NAS Blog

By Adrienne Carlson

It may come as a surprise to you, especially if you’ve always believed that online education is inferior to the traditional kind – there are certain careers where an online degree is your best chance of success. You may have heard that employers look down on online degrees, but not if you’re interested in a career in the following fields:

• Education: It’s one field where jobs will always be available and teachers who are skilled and have a natural flair for the task are going to be in demand. Education is high on the priority list of most people, so there are openings in schools and colleges for good teachers and lecturers. Earning your degree in education through an accredited online school is a good way to ensure that your future is secure. If you are already in the field of education, you could give your career a boost by earning your master’s degree or a doctorate in the subject of your specialization. Teaching children or young adults is a fulfilling and well-paying profession that does not cause too much stress and comes with a host of perks, not the least of which is vacation time twice a year.
• Information & Technology: With the entire world hooked on computers now, it’s only natural for everyone to want to jump on the IT bandwagon. The key to success in this field is to look for areas where there is a high demand and low supply, and choose your specialization accordingly. While most online schools grant you a degree in computer science or information technology, you may have to look for other certification courses to advance your skills in your specialty. And the best part about learning computer science is that you can work while you learn because this is a field that requires more practical knowledge than that which comes from books.
• Military & Defense: More and more members of the military are now earning their degrees online. They’re allowed various concessions and benefits and can cement the security of their future after they leave the military using an online degree. They know that they are more likely to secure a well-paying job if they have a degree to back them up, so enrollment is now on the rise in online colleges from this quarter. Education is an alternative way for military personnel to take their minds off conflict and use their time to their future advantage.

This guest article was written by Adrienne Carlson, who regularly writes on the topic of accelerated online degrees. Adrienne welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: adrienne.carlson1@gmail.com.

For 30 years, I have used Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in conjunction with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to illustrate allusion, ambiguity, irony, anxiety of influence, medium imperatives, and narrative architectonics.  Oddly, the last few times I showed the film, many students were left speechless by the intensity of the experience.  I was puzzled at first but then realized that their distress might stem from something that Apocalypse Now lacks:  CGI.

Today’s students are accustomed to computer-generated images and special effects, but CGI and full-motion capture/performance produce weightless pictorials with no substance.  Avatar and 300 are forgettable eye candy, impalpable as a mirage.  But in Apocalypse Now, when the script called for Col. Kilgore to order an airstrike and blow up a jungle with napalm, director Coppola blew up a jungle with napalm.  Coppola also blew up a physical Do Long Bridge and expended many hundredweight of black powder, phosphorous, and fuse on a physical village of Vin Drin Dop.  When a carabao is slaughtered, a real, luckless carabao was slaughtered.

This gravity of actuality is shocking to today’s students for whom simulation, simulacra, and virtuality are the “natural” landscape.  Film critic John Podhoretz decries CGI because

the extreme artificiality of the form creates distance between the viewer and the work. The secret about the movies is the way they trick you into believing you are seeing something realistic when you are actually watching something entirely artificial. The key is the recognizable human face and the interaction of the human body with recognizable real-world objects.  Remove those from the picture and you are in the entirely stylized realm of kabuki theater.

Cyberpunk legend William Gibson contends that soon most people will live in a “blended-reality state.”  The “entirely stylized” apparitions of CGI convince me that my students already live there with profound emotional and educational consequences.

Crosspost from www.NAS.org

Two weeks ago I published an article about a Marxist journal that has seized authority in the education world. The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS) is published by the UK-based Institute for Education Policy Studies (IEPS), “an independent Radical Left/Socialist/Marxist institute for developing policy analysis and development of education policy.” It takes its cues from Che Guevara and Paulo Freire.

Articles from JCEPS are required reading in some ed schools, and the editorial advisory board has representatives from universities in eighteen countries. In posting the NAS article on JCEPS, I thought that simply calling the journal what it is would be enough to discredit it. I wrote:

While it is appropriate to study the now discredited but historically important ideas of Marxism in political science, philosophy, and economics courses, education schools have no need for radical ideology. Ed schools should be preparing teachers to train the minds of the next generation, not to arm them with socialist politics. To do so cheats both future teachers and their future students out of the sound, unbiased education they deserve.

I assumed that most people would agree that Marxist politics have no place in the classroom, and that the JCEPS folks would be reluctant to own their radical left agenda. I was wrong. Since the article appeared on the NAS website, apologists for the journal have been coming out of the woodwork. We seem to have secured the attention of some of the last remaining Marxists on earth. One commenter, who seems not to be a native speaker of English, wrote:

Definitely, education should be explicitly involved in struggles for equity and justice, especially at the current situation. Therefore, it’s very meaningful to arouse teachers and students’ critical consciousness, as Professor Peter McLaren does.

School and society shouldn’t be separated. No matter it is in John Dewey’s mind “school is society”, or in other scholar’s essay “society is school”, schools have close relationship with society. George Counts once insisted that it was a great ideal that people should mainly focus on educating the children and care little about others, however, he thought that schools and teachers had to think about the injustice since the then unequal society greatly influenced teachers and students in 1930s.

