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Collegiate Press Roundup

Glenn Ricketts — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Student news hawks have a look at the president's state of the union address, lament the media's focus on trivia in covering the GOP primaries, demand that campus activists stop disrupting guest speakers and urge the sponsors of a planned protest in Chicago to take a step back.

We present our weekly review of selected student editors and news analysts. In this edition, they complain about the distractions caused by lap-top users in classrooms, rise to the defense of Greek life on campus, urge a planned protest to step back and evaluate the president’s state of the union address.

1) Although President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address wasn’t exactly awe-inspiring, an op ed writer for the UC/Berkeley Daily Californian still thinks that it offers reason for hope.

2) It’s a very good thing that Congress last week killed two anti-piracy bills – SOPA and PIPA – which threatened free speech and internet access in the United States. But we can’t rest easy, says a staffer for the Denver University Clarion. An even bigger threat to those rights comes from the largely unnoticed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an international treaty currently in the works between the US and many other countries. If it slips in under the radar screen, watch out.

3) Lap-tops and lectures are not a good mix, in the opinion of a columnist for the GW Hatchet. Students who use them usually don’t pay attention, and distract others in the classroom who do.

4) In the wake of the GOP presidential primary, the editors of the Independent Florida Alligator are simply exasperated: the national media seem pre-occupied with lurid trivialities rather than substance. If you’d like to know where the candidates stand on the national debt or foreign policy, you won’t find out by watching the debates so far.

5) You may claim to be a candidate for public office, but that doesn’t convince a regular for the Daily Illini that you’re entitled to run any Super Bowl ad that you want.

6) A features writer for the Indiana Daily Student tries to make sense out of a hooting audience’s reaction to a film that she really liked.

7) Greek organizations are not only a lot of fun, they do a lot of positive good on the UK campus. An op ed writer for the Kentucky Kernal really wishes the university administration would stop busting on them.

8) Student activism certainly has a positive role to play on college campuses, but the editors of the Williams Record don’t think that it extends to disrupting guest speakers, such as former president of Harvard Larry Summers.

9) A contributing columnist for the Howard University Hilltop argues that the recently enacted Defense Authorization Act poses some major threats to a number of America’s basic civil liberties.

10) Supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement are calling for a massive protest of the G8 conference planned for next May in Chicago. A columnist for the Emory Wheel urges them to stop dreaming that they can recreate the events of 1968 in the same city.

11) The precepts of faith and the demands of reason are by no means antagonistic, as the editors of Brigham Young University’s Daily Universe elaborate.

12) Although it may be true that zealous religious believers are frequently intolerant and anti-intellectual, a writer for the Tennessee Beacon thinks that their opponents are wrong to dismiss them with simple sneering or ridicule.

Two Styles of Academic Leadership

Abraham H. Miller — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Academia is not an environment conducive to good leadership, as illustrated by two extreme leadership styles.

The term “academic leadership” comes close to being an oxymoron. Academia is a labyrinth of bureaucracies. The guy willing to climb out of a trench, yelling, “follow me,” charging the enemy lines, at risk of life and limb, would rarely make it to the top levels of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy doesn’t tolerate leaders; it destroys them. Risk takers can achieve great things, but they also make mistakes. Bureaucracy is intolerant of mistakes, and more intolerant of anyone who isn’t a team player. Bureaucracy is about managers, paper pushers, and sycophants, people who have long learned to quash a thought at variance with policy, even bad policy. Bureaucracy is in essence about people who will say yes when they should be saying no. Bureaucracy is ultimately about survival, not about leading. Leaders learn how to circumvent the bureaucracy and get things done. They are rare.

I’m rounding the corner to the ten year mark of retirement. Looking into life’s rearview mirror has given me some perspective and, I’d like to think, insight into the concept of leadership. I worked witha lot of different people over my career. Precious few were leaders by anyone’s definition. But two extremely different types stood in both sharp and memorable contrast, almost as ideal types in the Weberian sense, at opposite points on a continuum.

The best person I ever worked under ran a department—a social science department in a research university—that bordered on anomie by preference, if not design. There were almost no department meetings. He encouraged people do what they were trained and hired to do and to do it well. He left them alone, and basically they left him alone. He ran the department the way Warren Buffet is said to run Berkshire Hathaway and the way some hedge funds are run. How did he know how well people were doing? The criterion was—did other people, who did what you do, say you did it well? They said so if you got into good, solid journals in your field. In the world of finance, the answer to how you did is indelibly printed in the profit and loss column. No ifs, ands, or buts. Did you make or lose money?

When we recruited for an open position, the head would assemble the hiring committee and would tell them the following, “I got rid of the weak resumes. So here are the good ones. All these people have exceptional pedigrees, published articles, and glowing recommendations. Your job is to find the person who has something different; the person who has done something different in life or career. I really don’t want to hear whether Chicago has a better department than Yale. I don’t want you to assign numbers, add up points, and tell me what some meaningless average is. Go look for the unique!”

Unique turned out to be a guy who worked with street gangs in Chicago, a Peace Corps worker in Brazil, a civil rights organizer in the Deep South, and a fellow who had worked on a small, anti-Apartheid newspaper in South Africa.

The department was not nirvana. There was little socializing and little collegial interaction. We were like a bunch of commodity traders on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade with our own portfolios and decision rules. But at the end of the year, we all had been productive, and productivity did engender a sense of personal affirmation, even if there were little collegial confirmation. Removal from both the pettiness of meetings and the time-consuming challenges of fruitless issues released us to engage unencumbered the life of the mind.

No one cared about administrative gossip or rumors. Our department head kept us out of those frays. We ignored them, and in reality, I suspect, he too probably ignored them. Nothing passes as quickly across the dimension of time as the latest crisis in a university president’s office.

