NAS

Is ‘Good President’ Redundant?

Ashley Thorne — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

At Phi Beta Cons, Jane Shaw sighs at Time magazine’s recently published list of “The 10 Best College Presidents.” She writes:

I’m not criticizing the presidents themselves at this point, just the journalists at Time for their profound ignorance about the state of our universities and their fawning treatment of its most prominent presidents.

Just for starters, let me quote from Time's profile of the top president, Gordon Gee of Ohio State, the highest-paid president of any public university. Time calls Gee a “thoroughbred politician” who is “campaigning for a revolution in higher education at a time when the field is more important, and perhaps more troubled, than ever before.” It doesn't say what the revolution is (even Gee hasn't made that clear).

Indeed, from the descriptions of each president, it sounds as if the Time journalists, knowing little else about what matters in higher education, decided to judge leaders based on their ideological allegiances.

NYU President John Sexton at #2 is adulated for his development of a campus in Abu Dhabi; his delicate “I found it offensive, too” response to Professor Tunku Varadarajan’s Fort Hood column makes sense in light of Sexton’s commitments in the Middle East.

Seven of the ten presidents have signed the AmericanCollege and University Presidents Climate Commitment, a pledge to, among other things, “make climate neutrality and sustainability a part of the curriculum and other educational experience for all students.” Several presidents on the Time list are praised for “going green,” establishing mandatory community service (I call it voluntyranny), and bringing in greater numbers of minority students.

But I suppose even these most cherished politically correct performances get old with repetition. The Time journalists found a few more angles. For instance, Mary Sue Coleman, the die-hard affirmative action advocate and president of the University of Michigan is #3 on the list. But profile on her omits her campaign for racial preferences and focuses instead on her campaign for fundraising that raised $3.2 billion, the most ever by a public university.

At #4, Arizona State University President Michael Crow, who leads the movement to make sustainability the foundation of all parts of higher education, also seems mischaracterized. His role as co-chair of the ACUPCC and his reputation for “building it [sustainability] throughout the entire university – operations, curriculum and research” apparently take second place to fostering “excellence and access.” Fostering “access” in higher education typically means granting admission to students who don’t earn it. Eduardo Padron of Miami Dade College and Juliet Garcia of the University of Texas at Brownsville are also quoted invoking “access.”

The ten presidents, of course, were honored for some more praiseworthy efforts, such as keeping Tulane University alive in the aftermath of Katrina (President Scott Cowen) and rescuing the University of California system from financial ruin (President Mark Yudof) by scaling back programs and expenses at each. But reading through most of the article, you have to wonder, “How did they pick these guys?”

What makes a college president good? What makes 10 presidents the best out of 4,861? NAS president Peter Wood has opined that “the position of college president has been turned into a silly job that attracts large numbers of silly people.” In “Dogfish: Why College Presidents Won't Save Higher Education” (subscription required), he wrote:

Americans hold the position of college president in high regard. One response to complaints about decline in American higher education is to expect college presidents to set things right. Few of today's college presidents, however, have the ability or the interest to initiate substantial reforms. [...] The ineffectiveness of college presidents is, however, rooted in the way they are recruited, the tasks to which they are set, and their typically brief periods of service.

They may not be able to save higher education, but can a college president be good, given the circumstances? Or are they all just silly people in a silly job? We leave to you to answer (one or all questions):

What are good qualities in college presidents?
What actions can they take to leave a college better off at the end of their time in office?
Did the Time presidents deserve to be on a top 10 list?
Who specifically, in your opinion, deserves to be a “Best College Presidents” list? Why?

To weigh in, click “Add a Comment” just below.

NAS President’s Report

Peter Wood — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Regular readers of this website have no doubt noticed my scarcity for the last month or so. Ashley Thorne has stepped up with an almost daily stream of articles, at the same time rolling out the new NAS blog. I’m grateful to Ashley for stepping in while I stepped out. Here’s what has been happening.

The National Association of Scholars had its Board of Directors meeting at the end of October. We met in the Hudson Institute’s office in lower Manhattan, courtesy of Herb London, president of the Hudson Institute and NAS board member. For several weeks before the meeting, NAS chairman Steve Balch and I were working and re-working our budget report and financial projections. It has been a tough year for many non-profits, and NAS is no exception. We cut back, but we still ran an operating deficit. We may run one next year as well. We will unless I find ways to make NAS popular with foundations that haven’t previously supported us and also convince individual supporters that our work merits their gifts.

So one reason I have been less visible on the website is that I have had my head down working on grant applications and solicitations to people who seem likely to help. But there is more to this. The October board meeting was my first as president of NAS. I sought and received the board’s approval on a crucial change in NAS’s by-laws, and I also presented my broader plan for NAS’s future. The by-law change and the broader plan are connected.

Opening Up Membership

The official change is this: we have opened up our membership to allow individuals outside the academy to join. It isn’t exactly a throw-open-the-gates-we-are-no-longer-an-academic-organization moment. Rather, we have created a category of “public members,” on the model of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ use of that term. Public members will pay the same dues (currently $42 per year) and receive the same privileges including an annual subscription to Academic Questions. But we aren’t changing the academic mission of NAS, and we put some safeguards such as a provision that reserves three-quarters of the seats on the board for academic members.

Why this change? Why now? We have been working on this idea for over a year. The goal is to strengthen NAS as we continue our efforts to reform American higher education. In that light, we have discovered that we have a considerable base of support among people outside the academy. We have had numerous inquiries from lawyers and school teachers especially, but also from a fairly broad spectrum of people generally represented what might be called educated men and women who are deeply concerned about the condition and the trajectory of American education, and who are alert to the larger cultural and civilizational implications of what has happened to the university.

So the first thing is that we know that there is a demand. People who previously were not eligible want to join NAS. The board’s action in October authorized us to say “yes” to those members of the public who seek to align themselves with our work.

