NAS Blog

At NAS.org, we noted that St. Louis University recently disinvited David Horowitz from a speaking engagement on campus. We also noted that the AAUP—not usually on the same side of issues as Horowitz—has defended Horowitz’s right to speak, as has the left-leaning College Freedom blogger John K. Wilson. What you might not have already heard is that St. Louis U’s mascot, the Billiken, seems to have played a role in censoring David Horowitz.

To read the whole story – and find out what in the world a Billiken is – click here.

We are proud to announce the arrival of a new book, The Politically Correct University, published by the American Enterprise Institute, which features chapters by NAS’s president Peter Wood and chairman Steve Balch. Dr. Wood’s chapter, “College Conformity 101: Where the Diversity of Ideas Meets the Idea of Diversity,” teases out the two contrasting meanings of the mysterious word “diversity,” and Dr. Balch’s chapter, “The Route to Academic Pluralism,” sets out some practical tactics for reforming higher education.

Other authors in The Politically Correct University are friends and partners of NAS, such as Victor Davis Hanson, Anne Neal, and Stanley Rothman.

The Politically Correct University is available for purchase here.

Over on Phi Beta Cons, Fred Schwartz (“20 Reasons Why Campus Learning Is Better Than Online“) cites my predictions about a “Great Transition” in which higher education will move from in-person campus-based institutions to mostly online instruction in the coming decades.  He dislikes the prospect and disagrees with how likely it is.  I don’t especially like the prospect either, but that’s neither here nor there.  The important question is whether something like the “Great Transition” could happen.  My answer is yes, it could.  That’s because, though our current institutional basis of higher education looks robust, it is highly vulnerable to small shifts in public esteem.  

My article, The Shape of (Academic) Things to Come, wore its satirical colors openly.  I described people, places, and events twenty years into the future and attributed my detailed foresight to scientifically-enhanced precognition.  It says something about the level of fear that online education strikes in today’s academics that a fair number wrote to me to protest this leap of imagination, as if, like Prospero, I could conjure it out of thin air.   Don’t blame me.  If something like the Great Transition were to happen, it won’t be because I set it in motion.  Nor do I think that my fellow seer, Jane Shaw, can be blamed. 

Fred Schwartz provides 20 reasons why campus learning is (or “can be”) better than online college education.  Most of his reasons sound right to me.  He starts out, “Not every subject lends itself to online learning.”  Entirely true, at least with current technology.  Looking at the last twenty years, I wouldn’t exactly rule out the possibility of dramatic improvements in the years ahead, but the more important point is that the subjects Fred cites as better learnt in person—“those that require laboratory work, clinical practice, studio learning, musical instruction, live performance, agricultural work, etc.”— do not require a university.  Historically, each of them was taught in a non-university setting.  Music conservatories and independent art schools still thrive.  Science grew up outside the university and has a vigorous life in independent institutes to this day.  Moreover, the decoupling of undergraduate education from more advanced studies already has models such as the Rockefeller University. 

I won’t go through all twenty of Fred’s reasons, but most of them fall into this pattern.  He makes a valid point about the attraction of or benefit to be had from residential colleges, but the point has no real bearing on the larger economic and social forces at work.  Yes, it is nice to retire to a college town (point 3), but are we going to keep colleges going in order to provide enhanced retirement options?  It seems unlikely. 

At the end of his post Fred allows that “most of these problems are surmountable,” but sees no positive reason why American society would want to surmount them.  In his view, “the college campus is not an expensive anachronism.” I wish that were true, and, even if it isn’t, I wish Americans would continue to believe it true.  But as my article suggested, it is a fragile hope.  For some fifty years, Americans have had drilled into them that higher education is mainly about getting the credentials to get a well-paying job.  If a technology comes along that offers much the same thing at a fraction of the cost, many people will choose that option (there’s “our friend the free market” for you). Online education is that technology, and it is late in the game for higher education to turn around and say, “Residential education is worth a premium price because college, after all, is really about the intangible aspects of shared culture, access to civilization, moral elevation, personal associations, and the richness of life.”   I think such claims happen to be true, but I don’t expect them to outweigh career ambition for the great majority of students or their parents.  To the contrary, the American public has drunk in the utilitarian calculus that college is a launching pad for lucrative careers.  And that public has also grown canny about the undergraduate degree becoming a merely intermediary step on the path to the credentials that really count.  To this we have to add the widespread recognition that in-person higher education is an enormously expensive and vainglorious enterprise that frequently produces meager results.