Our head would let the marketplace decide the mission and strengths of the department. People who published in the best places in their field would have created the reputation of the department. People of similar orientation could have come together to foster that reputation by getting external funding for major research projects in that field, which coincidentally was precisely what that department successfully did years later.

Some years later, I was in a department—again a social science department at a research university—whose head had a style that was quite the opposite. Department meetings were all-consuming. Politicking before and after meetings, lining up votes for or against trivial issues of undergraduate requirements, curriculum reform, or course descriptions became the raison d’etre of the department. The head would roam the corridors, plop himself into any office with a light on, and sit for at least an hour talking about his mission and vision for the department. He would then move on to the next victim. He thought of this as building consensus and cohesion, getting everyone to feel they were part of things. I longed for the productive environment of my earlier experience.

All the time, the head was attuned to every piece of gossip and rumor out of the faculty club. He scoured the boilerplate of public relations statements for indications of where the university was headed. If the president of the university made a meaningless public relations statement about the direction of the university, we immediately had to have a meeting to discuss it. One old salt said, “Doesn’t he know that presidents say all sorts of meaningless things for public consumption?”

Where my previous department could not get two people to join a faction norwould anyone feel the need to do so, the endless meetings in my new department didn’t build cohesion or consensus; they predictably split the department into factions. In academia, trivia is always important; for otherwise one has to confront the reality that so much of one’s work doesn’t matter. As the academic cliché goes: “The conflicts are so intense because the stakes are so small.” We began having intense conflicts. You would have thought that the fate of the universe hung on a methodology requirement that was a symbolic statement about where the department was going intellectually, but in reality, precious few of our undergraduate students could handle such a requirement.

The methodology requirement took on a life of its own being of such significance that it warranted an “en camera meeting” of those who were in support of it against the “old guard,” who saw it as a threat. The department head portrayed himself as leading a charge for academic change, a man on a mission to modernize the intellectual orientation of the department and sideline the old guard. He was doing all this through the rather bold and extremely meaningful strategy of, yes, changing the undergraduate curriculum. The irony totally escaped him.

Caught up in the whirlwind of conflict, no one stopped to ask whether it was all worth it.

These admittedly are two extremes: a head who was laissez-faire about his department and one who was all consumed with it to the point that like Louis XIV, he thought, “Le department, c’est moi.” My experiences juxtaposed a man who would rather come down with bubonic plague than call a department meeting and one who chose to sit ex-officio on every department committee and take over every meeting.

The real difference between the styles of these two men was a result of their experiences prior to their appointment: the first never really wanted to run a department. He preferred to do little more than engage in research. The other, after a lackluster career and watching his classmates achieve great professional heights, gave up on himself as a scholar—a decision that said more about his insecurity than his ability. He thirsted for administration as a new career path. He fancied himself a leader, but in actuality he was more interested in personal advancement than policy.

A number of years have passed since the events of these two departments. And most certainly factors other than leadership have affected how these departments progressed. Yet each of these men contributed to the culture of these departments long after his departure.

The first department was then known professionally as a small but exceptionally productive department is today far and away more than double in size. It has a strong graduate program and a strong reputation. Meanwhile the other department fell into a spiral of internecine conflict and mutual distrust reminiscent of the inner workings of an authoritarian regime. It was unable to come together and became high on the administration’s hit list for cuts. It currently is less than half the size of its heyday. Yes, there were other factors, but culture created by a leader, good or bad, persists long after he leaves the scene.

Early in my career, I wrote (with James McEvoy) a piece on the conflict at San Francisco State when S. I. Hayakawa became its president. The campus had a vicious faculty strike and violent demonstrations over admissions to its ethnic studies program. The issues fractured the faculty like the San Andreas Fault. Decades latter, I was at a professional meeting with some people from State, who told me that campus had never recovered from those days. It would, in their opinion, take a generational change to remove the scars seared by those events.

There are few criteria for becoming a leader in academia. There are no tests for leadership, no gauge of past leadership—as distinct from administrative—experience, just the desire to step up and have oneself nominated and a general perception from higher administration that the candidate is sufficiently compliant, eminently malleable, and possesses an ability to see the most important ethical issues as situational.

The intrusive head was not a bad person. As a colleague, he could be gracious, considerate, and affable. He had far more academic talent than for which he gave himself credit. He might not have achieved the fame of some of his classmates, but certainly he was capable of creating an intellectual presence in the discipline. He was totally unsuited to be a leader, but the more he failed at it the more he persisted. The more he failed, the more he sought success by aligning himself with the policies of the administration.

Academia toward the beginning of my career was a place for self-starters, mavericks, and people who thrived without structure. All of that has changed over the years. One associate provost, where I interviewed for a position, had me look out a window and asked me what I saw. I said a parking lot. He said no, what you really are seeing is a parking lot with five reserved parking spaces. When the number goes to ten, the place will have gone to hell. Years, later the number had gone to three hundred, and indeed the place had gone to hell many times over.

Leadership remains essential in academia, as it does in any setting, but the normative structure of academia produces the most ossified of bureaucracies. They value conformity over initiative. The current crisis in academia over a system that only seems to work for those who run it will not be solved from within. The academic “bubble,” as it is increasingly being called, is about to burst, and it will remain for those outside of academia to find a solution when it does.

Civics Lessons

Peter Wood — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Peter Wood critiques the new Obama administration report on college-level civics education.

On January 10, the White House staged an event to mark the release of a new report calling for “the nation to reclaim higher education’s civic mission.” The report, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future, is the fruit of the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement.

That task force was appointed by the Obama Department of Education in 2010. The new report comes with a forward by DOE Under Secretary Martha Kanter and the Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education, Eduardo Ochoa, who connect the enterprise with the Obama administration’s goal for the United States “to once again lead the world in the proportion of college graduates by 2020.”