When contemplating this step, I had imagined that we would make a big noise about this change in the organization. After all, if we are going to open up a new category of membership, we would want potential members to hear about it. But after talking to officers of some of the foundations that support NAS and to board members, I sensed a cautionary note. Our current members and supporters don’t want to see NAS desert its “niche.” We speak for members of the academy who uphold traditional academic values and who often feel squeezed out or marginalized by rampant political correctness and the academic Left’s domineering ways. Too sudden a shift in NAS towards a form of public membership could come at the cost of our credibility as speaking for this academic core.

So I have opted for a quieter roll-out. We have been contacting individuals we know are interested and trying to get the word out through friendly organizations. And I am spilling the beans here. I suppose there is some risk of The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed picking up the story and re-labeling it something to the effect, “NAS Throws in the Towel.” But I’ll brave that possibility.

We hope to attract the kinds of members who help us advance our work, in five ways.

First, we seek direct, personal involvement with our projects. Many of our Argus volunteers are non-academics. They have already demonstrated the capacity of “civilians” to rise to rigorous standards of observation and evidence in helping us keep track of campus developments across the country. We would like more Argus volunteers and more generally, more members who are willing to put time and thought (and sometimes writing) into our work. In a similar vein, we expect that some new members would help us with their expertise in areas that aren’t especially well represented in the current NAS.

Second, we seek to propagate our message as widely as possible. Our website helps a lot; but it is important that our journal, Academic Questions, get into people’s hands as well. Chances are that non-member readers of this website have never seen Academic Questions. That’s because it is published by a commercial publisher that keeps it in limited distribution to maximize its earnings from expensive library subscriptions and really expensive one-off online sales of articles. The situation of having our key journal locked up like this is the result of an ages-old contract that we can do little about. I’m frustrated by it, since Academic Questions is an absolutely first-rate journal. It presents very well-crafted, deeply-informed, and highly readable accounts of what is happening in the academy that you can find nowhere else.

But to get Academic Questions into the hands of readers, we need first to get people to become members. It is the only way.

Third, we need more mass. NAS is evolving to become a more publicly engaged organization. The academic left has become so entrenched on campus that it successfully controls the terms of the debate at most places and simply precludes the presentation of alternative views. As a result, critics have increasingly turned to media and venues that the left cannot control. This website is an instance of that, and our sister organizations have likewise established a presence in the public sphere. To do that, we need to grow the NAS membership both within the academy and outside the academy. Also, by opening up new paths to membership, we hope to build our network. Nothing attracts new members quite so powerfully as other new members.

Fourth, we increasingly see our mission as civilizational, not just academic. “Civilizational” sounds a little grandiose, and I’d welcome a more modest-sounding term. But, yes, we are concerned with the large questions of what cultural achievements, dispositions, aspirations, substantive knowledge, ideals, palladian concepts, and moral urgencies ought to be carried forth from generation to generation. The university cannot do all that work, but for at least 2,500 years, we have had institutions devoted to the task. If we don’t have a way to bring serious young adults into conversation with the worthy parts of our civilization, that civilization will wither. Some believe, with justification, that it is already withering. We don’t want to put NAS in the chorus of mourners. A great deal of good can still be done. But we need to rally more people—people who are themselves beneficiaries of that great conversation that extends all the way back to Socrates—to join us.

Fifth, as I said before, we need to broaden the base of our financial support. We began to discuss opening up the membership before the national financial crisis began to take its toll, but it is clear now that an expanded membership would help. That’s not because we receive much revenue from dues. The dues go mainly to cover the costs of Academic Questions and other publications. But among members, there are always those who are able and willing to give additional support.

Broader Horizons

During its first 23 years of official life (and several years of informal existence before its incorporation in 1987), the National Association of Scholars grew as an organization that spoke mainly in opposition to ideological trends in the academy. When it became clear by the early 1990s that critique alone wouldn’t be sufficient to call the academy back to its principles—and its senses—NAS began quietly to build alternative institutions. The AmericanAcademy for Liberal Education, The Association of Trustees and Alumni, and more than thirty campus-based centers and institutes are the fruit of that labor, and NAS also had a hand in founding the Historical Society and the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.

We are proud of this record, and what Steve Balch calls our “behind the scenes” strategy has had important dividends in keeping alive the flame of liberal learning in illiberal times.

But we aren’t deluded. When Irving Kristol declared that the culture wars are over and “we” lost, he spoke to many in our situation. We seem ever more consigned to the role of saving remnant. And frankly, we don’t like it. We actually speak for the majority, if you allow a voice for the great thinkers of the past and the men and women who aspired for and achieved a place in the larger intellectual conversation. We recognize a Burkean obligation to those past generations and the generations to come. And being a “saving remnant” just doesn’t do the job. We need a more robust approach.

I am not quite ready to spill all the beans on what kind of robust approach that will be. We have grant applications going out that harbor the details and it is best to keep that sort of thing close until we know we have the necessary funding. But the broad picture is this. I intend to put the NAS in the center of efforts to create a public agenda for reforming the academy. I want to put forward ideas and strategies that have won the assent of thoughtful people who have a policy orientation and that can play a part in our national political discussions.

Some of those ideas have been abundantly on display on this website; others will have to be winnowed out of discussion.

NAS is and will remain a non-partisan organization. We will put forth ideas and policy proposals that anyone in any party can adopt, and we hope that we will find some bi-partisan support. Realistically, it seems most likely that we will find a hearing among moderates, independents, conservatives, and libertarians.

The libertarian part of the equation requires special attention. There is a fair amount of reform that can be accomplished through free-market ideas even in the current situation. But we begin with the recognition that American higher education is currently enmeshed in the government’s regulatory regime. Reform has to begin with existing institutions.

We also have a caution for conservatives, who often brush higher education aside as a peripheral issue. We think that’s a profound mistake. The social and political elites in the United States get their ideas from somewhere. Hollywood and the liberal media merely echo those ideas. The ideas themselves come from the academy. And, yes, some students learned to see through the one-sided accounts that now fill up the liberal arts curriculum, but many just take in the bland assumptions about identity politics and social justice. And even those students who grow skeptical typically have little opportunity to learn about the alternatives.