As for the current situation which is much worse than in 1930s in many aspects, the “ivory tower” ideal had gone and would never come back, colleges and universities are more and more involved in the society economically and politically, students have to fight for the equality, and teachers are forced to fight for their right they deserved.

There are inequity and injustice in society, so it’s teachers’ responsibility to arouse their students consciousness to seek for the equity and justice. Those behind it are the ones who give up their responsibilities or the ones who own privilege, because they dare not to change the society or don’t want to give up their privilege. [emphasis mine]

Another person, ironically self-nicknamed “Cassiodorus” after the devout Christian who kept alive the flame of liberal learning after the fall of Rome, added:

Marxism isn’t discredited anywhere, education isn’t unbiased, and “radical” refers to the notion of examining the roots (“radical,” from the Latin radix, or root) of everyday practice, something which should be done more often in schools.  The rest of this is a rather amateurish collection of soundbites on a number of subjects, the least understood of which is critical pedagogy. [emphasis mine]

This is a delightful bit of self-delusion.  Marxism isn’t discredited anywhere?  Marxism is discredited just about everywhere, but if “Cassiodorus” needs a for instance, I can testify firsthand that Marxism is discredited in Novokuznetsk and other parts of Russia where I have stayed.  From his nom de plume, I would think Cassiodorus is implicitly acknowledging this reality.  His “Rome” would appear to be the Soviet State and the nations it held captive.  He is keeping the holy flame of Marxism alive in an age dominated by the barbarian idea of human freedom.

“Ferlaz” also chimed in:

In Argentina we are creating a new educational movement based on the critical pedagogies, especially the works of Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren.

This article only serves to confirm that we are on the correct path of struggle. This educational movement is not intended to build ideological blocs but returning to education because their political neutrality is also a way of doing politics.

This article ends endorsing own knowledge of the dominant classes, their ideologies and worldviews deny the possibility of conflict as natural and accepting the hegemonic discourse.

From Argentina, from the popular schools for youth and adults in factories recovered by their workers shouted: Che lives!, As in Peter McLaren’s page.

The grammar here is too shaky to figure out exactly what is making “ferlaz” so excited.  Che, the murderous thug of the Cuban revolution, is fortunately long dead.  He enjoys only the kind of immortality conferred by T-shirts and dorm-room posters.

It does seem to me of absorbing interest that the great folly of Marxism—having burned through the twentieth century as a fire that killed more than 90 million people, enslaved countless others, and brought more misery and oppression into the world than any other political doctrine in human history—still has its proud defenders.  And they are in schools of education.

The Wall Street Journal ran a review of Professor Jackson Toby’s book The Lowering of Higher Education in its December 23 edition. The reviewer, Ben Wildavsky, unfortunately buys into the standard line that college studies are highly beneficial and the country needs to encourage more students to enroll and graduate.

Wildavsky asserts that keeping ill-prepared students out of college is “one trade-off we should not make” because “the indisputable benefits of college should be spread more widely, not less.”

Nonsense. The supposed benefits of attending and (maybe, eventually) graduating from college are highly questionable. Toby shows that many students enter college with feeble intellectual background and learning tools, then coast through without learning much of lasting benefit. (As I argued here, it’s doubtful that students have any human capital gain from their college experience.) Moreover, there isn’t necessarily any financial benefit from going to college, even graduating. Unfortunately, Toby didn’t mention the mountain of evidence that college graduates often end up working in “high school jobs” that don’t pay very well no matter what your educational credentials. (That’s a point I have been making for years, for example, here.) Perhaps if he had, Wildavsky’s belief that going to college confers indisputable benefits would have been shaken.

In any case, it’s hard to see how you could read Toby’s book, which makes a strong case that many students graduate from college with an education in name only, and yet maintain that it’s so beneficial that we must not cut back.

“The list of academically and morally corrupt practices that ensue from our inability to adhere to our own standards is rather long. One of our worst offenses is that we admit, and re-admit students absolutely unqualified and absolutely incapable of achieving a college degree. Many go into debt or cause their families to go into debt into [sic] order to attempt a college degree. This is an absolutely corrupt practice and it may be criminal. If we have done this to even one student, then we are guilty of a low form of corruption.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights has announced that the University of Minnesota, in response to a letter from FIRE, promised that “[n]o University policy or practice ever will mandate any particular beliefs, or screen out people with ‘wrong beliefs’ from the University.” The FIRE letter was prompted by a proposal for the university’s school of education, to be voted on in January, that would require all ed students to study “white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.” NAS wrote about it here.

FIRE is cautiously optimistic about the university’s response. While warning that “The next version of the college’s plans must reflect this promise,” it has declared a victory for freedom of conscience.

The letter from General Counsel Mark B. Rotenberg, however, gives cause for continuing concern. Rotenberg asserts that the university holds the right, under academic freedom, to “engage in creative thinking, dialogue, and advocacy with respect to a broad range of ideas for improving P-12 education.” He added, “Academic freedom means little if our teaching faculty is inhibited from discussing and proposing curriculum innovations simply because others find them ‘illiberal’ or ‘unjust.’”

