history, so did they also exploit and dominate nature.[36] In the view of ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century amounted to the subordination of Mother Nature by male scientists and entrepreneurs:  

 

Two new ideas, those of mechanism and of the domination and mastery of nature became core concepts of the modern world. An organically oriented mentality in which female principles played an important role was undermined and replaced by a mechanically oriented mentality that either eliminated or used female principles in an exploitative manner. As Western culture became increasingly mechanized in the 1600s, the female earth and virgin earth spirit were subdued by the machine. 37] 

 

Other ecofeminists argued that feminism provided the common portal for activist groups: 

 

While feminism is a primary entry point, women and men also come to ecofeminism through environmentalism, alternative spirituality, animal rights, and other progressive affiliations. The kaleidoscopic lens of ecofeminism includes a prepatriarchal historical analysis, an embracement of spirituality, and a commitment to challenging racism, classism, imperialism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism, anthropocentrism (i.e., human supremacism), speciesism and other forms of oppression.[38]  

 

            Environmental activism also mixed with identity politics in the emerging “environmental justice” movement, which began to gather momentum during the early 1980s. In October 1991, a manifesto that emphasized the special connection between environmental deterioration and racial oppression emerged from the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held in Washington, DC.[39] This manifesto embraced virtually all “social justice” issues from racism to health care to nuclear testing to multiculturalism. As indicated in the preamble to its seventeen Principles of Environmental Justice:  

 

WE, THE PEOPLE OF COLOR, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth; to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves; to insure environmental justice; to promote economic alternatives which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods; and, to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples, do affirm and adopt these Principles of Environmental Justice…[40]

  

The reference to Mother Earth in this preamble should not be dismissed as rhetorical fluff. Many ecofeminists and other environmentalists deify the earth. The point is elaborated a little later in the document:  

 

Environmental justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction.[41]  

 

Environmentalism influenced a slew of other social protest movements, including ecosocialism, ecomarxism, ecotheology and ecospychology, as elaborated in Theodore Roszak’s 1992 The Voice of the Earth.[42] By the late 1970s, a radical fringe impatient with what they judged to be the slow pace of institutionalized reform began to indulge more strident rhetoric, including calls for violence. Earth First!—the exclamation point is part of its name—took the lead in this regard.[43]

 

            Ultimately, the most influential component of the environmental fringe was “deep ecology,” a term coined in 1972 by Norwegian philosopher and outdoorsman Arne Naess. Naess acknowledged his debt to Rachel Carson as inspiration, but took a long step further into radical activism.[44] In Naess’s description, “deep” ecology stands as an alternative to the “shallow” approaches of mere reformism. Reformism acknowledges such environmental degradation as water or air pollution, but fails to move beyond piecemeal corrections to probe the ultimate sources of damage. Reflecting many of his predecessors, especially Lynn White, Naess and his closest colleagues—American academics William Devall and George Sessions, and Australian Warwick Fox—argued that the most profound cause of the ecological crisis was conceptual: the “anthropocentric” orientation of the Western theological, scientific, and epistemological traditions, extending back to Greek philosophy. 

 

            For deep ecologists, a fatal wrong turn had occurred when Socrates posed the question, “What is justice?” He thus diverted philosophical inquiry from the contemplation of nature and the cosmos to purely human, “anthropocentric” affairs. Judaism and Christianity expanded this “anthropocentrism” by placing mankind at the center of their monotheistic beliefs as the special creatures of the one true God. This anthropocentrism was reinforced by the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, effected by such thinkers as Bacon and Descartes, which separated man from nature—viewing nature as something to be subjugated and dissected rather than respected.  

 

The principal features and assumptions of deep ecology are summarized in the Encyclopedia of Earth under ten headings: holism; no ontological divide; self (no autonomous individuals, selves, are part of the “web of nature”); biocentric egalitarianism (you are worth no more than a snail darter); intuition (beware overdependence on rational thought); environmental devastation; anti-anthropocentrism; ecocentric society; self-realization; and intuitive morality. There is an abundance here for explication. Consider the descriptive summary of environmental devastation: “Nature is undergoing a cataclysmic degradation, an ecological holocaust, at the hands of human societies.”[45] 

 

This statement approaches religious eschatology.  