For liberals, we offer this: if you are committed to humane values and a government that exercises its power on behalf of the weak, you must also be committed to the need to seek the truth and to ground public policy on well-honed judgment. No one can look at contemporary higher education, riddled as it is with self-congratulatory bias and intellectually feeble ideology and think that democracy can long thrive on such a base. We do need a social elite in our complex society, but a elite that has insulated itself from genuine critical inquiry dooms itself to irrelevancy.

What Else?

The National Association of Scholars has important resources in the form of individual members and our numerous state affiliates. We also have a deep and continuing investment in building campus programs. We have this website, which has published over 500 original articles in the last two years, our new blog, and Academic Questions. We’re a pretty visible organization now, no longer operating just “behind the scenes.”

But we need to convert readers into members and members into active participants.

If you hear this call and want to join, go to the blue “Join Now” button on the main page. And be prepared to work past the categories it offers. “Public member” isn’t yet listed. Just sign up as an academic members and we’ll figure it out.

Sign up now and be sure to get our upcoming issues of Academic Questions on “revisionisms” in the academy and on sustainability. They are not to be missed.

What Makes College Worth the Cost?

Ashley Thorne — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Which colleges are wise investments and which are scams? Michael Dannenberg, the founding director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, wants to know. In “Colleges Need a Lemon Law,” Dannenberg presents the case that a good project for Education Secretary Arne Duncan would be to publish a list of price-to-earnings ratios at U.S. colleges and universities.

When it comes to higher education, Americans pay way too much for way too little. Now more than ever, as tuition costs outstrip inflation and as students graduate with narrow job prospects and heavy debt, we need to help families make smart decisions about college. But how do we know what gives higher education value? What makes one college worth the cost and another one a rip-off?

There are many ways of calculating college value; I will highlight three. First is the method used in Kiplinger’s lists of “50 best values” in public and private universities. The rankings were determined based on criteria in academic quality and affordability, including:

Percentage of the freshman class scoring 600 or higher on the verbal and math components of the SAT (or scoring 24 or higher on the ACT)
Admission rate
Student-faculty ratio
Graduation rate
Total costs for students
Cost after need-based aid
Percentage of aid from grants
Cost after non-need-based aid
Percentage of all undergraduates without need who received non-need-based aid
Average debt at graduation

In 2009, the highest ranked Kiplinger public school is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the top private school is the California Institute of Technology. Lists like these are useful, and colleges take them seriously. But while they evaluate academic rigor, they don’t take into account the content of the institutions’ curricula.

Which brings us to a second method of measuring colleges’ worth - one that asks, “Do students at x college learn the subjects they should?” The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) wanted find out, and this year they created WhatWillTheyLearn.com, which surveys whether colleges require students to take “core subjects” of composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. history, economics, mathematics, and science. Schools that require six or seven of the core subjects get an A; only seven out of the127 schools ACTA reviewed made it to the A list. Unlike Kiplinger, ACTA doesn’t compare academic strength to the cost of attending, but it does have a list of about 50 schools in the “30,000+ Club.” The idea is to expose the colleges that cost the most but fail to ensure that students graduate with a solid education.

A note: ACTA’s approach is different from that of the assessment movement to measure “student learning outcomes.” Rather than trying to quantify every concept students learn in college (many of which are intrinsically unquantifiable), What Will They Learn identifies seven broad subjects that together make for a well-rounded education, and asks whether each college is making sure that students take at least one course in each before they graduate.

A complement to the “academic substance” method is to examine academic non-substance. Omitting core subjects hurts the quality of education; so does letting ideology permeate the university. As NAS president Peter Wood wrote in “What Does ‘Sustainability’ Have to Do with Student Loans?”:

When colleges and universities transform themselves into enterprises centered on "sustainability," which students are they serving? Are students assuming these burdens of debt (average balance over $19,000; a quarter of students owing nearly $25,000) willingly paying a premium to be indoctrinated in some resident hall director's theory of social justice?

When political ideologies are allowed to usurp the mission of higher education, students suffer the consequences. Instead of learning the important ideas and skills that college should provide, they get an education diluted with the drivel of race-class-gender. So method #2, in brief, weighs what students learn and what they could do without. As of now, no formal system measures both of these factors for general public use.

A third way of determining whether a college is worth the cost is to look at the income of its alumni. This is the idea Dannenberg promotes. He recommends that with publicly available information on colleges’ average net price after financial aid, starting and mid-career salaries of graduates, and the percentage of those who default on their student loans, the Department of Education (or anyone) should be able to create a “higher education p/e ratio, price of college to expected future earnings, for each school.”

For instance, Dannenberg writes:

Consider the State University at Binghamton and Niagara University, for example, both in upstate New York. From a purely financial standpoint, Binghamton is a great deal. Its sticker price is approximately $17,000 a year, and graduates earn a median income of $52,000 within five years of separation, according to Payscale.com.

In contrast, Niagara's sticker price is $35,000 a year, and graduates earn a median starting income of less than $38,000 within five years of separation.

People should know what they’re getting into when they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on higher education. For those schools like Niagara that offer a poor return on the investment, he advocates a surgeon-general-esque caveat to be placed at the bottom of recruiting brochures:

“Warning: One in three Acme College borrowers defaults on a student loan within three years of separation from Acme College. Acme graduates earn an average starting salary of $22,000 a year. Be careful before assuming substantial student loan debt to attend Acme College.”

Dannenberg’s price-earnings ratio idea is a good one for publicizing a purely financial cost-benefit analysis. But, as illustrated by the first two methods, future earnings aren’t all that matter in determining the value a particular college has to offer. Perhaps someone could produce a hybrid of all three? Maybe then it would become plain when a school is a good deal, financially and academically—or when it is soured by ideological commitments.

SustainaReligion

Ashley Thorne — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

This month Tim Nicholson, a sustainability officer for Grainger, the UK’s largest residential property company, won the right to sue his employer after he was laid off. Nicholson claimed that his dismissal was an act of discrimination against him for his belief in climate change. To everyone’s surprise, the judge agreed with Nicholson and granted that “a belief in man-made climate change… is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations Act.”

