You Can Help NAS Through ‘Give a Tweet’
Be the first to donate to the National Association of Scholars through Give a Tweet, a new Twitter fundraising site! Give a Tweet enables 
companies and individuals to match donations so that giving can increase. The transaction is completely secure and the site is easy to use. And when you give or match, you can help get the word out through Twitter. Give a Tweet sends a tweet to your followers, or you can donate anonymously.
If you appreciate what NAS is doing to revive intellectual freedom and reasoned scholarship on American college campuses, please take a minute to register as a donor or matcher with Give a Tweet. Your gifts are 100% tax-deductible.
To learn more about Give a Tweet, click here: FAQs.
To follow NAS on Twitter, click here: NAS Twitter page.
On Dewey and Critical Thinking
At American Thinker, Chuck Roger considers the damage done to education by John Dewey:
Psychologizing introduced an emotionalism to education that defocused the student from facts, knowledge, and contributing to the prosperity of society. Teachers gradually split into factions, with ruinous consequences for American society. Some teachers continued to embrace the knowledge goal, but many of them began to indoctrinate their captive young sponges in “critical thinking” — a euphemism for rabidly questioning everything and adopting a mindset that rejects all that has gone before. Traditional American values and free-market capitalism have become primary targets of critical thinking.
Roger also notes Candace de Russy’s post on how sociology today encourages students to hate America.
Light a Candle: For-Profit Education, Online Learning
As everyone knows, state funding of higher education is notoriously unreliable. After a nationwide surge in direct spending to universities (the boom years), the bust has arrived. Big surprise.
While direct appropriations to state universities have foundered, the state and federal money spent on students increased. This follows public choice theory: politicians spend money to gain the greatest number of votes. There are far more students (and their parents) who vote than there are institutions who want government money.
This is good for those students who use the money wisely and it is good for “school choice”: unlike K-12, students can choose their state college or university. Universities with declining enrollments moan and groan when students head to their competitors. To wit: my own university consists of two campuses: one with skyrocketing enrollment, the other in perpetual decline.
No doubt the news for those wedded to the status quo is bad. Nevertheless, recent trends in nontraditional education have taken off during this crisis. Even before the fiscal bust, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and many others noted that colleges had gotten flabby–not with money but with their way of delivering education in the 21st century.
Campuses facing fiscal difficulty need to get aggressive with educational innovation. Online learning is up (again). Philanthropist Bill Gates is expressing interest in putting his money into improving online education. For the first time, I am using a free online textbook funded by the federal government and distinguished foundations.
Institutions with enrollment and/or funding shortfalls are turning to for-profit alliances. One of the biggest surprises: the National Labor College has formed a for-profit joint venture that retains faculty unionization (NLC is dedicated to promoting unionism). “Bread-and-butter” union faculty ought to take notice: Change or die.
Here’s to a new year hoping that my own institution (Southern Illinois University) starts lighting candles rather than cursing the darkness.
Med School Tailgate Parties?
I know that many people, especially teenagers and college students don’t exercise a great deal of discretion with regard to Facebook postings these days. I wasn’t quite ready for this piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education, though. Seems that Med school students not only like to engage in sophomore frat-house antics, they like to provide videos of them for the world to see on Facebook. Wouldn’t you think that by the time you’re in medical school ……… Anyway, I wonder what this is going to do to malpractice insurance.
Bertonneau, Part Deux
In this Pope Center essay, Professor Tom Bertonneau argues that many young Americans — those who disdain books and any but the lightest reading — are sliding back into the state that precedes literacy, namely “orality.”
America spends great amounts to put computers into students’ hands and make sure that classrooms are fitted up for all sorts of fancy media stuff. Maybe we’d get better results, however, if we relied more on an old learning tool — the book.
Chico State Student Newspaper on Academic Freedom
The editorial staff of the Orion, the student newspaper at Chico State University, have written an article entitled “Academic Freedom Not a License to Say, Do Anything.”
They write:
Professors should have the freedom to push the envelope to get students thinking instead of letting them fall asleep and drool on the desks during class. But there are some teachers who overstep their bounds. [...] Students are here to learn, but they shouldn’t come to class worrying about being verbally attacked or harassed by their instructor.
I disagree with their next statement which asserts that students are customers. They may pay a fee for a service, but students are students, not customers. But overall, bravo Chico student writers. It’s good to know that students are understanding the true meaning of academic freedom.
“Will I See You in September or Lose You to the University of Phoenix?”
California has too many students and not enough cash. Last semester, De Anza college opened with 8,000 students still looking for classes. Sorry, kids! Most schools cap their enrollment to the number of students the state will fund; above that number, colleges cut sections, classes, and programs trying to stop the bleeding. Problem is—there are no consistent and transparent criteria about who decides what gets cut or on what basis. Some community colleges, having made their cap, have decided to close for the summer. See you . . . in September! Call it what you will: rationing, triage, enrollment management; I like “educational death panels.”