 

            Much of what Naess brought to environmentalism was a spirit of systemization and a willingness to spin out portentous-sounding principles. In 1984, Naess and Sessions formulated a Deep Ecology Platform as a point of departure for individuals and policymakers.[46] 

 

            Unlike many of its predecessors, deep ecology was almost exclusively academic in origin, although it quickly exerted significant influence among such radical environmentalists as Earth First! who found the “holistic” concept of nature particularly appealing. Deep ecology is thus a Philosophy of the Whole, in which everything, Commoner-style, is connected to everything else. It provides the conceptual “big picture,” which New Left critics had found wanting in the environmental movement of the 1960s. Humanity occupies no distinct status within nature; there is egalitarianism among all species. And the mystical “communion with the earth” seems to suggest a spiritual or religious component. (Reflecting earlier observations of Richard John Neuhaus, the ever-contentious Murray Bookchin accused Naess and Sessions of “pseudo-radicalism” and promoting nature worship).[47] A heavy moral obligation to act is demanded of all who embrace deep ecology, although it is not clear what actions are required, in contrast to environmentalists like Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner, who advocated the imposition of massive regulatory policies and mandatory changes in consumer habits and industrial production. 

 

            Deep ecology, once on the fringe, has become a key component of the sustainability movement, but remains vague in its implications. What if any part of its longed-for revolution can be accomplished without coercion?   

 

Environmentalism Becomes Sustainability  

 

            In 1987 the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, issued its report, Our Common Future. This document became a core text for the sustainability movement. It revived the sense of crisis and the interconnectedness (or “interlocking crises” in the Brundtland Commission’s characterization) of ecological destruction and other social ills characteristic of the environmental movement: 

 

Until recently, the planet was a large world in which human activities and their effects were neatly compartmentalized within nations, within sectors (energy, agriculture, trade), and within broad areas of concern (environmental, economic, social). These compartments have begun to dissolve. This applies in particular to the various global “crises” that have seized public concern, especially over the past decade. These are not separate crises: an environmental crisis, a developmental crisis, an energy crisis. They are all one.[48]

  

The four hundred-page report’s signature contribution, however, was its promotion of “sustainable development” as the essential remedy for the interlocking crises confronting humanity. The definition below has been endlessly quoted and paraphrased by today’s sustainatopians: 

 

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs….Development involves a progressive transformation of economy and society. A development path that is sustainable in a physical sense could theoretically be pursued even in a rigid social and political setting. But physical sustainability cannot be secured unless development policies pay attention to such considerations as changes in access to resources and in the distribution of costs and benefits. Even the narrow notion of physical sustainability implies a concern for social equity between generations, a concern that must logically be extended to equity within each generation.[49] 

 

The Brundtland Commission did not coin the term “sustainability,” however, and the origins of its appropriation by environmentalists are obscure. It was and is a logistical military term in reference to keeping troops supplied with materiel and provisions. [50]

 

An early instance of its environmental association is in the following title: The Sustainable Society: Ethics and Economic Growth (Westminster Press, 1976), a little-known work by Lutheran theologian and ethicist Robert L. Stivers. The term appears again in Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown’s opus, Building a Sustainable Society (W.W. Norton, 1981). Prior to the Brundtland report, sustainability was depicted graphically by economist Edward Barbier, who devised an enduringly popular and politically potent Venn diagram:

Although pictorially compelling, Barbier’s depiction was untenable.[51] Attempts to make sense of the overlaps and intersections proved endlessly elusive.[52] 

  

            Whatever its origins in the environmental lexicon, the Brundtland Commission gave “sustainability” international prominence and instant authority. The concept also proved amenable to an ever-expanding range of definitions, incorporating but not limited to economic justice, gender equity, “cultural” sustainability, tourism, income distribution, etc. Recently, the UN’s International Environment Forum identified no less than 1,000 distinct definitions of presumably indispensable “sustainable development,” prompting one exasperated critic to remark that 

 

Everybody can join. Any pet project—ranging from dislike for traffic congestion and concern for the Bald Eagle to fear that our grandchildren will be deprived of essential materials for survival—can qualify for inclusion under the sustainable development banner. No scientific proof or serious logical argument is necessary to gain support for any particular cause. All that is needed to ensure that one’s pet project or preference wins approval is to chant the mantra “this is needed in the interests of sustainable development…”[53] 

 

Blessed with an elastic definition, sustainability had become something very important. A reenergized environmental movement—somewhat displaced from public consciousness during the early 1980s—recaptured center stage.  

 

            Less than a year after the publication of Our Common Future, sustainability received a booster rocket from James Hansen’s apocalyptic Congressional testimony that hearkened back to Commoner and Ehrlich. Hansen, a NASA scientist, spelled out a vision of “global warming” as the newest ecological emergency requiring immediate, drastic counter measures. Time heralded the new era with its January 2, 1989, cover depicting an imperiled Earth as “Planet of the Year.” In June 1992, the Brundtland report received support and massive additional publicity from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro—known as the Earth Summit—which issued a declaration elaborating twenty-seven principles for sustainable development in the twenty-first century.[54] The conference also authorized the creation of a new permanent UN agency, the Commission on Sustainable Development, to assist in the implementation of these principles.  

