NAS Blog

A reply to Lawrence Auster‘s blog post:

ObamaCare as you rightly point out is a life and death issue.  That means that the efforts to pass it necessarily overshadow everything else.  The Democrats,

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

knowing that, are using the “reconciliation” as cover to pass some other dubious and politically unpopular legislation.  They are stuffing Obama’s takeover of higher education into it as well.  What ObamaCare is to medicine, Obama Loans are to college.  They will consolidate federal control of higher education finance in the Department of Education.  Obama wants this as part of his plan to double college enrollments by 2020 (from 18 million to 36 million) and make the United States the nation with the largest percentage of college-degreed citizens in the world.  Right now, the nation that holds that enviable position is Russia, with 55 percent.  This level of higher education has made Russia the powerhouse of innovation and productivity we see today, hasn’t it?  Why would it work out any differently for us?  Showering the country in empty credentials awarded to tens of millions of young people who have neither the talent nor the motivation to succeed at a real college education won’t improve the economy, as Obama promises.  It will, however, create a huge cohort of government clients.

That’s how the Obama loans (called “Direct Lending”) come into it.  Anyone who wishes to attend college and needs to borrow money to do so will have only one choice:  borrow from the Department of Education.  DOE will choose who gets the loans, how much, and under what terms.  Voila!  The great majority of college students are instantly long-term government clients who will spend the first decades of their working lives paying down their debt to Obama Loans.

The new program also locks into place the position of the federal government as chief patron to almost all colleges and universities except the super-rich (e.g. Harvard, Yale, Princeton) and the handful of scrappy we-take-no-government –funds exceptions (e.g. Hillsdale and Grove City).  Anyone who thinks the government will not make use of this leverage to impose its own priorities on what is taught, who teaches, and how colleges manage themselves, must not have heard of Title IX, the DOE Office of Civil Rights, and the host of previous infringements on the academy that grew up under the much weaker federally-guaranteed student loans program.

This development has come up so suddenly—just last week!—that few people outside higher education have awoken to the danger.  What danger would that be?  Just as ObamaCare threatens to destroy high quality health care in America by reducing medical services to sub-mediocrity for all but the elite, Obama Ed threatens to destroy higher education by making it the intellectual equivalent of today’s high schools.  College for everyone regardless of ability is college for no one.

Part of the Obama Loan program is to take the “savings” (currently estimated at $67 billion over 11 years) from eliminating fees to private lenders and recycle the money as grants to low-income students and favored colleges.  So the government program will have the additional angle of forcing the students who borrow from the government to pay for the educations of others who will be spared the borrowing.

I have written about this twice at “Obama-Care Meets Obama-Ed” and “Obama Loans, Who Collects?”

Back in March, I received a leaked copy of a plan for one of the colleges at Virginia Tech.  It was a new set of guidelines for faculty promotion and tenure that would require every candidate to compile an annual record of “demonstrated” diversity accomplishments.  Other Virginia Tech documents spelled out in detail what would pass muster as a diversity accomplishment.  The new rules were intended to apply to the classroom, research, publication, faculty involvement with student activities, and everything else that faculty members might do.

I raised a fuss through the National  Association of Scholars website, and other organizations, including FIRE and ACTA joined in.  Eventually, the Virginia Tech board and the president backed down.  But after the furor subsided the president and other officials made clear that their commitment to a comprehensive diversity regime at this state university was unchanged.

Now comes a new document, a “Strategic Diversity Plan,” for Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.  I got this one by internal leak as well, but it has subsequently been posted publicly.

Should anyone much care what is happening at this large and pretty ordinary university in southern Virginia?  I suppose the taxpayers of Virginia should have some interest.  But the matter does seem to deserve a some broader attention if for one reason:  it is about as well-documented a case as we are ever likely to see of a university in the grip of a race preference ideology attempting to enforce that ideology over everyone and everything in its reach.  Nothing is too large (creation of whole new departments), or too small (flyers to be inserted in packets for job applicants) to escape the diversiphiles at Virginia Tech—and they propose to fund their whole enterprise not with line items in the budget, but with a fixed percentage of the whole budget!

