NAS

California High School Compelled Students to Protest

Ashley Thorne — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Today in the San Francisco Chronicle Debra J. Saunders makes an excellent point about last week’s March 4 protests: while they were supposedly a complaint about shortchanges to education, the protests themselves brought education to a halt. Ultimately, Saunders wrote, “The event showed how little educators and students value education.”

She quotes Ian Glazman-Schillinger, a freshman student at Oceana High in Pacifica, California, who aptly called the protest a “temper tantrum” and said he had no desire to participate in it. But Oceana High School required all students to be involved in activism on March 4.

We have a copy of the letter that went out to all parents of Oceana students. It informed parents that “The Oceana staff has decided to change its regular school schedule on March 4^th and participate in public education activities on this day,” and “we want Oceana students to be a part of the events.” The letter gave parents the opportunity to sign a permission slip for their child to take part in off-campus activities. Students without such permission, it said, “will be involved in activities at school.” Nowhere in the letter were there provisions to choose not to participate in the protests. It says, “Everyone will return to school by mid-morning. The remainder of the day will be filled with educational workshops on the budget crisis and the political process.” One of those “educational workshops” turned out to be a session in which students were strongly exhorted to either call or write a letter to their legislator.

The March 4 demonstrations really were a temper tantrum in that they were loud, close-minded, and laughably self-contradictory. The case of the coercion at Oceana provides a perhaps emblematic glimpse of the activism required of students. Perhaps the only thing worse than observing a temper tantrum is being forced to throw one.

See the NAS article “March Forth” for more background on the nationwide campus protests.

To Infinity and Beyond! Kevin Carey’s Race to Over-the-Top

Ashley Thorne — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

This week Kevin Carey writes in “A ‘Race to the Top’” (subscription required, Chronicle of Higher Education) that President Obama’s project for K-12 school should have a higher ed counterpart.

Kevin Carey is fast becoming a household name in higher education reform circles. Back in 2004 George Leef spotted Carey’s report for Education Trust, which argued that we need to push more students through to college graduation. Last September NAS considered Carey’s predictions about the impending rise of e-colleges, and this January we took note of his interview with Time Magazine, in which he called on state governments to hold colleges and universities accountable for graduating “a reasonable percentage of [their] students compared with other universities that have similar students.”

Carey is policy director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank focused on education policy reform. Education Sector is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Lumina Foundation for Education, among other benefactors. Both the Carnegie Corporation and the Lumina Foundation are vigorous advocates of fulfilling President Obama’s goal to make the United States the most higher-educated nation in the world by 2020.

Carey’s writing corresponds to this goal as well. In this week’s Chronicle article he outlines reform strategies for five areas of higher education: college readiness, college transfer, college learning, graduation rates, and career readiness. He places the words “Truth in” before each of these and, of course, such language appeals to us traditionalists. But let’s take a look at his ideas for reform.

First, Carey recommends moving remedial education back from the beginning of college to the end of high school, by requiring states to test all high school juniors at the end of the school year for remedial placement. This sounds like a plausible improvement. Remedial education in college is a ludicrous waste of time and money. If a student does not possess the aptitude to do college-level work, he should not be admitted to college. Applying this simple rule would be a good way to cut college costs. Students who would like to go to college but who fall short academically should catch up before they matriculate. This would better serve the students, who are often in danger of wasting time and money on a pursuit that isn’t right for them; better for the qualified students who should be spared wasting classroom time with under-prepared peers; and better for the colleges, which should focus on higher education, not hand-holding.

While we agree with Carey that remediation should come before college, we’re a little puzzled by the format he proposes. Testing high school juniors to discover—only then?—which ones cannot write a coherent essay, handle quadratic equations, or distinguish the War of the Roses from the Rose Bowl so that they can spend senior year attempting to reverse what they missed during the previous eleven seems futile. But perhaps a little more futility in high school is better than an expensive waste of time in college.

Second, Carey points out that obstacles to transferring college credits from one college to another often prevent students from graduating and are another waste of time and money. Carey articulated this concern last week in a letter, cosigned by ACTA’s Anne Neal and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity’s Richard Vedder, to Education Secretary Arne Duncan. I have seen this problem firsthand among my classmates who transferred to my small liberal arts college and had to remain in college (and pay for tuition) for extra semesters and sometimes years because their credits did not transfer. So again, I agree with Carey in recognizing limited transferability as a barrier in higher education.

But let’s be clear about the nature of this problem. It is created by colleges, not imposed by anyone else. It is a kind of trade barrier, although the colleges that enforce it often falsely claim that their accreditors make them do it, or state law ties their hands. To the extent it makes any sense at all, it is a way for a college to assert that its home-grown courses are of higher quality, greater difficulty, or of more extra-special specificity than courses elsewhere. Those claims might have validity in a few cases. Someone trying to transfer credits from Joe’s Barber College to Alfonse’s Academy of Tonsorial Studies might, for example, have to brush up his accent.

Third, Carey [under]states what NAS and others are saying, “Pressure to increase college completion can have unintended consequences: Colleges might lower academic standards to push more students through.” That’s exactly right. As Peter Wood pointed out today, ballooning enrollments usually leads to erosion of quality: “The number of graded assignments dwindles; tests become mostly multiple choice and short answer; safeguards against cheating and plagiarism weaken; students who should be pushed are allowed to slack; professors fail to learn the names of every student, let alone every student’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses.”