The decision poses a problem in several directions. For one, climate change scientists are dismayed that this will undermine their research by equating it with spiritual, unscientific belief. They quake with fear that the ruling might shake people’s faith in global warming rather than reinforce it. “As a scientist who works on climate change, I find it deeply alarming,” fretted Myles Allen (writing for the Guardian), who directs the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford. Allen called it “an insult to science to rule that belief in man-made climate change is a religious conviction.” On the other hand, philosophers are also insulted. They are skeptical that “philosophical belief” is the right term—shouldn’t it be called a “lifestyle” instead?

And there is a general feeling that this ruling has done something serious and ridiculous by adding a new ism to the already long list in anti-discrimination clauses. As Nathalie Rothschild wrote in a Spiked article, “This signals that discrimination on the basis of green views is as unacceptable as sexism, racism or religious prejudice. How long before we see the term ‘envirophobia’ to describe people who dislike greens?” She is right. Like its predecessor the diversity movement, the sustainability movement gives diplomatic immunity to certain people who belong to certain identity groups. I will not be surprised to see condemnations of “carbon-normative” (like hetero-normative) people not too far in the future. All the while, the real bullies are the sustainabullies.

Sustainability is indeed a pseudo-religion with its own code of morality that misappropriates the ideas of “ethics,” “justice,” and “social mandate,” to shame people into compliance. Global warming advocates call skeptics “deniers,” a term that sounds disturbingly similar to “heretics.” And sustainability even has its own eschatology: if we don’t change our ways, we’ll end up boiling along with the planet. But if we are good—very, very good—we’ll have sustainatopia on earth.

Apparently Tim Nicholson was upset with his employer when his boss flew a staff member from London to Ireland to deliver a left-behind Blackberry. According to Spiked, “he was also angry about not being able to set up a company-wide ‘carbon management system’ because colleagues failed to provide the necessary data.” The resistance among the Grainger employees to having their carbon footprints measured and monitored is telling. Even in a company that made the effort to have a sustainability officer, people were disinclined to submit to such invasive scrutiny. And as for the plane-hop over to Ireland from England, compare that to Nicholson’s own highly publicized journey from Oxford, England to Oxford, New Zealand (“After nine sea crossings and 17,000 miles of driving we arrived”) in 2004-2005.

Nicholson now works for 10:10, a campaign to get individuals businesses, schools and universities, and organizations in the UK to cut their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. As for his religion, he carries it along to his new job. Nicholson defended himself in the Guardian last week: “I believe there is a moral imperative upon us all to individually take action to cut our own emissions as well as making others aware of what they can do.” He also hoped that that the judge’s decision on his behalf would help “climate change believers”:

Despite the concern expressed by some commentators about the judgment – that it could be used by climate sceptics to brand climate change as a pseudo-religious, irrational belief system - I hope that in practice it will encourage people who share my beliefs to speak up about climate change in their workplace and seek practical measures to cut emissions.

We’ll stay tuned to find out whether Nicholson wins his case. If he does, he can call it a victory in Jesus – er – Gaia.

My Degree in Diversity

Ashley Thorne — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

NAS has written over 500 articles since we launched our new website less than two years ago. We now post a new article every weekday, and our old essays are beginning to get lost in the archives. In order not to lose sight of some of our best articles and the ones that have received the most attention, we decided to re-post one or two pieces from the same month a year ago. Today we offer "My Degree in Diversity," written by Ashley Thorne after she took an online course on how to lead diversity workshops on campus. This piece was originally posted here.

Last month, I made a venture into the unknown. I took an online course on how to lead diversity education workshops.

The course, called “Facilitating Diversity Education Experiences: A Guide for New Professionals,” was offered by StudentAffairs.com. For only $130, I had the chance to enter the inner circle of diversicracy. I was full of curiosity about the course: what would be the assigned readings, the teaching material, the homework? Believing that a stint at sea would teach me what is necessary to know in order to steer through the storm of higher education ideology, I stepped lightly up the gangplank.

I logged in for my first day of class and looked over the assignments. Each one required students to answer three or four questions on a discussion board public to all in the class. We were first asked to introduce ourselves. I noted introductions from residence life coordinators, student affairs officers, and directors of multicultural programs. They hailed from DeSales University, University of California-San Diego, the College of Human Sciences at Iowa State University, Holy Family University, Wentworth Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and California State University.

Next we were to specify the race and gender we “most identify with,” along with reasons we are proud to have these identities. It seemed a strange juxtaposition. If it is assumed that we are proud to be who we are, shouldn’t it follow that we fully identify with our race and gender?

The identity worksheet also included a true/false question: “I have personally either been a victim of oppression (racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, ageism) at least once in my life or personally eye-witnessed (i.e. not on TV, movie or heard from a friend) an act of oppression against someone else.” I considered telling about an experience as a victim of anti-redheadism. But the worksheet was optional, so I kept my recollections to myself.

I had looked forward to getting to know the two course instructors, Debra Y. Griffith of San Jose State University and Thomas C. Segar of the University of Maryland. I anticipated seeing them in video lectures and interacting with them on the discussion board. Other than an initial brief welcome note, however, Ms. Griffith and Mr. Segar were non-presences in the course and we students were left to flounder as best we could.

The instructors assigned one piece of required reading: a packet they had compiled, called “Theoretical Foundations.” The packet was a set of “identity development models,” the totality of which consisted of ethnic identity, white identity, black racial identity, and homosexual identity.

There I read that white identity development (according to Helms, 1990) happens in stages: Contact, Disintegration, Reintegration, Immersion-Emersion (as exemplified in statements like, “We need to change, not them…Hey, it’s not cool to make those racist jokes”), and Autonomy (i.e., “I am both proud of being White and I am a supportive agent for change and equality for all races and cultures.”). The other identity models have similar patterns in their phases: confusion, denial, rage, acceptance, pride.

When I read about identity development models, I was at first confused. What did they mean anyways? Do all ethnic, white, black, and homosexual people go through these stages, and in this order? Or is the pattern true only of those who have reached multicultural “maturity”? I posed my queries on the discussion board and was not answered.