Rotenberg is right to praise the exchange of different and competing viewpoints. But U Minnesota needs to be more thoughtful about its proposals. Even illiberal brainstorming can take root when it results in public documents ready for approval. Take Virginia Tech, for example. Its  College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences recently came out with a “Strategic Diversity Plan” that aimed to put in systems for logrolling; provide incentives (some monetary) for faculty and staff to take part in diversity activities and for departments to make faculty hires; implement College-wide diversity course requirements; and enact racial preferences in spite of a Virginia Tech ban on affirmative action.

It is not clear what bureaucratic hurtles remain for the Diversity Plan’s approval or when it is likely to be granted (although the general CLAHS Strategic Plan has already endorsed the Diversity Plan), but it is clear that such a plan, if approved, will leave Virginia Tech’s intellectual integrity in ruins.

So no, proposing illiberal or unjust “curriculum innovations” is not as benign as Rotenberg would like it to sound. But for now, we join with FIRE in encouragement over the University of Minnesota’s promises not to mandate particular points of view.

Back in March, I received a leaked copy of a plan for one of the colleges at Virginia Tech.  It was a new set of guidelines for faculty promotion and tenure that would require every candidate to compile an annual record of “demonstrated” diversity accomplishments.  Other Virginia Tech documents spelled out in detail what would pass muster as a diversity accomplishment.  The new rules were intended to apply to the classroom, research, publication, faculty involvement with student activities, and everything else that faculty members might do.

I raised a fuss through the National  Association of Scholars website, and other organizations, including FIRE and ACTA joined in.  Eventually, the Virginia Tech board and the president backed down.  But after the furor subsided the president and other officials made clear that their commitment to a comprehensive diversity regime at this state university was unchanged.

Now comes a new document, a “Strategic Diversity Plan,” for Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.  I got this one by internal leak as well, but it has subsequently been posted publicly.

Should anyone much care what is happening at this large and pretty ordinary university in southern Virginia?  I suppose the taxpayers of Virginia should have some interest.  But the matter does seem to deserve a some broader attention if for one reason:  it is about as well-documented a case as we are ever likely to see of a university in the grip of a race preference ideology attempting to enforce that ideology over everyone and everything in its reach.  Nothing is too large (creation of whole new departments), or too small (flyers to be inserted in packets for job applicants) to escape the diversiphiles at Virginia Tech—and they propose to fund their whole enterprise not with line items in the budget, but with a fixed percentage of the whole budget!

Ashley Thorne and I have pored over the “Strategic Diversity Plan” and “fisked” it, i.e. added a critical commentary inside the original text:  http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1133. Last week we summarized the developments leading up to this new plan:   http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1131.

It’s hard to say whether this sort of effort on our part has any practical benefit.  Virginia Tech and a great many other colleges and universities are scudding along with their racial preference regimes (and other forms of diversity that likewise debase the academic mission) without serious public opposition.  But I do like the idea that we have paid attention and not just let this stuff settle in as though it made good sense and wise policy.

FIRE president Greg Lukianoff has an article in the Huffington Post about Yale’ s qualms over a t-shirt with an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: “I think of all Harvard men as sissies.” Lukianoff wrote:

Unfortunately–and is it any surprise these days?–a couple of Yale administrators decided that the word “sissies” was too offensive because some people interpreted it as a slur against gay men. This was news to the Yale freshmen who, like me, see “sissies” as being funny primarily because it is such a ridiculous, silly, old-fashioned put down, somewhere between “cad” and “toots” as far as insults go. Besides, in context, Fitzgerald actually wrote, “I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be.” Does anyone really think Fitzgerald was coming out as a success story of the ex-gay movement, or was he simply calling Harvard men, well, a bunch of sissies (modern translation: wusses, wimps, etc.)? The administrators were gearing up to ban the T-shirt, but the students backed down and changed the design.

Check out this NYT article on NAS Board of Advisors member Robert P. George.

Many who argue for a return to a more traditional, rigorous curriculum are also critical of online education. In this blog, I make the case that online education can help scholars reach nontraditional audiences, a cliche to be sure, but one that rings true with my personal experience after 15 years of delivering “distance learning” in addition to my “brick-and-mortar” courses.

First, it is no accident that online courses aren’t full of the trendy postmodern nonsense that dominates campus offerings. Nonsense flourishes where it is not transparent to the larger world. Online education operates by making itself transparent and open to that larger community.

Second, many institutions face stiff financial challenges. While I work at a state university, the online education division is entirely self-financed: not a single taxpayer dime, all revenue comes from tuition of students who sign up for courses. It is no accident that this division is the most entrepreneurial of all our divisions, and most no-nonsense with its offerings (Foucault 101 wouldn’t “sell” to our students in the military, single parents working during the day, high school teachers expanding their content knowledge, etc.).

Online education can be done badly. There is a possible “race to the bottom” in terms of quality but, as the work of the NAS amply demonstrates, this is also a problem on campus. If anything, the market reality provides a test of what people–not tenured radicals–want from a college education.

As an advocate for online education at my university, I submitted the following presentation to my college of liberal arts. For those unsure about online education, I also recommend an excellent 20-minute video presentation that I have posted online (with the permission of the professor).