But Carey’s suggestion for ensuring that academic standards remain strong is to measure student learning outcomes: “every college should be required to submit annually a ‘public learning audit.’” While it is desirable for the public to know what colleges are actually teaching, we’ve found that the bureaucratic focus on student learning outcomes has unintended consequences in the direction of actually lowering academic standards. Outcomes assessment encourages teachers to set the lowest possible goals for their classes so that, come assessment, they can prove that they have met those goals. It also forces teachers to concentrate on aspects of their subjects that are easily measurable, rather than intrinsically important. (See “Seat Time at the AAC&U” for more on the outcomes assessment movement). So while Carey has the right instinct for what will happen to higher education shaped by Obama’s goal, the safeguard he proposes is the wrong one.

Fourth, he advises that states mail graduation rates for every institution to all students in eighth grade or higher. In his interview with Time, Carey argued that graduation rates are a significant measure of a college’s success. Higher graduation rates (at least, comparable to universities of similar size) are almost always a good sign—although he conceded that Harvard’s 98% is perhaps too high—“I’m pretty sure you’d have to shoot somebody not to graduate from Harvard.” But does a high graduation rate generally signify a job well done? It could also point to grade inflation and relaxed academic standards. We have recently seen Toyota get into trouble with quality standards for attempting to scale up production too quickly. Creating higher graduation rates shouldn’t be hard if colleges are nudged to a rule of “everyone passes.”

Carey adds that “states should publish the total number of degrees and credentials that each institution will need to produce in every year from 2011 to 2020 in order to contribute their share of meeting President Obama's college completion goal.” While I’m not sure how those reports would benefit prospective college students, I’d be interested to see those numbers. In “Cold Brine: The College Board Loses Its Senses,” we at NAS tried our hand at calculating the necessary expansion. In short, Obama’s goal requires roughly a doubling of American higher education as we now know it. We believe that while indeed, America is falling behind the rest of the world academically, the solution lies in improving the quality, not the quantity, of education.

The term “share of meeting President Obama's college completion goal” is a bit ominous. Colleges don’t have any legal obligation to balloon themselves into an unmanageable and educationally destructive size just because President Obama thinks that is a nifty idea. Making them report on the number of degrees awarded is a subtle tactic of intimidation, especially as we approach the era of “direct loans,” in which the federal government will have the power to decide who will and who won’t get the necessary financing to attend college, and colleges and universities will be more than ever on the DOE’s leash for eligibility to participate in the program.

Lastly, Carey elevates “career readiness” as the end of higher education, and he says states should “publicly report work-force outcomes for individual colleges and universities...one, three, five, 10, and 20 years after students leave college.” Perhaps it’s old-fashioned of me, but I wonder whether how college graduates would feel about being monitored so closely. And while earning a higher income is the reason why more and more people go to college (although it’s common knowledge that post-graduation earnings often don’t increase with the possession of a degree), it shouldn’t be the primary gauge of educational success. Nor should it be the only reason to go to college in the first place. As Diane Auer Jones wrote last week, “I am not against vocational training, but we should be honest about the fact that vocational training, even if it takes place on a college campus, is not the same thing as a higher education.”

These five points were meant by Carey as criteria for theoretical “Race to the Top” funds in higher education. In evaluating his reasoning, we take our cue from one commenter who wrote:

Also, lurking here as usual is Carey's assumption that learning accountability is monodirectional—only the school, never the students. I'd be more amenable to Carey's Foucauldian demands for documentation and oversight if universities could also submit the How Often Students Blew Off Class Matrix, the Plagiarism Index, and the Yearly Report on Never Doing the Reading.

It’s true, accountability goes both ways, but academic responsibility has become more elusive than ever. While we agree with Carey in several respects including his points on remedial education and course transfer, we don’t think a deluge of federal spending is the way to reform higher education. Trying to measure everything students learn, engorging classrooms to pump up graduation rates, and considering college as mere vocational training will only degenerate the intellectual heritage we bequeath to the next generation.

Reply to Dave Taylor Re: March Forth

Peter Wood — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Editor's note: This posting is a response to a comment on the NAS article "March Forth."

My thanks to Dave Taylor for his cogent response and good question. I should say first that my observation on the excessive scaling up of universities wasn’t meant to apply to California in particular, but to the situation across the country. California, however, is the leading example of a public university system that has grown beyond its capacity to perform its mission competently.

Mr. Taylor asks me to clarify my statement, in which I agreed with the AAUP that the shift away from full-time faculty members to part-time and adjunct teachers erodes the quality of higher education. The AAUP sees the danger arising from administrators who can hire and fire the part-timers at “whim.” But I see the danger as arising from another quarter: “It comes from scaling up university enrollments past the point in which it is financially feasible to sustain the curriculum on the basis of a mostly full-time tenured faculty.”

That was a very terse way to summarize an argument that didn’t properly fit in a brief report on the March 4 protests. Mr. Taylor correctly spots one of the unexpressed points: colleges and universities that admit more students than they can properly teach compromise their educational programs. But since each additional student brings an increase in tuition revenue, how does expanding its enrollment hurt a college or university financially? Isn’t more revenue just more revenue?

