NAS Blog

Education needs a manifesto for a new humanism; sadly, Martha Nussbaum’s new book is not that manifesto.  I had high hopes for Not for Profit but Dr. Nussbaum’s argument quickly becomes a tangle of faulty logic and ideology and notably stale seventies feminism.  Why is she still pumping the wells of female victimization (while referencing the female president of Harvard) and the plight of African American children who lack role models (while noting the African American President of the United States)?  At one point, she praises Mr. Obama’s personal values as developed by the progressive education she endorses.  Then she indicts him for not supporting such education for others, raising the question of just what sort of person her recommended liberal education actually produces.  When  Nussbaum pleads for progressive schools (wherein teachers sagely guide students to discover and construct knowledge themselves), I think of Geoffrey Pyke [pictured] and his Malting House School (John Dewey meets William Golding).

Although Dr. Nussbaum embraces Socratic self-examination, ideology blinds her to her own biases.  She is pedantic when attacking pedantry, and she abhors “the dead hand of authority” yet repeatedly invokes the authority of Nobel Prize credentials.  She advocates critical thinking to combat “demeaning stereotypes,” then proceeds to stereotype men, women, whites, and Southerners.  Masculinity comes off badly unless it is “maternal” which, she implies, is the true essence of human nature (making masculine behavior an aberration, less than human).  In this book, women are saintly and victimized (unless they are named Margaret Thatcher).  Nussbaum scorns the image of the self-reliant cowboy, then, on the next page, explains that every child must develop “less need to call on others.”  Decrying education that involves mere inculcation of facts (more Seventies flotsam), she later admits to the necessity for “a lot of factual knowledge.”

Worse, Dr. Nussbaum extols the individual but avoids any mention of the tribalizing effects of multiculturalism and its diminution of . . . the individual.  Among several straw man arguments, she condemns “the facile equation of Islam with terrorism” without mentioning just who ever assumed that equivalence.  The values she prizes are particularly Western, giving her desire to spread them globally a whiff of cultural imperialism.  And Dr. Nussbaum recommends role-playing to develop sympathy for “the other.”  I met an eyewitness from one progressive school in Northern California that did just that:  to develop sympathy for slaves on a ship, teachers locked students in a Quonset hut, chained to their desks surrounded by rotting fish.

In fact, Dr. Nussbaum’s book is a call not for a new humanism but for an old political correctness.  She even warns that because artworks are so effective at creating empathy, teachers must exercise “careful selectivity” so that students do not read “defective forms of `literature’” which evoke unsocial feelings and “uneven sympathies.”  Yikes!  Goodbye Salinger, Twain, Poe, O’Conner, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka.  With friends like Dr. Nussbaum, liberal arts education doesn’t need enemies.

Back in January I wrote about anti-male prejudice at the University of Wyoming here and mentioned the birth of a new “male positive” discipline called Male Studies.  An organizing webinar in April has led to a full Male Studies conference in New York next October 1-2.  As the conference description makes clear, “This is not a gender studies conference. It is not a men’s studies conference in the generally accepted sense.”  That is, the conference will attempt to investigate, understand, and describe male experience rather than mock, condemn, even erase masculinity, manhood, and manliness.  How refreshing!  Anti-male prejudice and stereotyping permeate academia.  I have described my own experience here and here.

One of the funniest sequences in Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary film  Indoctrinate U is when he wanders from campus to campus asking for directions to “the Men’s Center.”  If Male Studies takes hold, maybe someday Evan might actually be able to find one.

Here are the details and the call for papers from the convener, Dr. Miles Groth of Wagner College:

“Wagner College will host the first annual Conference on Male Studies, on Friday and Saturday, October 1-2, 2010. Six themes representing several disciplines will be addressed by panels and individual presenters:

▪  The deep biology of the experience of being male (genetics, biology, psychoneuroendocrinology, paleoanthropology);

▪  Literacy and education of boys and college males (pedagogy, sociology);

▪  Socioeconomic factors leading to males’ over-involvement in the criminal justice system, underemployment and limited opportunities as fathers, resulting from changes in child custody law (economics, forensics, law, public policy);

▪  Misandric representations of boys and mature males in the media and advertising (media studies including cinema, television and internet, and advertising);

▪  Accounts of the experience of being male (history, literature, autobiography);

▪  Pressing issues related to the emotional well-being of boys and older males, most notably depression and suicide (clinical psychology, medicine and psychiatry, social work).

Specialists in all of the above disciplines as well as related areas of research will present position papers or engage in carefully organized panel discussions of the themes. We expect participants to include scholars from more than the 12 countries who participated along with you in the April 7, 2010 inaugural teleconference and webinar broadcast.