We haven’t heard much about that goal recently, perhaps as economic realities impressed themselves on the administration. To achieve the “lead the world” proportion of college graduates by 2020 would require more than doubling current college enrollments in the next five years. Our colleges and universities have no capacity to do that, nor can the nation afford the cost. But it is nice to see that DOE officials haven’t forgotten the President’s February 2009 grandiose promise.

The connection between the dream of vastly expanded college enrollments and “democracy’s future” isn’t self-evident. We have had democratic institutions, after all, for several hundred years without the assistance of an everybody-goes-to-college national policy. The connection that Kanter and Ochoa offer is that colleges need “to educate students for informed, engaged citizenship.” Stated as an abstract proposition, few would disagree with that goal, although it is a little obscure why engaged citizenship requires a college degree.

A Different Civics

American grade schools were educating students for citizenship from the days of the early republic. I recently made the acquaintance of a retired professor, Bruce Olson, who is profoundly interested in restoring civics to the K-12 curriculum. Olson, who once led a taxpayers organization in California, is now the executive director of the American Grand Jury Foundation and is the author of Grand Juries in California: A Study in Citizenship. He made a second career as a contractor who taught California grand jurors how to perform their work.

I learned from him that the grand-jury system during the progressive era functioned as a means by which citizens could launch investigations of larger social ills, and weren’t just an instrument by which prosecutors sought indictments.

He is a strong advocate of active citizenship—namely that citizens should understand their government at every level; should be vigilant in holding public officials accountable; and should understand the practicalities of local self-government.

Olson has been at this a long time. Now in his eighties, he hopes to publish a new civics textbook because he is not much satisfied with those currently available. Along the way, he has collected and read some sixty civics schoolbooks published between the late 18^thcentury and 1932, which gives him a fair claim to expertise in the area Kanter and Ochoa profess to be concerned about, and quite a bit of knowledge that bears on the work of the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement.

But in the course of five or six hours of conversation with Dr. Olson, I could see he is not really in step with what we might call the “new civics” enunciated by the Obama administration’s Task Force. The difference between Olson’s views and those presented in A Crucible Moment isn’t one of vocabulary. Olson and Crucible use many of the same words and both clearly favor a muscular view of citizenship. What then?

The differences have to do with temperament and trajectory. Olson is a moderate who feels at home with the progressive outlook of the Teddy Roosevelt era. He basically likes the American system of self-government and champions the people who take the initiative to make it work. He approached me initially because he is trying to find someone who might like to take custody of his voluminous files of news stories about citizen activists. (Contact me if you have a scholarly interest!)

Property Rights 0, Diversity 87

The authors of A Crucible Moment strike a very different tone. Among other things, their goal is not to prepare students for life in the nation as it now exists, but to have them become “globally knowledgeable citizens.” The rhetoric of the report is shrill and it depicts the nation on the verge of such calamity that only some drastically new kind of “engagement” will save it. And the text lays into unnamed political opponents for their “poorly conceived remedies for the challenges facing the United States” (p. 17).

The report is often vague and platitudinous. Many of its 105 pages are filled with declarations that mean next to nothing or unroll in feel-good bureaucratic jargon (e.g. “generative civic partnerships,” “local and global generative partnerships,” “civic investment plan,” purposeful and progressively sequenced designs for civic learning and democratic engagement”).

But it isn’t that hard to spot the radical hand in the bureaucratic glove. Why is this a “crucible moment in US history” (p. 25)? What is it that makes “transformations necessary for this generation”?

The answers come down to—no surprise—“to eliminate persistent inequalities, especially those in the United States determined by income and race, in order to secure the country’s economic and civic future.” But not just that. We also need to respond to “growing global economic inequalities, climate change and environmental degradation, lack of access to quality health care, economic volatility, and more.”

“More,” I suppose, covers everything not mentioned, but it is useful to think about some of those civics lessons that are left out entirely. The list includes property rights; ballot initiatives; grand juries; external audits; trustees; fiduciary responsibilities; gun ownership and Second Amendment rights; prisons; military service; and even taxes. The word “elections” occurs twice; “voter registration” once (in an appendix); and the Bill of Rights once.

What vision of civics education is this? It is one where the concept of “inequality” looms large (14 direct mentions and a subsection of “Dangerous Economic Inequalities”), “transform” 44 times, and cognates of “diversity” occur 87 times.

Word counts are only a rough proxy for content, but I’ll leave a closer textual analysis for another time. I will warrant, however, that the word counts don’t give a misleading impression. The civics lesson on offer in A Crucible Moment are a reiteration of a certain political agenda in which inequalities and diversity are the prime concepts, and “citizenship” evanesces into the air of “global” participation.

Occupy Osawatomie

I don’t suppose it is amiss for a President of the United States to avail himself of all the instruments of the executive branch to pursue his policy goals. So there is certainly nothing wrong with President Obama’s Department of Education setting in motion the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement. But let me offer a little civic engagement of my own.

A Crucible Moment reflects a view from inside the academy. Of the eleven members of the Task Force, nine are current or former academics, and all of them, as nearly as I can tell, represent left of center views. It is small wonder that their report is dead silent on the many aspects of civic participation and democratic engagement that concern the roughly 175 million Americans who consider themselves as conservative or moderate.

From that perspective, the Task Force might be thought of as one of the first official expressions of the spirit that was eventually embodied in more aggressive form in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The notion that overcoming “inequality” in all its forms ought to be at the center of our political and civic life is the core of President Obama’s widely noted December 6 speech in Osawatomie, Kan. “This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class,” he declared and he took the themes of “the people who’ve been occupying the streets of New York and other cities” as an expression of “the defining issue of our time,” i.e. income inequality.