After that I thought, “But I never went through these stages.” Perhaps I was in denial. I haven’t yet gotten to rage, acceptance, or pride, but I do think it interesting that pride is the end point for each model. In fact, NAS has found that, nurtured in diversity training, people often place their identity in their group’s prideful rage.

Griffith and Segar’s packet also includes one page on learning styles and another on the four areas of focus for diversity education experiences: Awareness, Appreciation, Acceptance, and Advocacy. “Awareness,” it said, “involves recognizing that various identities and ways of being exist that are different than your own.” I was always under the impression that most of us recognize that a few months after birth, but I guess sometimes you have to teach these things.

The rest of the three-week course consisted of discussion board assignments with a few introductory words reminding us to, “Get people moving!” and “Infuse social justice advocacy into your session.” As the course moved forward, my anticipation grew…I was about to learn the deep secrets of diversity education. I wondered which principles made up the core doctrines, which phrases would be approved for group chanting, and which signals measured “awareness” progress.

But I finished last week (Did I graduate? Will I get a degree?) to find my hopes had been in vain. Instead of giving clues as to what the actual content of a diversity workshop should be, the questions and accompanying hints dealt exclusively with method. The session leader, they indicated, should have certain “skill sets” to be a facilitator, namely, “being in the moment”; “witnessing what is going on around you”; “taking appropriate risks”; being “attentive, energetic, self-aware, affable”; and leading with “spirit.” Facilitators (at one point called “Presentrainers”) should also consider logistics such as room temperature and privacy from outside disruption.

These directives sounded like pointers for leading a small group Bible study. Of course, there were some distinctly diversiphilian questions, like “How can you go beyond ‘celebrating differences’ to connecting stereotypes, ignorance, prejudice, privilege?” and “What do you know about world history in general, and U.S. history in particular (e.g., see Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and/or Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America) to make sense of the current state of diversity?” Still, the questions were posed, not answered.

Perhaps the course was trying to follow its own rules of “what to avoid in designing and delivering educational experiences”:

1. Too prescriptive – “This is what you need to do to demonstrate your appreciation for diversity… Just follow these ten steps I’ve outlined here, and you will get all you need to get within the next 59 minutes”

2. Too superficial – “Our differences are only skin deep. We are all really the same inside… Let’s talk about how much we love everyone, and how we don’t even see color or anything like that.”

3. Too cognitive – “Let’s think about diversity, but we can’t have any feelings at all about any of this stuff. In fact, let’s just be intellectual about this, and simply let the statistics speak for themselves.”

4. Too rigid – “Here’s my outline, and we’re going to stick to every single point. Please don’t ask any questions that may put us behind or keep me from sticking to this exactly as I have planned it. We gotta stick to my plan.”

5. TOO MUCH – “Ok, we have tons of fun stuff planned for today. First we’ll go over these 20 items, and then we have about five activities, then we have about three small group segments, and then we come back together for about three or four debriefings. All of that must happen before we go to lunch.”

A quick note: caution about being “too cognitive” is highly indicative of diversity education culture’s embrace of the opposite extreme, emotionalism. This culture has spread to the classroom, ushering in the “feelings-are-everything-in-learning” era. Accordingly, the online course faced no danger of being too rigid, prescriptive, or cognitive.

My poor classmate, who was “quite a newby at this,” and whose job actually depended on the information, confirmed the class’s vacuity in her posting on the “general questions not covered in the materials” discussion board (where the instructors conceded, “We realize that we have not exhausted all the material on this topic”). “Newby” diversity trainer asked the vital question and appealed for “any information/suggestions of what people do in their sessions.” Another, more experienced classmate took pity on her and gave her some links to educational diversity games: Archie Bunker’s Neighborhood, Privilege Walk, and BaFa’ BaFa’.

The first is named after Archie Bunker, the racist yet lovable character from the TV show All in the Family. In this game, participants are given various identity labels to role play, with the goal of building a town using Archie bucks and building permits. The “trick” in the game is that the people playing police officers “should capitalize on every stereotype they have ever heard and use it against all of the groups except the white group.”

Privilege Walk also contrasts identity groups, but instead of role playing, participants respond to statements about their real lives, such as “You are not followed when you enter a store” and “You will graduate from one of the world’s elite universities.” Those for whom the statement is true must step away from and face the others, who hold hands. This exercise was adapted from Peggy McIntosh’s article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

And BaFa’ BaFa’ is the classic simulation game acclaimed as “an ‘Ah-ha!’ learning experience,” that “initiates immediate, personal change.” BaFa’ BaFa’, according to Frederick R. Lynch in his book The Diversity Machine, is supposed to:

generate culture shock, to impart the feeling of confusion, frustration, and even foolishness that comes from trying to figure out the unwritten rules of a new society—as presumably minorities, women, and immigrants must learn to negotiate the invisible white male rules of corporate America.

My Facilitating Diversity Education Experiences class did mention BaFa’ BaFa’ and Archie Bunker’s Neighborhood, plus two more called Barnga and Star Power, without any elaboration. Griffith and Segar also humored us by suggesting the possible anatomy of a session, which opens with a “warm-up activity that is fun and in-motion” and ends with “a quote and commitment—remind folks this is not the end, but just the beginning.”

And yes, this is the beginning. I can now teach diversity at the university level (doesn’t that seem an oxymoron?), and have learned nothing new. Now that I’ve completed the course, I intend to start conducting diversity education workshops. I’ll try to take the same approach Griffith and Segar recommend and lead discussions with fair open-mindedness. I plan, however, to focus on intellectual diversity rather than identity group diversity. We’ll have civil debates on controversial topics and we’ll play “Guffaw Guffaw,” a game of wit and hilarity that is won by the player who can produce the most effectively humorous come-back to politically correct bromides.

After all, the online course implied that all you need are a few games and an affable attitude. Griffith and Segar assumed that new professionals don’t need a guide to diversity itself—they learned that in college! Indeed, one of my classmates wrote that what prepared her for her job was “the Pluralism course I had to take in college, as well as other classes in Global Justice, Current Sociological Issues, and political current events classes.” So instead of revisiting the fundamentals of multiculturalism, the online course perched on principles of discussion-leading.