 

The occasion also witnessed the resurgence of the alarmism and celebrity advocacy that had bolstered and legitimized the environmental movement from its inception. In 1992, for example, then United States senator and vice-presidential candidate Al Gore published Earth in the Balance, a best-seller in the Carson and Commoner tradition in which he asserted the need to make “the rescue of the Earth the central organizing principle for civilization.”[55] And in November 1992, the international Union of Concerned Scientists issued an ominous, resounding “Warning to Humanity” that stressed the need for immediate, comprehensive policy responses to the rapidly accelerating environmental crisis: 

 

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision that our present course will bring about.[56]

  

Eighteen years later, the “fundamental changes” called for have not materialized, but oddly enough, neither has the anticipated extinction of plants, animals, and mankind.  

 

Sustainability and Higher Education  

 

            Sustainability was born outside of the academy, but environmentalism paved a relatively smooth way in. The social activism of the 1960s was institutionalized by the 1990s, and the sorts of people who would have raised skeptical questions about a movement founded on apocalyptic visions and ideological enthusiasms had either retired or been marginalized. The new academy could only raise one series of questions to any new supplicant: Will you respect diversity? Will you accommodate the sensitivities of identity groups? Will you join in a view of the world that treats the basic narrative of society as a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed?  

 

            Sustainability came to the table with the right answers. But while the environmentalist movement had already joined the team by melding with ecofeminism, the environmental justice movement, and a tangle of alliances with other grievance groups, sustainability did not immediately become a major campus movement. That took some serious effort by determined advocates.  

 

            In 1990, Teresa Heinz, then married to Republican senator John Heinz, met Massachusetts Democratic senator John Kerry at an Earth Day rally. The Widow Heinz met Senator Kerry again at the Earth Summit in 1992, and during the ensuing courtship in 1993 they co-founded Second Nature: Education for Sustainability, a non-profit organization dedicated to making sustainability a key feature of American higher education.[57] Second Nature had (and still has) a strikingly narrow focus. It would advance sustainability not by winning over students, not by funding faculty research, but by converting the campus leadership. With a focus on “senior college and university leaders,” Second Nature placed itself, ironically, in the tradition of Christian missionaries who evangelized the chiefs, confident that they would in turn force everyone else to heel.  

 

Moving outward from university leaders, Second Nature evoked the familiar environmentalist image that everything is connected with everything else. In the end, the community would convert:  

 

We believe that in order for society to move in a sustainable direction, higher education must develop a framework in which the sector and individual institutions operate as fully integrated communities that teach, research, and model social and ecological sustainability.[58]

 

In common with Marxist, feminist, Afrocentrist, and multiculturalist antecedents, Second Nature views sustainability as central to the entire academic enterprise, rather than as compartmentalized within a single discipline or department:  

 

Our work toward this vision embraces interdisciplinary learning and includes the community as a whole. By reinforcing the concept that the educational experience of all students must be aligned with the principles of sustainability, we help ensure that the content of learning embraces interdisciplinary systems thinking to address environmentally sustainable action on local, regional and global scales over short, medium and inter-generational time periods.[59]

  

With relatively little public visibility, Second Nature has gradually secured the support of senior administrators and other academics through a series of conferences, seminars, and international gatherings that promote its vision of sustainability. Its most signal success is undoubtedly the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment. Signatories—now more than 650 college and university presidents, representing about a third of American college students—have committed their respective institutions to political, social, and educational activism, often at significant expense, in immediately addressing the “challenge” of climate change:  

 

We, the undersigned presidents and chancellors of colleges and universities, are deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming and its potential for large-scale, adverse health, social, economic and ecological effects. We recognize the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is largely being caused by humans. We further recognize the need to reduce the global emission of greenhouse gases by 80% by mid-century at the latest, in order to avert the worst impacts of global warming and to reestablish the more stable climatic conditions that have made human progress over the last 10,000 years possible.[60] 

 

A college president’s commitment to sustainability virtually assures that academic deans, support staff, and department chairmen will do likewise. Newly-hired junior faculty members will also eagerly queue up, understandably believing that support for “sustainability” will enhance “professional development” and bolster their prospects of gaining tenure or promotion. They will also pass the good word to their students.  