This may work on the campaign trail, but higher education ought to hold itself to a higher standard. The civics education that college should provide students should surely be more than an immersion in the values and worldview of one side of the political spectrum, and an attempt to erase all other values and views. A Crucible Moment fails this test.

This article first appeared at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Innovations blog on January 26, 2012.

Capitalism and Western Civilization - The Founding

William H. Young — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:00:00 GMT

William Young discusses the founding of the American commercial republic in the context of Western Civilization.

Fortunately for our heritage, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and destroyed the theoretical underpinnings of British mercantilism, which the American Revolution was fought to overcome. Our Founders adopted Smith’s ideas while creating a unique economic system for a new nation.

Sir James Steuart, a contemporary of Smith, actually wrote the first systematic treatise on economics in English, Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767). Steuart was an exponent of mercantilism (or corporatism), the existing system of Great Britain and France. He accorded government a key role in the economic development of society, particularly in the perfectibility of man and employment. He advocated export subsidies, price supports for agriculture, and government job-creation programs. The Encyclopedia Britannica adds:

He understood that all such programs would require higher taxes but felt this to be a fair trade-off, given his assumption that tax revenues would come mainly from the wealthy. He believed that these programs would benefit politicians by keeping their “subjects in awe.”

Ironically, our current economic debate could be seen as noted economist and occasional baseball player Yogi Berra would put it, déjà vu all over again.

Steuart’s treatise was Smith’s chief target for refutation. In Book 4 of Wealth of Nations, he indicted the failures of mercantilism and control of the economy by the state, politicians, and monopolies (crony capitalism, as we would say). He also disagreed with the theories of the French Physiocrats—which Tocqueville would call “democratic despotism”—except for their concept of laissez faire, or free trade. Smith believed that free markets could better the world, and that progress required “little else…but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.” He wanted “the establishment of a government which afforded to industry the only encouragement which it requires, some tolerable security that it shall enjoy the fruits of its own labor.”

Smith’s notion of the general interest was simply the sum of the interests of all the members of the society, including the working classes. This was perhaps the most novel aspect of Wealth of Nations. The title referred not to the nation as the mercantilist understood it—the nation-state whose wealth was the measure of its strength vis-à-vis other states—but to the people comprising the nation. It was their interests, their wealth that would be promoted by a political economy that would bring about a “universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”

Almost all of the Founders read and praised Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and absorbed the thrust of his concepts. Hamilton worked arguments derived from it into his public papers. Madison quoted from it unconsciously, without attribution, in his speeches.

We have seen that man’s universal instincts include a deep-seated capacity for envy. Man has a need for recognition or esteem from others. Human nature was forged in competition; the drive for human dominance is universal. Human nature countenances hierarchy; humans form hierarchies of dominance. The Founders took account of those innate features of human nature and sought to transcend the history of failures of past Western republics due to envy, class warfare, and economic conflict over scarcity among factions.

In a historic first, America was founded from the beginning as a commercial republic—with few rewards provided by government—to provide for private pursuit by individuals of self-interest and prosperity through a market system utilizing private property and entrepreneurial initiative. Past republics had viewed man’s insatiable appetite for material comforts and commerce as a sign of decadence and impending social instability. Our Founders saw that man’s appetites could be satisfied in a commercial economy in which economic progress, based on freedom, could lift the burdens of life from the shoulders of the common man. They realized that the pursuit of material well-being through individual work and performance based on reciprocity in the private sector contributes to the welfare of society—both in the sense of creating personal fulfillment and wealth and the social unity engendered by commerce. Stability was achieved because individuals pursued their economic self-interest rather than warring over frivolous religious and political disputes.

The Founders turned to private property and multiple productive hierarchies within the private sector as the primary way for citizens to fulfill their different and unequal faculties of human nature, satisfy their inherent human ambitions for dominance and hierarchical status, and achieve recognition and esteem from others. They uniquely recognized that “different and unequal faculties” are part of human nature. James Madison expresses this in The Federalist, Number 10, when he argues:

The diversity of the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results

“Madison has in mind such ‘faculties’ as ambition, intelligence, experience, energy, and strength,” explains Thomas West in Vindicating the Founders (1997):

These lead people into different jobs and professions (leading to different ‘kinds of property’), and the same differences lead to different levels of income (different ‘degrees’ of property)….The right to acquire property was understood by the Founders, and by Americans long afterward, as a protection to rich and poor alike. It was a means by which the poor could ascend from poverty to wealth and not, as is so often asserted today, a device to keep them down.

To Madison, government had been instituted not to protect any particular property, but to protect the human faculties of acquiring it now and in the future.

Alexander Hamilton sought to establish a government system that would both channel the individual pursuit of self-interest into developing the American economy and protect that economy from the follies that untrammeled self-interest always leads to. One of the greatest problems facing the American economy was the lack of liquid capital available for investment. Hamilton wanted to use the national debt to create a larger and more flexible money supply. Government bonds held by banks could serve as collateral for bank loans, multiplying the available capital. By 1794, the United States had the highest credit rating in Europe, one more lesson our postmodern politicians could learn from the founding.

“The most forceful architect of the political economy expressed in the Constitution was Hamilton, a Lockean who also viewed his teaching as tempered by an older notion of moral order,” explain Robert N. Bellah and the other authors of The Good Society (1991):

For Hamilton, progress was a highly charged moral idea. But progress had to be institutionalized, to be given public standing and recognition in order to be an effective force in human affairs. For Hamilton, progress was a spirit human society had to learn...The institutions of Hamilton's model of political economy—from the money supply and national bank to publicly chartered organizations for the promotion of enterprise to the laws of contract and obligation—were pedagogical devices. Their aim was the moral transformation and improvement of human beings.

