NAS

The Chico Romance

Ashley Thorne — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Scanning the headlines yesterday for news about sustainability in higher education, I was surprised to find a letter to the editor of the ChicoER newspaper entitled “Sustainability has other goals.” Cynthia Van Auken, a grandmother who in 2002 ran for Congress as a Republican in Georgia’s fourth district and lost, wrote the letter. In it she challenges those going to a sustainability conference at California State University, Chico to learn about Agenda 21 (the United Nations blueprint for sustainability in the twenty-first century) and the sustainability movement. She warned that the sustainability movement ultimately takes away individual liberties and urged readers to “read the agenda. It is not only about saving the planet from plastic water bottles.”

NAS has shown that the sustainability movement is not solely environmental; it sells eco-responsibility but delivers big government, economic redistribution, and loss of individual freedoms (see our articles on sustainability). Advocating stewardship of the earth via solar panels, reusable grocery bags, and energy-efficient light bulbs is not inherently ideological. Sustainability on the other hand, with its aims to radically alter our social and economic landscape, is a launching pad for progressive political agendas. And applied to the college campus, where students are ripe for recruitment into progressive activism, sustainability has found a breeding ground. Because sustainability presents itself under the mask of environmentalism, few people question its underlying motives. But this fall we’ve learned of a few concerned people who do question it. Among them are Holly Swanson, founding director of an Oregon-based organization called Operation Green Out that works “to get Green politics out in the open and out of the classroom,” and David Wood, chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Company in California.

The conference in question in Van Auken’s letter, the fifth annual “This Way to Sustainability” summit at CSU Chico, is taking place (Nov. 5-8) as I write this. Last year’s conference had 1,200 attendees, making it the largest student-run sustainability conference in the nation. This year, with nearly 100 (I counted 97) speakers and panelists speaking on themes broadly categorized as Sustainability 101, Green Agriculture, Green Curriculum, Green Energy, Green Ethics, and Green Solutions, the conference wraps its blanket broadly around some wide-ranging themes. There are sessions on pet overpopulation, human overpopulation, natural birth, slavery, happiness, cultural traditions, Christian spirituality, Buddhist spirituality, and the Obama health care plan. Are these really green issues? “Happiness” seems a stretch. But the over-reaching here shows that sustainability, as opposed to environmentalism, can be applied to just about anything.

In addition to these sessions, presenters are speaking on Green Dorm Projects; strategies to “ensure that sustainability is incorporated into all projects, curricula, planning, and operations”; the campaign against bottled water (see “Tap Dancers: Bottled Water and College Students”); “food justice”; the Fair Trade movement; and the “excessive and misdirected military spending.” One speaker from an organization called Growing Resourcefully Uniting Bellies (GRUB) will tell about fourteen people who “came together to form an intentional community based on sustainable living. They live together, eat together, and work their forty-acre farm together.” Their commune calls to mind the well-intentioned but fated one in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. And a session led by a UCLA professor, and reps from the Sierra Club and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society will speak about how there are too many people in the world:

Overpopulation is a fundamental obstacle to sustainability. Unless populations stop growing, continued growth will cancel out reductions in consumption made by individuals and societies... Failure to confront overpopulation is just one example of how the modern environmental movement is failing to protect wild nature, conserve natural resources, and maintain quality of life.

Hmm...sounds like “save the whales and kill the babies” to me.

CSU-Chico’s conference is sponsored in large part by the Associated Students sustainability fund, which comes from a $5 increase in student fees to support sustainability. More and more colleges and universities are implementing such student fees.

The conference is open to the public and free for students, so if you live in the Chico area, you might want to stop by and check it out this weekend. Even if you think, as we do, that the worship of sustainability is a waste of time that diverts attention from education, attending an event like this may be an eye-opening experience. We need to realize that sustainability is greedier than it sounds. It craves, not just our recycling, but our whole lives, our whole society, our whole economy. As Anthony Cortese, president of Second Nature, put it: “Humans are guided by a whole set of beliefs and values, and those come from culture, from religion, from social, economic and political structure. We need to change all of those.”

So we join with Mrs. Van Auken in saying, “Freedom is fleeting. Can you educate yourself enough to maintain it?”

Response to Mitchell

Jonathan Smith — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Editor's note: After NAS posted Academic Questions article "Remapping Geography," Don Mitchell offered a response to the authors, Jonathan M. Smith and Jim Norwine. Here Professor Smith responds to Mitchell.

I would like to thank Professor Mitchell for taking the time to read and respond to the article “Remapping Geography,” and also for his boldness and plainspoken candor. His opinions are visible, his convictions earnest, and his pen deliciously poisonous. He is not one of those academic rabbits forever sniffing the wind at the mouth of their burrows. A point-by-point rebuttal of Mitchell’s response would be tedious, in large part because it would require a soporific rehearsal of arcane lore from the field of geography. I will, however, attempt to answer three questions: Did Norwine and I forget ourselves when we composed “Remapping Geography”? Are books proposing remedies to nihilism to be taken as evidence that nihilism doesn’t exist? Is Mitchell’s “critical” thought tendentious or fair? I’ll close with a defiantly conciliatory note.

Norwine and I did not say that there are no conservative scholars in geography. Many times at geography conferences I’ve looked up while washing my hands and seen one. And we state in the article that conservative opinion has been published. But the fact that we’ve recently published a non-progressive editorial in the A.A.G. Newsletter is about as significant as the fact that I often see a conservative geographer in the bathroom mirror when it comes to assessing the tone and temper of the field. Our editorial was, and Jim and I are, anomalous. The instances that we describe as progressive political posturing are not anomalous; they are typical. And they also differ in character from anything (except, perhaps, “Remapping Geography”) that Norwine or I have ever done. The difference is that they are extravagant, in the literal sense of straying some measurable distance from the academic competence of the geographers in question. It is understandable, and proper, that these geographers should form opinions on global warming, Darwinism in the schools, or the foreign policy of the Bush administration—we all do that—but none of them has academic authority on these questions. They are simply educated citizens venting opinions and waving their geographer’s badges to see if anyone will be impressed. The editorial that Norwine and I wrote was, in contrast, about education and the character and attitudes of students. Most geographers are educators (not legislators, jurists, or law-enforcement officers), so the topic is appropriate. Moreover, we both possess some academic authority on this question. Between us there is more than half a century of teaching experience and a co-edited book; and Norwine has done research in this area for years.

There are, I confess, a great many books I have not “cracked,” mention of Marx in the title sometimes being the reason. No doubt there is in the books Mitchell cites some discussion of limits, absence of limits being widely recognized as a serious defect in almost all post-enlightenment thought. Ever since modern philosophers dismantled the authority of tradition and the church in the eighteenth century, they have been scrambling to find a new source of authority (and hence of limits), in nature, reason, history, the deliverances of positivist science, or (like Leavis and Williams) art. So far none have done this to general satisfaction. Nietzsche is just one of the writers who insist that they labor in vain, since modernity is nihilistic at its core. If Nietzsche is correct (and I believe he is, in diagnosis but not prescription), we should not be surprised to find that a desperate scramble for authority (and hence limits) is a pervasive feature of modern thought. Just as we would not be seeking a cure for cancer if there were no cancer among us, so we would not be seeking a solution to nihilism if we were not nihilistic.

Mitchell assures us that he does not indoctrinate his students, but rather seeks to make them think critically. I do not doubt that this is true; nor do I doubt that his classes are stimulating, provocative, and lively. He is an intelligent, articulate, and amiable man, justifiably confident in his abilities, and possessed of a real regard for justice and fair play. Critical thought is not, however, limited to thought that issues from self-conscious reflection and open debate, and critical thinking is not the same as being able to articulate reasons for all of one’s opinions. To limit the meaning of the word critical in this way is to insinuate an ideology (“crack,” for instance, Maurice Cowling’s Mill and Liberalism). Critical thought is simply thought that embodies judgments, some of which have been consciously formed, some of which were received but are susceptible to rational defense, and some of which are core commitments held dogmatically as prejudices. The reason that critical thinking is ideological under Mitchell’s narrow definition is that it always drives the weaker party in a debate into an impossible defense of his received opinions and core commitments. Because he has no reason for these beliefs (the defect being accidental in the case of received opinions, necessary in the case of core commitments), an aggressive critic employing a wholly spurious logic may persuade him to disavow these beliefs. I’m not suggesting that Mitchell is a bully; I’m almost certain he is not. But his “critical thought” employs a bullying logic, and this bullying logic is, I have found, very common among progressive scholars. It’s always the more timid person’s opinions that are in the dock (i.e. students lose). There are also, I know, conservative bullies, but their tyrannies are much more obvious (and much less effective). They dogmatize rather than criticize. But criticism is very often dogmatism in disguise.

Mitchell and I differ on many questions, but we are of a generation, and so like-minded on many others. One idea that I believe we share—and that conservatives and radicals generally share—is that of a relational ontology. This is simply a ponderous way of saying that we believe that human experience is not of things, or of mental states, but of relations between subjects and objects. The simple lesson to derive from this is that few perspectives are complete fantasies, and no perspective is altogether true (in the austerely realist sense of that word). Norwine and I painted our picture of the new cultural geography in bold colors and slashing strokes to make a vivid impression. But we did not make it up and we are not subject to hallucinations. It is, as we humanists like to say, a symbol of our experience. And we did not form this symbol as “red meat” for some slavering pack of NAS members (talk about lurid fantasies!). We wrote it, partly, for the new cultural geographers, who desperately need an “outsider’s perspective”; but we wrote it mainly for our fictional “eager young geographer,” who shouldn’t be made to feel like an outsider, whatever her politics, religion, or favorite flavor of ice cream. “Remapping Geography” is, when all is said and done, an outsider’s perspective, and so has all the irritating rancor, useful clarity (and no doubt regrettable stupidities) common to such views.

Message to Ed Schools: Practice What You Teach

Ashley Thorne — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

“If you want to be a journalist, don’t major in journalism.” When I attended the bootcamp-esque World Journalism Institute as an undergraduate, I remember WJI director Bob Case emphasizing this point. He wisely said that future journalists should study history or political science or economics, and then, having learned subjects of substance, they will have something meaningful to say. Journalism students, he said, may know how to construct an article, but if all they know is journalism, their work is destined to be shallow. Facts need to be reported in context, and that’s what the study of the liberal arts provides.

In an op-ed in the New York Times this week, Susan Engel says the same thing about education students. Engel, a “senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at WilliamsCollege,” deplores the paradox that education schools are among the least academically rigorous components of the university. Ed schools graduate ill-prepared students: “Our best universities have...typically looked down their noses at education, as if that were intellectually inferior.”

She sets out a plan for reforming teacher education. Her most important point is that ed students must study the subjects they intend to teach. It sounds basic, but in fact, as Engel writes, “Too often, teaching students spend their time studying specific instructional programs and learning how to handle mechanics like making lesson plans.” In addition, Engel prescribes that like medical students and junior therapists, teachers should be trained under close supervision and collaboration with mentors.

Engel’s two other ambitious ideas for fixing ed schools are to “give as many public schools as possible the financial incentives to hire these newly prepared teachers in groups of seven or more” and to foster “teaching programs that are as rich in resources, interesting, high-reaching and thoughtful as the young people we want to attract.”

These are well meaning suggestions for ameliorating the problem. If adopted they would leave the ed school system in place but bump it up to something more educationally serious. In that sense, Engel’s proposal runs counter to what many other critics have called for: the abolition of the ed school system altogether. Could Engel’s style reform –make the would-be teachers study the subjects they will teach; improve supervision of fledgling teachers; fund schools to hire new teachers in cohorts; endow programs with lots of money—really turn these cul-de-sacs of mediocrity into runways of academic excellence? It sounds a little far-fetched.

