NAS Blog

As the House of Representatives approaches a vote on the America Competes Reathorization Act, our long-time friend Christina Sommers takes note of an obscure section tucked deeply within the bill which could have major consequences for academic searches in the sciences or engineering. On the face of it, the act seems like a good thing, intended to maintain an American competitive advantage in the burgeoning global economy. But take a look, Sommers tells us, at that unheralded little section the, “Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Science and Engineering Amendment.” If that provision becomes law as seems likely, Sommers argues, we can expect to see an explosion of “gender bias” and “gender equity” workshops intended to redress the “underutilization” of women in aeronautics, physics and mathematics, under the aggressive leadership, no less, of the White House Office of Science and Technology. “Gender Equity” in the sciences, of course, has long been chief among the perpetual discontents of academic feminists, a remaining citadel of entrenched sexism and male domination. Now, it seems, they are about to add substantial federal clout to their arsenal.

In 2009, ten days before the inauguration, I was in Washington for the NAS conference but had decided to stay near the National Mall at the ritzy Hay-Adams across from the White House.  With Blair House unavailable, President-elect Obama had also picked The Hay, so my stay had been filled with concrete barriers, metal fences, and Secret Service.

One night, walking back from the conference, I stupidly headed the wrong way, towards Delaware, 180 degrees from The Hay.  In the drizzle, I heard, “Hey, beautiful brother . . .” as a woman on a bicycle coasted by on the wet street.  I shook my head but a minute later I heard her again, “I’m no threat to you.”  The panhandler had dismounted and was already at my elbow.

“You’re following me . . . .”

“Yeh, but I can’t hurt you,” she said, looking up.  She was slender, with chocolate skin, soulful eyes, a real smile unperfected by braces, wearing a puffy nylon jacket.  I started walking but she launched into her pitch:  raised by her grandmother, finding her mother dead on the floor.  “Some folks have just had a harder time, you know?”  I gave detached “hmmms” and “ohs,” but also wondered about her—she was engaging, persistent but gentle, obviously smart.  She asked, “What’s your name?”

Cautious, I said, “David.  I’m from California, here for a conference, but I think I’m going the wrong way.”

“I’m Robin.  Where you staying?”

“The Hay-Adams.”

“Oh, you kidding me?  That’s where Obama’s staying!  Aren’t you going in the wrong direction!  C’mon, I’ll take you there!”  She wheeled her bicycle around, pushing off into the night.  “David from California.  You know, isn’t that something?  There you was, lost, and I came along and found you.”  She shook her head.  “That’s how I know there’s somebody more up in the sky than the Man in the Moon.”

“Are you from Washington?”

“My whole life.  I have five kids, but . . .” she ducked her head, “I don’t have any of them.”

“Robin,” I said, “I’m a teacher.  You seem as able as most of my students.”

She was silent.

We reached double digit streets, nearing The Hay, but I no longer wanted the encounter to end.   “Robin, with your personality I’m sure you could . . .” (I thought frantically how to convey confidence in her without being patronizing) “. . . get a regular job.”  She looked down again.  “I don’t like living in the shelters.  There’s too many drugs.  I have to hide my stuff around.”

We cut through a Metro station where human figures hunched near the warm wind pouring up the stairwells.  Back in the rainy night Robin exclaimed, “Look!  Ducks!”  Under a sapling, on a patch of wet grass, two young Mallards huddled, dazed by the glare of headlights and neon.

“Do you read?” I asked.

“Yeh.  `DON’T WALK.’  `NO TRESPASSING.’  `CLOSED.’”  She smiled, then repeated:

Imagine that, David from California.  There you was lost, and I was supposed to find you.

“Are you going to the inauguration?”

Her face clouded, “I don’t like crowds.”

We saw the floodlit Hay now.  She slowed and said hopefully, “I know you would take care of a sister.”

Not yet.  She had to know that I was not embarrassed to be with her.  The moon gleamed off temporary bleachers and metal barricades around the White House as we walked the final block.  At the checkpoint, she stopped again.  I took the last $50 bill from my wallet and said, “Thanks, Robin.  Please take this.  I’m glad I met you and that we got to talk.”

Robin stared at Ulysses Grant; I wondered what she knew about history.  “Oh, there’s more in the sky than the Man in the Moon.” She shook her head, smiled up at me, and we embraced.  Then she swung onto her bike, and I turned toward the security tent, the metal detector, and the shiny black cars.