Hamilton conceived political economy as making possible a spiral of human progress, not just in commerce and technique but in morals as well, through popular opinion and associations.

For more than two centuries, America has had the world’s foremost record of economic growth through entrepreneurial capitalism and its own Industrial Revolution, producing a much improved standard of living for all of its people. The story of the founding of our commercial republic and the economic system that produced that record should be included in college liberal education. Tragically, most students today encounter our founding, if they do at all, exclusively through the lens of multiculturalist critics.

Next week’s article will address the emergence of economic growth in Western and American history.

______________________________________________________________________________

This is one of a series of occasional articles applying the lessons of Western civilization to contemporary issues relevant to the academy.

The Honorable William H. Young was appointed by President George H. W. Bush to be Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy and served in that position from November 1989 to January 1993. He is the author of Ordering America: Fulfilling the Ideals of Western Civilization (2010) and Centering America: Resurrecting the Local Progressive Ideal (2002).

Games of Chance

Peter Wood — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Peter Wood observes that even as higher education frets about students’ gambling addictions, it feeds the underlying problem.

Atlantic City probably belongs on the list of America’s most desolate places. It huddles on the coast, an expanse of run-down two-story houses, tattoo parlors, cash-for-gold shops, vacant lots, and discount stores, below the towering palace-like casino-hotels desperately trying to convey an image of glamour in the midst of shabbiness.

The “gaming industry,” as it now likes to be called, doesn’t worry too much about exteriors. The outside of the casinos are meant to be seen from a distance, as mirages of sophisticated splendor. At street level, they are utilitarian and ugly, except for the entrances which are shiny glass and brass studies in visual vulgarity. Inside, the buildings are designed to whirl the visitor though pathless mazes of slot machines and to dazzle with flashing lights and fruity electronic noise.

There is perhaps a metaphor here for contemporary higher education, but I’ll let that go.

I have found myself at casinos several times in recent years, either because convention organizers thought the venue would be a lure or because a well-meaning host insisted I see how this or that tribe of Native Americans had found a way to cash in on their legal privileges. The experience always leaves me feeling a little unclean; sad at the display of deadening folly; and angry at the politicians who promote this sort of thing.

And promote them they do. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for example, has just proposed a joint venture with the Genting Group, a Malaysian company that builds and operates casinos, to build a giant casino-cum-convention center at the Aquaduct Racetrack in Queens. The artistic renderings are, of course, beautiful, but what you see inside a real casino is something else.

Sure enough, in Atlantic City there was the woman attached to an oxygen tank feeding a slot machine. Here was an elderly husband spoon feeding his stroke-felled wife, as though he could think of no better place to tend to her last weeks or months than the vicinity of the blackjack tables. Here were families with five- and six-year-old children along, apparently, to learn how to squander money that might be put towards their educations. At night the casinos filled up with separate knots of boys in skinny jeans and girls in tight mini-dresses and stilettos, doing their best to live up to the Jersey Shore stereotypes.

The group I was with kept to the seminars and stayed away from the gambling except for one fellow of modest means who ended up spending twelve hours losing money at the casino. I know the rationale: He is making his own choices. And the piped in soundtrack in the elevators offers a frequent reminder of the 1-800 number to call if you have “gambling problem.” But gambling is all by itself a problem, and not one the casinos are eager to cure.

My hotel room in the Hilton looked out at a slant at the cold gray Atlantic. It snowed that day in New York, but just drizzled on the Jersey coast. Several stories below my window were the roofs of annexes, missing tiles from the storms that blow in hard against the boardwalked beach. And lying on their backs, scattered over one of those roofs were the fallen giant red letters, H, I, L on one side, T, O, N on the other—the debris of a bygone age when Atlantic City was an actual family resort.

What does any of this have to do with higher education?

I take it as a specific instance of a general rule. Contemporary American higher education always finds ways to exploit and generally worsen cultural blight. In this case, it does that in two ways: by preparing students to work in the gambling industry, and by fostering the fantasy-logic on which the industry feeds.

As for the first, colleges and universities have created programs to credentialize the casino operators. “Gain the knowledge and skills to advance to a high-level management position in the casino industry,” says Drexel University in its ads for its one-year onlineGraduate Certificate in Gaming and Casino Operations. The curriculum includes HRM 670 “Casino Financial Analysis” and HRM 676 “Casino Marketing.”

The University of Las Vegas is home to the International Gaming Institute, “a non-profit academic and research facility which offers educational programs for professionals in the gaming and hospitality industries.” The curriculum includes such salubrious coursesas IGIGAM0948 “Slot Performance-Potential Modeling,” and IGIGAM1005 “What Casino Management Should Know about Video Poker.”

Eastern Maine Community College announced last month that it is getting into the act as well, partnering with a local casino:

As part of the initiative, Hollywood Slots is partnering with the college on a program that would provide training for jobs such as black jack and poker dealers, pit bosses and other positions related to the addition of table games to Hollywood Slots.

Of course universities and colleges that move into this business face competition from some more plainly vocational outfits such as the Casino Gaming Institute (“Start Your Career with a Proven Winner”) which offers certificates in Slot Technician Training, All Casino Games, and Casino Management, with four convenient locations, including onsite at the Harrington (New Jersey) Raceway & Casino.

Hondros College in Westerville, Ohio advises students to “Quit gambling with uncertainty and find your new career in the casino gaming industry!” Its Casino Gaming program trains students to be dealers in baccarat, blackjack, craps, pai gow poker, pai gow tiles, poker, and roulette.

I am sure there are many more such programs but that’s enough to cover the principle that if something is legal, there is sure to be a college or university program that will offer a path to a career in it.