 

            Beyond the tentatively informed enthusiasm of college and university presidents, the sustainability movement has been buoyed and promoted by the torrent of publications that has appeared since the Brundtland report. Typically, these works view higher education as the critical agent in service of the massive social, economic, and ideological reorientation necessary to ensure the “survival” of humanity and life on Earth.  One of the earliest and most influential campus proponents of sustainability, Oberlin College environmental studies professor David Orr, sees the reform of higher education as paramount to sustainability’s success. Reflecting the once marginal tenets of deep ecology, Orr fixes the wellsprings of ecological distress at the conceptual level:   

 

The crisis we face is first and foremost one of mind, perception, and values. It is an educational challenge. More of the same kind of education can only make things worse. This is not an argument against education but rather an argument for the kind of education that prepares people for livelihoods suited to a planet with a biosphere that operates by the laws of ecology and thermodynamics.[61] 

  

Echoing the ideas of Arne Naess and other deep ecologists (as well as Afrocentrists, feminists, and post-colonialists), Orr accuses the Western philosophical tradition, especially the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, of providing the basis for devaluing nature and making mankind its master rather than one constituent part among The Whole.  

 

            The catastrophic consequences of this mindset require comprehensive social, economic, and political reorganization, a task Orr assigns to higher education. Those who are “educated,” in Orr’s view, must stabilize world population, cut greenhouse gases, grow forests, conserve soils, use energy-efficient materials and solar energy, eliminate waste, and pretty much undo “200 years of industrialization.”[62]

 

            It doesn’t stop there. With Orr, we encounter the feature of sustainability that distinguishes it from the earlier forms of environmentalism: the triumvirate established via the merger with economic redistribution and social justice. So, along with undoing the Industrial Revolution, Orr also charges this educated elite with overcoming “social and racial inequities.”[63] 

 

            Orr has successors, among them Andres R. Edwards, who explicates sustainability as the “holistic” approach entailing the Three E’s: “ecology/environment, economy/employment and equity/equality.”[64] The Three E’s, however, must be addressed as a single entity, a “revolution of interconnections,” once again invoking the master trope of the environmentalist movement, Commoner’s mystic “everything is connected to everything else.” Edwards declares:  

 

The Sustainability Revolution provides a vital new approach to tackling the issues confronting the world today. By taking a comprehensive look at the interconnections among ecological, economic and equity issues ranging from global warming to pollution, health and poverty, we are more likely to seek and implement lasting solutions.  

 

The Sustainability Revolution marks the emergence of a new social ethos emphasizing the web of relationships that link the challenges we currently face.[65] The “web of relationships” encompasses an apparently limitless range of political and social issues, all of which, in Edwards’s view, fit neatly under the “sustainability” umbrella: 

 

Sustainability encompasses a wide array of issues including: conservation, globalization, socially responsible investing, corporate reform, ecoliteracy, climate change, human rights, population growth, health, biodiversity, labor rights, social and environmental justice, local currency, conflict resolution, women’s rights, public policy, trade and organic farming. These issues cross national boundaries, socioeconomic sectors and political systems, touching every facet of society and driven by life-affirming values that influence policies and initiatives at the local, regional, national and international levels.[66] 

 

This synthesis, of course, has now become axiomatic to the intellectual supporters of sustainability. It purports to state a self-evident social and biological truth. But is it true?  

 

            Discovering connections between apparently unrelated phenomena is surely one of the keys to scientific discovery, but also to literature, art, and religion. We are, as humans, deeply oriented to seeking out patterns, and uncovering ways in which the universe fits together is among our most satisfying accomplishments. Such discovery often requires, however, that we first break things down to their underlying components. Simply asserting that everything exists in a “web of relationships” doesn’t get us very far and may well impede the search for real connections. “Everything is connected to everything else” isn’t science or philosophy. It is a declaration of faith. Sometimes the important thing is the discovery of non-relations. Magical spells don’t make it rain. The evil eye doesn’t cause sterility. Childhood vaccines don’t cause autism. Some connections, no matter the grip they have on our imaginations, aren’t real. Is it possible that carbon emissions don’t cause global warming?  When we hear such declarations from people grounded in the “everything is connected to everything else” approach to inquiry, we ought to approach the hypothesis warily.  

 

            Orr and Edwards, as leading and typical spokesmen for sustainability, also recall Charles A. Reich’s Greening of America, that archetypal 1960s text invoking a new kind of knowledge one would gain through a vague, holistic “consciousness.” Like his contemporary Herbert Marcuse, Reich established the “interconnections” between American consumer capitalism and all existing social evils by simple assertion.  He believed this not because of compelling evidence, but as matter of “insight,” and convinced those disposed to believe, almost as a matter of faith. 

