NAS Blog

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has released a report card on public higher education in the state of Illinois. According to the ACTA press release:

The report card, entitled For the People, surveys 10 public four-year universities that together educate more than 90 percent of students enrolled at such institutions in Illinois. It offers a Pass or Fail grade in four key areas: what a college education costs, how the universities are governed, what students are learning and whether the marketplace of ideas is vibrant.

The institutions, as it happened, failed ACTA’s standards in all four areas.

Download the 66-page For the People report

Download the 2-page executive summary

Cross-posted from NAS.org, “An Unsuccessful Education Can Ruin You“:

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article, “Course Reminds Budding Ph.D.’s of the Damage They Can Do,” about a seminar taught at the CUNY Graduate Center on the ethics of teaching. Steven M. Cahn teaches the class, and he seeks to dispel the notion that all education is innocuous:

“People often think that education works either to improve you or to leave you as you were,” Mr. Cahn says. “But that’s not right. An unsuccessful education can ruin you. It can kill your interest in a topic. It can make you a less-good thinker. It can leave you less open to rational argument. So we do good and bad as teachers—it’s not just good or nothing.”

Cahn discusses with his small class the meaning of academic freedom (“How free should instructors be to proclaim their beliefs in the classroom? And how sensitive should they be to their students’ personal commitments?”) and the question of university neutrality (“Do colleges have an institutional duty to stay out of certain public debates? Or is that kind of neutrality actually undesirable or impossible?”). His students enjoy tackling these issues; as future professors, the subjects they consider in Cahn’s seminar will soon become very real for them.

This course covers the very same fundamental higher education debates in which the National Association of Scholars has found a voice for the last twenty-two years. These are conversations well worth having – they ponder “What does it mean to be a university of integrity?” The existence of the CUNY seminar is encouraging. Now if only all faculty members and administrators took this course, perhaps we’d have a better foundation for teaching the next generation.

Check out Peter Wood’s response to Robert Weissberg’s Minding the Campus article, “Rescuing the University.” 

The debate was also linked on Instapundit.

One day last April, most of the copies of the UNC conservative publication Carolina Journal were stolen. Who dunnit? No evidence was at hand and the matter was forgotten — until the school’s SDS chapter posted some photos on its Facebook page showing beyond doubt where the copies of Carolina Journal had gone. They were on the floor of the house of the SDS chapter’s president, evidently service as a dropcloth during painting.

Here is the post about the incident, with the pictures (since taken down from the SDS page, I understand).

Maybe the SDS punks don’t mind this at all. It might help them land jobs in the Obama regime’s dissent-suppression (oops–”fairness”) initiative.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Carey Stronach, president of the Virginia Association of Scholars, explains why the crusade for “diversity” by the administration at Virginia Tech is unacceptable to scholars.

Academic promotion should no more depend on “diversity accomplishments” than on “religious accomplishments” or “chess accomplishments” or “gardening accomplishments.” If the administrators can’t see that by “privileging” (to use a favorite leftist term) the diversity mindset over everything else they’re undermining real academic work, they should be summarily dismissed.

Over at NAS.org, we’ve got a nice debate going between NAS and University of Alaska Professor Richard Steiner. After I wrote about him in “Sustainability Skepticism Has Arrived,” I contacted Professor Steiner to let him know about the article. He subsequently wrote to the University’s president Mark Hamilton to challenge him to a debate over academic freedom:

President Hamilton –

Given recent circumstances, I would like to invite you to debate with me, openly and publicly, re: the issue of academic freedom, and the influence of corporate donations to the university.

You have said many things in support of academic freedom over the years, but when push came to shove in my case, you made a decision in opposition to free speech.
In 2002, you received an award for your support of academic freedom from a group calling itself the “National Association of Scholars”, who it turns out, actually opposes sustainability movements on today’s college campuses. They say that sustainability is “deceptive, coercive, closed-minded, a pseudo-religion, distorts higher education, shrinks freedom, programs people, is anti-rational, by-passes faculty, and is wasteful.” This group apparently supports free speech only when they agree with what is spoken, and opposes it when they disagree with what is spoken. Apparently this is your position as well. That you chose to accept an award fro this group calls into serious question the progressive character of the University of Alaska.

All of this is an extremely serious transgression of the very role a university is supposed to fulfill in civil society.

I look forward to your reply, and to debating this issue publicly and honestly.

Sincerely, Rick Steiner, Professor

His challenge to President Hamilton, as well as his response to NAS which we posted unedited on our website, called into question our dedication to academic freedom. NAS president Peter Wood responded here. He wrote:

And, yes, we support the right of Professor Steiner to speak his mind about sustainability, but his academic freedom gives him no follow-on right to accept public funding under false pretenses.  Sometimes we have to make choices.  Taking money for scientific investigation and then using it to fund political advocacy isn’t an exercise in academic freedom.  It is, at best, an act of deviousness.  It sounds to me like a form of academic dishonesty, not an act of academic freedom.  But let me hold that criticism in abeyance.  If Professor Steiner can defend his actions without twisting the terms of academic freedom into self-serving knots, let him do so. 