How did this mess happen? First, our 110 open-door community colleges have an impossible triple mandate to deliver quality transfer curriculum but also to provide career and technical education (CTE) but in addition to remediate basic skills for nearly 3,000,000 students. Meanwhile, the CSU system is swamped with students, many of whom (up to 80% at some campuses) are unprepared for college level work. Many are unprepared for high school work meaning six years to a BA.
Other students survey the unemployment figures and decide to hunker down. Euphemistically called “super seniors,” they conclude that between college dorms, college health services, cafeteria, library, gym and pool, hey, life is good! Why graduate? The big losers are first-time college students who find their seats filled by superslackers. The CSU solution is to “redirect” them back to community colleges that are already choked with students who can’t transfer. Add to this toxic brew the fact that money is just going to get tighter because Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer are fed up with paying college professor salaries to teachers of yoga and spelling.
According to Patrick Perry, CCCO Vice Chancellor of Technology, Research and Information Systems, California far and away has the greatest access to higher education, but it has a mediocre success rate (defined as granting degrees and certificates). Perry says states with both high access and high success have:
• Strong Statewide Articulation/Transfer Agreements
• Common Core Curriculum
• Common Course Numbering
• AA transfer guarantee or Statewide General Ed guarantee
• CTE pathways
• Strong online student academic planners and support
• Common assessment tools
• Statewide Transfer scholarships
California comes up short in virtually all these areas, and community college students, sick of plodding through the maze, are transferring instead to for-profit and online schools such as The University of Phoenix. So far, it’s just a small leak in a big boat but the number has grown five-fold since 1995, and change is in the wind.
A Skeptic at a Diversity Discussion
Should diversity skeptics bother to participate in diversity discussions? Forums conducive to full and fair discussion would seem to be quite scarce. Is it better to contribute as possible, or ignore such events entirely?
So asks Brian T. Johnson, a political science student at the University of Missouri. After attending a diversity dialogue session on campus, Johnson offers some pointers for skeptics who desire to influence the direction of such conversations:
- Understand the unique language of the movement. Diversity vernacular tends to be surreptitious and supple, with a heavy emphasis on subjective personal experience, emotion and perception.
- Bring at least one fellow skeptic to any diversity discussion.
- Organize your own diversity discussion, designed with better balance for a more full and fair discussion. Invite intellectually honest participants of divergent viewpoints to attend.
- Educate others – outside formal discussion environments – about the larger goals and philosophical underpinnings of the diversity movement. The lay observer may simply need some friendly confirmation that it is indeed acceptable to think critically about what a confident, politically-correct movement like the Diversity movement hands down as gospel.
Vanderbilt Chaplain Affirms Shariah Death-to-’Gays’ Law
The university is scurrying to disassociate itself from Awadh A. Binhazim, who is listed on the campus’ website as “Adjunct Professor of Islam at the Divinity School” and an adviser to the 
Muslim Student Association (MSA). Binhazim also offers courses gratis at Vanderbilt.
The professor, as World Net Daily reports, responded to a question before a “diversity” meeting of students by acknowledging that homosexuality is punishable by death under Islam and that he accepts whatever Islam teaches.
Devin Saucier, who posed the question and serves as president of Vanderbilt’s chapter of Youth for Western Civilization, called Binhazim’s presentation before the group a “30-minute, roses and butterflies overview of Islam.”
Saucier explained in a blog that he attended (and videotaped) the MSA-sponsored event out of curiosity about the
‘unholy alliance between Muslims and leftists – how could the latter, who fervently support multiculturalism, gay marriage, and gender equality, ally with the former, who support religious and cultural supremacy, traditional marriage, and the oppression of women? … I knew [the gathering] would be ripe grounds for me to expose the gullibility of leftists who grovel at the altars of tolerance and acceptance.’
The rest of this enterprising student’s observations about the event are of interest, as are Vanderbilt’s predictable evocations of “free speech for all” and simultaneous touting of its “non-discrimination” policies regarding sexuality.
Diversity in Admissions: Objective Analysis Finally?
Have a look at this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I shouldn’t get my hopes up too high too fast, but it suggests that the longstanding omerta about the effects of “diversity” based admissions policies – the kind which girded the Supreme Court’s unfortunate decision in the Grutter case – is finally being discarded. The piece is admirably even-handed, and acknowledges that some recent research leaves ample room for doubt about the benefits of affirmative action admissions policies. We’ve got a long way to go, but it’s a vast improvement over the University of Michigan’s in-house Gurin report.
NAS.org articles
- The Green Police, They Live Inside My Head Ashley Thorne
- Ivy League Sex Education...No Comment Glenn Ricketts
- Radio Segment on 'The Death of Manliness' Ashley Thorne
- Hookup Ink Wendy Shalit
- Are Diversity Discussions Useful? Brian T. Johnson
Recent Comments