NAS Blog

The Chronicle of Higher Education jobs list includes this gem:

“The Department of English at UCLA invites applications for the position of Assistant Professor in Residence, in the area of 19th-century American literature . . . .”

“Candidates should demonstrate engagement with the changing dynamics of the field, which is now characterized by disparate approaches and new configurations of interests, including (but not limited to) transatlantic studies, hemispheric studies, print culture and material textuality studies, gender and sexuality studies, visual culture studies, comparative race and ethnicity studies, geographical studies, disability studies, and other innovative frameworks.”

Literature?  The mind boggles.  Disability studies should have a field day with Captain Ahab.

By now, most of the world has heard of “Climategate”– the e-mail scandal surrounding the Hadley Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK. (If you are unfamiliar with the story, you can catch up with this Wikipedia article.) In short, hackers broke into the university’s e-mail system and posted on the internet private communications between climate researchers, and the e-mails are far from flattering. Besides gloating over the death of a climate change skeptic, the e-mails show concerted efforts by the researchers to manipulate temperature data, to block public access to their data, and (perhaps most disturbingly) to exclude skeptical or critical researchers from the peer review process. While it may be too early to describe this behavior as “scientific fraud,” it is certainly appropriate to label it “unethical.”

The New York Times‘s John Tierney wrote an excellent piece about this scandal and its implications for climate change advocates. Tierney points out that the climate researchers involved became “so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate[d] their certitude — and ultimately undermine[d] their own cause.”

What this situation also reveals is that scientists who become public policy advocates can lose the most important characteristic they have: objectivity. Scientists must accept data for what it is, not what they wish it to be. Scientists must deal with contradictory data, not ignore it. And most importantly, scientists must be transparent with their research and the conclusions they draw, not secretive. However, these ethical principles become far more difficult to uphold when scientists become activists.

To be sure, “Climategate” does not disprove global climate change, but it absolutely raises the suspicions of a general public who is often leery of science to begin with. Furthermore, scandals such as this damage not only the researchers involved but the entire scientific endeavor itself.

Scientists who become public policy advocates must walk a fine line.  Unfortunately, the researchers at East Anglia crossed that line.

This week in Frontpage Magazine Michelle Malkin has an article, “Hollywood and Howard Zinn’s Marxist Education Project.” Here’s an excerpt:

Zinn’s objective is not to impart knowledge, but to instigate “change” and nurture a political “counterforce” (an echo of fellow radical academic and Hugo Chavez admirer Bill Ayers’ proclamation of education as the “motor-force of revolution”). Teachers are not supposed to teach facts in the school of Zinn. “There is no such thing as pure fact,” Zinn asserts. Educators are not supposed to emphasize individual academic achievement. They are supposed to “empower” student collectivism by emphasizing “the role of working people, women, people of color and organized social movements.” School officials are not facilitators of intellectual inquiry, but leaders of “social struggle.”

Zinn and company have launched a nationwide education project in conjunction with the documentary. “A people’s history requires a people’s pedagogy to match,” Zinn preaches. The project is a collaboration between two “social justice” activist groups, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

[...]

No part of the school curriculum is immune from the social justice makeover crew. Zinn’s partners at Rethinking Schools have even issued teaching guides to “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers” — which rejects the traditional white male patriarchal methods of teaching computation and statistics in favor of p.c.-ified number-crunching [see NAS's articles on this, "Social Changelings" and "Mathematical Deceptions"].

[...]

Our students will continue to come in dead last in international testing. But no worries. With Howard Zinn and Hollywood leftists in charge, empty-headed young global citizens will have heavier guilt, wider social consciences and more hatred for America than any other students in the world.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan contributes a piece entitled “Banks Don’t Belong in the Student Loan Business.”

What he opposes is federally subsidized bank loans and I’m with him on that. Subsidizing student loans is no better policy than subsidizing home loans.