This adds up to vulnerability.  Fred believes the risk is an illusion.  He cites (point #10) earlier claims that “printing, the telephone, sound recording, radio, movies, television, and various generations of computers,” would “revolutionize education and make all our schools and universities obsolete!”   That’s a pretty misleading “and.”  Most would say that printing, at least, did revolutionize higher education.  The other technologies on the list have had considerable consequences for higher education too.  It might be useful to think of online education as the synthesis of all of them, perhaps as the gasoline-powered automobile combined and synthesized a host of technologies that had already been invented, and spurred the invention of still more.  We can visit Lancaster, Pennsylvania for reassurance that automotive technology did not render horse-powered agriculture and transportation “obsolete,” but the equine economy isn’t what it once was. 

I repeat, I am not eager for the rise of an online dominated form of higher education.  The cultural losses would include some that matter to me profoundly.  But I have yet to see a solid argument why the Great Transition won’t happen.  “I’d regret it” isn’t an argument.

AASHE released an early version of a project called the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) to measure colleges’ sustainability progress. It measures items such as:

Click here to read the full NAS article about STARS.

NAS welcomes a new web-based effort to reform higher education, CampusReform.org:

Historically, conservatives have favored the ways of the past—which is why they sometimes fall behind the left in using technology to get organized. But Campus Reform breaks out of the mold to help give this generation’s conservatives a forward-thinking cause.

NAS, “Campus Reform Looks Forward“

Alana Goodman, a student at the University of Massachusetts, has published an excellent article, “Institutionalized Racism in Student Government,” in the Collegian, the schoool’s student newspaper. Here’s an excerpt:

As we prepare to swear in our elected representatives to the SGA Senate next week, UMass students should be aware that 13 percent of our SGA Senators will not have even competed in Tuesday’s elections. Instead, they will be appointed to their positions before the election results even come in, solely on the basis of skin color.

This portion of the Senate is appointed by a registered student organization (RSO) called the African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Caucus (no relation to this columnist). Only minority students who fit one of those four racial categories– or other students who the Caucus approves as “minority allies”– are considered eligible for these Senate seats.

[...]

This practice has been going on for years, and in addition to its sleaziness it’s also illegal.

The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh student newspaper, the Advance-Titan, has published an article about our article “Sustainability is a Waste.” The staff writes, “the idea that an ideology enters any classroom unexamined is something students should be concerned about. As students, we have the first and foremost duty to educate ourselves for the future. Our goal should first be to learn something about the world before attempting to change it in ways we may not fully understand.”

We are pleased to see the Advance-Titan paying attention to the realities behind the campus sustainability movement.

Peter Wood’s article, “Never Waste a Good Cliché,” ponders the reasons college presidents sign their institutions up for the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) in their eagerness to jump on the sustainability bandwagon. He imagines 4 possibilities:

A. They aren’t very deep thinkers. They just like the sound of “sustainability,” and enjoy being in front of a popular cause.
B. They are cynics. They see where the movement is headed but calculate that it is to their advantage to play along.
C. They are true believers. They know sustainability aims at radical, even utopian transformation of human society and they are all for it.
D. They are gamblers. They understand the sustainability movement has an extremist element, but they see themselves as capable of drawing what is good from it without getting trapped in its craziness.

Peter cites a letter by the president of Hamilton College, whose rhetoric is so blandly superficial, she seems to go in category A.

 Using ancient Greece and military history as commentary, Professor Hanson will analyze the legal dilemmas faced by democracies when defending themselves against terrorist entities.

 

Victor Davis Hanson is a Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor Emeritus of Classics at the California State University at Fresno, noted historian of ancient Greece and preeminent military historian. He is author of more than 170 articles, 16 books, and recipient of many awards, including the National Humanities Medal. 

We’re curious…