Proceedings of the conference will be published in the first issue of a new journal, Male Studies, in 2011.”

I just hosted a three-week colloquium exploring the relationship between great books and democracy which featured former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson, and poet and former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia.

Pinsky stressed how the medium for poetry is the body of the speaker, making poetry individual and on human scale in our mass media world.  Hanson argued three positions which give postmodern academics hissy fits:  that there is such a thing as human nature, that we can learn from the past (reading gives us knowledge without having to go through painful experience), and that life is tragic, not therapeutic.  He attributed California’s manifold problems to a utopian desire to be what we should be rather than a realistic desire to be what we actually could be, reminding me that California was the cradle of the Self-Esteem Movement.  Gioia warned about the cultural dangers of not reading, citing in particular non-readers’ disengagement from civic and social life.  Reading requires “sustained linear attention” which is not a property of electronic entertainments.

Although Gioia was optimistic (“we can create the society in which we want to live”), the nagging question at the center of the colloquium remains:  if reading and poetry nurture the individual and have positive civic consequences, might it be that the fate of liberal arts education is tied to the fate of liberal democracy itself, that the fate of literature is entwined with the fate of the West?

Analytic philosopher Martha Nussbaum offered her answer in the Times Literary Supplement (April 30).  As colleges carve away the liberal arts in the name of economy or productivity, Nussbaum says,

[r]adical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through.  Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive.  If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful, docile, technically trained machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements.

I run a Great Books Program that offers courses online so that students anywhere can earn a certificate.  Recently I heard Gareth Williams, Chair of Columbia’s famous Lit-Hum core and emailed him for his thoughts on teaching great books online.  He was, not surprisingly, dubious:

As for Core courses online, I myself would be sceptical about the feasibility of such a step, at least from a Columbia perspective: so much here depends on the seminar format of voices heard around the table, and I feel that that format would be very hard indeed to reproduce in anything like its ‘real-life’ vitality if we tried it online.

I confess to similar doubts, admit that synchronous live dialogue is not reproducible, and acknowledge that the online courses are a marketing tool.  Still, in 2010, perhaps discussion takes a back seat to getting students exposed to challenging texts at all.  I started my program basically to keep frequently-cancelled literature courses alive in my institution (administrative pluses:  lower cost and a draw for disenfranchised literature students across the country).  Yet Professor Williams’s reply started me thinking about other virtues of online courses (I have taken at least a dozen and taught even more).  My defense of the online mode was bolstered by an experience of “voices around the table” while reporting to an informal group of students about the Association for Core Texts and Courses Conference where I heard Dr. Williams.  I could hardly get a word in edgewise with all the interruptions and crosstalk.  Everyone wanted to speak at once; everyone had an opinion; no one had a question; no one cared to listen.  I finally gave up.

Neil Postman preached that

for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost.

For now, the cost of electronically embracing what Victor Davis Hanson calls the “vanquished civilization of readers” may be the loss of “voices around the table.”  The advantage of online discussions, however, is the opportunity to complete one’s thought.   Students can also take time to frame their words, reflect rather than react, revise, expand, cross reference,  corroborate, and fact-check.

My online classes often turn into one-on-one tutorials, epistolary, more time-consuming than the classroom but with a balance of distance and intimacy.  The shy can “speak” as loudly as the bold.  Discipline is limited to enforcing the flaming policy.  No one is watching the clock or tweeting, and students are no longer packed in a box (by the end of the day, my 1940s era classroom is redolent of a high school locker room).  Martin Pawley used to argue that all technology acts as insulation against human contact.  Sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

NAS had a quite a sustainability week; most notably, we got word that Stanford was voting on a proposal to make sustainability education a requirement for graduation. We wrote to the Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policy (“Letter to Stanford Committee: Vote Against Mandatory Sustainability Ed“), explaining that sustainability is a contested ideology, and  urging the members to stand back and give this proposal a truly critical examination. We will give a report when we learn the results of the Friday vote.

A major NAS publication is our Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education. We have posted an updated 3rd edition, with new entries on key figures, groups, and legislation guiding the movement.

We welcome suggestions for new entries and corrections of any inaccurate information. Click here to view the encyclopedia on the NAS.org website or click here to download the encyclopedia in PDF format (with extra photos).

We observed that Stony Brook University has announced that, due to budget constraints, it will close its sustainability campus in Southampton, NY (“To Sustain Stony Brook, Sustainability Campus Will Close“). Sustainability, higher education’s current trendiest idea, has taken some hits in the last six months with Climategate, the Copenhagen flop, and global warming scientists’ admissions that they lack evidence for their claims. Would Stony Brook have considered shutting down Southampton before all this happened?