Of course, higher education is fraught with gambling problems of its own: both sports betting and the large number of students who get lured into gambling and become “problem” gamblers. I don’t know whether to credit these statistics, but various Internet sites claim that “between 5 and 9 percent of male college students and 1 to 2 percent of college women” have gambling addictions. The rate of compulsive gambling among college students is roughly double that of the general population. CollegeGambling.org, a project of the National Center for Responsible Gaming offers some statistics, but this is clearly a gambling industry undertaking that serves the larger project of keeping the roulette wheels spinning.

Gambling is so entrenched among college students that there is even a Web site, Ultrinsic, where students can bet on their grades. The idea is to create some convergence between the impulse to bet and the motivation to study, though it might just as well provide additional reasons to cheat.

Is it a surprise that college students are especially prone to gambling addictions? Gambling is heavily marketed to college students, and students often have the time and the willingness to be diverted, especially to the online versions of poker and sports betting. But college students may also be predisposed to gambling by the very fact of their college enrollment. For many, the pursuit of a college degree is itself a large bet against uncertain odds. Given the out-of-pocket costs, the typical student-loan burdens, and the poor job prospects, a college student isn’t all that different from the player, who is induced to “play to extinction.” The idea is “to create machines and environments that entrance players to follow loss with more loss,” until they have nothing left with which to play. Those cash-for-gold shops down the block from the casinos are there for a reason.

When I encounter a deeply indebted recent college graduate about to enroll in law school or a graduate program in the liberal arts, that’s exactly what comes to mind: the university has trained the student to play the game all the way to extinction. Of course casinos are faster.

From my hotel room looking out on the slate gray January Atlantic, I saw an empty beach and a boardwalk with a handful of people doubled against the wind. The “action” as the casinos style it, is all on the inside. The trouble is that there is a lot inside that is just weak, troubled, short-sighted, probability blind, and self-destructive. We would be better off without industries that exploited these frailties.

This article first appeared at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Innovations blog on January 24, 2012.

Peter Wood on Radio on Ward Case

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Peter Wood will discuss a counseling student who was expelled from Eastern Michigan University because the administration was intolerant of her Christian beliefs.

Peter Wood, president of the NAS, will be interviewed on a Southern California radio station (KBRT) by Roger March and David Householder on their program "The Bottom Line." He will talk about the Ward v. Polite case (see NAS's press release linking to our friend-of-the-court brief in the case).

The interview will be today at 6:30EST. Those who don't live in Southern California can click here to listen live online.

Collegiate Press Roundup

Glenn Ricketts — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Student press corps regulars analyze the president's call to narrow the wealth gap, argue that the bad economy isn't all the fault of Wall Street, ponder the options for voters in this year's presidential election and observe that college may not be the ticket for everyone.

We present our weekly review of selected student editors and news analysts. For this week, they assess the state of student activism, explore the possibility of male/female friendship, weigh in on recent Vatican policies and discuss the place of marriage in one’s life

1) In an increasingly diverse society, ethnic studies are vital to the K-12 curriculum, and a writer for the Northern Arizona University News thinks it’s too bad that a program in Mexican-American culture has been banned by the state’s superintendant of education.

2) As the 2012 presidential election looms ever closer, a political commentator for the Emory Wheel thinks it’s pretty clear what the options are between the GOP and President Obama’s Democrats.

3) Can men and women just be friends, without romantic intrusion? Yes, they can, says a regular for the Daily Illini.

4) A columnist for the Indiana Daily Student ponders the consequences of Vatican policies for re-uniting with traditionalist Anglican congregations, especially if they have married clergy.

5) As the Occupy Wall Street movement confirms, student political activism is on the rise, nationwide, and a writer for the MSU State News hopes to see a return of massive 1960s-style protests. But in the opinion of his counterpart at the Brown Daily Herald, activism also has its complexities.

6) Meanwhile, a colleague at the University of Maryland Diamondback argues that it’s tempting, but far off base to put all of the blame for today’s economic distress on Wall Street. How about the feckless and opportunistic congressional politicians who helped put us in the tank?

7) President Obama’s call to narrow the gap between rich and poor really resonates with a staffer for the Minnesota Daily, although she argues that much more than simple social class accounts for it.

8) What’s to say about marriage? Two writers for the Daily Nebraskan offer contrasting perspectives here and here.

9) What exactly is former GOP presidential contender Herman Cain doing these days? A writer for the Virginia Cavalier Daily is pretty puzzled by his actions following his departure from the GOP primaries.

10) Most Americans are disillusioned with politics: either party is just as bad as the other. A political analyst for the UW Daily Cardinal attempts to explain why.

11) Notwithstanding president Obama’s recent statements, college simply isn’t for all of us, says a Temple News writer. We need to explore alternate routes for those in need of them.

12) Despite legitimate controversy over a recent ad in the OSU Lantern, a guest columnist argues that the paper is decidedly not anti-Islamic.

Skepticism and Tradition

Peter Wood — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Higher education should balance skepticism with respect for tradition.

The men’s house is the center of cultic ritual in numerous New Guinea societies, and the ritual invariably focuses on the initiation of boys into some of the secret knowledge of the elders. In 1968, the anthropologist Fredrik Barth, who was then forty, succeeded in getting himself included in the ritual initiation cycle of one such tribe—a group of only 183 people living high in a remote mountainous rain forest and pretty much untouched by the outside world. As Barth described the process in his classic Ritual and Knowledge Among the Baktaman of New Guinea, the tribe had evolved an elaborate system of initiation grades. Having passed though one grade, a young man could look forward to many more, if he lived long enough.