My point—which is not especially novel—is that high-quality college instruction has few and limited economies of scale. The largest single cost in higher education has long been faculty salaries. (This may be changing, but more on that below.) Higher education overall has achieved little of the enormous gains in “productivity” that most other sectors of the economy have achieved in recent decades. A good writing class can seldom be larger than twenty students without a steep drop-off in the level of individual attention to each student and without reducing meaningful assignments to a handful a semester. (Ideally a freshman writing class should require weekly original papers. I doubt that there are any such courses in the California public system.)

Ever since the post-World War II boom in college enrollments, administrators have struggled to find ways to increase faculty productivity. The most famous step was the creation of mega-lectures, usually in introductory courses. A few faculty members excel at this form of instruction, but it really doesn’t solve the larger problem. Frequently the lecture course is married to “discussion sections” led by teaching assistants and adjuncts. So the mega-lecture approach turns out just to be a backdoor to the same labor-intensive teaching that it was meant to ameliorate. Moreover, students as a whole are less and less interested in attending lectures. Posted course notes, the professor’s own Power Point summaries, and online versions of such courses proliferate.

The search for greater faculty “productivity” in teaching always hits the wall that traditional teaching, done right, is essentially a small group undertaking. How small the group depends on the subject and the ability of the teacher. Some subjects require intensive instruction; others can be scaled to groups of 50 or 75 students, perhaps with the help of a T.A. But scaling even at that modest level almost always entails some erosion of quality. The number of graded assignments dwindles; tests become mostly multiple choice and short answer; safeguards against cheating and plagiarism weaken; students who should be pushed are allowed to slack; professors fail to learn the names of every student, let alone every student’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses.

The latest way to achieve the economies of increased instructional productivity in higher education, of course, is online curricula. Online course are increasingly popular with students and they do, to some extent, bypass some of the stringencies of small-group teaching. My guess is that, in time, a large percentage of high school graduates will opt for online-only or online-mostly college instruction. If that were to happen, the deeper problems that lay behind the March 4 protests would become irrelevant. The public will have chosen a “good-enough” substitute for the relatively expensive, too-often-mediocre, and sometimes spottily delivered public university offerings of today.

Can an online curriculum provide a really top-drawer liberal arts education? Maybe not, but that isn’t really the issue. The issue is that if our society—or California in particular—continues to stick with the idea that nearly every high school graduate should go to college, the only financially feasible way to achieve that consistent with maintaining any worthwhile level of academic quality will be for a large percentage of those students to study online. There is simply not enough money that can be taxed out of taxpayers or borrowed against the supposed future earnings of college graduates to send these students to colleges run on the basis of full-time professors teaching moderately-sized classes.

I said above that the largest single cost in higher education has traditionally been faculty salaries. But that may no longer be the case. Two years ago the Department of Education reported that what it classes as “administrative” positions had finally edged past the number of teaching positions in higher education overall. We have surely seen an extraordinary expansion of the non-teaching side of the university. Mr. Taylor suggests that I am unrealistic (it is a “nice fantasy”) to think that colleges and universities would “cut faculty and administrators.” Perhaps. Maybe California has not yet reached that existential moment when it has to decide whether maintaining thousands of positions for quasi-therapeutic counselors, identity politics factotums, sustainability officers, and the like is so important that it is willing to suffer a decline in the quality of its academic programs to a derisory level.

To be clear, I don’t have a “socialist” response and Mr. Taylor’s remark on that score in turn perplexes me. How is it “socialist” for California—or any state—to say, in effect, “We cannot afford to pay for a traditional college education for everyone?” I am not in favor of “manipulating” anyone to lower “demand” for higher education. Lowering state incentives that stimulate demand isn’t manipulation. It is just good sense.

Suitable for Framing: Revisiting Virginia Tech's Diversity Litmus Test

Ashley Thorne — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

In order not to lose sight of some of NAS's best articles and the ones that have received the most attention, we are re-posting one or two pieces from the same month a year ago. Today we offer "Suitable for Framing," written by Ashley Thorne on Virginia Tech's infamous policy requiring faculty members to demonstrate their commitment to diversity. After pressure from NAS and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the university backed away from the policy, but some of the constraining language still remains in the promotion and tenure documents (see FIRE's case materials for details). This piece was originally posted here.

Last week, NAS wrote about how Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) has made “diversity” service a requirement for faculty promotion and tenure. There, we showed that

“Diversity” is not a category of academic accomplishment equivalent to high-quality teaching or success in scholarly research and publishing. “Diversity” is an ideology. The term summarizes a set of objectives popular on one part of the political spectrum. Virginia Tech, which is a public university, has no business turning a partisan political credo into a test that must be passed for faculty members to win tenure or to advance in rank.

The promotion and tenure policy is new, but Virginia Tech has been making breathless announcements about diversity for a long time. Back in 2005 the university had already made commitment to diversity "suitable for framing." Now it simply wants to frame faculty advancement as dependent on "diversity accomplishments."

But not everyone is happy with this. Things have been heating up.

Yesterday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) sent a letter to Virginia Tech president Charles Steger, calling on him to revise these standards to be in accordance “with the First Amendment and common sense.”