But let’s give Engel the benefit of the doubt. I made a visit to the website of Engel’s own teaching program at Williams and was pleasantly surprised. The program does not offer a major or minor but “seeks to promote and facilitate an exchange of ideas about teachers, learners, and schools, within and beyond the Williams campus.” If students want to gain teacher certification, they must complete both the Williams program and a post-BA semester of teaching practicum through the nearby Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

The wholesome-looking Williams teacher program actually revolves around core liberal arts subjects: “we want students to be deeply immersed in their course of studies so they will have something to teach.” So perhaps some of Professor Engel’s hopes of creating a culture of discipline-based teacher education are founded in reality after all.

The Williams program is thoroughly Engel-esque, combining her specializations of education and psychology—the three required courses are PSYC 272: Psychology of Education, PSYC 336: Adolescence, and PSYC 372: Advanced Seminar in Teaching and Learning. Unfortunately the program also includes some identity-group-inspired courses such as “Latinos and Education—The Politics of Schooling, Language, and Latino Studies” and “Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination.” The story of plagiarism and a noose concerning former ColumbiaTeachers College professor Madonna Constantine illustrates why such politicized teaching breeds an unhealthy emphasis on grievance.

The presence of this sort of identity politics in the Williams program underscores the problem of trying to reform ed schools. They are so saturated with unwise pedagogical assumptions that through long-use and familiarity have become invisible to the faculty that it seems nearly impossible for even the best-intentioned reformers to think their way outside the meretricious ideas that compromise the mission.

For example, two years ago Howard Zinn published a children’s version of his notorious oppression-themed history textbook. A Young People’s History of the United States, intended for middle school classrooms, is on reading lists at education schools at the University of North Carolina, George Fox University, Syracuse University, and Binghamton University. At Binghamton, the object is to emphasize a “constructivist approach to the teaching of social studies.” At UNC, the goal is to promote “equity,” defined as “the state, quality, or ideal of social justice and fairness” that acknowledges “the unequal treatment of those who have been historically discriminated against.”

But teaching history from this skewed angled is perhaps just as bad as not teaching it at all. Ed schools should take Susan Engel’s advice about giving students a solid liberal education, but Engel fails to identify the main problem with teacher education. NAS has identified it: schools of education, perhaps because they are prone to lower intellectual standards, often make it their mission to brand students with a “social justice,” critical pedagogy, über-progressive outlook. In “The Negative Influence of Education Schools on the K-12 Curriculum,” NAS board member Sandra Stotsky reports on the anti-civic, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-marriage, and anti-family themes that education schools propagate, and the damage that these messages inflicts on K-12 learning.

So yes, teachers-in-training should learn something before they begin teaching. But they should not learn just anything—they should study the true tenets of our civilizational heritage, read the Great Books, grapple with problems of enduring significance. Only then will America’s teachers inherit the intellectual legacy they should have been bequeathing to students all along.

To read more about NAS’s work regarding schools of education, see:

“Accreditation and Politics” 11/02/05 Inside Higher Ed

“NCATE Drops ‘Social Justice’ as Accreditation Standard” 06/05/06 Press release

“Disposed to Mischief” 01/13/08 by Glenn Ricketts

“The Negative Influence of Education Schools on the K-12 Curriculum” 06/30/08 by Sandra Stotsky

“Bias Isn’t Bias If It’s Ours” 02/18/09 by Peter Wood

“An Opinionated Pragmatist Survives Stanford” 07/25/09 by Michele Kerr

Response to Smith and Norwine on Remapping Geography

Don Mitchell — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Editor's note: Dr. Don Mitchell, author of Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction who was mentioned in Professors Smith and Norwine's Academic Questions article "Remapping Geography," has written a response to their article. Dr. Mitchell is a Distinguished Professor of Geography and Chair of the Geography Department in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Below is his text.

I must admit to having found Professors Smith & Norwine’s take-down of geography in general and cultural geography in particular quite bemusing. This is not only because of its fittingly droll tone; nor is it because I am only Exhibit #2 in their case (being “highly regarded”– not least by my own self – I do always hope to be Exhibit #1); nor is it because they can’t even get basic facts right (like my name: I have known Professor Smith for quite some time and would not presume to call him “Jon;” or like their claim that abstracts for AAG meetings are not published: they are, in paper, on the web, and in those toss-away disks); nor even because of their remarkable abilities of inattention: that it could escape their notice that they – as self-professed non-progressives – have been published in the opinion section of the AAG Newsletter only a scant couple of months (August 2009) after Professor Ross was in a feat of amnesia truly deserving of admiration.

No, it is mostly because, to quote a remark of Carl Sauer (that remarkably conservative scholar – Sauer’s materialism was both a function of, and at the root of, his conservativism), Professors Smith & Norwine, for all their strenuous efforts, end up “bagging their own decoys,” a result which, without a doubt, would not at all have escaped their “eager young cultural geographer” (funny hat or no).

Let’s just take Exhibit #2 – me. While it is true that I am wont to wear jeans, I am pretty sure I have never owned a black turtleneck (and if I have it was sometime before I became a geography major and was instead studying and making a – partial – living in music, where such clothing also has some currency) and certainly have never shaved my head (shaved heads are much more common among economic than cultural geographers – especially English ones working at the Universities of Manchester and Durham). More important, perhaps, is this. One of the targets Professors Smith & Norwine take aim at is the hidden politics of geographers and their organization, the AAG. Apparently, when geographers complain about the evisceration of science, they are really complaining about the Bush Administration; when they critique U.S. foreign policy, they really just hate the Bush Administration. When they worry about the censoring of the teaching of Darwinian evolution, they just hate evangelical Christians. But when one of us (me, again!) wears his politics on his (non-turtlenecked) sleeves, asks students to come to his writing critically (i.e. I state outright what we all do, and what S&N do here – write to convince – and invites students therefore to look for the problems with my arguments), he is somehow just as bad as those dishonest scholars who only hate the Bush Administration (and evangelical Christians). Even more, by inviting students to assess my politics even as they assess my scholarship (since my politics can no more be cleanly excised from my scholarship than can Professor Smith’s or Professor Norwine’s), I am somehow thinking that students are merely “dupes” who need to be shown the light. The logic here is not clear, but the point is: if you make an argument where your (assumed) politics are not clearly declared you are a nihilist (or is it hypocrite? or hegemon?) and if you make an argument where your politics are clearly declared you are a nihilist (or, ditto?). This is droll indeed! For what have they shot but their own decoys: their problem, hidden cleverly in their long disquisition, is they hate the Obama Administration (I am pretty sure), or it is in the first half; in the second half, where they take their gloves off and get really political, it’s clear that they take us for dupes: that we cannot see through shoddy and inconsistent argument and will follow them on their merry trail to…

… Nihilism! How we get there remains rather mysterious, but it has something to do with the materialism of cultural geography. This materialism is rooted in Sauer (one who was no fan of “planning,” and indeed a great fan of “letting things take their natural course”; even more, as even a quick glance at his work makes clear, he really did value letting “those who are truly different go their own way” – all “conservative” traits that also, interestingly had great appeal to a coterie of Sauer-loving Bay Area “ecologists” in the late 1960s, to say nothing of the proto-anarchists who gathered around them). It is true, I think, that Sauer had little time for Social Darwinism (precisely because he valued those who are truly different, etc, etc.), and perhaps even less time for the neo-Lamarkism that had guided an earlier generation of geographers, but it is not clear that that in itself would lead to “nihilism.” Apparently, it is instead that “cultural geographers,” who remain, in Professor Smith and Norwine’s telling, “materialists” (if “anti-essentialist” ones) have decided that people are not constrained in any way by nature, or things, or (dare I say it??) structures (you, my readers in this venue, might prefer “institutions” and “traditions,” use that term if you would like). I hate to bring up Exhibit #2 again (well, actually, I don’t: I’m not sick of him, yet), but if Professors Smith and Norwine had bothered to hold their noses and read beyond p. xv, they would have found, at least in my version of materialist cultural-geographic theory, such a charge is simply wrong. The whole damn book is about structures and constraints (this is what my students hate about it), sometimes even of “nature” (have a look at the chapter on sex, Jon and James, and you’ll see; or the chapter on race, where I argue it does not exist even though phenotypic variation can be so determinant). But I am missing their point. Their point is that, following Sauer, we are interested in survival and not flourishing. I am a bit guilty here, as are lots of my comrades (I just published a paper, in fact, called “The Geography of Survival”). That’s because I think survival is propaedeutic (don’t you love that term, it’s almost as cool as “entelechy;” though its translation from philosophy is not exact here, it does convey exactly the meaning) to flourishing: it’s just that I call flourishing justice and demand that it not be an exclusionary property. So, apparently, because some of us are interested in survival on the way to flourishing, and flourishing that happens not at the expense of others, we are nihilists, and this nihilism is rooted in our materialism itself.

Interesting argument, but not a very “compelling” one (which the Shorter Oxford defines a bit different from S&N, referring to it as something that “compels strong interest or feeling or admiration,” a sense the term has carried since the early 17^th c. – no wonder editors want this in the papers they publish). It becomes even less compelling when Professors Smith and Norwine declare – on the basis of who knows what evidence – that Marxist “preoccupation” with the means of production leads directly to “nihilism.” It becomes even less compelling because by making that claim the authors simply have no way to account for such deeply conservative (in just the sense they value), but also Marxist and materialist, scholars as Raymond Williams. (I’ve seen pictures: I don’t think he ever shaved his head; and I bet he owned precious few pairs of jeans; the turtlenecks though are quite becoming). Williams never rejected Leavis, even if he contested him at any opportunity. And if you – or they – do not think Williams was interested in human flourishing (as well as the means of production), then you haven’t read The Country and the City, or even his little essay “Culture is Ordinary.” Even more, if you do not think the limits of nature and institutions and tradition are not right at the heart of his work, then you have not even cracked Marxism and Literature or Cultural Materialism, either of which lay out, precisely, theories of limits.

I bring up Williams because he has been as influential in “new cultural geography” as has (the critique of) Carl Sauer. And this is what I mean about Professors Smith and Norwine bagging their own decoys: they do not describe anything like cultural geography as it is actually practiced (and argued over): they describe a figment of their own imaginations. They turn this imagination into a great big juicy target (so big that it seems to encompasses the whole of the AAG, that radical organization that has done so much in recent years to promote geography’s ties to industry, the military, and to other revolutionary sects, while at the same time making room for a few voices like Professor Ross’s and mine [see my radical take on “community geography,” appearing in the same space: world destroying it ain’t!] and Professor Jonathan Smith & Professor Jim Norwine’s early arguments on nihilism). And then they knock down this big juicy target with only a couple of well-aimed shots. As for those the decoy is supposed to attract (I know, I know, you are the real meat S&N want to attract, they wrote for you not for me; we are the bait, but please bear with me on this metaphor for a moment longer), we will continue unscathed, comforted not only by the fact that finally geography is becoming important enough to be shot at (and not only by you Jonathan and Jim, rumor has it that Horowitz’s latest gives us a go too), but especially because we know that our arguments must be – and are – more than bemusing: they must be and are rooted in a reality not of our own making. As Jonathan knows – because we have known each other long enough – Exhibit #2 himself welcomes Professor Smith’s contributions to the understanding of this reality not despite, but because it is so different from my own.

Academic Freedom Forum

Peter Wood — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to Minding the Campus for its forum on academic freedom. Saying something constructive about academic freedom doesn’t look all that difficult. It is one of the core doctrines of higher education. It has an abundant history, full of colorful characters, eloquent declarations, incisive legal arguments, and enlivening controversies. Yet somehow University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer managed to turn these ingredients into rhetorical sludge and draw disdain from left, right, and middle. Peter Sacks faults Zimmer for hypocrisy. Zimmer promotes the principle of academic freedom the way The Museum of Modern Art promotes a niftily designed egg-beater: as something to gaze at under glass, not as a tool for frothing eggs. Academic freedom in actual use, says Sacks, is just a pretext for private universities to remain exclusive.