Ashley Thorne and I have pored over the “Strategic Diversity Plan” and “fisked” it, i.e. added a critical commentary inside the original text:  http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1133. Last week we summarized the developments leading up to this new plan:   http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1131.

It’s hard to say whether this sort of effort on our part has any practical benefit.  Virginia Tech and a great many other colleges and universities are scudding along with their racial preference regimes (and other forms of diversity that likewise debase the academic mission) without serious public opposition.  But I do like the idea that we have paid attention and not just let this stuff settle in as though it made good sense and wise policy.

Last week an NAS member, a professor at the University of Southern Indiana we’ll call Professor Smith, brought to our attention a new “Center for Social Justice” at the university. He asked for advice on how to mitigate the adverse effects of such a center. I replied:

Dear Professor Smith,

Thank you for your inquiry last week about the recently created “Center for Social Justice” at  the University of Southern Indiana.  I agree that it sounds like another instance of political advocacy masquerading as academic inquiry.

Centers such as this are in vogue.  After getting your email Ashley Thorne and I started doing some checking and included some comments on these centers in an article we posted to the NAS website last week, “Stories We’re Watching.”  In that article we noted some of the other colleges and universities that have similar centers.

Your deeper question is what can you do about this?  Certainly there is no silver bullet.  But these centers are very dependent on a handful of conditions that can be challenged.  The conditions they depend on include:

1. Camouflage for off campus.  They typically like to grandstand to their supporters about their radical credentials, but they typically go to great trouble to present themselves to alumni and people outside the university as just another academic enterprise engaged in wholesome scholarly work and teaching.  They try to phrase their advocacy in terms that make it blend into the campus surroundings—perhaps a little edgier than Shakespeare or engineering, but basically the same sort of “educational stuff.”  This is deeply and thoroughly dishonest.  Advocacy and education are not the same thing, which leads to the next point.
2. Blurring the definition of academic work.  If you make out that volunteering for a politician’s campaign or helping out at the local ACORN office is an “educational” experience worthy of academic credit, you can make almost anything “academic.”  The trick here is the elasticity of the word “educational.”  Surely it is “educational” in some sense of the word to organize street protests or for that matter to throw a brick through a storefront window.  But is that the sense of “educational” that should prevail in a university?  Among the community of the learned?  Among students seeking to gain understanding of their society, science, culture, and heritage?  Is it educational in the sense of helping students distinguish truth from falsehood or good reasoning from fallacy?
3. Opportunism.  These centers like to hitchhike on popular causes.  If students are upset about something, they try to fan the flames and then come forward as the natural leaders.  Much of this is quite cynical.  The key participants don’t care about the issue per se.  They care about the opportunity to make their work more salient on campus.  When they do this, there are always students who catch on that they have been used.
4. Appropriating successful campaigns from other universities.  Denouncing bottled water, or asserting that Coca Cola harms third world nations, or setting up “bias reporting” sites—there is always a trend, and the Centers for Social Justice are extremely alert to these straws in the wind.  Their members attend conferences and stay in close communications with their counterparts.  This gives them easy access to pre-made propaganda and spares them the trouble of actually having to think about things.
5. Institutional influence seeking. Center officials are often among the busiest and most connected people on campus.  They volunteer for committees and nominate their own to every possible opening.  Chances are pretty good that the Center at USI is the result of this kind of log-rolling, but it is now in a position to do even more of it.  Watch out for the Center asking for “representation” on campus committees, and watch out as well for claims that it speaks for certain “constituencies” that have been “excluded.”  Those are all claims worth challenging.  Typically they are sheer assertion.  The “communities” in question have never heard of them and may themselves be imaginary.
6. Resource hoarding. These centers usually demand hefty budgets and nervous administrators grant them more than their fair share. The truth is that their fair share may be zero, since they do nothing to advance the academic mission and may do quite a bit to hinder it.

You can challenge any of these things.  A successful challenge must always be based on the facts.  So the first thing I suggest is that you and anyone else you can find who is interested just begin to assemble a well-organized file of what the Center for Social Justice publishes, says, and does.  This doesn’t require any skullduggery—and in fact shouldn’t.  the publicly available stuff will be more than adequate.  That’s because the Center itself will assume until it learns otherwise that it can do and say whatever it wants.  Think of ACORN before Breitbart.

