NAS Blog

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I review the new AEI book The Politically Correct University.

I recommend the book highly. It provides an excellent analysis of the problem of ideological imbalance and politicization that besets our higher education system and the closing chapters explore the prospects for change.

Should sustainability be a “defining feature” of higher education? I examine the sustaina-zeal at Penn State U in a recent NAS.org article. It sounds as if sustainabullies are ready to invade every aspect of the university. Some takeaways:

• Sustainability at PSU goes hand-in-hand with “global citizenship,” which is antithetical to national citizenship and national patriotism.




• PSU’s Institute for Teaching Excellence sponsored a national Educating for Sustainability conference in order to “Promote sustainability in all sectors of higher education, but particularly the scholarly/academic arena.”




• The director of sustainability defines sustainability as “A pursuit that weaves economic, environmental, and social impact metrics in the assessment of decisions” and “A value system to weave into the fabric of our university.”




• A presentation at the conference urges that sustainability be factored in to promotion, tenure, accreditation, and “professional identity as an academic.” Sound familiar?




• Much of one presenter’s slideshow matched exactly a presentation given by Kathleen Kerr, the architect of the disgraced University of Delaware residence life program, known for coercion, intrusiveness, and attempts to indoctrinate freshmen living in the dorms.




• Quote from presentation: “Be more methodical and systematic in all your efforts to create a shift of the norms here in curricula, policies and culture, and nationally (e.g. institutionalize it into annual reviews). [...] “A rapid shift in mindset is needed and education to action is the key.”




• Quote from presentation: “Sustainability is everyone’s job. Doing nothing is not benign – it is a destructive decision for society.”




• Michael Mann, implicated in the “hide the decline” emails, is a professor at Penn State U. After “Climategate” the university announced an investigation into his work. But will Penn State, so nurtured in sustainability, give him a fair investigation?

I’m happy to report that Google is now allowing its suggestion function to accomodate searches for Climategate. Recall that I posted last week in reference to the very strange absence of this search tool, on a subject which was generating more hits than all other “climate” inquiries combined. Give it a try, you’ll find all kinds of interesting stuff. I’d suggest that you hurry, though: you never know when this curious malfunction might recur.

Glenn Ricketts

Kudos to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for raising an issue that the higher education establishment would rather keep buried.

The commission’s latest inquiry involves suspected gender discrimination on campuses, where women are approaching 60 percent of the applicant pool. As this report indicates, women are “more plentiful” in college admissions, no matter that feminist activists have been carping for years about supposed discrimination against females. The question arises whether, bowing to “reverse” gender bias, campuses  are now limiting the number of women they admit so as to increase the ranks of less meritorious men.

Jennifer Rubin at Commentary remarks aptly on this ironic turn of events:

First, where are the Justice Department and so-called feminist groups? They apparently don’t much care if women are now on the short end of gender preferences. It’s all about “diversity,” you see. And second, one realizes how misplaced has been the hue and cry about anti-female discrimination in education. Apparently there is no civil-rights or other organization upset that men now make up only 40 percent of the college-admissions pool. Are they being discriminated against? Are their educational needs being ignored? We don’t know, and no one seems interested in finding out why.

The Financial Times has an article on how corporations, which formerly touted their commitment to the environment as a marketing ploy, now really believe in the eco-cause. More and more business schools have “infused” sustainability into the curriculum due to student and corporate demand:

A cynic might question how deeply companies believe in the value of social responsibility but Tom Lyon, director of the Erb Institute at University of Michigan who holds an endowed chair at the school from Dow Chemical, insists that companies that approach him are “sincere”.

“I am sure there’s some degree of reputation and image building, but there is also a sincere effort to be connected with a university. These companies want to be up to speed on the latest thinking, to know what students are thinking and to understand how to get the next generation’s best and brightest to come work for them.”

A sustainability director at Yale said, “We know you can get filthy rich destroying the planet, but now we’re starting to think about how you can make lots of money saving the planet.”

A blog on Inside Higher Ed that I pay attention to, Getting to Green, has an interesting discussion about advocacy intruding on higher education. Note that the Getting to Green blogger writes under a pseudonym and is “a sustainability administrator at a large private research university, an adjunct faculty member, and a farmer.”

Michael Legaspi at Creighton University commenting on Getting to Green:

Advocacy rears its head too often, in multicultural moralism, identity politics, and, as the CRU debacle shows, in too many kinds of environmental studies. When we are concerned only to convert students to the “right” view of things, rather than to lead them through complex engagement of the intellectual substance of important questions, we make it all too easy for them to get by in our classes by telling us what we want to hear. When they do so to our satisfaction, we may have scored a cheap political victory, but we have surely done so at the expense of our best and highest ideals.