O’Connor and Black spot the Big Silence in Zimmer’s account of academic freedom: he says nothing about the duties that faculty members must shoulder if they assume the “right” to academic freedom. High on that list of duties is the need for disciplines to enforce tough professional ethics. Because these days that enforcement has withered, academic freedom in the true sense is pretty much a dead letter—just another rationale for privileged people to do whatever the hell they want.

Adam Kissel, a close of observer of the University of Chicago, calls Zimmer out for his vapid claims about the university remaining studiously above political advocacy, while in fact it is awash in a Lake Michigan-sized commitment to leftist orthodoxies. U Chicago promotes “diversity, civility, and equity” to the point of threatening literally to “punish” anyone who dissents. The University is speech-coded, bias-response-teamed, feminist-missionized, and sustainabullied to the hilt. We have to guess that these matters seem to Zimmer of no ideological weight at all. They are just the wholesome stuff of contemporary “liberal” education.

My friend John Wilson, a man of the left with a sharp eye for suppressio veri catches Zimmer on several inconvenient facts about The University of Chicago’s rough handling of several socialist professors in years past, as well as student dissenters.

And Candace de Russy (my board member) faults Zimmer on the opposite shore: he is so meek an advocate of academic freedom that he offers not a peep of criticism of those ideologues among the faculty who, claiming the mantle of academic freedom for themselves, ride roughshod over everyone else’s.

What more is there to say? As Candace puts it, Zimmer’s tone is “lofty.” But his writing is, well, creaky. Get the man a copy of Strunk & White, or Fowler.

As to the substance of his speech, all that I would add this to the comments already posted is that while academic freedom is of great value, it is still possible to blur its value by overstatement. Zimmer puts the value of academic freedom so high that it teeters in existential peril. Academic freedom, in his view, is the pivot of everything valuable in higher education. Dealing with “societal, scientific, and humanistic issues,” “the ability to investigate, invent, and give account,” “rigorous and intense inquiry as the highest value” (at least at Chicago), and so on. Well, academic freedom is a very good thing, but other things matter too in higher education—things such as the pursuit of truth, integrity in research, genuine care for the welfare and educational prospects of students, and respect for freedoms besides academic freedom.

George Lakoff’s New Happiness: Politics after Rationality

John B. Parrott — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

John B. Parrott is a writer and independent scholar residing in Pennsylvania; parrottjohn@msn.com. He has taught at Oglethorpe University, Kennesaw State College, Kutztown University, and the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to teaching, Dr. Parrott served as an Air Force intelligence officer, where before retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel he saw duty in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War. He is the author of Being Like God: How American Elites Abuse Politics and Power (University Press of America, 2003).

Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science George Lakoff is among the handful of current faculty members in the United States to have successfully recast himself as a significant figure in national politics. Though his views place rather far on the progressive left, he has, unlike some other scholar-activists, focused most of his energy on advancing the fortunes of the mainstream Democratic Party. Having eschewed the more radical views of Noam Chomsky or Bill Ayers, Lakoff remains somewhat less in the spotlight. His influence is, nonetheless, both broad and deep.

Lakoff is best known for his advocacy of the idea that most people are profoundly influenced by metaphors that “frame” their decisions, including those about party registration and voting. He believes that politicians are aware of this human frailty and manipulate it to their advantage. In other words, political choices in a democracy have little to do with voters making rational and informed decisions and a great deal to do with how elites set up the “narratives.” Lakoff’s involvement in politics has consisted of arguing three points: that Republicans have been masterful in manipulating voters by means of framing devices; that Democrats possess the better arguments but have generally failed to find effective ways to frame their messages; and that he, Lakoff, can help the Democrats close the metaphor gap.

There is more to Lakoff than this summary suggests. Properly understood, he is heir to a tradition of radical utopian thought and has affinities with twentieth-century neo-Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, who also concerned themselves with how best to bring about revolutionary consciousness among people who seemed content without it. Towards this end, Lakoff makes some extraordinary claims by rejecting reason and rationality as they have been understood in Western thought for essentially the past twenty-five hundred years. In this essay I reflect on Lakoff’s ideas and career in an effort to clarify his contemporary influence. I focus mainly on his 2008 The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21^st-Century American Politics with an 18^th-Century Brain.[1]

Cognitivism: A Reflexive, Not Reflective, Mind

George Lakoff began his career in 1972 as a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is now the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics. Intensely interested in egalitarianist, or “progressive,” politics, he also founded and was senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute, which operated from 2003 to 2008. According to its (now defunct) website, the institute “promote(d) the effective articulation of progressive values.” It did this by

monitoring public debate and suggesting both long-term and short-term options for framing that offer a progressive perspective. We work primarily at the level of values and ideas across specific policy areas. At the level of language, we point out ineffective word choices and suggest argument forms and phrasings that better express progressive values.[2]

In addition to The Political Mind, Lakoff is the author of many works, including Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) and Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives (Chelsea Green, 2004), which garnered acclaim as a New York Times bestseller.

Lakoff’s ideal seems to be a “velvet” revolution, i.e., the use of peaceful means to inculcate the ways of radical equality into government and society and muscular government as the curator of this equality. The velvet revolutionary parts company with the traditional revolutionary in that he avoids confronting the fortress of established power directly, but seeks rather to erode the sand from under it. He doesn’t throw bricks at the police; he talks to the people.

In The Political Mind Lakoff says that the American Founders created a living, breathing democracy based upon freedom and the spirit to imagine: “We have new wonders to discover, new dreams to dream” (13). And this “dynamic democracy they designed leaves open the possibility of revolutionary change” (13). It is time for revolution, Lakoff indicates—but he means it metaphorically: a revolution in how we think about knowledge and knowing. The traditional way we think about knowledge and knowing, or the conventional way we understand rationality, is outmoded. Lakoff calls the paradigm that holds that the brain is a deliberative device capable of independent thought and analysis the “Old Enlightenment” way, and he says it should give way to a new paradigm, or “a new understanding of how we understand reality” (14). He calls for a

new philosophy—a new understanding of what it means to be a human being; of what morality is and where it comes from; of economics, religion, politics, and nature itself; and even of what science, philosophy and mathematics really are. We will have to expand our understanding of the great ideas: freedom, equality, fairness, progress, even happiness. (14)

Lakoff’s claims ought to strike sober, literate, and educated people as hyperbolic. There is indeed a tradition of sorts in which thinkers claim that their views will once and for all overturn the accumulated weight of philosophy and science and usher in a new age. But such breathless fantasy is more common to self-published pamphlets distributed in public parks than to books written by chaired professors. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Does Lakoff provide it? No, but he has a theory.

Specifically, Lakoff says that knowledge and knowing reside in, and rationality exists in reference to, the cognitive properties of the brain, or the ways it symbolizes concepts and represents facts. Rationality, he says, resides in narratives. Narratives are the subconscious pictures we have of ourselves, others, and the political and moral events of the day. They center around dichotomies, such as Good and Evil, and they “give meaning to your life” (33). Narratives also center around roles that, like narratives, arrange dichotomously and involve a protagonist we sympathize with and a demon who threatens us. Particular roles Lakoff names and describes are Hero, Villain, Victim, and Helper.

Narratives are cultural and “are instantiated physically in our brains. We are not born with them, but we start growing them soon, and as we acquire the deep narratives, our synapses change and become fixed” (33–34). “We cannot understand other people without such cultural narrative,” he continues, “but more important, we cannot understand ourselves” (34). Narratives “can be activated and function unconsciously, automatically, as a matter of reflex” (34); “[c]ultural narratives define our possibilities, challenges, and actual lives” (35). Lakoff also refers to narratives as “Frames,” which is the appellation he seems to prefer.

Lakoff writes that not to accept the cognitive paradigm and the primacy of psychological narratives is not to comprehend rationality and how human beings know about their world. This is a way of saying that we can pretty much dispense with the Western tradition, starting with Plato and Aristotle, and everything since founded on the premise that disciplined rational inquiry might get us somewhere. He is silent on the matter of how much the discovery of these psychological narratives is itself indebted to rational thought.

The Lakoff reader, however, might be troubled by the paradox. What if the primacy of psychological narratives is just another psychological narrative? If we follow Lakoff by radically downgrading the power of rational thought, what basis do we have to credit his own theory? The answer, to the extent Lakoff gives one, seems to be: a political basis. His theory squares with progressive politics, so it must be right. Right?

Writing with politics and morality in mind, he says that rationality isn’t just undesirable, but dangerous. To hold to the traditional view of the rational mind “not only hides the real threat to our democracy, it all too often keeps many of our most dedicated political leaders, policy experts, commentators, and social activists from being effective” (15).

In The Political Mind Lakoff argues that knowledge and knowing should proceed according to the cognitive practices of framing and polarization.

“Framing” is the rhetorical technique of putting the “right” context in place so that a particular side wins in argument. And the “right” side for Lakoff is the progressive side; therefore framing has a decidedly and explicitly political application. Lakoff argues that conservatives threaten democracy: “In its moral basis and its content,” he writes, “conservatism is centered on the politics of authority, obedience, and discipline. This content is profoundly anti-democratic, whereas our country was founded on opposition to authoritarianism” (68).

Lakoff intends The Political Mind to be a guidebook for progressives, and advises on how the progressive can formulate positions so that his arguments will carry the day in debate, his policy preferences will be popular in the public eye, and his candidates will win at election time. He writes, “You have to make the progressive version of (the ideas of freedom, equality, fairness, and opportunity) uppermost in the public mind” (115). And he tells the reader to repeat the progressive version multiple times: “Say things not once, but over and over. Brains change when ideas are repeatedly activated” (116). When progressives don’t narrate issues in ways that cause the acceptance of their version, and when they don’t repeat the frames often enough for other brains to internalize them, progressives fail to get what they want, and leave the field of political combat to their opponents—conservatives.

Lakoff uses the Iraq War to illustrate what he means by framing. To justify its involvement in Iraq, he writes, the Bush administration employed three narrative templates that had the effect of “selling” the war to the public by making it seem necessary. The administration formatted facts according to the “Self Defense” template, which depicted the war as defending the United States against Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction; the “Rescue” template, which spun the war as an effort to rescue the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s cruelties; and the “War” narrative, which saw events in the context of traditional combat (148–49). And because the Bush administration shaded events in language and symbols and metaphors along the lines suggested by these three positive themes, and got the public to accept them as valid, it was able to insert the United States Army into Iraq and maintain its presence there.

Lakoff also puts forward the progressive template, which he casts as the corrective to the Bush administration’s frames. He calls this the “Occupation” frame. Unlike the Bush frames, which amount to ruse, Lakoff argues that the Occupation frame more realistically depicts what is actually happening. The Iraqis have risen in insurgency against us and the Iraqi Army is ineffectual and corrupt; in light of these realities “occupation” better describes the American presence in Iraq. But the Bush administration wouldn’t use the Occupation frame because it didn’t want people to know the truth: “the Bush administration had to keep the War frame in order for Bush to be a War president, and thus keep his war powers” (149). Lakoff’s advice to progressives to confront this situation? To “repeat over and over the truth that we were running an occupation and that there was no way of winning” the war (152).

Lakoff intends to show that progressive-led government is a beneficial force that ought to be sturdy because it exists to serve people, so he favors frame-making that depicts government as positive and candidates favoring big government as worthy of being elected. “The ethics of care shapes government,” he says. “Empowerment [of people] by the government is everywhere” (47). “The role of progressive government is to maximize our freedom—and protection and empowerment do just that. Protection is there to guarantee freedom from harm, from want, and from fear. Empowerment is there to maximize freedom to achieve your goals” (48). And because it is the party progressives feel most comfortable with, The Political Mind is filled with illustrations firmly and uniformly inclined toward the Democratic Party. Lakoff sees the intent and effect of pro-progressive framing as the marketing of issues and candidates in ways that convince the public to trust centralized government and the Democratic Party.

At this point, the reader may wonder whether “framing” is just another word for “propaganda.” I am not sure how to answer that doubt. Certainly much of what Lakoff argues sounds like a theory of why propaganda works. Both “framing” and “propaganda” intend to instill a politically relevant disposition into an audience. Of course, the word “propaganda” is in bad odor, and extolling the importance of the “right frames” avoids that complication.