Candace de Russy on Phi Beta Cons links a website picture of a test about the Constitution given in 1954 in which an 8th grader, Kenny Hignite, scored 98½ percent by listing all the cabinet positions and the people holding them, all the justices of the Supreme Court, the substance of the first 22 amendments, and more. It is a feat few eighth graders could perform today—or for that matter, few adults, and certainly few college students.

The thinness of substantive knowledge among today’s students is often remarked in a general way. But there actually is a systematic study comparing the general knowledge of high school grads from Kenny Hignite’s era with today’s college grads. In December 2002, the NAS published a survey, “Today’s College Students and Yesteryear’s High School Grads: A Comparison of General Cultural Knowledge.” We did this by commissioning Zogby International to poll a sample of 2002 college seniors with 15 questions regarding “cultural knowledge” that had originally been administered to similar groups of high school seniors in 1955. These included knowledge of canonical authors, geographical knowledge or watershed historical events. The results were not reassuring. 61% of high school seniors polled in 1955 knew that Madrid was the capital of Spain; 63% of college seniors in 2002 also knew. At the same time, 67% of those responding in 1955 knew that Maine bordered Canada, while only 50% of 2002 college seniors answered correctly. Overall, we found that the two groups – high school seniors of 1955 and college seniors of 2002 – were approximately equivalent in their general cultural and historical knowledge.

We could be pleased, I suppose, that absolute decline hasn’t set in. But we should also keep in mind that 1955 was before Sputnik, and the first great national effort to raise academic standards to keep up with the Soviets. And it was before the 1965 Higher Education Act began the immense federally-funded expansion of higher education. All those billions spent improving our schools and colleges may have done something, but they don’t appear to have improved American’s cultural knowledge. What we have instead is college seniors who perform at the level of 1950s high school students.

“Sustainable Sausage,” a blog that promotes “sustainability for twenty somethings” features the views of three New Zealanders, Lisa, Kavi, and Janelle. One of the Kiwi sausage-makers found her way to Ashley’s and my provocative press release from a month ago, Sustainability is a Waste:  10 Reasons to Oppose the Sustainability Movement on Your Campus, and was appropriately provoked.  She imagines we invite “huge piles of garbage all over the world,” and also accuses us of confusing Soviet communism with the Green movement.  Ah, no.  Communist regimes proved themselves in the last century to be the most environmentally destructive in human history.  The Soviet Union gave us not only Chernobyl, but massive pollution in the Urals; uncontrolled radiological releases including the now famous Chelyabinsk-65 release in 1957 that contaminated 20,000 square kilometers and the Tomsk-7 release in 1993 that poisoned another 100 square kilometers; chemical dumps on the Baltic Seabed; the attempt in the 1970s to re-channel northern-flowing rivers with nuclear explosions; and the destruction of the Aral Sea to irrigate deserts. 

The modern West has not always been a good steward of the environment, but there is nothing in the West in the last century remotely on the level of heedless destruction of the environment carried out by communist regimes.  It might, however, be a good thing if promoters of the sustainability movement with its emphasis on central planning and an ideology of shared sacrifice showed a little awareness of where public policy based on those principles has led in recent times.

We never drew or implied a comparison of communism with the sustainability movement.  Yet Lisa-Kavi-Janelle are so baffled by our criticisms of the sustainability movement that they jump to the idea that when we said “sustainability” we really meant “communism.”  Sorry, Kiwis.  When we said “sustainability” we meant “sustainability.”  And we are not at all keen on having “huge piles of garbage all over the world.”  We are just keen on making sure that people like you—people who seem ignorant of recent history and determined to promote the latest feel-good cause without any understanding of its larger social implications—are put on the spot.