We might think of this as something like initiation into the Fraternal Order of the Masons—except that for the Baktaman at the time Barth was studying them, the initiation cycle was their key social institution. Almost everything else revolved around it: reproduction, warfare, subsistence gardening, hunting. In that sense, it was perhaps more like the series of jumps in our society from grade school to middle school to high school to college, to graduate school, to post-doctoral training…

Baktaman initiations were occasions in which the older, already initiated men revealed secrets to the novices. What secrets? Origin myths, magic, and what might be called tribal lore. The secrets have to do with the meaning of powerful visual, tactile, and acoustic symbols. Wild pork fat, for example, is equated with human semen. The dependence of the tribe on the intercession of the ancestors is revealed over and over. The secrets are conveyed not just by “telling,’ but by immersing the novices in vivid sensory experiences. But by far the most interesting secret was the revelation that the secrets revealed at the previous initiation were false. They had been a deception necessary to protect deeper truths for which the novices were not yet ready.

Apparently the entire Baktaman initiation system operated on this principle: each successive initiation revealed that the previous one had been a cheat, a subtle act of obfuscation. Of course, after one or two of these “now we will really level with you” surprises, the Baktaman novices could deduce the shape of things to come. But that didn’t undermine their interest in moving forward. It simply underscored that the deepest knowledge would be long in coming and difficult to attain and that it might be best to cultivate a certain sense of provisionality. The Baktaman initiated their young men into skepticism, or more precisely, they initiated them at one and the same moment into both respect for tradition and doubt about it.

I’ve long thought of this as a powerful model for how culture in general and education in particular work. We create a spider web anchored between a rock and a slender stem, between fixed tradition and uncertainty.

Too strong adherence to either one spells a certain kind of ruin. No people can live entirely within a static tradition. Even the Baktaman in their rain forest fastness are constantly improvising, adapting images from other small tribes, forgetting some details and adding others, reinterpreting as they go. (One of Barth’s signal accomplishments was to capture this buzz of micro-innovation on the fly.) But none can live without the stability of tradition either—not even anarchists and post-modernists, who no sooner cast off their cufflinks than they don brand new handcuffs and straitjackets. Think of the late Occupy Wall Streeters adopting the exact same images, tactics, dress, and slogans and repeating sentences word by word in their encampments across America’s cities. It turns out that ritual behavior reasserts itself in a heartbeat. Literally, we can’t act without it.

These days, the idea that tradition has a rightful claim on the university has little support. We see this in decline of general education standards, which the National Association of Scholars documented in The Dissolution of General Education: 1914-1993. We see it in the disappearance of Western Civilization survey courses, which the NAS documented in The Vanishing West: 1964-2010. We see it in the near total focus on contemporary writing in college summer reading lists, which the NAS documented in Beach Books: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class? 2011-2012. I cite reports from my own organization because I know them well, but the disregard, sometimes edging over to disdain, for the traditional content and order of the curriculum is to be found pretty much everywhere in contemporary American higher education.

These are losses that we don’t really know how to repair.

I have recently exchanged views with several advocates of the idea of making “critical thinking” a more prominent part of the curriculum. Critical thinking is, more or less, the other anchor of the spider web: the willowy stem of skepticism. Unanchored at the other end to the rock of tradition, critical thinking is a gossamer thing of no real purpose. Hence it has been appropriated by all manner of campus ideologies eager to assert some connection to higher academic goals.

The Baktaman initiation system doesn’t really have a termination. There are always new layers of knowledge to be uncovered, deceptions to be overcome, and coherencies to grasp. To advance, the Baktaman must gain a sense of how skepticism deepens tradition and tradition deepens skepticism. That’s the same circle we need to turn to bring real improvement to American higher education, and it is a theme I intend to explore in my Innovations articles over the next several months.

This article first appeared at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Innovations blog on January 19, 2012.

Capitalism and Western Civilization - Human Nature

William H. Young — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:00:00 GMT

William Young examines the role of human nature in shaping modern capitalism.

Our commercial republic and capitalist market economy were designed for the nature of man as understood in the Western tradition. As part of that tradition, the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith, and our Founders embraced the idea of an inherent human nature with universal traits, through which individuals pursue their own material well-being and largely determine their own fate. Marxism, socialism, progressivism, and postmodern multiculturalism base their opposition to Western capitalism on the contrary concept that human nature is formed entirely by history, culture, and the state—“social constructionism,” which I elaborated here last August.. We need to rediscover Smith’s and our Founders’ Western wisdom in thinking about our economic future.

Smith’s most famous work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), is wrongly seen, by critics of capitalism who usually have not read it, as favoring selfishness, avarice and greed, as noted last week. Quite to the contrary, cooperation—building upon the positive features of human nature—is its central theme. Let’s examine those features in a little more detail by returning to what Smith considered, and many others consider, his greatest book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

With Hutcheson and the other Scottish philosophers, Smith saw an innate moral sense which he dubbed “fellow-feeling” or “sympathy,” a natural sense of identification with other human beings. Interaction with others provides feedback from which we adjust our behavior and focus ourselves on the things that make us loved by others and by ourselves. The natural senses of conscience and sympathy guide self-interest beyond selfishness and ensure that human beings can and do live together in orderly and beneficial social organizations. Social organization is the outcome of human nature and human action, not the result of society or the state.

In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued against theorizers of ideal systems of his time, such as the British Mercantilists and French Physiocrats:

The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it….He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.

Smith provides as powerful a brief for competition and free trade, rather than “the wisdom of politicians,” as was ever written—which should be required reading for our postmodern social constructionists.

Ironically, both Smith and the Founders rejected the idea of the Physiocrats that human nature is shaped by the economy and the state, whose theory Tocqueville characterized as “absolute equality, State control of the activities of individuals, despotic legislation, and the total submerging of each citizen’s personality in the group mind”—a Gallic precursor to Marxism and social constructionism. James Madison also explicitly rejected Englishman William Godwin’s utopian concept of the perfectibility of man, correctly anticipating the destructive consequences of social constructionism.

