NAS Blog

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

Cross posted from NAS.org

We are pleased to announce that the current issue of Academic Questions, a special issue on “Sustainability,” is available FREE online! To read it, click here, or click on the article titles below to download the PDF versions. This issue will remain publicly accessible for twelve to eighteen months. We encourage you to forward the above link to potential members and subscribers.

Members, to gain access to other issues of Academic Questions, email nasonweb@nas.org with “AQ access” in the subject line. We’ll email you a unique link which you can use to set up your online AQ account. If you are not a member of NAS, please join us! We welcome everyone who agrees with our principles. Membership is renewable annually and includes a one-year subscription to Academic Questions in print and online.

The Issue at a Glance

Earth Worms: The Eco-Corruption of Higher Education
Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars
Editor’s introduction to this issue

The Roots of Sustainability
Glenn M. Ricketts, National Association of Scholars
In a sweeping history that begins in the 1960s, Prof. Rickets, NAS director of public affairs and tenured historian, investigates how the sustainability movement emerged from the extremes of environmentalism. In considering how these movements diverge, Ricketts points out that what sets “sustainatopians” and environmentalists apart from earlier conservationists is their quasi-mystical claim that “everything is connected to everything else.”

If the Science Is Solid, Why Stoop? An Environmental Scientist Parses Climategate
Stanley W. Trimble, University of California at Berkeley
According to Prof. Trimble—soil scientist, UCLA geography professor, and environmentalist—“Climategate is…the greatest science scandal in my lifetime.” He urges that scientific skepticism is the only responsible academic reaction to current revelations about the research behind “climate change theory.”

Under the Green Thumb: Totalitarian Sustainability on Campus
Adam Kissel
Mr. Kissel offers a compelling indictment of the totalitarian tendencies within the sustainability movement on campus, whose proponents relentlessly argue that saving the earth outweighs every civil liberty.

Corroding the Curriculum: Sustainability v. Education
Austin Williams, Future Cities Project
In The Enemies of Progress: The Dangers of Sustainability (Societas, 2008), British architect Austin Williams called sustainability “an insidiously dangerous concept at odds with progress.” In his Academic Questions essay Williams examines the sustainability agenda in education in the United Kingdom (with parallel examples from the United States) and reveals that sustainability curricula are propagandistic and motivated by envy, status seeking, and financial gain, particularly among the less distinguished academic institutions.

Is Sustainability Sustainable?
Daniel Bonevac, University of Texas at Austin
What is “sustainability”? The sustainability movement has smugly produced hundreds of definitions, but can any of them withstand genuine analytical scrutiny? Philosophy professor Daniel Bonevac strives to answer that question and finds that many of the definitions by sustainability advocates rest on impossibilities or appear to be well-argued abstractions lacking substance. He concludes that sustainability is a bucket with no bottom.

Pluralism Lost: Sustainability’s Unfortunate Fall
Edward T. “Terry” Wimberley, Florida Gulf Coast University
Dr. Wimberley, a professor of ecological studies at Florida Gulf Coast University and supporter of the concept of sustainability, offers an unflinching account of what happened in a very short amount of time when one university carried its commitment to sustainability beyond the bounds of fair-minded intellectual pluralism.

Art and Delusion: Unreality in Art School
Ross Neher, Pratt Institute
Pratt painting instructor Ross Neher shares an inside look at the contemporary art school and observes that institutional obeisance at the altar of postmodern theory has only worked to widen the gap between an art student’s dreams of success as an artist and the harsh realities of the postgraduation world.

Bibliotherapy: Literature as Exploration Reconsidered
Stewart Justman, University of Montana, Missoula
Stewart Justman, Liberal Studies Program director at the University of Montana, Missoula, examines Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration, a popular textbook used since 1938 (in five successive editions) in high school English classrooms across America. Prof. Justman discusses how the one-time college roommate of Margaret Mead managed to transform teaching literature into a form of student therapy that encourages students to find their own meaning in texts.

Letters of an Old School New Critic
Robert B. Heilman: His Life in Letters
Edited by Edward Alexander, Richard Dunn, and Paul Jaussen
Reviewed by James A. Grimshaw, Jr.

Poems by Benjamin A. Plotinsky and David J. Rothman
“Jennifer Cheevy” by Benjamin A. Plotinsky, City Journal
“Three Voices” by David J. Rothman, Conundrum Press

Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest
Compiled, with commentary, by Peter Wood

LETTERS

A new essay on campus feminism is now available online at NAS.org. Authored by Karin Agness, founder and president of the Network of enlightened Women (new friends of NAS), the article will appear in the forthcoming “Student Culture” issue of Academic Questions (vol. 23, no. 2).