Tuesday, Virginia Tech’s student newspaper Collegiate Times joined in expressing alarm. The editorial board, concurring with NAS, wrote, “Diversity should be held as important, but ultimately it is an ideology.” The editors concluded, “An enforcement of this idea undermines not only the idea of faculty research, but also may lead to another, more disturbing outcome: a façade of interest in diversity while building resentment toward the entire enterprise.” We are encouraged to see that the students of Virginia Tech understand that the university has overstepped its role.

Today, Robin Wilson published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education covering the policy. Her piece mentions our objections but is ultimately sympathetic to the university. Wilson interviewed Virginia Tech provost Mark McNamee, who said that the diversity guideline is “merely intended to encourage faculty members to pursue activities related to diversity, not to require it.”

One of our readers, John K. Wilson, also initially rejoined that diversity service was not mandatory. But when he examined the policy more closely, he changed his mind. He noted that the Promotion and Tenure Guidelines state, “The committee expects all dossiers to demonstrate the candidate’s active involvement in diversity.” Wilson also uncovered a document we had not seen that throws even starker light on the Provost’s intentions. The provost’s May 29, 2008 letter called “Guidance from the University Promotion and Tenure Committee elaborates on the idea of “diversity accomplishments” as a requirement:

Diversity accomplishments: Diversity accomplishments are a meaningful part of the faculty review process. Candidates must do a better job of participating in and documenting their involvement in diversity initiatives. Diversity accomplishments are especially important for candidates seeking promotion to full professor. Please use the categories developed by the Commission on Equal Opportunity and diversity to prompt and organize diversity-related contributions. The categories may be found at section VII. C. 1-8 of the promotion and tenure guidelines. They are also available at www.provost.vt.edu/documents/reporting_diversity.php. Committees are asked to develop working expectations for department members, perhaps sharing good examples, and to review diversity contributions included in the dossier with those expectations in mind.

Thank you John Wilson. We note here that a combination of NAS sleuthing and an independent scholar’s initiative have uncovered an important story that the professional journalists at the Chronicle of Higher Education were unable to find even when they were looking. The “mainstream press” in this case was willing to take the provost’s self-serving account at face value.

The documents we cite are all publicly available:

Promotion and Tenure Guidelines 2008-2009
Dossier Guidelines 2008-2009
Activities Report Guidelines 2008-2009
Guidance from the University Promotion and Tenure Committee 5/29/08

Faculty members have until the end of this month to vote on the guidelines for promotion and tenure, but their approval may merely be a formality. According to Debra Stoudt, the College’s Associate Dean for Academic Policies and Procedures, “Chairs and heads already have been asked to begin aligning departmental guidelines with this document.”

We join with FIRE in urging Virginia Tech to reject this ideological litmus test and to reinstate freedom of conscience for its faculty.

Member Alert

Peter Wood — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Have you been getting your issues of Academic Questions on time? We have received some complaints from members who did not get issues or who have received issues bizarrely late. In February, for example, our publisher, Springer, apparently sent copies of our Winter 2008-09 issue on Liberal Arts and the Family more than a year late to some members. Other members report not receiving the Winter 2009-10 issue on Academic Revisionisms, mailed in November 2009. If you have had either of these problems or other lapses with your subscription to Academic Questions, let us know by emailing nasonweb@nas.org.

We want to make sure you receive the issues, and we want to get to the bottom of the problem with Springer’s handling of our subscription fulfillment.

March Forth

Peter Wood and Ashley Thorne — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Today is March 4^th—a day to march forth. Thousands of students at universities around the country and especially on California campuses are rallying to protest budget cuts to public higher education (see map of events). Today has been proclaimed a “national day of action to defend education” by a long list of progressive and socialist groups. There’s a sit-in at Syracuse University in New York and a strike, teach-in, and rally at Louisiana State University. At San Francisco State University, protesters formed a picket line this morning and will continue protesting up to tonight’s “massive rally.”

March 4 may not be the most auspicious date for such a protest. It’s the anniversary of the deposition of King Henry VI in 1461, which ignited the Wars of the Roses in England. It’s also the date in 1519 on which Cortez landed on the coast of Mexico to launch his fateful march on the Aztec empire. In 1791 Vermont was admitted to the United States as the fourteenth state—setting in train circumstances that would lead eventually to the election of Bernie Sanders as a United States Senator. Nor was that the last catastrophe. In 1918 the first-ever case of the Spanish flu was reported, marking the onset of the worldwide pandemic.

Not all the omens of March 4 are bad. In 1824 on this date the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck was founded in Britain.

So will the student protest against budget cuts save American higher education from shipwreck? Or will it doom the Aztec empire of our imperious public universities?

Students are evidently upset over rising tuition costs and what they call “privatization” of higher education. In other words, the aim is to protect state funding for public institutions. The American Association of University Professors echoes their goal. In the most recent AAUP newsletter, General Secretary Gary Rhoades expressed the AAUP’s solidarity with the protests.

Mr. Rhoades offers a serious-sounding explanation for why faculty members should endorse this protest. He seems to see this as an occasion to advance the AAUP’s own diagnosis of what ails the university. To that end, he outlines three ways in which his organization can build on the discontent of the students. First, he characterizes the cutbacks in state support for public colleges and universities as an attempt to “privatize” them. Second, he declares that “our challenge is to reverse patterns of resource allocation within institutions.” This means, “Give less money to administrators and more to faculty members.” Third, he calls for faculty members to reassert their role in “shared governance.”