Thus, I came to the end of my maiden voyage in diversity education; the route was local and the water shallow. The ship I had boarded didn’t need complex navigation tools. No one much cared where the winds took us, as long as we floated aware, appreciative, accepting, and advocating. I returned to my landlubber life, disappointed that I’d not learned how to steer the ship, but only how to dress like a sailor.

Election 2008: The University's Long Shadow

Peter Wood — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

NAS has written over 500 articles since we launched our new website less than two years ago. We now post a new article every weekday, and our old essays are beginning to get lost in the archives. In order not to lose sight of some of our best articles and the ones that have received the most attention, we decided to re-post one or two pieces from the same month a year ago. Today we bring you "Election 2008: The University's Long Shadow," written by Peter Wood following last year's presidential election. His observations are perhaps even more relevant now. This piece was originally posted here.

Congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama. The National Association of Scholars looks forward to working with your administration to improve American higher education.

We expect we will differ with you on some points, but on one essential point we sense common ground. You understand the profound importance of higher education. And your election underscores that the ideas and attitudes fostered by the academy have consequences for the larger culture. So too the pattern of motivation laid down in years of schooling and the view of the world that comes to seem compellingly true because it is backed by both intellectual authority and shared experience.

We have long been critical of the widespread failure to realize the deep significance of what happens in higher education among those who give lip service to traditional values. It is too soon to know whether this election cycle will shake tendencies to trivialize the importance of those years in the lives of young men and women when they first encounter thoughtful discourse about the nature of human society, but a reassessment is certainly overdue. For many students, college sets in place their sense of what the larger world is really like. They have the opportunity to examine—critically—matters that at earlier stages of their lives seemed simply true and in need of no argument. It is the time and place in the lives of many when they decide once and for all which of the great narratives will be their own.

Will it be the diversity narrative? That’s the one that emphasizes that who we are most fundamentally depends on our race, ethnicity, gender, and that our nation’s history is mainly a matter of identity groups overcoming their oppression. Will it be the cosmopolitan narrative? That’s the one that emphasizes a personal liberation from the small-minded, parochial views of our natal communities, and one’s new identity as a “citizen of the world.” Contemporary college life offers several other great narratives. Sustainability is the newest. That’s the one in which we find our life’s work in forestalling the impending ruination of earth caused by the heedless exploitation of the older generations.

Somewhere far down the list of possibilities is the narrative that emphasizes the exceptional nature of American society and its radical break with prior human history in developing institutions that foster personal freedom. Today, the main role played by this great narrative is to be the foil to the others. The diversity narrative mocks it as a lie intended to disguise centuries of group oppression. The cosmopolitan narrative smiles derisively at its naïve simplicity. The sustainability narrative groans in embarrassment that such profligate freedom could ever have been unleashed to cut down forests, plow the long-grass prairie, and pollute the waters and skies.

It’s widely understood that life on American college campuses is centered on narratives that cultivate a certain disdain for the American past as well as some disturbing hopes for the American future. But having nodded in acknowledgement, too many give forth a complacent yawn. Their assumption has been that when the boys and girls graduate from college and head into the world of adult responsibilities, most of them will set aside their unrealistic views of American society and get on with the work of the world.

This seemed to be the guiding assumption of President Bush. To the extent that he paid any attention to higher education, it was through Secretary Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which took the central issue to be how to encourage colleges and universities to do a better job preparing students for the workforce.

Surely this is a real issue, and even more so now that we are in a recession and jobs are scarce. One of the functions higher education has come to perform over the last 150 years has been to certify individuals as capable of performing various specialized tasks (engineering, farming, accounting, therapy, etc.) and capable as well of a diffuse range of intellectual and social skills (writing a coherent letter, explaining why one proposal is better than another, working with colleagues to solve a moderately complex problem.) We still do fairly well with the specialized tasks because individuals who want to pursue careers in these fields look out for themselves and get the education they need. But we have become very spotty in the ability of our colleges and universities to cultivate in students a reliable command of that more diffuse range of intellectual and social skills.

A great many students holding college diplomas don’t know these things, and worse, don’t know that they don’t know them.

Why?

It is not a question with a simple or easy answer. Parts of the answer, however, are visible. Dare we bring up Bill Ayers? He stands in this instance for the successful effort to turn many schools of education into “sites of struggle” in the culture wars. Ayers is among many prominent education theorists who are strong proponents of a vision of America as fundamentally unjust and who view schools of education as a means of recruiting teachers to bring this perspective to their classrooms. The result of this experiment running over several decades is that many of our K-12 schools pay a great deal of attention to laying down the premises of the counter-narratives of American history. Diversity and sustainability are simple enough in outline for primary school.

One might think that Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy with its relentless regime of academic testing would have countered the rise of ideology in schools, but that is not what happened. Rather, the ideologists captured the textbooks and the tests. The National Association of Scholars has published several detailed critiques of the current K-12 curriculum, including thisby University of Arkansas professor Sandra Stotsky.

Thus many students come to college primed for the more sophisticated counter-narratives they will study in classes. Much has been said recently against the proposition that college professors actively indoctrinate students. A year ago, two professors at a Harvard symposium presented data they said showed that most professors are actually moderate. (NAS president Steve Balch raised an eyebrow at their methods.) The University System of Georgia released a study in August that purported to show that students see little bias in class. (I found fault with that study.) A new book, Closed Minds? by three George Mason professors argues that campuses are not “saturated by politics” at all; rather professors shy away from political controversy. (NAS’s Glenn Ricketts has doubts.) This week New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen took notice of the George Mason book and other research to argue the case that the faculty, though overwhelmingly liberal, don’t force their views on students.

I’ve never thought “indoctrinate” was the right word for the transmission of values and worldview that occurs on campus. Although there are plenty of professors who are eager to persuade students of the merits of their own political outlook and are willing to transgress the traditional boundary between instruction and advocacy, the real issue is not so much the pontificating professor as it is the campus as a self-enclosed social world in which some narratives have high status. The student eager to show that he or she “gets it” and isn’t some sort of clueless dolt adopts the postures that need to be adopted.