A key problem for theorists of revolution along statist, egalitarian lines lies is getting the public to accept the revolutionary paradigm as valid. If the status quo is illegitimate and its ideas only conditional, what makes the ideas of the revolutionary any more universal and worth espousing? The Political Mind addresses this problem by contending that progressive ideals are natural to the human being—that we naturally dispose to them. In other words, to the brain left to its own devices and unfettered by distractions, the progressive narrative on any issue will be seen automatically as “truth.”

Frames and frame-making derive from Lakoff’s conception of the mind as “embodied.” Embodiment seems to be Lakoff’s equivalent, at least functionally, to B.F. Skinner’s Behavioral idea of the conditioned reflex, which holds that the mind as an independent and deliberative device does not exist and that instead thoughts and their consequent actions root in reflexes. “If all thought were conscious and reflective, you would know your own mind and be in control of the decisions you make,” Lakoff writes. “But since we don’t know what our brains are doing in most cases, most thought is reflexive, not reflective, and beyond conscious control. As a result, your brain makes decisions for you that you are not consciously aware of” (9).

According to Embodiment, ideas—and again, Lakoff writes in reference to moral and political ideas—come into being as the result of the physiology of the brain and the impact on the brain of our material environment and social relationships. Ideas are created by “the neural anatomy and connectivity of our brains” and “the ways we function bodily in the physical and social world” (10). The import of this would seem to be that thinking does not take place in the form of rational mental abstractions, and that the human mind that births ideas does not do so as an analytical device that possesses intellectual or conceptual sentience. “Morality and politics are embodied ideas, not abstract ones, and they mostly function in the cognitive unconsciousness—in what your brain is doing and you cannot see” (10). The embodied mind “ultimately determines what morality and politics should be about. This is how reason really works” (11).

And this embodied mind is one that reposes naturally toward the progressive political outlook. Dr. Lakoff contends that the brain is “wired” to identify with certain concepts, and, in the realm of politics and government, to desire and support certain actors and their policies and to oppose and reject other actors and their policies.

Conservatives, Lakoff says, hold a worldview centering on authority and competition. “Conservative thought begins with the notion that morality is obedience to an authority” (60). Linking conservatives with obedience inherently inclines them, or at least makes them vulnerable to, authoritarianism and selfishness, qualities civilized people in a democracy regard with contempt. Progressives, on the other hand, hold beliefs that orient around compassion and cooperation, traits our brains favor and tell us we benefit from, and that operationalize when we form ourselves communally into democracy. “Empathy is at the center of the progressive moral worldview,” Lakoff writes, and the mind automatically inclines to the progressive worldview: “we are not just pre-wired for empathy, but for cooperation” (101). If at any time we think or act in selfish ways, he says, it is because our natural mind gets sidetracked from its default setting. In politics, this happens when conservative actors play on the mind’s attraction to authority and competition and the accordant susceptibility to fear that inheres in these traits. “The politics of authority is succeeding because conservatives have been activating their ideas in the brains of the public, while finding ways to inhibit the use of progressive modes of thought” (120).

Lakoff examines a second cognitive device that he says should be utilized in the new philosophy of understanding: “polarization,” or what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style” of discourse. He arranges the content and conclusions of The Political Mind along a tidy Good-Evil axis, with progressives and their policy preferences always residing with the Good and conservatives and their preferences universally housed with the Evil. A longtime staple of the egalitarian politics and worldview, polarization as a device for persuasion has been written about by philosophers like Sorel, activists like Saul Alinsky, and revolutionaries like Lenin. “Before men can act,” Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals, “an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced that their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil.”[3]

The Political Mind legitimizes a polarized style of thinking by asserting that the Left-Right spectrum, in which liberalism and conservatism are taken as different streams of the philosophical mainstream, is an “inaccurate metaphor, and a dangerous one” (45). Lakoff claims that the spectrum metaphor permits conservatism to be “passed off as ‘mainstream’ ideas, which they are not,” and progressive ideas to be “characterized as ‘leftist’ and ‘extremist,’ which they are not” (45). And “there are no moderates—that is, there is no moderate worldview, no one set of ideas that characterizes a ‘center’ or ‘moderation’” (44). “The moderate” is actually the person who uses conservative thought in some instances and progressive thought in others. “My job here is to make you think twice about [the left-to-right scale] and then stop using it,” he says (47). For Lakoff, the only paradigm that explains morality and politics is the dichotomy between progressivism and conservatism, and the fact that all that is moral and functional in a democracy stands with the former, while reaction and authoritarianism reside solely with the latter.

In The Political Mind Lakoff offers many reasons why we should not think like the conservative. On issue after issue, he paints progressivism in bright, hopeful colors, while conservatism shades bland or darkly. On economic markets, progressives stand for empathy and believe that markets ought to be regulated by government, because government “has a crucial moral mission to play…that in many cases inherently cannot be carried out by private enterprise” (51). Conservatives, on the other hand, see markets as “conferring economic freedom—freedom to make money in business any way you can” (62).

In morality and policy, progressives, again, stand for empathy—“behind every progressive policy lies a single moral value: empathy, together with the responsibility and strength to act on that empathy” (47). For conservatives, “morality is the morality of obedience” (65). On government, progressives represent compassionate government that empowers and protects people (47), while conservatives “rarely talk about government empowerment and act as if it does not exist—except in the case of corporate subsidies” (63). On democracy and power, progressives favor separation of powers “to avoid dictatorial powers via a balance of power” (50), while conservatives favor unitary power vested in the executive branch that led during the Bush administration to wiretapping, threats to habeas corpus, and other antidemocratic tendencies. The problem wasn’t with Bush, Lakoff says, but rather with his administration’s “general conservatism—the mode of thought itself” (65).

The Political Mind goes on and on about issues all across the political horizon; from military intervention to social security to the environment to civil rights and beyond, progressives repose as the compassionate Good and conservatives skulk as the selfish Evil. Progressives are, either directly or via insinuation, the Heroes, people with whom we can relate, while conservatives appear as the Villains, agents seeking to thwart the Heroes at every turn. And because our minds naturally incline to the progressive side, we should see this automatically; if we do not, it is because conservative imaging of reality has prevented it. But the antidote is available: use progressive frames to counter conservative ones. “You can use progressive language, ideas, images, and symbols repeatedly to activate the progressive worldview in people, who have both [progressive and conservative] worldviews, so that the progressive mode of thought is strengthened and the conservative mode weakened” (114).

The merits of this caricature of conservative thought and panegyric to progressive thought lie beyond this essay. I think it’s safe to say, however, that few conservatives would recognize themselves or their ideas in this hostile portrait. What’s more arresting is that Lakoff not only sells his product, but buys it too. After explaining that the human mind can’t really think but can consume highly reductive and polarized images, he proceeds to conjure his own highly reductive, polarized images. There is an elemental honesty in this, but it’s not exactly what you’d expect from a senior scholar with scientific pretensions. Lakoff seems to have talked himself into the virtue of being stupid, and then proceeded to demonstrate how the new stupidity works.

In The Political Mind Lakoff endeavors to get classical liberals—he uses the term “neoliberals”—to recognize the unreality of their “moderation.” He chides neoliberals for refusing to engage in pro-progressive framing, and for accepting the Old Enlightenment view of rationality and its prerequisite of investigating facts wherever they may lead and apart from the pre-determined assumptions of progressive ideology. “Neoliberal thought,” he writes, “arises from the Old Enlightenment view of the mind” (59). “I have previously criticized neoliberals for assuming that just citing facts and figures will carry the day politically, when what is needed is an honest, morally based framing of the facts and figures, showing their moral significance, and conveyed with the appropriate emotions and with words, images and symbols that really communicate” (52).

What bothers Lakoff about classical liberals in particular is their propensity to discuss progressive actors and progressive-oriented issues in terms of self-interest. When the scholar acknowledges that progressives have interests, his observations leads him to conclude that they act the same way conservative actors do, and such analysis detracts from the progressive message. In talking about progressives as being motivated by self-interest, Lakoff says, progressivism looks the same as conservatism, which prevents progressive frames from prevailing and allows the conservative status quo to continue. To be “honest” and to posit knowledge that is “morally based,” one must imbue with progressive ideals and utilize progressive framing techniques. One must not follow the truth wherever it may lead.

Written by perhaps the nation’s foremost contemporary cognitivist scholar, The Political Mind is itself an exercise in cognitive politics, and the reader familiar with image-making and the paranoid style will recognize these devices in the book’s pages. The reader interested in polarization rhetoric, for instance, cannot help but compare Lakoff’s framing of the current culture war with the imagery employed by a certain Wisconsin senator fifty years ago. The Political Mind begins:

Radical conservatives have been fighting a culture war. The main battlefield is the brain. At stake is what America is to be. Their goal is to radically change America to fit the conservative moral worldview. The threat is to democracy and all that goes with it.

Things, Lakoff says, are bleak:

The radical conservatives seek and have already begun to introduce: an authoritarian hierarchy based on vast concentrations and control of wealth; order based on fear, intimidation, and obedience; a broken government; no balance of power; priorities shifted from the public sector to the corporate and military sectors; responsibility shifted from society to the individual; control of elections through control of who votes and how votes are counted; control of ideas through the media; and patriarchal family values projected upon religion, politics and the market.

Lakoff continues:

The future of democracy is at stake now. (1)

Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, begins:

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are really down—they are truly down…

The situation, McCarthy said, was dire:

Six years ago, at the time of the first conference to map out peace—Dumbarton Oaks—there was within the Soviet Orbit 180,000,000 people. Lined up on the anti-totalitarian side there were roughly 1,625,000,000 people. Today, only six years later, there are 800,000,000 people under the absolute dominion of Soviet Russia—an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around 500,000,000. In other words, in less than six years the odds have changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5 against us.

McCarthy went on:

As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without but rather because of enemies from within.”

The truth of this statement is becoming terrifyingly clear as we see this country each day losing on every front.[4]

The Anti-Intellectualism of the Cognitive Style

Lakoff contends that our minds use narratives to push the facts we observe into perceptual categories that are familiar and help us make sense of the world. These narratives, or frames, give us roles we play, and these roles arrange according to a binary structure: we are geniuses or fools, aggressors or victims, builders or destroyers. Lakoff claims that we don’t realize any of this because (a) the narratives we employ and our dispositions regarding empathy and authority function on a subconscious level, and (b) Republicans and conservatives bombard us with faulty information that confuse our narratives, excite our fears, and short-circuit our natural inclination toward compassion and left-leaning progressive policies. The Academy tends not to want to acknowledge that the psychological approach is becoming a significant part of the teaching process. But framing and the polarized style constitute both for students and the professoriate exceedingly damaging practices, and they deserve scrutiny.

One anti-intellectual feature of the cognitive style is that it prevents college students from doing what they’re supposed to do—learn. Framing issues may result in getting certain parties elected to office and certain policies popularized, but it still represents an artificial form of knowledge, and one inferior to genuine understanding based upon facts. Progressives may call framing reality, but it is not.

The student who reads Lakoff is told that the War on Terror is little more than a Republican narrative intended to dispose the public toward authoritarianism by playing to its fear of insecurity. Lakoff depicts the September 11 attacks as events Bush used to create a national trauma, an ordeal whose conditions embossed into the minds of Americans an artificial need for wiretapping, vigorous police surveillance measures, and the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. The War on Terror, Lakoff writes, is only a metaphor, and one that serves as “the staple of right-wing politics at home” (128). However valuable this imagery proved in discrediting George W. Bush and his policies, it fails miserably in explaining what actually happened, or in predicting what can happen in the future. The student who reads The Political Mind will be surprised to learn about various plots of genuine Islamic terror cells in the United States, including the May 2009 plot to bomb synagogues in New York City, or the overwhelming and bipartisan vote by the Senate to refuse to close the Guantanamo facility and transfer its detainees to prisons on the American mainland. The list of Lakoff’s frame-making that turns out to be fiction can go on. While they helped to delegitimize policies and policy actors opposed by Lakoff and the Progressive Left, such images have no value to the individual interested in learning what really happened.