These don’t exactly sound like the grievances that have brought traffic to a standstill at the University of California, Santa Cruz or prompted a “daylong symbolic occupation” at the University of Oklahoma. But we can’t blame the AAUP for getting on the bandwagon.

The bandwagon itself appears to have been set in motion by a group called the California Coordinating Committee. This is one of those ad hoc radical blossomings familiar to anyone who pays attention to leftist organizational tactics. The Committee has a vague name, mysterious antecedents, and lots and lots of dubious friends. Its call for the March 4^th protest has been endorsed by 186 groups including BAMN (By Any Means Necessary, the frequently lawless group that promotes racial preferences), the zombie-like Students for a Democratic Society that has returned from its crypt, the oxymoronic Freedom Socialist Party, the New School in Exile, and such lovely-sounding groups as FIST (Fight Imperialism, Stand Together).

To us this sounds like a typical exercise in socialist agitprop. Large numbers of students are concerned about tuition increases at their colleges and universities. Radical groups are attempting to capture this fear and apprehension for their own purposes by misleadingly framing the problem as one of class struggle. The California Coordinating Committee depicts the budget stringencies as an attack on “working people and people of color.” It urges students to see a conspiracy that serves the interests of “the financial institutions that caused the recession in the first place.”

In short, today’s demonstrations are an instance of socialist rabble-rousing. It indeed speaks to a profound weakness in American higher education that so many college students are susceptible to such demagoguery. The endlessly repeated declarations by college administrators that their institutions equip students to “think critically” come down to this. In a moment when critical thinking is actually needed to distinguish between real issues and exciting propaganda, all too many students succumb to the lure of the latter.

In our view public higher education across the country does face some deep financial problems. Those problems are rooted in vast overexpansion of colleges and universities in the last several decades. We in fact agree with at least one part of the AAUP’s diagnosis: “institutions have increased their relative investment in administrative positions and expenditures, and decreased their relative investment in educational positions and expenditures.” There has been a bewildering expansion of supernumerary administrative positions, including diversity officers, identity group deans, directors and staff of women’s centers, sustainability officers, residence life curriculum developers, outcomes assessors, and campus therapists of every conceivable brand. It is not clear that the AAUP realizes that it has wandered into the territory of agreeing with the NAS. But if the AAUP is serious about the problem of administrative bloat, it will need to take on all those fashionable PC annexes to the basic educational mission of the university.

We may also have some common ground with the AAUP in its worry about “a restructuring of the academic workforce from a largely full-time tenure-track faculty to one that is overwhelmingly contingent on managerial discretion and whim.” Some of what is indispensable to a genuine liberal arts education depends on having a faculty that is full-time and fully dedicated to the students in its charge. The danger, however, doesn’t come from “managerial discretion and whim.” It comes from scaling up university enrollments past the point in which it is financially feasible to sustain the curriculum on the basis of a mostly full-time tenured faculty.

These are important issues and ones on which we would welcome reasoned debate with the AAUP. The March 4^th student protests don’t look to us as an occasion where reasoned debate on anything stands much of a chance. We said we can’t blame the AAUP for jumping on this mass protest bandwagon—we can’t blame it but we do regret its choice. What’s amiss in higher education today isn’t going to be set right by demagoguery, chants, and rallies. Now more than ever we need serious foundational thinking about the role of colleges and universities in our society. It serves no good purpose to continue to pretend that higher education can grow its way out of its difficulties. We need to find ways to educate Americans that America can afford.

Incidentally, March 4 was also the date in 1778 when the Continental Congress ratified the Treaty of Amity.

Sustainability Links

Ashley Thorne — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

In the same vein as the higher education articles of interest posting, we offer here a few sustainability-in-higher-ed articles of note for this week. Regular NAS readers know that we have been tracking the campus sustainability movement and its implications for the future of higher education for the past several years. Based on this research, our sense is that sustainability is a concept that sells stewardship of the earth but in fact distorts education, subverts individual liberties, and undermines Western civilization as embodied by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the family, and freedom of choice.

Here are some articles that show how sustainability plays out on campus today:

UF Asks Gators to Mark 40 Days of Change to Commemorate Earth Day, UF Sustainability
The University of Florida’s Office of Sustainability is celebrating “40 days of change” leading up to Earth Day. So has Earth Day become the new Easter?

Hands-On Learning Fuels Sustainability Class, Shane Arman, UW Oshkosh Today
Students at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh study the role of the university in the sustainability movement. They read Greening the Ivory Tower (1998), conduct a campus environmental audit, and participate in Recyclemania and Earth Day. See the syllabus for Environmental Studies 390: Campus Sustainability.

Maine Students Gather for Sustainability Institute Led By Bowdoin Students, Bowdoin Campus News
Students held sustainability training sessions at Unity College last weekend. See also Bowdoin’s statement of commitment to sustainability: “Sustainability is more than an intellectual concept at Bowdoin. It is at the heart of our enduring commitment to “the common good.”

Articles of Interest This Week

Ashley Thorne — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

I was out of town earlier this week visiting family and have since been getting caught up on the latest happenings in higher ed. In case you were on spring break too, I thought I'd share some of my findings. While I was playing golf in Texas, George Leef and Richard Vedder were debating Margaret Spellings on whether we need more college graduates; the group By Any Means Necessary was campaigning to reverse California's ban on racial preferences; David Horowitz was sitting in class at UMass Amherst investigating classroom indoctrination; and Anne Neal and others were asking Arne Duncan to address credit transfer problems.