In response to our article noting the arrival of CampusReform.org, a reader commented:

The recent article on CampusReform.org has the following statement: “NAS is politically non-partisan. We do not take positions on issues such as health care, immigration, and foreign policy. And we believe that reason, civilization, intellectual freedom, civil debate, and the pursuit of the truth are principles that transcend the political lines that have traditionally divided most Americans. But we also believe that CampusReform.org has a potentially vital role to play in helping the beleaguered partisans of American conservatism get a fair intellectual shake at our universities and colleges.”

I strongly agree with the first two sentences, above. However, I have been increasingly disturbed that the NAS has a reputation of being a politically conservative organization, and the tentative endorsement of CampusReform.org will tend to strengthen this widespread belief .

Further, statements like, “At each college subsite, students can also identify ‘leftist faculty’ and review ‘biased textbooks,’ while they may be appropriate to a conservative organization, are not appropriate to ours. I think this endorsement should be rewritten to make it clear that we are not endorsing a witch hunt of any kind and that our kind thoughts towards this organization has nothing to do with its conservatism, but only seeks to bring some balance into what has become a growing tendency to make liberalism an approved doctrine on college campuses.

- John C. Wenger

I replied:

John C. Wenger’s comment raises some important points. NAS indeed has a reputation as a “conservative organization.” I’ve tried in numerous posts to address this, most conspicuously in an article titled, “Is NAS Conservative?” Plainly in the sense of the word used by most Americans when speaking of politics, NAS is not a conservative organization. We have been labeled “conservative” by opponents as a tactic aimed at de-legitimizing NAS in the eyes of fellow academics. The tactic itself displays the extraordinary level of bias in academe. Calling a person or a group “conservative” should on its face be neutral, but it is not. The matter is further complicated by the other, non-political meanings of the word “conservative.” NAS is not about to abandon its commitment to enduring principles, such as the foundational importance of the pursuit of truth in the university or the need for the university to find its place among free institutions, even if these principles are caricatured as dowdy and out-of-date by fashionable ideologues. So NAS is conservative in this larger civilizational sense.

I disagree with John C. Wenger on the question of whether, to prove our purity, we ought to distance ourselves even further from groups such as CampusReform.org. We declined an invitation to participate in CampusReform.org, just as we would decline to participate in any organization that defines its primary purpose as political. CampusReform.org, however, promises to bring a badly needed element of ideological balance to campus debates, and we welcome that prospect. NAS can stand on its own record on the question of “witch hunts.” We’ve been around for 22 years without ever engaging in behavior that could be credibly characterized that way.

At the same time, I have no objection to an explicitly partisan group such as CampusReform.org attempting to make its case by inviting students to identify “leftist faculty” and to review “biased textbooks.” The university left has made a central part of its activity over the last several decades the effort to identify (and often demean on spurious grounds) scholars who dissent from leftist positions, and fields such as women’s studies have long promoted the practice of combing textbooks for instances of “bias.” I don’t see a particularly good argument that these tactics should be allowable to the left but not to the right. They aren’t NAS’s tactics. Our ideal would be a de-politicized university. But the reality is that we now have a university that is overwhelmingly dominated by the political left, and with that in view, we welcome the challenge that CampusReform.org poses to the status quo.

Will this arm’s-length welcome deepen NAS’s reputation as a “conservative” organization? I doubt it. We are routinely mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, and other publications as conservative. Nothing we say or do seems to shake this caricature. Not long ago, a liberal professor tried to involve us in a project to promote “civic literacy” on the terms that we would represent the “conservative” view of things. We declined on the grounds that we aren’t conservative and don’t speak for conservatives. He was incredulous, then angry. “Everybody knows…” Well, no everyone doesn’t.

Distinctions need to be drawn. That is supposedly what scholars are good at. No fair-minded scholar looking at the facts would say that NAS is politically conservative. The label is inaccurate, but I am not going to form NAS policy in a deliberate—and no doubt futile—effort to disprove it. We will continue to make decisions on the basis of where we see the most benefit for the core principles of higher education. On that ground, CampusReform.org looks to be, on balance, a wholesome organization, and we do indeed welcome it.