Getting to Green responds:

Michael Legaspi is concerned that too much of American higher education consists of political advocacy. He’s right to be, and I agree with him. In fact, I’d go further. I’d say that too much teaching consists of social and economic advocacy, as well. Too much of what goes on in social sciences and professional schools treats how things are as the best they could possibly be (in this, the best of all possible worlds). Advocacy may be an acceptable form of consciousness-raising, but it’s far from the highest form of teaching.

When I work with professors at Greenback, I really don’t know how much sustainability-related advocacy they indulge in. My impression, and my sincere hope, is that it’s not much. Advocacy is appropriate in the marketplace of ideas, but potentially troubling in the classroom. My objective is to get students to engage both with the material — the facts — and in some degree of substantive analysis. If a student seriously engages with the idea that natural resources (both sources and sinks) are finite, that the systems which interact to produce the planet’s climate are many and complex, and that societies may have a responsibility to address problems of their own creation, then I’m satisfied. Not everyone has to agree with my conclusions about climate disruption, its causes, its likely costs for humanity if left unchecked, or the need to address it globally and immediately. What I comment on when I review student projects and papers is whether they demonstrate an understanding of the material, not whether that understanding matches my own.

I don’t agree with G2G’s entire post (especially the part about the mainstream media giving credence to Climategate – think Googlegate), but he’s saying the right thing here. One of the main problems with the push to “infuse” sustainability into higher education is that it brings ideological advocacy into the classroom. If we are to have sustainability education in the university, the approach G2G is talking about sounds like the right one.

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (subscription required) highlights the Abbeville Institute, which is ”an association of scholars in higher education devoted to a critical study of what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition.”

Here are some quotes from the article:

Professor Donald W. Livingston (Institute’s founder): “Academics who claim to find something valuable in the Southern tradition are sure to suffer abuse.”
“The university should be the place where the unthinkable can be thought and the unspeakable said as long as it is backed by civil conduct and argument.  It is not that today”

Heidi Beirich (Southern Poverty Law Center): “At the end of the day, they are just trying to revise the history of the South in favor of whites.”

Clyde N. Wilson (Charter Abbeville member): “”The academic tendency now, because of America’s preoccupation with the race question the last half-century or so, is to put the whole Southern history into a dark little corner of American history.”

Check out the Abbeville website and see what you think.

The mania over “diversity” (that is, preferences for certain people whose ancestry puts them into an “underrepresented” category) has swept through most of American higher education. It’s bad enough when, say, English departments fret that they aren’t adequately “modeling diversity,” but far more worrisome when medical schools do. In this Pope Center article today, I write about this disturbing phenomenon.

From the blog Remaking the University is an interesting article with charts showing the decline in the ratio between ladder rank faculty and senior management staff at the University of California. The decline is happening across all UC campuses.

Our friends at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) asked us to let our members and readers know about the scholarships (up to $12K!) they award to graduate students through their Humane Studies Fellowship. The deadline to apply is December 31. Here is the announcement from the IHS website:

Humane Studies Fellowships are awarded by the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) to students interested in exploring the principles, practices, and institutions necessary for a free society through their academic work. IHS began the program in 1983 as the Claude R. Lambe Fellowships and in 2009 awarded more than 165 fellowships ranging from $2,000 to $12,000.

IHS considers applications from those who will be full-time graduate students, including law and journalism students, or undergraduate juniors or seniors during the 2010-11 academic year and who have a clearly demonstrated research interest in the intellectual and institutional foundations of a free society.

Previous award winners have come from a range of fields such as economics, philosophy, law, political science, anthropology and literature. Their research focused on a variety of topics:

• market-based approaches to environmental policy
• the legal development of privacy and property rights in 18th-century England
• the role of patient autonomy in bioethics
• impediments to economic growth in developing countries
• the relationship between U.S. presidential politics, fiscal policies, and economic performance

Select winners are invited to present and discuss their research at the annual Humane Studies Research Colloquium and to attend other colloquia throughout the year. Fellows also join a network of more than 10,000 IHS academics committed to the ideas of liberty and intellectual freedom.

“The Humane Studies Fellowship award is a precious gift of time that will enable me to continue with my research projects at a more rapid and effective pace. It makes a great difference.”

- Susan Hamilton, Harvard University, HSF Winner

If you have any questions, please visit the frequently asked questions page and read about the application process. If you need assistance after reading the FAQs, please submit a question via our contact form.

Please pass the word on to any graduate students you know who may be interested in this.