NAS Blog

Is there a strong bias against conservatives in higher education? Researchers have produced numerous studies to examine this question. They have sought to measure bias quantitatively through various surveys. Usually they conclude that there is little evidence of bias, and that people who say there is are merely crying wolf.

In a new in-depth essay at NAS.org, NAS Chairman Steve Balch argues that the burden of proof should rest with those who deny bias: they must prove that it does not exist rather than demanding proof that it does.

Dr. Balch’s timely essay comes the week after NAS published “They So Despise Her Politics – Do Conservative Faculty Members Get a Fair Shake?. That article describes the case of Teresa Wagner, who believes she was denied a teaching position because of her conservative politics. There we published documents from Wagner’s lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law.

What do you think? How can we know for sure whether conservatives face systemic discrimination in the Ivory Tower?

I’m pleased to introduce Jason Fertig as a new contributor at NAS.org. Dr. Fertig is an NAS member and assistant professor of management at the University of Southern Indiana. Dr. Fertig brings a depth of perception and lively anecdotes from his own experience in the classroom to speak to some of the  most real issues in higher education today.

He has written three articles for NAS so far:

More Millennials Need to Work at McDonalds advises recent college graduates: get a job, anywhere.

Real Sustainability: Saving Our Sense of Culture asks, “Are we failing to hand down our cultural legacy to the next generation?”

Dangers of Credentialing the College Degree: A Real-Life Example is a case study that illustrates the popular idea that students are entitled to get a passing grade – even if they don’t earn one.

I especially recommend the third article, which received attention from blogs such as Phi Beta Cons and Joanne Jacobs.

Also check out his essay at the Pope Center on the gap year, The Gift of Academic Maturity. Fertig spoke about the gap year this morning on Wisconsin Public Radio.

You can look forward to more NAS articles by Dr. Fertig in the weeks ahead.

Of interest to law professors, lawyers, and curious individuals, NAS has recently published three articles about law schools:

“Conferring Privilege: DOJ, Law Schools, and the New Politics of Race” examines the Association of American Law Schools’ efforts to prevent racial colorblindness.

“’They So Despise Her Politics’ – Do Conservative Faculty Candidates Get a Fair Shake?” presents documents in the lawsuit of an unsuccessful faculty candidate for a position at the University of Iowa College of Law who believes she was denied the appointment because of her politics.

“Potemkin Admissions: Law Professors Propose to Hide LSAT Data” exposes a movement to persuade law schools to withhold LSAT scores from U.S. News and World Report. The idea is to make it harder for the public to see how much the pursuit of racial preferences drags down the quality of admissions.

“They So Despise Her Politics” has received attention from the Daily Iowan, Instapundit, TaxProf Blog, and One Minute Lawyer.

George, thanks for sharing the Pope Center piece on student evaluations. I thought this paragraph was especially poignant:

Today’s student-survey approach may tell us how students viewed the course, but the data tell us nothing about actual learning. It is not that questionnaire designers disdain knowledge; they just cannot measure it, and thus they exclude a key element of teaching. Ironically, universities can now hire or retain teachers who impart nothing of value but have superb ratings.

Incidentally, NAS published an article by Peter Cohee on student evaluations last week. Cohee concluded:

A decade spent writing evaluations of public school teachers has brought me to this disillusion: evaluations as they are don’t make teachers better, don’t get rid of bad teachers, aren’t needed by good teachers, and don’t improve schools or student learning. They tend to induce cynicism and to engender ill will between the teacher and the evaluator. They are an almost complete waste of the enormous time, energy, and money spent on them.

He argued that several factors render evaluations useless:

1. Pre-written forms are created by those who don’t teach and allow for mediocre teaching (“I’ve also seen altogether mediocre teaching that meets every formal requirement.”)
2. No meaningful consequences or rewards follow evaluation
3. Evaluation is not tied to what and how well students have learned

Cohee offers some concrete suggestions for making evaluation meaningful and effective.