These days, I often think of my beautiful sister Robin, huddled in a D.C. shelter, still hiding her stuff, still waiting for hope and change.

According to this survey from the National Association of College Stores, students prefer traditional print textbooks by a significant majority, and would not buy digitalized versions even if they were readily available and inexpensive. I’m not sure exactly what this signifies in the larger scheme of things, since students increasingly are deficient in reading proficiency irrespective of the particular medium involved. I can’t help gloating just a bit though, since I’ve been so regularly assured that “technology” is the unstoppable wave of the future, and that I’d better get used to the fact that traditional textbooks are already obsolete. Full disclosure: I’m a skeptic about “technology.” I haven’t rejected the use of my computer, but I think enthusiasm tends to run way ahead of evidence where things such as online courses are concerned. I don’t doubt that many in higher education, especially administrators fervently wish for that eventuality, and maybe it will come to pass. For me, however, that’s a separate question from whether it will be able to deliver pedagogical dividends. Now if I see evidence that students begin to take to digitalized texts and their reading habits are likely to improve, I won’t stand athwart the March of Progress. But for the moment, they’re not interested in buying, much less reading the new gadgets.

This weekend, I graduated from the University of Missouri with a BA in political science. Walking across the stage to receive my diploma gave me a great feeling, particularly after being away from school for a few years. My experience this past year at a major state university instructed me not only in the nature of scholarship, but in those other things that have so little to do with, but so often accompany, the serious work of the academy.

The commencement exercise featured the usual fanfare, a notable part of which has become the donning of specialized, non-academic apparel in addition to the traditional academic attire of such events. Students not only wear gown, cap and tassel, but many if not most black students also displayed brightly-colored, boldly-designed sashes, ribbons and mortar board decorations representing racially-defined organizations.  The idea seems to be to celebrate the black experience of one’s college years.

Call me curmudgeonly, but I think this inappropriately draws attention away from those wearing distinctive apparel recognizing actual academic achievement. This strikes me as a presumptuous prerogative.  The function of commencement is to confer an academic degree and mark a new start for graduates. The alternative attire not only ignores that purpose and diverts attention from its highest exemplars, but elevates racial identity to similar standing with the active, educational endeavors of the wearer.

Academic officials would do well to curtail this “celebration of diversity,” restoring dignity not only of ceremonial purpose,  but to all its participants.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I comment on the recent AEI paper by Professor John Thelin, in which he shows that there was no “golden age” of higher ed in America when most students who enrolled completed their studies and received their degrees.

Even elite schools had fairly high dropout rates a century ago and hardly anyone thought that college dropout rates mattered — except insofar as they hurt school finances.

Thelin accepts the standard view that today’s high dropout rate is “troubling” but doesn’t make a case. Many of those who drop out are students who won’t benefit much from college coursework. They’re cutting short their losses on an “investment” that probably won’t pay off.

How does traditional American culture and Western civilization fare on your campus?

What are some of the obstacles or difficulties a traditionalist, conservative, or libertarian might find on your campus?

What can you tell us about the aesthetics of everyday life on your campus, from dating and sex, to dress and tastes, to behavior and mores?

NAS asked 8 undergraduate college students these questions for a student symposium in the forthcoming “Student Culture ” issue of Academic Questions (vol. 23, no. 2). We left it up to each respondent to choose which question to answer and how to answer it. The students’ essays are the following:

Beneath the Rungs: Locating the Liberal Arts at Harvard by Brian Bolduc

From Raging to Engaging at Vanderbilt by Mary Frances Boyle

Catholic or Bust? The Spirit of Inclusion at Notre Dame by Mary K. Daly

Generation A at Fordham by Amanda Fiscina

Debate Denied: Conservatives Stifled at Stanford by Gregory Hirshman

Intolerant Tolerance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by Nash Keune

Conservatives and Libertarians Face Challenges at the University of Michigan by Adam Pascarella

Pursuing Truth and Virtue: The Great Tradition at Hillsdale College by Julie Robison

This seems to be a week for uncovering students who have gotten into college under false pretenses of one kind or another. I’m referring specifically to two instances, one at Harvard, and the other at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. The Harvard student is an allegedly consummate con artist, while the Georgia case involves an illegal immigrant. Dishonesty in both cases, but it’s fascinating to compare the institutional responses and the ensuing online reader reaction as well. Have a look, and then see what you think.