A second anti-intellectual feature of the cognitive paradigm is that it undermines the wall separating the Academy and the state. Because it conforms so closely to politics—because its categories of Morality/Functionality and Immorality/Disfunctionality correspond to political categories and because politicians build their structures on shifting sand, cognitivists will forever lack consistency in their work. The result will be an unending series of episodes that embarrass both the scholar and his profession. The reason for this is that in linking his work to partisan opinion-makers the cognitivist will find it hard to retreat from reality when those opinion-makers shift to using frames.

In The Political Mind Lakoff uniformly images Barak Obama, then a senator, as a full-blooded progressive. During the Bush administration Obama brought our attention to the “empathy deficit—a failure to care, both about others and each other” (47). And what’s more, Obama is a senator who does what others do not—he refuses to accept his opponents’ frame-making, and instead shifts discussion of issues toward his own frames (153). What does Lakoff do now that Obama is president and conducts some of the same policies as conservative Republican George W. Bush?

“On wiretapping,” Lakoff says “the issue is one of liberty. [George W. Bush] wanted to take ours away” (152). Since Mr. Obama has continued the wiretapping, is he also trying to take away our liberty? On the Iraq War, Lakoff “published an article pointing out the consequences of allowing [Bush] to keep the War frame in the public mind, and suggesting that the truth be told: it was an occupation” (149). Since President Obama uses the “Iraq-as-War” rather than the “Iraq-as-Occupation” frame—even to the point of visiting the troops in Iraq—will Lakoff write another article suggesting that “the truth be told?” Or, since Obama does not accept his opponents’ frame-making, will Lakoff now inform his readers that Bush’s policies were factually based and the progressive frame was fiction?

A third anti-intellectual feature of the cognitive approach, at least as it is outlined in The Political Mind, is that it misstates the traditional Rationality model, and does so in a way that makes investigation of the progressive positions on issues impossible. Lakoff indicates that the traditional Rational Actor model fails because it “makes the inherent claim that reason does not involve either metaphors or frames. It therefore cannot be a model of real human reason” (221). Only the cognitivist paradigm can be a model for rational action, he says, because it alone takes into account that the brain operates according to unconscious symbols and frames.

And since Lakoff has already established that the brain inclines naturally toward empathy and progressivism, rationality simply equates to what its consciousness, aided by imagery from progressive activists, tells it. However, the true student of the Rational Actor model regards the mind as a deliberative device—not predisposed in any one direction and simply captive of the frames others have placed into it—and views the rational process as involving scrutiny of all information, including the ways such information is packaged to him by others as well as his own non-rational feelings and emotions.

For example, in considering how to view global warming, Cognitive model analysis would stress compassion and view events according to the following narrative, which would be seen as natural to the mind:

Economic man produced global warming and chemical chickens. The unbounded pursuit of self-interest that was supposed to be moral, was supposed to produce plenty for all, is bringing death to our earth. If it continues, half the species on our planet will die within a century. Economic man was an idea—a claim about human nature. Empathy and real reason…reveal its fallacies. (121)

In its assessment of global warming, on the other hand, the mind using the Rational Actor model might follow this path: “Scientists are contending that the planet is warming and that human beings are the cause. We know that the polar ice caps are indeed melting. But at the same time, other scientists say that the warming is very slight, and may be occurring naturally. I also know that prominent environmentalist voices, while they sound the alarm on global warming, live in elaborate energy-guzzling mansions, and avoid being impacted by conservationist measures.” The former sentiment, which belongs to Lakoff, accepts global warming claims automatically and doesn’t burden itself with contrary information because it has internalized progressive frame-making: “When you accept a particular narrative, you ignore or hide realities that contradict it” (37). The latter logic investigates multiple aspects of the issue and results in a more complete analysis. It subjects feelings the person possesses to examination. Adopting the cognitive model might work well for progressive pressure groups and political candidates, who find that uncomfortable realities and contradictions to their positions will not be inspected, but it is the latter process that is more likely to render a better appreciation of the issues.

A fourth and perhaps most important anti-intellectual feature of the cognitive approach is that innocent people can be damaged by its devices. Framing and polarization are said to represent ways of understanding facts that move civilization to a higher level. The problem with these devices is that their operators often use them in ways that, intentionally or not, hurt innocent people.

In velvet revolution, no less than in conventional revolution, innocent people may count among the casualties. Frame-making includes labeling someone as a racist or a sexist. The progressive may argue (but only in private) that society as a whole benefits from cognitivist devices, and that in order to make an omelet a few eggs must invariably be broken. But under such logic everyone lives in constant intimidation, and the progressive becomes the thing he says he despises—the witch hunter.

Conclusion

As 2005 dawned progressives were down and dispirited. George W. Bush was newly re-elected, and Congress was firmly in Republican hands. Bush in 2004 had garnered a majority of the vote—the first president since 1988 to have done so—and his coattails helped Republicans gain seats in both the House and Senate. As Bush began his push in January 2005 for Social Security reform, with a plan that centered around voluntary personal investment accounts, the chances were good that progressives might suffer yet another defeat, and that the Republican wave might turn into a juggernaut.

Democratic leaders caucusing on the issue invited George Lakoff to a strategy meeting held in Cambridge, Maryland. Lakoff received the invitation from North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, the chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee. Dorgan had picked up a copy of Lakoff’s Moral Politics, and became an instant fan of the framing concept. He was also familiar with Lakoff’s runaway bestseller Don’t Think of an Elephant, a copy of which Lakoff would send to every Democratic legislator. Don’t Think of an Elephant would become, according to journalist Matt Bai, “ubiquitous among Democrats in the Capitol.”[5]

At the Cambridge gathering Lakoff urged Democrats to resist private investment accounts by imaging them as reckless. Democrats went to the media with a message that Americans’ savings would be gambled away by the plan, and before long a frightened public blanched in its enthusiasm for social security reform. A CNN–USA Today poll noted that those favoring the idea went from 42 percent in January to 33 percent in April. “We branded them with privatization,” Nancy Pelosi said afterward, “and they can’t sell that brand anywhere.” “At the beginning of this debate,” she went on, “voters were saying that the president was a president who had new ideas. Now he’s a guy who wants to cut my benefits.”[6] Republicans themselves pulled away from the plan, and when in March 2005 Majority Leader Bill Frist said the Senate might have to postpone the vote on the issue, its fate was sealed. Bush had been delegitimized on Social Security reform, and his private investment accounts proposal was defeated. The framing campaign had done its job.

There is nothing new about political figures relying upon appearances rather than reality when exercising their power. In his famous tract published in 1513, Niccolo Machiavelli advised the Medici rulers to “appear as you wish to appear.” What is disturbing, however, is that more and more we see public officials—and scholars—living in fiction. What is also disturbing is that neither statesmen nor scholars seem to realize is how uncontrollable this practice is.

[1]George Lakoff, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21^st-Century American Politics with an 18^th-Century Brain (New York: Viking, 2008). Subsequent references to this work will be cited parenthetically within the text.

[2]For existing details about the Rockridge Institute, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockridge_Institute and http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/rockridgeinstitute.org.

[3]Saul D. Alinsky, Rules For Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971; New York: Vintage, 1989), 78.

[4]Joseph McCarthy, “Speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, 9 February 1950,” in Michael P. Johnson, ed., Reading the American Past: Selected Historical Documents, Volume II: From 1865 (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 191-95, cited at http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/mccarthy_wheeling.pdf, 1.

[5]Matt Bai, “The Framing Wars,” New York Times Magazine, July 17, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17DEMOCRATS.html.

[6]Ibid.

LEAPs and Bounds

Ashley Thorne — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

David Mulroy, an NAS board member who teaches Classical Languages at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, recently brought to our attention a program at UWM called Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP). It didn’t leap out of nowhere. LEAP was created by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) to focus “campus practice on fostering essential learning outcomes for all students, whatever their chosen field of study.” LEAP gives “special attention to access and success for students from underserved communities.”

As often happens with bureaucratic initiatives, they steal ahead with little opposition because they sound so boring that no one pays much attention to them. LEAP has all the cachet of phase three of the Commissar’s fourth five-year plan for increasing tractor productivity in Kazakhstan. It is ennui, wrapped in tedium, inside monotony.

But never fear. NAS will now perform the immensely valuable public service of explaining what is really going on when the lords of education go a-LEAP-ing. This won’t be easy or short. Get your snack food before you start. Ready?

Learning Outcomes Background

LEAP is part of the broad movement to measure “learning outcomes” in college classrooms. NAS president Peter Wood has written about this trend in several articles, including “Seat Time at the AAC&U.” He tells how the assessment movement has developed:

In fact, “outcomes assessment” had been gaining ground with accreditors since the mid 1990s. “Outcomes assessment” is a stepchild of the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement that was popular in American business in the 1980s. Applied to higher education, “outcomes assessment” initially meant asking colleges to develop tools to show that students were reliably learning what the college claimed to teach. But like TQM, “outcomes assessment” was tied to a concept of “continuous improvement.” The goal was to encourage colleges to collect data on what worked well and what could be enhanced.

The major challenge was that in the eyes of “outcomes assessment” advocates, the grades that students received were of little use as an assessment tool. That’s because grades might measure individual performance in the class but they showed nothing whether the class itself advanced larger curricular aims.

As the regional accreditors became enthusiastic about “outcomes assessment,” colleges and universities had to scramble to find ways to measure things they had previously taken for granted and some things that are probably intrinsically unmeasurable.

Great Books expert David Clemens, in a 2003 Inside English article “Five Myths of Assessment,” told how the rise of Outcomes Based Education (OBE) was attractive to both the Right and the Left:

The Right saw OBE as a means to accountability, productivity, and particularizing standards. The Left saw OBE as an engine for social change, attitude engineering, and infusing ideology into curriculum.

Where does LEAP fit on this spectrum of projected hopes?

You Value That? Didn’t This Class Teach You Anything?

The AAC&U, although not an accreditor, is one of the foremost advocates of outcomes assessments. Its LEAP project identifies four “Essential Learning Outcomes” (ELOs):

1. Knowledge of Human Cultures and the Physical and Natural World

2. Intellectual and Practical Skills

3. Personal and Social Responsibility

4. Integrative Learning

Brace yourself. No MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) with ELO in this class. Why are there four ELOs, you might wonder, instead of two or six or sixty? Are we touching the fundamental principles of the universe? The quarks of education? Note what gets jammed together and what gets left out. All knowledge about culture, the physical, and the natural worlds makes up one ELO. Which seems to mean that history matters only as a subordinate aspect of culture, and knowledge of great men and women matters not at all. Scan the Four Great ELOs and ask where knowledge of God, theological inquiry, or the transcendent has any claim whatsoever on the goals of education. Guess not. How about aesthetics, beauty, art, music? Maybe those get swept in with human culture or practical skill. But you get the sense they don’t matter that much to the architects of ELO.

Actually, the LEAP-ites explain their logic in a document titled College Learning for the New Global Century. Well, “logic” is perhaps not the right word. But the Four Great ELOs have a genealogy, sort of like the genealogy of the Gods in Hesiod’s Theogony, where Chaos gave birth to Darkness and Night. In this case, Multiyear Dialogue gave birth to Greater Expectations and Taking Responsibility. Though Hesiod pretty much covers the same territory, AAC&U’s modern version goes as follows:

This listing [of the Four Great ELOs] was developed through a multiyear dialogue with hundreds of colleges and universities about needed goals for student learning; analysis of a long series of recommendations and reports from the business community; and analysis of the accreditation requirements for engineering, business, nursing, and teacher education. The findings are documented in previous publications of the Association of American Colleges and Universities: Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (2002), Taking Responsibility for the Quality of the Baccalaureate Degree (2004), and Liberal Education Outcomes: A Preliminary Report on Achievement in College (2005).