We hope this exchange will open up the doors of debate over the role of advocacy in higher education and the true meaning of academic freedom.

So,  for the first event of the Arizona Association of Scholars, Ward Connerly will be our guest.  Being a strong believer in open dialogue I forwarded a press release to many student organizations on campus. Here is one response:

To: Daniel, Arturo, Andrea, Lorenzo, Socorro, and David

I didn’t want to explain all of this to the greater email list, but I’m just sending this to a few leaders on campus:

Ward Connerly (for those who may not be familiar) was a key opponent of Affirmative Action when the University of Michigan defended its admissions process to the Supreme Court in the late 1990s.  As chair of Alianza (Latino student organization) at the University of Michigan during the Affirmative  Action cases, I can attest that, frankly, his advocacy can do more potential damage for student of color resources on campus than the cultural center restructuring plans.  So, I urge you to research Connerly’s track record, attend the talk, and let your voices be heard.

If you think it would help, I’d be glad to address your organizations, just let me know.

Thanks,
Maurice

Jeepers, so much for free inquiry and open dialogue, which now seems to be a dangerous commodity.

Last Thursday, NRO published an article that took me aback, “Send More Students to College” by Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute.

I have been arguing for years that we have oversold higher education and was surprised to see the title. Had I overlooked something important demonstrating that, to the contrary, we haven’t done enough to promote it?

Without having read it, I posted a brief skeptical rejoinder and after having read it, this lengthier counterattack.

If you don’t want to take the time for the posts, here’s my key argument, as I wrote at the John Locke Foundation’s blog:

The central difficulty in the Winters article (and many others like it) is the assumption that because, on average, college educated people earn more than those who don’t have degrees, college is responsible for adding the “human capital” that makes them more productive. Although it’s true that on average the college educated earn more, that is in large measure due to the fact that over the last few decades, opportunities for people who ended formal education with high school to get into entry-level jobs that lead to high-paying positions have been steadily decreasing. That’s because of credentialitis: employers screen out the presumably less reliable and trainable people who don’t have degrees.

Some young Americans go through college, learning a great deal, and augmenting their knowledge and skills considerably, but we also know that many others just loaf through college, taking easy courses that require little intellectual exertion and graduate with very weak skills in reading, writing, and math. If they get jobs that pay above average, is it due to the “human capital” they gained in college, which is awfully hard to discern, or is it due to the fact that they have benefited from the way employers use credentials as a raw screening mechanism? I think my argument better accounts for the facts.

Those of us laboring for academic reform often feel like Sisyphus, rolling a rock up the hill only to have it come crashing down again. The gods of academe seem to have condemned higher education to inevitable decay.

That thought came to me as I read about the demise of an institute (at Hamilton College) that did everything right, yet the overlords of Political Correctness purged themselves of enemies and “deviationists.” I use these terms because the notion that all-is-political, enemies-must-be-destroyed is linked so strongly to communism and its close cousin national socialism.

In the above unhappy story, Mark Bauerlein tries to see a silver lining by noting that the Institute survives outside the college. Students can go there and read books for which they receive no academic credit, of course. If ever there was a case study in how much the Left prizes control of higher education, this is it.

The next time you are tempted to think that much of what happens is a “misunderstanding” or “good intentions gone awry,” please banish the thought. When push comes to shove, there are those who would put a bullet in your head if this were a different place and time. Instead, they kill ideas by depriving them of air space on campus. No institute, no nonconformist faculty.

Or, as Stalin put it: “no people, no problem.” We, the few, will retire some day and then there will be nobody to speak out against the barbarians.

That is our problem.

Postscript: Robert Weissberg nails the problem(s) exceptionally well in this article.

The University of Texas-Arlington is putting on a campus event called “Sustainability Shock Shack” this Wednesday. According to the UTA sustainability blog:

“Scary” images resulting from human carelessness and displays of the “good” and “evil” of waste set the tone for the Sustainability Shock Shack, an awareness event planned for 10:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 28, at the Central Library mall.

The event aims to increase awareness of global environmental issues and inform about the University’s commitment to sustainability via the efforts of the President’s Sustainability Committee. Inside the Sustainability Shock Shack, visitors will find information on environmental action, giveaways, candy, door prizes and how to get involved on campus.

Apparently the planning committee is gettting academic credit for putting on the event “as part of a project in Shelley Wigley’s public relations campaigns class.”

The Sustainability Shock Shack reminds me of the legendary Tunnels of Oppression that normally take place on campuses before Halloween. A tunnel is typically set up as a sort of gallery for visitors to walk through. It often contains skits that portray disturbing scenes of “the dirtiest, ugliest, bloodiest issues” such as rape, KKK threats, and violence toward homosexuals. Tunnels of Oppression borrow the concept of a haunted house to scare participants into social change. The Sustainability Shock Shack seems to have similar aims. 

Its creation is a sign of the times. Oppression used to be scary, but now we terrify ourselves with the prospect of “human carelessness.”