So for your perusal, here are this week's must-reads:

Airy Rhetoric Versus Gritty Reality, George Leef, PopeCenter
PopeCenter president George Leef and Center for College Affordability and Productivity President Richard Vedder took part in a PBS televised debate last week over the question, “Does the United States need more college graduates to remain a world economic power?” Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund, argued the affirmative side and were challenged by Leef and Vedder. In this article, Leef summarizes the arguments on both sides and explains why putting more students through college is a bad idea.

Saving the Life of the Mind [subscription required], Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education
An introduction to the Chronicle’s special report on the future of the liberal arts: “As pressure mounts to produce skilled workers, colleges try to promote intellectual values.”

Philosophy, for Profit [subscription required], Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education
This article is part of the special liberal arts report. It profiles the American Public University System’s online, for-profit, marketed-to-soldiers, liberal arts model, where the provost says, “I want online Oxford.”

What Will Replace Behemoth State University? Robert C. Koons, Public Discourse
New technological developments and pressing national needs suggest that the future of higher education may be friendlier to the classical tradition of liberal education, writes Koons, president of NAS’s Texas affiliate.

How Bad is the Indoctrination in Our Colleges? David Horowitz, FrontPageMag.com
David Horowitz visits a class at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and witnesses firsthand how professors supply students with ready-made conclusions.

The Tortured Logic of BAMN, Mark Bauerlein, Minding the Campus
The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary (or BAMN for short) is on a campaign to strike down Proposition 209, which bans racial preferences in the state of California, by attacking Ward Connerly. Two years ago, BAMN also tried to strike down Michigan’s ban on racial preferences; see Terry Pell’s NAS article on the group’s failed attempt to reinstate affirmative action.

Higher Ed Experts Urge Secretary of Education to Tackle Transfer Policies, Press Release, American Council of Trustees and Alumni
Five higher education experts—Anne Neal, Kevin Carey, Frederick M. Hess, Richard Vedder, and Mark Schneider—urge Education Secretary Arne Duncan to work on improving credit transferability in order to increase graduation rates.

Unimaginable Calamity

Peter Wood — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

“Unimaginable calamity” is the phrase that Al Gore used this week in a Sunday New York Times op-ed. He was writing of course on his signature subject: the prospects of a catastrophe resulting from global warming. What summoned Mr. Gore from his igloo of recent silence is the increasingly wobbly public support for the idea that human activity is significantly warming our planet. The Climategate emails made public in late November and the cascade of news since about the lies, evasions, missing data, ill-sourced extravagant claims, stonewalling, and cover-ups that have been part of what Mr. Gore calls “the science of global warming” have shaken public confidence.

The public might have been shaken still more if the New York Times and other major print and broadcast media had treated Climategate and the ensuing scandals more seriously. Some portion of the public seemingly still relies on the old media as a source of news. But the cordon sanitaire that the major media placed around this ongoing scandal has proved ineffective. The American public has begun to size up the real picture.

This gives the phrase “unimaginable calamity” a certain ring. The real unimaginable calamity facing Mr. Gore is the spread of skepticism. Insisting that global warming is backed by “scientific consensus” doesn’t wash anymore. That supposed consensus was—to borrow Noam Chomsky’s memorable phrase—a “manufactured consensus,” achieved by suppressing contrary views, blackballing dissenting researchers, and, on more than one occasion, just making stuff up. The attempt to stigmatize skeptics as “denialists” is backfiring. Better to be a denialist, than a… well what? A liarist? The word seems to slip easily onto the shoulders of climate change gurus such as the Pennsylvania State University’s inventive Michael Mann, the University of East Anglia’s forgetful Phil Jones, and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s chief, the lubricious Rajendra Pachauri.

The National Association of Scholars isn’t really suited to take positions on the scientific substance of a debate like this. The hypothesis of human-caused global warming may stand or fall; ultimately that will be decided by good scientific work. The NAS, however, does have a stake in the integrity of science as one of the central enterprises of the modern university—and we have long linked the freedom of inquiry in higher education to the persistence of free institutions in society at large. Being free to ask hard questions and to seek conscientiously for well-founded answers is bedrock for governing ourselves wisely. The university ought to be the place where circular arguments encounter the circuit breaker of skeptical examination.

Our republic, of course, has never been free of fads and manias. Foreign observers, as far back as the eighteenth century, have noticed our capacity to entertain extraordinary enthusiasms that could never withstand rational reflection—all the while maintaining our placid confidence that we are acting as sober adults. In 1801 a New England counterfeiter named Justus Winchell prompted the residents of Rutland County Vermont to chase around the countryside with witch hazel divining rods and shovels to unearth hidden gold. Lest we laugh too hard at the credulity of our forebears, we should consider the credulity of more recent Americans, witch hazel rods and shovels in hand seeking their fortunes in the derivatives market. In between lie a couple of centuries of millennial cults, market bubbles, gold rushes, pet rocks, flagpole sittings, and hula hoops. America has had Great Awakenings, Great Depressions, and Bernie Madoff. Unwillingness to believe implausible tales is not our failing. Give us a rollicking narrative about something—be it a celebrity divorce or planetary extinction—and we are all ears.