We could say these are just postures destined to be as readily discarded as they were donned. We could say that, but then we have to think about why it is that students in large numbers aren’t learning that diffuse range of intellectual and social skills that were once synonymous with earning a college degree.

To do so, we need to weigh such factors as the abandonment of a coherent curriculum in most colleges and universities in favor of the current mishmash of aimless majors, identity group studies, and nonce courses. This amorphous curriculum is not a happenstance of history or the marketplace. It was a central demand of the academic left as it as took power in the humanities and social sciences. If students don’t know much about the larger narratives of western or American history, this is the fundamental reason. If their grasp of philosophy, literature, and science is refracted through identity politics, that is likewise the result of what the NAS has called the dissolution of general education. (“I studied African philosophy, gay literature, and the exclusion of women from science.”)

But it is more than just entropy in the curriculum that leaves students indifferent to that range of intellectual and social skills that were once the prized distillation of a liberal education. It is rather the dimming of desire for such achievement. After all, if your master narrative of going to college is to acquire scorn for your society’s shameful history of oppressing identity groups, or liberation from the norms of parochial America to be a citizen of the world, or anger at a culture that exploits the earth, you don’t have all that much use for the mere formalities of the civilization you are discarding.

Even if you are not actively discarding it, but just going along with the flow of conventional opinion.

The result in either case—enthusiastic ideological commitment or passive acceptance—is that a student takes a minimalist approach to those aspects of learning that don’t actually bear on grades or credits. Why learn to write formal essays when emails will do? Why bother with emails when instant messages get the point across? The diminution of some kinds of effort by students is a reflex of the low standing into which traditional notions of cultural attainment has fallen.

Of course, that bothers conservatives, but seemingly not enough to take the cultural inversion in higher education all that seriously. John McCain’s position statement on higher education is entirely of a piece with the Spellings’ Commission. Lead idea: “America is facing increased competition from overseas like never before. Higher education is as much a part of that competition as the job sector, and we must rise to the challenge and modernize our universities so that they retain their status as producers of the most skilled workforce in the world.”

Yes, indeed, higher education has a lot to do with preparing a skilled workforce. But it has even more to do with transmitting to the next generation the core legacy of a civilization. Men and women don’t just work, like ants in an ant colony. Nor is the prospect of building a more competitive ant colony much of an inspiring ideal. Men and women work for the ideals and purposes that they find meaningful and compelling, and the deep wells of meaning are family, religion, and civilization. Higher education connects with all three, but most centrally civilization. It is in college that we have our first and best opportunity to weigh the claims of civilization against the possible alternatives.

McCain’s loss can be traced to many causes and surely his failure to grasp the nature of the problem in higher education is very far down the list. Or is it? The failure of Republicans and conservatives to spend any significant effort as stewards of the key institution that transmits from generation to generation our civilization’s highest claims would seem to be a pretty damning act of neglect, and one likely to have massive consequence.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning, “When Barack Obama takes the oath of office next January alongside his running mate, Joe Biden, it will be the first time in history that the president, vice president, and both of their spouses have worked in higher education.” Obama articulates many of the ideas and the ideals of the academic left, and surely many see in his presidency an implicit promise that he will bring the values and styles of the American college campus to American society at large.

To the extent that this is true, it may thrust a new importance on the National Association of Scholars. We were until yesterday the principal voice for traditional ideals of scholarship in a free society. Now it seems we may be unofficially something more: a key voice for traditional ideals of intellectual culture during an era when the campus culture we have opposed appears ready to break its bounds and move into society at large.

Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1922-2009)

Ashley Thorne — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

The National Association of Scholars mourns the passing of Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1922-2009), who served as a member of our Board of Advisors along with his wife Mary Lefkowitz. Lloyd-Jones was a valiant defender of the Classics. He studied Literae Humaniores at Oxford was the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University from 1960-1989. He was knighted when he retired from the Regius chair.

The London Times called him “one of the liveliest and most celebrated Greek scholars of the past half century.” We take this moment to commemorate his legacy and extend our sympathy to his family.

Blue Blastoff

Ashley Thorne — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

My high school senior trip to New York City included Broadway shows, an elevator ride to the top of the Empire State Building, a trip to Harlem for authentic New York pizza, and front row seats at a performance by the Blue Man Group. When my class arrived at Astor Place Theater for the latter, we discovered we were in the “poncho section.” We braced for water guns.

But the Blue Men surpassed our expectations. With eyes bulging from their bald blue heads, they pounded on huge drums, splashed neon paint everywhere, included audience members in wordless comedy, and sprayed the first few rows with, not water, but banana bread batter. After the show we dined at a fancy restaurant with bits of banana in our hair.

Today, two- through six-year-olds are going to school in a permanent poncho section. When the three men who formed the original Blue Man Group began having children, they were dissatisfied with the education options they saw. So they started their own pre-K and kindergarten school, the Blue School, in lower Manhattan.

Is it a training ground for the next generation of Blue Men? Is it a trade school where children learn to make messes?

The Blue School is in fact a private (and pricey) school that renounces traditional methods of teaching. There, children dance on disco-esque light-up floors, use glow-in-the-dark paint, play in a dirt “earth box,” practice yoga, and resolve conflicts on the “peace bench.” They post their daily emotions on the feelings grid. The BlueSchool is child-centered, therapeutic, self-esteem pedagogy at its finest.

The educational model includes a core curriculum: language arts, science, fine arts, technology & media literacy, social studies, lively arts, math, and physical arts & fitness—and values: creativity & expression; family & community connection; playfulness, exuberance & fun; self-awareness & well-being; global and environmental exploration; and multiple perspectives and differentiated learning experiences. “Our model,” the website says, “emerged out of a desire to achieve a new kind of balance between academic rigor and academic enchantment” (emphasis in the original).

Enchantment...we’ve heard the term before in reference to avant-garde pedagogy, in Peggy Barlett’s Current Anthropology article, “Reason and Reenchantment in Cultural Change: Sustainability in Higher Education.” NAS President Peter Wood wrote about it in “Enchanting Sustainability.” Barlett tries to combine reason and anti-reason the same way that the Blue School tries to combine rigor and anti-rigor.