So much for where the ELOs came from. Down at the level of actual, earthly institutions, the existence of the ELOs tends to be taken as given. The question is how to get along with business. What do the ELOs want from us? What sacrifices do they expect? How best to worship them? Who shall be their priests? The answers may vary from one university to another. But since we were cued into the ELO cult as it is practiced at U Wisconsin, we will pick up the story there.

At U Wisconsin, each of the ELOs is evaluated based on the student’s learning in the cognitive dimension (“what the student will be able to KNOW”), skills dimension (“what the student will be able to DO”), and affective dimension (“what students will be able to demonstrate they VALUE and APPRECIATE”). Faculty members are required to record outcomes in a web database called WEAVEonline that is used by over 100 American colleges and universities for the purpose of documenting learning outcomes. WEAVEonline, a money-making venture arising out of the assessment movement, was developed by Virginia Commonwealth University.

That education’s effectiveness is being measured by what students “VALUE and APPRECIATE” (emphasis in the original) ought to give us pause. Is it the duty of college professors to instill particular beliefs in students? Or does attempting to measure students’ values open the door to ideological indoctrination?

Perhaps the people behind LEAP will give us a clue. Its National Leadership Council members include Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University and champion of racial preferences in his 1998 book The Shape of the River, and Martha Nussbaum, diversiphile and author of the 1997 book Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Also in leadership are Mary Sue Coleman, die-hard affirmative action proponent and president of the University of Michigan, and Sylvia Hurtado, director of the Higher Education Research Institute and crusader for racial and gender diversity in higher education.

So it might be reasonable to wonder whether LEAP has an implied bias towards the sort of education that favors identity politics. Many of its architects explicitly favor a form of higher education that puts racial preferences center stage. Does LEAP do that too?

LEAP does seem to be coupled with forms of racial preferences. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, engagement with LEAP, categorized as general education reform, is combined with the Milwaukee Commitment (to “diversity”). The commitment is a strategic plan to recruit increased numbers of “TRE/D” students and faculty members to “achieve critical mass at UWM.” TRE/D stands for “targeted racial/ethnic and disadvantaged.”

We have some other clues as to LEAP’s ideology. On the project’s blog, Kevin Hovland, the AAC&U’s Director of Global Learning and Curricular Change, expresses disappointment that the College Sustainability Report Card did not measure institutions’ teaching on sustainability or students’ mastery of it. He wrote:

Many institutions find sustainability a useful common ground for developing interdisciplinary approaches to general education. I recently learned that Furman College has introduced a new requirement that all students take at least one course addressing “humans and the natural environment.” Curriculum development for such courses is coordinated by Furman’s new David E. Shi Center for Sustainability. Is your campus doing something similar? Let us know and AAC&U will eagerly spread the word. And I will look forward to a time when commitment to sustainability is judged by student learning as well as by the current criteria.

NAS has researched the campus sustainability movement for the last two years, and we have published our findings (over 30 articles)—that sustainability is about one-third environmentalism and two-thirds anti-capitalism. We were glad to find that the College Sustainability Report Card does not include teaching, research, or other academic aspects concerning sustainability. Leaders of the AAC&U, however, encourage the re-casting of this shady ideology as the foundation of higher education.

We’ve observed that the sustainability ideology, which is relatively new to the American college campus, is bidding to replace the diversity ideology as the favorite instrument for advancing “progressive” political values. The AAC&U document, released in 2007, is just old enough to be stuck in yesterday’s ideological clichés, and the cast of imposing characters on its National Leadership Council are mostly people who gained prominence by means of their skill as apologists for the “diversity” credo. They have to re-tool now to get with the sustainability program. Life is so unfair. But we need to understand LEAP as yesterday’s exercise in faddishness, despite the wishful thinking on display in the title College Learning for the New Global Century. Sorry guys. It should now be, College Learning for the End Times.

Blindfold Students and Spin Them Around

In addition to the four Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs), LEAP sets out seven “Principles of Excellence”:

1. Aim High – and Make Excellence Inclusive: Make the Essential Learning Outcomes a Framework for the Entire Educational Experience, Connecting School, College, Work, and Life

2. Give Students a Compass: Focus Each Student’s Plan of Study on Achieving the Essential Learning Outcomes—and Assess Progress

3. Teach the Arts of Inquiry and Innovation: Immerse All Students in Analysis, Discovery, Problem Solving, and Communication, Beginning in School and Advancing in College

4. Engage the Big Questions: Teach through the Curriculum to Far-Reaching Issues—Contemporary and Enduring—in Science and Society, Cultures and Values, Global Interdependence, the Changing Economy, and Human Dignity and Freedom

5. Connect Knowledge with Choices and Action: Prepare Students for Citizenship and Work through Engaged and Guided Learning on “Real-World” Problems

6. Foster Civic, Intercultural, and Ethical Learning: Emphasize Personal and Social Responsibility, in Every Field of Study

7. Assess Students’ Ability to Apply Learning to Complex Problems: Use Assessment to Deepen Learning and to Establish a Culture of Shared Purpose and Continuous Improvement

These are all nice-sounding principles. Students should engage the big questions, be able to solve complex problems, and learn through inquiry and analysis. We intend to throw a little cold water on some of these principles, but let’s first consider the sheer banality of the list. What would the alternatives be? This?

1. Aim Low and Make Excellence Exclusive. Most of what goes on here doesn’t matter anyway.

2. Blindfold Students and Spin Them Around.

3. Teach Mimicry and Dull Repetition.

4. Emphasize Trivia.

5. Connect Ignorance with Indecision. Remember, we want them to be followers.

6. Foster Angry, Prideful Identity Groups and Moralistic Grandstanding.

7. Assess Students to the Lowest Common Denominator.

But back to the actual “Principles of Excellence.” Probe the pleasant language and these principles become more puzzling. “Make excellence inclusive,” has a hidden meaning. We’ve seen it before, back in May when Virginia Tech affirmed its “commitment to inclusive excellence” after NAS and FIRE exposed the university’s illiberal policy requiring faculty members to prove their service to diversity as a condition for promotion and tenure. In his article, “Virginia Tech’s ‘Inclusive’ Rodomontade,” Dr. Wood interpreted the phrase’s meaning:

“Inclusive excellence” is based on the idea that different social and cultural groups have their own standards for excellence that cannot be shared or in most cases even translated across group boundaries. The excellence pursued by white Americans is one thing; that pursued by African-Americans another. The excellence pursued by women is one thing; that pursued by men is another. Under the doctrine of “inclusive excellence,” a university makes clear that it recognizes and values the distinctive excellences of each and every campus group.

Well, not really. In practice it means having separate (and lower) expectations for some groups than others. A simple translation of “inclusive excellence" is that it is affirmative action for ideas. Ideas that are too weak, too flawed, too unsupported to withstand critical inspection get a sharply discounted admission ticket under the reign of “inclusive excellence.”

LEAP appears to buy into the same concept of “inclusive excellence.” And emphasizing “personal and social responsibility in every field of study” sounds dangerously close to “use the classroom to encourage political activism.”

Assess What?

Fueled by the language of “access” and “inclusive excellence,” the assessment movement is flourishing. Last week the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) reported (download executive summary pdf) that about 75% of American colleges and universities use a common set of learning outcomes applied to all students. NILOA found that 92% employ at least one outcome assessment. The report quotes from “The college calculation: How much does higher education matter?” printed in the New York Times Magazine this September:

Colleges… do so little to measure what students learn between freshman and senior years. So doubt lurks: how much does a college education – the actual teaching and learning that happens on campus – really matter?

This is a question worth asking. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) recently unveiled its new website, WhatWillTheyLearn.com, which rates institutions based on whether they require students to take courses in core subjects: composition, literature, foreign language, United States history, economics, mathematics, and science. The idea is to see whether students are taking the subjects essential to a liberal higher education and therefore, that they graduate having learned something. As curricula become more and more student-centered and flexible, are students still getting a solid education?

The AAC&U, the NILOA, and ACTA all share the concern that students aren’t learning what they should, and that this undermines the value of the college degree. The proponents of the assessment movement, however, are not worried that students are missing out on courses on the American constitution. They are more interested in quantifying “outcomes” and tallying up success points. The students may not know what the Federalist Papers are but four years at an ELO-ized university is certainly going to give them an Excellently Inclusive Big Question Compass with a glow-in-the-dark Culture of Shared Purpose and Continuous Improvement.

Low Jumping

One reason for the popularity of the assessment movement is the unpopularity of assigning grades and the decreased significance of grades due to grade inflation. A commenter on a Chronicle of Higher Education note on assessment argues:

Grading student work has lost credibility as a measure of student learning for many stake-holders, who want another way to measure. Put simply, what does it tell me if Sally got an A minus but Jessica got a B in English 101? What did Sally learn that Jessica did not? The problem with grading is that it is an average of Something, but the Something it not publicly accessible. Moreover, the "unit of control" in grading is the individual student.

But there are two main problems with measuring student learning outcomes. First, it assumes that the goal is for all students to achieve equal outcomes. This is inherently problematic because people aren’t equal. We can’t all do a two-foot vertical jump, even if someone shows us how and we practice for weeks. We don’t all earn the same income or the same grades in school. That’s why even the most dedicated and patient college professors, who explain concepts carefully in class and give extra help outside it, can’t be held liable if some students fail or finish the class without getting much out of it. But assessing education based on learning outcomes instead of grades motivates faculty members to set the standard low in order to be able to report success. We can all jump three inches high.

The second problem, as Dr. Wood explained above, is that assessment tries to measure results that are often un-measurable, especially in the liberal arts. It snaps the creative tension between technical practicality and intellectual exploring that is necessary for higher education to flourish. As he puts it:

At bottom the assessment movement is anti-intellectual. It emphasizes the aspects of education that are easily standardized, undercuts disciplinary expertise, and builds incentives for faculty members to set low and easily achievable goals for their courses.

Dr. Mulroy adds:

to me the worst part is the way LEAP ignores specific disciplinary goals. When I teach Latin, for example, every aspect of my teaching is subordinated to the goal of helping my students to learn how to read Latin. These ELOs relegate the craft of teaching specific subjects like that to the margins.

Such skepticism appears to be the norm among faculty members. According to the NILOA survey, “Among large research universities, almost 80 percent cited a lack of faculty engagement as the most serious barrier to student-assessment projects.” George D. Kuh, director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, has an idea for motivating professors. He says that faculty members’ annual reviews should include assessment, and that colleges should dedicate more administrators to overseeing the process.

Indeed, many faculty members believe outcomes assessment undercuts the basic purposes of higher education and isn’t worth the tedium and time it requires. Dr. Mulroy views it as “at best a great waste of time and resources,” and NAS public relations director Glenn Ricketts, who teaches political science at Raritan Valley Community College, recalls his college’s efforts some twenty years ago to adopt learning outcomes assessment: “It was a colossal waste of the faculty’s time—constantly having to revise our course materials to resemble contractual agreements.” Perhaps “phildept,” a commenter on the Chronicle, says it best:

The main problem with outcomes assessment is with the outcomes. To the extent that they oversimplify education and leave out the more ambitious and wisest purposes (e.g. self-reflection, awareness of limits of current thinking, honing of commitments to service, inspiration to emulate insightful writers) of university educations, then they dilute our possible achievements.

Leaping Lizards

LEAP—Liberal Education and America’s Promise—shod with the jump-soles of its diversiphile leadership and commitments to “inclusiveness,” leaps over some of the fundamentals of academe. As part of the outcomes assessment movement, the LEAPers believe they can transcend the kind of academic rigor, disciplinary teaching, and faculty discretion that lie at the heart of higher education.

