Tom Bertonneau, who has previously written some excellent articles for the Pope Center on the difficulties of teaching young Americans who disdain reading, today begins another series of pieces. This one takes a scornful look at the claim that while students today may not be very good at reading, they compensate with a high level of “media savvy.” Based on his teaching experiences, Tom says it just ain’t so.
Yesterday, Apple unveiled its latest super-cool gadget the iPad: a cross between an iPhone and a Mac laptop. Some people are comparing it to Amazon’s reader the Kindle. Some are pondering whether the iPad will come to replace college textbooks as a lighter, cheaper, eco-friendlier alternative.
I’m sure that like all new technology, this thing will quickly become outdated. But in the meantime I wonder: how will the iPad affect college classrooms?
NAS President Peter Wood will be speaking in a live radio broadcast this evening at 5:17 P.M. He will be interviewed by Dr. Russell Moore on the Albert Mohler program, on the topic of how Christians should respond to the state of the union address given by President Barack Obama last night. To listen live or download the program afterward, click here.
I am in the middle of Reimer, Paolitto and Hersh’s Promoting Moral Growth from Piaget to Kohlberg as part of research on business ethics.
Kohlberg claims that as children mature they develop greater capacity for ethical deliberation in six stages. The two highest levels are adapted from formal philosophical systems, John Rawls’s contractual utilitarianism and Kantian duty-based ethics, that all action should be a universal law to (in Kohlberg’s version) maximize social welfare.
Levels five and six make the claim that concern for society at large equals moral maturity. Kohlberg confounds complex thinking with moral maturity. Some people consider social justice in their moral thinking, others may give weight to economic rationality. This does not make strong utilitarianism (the agent’s thinking of society at large) more “mature”. It just makes it acceptable to Kohlberg and his followers.
In one of the case studies he uses to test moral maturity, Kohlberg excludes economic rationality from moral deliberation. He views people who think that it is moral to steal a needed drug as more moral but those who understand that strong moral assumptions about stealing are necessary for economic rationality are less so. In other words, the advocates of moral maturity see theft as morally acceptable if it maximizes economic illiteracy. Kohlberg’s theory is ideologically utilitarian.
Kohlberg claims that moral maturity causes social justice thinking when the relationship ought to be that cognitive eomplexity causes complex ethical deliberation. Numerous grants for ethics programs were awarded to Kohlberg and his followers.
Williams College will cancel classes to engage in “pomosexual” poetry performances, politicized art discussions, a “queering communities” panel, and “reclaiming New England’s aboriginal history.”
“In the first place, if it is community — or the attainment of something common — we seek, we might begin a serious discussion about the curriculum, which now is almost entirely an uncommon experience. Few students read the same books at the same time; even different sections of a single course (e.g. The Problem of God) can have entirely different syllabuses. Without something in common to talk about, how can we expect students to attain community?”
We just received a press release from our friends at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) with some good news:
Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, has just been appointed to the newly-reconstituted National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. NACIQI makes recommendations to the U.S. Secretary of Education regarding the fitness of higher education accrediting bodies, without whose seal of approval colleges and universities cannot receive federal funds.
Congratulations, Anne. We know you’ll use your appointment to help uphold integrity in higher education.
In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I write about an essay by former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor in which she expresses some reservations about the Grutter decision in 2003 — the decision that upheld the use of racial preferences by state universities.
She evidently is uncertain about the claimed “educational benefits” of “affirmative action.” She ought to be. The evidence advanced by the “diversity” advocates was pathetically weak and the Court’s majority swallowed it without the least bit of scrutiny. O’Connor doesn’t know how right she is in suggesting that a future case should lead to reassessing Grutter.
But there is no reason why university officials should wait for another legal challenge. They are not obligated to engage in discriminatory admissions policies by Grutter and could reassess their policies at any time. If they chose to examine the matter carefully and objectively, I think the conclusion must be that racial preferences have little or no concrete benefits and work considerable harm.
Incidentally, the book in which O’Connor’s essay appears seems to be lopsidedly pro-affirmative action. I don’t yet have the book, but looking at the contents, I see nothing that looks the least bit skeptical. It’s similar to the global warming agenda in that regard; the public must be led to believe that the question has been definitely settled.
Under an initiative set to be finalized today, the state’s only public medical school will partner with UMass campuses in Boston, Amherst, Lowell, and Dartmouth to create a joint baccalaureate-MD program that would ensure admission for aspiring doctors from underrepresented ethnic and socioeconomicgroups. [...] The medical school will set aside 12 slots in its 125-student, first-yearclass for qualified students from groups underrepresented among Massachusetts doctors. Those groups include African-Americans, Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers.
The program will also offer students an “enhanced financial aid package.” Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity responds at Phi Beta Cons:
I won’t make the usual and obvious points about why discrimination on the basis of skin color and national orgin is unfair, divisive, and stupid. All that aside, this seems to me to be almost certainly illegal. To be sure, this isn’t exactly like the race/ethnicity set-aside program that was struck down in Bakke, since here the slots are also (in theory at least) going to be open to applications from members of disfavored racial and ethnic groups, so long as they are low-income or the first in their families to attend college. But this is still a very mechanical use of race, like the point system struck down in Gratz v. Bollinger. And the justification given for the racially discriminatory program by UMass president Jack Wilson is the need for “role models” — which has also been rejected by the Supreme Court (in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, in 1986).
This reminds me of Pelosi’s health care bill, which encourages racial preferences in medical schools. I told someone about this and he said that such a bill was a good incentive for people to choose white doctors. “That would be the only way to know you were getting doctors who know what they’re doing and didn’t just get through med school on the basis of their skin color,” he said. In that sense, racial preferences for future doctors actually engenders discrimination against minorities instead of empowering them to fulfill their dreams.
If UMass wants to ensure the ultimate success of minority doctors, it should respect them enough to let them earn it through free competition.
I have long thought that accreditation is just about useless as a guarantee of quality and integrity in higher education and the article the Pope Center has just released gives additional support to my skeptical view. In it, Professor Tony Fels of the University of San Francisco writes about the indifference with which the Western Association of Schools and Colleges treated his complaint that a dean had set his department up for a bad review of its “diversity” efforts by stacking the review team with people known to be diversity zealots. That would appear to violate WASC standards, but WASC couldn’t be bothered even to investigate Professor Fels’ charges.
Is accreditation more about political correctness than anything else?
This reminds me of Pelosi’s health care bill, which encourages 
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