The current issue of Academic Questions focuses on “sustainability,” that hollow abstraction around which coalesce feel-good connotations of moral superiority and environmental correctness.  At the very least, higher education should foster a scrupulous, continuous, and critical attention to language, yet academia today seems more enamored of rhetoric which is either empty (“student success”) or deceptive (“social justice”).  My own college has an institutional commitment to “diversity,” a word whose apparent meaning changes from document to document even though HR requires all teaching applicants to produce a “Diversity Statement.”  Diversity is a good thing and we’re for it, and, by gosh, you had better be, too, whatever it is!

We also have an institutional commitment to “critical thinking.”  In my experience, most teachers are confident they know what critical thinking is (it’s what they do) but hardly any can provide a definition.  For them, “critical thinking” is just another abstract good thing.  Actually, California State University Chancellor Glenn Dumke’s Executive Order 338 defined “critical thinking instruction” as

. . . designed to achieve an understanding of the relationship of language to logic, which should lead to the ability to analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas, to reason inductively and deductively, and to reach factual or judgmental conclusions based on sound inferences drawn from unambiguous statements of knowledge or belief (1980).

Personally, I favor William Graham Sumner’s succinct definition of critical thinking as “the examination of propositions of any kind which are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to reality or not” (1906).

By either definition, my school’s proud commitment to “Promote academic excellence and critical thinking across all areas and disciplines” is incoherent since critical thinking is not germane in all disciplines.  Music?  Dance?  Literature?  Ornamental horticulture?  The academy’s adoption of language which is, in Peggy Noonan’s words, “bland and indecipherable,” betrays the foundation of verbal communication itself–that, as David Mulroy puts it in The War Against Grammar, “intelligible statements have definite literal meanings.”

“Sustainability,” “diversity,” “social justice,” “critical thinking” are intended to convey feelings, not meanings.  In Disturbing the Peace, Vaclav Havel asks, “Isn’t just such a subtle abuse of the truth, and of language, the real beginning . . . of the misery of the world we live in?”  Perhaps higher education should be promoting clarity rather than sponsoring a new confusion of tongues.

Michael Totten, a foreign correspondent, extols Paul Berman’s new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals:

While we haven’t had a repeat of the apocalyptic terrorist attacks on September 11, what we do have is an entirely new class of people in the Western democracies who live in hiding and under armed guard from the same sorts of killers. Salman Rushdie was but the first, and Somalia-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one-time collaborator with the butchered Theo Van Gogh, is now but the most famous.

Totten describes Berman’s condemnation of much of the intellectual class to this persecution: “The killers’ would-be victims have been excoriated … , and even, in some cases, blamed for their predicament.”

Kudos to Berman for his defense of those preyed upon by Islamic extremists.

NAS posted an essay, “Achievement Gap Politics,” by an anonymous author whose story illustrates why ed schools try to keep students with non-progressive views out. The author writes:

First, you have to understand that educational policy is consumed by the achievement gap, which is the disparity between groups of students on most educational measures, particularly the groups of race and socio-economic income—and, if I’m going to be honest, it’s race that generates the most intensity. I don’t just mean that this is the number one priority. It’s the only priority. The achievement gap pervades every corner of American educational policy discussion. Nothing else matters. No Child Left Behind was entirely about the achievement gap and measuring schools to see if they’d closed it. Obama’s Race to the Top is just another take on the achievement gap—again, focusing on testing and this time holding teachers responsible if they can’t get low-performing students to improve.

The author outlines three possible views of the achievement gap:

1. The progressive view, which “holds that social injustice, institutionalized racism, white prejudice, and other societal ills cause the achievement gap.” The solution progressives offer is “for underachievers to spend more time with achievers who will model desirable behavior.”
2. The conservative view, which says that “parents and teachers of low-performing students are the cause of the gap, by failing to give the students the correct cultural values.” Conservatives argue that the solution is “hard work, family values, commitment to the importance of education, and ‘no excuses.’”
3. The third view, which the author calls the “Voldemort view” (because it must not be named) and considers the achievement gap to be the result of disparity in cognitive ability.

John Derbyshire linked to the article on the Corner at NRO.