Karl Marx held that “all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature,” explains Vernon Venable in Human Nature: The Marxian View(1945). Marx argued that the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. Man is the world of men, the State and Society. The essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in each particular individual. The real nature of man is the totality of social relations. Individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class relations and class interests.

Following Hegel, American universities made the doctrine of social construction of the individual by culture or the state into an article of faith in sociology and some schools of psychology. The superorganic or group mind, instead of the individual mind, became a basic tenet of social science. Progressivism and postmodern multiculturalism emphasize equality—the achievement of equal individual results through communal sharing to transform human nature. The administrative state commands the perfection of man and society by allocating status and entitlement rights—to groups rather than to individuals.

It has become a common saying that “the trouble with socialism is socialism; the trouble with capitalism is capitalists.” We will see in later articles some of the adverse effects of the sometimes bad judgments and wrongful actions of capitalists. But socialism has a fundamental flaw: it is based on an inaccurate and misguided concept of human nature and, therefore, creates far more adverse consequences. Socialism is based on the social construction of the individual rather than the freedom of the individual.

Confounding social constructionism, the modern science of evolutionary psychology establishes that there is psychological unity of an immutable human nature with universal instincts beneath the superficial differences of physical appearance and parochial culture. Evolutionary psychology has elucidated traits of human nature, summarized by Will Wilkinson in the report Capitalism and Human Nature (Cato Institute, January/February 2005) and Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate (2003), which connote a natural social and economic order.

Humans have a deep-seated capacity for envy; as such they are envious zero-sum thinkers. They have a need for recognition or esteem from others. Human nature was forged in competition; the drive for human dominance is universal. Human nature is hierarchical; humans form hierarchies of dominance. Our civil society and competitive exchange economy provide outlets for human ambition and recognition in productive hierarchies.

Complex adaptations have evolved to benefit the individual within the social contract (our founding) tradition. The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies imply that inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that there is an inherent tradeoff between equality and freedom. The human mind evolved modules for making judgments about property, a basic element of our market economy.

The most common ethos of humans is reciprocity or voluntary exchange, not theimposed communal sharing that is the basis for Marxism and socialism. This confirms Smith’s recognition of the individual’s propensities of both self-interest and consensual exchange.

Evolutionary psychology has substantiated Smith’s and our Founders’ idea of an inherent, mixed human nature. The theory of social constructionism and the group mind that has so debased Western economic and social thought is revealed as false as well as destructive. A commercial republic and market economy based on voluntary exchange of private property and goods reflects and builds upon man’s human nature. The marvelous advantage of capitalism is that it captures the motivation to self-interest and channels it in a way that encourages human cooperation and betterment.

Yet by the time most American students leave high school they have been indoctrinated in Marxist theory, social justice, and disdain for capitalism and a market economy by public education, as I described in Marxist Justice and Western Civilization. Charles Beard’s discredited An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) sows the seeds of Marxist “economic determinism,” the basis for the command societies referred to by Stephen Balch in Is Our Civilization a Bubble? (part II ). Needless to say, college instruction generally worsens rather than improves knowledge of the workings of our economic system.

Future college liberal education about our capitalist economic system, as called for in last week’s article, should include the importance of the universal traits of human nature as revealed by evolutionary psychology and how they are utilized by an exchange economy.

Next week’s article will show how the wisdom of Adam Smith and the Founders combined to form the basis for our commercial republic.

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This is one of a series of occasional articles applying the lessons of Western civilization to contemporary issues relevant to the academy.

Ask a Scholar: Current Racial Score Gap Stats

Stephan Thernstrom — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Is the data about racial achievement gaps in the book No Excuses still true today?

Dear Ask a Scholar,

Regarding score gaps between blacks and whites on NAEP - the Thernstroms in No Excuses wrote that the typical black 17-year-old scored no better than the white 13-year-old. That book was using data from the 90s - is this still true today?
- Alejandro Duran

Answered by Stephan Thernstrom, who is the Winthrop Research Professor of History at Harvard University, where he taught American social history from 1973 to 2008. His books include Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (1964), The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (1973), A History of the American People (1984), and (with his wife Abigail) America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (1997) and No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (2003).

In 2003, my wife Abigail and I published a book titled No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. It opened with a review of the evidence demonstrating how badly African American children were doing in our schools, and then proceeded to review what might explain their poor performance and what might be done to improve it. We noted that black children are far behind whites (and Asians) when they enter school, and ever farther behind at the end of high school. In fact, at the age of 17 they are no better in reading or math than whites still in junior high.

The latest published National Assessment of Educational Progress data available to us when our book went to press were from the 1998 NAEP reading tests and the 2000 NAEP math tests. After the passage of more than a decade, do things look any better?

Alas, the answer is no. The latest precisely comparable evidence is from the 2008 NAEP Trend Study (it can be checked at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/. Another Trend assessment is underway at the present, and results should be out towards the end of 2012.)

In 2008, black 17-year-olds had a median reading score of 266 (on a scale that runs up to 500.) Whites aged 13 actually scored two points higher than African Americans four years older than they were. The same was true in math, with white 13-year-olds averaging a score of 290 and black 17-year-olds only 287.

The more recent assessments that have been completed, such as the 2011 Reading and Mathematics reports, are not strictly comparable from year to year for technical reasons. For one thing, they do not include high school students at all. But NAEP analysts think that they are comparable enough to report discouragingly that the black/white gap in reading for 8th-graders narrowed between 1998 and 2011 in just one state--tiny Delaware. In math, similarly, the 31 point gap between black and white students in the 8th grade was only two points smaller than it had been two decades ago.

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