Al Gore’s “unimaginable calamity” probably needs to be reckoned in these terms: an intellectual hula hoop for that portion of the public that needs a little existential gyration to warm up to life. It has been said by more than one observer that the fantasies of global warming catastrophe are a kind of substitute religion, replete with a salvation doctrine, rituals of expiation, and a collection of demons to be cast out. It is a religion that is conveniently this-worldly: reducing your carbon footprint has a kind of mechanical gaiety to it. Going without trays in the campus cafeteria and forfeiting plastic straws is the new Green mortification.

At what point does an idea that is originally framed as a scientific hypothesis become so untenable that it slips to the status of a punch line? No one today believes that interstellar “ether” is necessary to propagate light, or that fire involves the invisible element phlogiston. These were serious scientific ideas in their time, along with many other discredited theories. The people who believed them were not stupid. But the ideas failed key tests and were displaced by better hypotheses. Other hypotheses linger in the shadows long after they seemingly have lost the main scientific debate. Geology was pretty content to work for two centuries with James Hutton’s idea that the earth is shaped by simple events played out over immense stretches of time. Such uniformitarianism displaced the belief that the world had been shaped by catastrophes such as Noah’s flood. But since the discovery that the earth has been repeatedly subject to asteroid impacts, such as the one that 65 million years ago produced the Chicxulub Crater near the Yucatán Peninsula, catastrophism has staged a comeback.

The revival of serious scientific interest in radically disruptive events probably played a role in making global warming theory seem plausible. For sure, we have no reason to say that man-made global warming theory is inherently implausible. But the tactics of those who have been most active in promoting the idea are giving it practical implausibility. When we are told by impassioned believers that the science is settled and there is no time for anything but radical action, we should be as skeptical as if we were pitched a time-share condo at the bottom of Chixculub Crater.

The burden of proof for this theory has shifted. Those who think, in good faith, that man-made global warming is real, can no longer expect their claims to have an easy passage to public acceptance. They need instead to assume the burden of validating their claims with transparent science, which includes making the data public and transparent; answering critics with reason and evidence rather than with sneers and exclusion; and ensuring that they give full intellectual scope to the discrepancies and alternative explanations. When the head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit Phil Jones (currently on leave) admitted recently that there has been no significant global warming for the last fifteen years, we witnessed a theory in the midst of scholarly collapse. Pennsylvania State University has attempted to exonerate Professor Michael Mann from the strongest charges of scientific misconduct, but there, too, the “hide the decline” professor of global warming has burned up his reputation for scholarly and scientific probity. No one who seeks a reputation for serious scientific investigation will ever again be able to build on the work of Jones or Mann, and the institutions associated with them will likewise remain under the shadow of settled suspicion.

The public is quite likely to render adverse judgment on man-made global warming well before the academy does. That’s not just because the public is fickle and given to hasty judgments. The public is fickle, but it is also alert to the odor of fraud. The academy, however, has sunk a deep well of belief in Gorish catastrophism. The National Association of Scholars over the last two years has been tracking the “sustainability” movement as it has swept across American higher education—and settled like a stagnant pond over K-12 education. Children grow up now thinking that the global warning catastrophe is just a few incandescent light bulbs or a discarded soda bottle away. And colleges and universities have adopted the “climate change” doctrine as pretty much their Westminster Confession.

Long after the man in the street will guffaw at the mention of Al Gore’s name and “unimaginable calamity” has become the name of an Icelandic rock band, our colleges and universities will be teaching courses on the imminent disaster of manmade global warming. That’s what hula hoops do. They go round and round.

Chivalry Lives: An Interview with Blayne Bennett

Ashley Thorne — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

The Network of enlightened Women (NeW) is an organization for conservative women college students. It has an increasing number of chapters on college campuses across the country. Its president, Karin Agness, who has an article on campus feminism in a forthcoming issue of the NAS journal Academic Questions, founded NeW in 2004 as a book club at the University of Virginia.

NAS and NeW have much in common. We are both concerned about the campus hookup culture and the influence of feminism in higher education. We take a traditional view on sexuality, foster debate on controversial topics, and uphold equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes. Our shared goals led us to one another and we are beginning to work together in various ways.

Most people who see the NeW acronym wonder why the e isn’t capitalized (I did). The leaders wanted the organization to stand in contrast to the feminist National Organization for Women (NOW), whose all-caps acronym looks somewhat angry. The enlightened women decline to adopt the raised-fist strategies of feminists. Their approach, as executive director Holly Carter put it, is to “challenge the negative stuff on campus in a positive way.” One way they are doing this is by putting on their second annual “Gentlemen’s Showcase” locally at Arizona State University and nationally through a Facebook online forum.

Those who nominate someone for the showcase must describe a “gentlemanly act” he has done. The ten most nominated ASU men were honored at the evening showcase on March 2.

Blayne Bennett, president of the ASU chapter, graciously agreed to an interview with the National Association of Scholars to tell us more about what NeW is doing. Blayne is a senior and finance major at ASU. When she graduates, she hopes to work in economic and regulatory policy analysis.

To learn more about the Network of enlightened Women, visit www.enlightenedwomen.org.

NAS: How did you get involved with NeW? What specifically attracted you to the organization?