Over on Phi Beta Cons, Fred Schwartz (“20 Reasons Why Campus Learning Is Better Than Online“) cites my predictions about a “Great Transition” in which higher education will move from in-person campus-based institutions to mostly online instruction in the coming decades.  He dislikes the prospect and disagrees with how likely it is.  I don’t especially like the prospect either, but that’s neither here nor there.  The important question is whether something like the “Great Transition” could happen.  My answer is yes, it could.  That’s because, though our current institutional basis of higher education looks robust, it is highly vulnerable to small shifts in public esteem.  

My article, The Shape of (Academic) Things to Come, wore its satirical colors openly.  I described people, places, and events twenty years into the future and attributed my detailed foresight to scientifically-enhanced precognition.  It says something about the level of fear that online education strikes in today’s academics that a fair number wrote to me to protest this leap of imagination, as if, like Prospero, I could conjure it out of thin air.   Don’t blame me.  If something like the Great Transition were to happen, it won’t be because I set it in motion.  Nor do I think that my fellow seer, Jane Shaw, can be blamed. 

Fred Schwartz provides 20 reasons why campus learning is (or “can be”) better than online college education.  Most of his reasons sound right to me.  He starts out, “Not every subject lends itself to online learning.”  Entirely true, at least with current technology.  Looking at the last twenty years, I wouldn’t exactly rule out the possibility of dramatic improvements in the years ahead, but the more important point is that the subjects Fred cites as better learnt in person—“those that require laboratory work, clinical practice, studio learning, musical instruction, live performance, agricultural work, etc.”— do not require a university.  Historically, each of them was taught in a non-university setting.  Music conservatories and independent art schools still thrive.  Science grew up outside the university and has a vigorous life in independent institutes to this day.  Moreover, the decoupling of undergraduate education from more advanced studies already has models such as the Rockefeller University. 

I won’t go through all twenty of Fred’s reasons, but most of them fall into this pattern.  He makes a valid point about the attraction of or benefit to be had from residential colleges, but the point has no real bearing on the larger economic and social forces at work.  Yes, it is nice to retire to a college town (point 3), but are we going to keep colleges going in order to provide enhanced retirement options?  It seems unlikely. 

At the end of his post Fred allows that “most of these problems are surmountable,” but sees no positive reason why American society would want to surmount them.  In his view, “the college campus is not an expensive anachronism.” I wish that were true, and, even if it isn’t, I wish Americans would continue to believe it true.  But as my article suggested, it is a fragile hope.  For some fifty years, Americans have had drilled into them that higher education is mainly about getting the credentials to get a well-paying job.  If a technology comes along that offers much the same thing at a fraction of the cost, many people will choose that option (there’s “our friend the free market” for you). Online education is that technology, and it is late in the game for higher education to turn around and say, “Residential education is worth a premium price because college, after all, is really about the intangible aspects of shared culture, access to civilization, moral elevation, personal associations, and the richness of life.”   I think such claims happen to be true, but I don’t expect them to outweigh career ambition for the great majority of students or their parents.  To the contrary, the American public has drunk in the utilitarian calculus that college is a launching pad for lucrative careers.  And that public has also grown canny about the undergraduate degree becoming a merely intermediary step on the path to the credentials that really count.  To this we have to add the widespread recognition that in-person higher education is an enormously expensive and vainglorious enterprise that frequently produces meager results.

This adds up to vulnerability.  Fred believes the risk is an illusion.  He cites (point #10) earlier claims that “printing, the telephone, sound recording, radio, movies, television, and various generations of computers,” would “revolutionize education and make all our schools and universities obsolete!”   That’s a pretty misleading “and.”  Most would say that printing, at least, did revolutionize higher education.  The other technologies on the list have had considerable consequences for higher education too.  It might be useful to think of online education as the synthesis of all of them, perhaps as the gasoline-powered automobile combined and synthesized a host of technologies that had already been invented, and spurred the invention of still more.  We can visit Lancaster, Pennsylvania for reassurance that automotive technology did not render horse-powered agriculture and transportation “obsolete,” but the equine economy isn’t what it once was. 

I repeat, I am not eager for the rise of an online dominated form of higher education.  The cultural losses would include some that matter to me profoundly.  But I have yet to see a solid argument why the Great Transition won’t happen.  “I’d regret it” isn’t an argument.