Where we part company is in his approval of direct government loans, which he wants to increase so that more students can “realize the dream of getting a college education.” As I have frequently pointed out, a college degree is what many students want. Relatively few dream of education. Low-cost loans entice large numbers of young people who gain little if anything in the way of lasting knowledge and skills into college, where they pile of debts they’ll have a hard time repaying once they get into the labor force and get a job that most high school kids could do.

Besides that, nothing in the Constitution authorizes the federal government to lend money for this or any other purpose.

I was recently asked to respond to that question for The Chronicle Review, prompted by a recent study finding that many college students who drop out say that the reason they did so was too much pressure to work to earn money. Roger Clegg and I were the Grinches in the piece.

There was a tight word limit on comments and there are some points I think worth adding.

First, how do we really know why a student drops out? It is easy and I would think tempting for a student who just couldn’t or wouldn’t handle the academic work to save face by stating that financial pressure was the reason for leaving school.

Second, instituting class-based affirmative action wouldn’t do anything for poor people (or more accurately, poor people who have children who can get into college) as a group. The tendency of leftists to look at the world in terms of groups (and also to judge policies by their intentions) gets in the way of understanding the true impact of affirmative action. Suppose that all the selective schools decided that they wanted a quota of, say, 10 percent SES (socio-economic status) admits. That would be a small percentage of the total number of students from lower income households who go to college, and those given this preference would undoubtedly be the best of those students — kids who probably could handle the workload at the non-selective colleges where they’d otherwise enroll. At the same time as a few students are admitted on SES grounds, equal numbers of non-poor students will have to enroll at a less selective institution. Going to a more selective school might be of a slight benefit to those few who are chosen to fill SES quotas (or it might actually prove harmful on “mismatch” and cost grounds), but it doesn’t make the mass of poorer people one bit better off.

Herewith a link to the most recent posting by the excellent legal journalist Stuart Taylor.  In a book co-authored with K.C. Johnson, Taylor had chronicled in detail the enormous travesty of justice at Duke when a black stripper falsely accused white male lacrosse players of rape — the denial of due process to the laxers was reminiscent of Jim Crow days, but with racial roles reversed.  [I discuss the case and the book in an Academic Questions article entitled "Durham's Disgrace" - subscription required].  Taylor’s recent posting details the continuing rise to glory of the Duke academics who had tried to “lynch” the laxers.  It makes for riveting and depressing reading.  Duke alums, if you haven’t yet suspended your donations, now’s the time.

Teaching Introduction to Literature, I see a curious new phenomenon:  more and more students complain, bitterly, about how dark the readings are.  I’m not sure what this new critical term means; I employ a canonical set of works including Hawthorne, Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Sophocles, and newer works by Phillip Larkin, Tobias Wolff, and J.G. Ballard.  If such authors do anything, they force us to face existential questions.  Once, students went to college to experience just this sort of perennial questioning.  Today, questioning is a nonstarter having been replaced by what Phillip Rieff called “the triumph of the therapeutic” and, as he predicted, by students preoccupied only with themselves and with attaining a “durable sense of well-being.”  This ends any interest in reading about what Victor Davis Hanson calls “the tragic limitations of human existence and how to meet them and endure them with dignity.”

When Larkin observes that

At death you break up:  the bits that were you

Start speeding away from each other for ever

With no one to see

it does not sit well with the Facebook and Twitter crowd, many of whom are now convinced that advancements in regenerative medicine will indefinitely postpone their senescence.  With death no longer inevitable, they find that a literature based on the tragedy of mortality is both archaic and irrelevant.  In insulated, technological isolation, with electronic “friends” and avatars, Comedy Central and Family Guy, they are more concerned with distraction and are irritated that plot and character create inevitabilities and moral consequences.  That’s just so…dark.

Anu Garg, founder of Wordsmith.org and the beloved A.Word.A.Day, graciously agreed to an interview with us for NAS.org. His passion for good words is infectious, and his creativity delightful. Enjoy!

“Words are like air—they are all around us even though we can’t see them, and they are just as essential.” – Anu Garg

Inside Higher Ed’s Getting to Green blogger says, “The truth of the matter is that education is always a political act.” Do you agree?