Bennett: I became involved with NeW at Arizona State University as a freshman. I knew that I wanted to join a club for women, so I started my search. Somewhat of a blessing in disguise, I wasn’t accepted as a volunteer for the Violence Free Crisis Line, an organization I had been involved with in high school. One afternoon I passed a table for NeW, and after a three-minute conversation I knew it was perfect. NeW was everything I wanted: a club for women to discuss important issues without the precursor of hating men. I had no idea the doors that NeW would open for me.

NAS: NeW’s mission is to “foster the education and leadership skills of conservative university women.” Are liberal university women allowed in?

Bennett: At ASU we have had several liberal women attend our meetings in the past. We encourage respectful discussion and debate. Having to defend your personal beliefs is the best way to cement your ideology with a logical foundation.

NAS: The NeW website says, “NeW is also devoted to expanding the intellectual diversity on college campuses.” What does “intellectual diversity” mean to you?

Bennett: I believe intellectual diversity is the discussion of opposing beliefs, values and opinions. A university education is often dogmatic with theories taught and accepted as truths. NeW seeks to challenge this system by discussing issues that have more than one perspective. Discussing diverse viewpoints not only helps people become more well-rounded, it also requires them to justify their own views.

NAS: You appear in the promo video for the showcase, and at one point you say, “hopefully we’ll have a culture shift” as a result of getting people to think about chivalry. What kind of culture shift do you seek?

Bennett: I am seeking to change the framework in which people think of relationships, starting with the college culture. When we were shooting the video and asking if students thought chivalry was dead, we received a resounding “YES!” from the women, and the men seemed to be confused as to what even characterized chivalrous behavior. The current framework is not generating healthy relationships. I believe that chivalry provides the positive framework to maximize the overall happiness of men and women.

NAS: How does promoting gentlemanliness advance the goals of NeW? In other words, why are you looking for gentlemen? How does it challenge the dominant mindset among college students which has been instilled by feminism? What is that dominant mindset?

Bennett: The radical feminist movement has vilified men. The Vagina Monologues is a play with a viciously anti-male agenda that is shown on college campuses across the nation. The play portrays all men as evil, except one: Bob, whose only redeeming quality is that “he liked to look at it.” By promoting gentlemanly behavior, NeW hopes to expose how relationships have deteriorated as a result of the feminist movement. Men have been told to that chivalrous acts are demeaning to women and that they should respect women’s independence. Women are told we should want to be independent and self-sufficient. But the responses I hear from women reveal something completely different: women want to be treated like ladies. Encouraging gentlemanly behavior promotes respect and reverence between the sexes.

NAS: Dictionary.com defines a gentleman, in one sense, as “a civilized, educated, sensitive, or well-mannered man.” Is this how you define a gentleman?

Bennett: I believe a gentleman is driven to be successful but is not self-serving; he is confident but not conceited. A gentleman understands how his actions impact others and holds fellow human beings in the highest regard.

NAS: One Facebook reader (male) recently challenged NeW’s initiative, saying, “You have this vision of an ideal man that does not exist,” and claiming that women are not attracted to “good guys.” Is there some truth to what he says?

Bennett: Challenges like the one you mentioned reinforce my commitment to this movement. I have the privilege of reading every single nomination submitted, and I always catch myself with a huge grin as I read about these phenomenal men. There are hundreds of great men at ASU alone, and hundreds of women that appreciate their kindness. This gives me faith that what our small group of women is doing at ASU strikes a nerve with the greater population. Chivalry is not dead; it’s just dormant.

NAS: Does NeW at ASU ever come under attack by others on campus or in the media? What is it about the enlightened women that irks them?

Bennett: NeW challenges the politically correct ideology prevalent on college campuses, and criticizes the radical feminists’ quest for power. Feminists have used legislation and policy to further their agenda and the result is not equality of opportunity but equality of outcome—essentially a quota system—which is harmful to both men and women. Radical feminists promote policies that are biased to favor women. Opposing these goals is not the most popular stance to take, and NeW has been criticized for being “anti-woman.” Enlightened women understand that to be “pro-woman” it is not necessary to be “anti-man.”

NAS: You have brought Christina Hoff Sommers, a member of NAS’s Board of Advisors, to campus to speak about “the underlying radical feminist agenda of the Vagina Monologues,” and your website says the event sparked some good debate. Did her talk and the conversations it inspired cause ASU students to look more critically on the play?

Bennett: The Vagina Monologues aims to be much more than an entertaining play. Eve Ensler, the creator of the Vagina Monologues, proclaims it to be “the Bible for a new generation of women.” Cast members of the Vagina Monologues came to the event and challenged Dr. Sommers during the question and answer period. Dr. Sommers handled the questions extremely well and countered with sound logic, causing students and even some of the cast members to concede that the message of the Monologues does not speak for every woman.

NAS: A prevalent idea taught in college today is that much of life is socially constructed, including truth, meaning, and gender. In other words, truth and meaning are relative to each person’s own conclusions, and inherent maleness and femaleness do not exist. Do you agree?

Bennett: I believe there are inherent masculine and feminine qualities; our bodies are so biologically and chemically different! While I completely agree that environment and culture play a huge role in human development, there are some things I believe to be innate. For example, humans around the world smile to express happiness, despite cultural differences. I believe there are inherent masculine and feminine traits, and I embrace my femininity.