Why do they believe this? Many of the architects of this program are very intelligent and well-informed, and certainly well-intentioned. Yet they have ended up with a recipe for educational superficiality streaked with ideology. Perhaps part of the answer is that LEAP is founded on anxiety. The university leaders who lent their names to it know that contemporary higher education in America is, all too often, an intellectual mess. It cannot justify itself on the evidence that graduates of expensive colleges and universities have learned that much, developed that much in the way of sophisticated skills, matured into adults of estimable character, taken possession of their own civilization, emerged as cultured or rounded human beings, or shown themselves ready for demanding jobs. A few achieve all these things. Many achieve little on any of these scales.

Tom Wood in a series of articles for this website marshaled the mounting evidence that students who attend college generally do learn something, and part of what they learn is indeed “critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and written communication.” No matter how undistinguished the college, students advanced a little towards these goals. No matter how ungifted the student, if he sticks with his program, he advances a bit. We know this, or at least we have evidence for it, because the Council for Aid to Education (CAE) has been running a test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has been studying the results of that test.

The test and the follow-up study are further testament to the broad anxiety about the quality of learning in American higher education. We wouldn’t be searching for such reassurance if it was plain that colleges do their job. The anxiety was also on display during the period in which former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings convened her Commission on the Future of Higher Education and then tried to use its findings as the basis for advancing her own version of “outcomes assessment.”

The doubts about the worthiness of our system of higher education seem to us at NAS to be well-founded. But how do those who have deep investment in the current system respond to these doubts? They are partly responsible for creating the mess, so their inclination might be to minimize the problems. And that is part of what LEAP does. It sets the criteria—the ELOs—by which the dinosaurs of Leftist academe would prefer to be judged. Ask the Ankylosaurus the best criteria for judging dinosaurs and he might well mention (1) a low center of gravity, (2) nice dorsal spikes, (3) a hefty club tail, and (4) a pointy nose. A T-Rex, by contrast, might think tiny arms, big teeth, good jaws, and two legs altogether more admirable.

LEAP is the Anklylosaurus of self-justifying mediocrity in higher education. It sets out the criteria that the old guard would like to maintain, but dresses them up as skills for the “New Global Century.” That’s called wishful thinking. Nothing comes more easily to leftist academics as to see themselves as riding the wave of the future, even as they stand there with their surf boards in the middle of Death Valley.

Remapping Geography

Jonathan M. Smith and Jim Norwine — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Jonathan M. Smith is professor of geography at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843; jmsmith@tamu.edu. Jim Norwine is Regents Professor of Geography, Texas A&M University–Kingsville, Kingsville, TX 78363; kfjrn00@tamuk.edu.

Little that occurs in contemporary academic geography will surprise members of the National Association of Scholars, for a large part of the field has joined the other humanities and social sciences in the bawdy saloon of progressive politics, cultural nihilism, and subjective epistemology. That geographers are in there roistering with the literary critics and women’s studiers may surprise those who expect them mainly to be experts in river lengths and major exports, but no one will be surprised by the songs geographers are singing as they clank flagons with other progressive scholars. If you work in the social sciences or humanities, there is an excellent chance that someone is at this moment whistling one of these tunes in the corridor outside your office door.

We’ll begin with a description of contemporary cultural geography and close with an analysis. Our description admittedly dwells on striking examples, but these examples are emblematic of pervasive beliefs and attitudes. Not one is fanciful, overdrawn, or anomalous. To cautious readers who object that we may have committed the error of identifying the abuses of an institution with its essence, we respond with this question: where, then, are the protests? Radical politics and cultural subversion are not ubiquitous in cultural geography, but they are abundantly present and more than welcome. Here as elsewhere in the university, the prevalent opinion is that there are no enemies to the left (and no intelligent life to the right).

This essay may of course be read simply as a depressing report of the spread of a deplorable fad to yet another academic field, but we believe that something more can be learned from the case of cultural geography due to the peculiarities of the field. In our analysis we explain why cultural geography has been so susceptible to cultural nihilism, why its small size has made it an easy conquest for progressive politics, and why its peculiar understanding of interdisciplinary research has been favorable to subjective epistemology.

Cultural Geography Today

Geography is a small, rather strange academic field. Nearly half of the geographers in the United States are “physical” geographers who study landforms, soils, climate, and vegetation. The rest are “human” geographers, most of whom consider themselves social scientists, and a few who consider themselves humanists. “Cultural geography” is the subset of human geography that studies the geography of culture, although within the discipline the meaning of “geography” and “culture” are hotly disputed.

When first undertaken at the turn of the nineteenth century, cultural geography was governed by the doctrine of social Darwinism and sought to explain global cultural diversity as the product of natural selection. It later drifted to the outskirts of cultural anthropology and studied the ways that different cultural groups shape the earth’s surface. Geographers called the product of this shaping “landscape.” Until the late 1970s cultural geographers wrote mostly about landscapes: the shapes of courthouse squares and corncribs, motels and main streets. This harmless, if arguably sometimes pointless activity began to wind down in the 1980s, giving way to the “new cultural geography.”

The new cultural geography “interrogated spatial practices,” “deconstructed nature,” “decoded discourses of domination,” and otherwise gave pretty free rein to the fashionable “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Gone were the courthouse squares and corncribs; arrived were the progressive politics of class, race, sex, and sexuality. Cultural geographers, who had formerly favored tweed jackets and sturdy walking shoes, now shaved their skulls and donned black turtlenecks and jeans. It was—they were—totally tuned in to what was happening in the other social and human sciences.

Much good blew in with the new cultural geography. Culture was no longer seen as a consensus, but rather as a sometimes-fractious dialogue. To its utilitarian core of economic skills and solidarity were added the larger philosophic and artistic tasks of interpreting and representing the cosmos. These interpretations and representations were understood, at least at first, not as mere emanations from or reinforcements of the utilitarian core, but as autonomous processes with their own logic and end.

But weirdness blew in as well. Before long one could hear a conference paper read by a graduate student who had quit her job as a gym teacher and come out as a lesbian in order to write a dissertation on the “erotics of the locker room,” or by a solemn assistant professor on “the aesthetics of fat wattles on large bodies.”[1]

What memorable presentations of this sort shared with the general run of writing in the new cultural geography was the assumption that conventional attitudes are mere prejudices (i.e., groundless, perhaps power-serving beliefs), and that the job of cultural geography is to subvert them. After all, what’s wrong with a gym teacher’s voyeurism? And why should corpulence be considered unattractive? Indeed, is there anything at all to be said for any aesthetic or moral judgment—or are they all a mask of power?

The weirdest papers normally remained largely out of sight in the scholarly sub-basement of conference abstracts, and had as their principal purpose prizing travel money from department heads and deans. But the winds of counter-cultural subversion also blew through the pages of geography journals, and even some textbooks. One celebrated undergraduate textbook, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction, offered itself as “an intervention” in the culture wars, written in the hope of “spurring action” towards “cultural justice.” Author Donald Mitchell, a very highly regarded new cultural geographer, allowed that his “materialist and Marxist” account of culture “comes with its own set of blinkers,” and then gave fair warning that “my goal has been everywhere and always to make those blinkers as invisible to the reader as possible.” He did this because, “I want to win.” The only objection he could imagine to manipulating students in this manner was that “it will certainly strike some as masculinist.”[2]

Undergraduates, formerly considered to be merely ignorant, were now regarded as duped and mesmerized by a great illusion—an illusion from which cultural geographers, mysteriously immune, must somehow deliver them. It is of course possible that in the classroom professors of cultural geography were timid and benign figures diffidently directing the attention of their students to the global extend of Urdu; but gathered at the bar after a long day discussing locker room erotics and fat wattle aesthetics, many seemed to imagine themselves a Marat, a Bakunin, a Guevara.

This was not an altogether bad thing. Progressive thought is a form of thought, and every university should be able to exhibit a few true believers. But the same can be said of other forms of thought, other beliefs. Shouldn’t every university, every field in the human and social sciences also house at least a few professors who think that spontaneous organization is superior to planning (i.e., conservatives), that received opinion has a serious claim on our allegiance (i.e., traditionalists), that reality is both real and in its ultimate ground personal (i.e., theists)? Such forms of thought are no longer frequently found in the university or cultural geography. Whether this is because they are not present or because they are not professed, we do not know. In cultural geography we suspect they have been driven to near extinction by the ferocious intolerance of the now hegemonic new cultural geography.

In the unlikely event that a right-thinking, progressive, new cultural geographer should read the preceding sentence, he will no doubt feel a wave of shocked umbrage at its wild, nay wicked, accusation. “Intolerance! Ferocious intolerance? Nonsense!” And especially rich nonsense, he might add, as it comes from some sort of conservative-traditionalist-crypto-bigot. Without agreeing to this characterization, we in turn would feel a flush of pleasure over such an outburst, for cries of indignant protest are among the surest signs that an arrow has hit home.

That progressives are tolerant, that they smile on diversity: these are great load-bearing myths of the progressive imagination. Five minutes reflection on the meaning of “progress” will show that they represent either a pretense or a delusion. Progress implies a goal, a goal implies a plan, and plans have no place for people who won’t get with the program. Progressivism is not interested in letting things take their natural course (a conservative idea), and it does not allow those who are truly different to go their own way (something traditionalists are rather good at). Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as a community parade in which everyone wears a funny hat but marches in the same direction.

Let us imagine an eager young cultural geographer, not given to funny hats, but embarking on an academic career under the credulous assumption that diversity means, well, diversity. He would at once enter a cloying fug of uniform, smug, and frequently ignorant political opinion—the sort of social verities that were once known as cant. Although we are now aware that one of the many reasons not to make a joke at the expense of homosexuals is that there may be a homosexual in the audience, the insight has not been generalized to a caution against rude humor at the expense of certain other groups. Among cultural geographers, as among many academics, it has not inhibited the easy discharge of pleasantries aimed at Christians, Republicans, or white men who own guns. (Is there a difference?) Surely, almost everyone assumes, they are not among us. Amid the cozy chuckles, our eager young cultural geographer is strangely silent.

He begins to look around. What about our professional organization, the Association of American Geographers (AAG)? Notice the progressive fee schedule, which is intrusive (how much do you earn?) so that officers can practice micro-socialist redistribution of piddling amounts of money. Don’t write a letter—it won’t be answered. See how, two years ago, the AAG invited the great linguist Noam Chomsky to address a plenary session at our national meeting in Boston; yet not as the man who discovered transformational grammar, but as the celebrated radical propagandist. Don’t question an AAG officer; he won’t understand your problem. Consider the appeal distributed to AAG members some years ago soliciting signatures to a petition denouncing the Bush administration for “ignoring science” and refusing to sign the Kyoto Accord.[3] Then reflect on the fact that the appeal’s author, a prominent new cultural geographer, had a few years earlier published a rousing takedown—under the memorable title “For a Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Scientific Geography”4]—of precisely the sort of positivist science the Bush administration rejected. Was he worried about global warming? Or was he worried about the Bush administration?

See how just this year the AAG president, a human geographer, in an email encouraged geographers in Texas to write their legislators to protest a pending bill that would circumscribe the ways in which Darwinism is taught in the schools. How odd this is, given that virtually every living human geographer also circumscribes Darwinism, and repudiates geography’s Darwinian past, every form of Social Darwinism, and the Malthusian Principle of Population on which the whole Darwinian edifice might be said to rest. Were geographers being asked to speak out for Darwin? Or were geographers being asked to speak out against evangelical politics?

This past April our eager young cultural geographer would have opened his monthly AAG Newsletter to an editorial that begins: “President Barack Obama should ask George W. Bush to surrender his passport in the interest of national security.”5] Were the former president to venture travel abroad, Amy Ross of the University of Georgia suggests, an international tribunal would very likely clap him in the gyves of justice and “provoke a dangerous international incident.” Needless to say, Professor Ross is clearly not at all concerned with national security, avoiding international incidents, or preserving the liberty of our former president. She would quite happily clap him in the gyves of justice herself, given half a chance, and is only eager to see that American courts be given the “first shot” at prosecuting Bush for the “criminal violence he has directed.” Our geographer would not need to be an admirer of George W. Bush, or a champion of his policies to wonder why the AAG Newsletter published such an editorial. The Nation or the Daily Kos, to be sure. Historically, the AAG Newsletter is where young geographers have gone to read job advertisements, middle-aged geographers to read grant announcements, and old geographers to read obituaries. Yet, who knows? Maybe in today’s AAG a call to incarcerate—perhaps to execute—the former president is as prosaic as a job advertisement, a grant announcement, or an obituary.