The founders, however, prioritize fun and creativity. In a video on the school’s website, they say that the Blue School aims to prevent students from becoming serious and stressed out by pressure from their education. Matt Goldman says, “It’s a place where...you have such a zest for learning, a love of life, all the way through, not having it educated out of you.” Chris Wink puts it in a metaphor:

The traditional model of education is that children are freight cars and the school is a grain silo and it’s just going to fill each kid up and then move ‘em down the track. We’re interested in creating a launch pad where kids are the rockets and we’re just there trying to find the fuse.

Goldman is also quoted in an article in American Way magazine saying:

There was a sense when I was going to school in the ’60s that you could actually learn all of American history, but we can’t just teach kids facts anymore...The amount of information on this planet is doubling every two or three years. The best thing you can do is teach kids how to learn on their own about the things they want to learn.

We can’t teach kids facts anymore? The Blue School’s mission is to “cultivate creative, joyful, and compassionate inquirers who use courageous and innovative thinking to build a harmonious and sustainable world.” I suppose the school doesn’t teach the facts about sustainability (NAS does), even though its leaders “believe that global citizens in the 21st century have an unprecedented responsibility to be actively engaged in the effort to protect the environment” (see NAS on global citizenship). At BlueSchool, “Children explore the concepts of conservation and sustainability and have opportunities to make choices that positively impact our program's ‘ecological footprint.’” Sounds like they don’t have opportunities to make choices that negatively affect the footprint...

But in any case, the directors are proud of what the school is doing, and they want to inspire the creation of many other similar programs. Following the open source movement, Blue School hopes to become an “open-source entity, one whose genetic code can be accessed and incorporated by public schools, charter schools, and anyone else,” according to the American Way. Yet the school is less than open when it comes to admissions, and Goldman admits that perhaps Blue School is just another elite program for a privileged few New York families: “Sadly, we’ve become the thing we were rebelling against, with 200 kids for 15 open spaces.”

NAS’s esteemed board member Candace de Russy wrote about the Blue School earlier this year. Her article in the American Thinker traces the school’s philosophy back to Loris Malaguzzi who pioneered the progressive education movement in Reggio Emilia, Italy after World War II. De Russy wrote:

Malaguzzi placed special emphasis on children as active, indeed powerful, agents of their own development. The "resourceful child" he envisaged, explains psychologist Carolyn Pope Edwards (quoting Carlina Rinaldi), "generates changes in the systems in which he or she is involved and becomes a ‘producer of culture, values, and rights.'"

[...]

At root, Edwards writes, this approach is based on "an explicit idealism" or a "turn away from violence, toward peace and reconstruction" as well as social constructivism, a psychological theory which holds that humans construct knowledge and meaning from their experiences, and which is frequently tied to pedagogical practices that emphasize "active learning," or learning by doing.

The Blue School seems to think it has started something new (“We need families who believe a new approach to education is within our grasp”), but de Russy highlights prominent critics who have exposed the follies of the sixty-five-year-old Reggio approach. De Russy concludes by wondering whether progressive schools cripple students when they have to face the real world:

But they have about them an aura of unreality that leads one to ask, with added urgency in today's global climate of financial and political insecurity: Will the children in their charge, formed as they are by directing their own learning, be able to attend to anything that is "uncreative" and "unexciting"? Can they produce goods, manage money? Above all, will they be able to keep their families and the nation safe?

Indeed, if students are rockets (to humor Chris Wink’s metaphor), are they ready to launch if they have no fuel? They may love learning, but if they don’t know any “facts,” how will “enchantment” teach them the important ideas that undergird civilization? How will “global citizenship” help them understand national citizenship? And how will constructivism lead them to pursue the truth?

The Blue School is ready to send children blasting off into the world with minimal preparation in a burst of fun and laughter. While this model may be good enough for very young children, the Blue School aims to add a new grade every year up to fifth grade. By fifth grade, classes will have moved beyond the feelings grid and on to vacuous and politicized subjects like ethno-mathematics and sustainability literacy. Suddenly getting filled with grain and moving down the track doesn’t sound so bad.

Should Everyone Go?

Ashley Thorne — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published a symposium on a hot topic in higher ed: “Are Too Many Students Going to College?” (subscription required). The newspaper asked nine experts, including Charles Murray and Richard Vedder, to answer the following questions:

Who should and shouldn’t go to college?
How much does increasing college-going rates matter to our economy and society?
Economists have cited the economic benefits that individual students derive from college. Does that still apply?
Who should pay for students to attend college?
Does the United States view and handle this issue differently than other countries? Should it?
At what point does the cost of going to college outweigh the benefits?

These are timely questions following President Obama’s goal that by 2020 America would have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. NAS has weighed in on the implications of this goal (also voiced by the Carnegie Corporation, the Lumina Foundation, and the College Board) in multiple articles. Our instinct is that college is not for everyone—and new research shows that spending billions to multiply enrollment numbers does not lead to greater innovation or national competitiveness. Instead, attempts to make higher education universal will only cheapen the quality of learning and the value of the degree; sink more and more students into deep debt; and waste America’s tax money.

In the Chronicle forum, five experts said that all students who have the desire and ability should be able to go to college. Four said that many people should not go to college but should look into other forms of continuing education, such as apprenticeship, on-the-job training, or the military.

At the end of the article, each author considers the issue from a moral point of view. Some said we have a moral duty to make higher education accessible to everyone; some said that sending too many students to college is “morally questionable”; and one (Charles Murray of course) said “We have a moral obligation to destroy the current role of the B.A. in American life.”

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has also taken a tone of morality in regard to education access. In a March 2009 letter to the attendees of the UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development, he wrote that “education for sustainability is not just about the environment,” but is also about “providing maximum educational opportunity – at every level for every person.”

The Chronicle asked readers to give their opinions in the comments section of the article. We are interested in what NAS readers in particular have to say about this issue. Should all Americans go to college? Is it worthwhile? Is there any harm in putting too many students in higher education?

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?”