Jennifer Gratz, plaintiff in Gratz v. Bollinger in 2003, testified in court last week against AB 2047, a new bill that if passed, will overturn Proposition 209 and allow racial preferences in California university admissions. When asked, “If you had to bet your $5 on which kid was going to be more successful…one kid white, one kid of color, which kid do you think you should bet on?” she replied, “I wouldn’t bet on either kid based on their race, I would look at the kid as a whole.”

Her interviewer pressed, “I regrettably come to the conclusion that race does still matter in terms of the ability of young people to succeed,” to which Gratz answered, “I think the question should be: how do we get to the point, then, where it does not matter? And the government sticking its nose in the issue of race and determining based on someone’s race who gets into a university, and picking and choosing winners and losers based on skin color, does not get us there.”

Watch the exchange in the 5-minute video below (via ACRI):

Proposition 209, the law prohibiting racial preferences at public universities in California, is under attack.

Last week the California Association of Scholars (CAS), an affiliate of NAS, filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit against Prop. 209 by an organization that, as NAS president Peter Wood said, “has deployed questionable tactics against civil rights initiatives in every state where they have been proposed.” CAS, along with Ward Connerly and the American Civil Rights Foundation, will be represented by attorneys with the Pacific Legal Foundation.

There is also a bill called AB2047, which would effectively overturn Prop. 209 and is now in the hands of the California Senate. CAS president John Ellis has sent a letter to the Senate chair, Gloria Romero, urging her and her colleagues to vote down this law.

Links

Press Release on CAS and BAMN lawsuit

CAS Letter to State Senate

Chronicle of Higher Ed

Pacific Legal Foundation Press Release

In the movie Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character works for a company that sends him around the country to fire people. To save the company money on airfare, hotels, and rental cars, Clooney’s female colleague, a young Cornell grad, suggests that they switch to firing people through videoconferencing on laptops.

The method seems to work, but the viewer feels instinctively that this is even more demeaning than getting fired by a third party company. There’s something so impersonal and distant about talking to a screen. Later in the movie, the girl (Cornell grad) gets dumped by her boyfriend via text message, and once again, we see the medium itself as adding to her humiliation.

We’ve always had the sense that with any communication short of face-to-face conversation, there’s something vital missing. That’s been the abiding concern during the rise of online education. But an article in today’s Inside Higher Ed declares that online education will lose none of the elements that make traditional education what it is:

As we look to the future of liberal education, we seem unlikely to change the fundamentals of what has made that model successful. We will enhance the curriculum with interactive smart classrooms, course and lecture capture, ubiquitous wireless connecting smaller and more capable digital devices, and other technologies not yet invented, but close faculty-student and student-student interaction will remain the core. What seems more likely to change – and to offer transformative possibilities – is the medium.

But isn’t the medium the message? The author maintains, however, that “there is every reason to believe that whatever ‘liberal education’ is, ‘it’ can travel over a network.”

He offers some compelling reasons.

Cross-posted from NAS.org

NAS President Peter Wood appeared on New Jersey’s My9 News on Wednesday along with Todd Zipper, co-founder of Test Drive College Online, in a segment on the pros and cons of online education. Dr. Wood said, “I’m regretful that we can’t have everybody go to college in a form of traditional education, but that isn’t going to happen; we have to learn how to make this new medium really work.” Click here to watch the 3-minute video.

NAS has released a new report, “Beach Books: What Do Colleges Want Students to Read Outside Class?” on common reading programs at colleges and universities.

In the last decade, the number of colleges that assign summer reading to incoming freshmen has soared. The National Association of Scholars has tracked and analyzed 290 such programs—the most comprehensive study of “common reading” programs to date. The study reveals national patterns in book selection. Major findings include a widespread assignment of books that promote liberal political views; a preponderance of contemporary writing; and a surprisingly low level of intellectual difficulty. The NAS recommends seven steps colleges can take to improve their book choices.

Download the report (PDF)

Download the book list

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