Agness documents the rise of feminism in higher education and recounts her own encounter with feminism as an undergrad at UVA:

At the end of the tour, I asked her, “Would the Women’s Center consider cosponsoring a group for conservative women?” She looked at me as if I were crazy, chuckled, and said, “Not here.” I thanked her and decided to start a club for conservative women on my own.

Last week I published “Bias, Barriers, or Biology” in response to the AAUW’s March report Why So Few? on why fewer women than men pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). I argued that while social norms and parent/teacher encouragement play a role in leading women to pursue such careers, attempts to achieve some sort of gender balance are misguided and ignore the fact that men and women are inherently different and their interests aren’t always the same.

This week Minding the Campus features two additional articles responding to the AAUW report. Susan Pinker, author of The Sexual Paradox, writes that “there’s good evidence that on average, women choose different disciplines than men do–or in different proportions–and they do so with their eyes and options open.” John Rosenburg of the blog Discriminations places Why So Few? in context with a mountain of similar research by feminists puzzled by women’s “underrepresentation.”

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Diane Auer Jones warns, “the inherent bias in this report should caution everyone against taking the results too seriously” (the report had no male authors). Jones acknowledges a “gender gap” in STEM fields but says women need to stop blaming this on men and take responsibility for their own career success.

To read more about this debate, see the AQ article “Feminizing Science: The Alchemy of Title IX” by Patricia Hausman and the book The Science on Women and Science, compiled by NAS board member Christina Hoff Sommers.

Cross posted from www.NAS.org

NAS members, have you been getting your issues of Academic Questions on time? We have received some complaints from members who did not get issues or who have received issues bizarrely late.  In February, for example, our publisher, Springer, apparently sent copies of our Winter 2008-09 issue on Liberal Arts and the Family more than a year late to some members.  Other members report not receiving the Winter 2009-10 issue on Academic Revisionisms, mailed in November 2009.  If you have had either of these problems or other lapses with your subscription to Academic Questions, let us know by emailing nasonweb@nas.org.

We want to make sure you receive the issues, and we want to get to the bottom of the problem with Springer’s handling of our subscription fulfillment.

Check out this week’s articles at NAS.org:

Member Alert
We want to make sure you are receiving your issues of Academic Questions on time. Let us know if you’ve had any problems with your subscription.

Debating Diversity at Smith College…No Comment, Glenn Ricketts, Mar. 1
Two contrasting student views of the “main topic” at Smith College.

Chivalry Lives: An Interview with Blayne Bennett, Ashley Thorne, Mar. 3
Gentlemanliness is not dead; it’s just dormant, says the Network of enlightened Women.

Unimaginable Calamity, Peter Wood, Mar. 4
How does global warming doctrine’s foothold in higher education fit with the integrity of science?

Articles of Interest This Week, Ashley Thorne, Mar. 4
A roundup of must-reads in higher education news.

Sustainability Links, Ashley Thorne, Mar. 4
Articles of note on campus sustainability – of special note is UF’s “40 days of change” leading up to Earth Day. Is Earth Day the new Easter?

March Forth, Peter Wood and Ashley Thorne, Mar. 4
On March 4 thousands of students at universities around the country and especially on California campuses are rallying to protest tuition hikes in public higher education. College costs have indeed become exorbitant, but is this the right way to confront the excess?

Suitable for Framing: Revisiting Virginia Tech’s Diversity Litmus Test, Ashley Thorne, Mar. 5
This month last year, NAS showed Virginia Tech had made “diversity” service a requirement for faculty promotion and tenure.

NAS’s Glenn Ricketts traces the history of the sustainability movement, now dominant as a campus ideology, in a major article that will appear in a forthcoming sustainability-themed issue of our journal Academic Questions. His piece examines the roots of the movement, from the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring to Murray Bookchin’s theories of “social ecology” to the emergence of urban atheists’ religion of choice to an “interconnected” web of political and spiritual ideology.

This important article gives historical context for an idea that has gripped America’s colleges and universities. If you’ve ever heard about or been affected by sustainability mania and wondered, “How did we get here?” this essay is an excellent reference point.

NAS members and AQ subscribers, the December issue is available online. You can log in and download and print individual articles or simply read them on your computer. If you are a member/subscriber, click here to find out how to access the journal online.

If you would like to subscribe to NAS’s quarterly journal Academic Questions, the easiest  and most affordable way to do so is to become a member of NAS.