 

            The sustainability movement proceeds in the same mysterious way, asserting a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the world, but rarely checking its propositions against the facts, and often furious when anyone dares to look beyond the conclusions to the supposed data. The movement espouses a peculiarly potent distillate of political and religious enthusiasm, even in precincts one might think would resist any rush to judgment. Within sustainability, “modeling” typically trumps evidence—models being infinitely adjustable and never actually falsifiable.   

 

            The late Michael Crichton observed tellingly that:  

 

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists….Increasingly, it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us or one of them.[67]

  

Physicist Freeman Dyson, a professed environmentalist but also a skeptic with regard to global warming, recently lamented the shrill intolerance and crude contempt directed toward dissenters like himself and MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen by mainstream academic and scientific societies, for whom they have become apostates:  

 

The United Kingdom has made up its mind and takes the view that any individuals who disagree with government policy should be ignored. This dogmatic tone is also adopted by the Royal Society, the British equivalent of the US National Academy of Sciences….In other words, if you disagree with the majority opinion about global warming, you are an enemy of science.[68]

  

Like Crichton, Dyson attributes this puzzling hostility to the fact that environmentalism has evolved into a new and fervent religion:  

 

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world. Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion.[69] 

 

Thus, Dyson concludes, even though the impact of environmentalism had been highly salutary and the movement unquestionably “[held] the moral high ground,” the detached, scientific evaluation of global warming had been seriously impeded by the fact that  

 

some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become so bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment.[70] 

 

Crichton and Dyson speak of the “environmental movement,” but their words apply even more aptly to sustainability.  

 

            What exactly is the difference?  Environmentalism focused on the environment and went in search of how environmental issues connected to other matters of concern to social activists. Sustainability simply assumes all those connections and reduces environmental issues to one leg of a three-legged stool. The credo of sustainability is that the earth, humanity, and life itself will be extinguished by human greed and folly unless we truly repent. Reducing your carbon footprint is not enough. We must also submit to new structures of authority in which those who possess the wisdom of “interconnectedness” will make the right decisions for us. We must relinquish capitalism, with its endless need for consumption and growth. We must reorder human society to rid ourselves of the age-old scourges of hierarchy, racism, and sexism.  

 

            Sustainability can put on different hats at different times, sounding as if it is sternly scientific at one moment, enchanted with mystical unities the next, and down in the street fighting for social justice and cut-rate mortgages the moment after that.  Like most ideologies, it can be amorphous when it is tactically useful to its proponents to blur the issues. But it does have core ideas, and “interconnectedness” writ large is the most important of these.  

 

            From its origins in the intellectual contortions of the 1960s, sustainability has emerged as the newest missionary ideology within higher educational institutions in the United States. With an ever-expanding conceptual reach and touting the authority of “science,” its influence is manifest in every aspect of campus life. It embodies the omnipresent sense of emergency long characteristic of environmentalism and the aggressive intellectual imperialism of the 1960s, and confers an automatic aura of moral obligation and concomitant moral superiority. Sustainability provides, to borrow Robert Conquest’s term, “The Idea”—the thing, the system, the beliefs that encompass and explain everything—pursued by secularized intellectuals of the West since the late eighteenth century.[71]And it is now ascendant in academic institutions that have long since been transformed into citadels of ideological indoctrination, postmodernism, and political correctness. 

 

 

 

 

 

NAS Urges Court to Rule Racial Preferences at U Texas Unconstitutional

The NAS has signed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.

The National Association of Scholars has signed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Together with the Pacific Legal Foundation, the American Civil Rights Institute, and the Center for Equal Opportunity, the NAS calls on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse and remand the district court’s decision to uphold the University’s use of race-based admissions. 

Currently the University grants preferences to students of certain races and ethnic backgrounds. We believe that such preferences not only propagate racial discrimination and a double standard in higher education, but also directly violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in the United States Constitution.  

NAS president Peter Wood’s book Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, quoted in the brief, characterizes the identity-group version of diversity:  

Diversity raised to the level of counterconstitutional principle promises to free people from the pseudoliberty of individualism and to restore to them the primacy of their group identities. 

The brief concludes: 

In promoting racial diversity, the University dehumanizes and stereotypes the very students it attempts to protect. Because racial balancing clearly has been prohibited by the Supreme Court, the University calls its racial balancing “diversity.” But its policy lays its true intent bare. It is racial balancing by a different name, and cannot survive the demands of strict scrutiny. 

To view the amicus brief, click here to download the PDF file.