If the AAG has permitted equivalent non-progressive posturing in its name or under its auspices, it has escaped our notice.

Suppose that our eager young cultural geographer is tolerant, and therefore willing to overlook boorishness and bullying. He still must pass the live-or-die test of publication in the journals. Although we have found that it is possible to publish papers that dissent from the progressive consensus, it is not easy, expeditious, or advisable for someone whose tenure clock is swiftly ticking toward midnight. Our own difficulties may have been due to poor execution, of course; but even after contortions of humility, we doubt our efforts represent the rock bottom of geographic scholarship. The problem would seem to be, as one of us recently learned from a regretful editor, that our conservative arguments are “not compelling.”

But we had not considered them compelling, if the word denotes an irresistible demonstration before which all rational beings must bow. Few, if any, arguments in the human and social sciences rise to this epistemological standard, and the consequence is that few, if any, beliefs are rationally compulsory. This does not mean that we can never hope to persuade another person, or that we must treat all opinions as equal; but it should prepare us to expect some incorrigible diversity of opinion. That our young scholar will not find much diversity of opinion in geography may be taken as evidence—although not, of course, compelling evidence—that certain beliefs have become socially compulsory.

So our eager young cultural geographer faces a choice. He may, of course, don a funny hat, join the parade, and get with the program. He will have to learn a few redneck jokes. He could, alternatively, go undercover and publish innocuous articles on the distribution of barbecue sauces or baseball cards while reading the New Criterion under the blankets by flashlight. Or he could drop out; maybe start driving a school bus.

Analysis

In sliding to the left, appointing itself to the task of cultural subversion, and excluding minority opinion, cultural geography resembles other humanities and social sciences, and we may suppose the explanation of these changes is in all cases very much the same. Peculiarities of the field do, however, cast useful light on the way in which geographers squeeze (or are herded) into the crowded saloon of cultural nihilism, progressive politics, and subjective epistemology. Here we attempt to explain why.

From Materialism to Nihilism

Nihilism is arguably at the heart of modernity, and may be the destination to which every one of us is tending, albeit at different speeds and with different degrees of reluctance. Cultural geography today is thoroughly nihilistic, although the polite name of the doctrine is “anti-essentialism.” What this means is that most cultural geographers deny that, when dealing with things, other people, or ourselves we are in any way constrained by the nature of the thing, person, or self. Human desire is constrained (when it is constrained) by nothing but other desires. Thus, according to the nihilist, although there are many things I may not do to you because of what you desire, there is nothing I may not do to you because of what you are. To myself I may do anything I desire. To things I may do anything that does not impair the right of other desiring beings to equal satisfaction of desire.

True nihilism did not reach cultural geography until the 1980s, when it entered as the philosophical operating system behind radical feminism; but cultural geography had been prepared to receive it by nearly a century of scholarship focused on human adaptation to and of the natural environment. Cultural geographers had from the beginning studied human cultures as adaptations to the earth’s diverse physical environments, and were understandably impressed by the almost limitless capability of human groups to adapt and survive on tundra, in desert, or by sea. Because the human species has no definite habitat it was easy to draw the inference that human beings have no definite nature.

Yet cultural geographers were bewitched by a partial truth. Because, as the cultural geographer Carl Sauer wrote in 1940, “the traits of making a living are for us the dominant things to observe,”6] cultural geographers understood the property of being human simply as a matter of being a living human. Survival was the test, and all who survived were equally human because equally alive. We do not wish to disparage the tremendous resourcefulness humans have shown in the struggle for survival, but observe that culture is a means to human flourishing as well as a means to human survival. A long line of scholarly reflection exists on the entelechy of the human, in which mere survival is necessary but not sufficient to full humanity; but because cultural geographers had no professional acquaintance with this thought, they were, we believe, defenseless against true nihilism.

When Small Is Not Beautiful

Geography is a small discipline that is further subdivided into a number of very small, virtually autonomous subdisciplines. The Cultural Geography Specialty Group of the AAG presently claims 379 regular members, not all of whom are primarily associated with cultural geography or research active, so we may suppose that the community of cultural geography comprises at most around 300 scholars. We know as a basic axiom of social science that differentiation of function and opinion does not occur in small populations. Ideological differentiation does not occur in small populations because there are not enough individuals to form a viable subculture that insulates its members against pressures to conform to majority opinion. A city will, for instance, exhibit more diversity of opinion than a village because an urban minority, while a minority, is nevertheless large enough to form a viable and insulated network of mutual support and encouragement. The proverbial village atheist, in contrast, enjoys no such network of support and encouragement, and so must either conform, move away, or become an angry crank.

Conservative scholars are, we know, a minority in the university; but the total academic population is sufficiently large that this minority, even if only 10 percent of the total, can form a viable, insulated network of mutual support and encouragement—exactly what the National Association of Scholars is! Some humanities and social sciences are individually large enough to support formal or informal associations of intellectual minorities. The Society of Christian Philosophers is an example. A very small field like cultural geography may possibly be too small to sustain meaningful intellectual diversity. A conservative cultural geographer therefore faces a situation much like that of the village atheist.

The practices of academic publication aggravate the pressure to conform. Because an academic paper is expected to come with citations from “the literature,” expressing an opinion that has not been expressed fairly recently in the publications of one’s immediate research community poses difficulties. If one wishes to advance the proposition that, say, gender is a social construct, finding a precedent for this opinion (and hence a footnote) in the recent literature of almost any subfield will be easy. Because conservative scholars and scholarship are not as plentiful as progressive scholars and scholarship, statements of conservative opinion are comparatively few and far between. A conservative scholar seeking citations must, therefore, reach further into the past than his progressive counterpart, and more frequently into neighboring disciplines. This is a simple matter of arithmetic, but it makes conservative opinions appear outdated and recondite. We have had papers rejected solely because they fail to “engage the contemporary literature in cultural geography”—a bureaucratic way of saying that they are not thoroughgoing exercises in progressive nihilism.

Rule Is Easy When Rules Are Few

Geographers have long supported the idea of interdisciplinary research, and regarded geography, with its physical, social, and humanistic branches as a sort of interdisciplinary discipline. Being well socialized into the platitudes of our field, we agree with these opinions, but note that “interdisciplinary scholarship” may indicate two rather different forms of scholarly activity. It sometimes indicates collaboration between two or more scholars from different disciplines, and it sometimes indicates the work of an individual scholar who freely crosses back and forth over conventional academic boundaries. A geographer writing a paper on the novels of Thomas Hardy or building an argument around the philosophy of John Paul Sartre are examples of the second kind of interdisciplinary scholarship. This type of scholarship, which might be better described as transdisciplinary, is common in cultural geography and no doubt explains the attraction of the field for a scholar like Jared Diamond.

Since we ourselves are decidedly transdisciplinary, we are not about to condemn the practice, however odd and amateurish it may appear to scholars in disciplines that are, well, more disciplined. But we must acknowledge that it has the consequence of inhibiting development of formal decision procedures. Cultural geographers must of course judge the quality of evidence and arguments—and we believe they often do this as well as scholars in other fields—but their judgments are often highly intuitive. Formal decision procedures develop only when a group routinely makes the same sort of decision using the same sort of evidence. We do not regard cultural geography’s neglect or underdevelopment of such procedures as a failing; it is an unavoidable consequence of the subdiscipline’s transdisciplinary nature. But it, too, has a consequence.

Formal decision procedures, like objective evidence, are the means by which minorities may speak truth to power. If I have a prior commitment to accept the conclusion of all arguments that meet certain formal criteria, I can be forced to accept substantive conclusions I find distasteful, inconvenient, or costly. So must a discomfited majority, however large it may be. In the absence of formal decision procedures (which is often unavoidable), I can, however, simply announce myself “not persuaded,” and dismiss an unwelcome argument with the vague and unanswerable complaint that it is “not compelling.” The freedom of transdisciplinary research is, therefore, often spurious, since intuitive judgment and subjective epistemology result in a discipline where no thought is rationally compulsory, but many thoughts are socially compulsory.

Conclusion

Contemporary cultural geography is intellectually and politically homogenous. It is also intolerant and exclusionary in the roundabout but effective ways common to many homogenous, intolerant, and exclusionary groups. From the example of cultural geography, conservative scholars can draw at least three useful lessons. (1) A materialist preoccupation with the means of production, whether Darwinian or Marxist, paves the way to nihilism. (2) Intellectual minorities will find small disciplines and subdisciplines especially inhospitable, and can hope to survive only through an interdisciplinary alliance such as the National Association of Scholars. (3) The more informal or intuitive the logic in a discipline or subdiscipline, the more completely majorities will control the conversation.

[1]The first paper was read to the Society for Philosophy and Geography at Towson University in 2000, a meeting where Smith, incidentally, gave the presidential address. The second was read to a special session at the Association of American Geographers meeting in Chicago in 2006. We are unable to cite the proceedings or published abstracts in which either of these papers are recorded because neither conference published proceedings or abstracts. The AAG does publish abstracts on a CD included with the registration package, but almost all of these (including ours) go, unread, directly into conference hotel wastebaskets. That little or no effort is made to record or preserve conference papers and abstracts is, of course, strong evidence that these papers are not primarily instruments to communicate knowledge, but rather shibboleths to signal membership in a politico-theoretical tribe.

[2]Donald Mitchell, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000), xxi, xv.

[3]The petition can be found at http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/AAG_Climate_Change/.

[4]Deborah P. Dixon and John Paul Jones III, “Editorial: For a Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Scientific Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86, no. 4 (December 1996): 767–79.

[5]Amy Ross, op-ed, “Geographies of Justice,” AAG Newsletter, April 2009, 12, http://www.ggy.uga.edu/pdf/aag2009AprOped.pdf.

[6]Carl Sauer, “Foreword to Historical Geography,” presidential address, Association of American Geographers, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, December, 1940, http://www.colorado.edu/geography/giw/sauer-co/1941_fhg/1941_fhg_body.html#* .

"An Unsuccessful Education Can Ruin You"

Ashley Thorne — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:00:00 GMT

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article, "Course Reminds Budding Ph.D.'s of the Damage They Can Do," about a seminar taught at the CUNY Graduate Center on the ethics of teaching. Steven M. Cahn teaches the class, and he seeks to dispel the notion that all education is innocuous:

"People often think that education works either to improve you or to leave you as you were," Mr. Cahn says. "But that's not right. An unsuccessful education can ruin you. It can kill your interest in a topic. It can make you a less-good thinker. It can leave you less open to rational argument. So we do good and bad as teachers—it's not just good or nothing."

Cahn discusses with his small class the meaning of academic freedom ("How free should instructors be to proclaim their beliefs in the classroom? And how sensitive should they be to their students' personal commitments?") and the question of university neutrality ("Do colleges have an institutional duty to stay out of certain public debates? Or is that kind of neutrality actually undesirable or impossible?"). His students enjoy tackling these issues; as future professors, the subjects they consider in Cahn's seminar will soon become very real for them.

This course covers the very same fundamental higher education debates in which the National Association of Scholars has found a voice for the last twenty-two years. These are conversations well worth having - they ponder "What does it mean to be a university of integrity?" The existence of the CUNY seminar is encouraging. Now if only all faculty members and administrators took this course, perhaps we'd have a better foundation for teaching the next generation.

Responding to Weissberg

Peter Wood — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:00 GMT

NAS president Peter Wood has published a response to Robert Weissberg's "Rescuing the University" (Part I and Part II).

His response may be found at Minding the Campus: "Responding to Weissberg."