Is the campus sustainability movement losing its momentum? A year ago Steven Hayward discerned a growing “green fatigue” setting in with the public. But in academia, budget cutting so far has carefully tiptoed around sustainability programs (see Chronicle article “Even During Hiring Freezes, Many Colleges Stick with Sustainability Plans”). The rationale was that sustainability was both a money-saver and a planet-saver; thus it would be one of the last to go during even the most ruthless recessional slashing of other programs. Stony Brook’s decision, while it won’t cut the sustainability program altogether (at least not yet), may be a sign that the stronghold is crumbling. This could be the beginning of the end of sustainability’s diplomatic immunity on college campuses.

Also of note, the UN’s Earth Charter, endorsed by many U.S. colleges and universities, has its own 200-pound “ark” for transportation (“Ark of Hope for the Earth Charter“), and participants at an upcoming meeting in Vancouver will look for ways to shrink the economy in the name of sustainability (“De-Growth Conference“).

1:00 p.m.  While students wander in, I fire up my iPhone for some “bumper music.”  Jackson Browne croons “Stay” but Devin asks, “Who did the original?”

“Maurice Williams—wrote it when he was 15.”  I scroll and tap.  “There.”

Devin’s favorite is Sam Cooke.  Joshua’s screen name is “jeffplane67.”  Alexis is wearing a Led Zeppelin tee-shirt and Joy has already requested “anything Zep.”  They chat about Monterey Pop.  I say, “Yeh, I was there.  Paul Simon, the Animals, Mamas and Papas.”

Alexis scowls.  “What happened?  Why is there nothing like that now?”

Such disconcerting affection for their grandparents’ music may be related to why many students suddenly want to read and discuss “great books.”  Lately, I see more and more students with a hunger for the real deal, for the old school higher education they have only heard about.  Like Alexis, they feel cheated and empty, as if having missed a Golden Age.  Worse, they seem to feel that they are being prevented from experiencing the world in a more meaningful and satisfying way.  Ben got turned on by my archaic New Criticism approach to literature:  architectonics, the “intentional fallacy,” close-reading, ambiguity.  Then he transferred and was promptly turned off by his new school’s multiculti victim-a-thon.  Another literature major bites the dust.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, and a steady stream of books document the extinction (or suicide) of the liberal arts, especially literature, but some students haven’t gotten the memo.  They are still beguiled by Robert Hutchins’s metaphor of “The Great Conversation” and the prospect of becoming able to understand and participate in it.  Over 200 registered for Great Books courses in my new program last fall.

Chatting with Dana Gioia last week I recalled how he said of his poetry that

The essential thing was to tell a story of moral consequence.  Something of life-or-death importance had to be at the heart of the poem.

One rarely hears such charged language in the secular, relativistic world of public higher education.  But, like Gioia, post 9/11 students may sense that some things actually are important, beyond the reach of postmodern ironizing.  Gioia remembers how Catholic ritual fostered in him an awareness of symbolism and led him to ponder “the relationship between the visible and the invisible.”

Glenn Reynolds mentions a Pew report suggesting that students want spirituality but not actually religion, commenting wryly that “religion often tells you to do things you don’t want to do, or to refrain from doing things you want to do, while spirituality is usually more . . . flexible.”  My students don’t seem particularly religious, yet clearly they feel the yearning for ecstasis that music, religion, and literature provide.  Unfortunately, too much flexibility leaves you formless, and without at least a working knowledge of religion, students are left bewildered by the complex tapestry of great literature from Chaucer to Flannery O’Connor.

Under pressure, 48 states have proposed common standards for grades K-12. Some of them are having second thoughts. Chester Finn says the standards should be taken seriously because they’re intellectually solid, voluntary, and will help parents make better school choices. But others such as Sandra Stotsky, say the standards are much too low.

What do you think?

I am still jazzed by the techno-pitchman’s hype last week about clickers, assessment, and SLOs, and I know clickers are the future of edubiz!  Clickers generate tsunamis of admin’s holy grail—data! With data I can prepare reports and quantify learning to show that I’m accountable.

I went right to work, making a PowerPoint of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” embedding slides to measure student learning of the concepts.  This way I can build a data bridge from my students’ clicker responses to bar graphs and data reservoirs.   Crunching the data even shows the accreditation Cylons just how effective (but perpetually improving!) my methodologies and pedagogies are in producing the feedback loop of capability enhancement and desirable outcome consequentialities.  God, I love being a teacher!

Now to ze text:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

I ripped “P-Frock” off the Net (whoops, no epigraph on this one but I’ll add a link to Dante).  WTF?  An entire stanza is missing!  Data entry malfunction—and there are formatting problems and mis-transcriptions.  Better hyperlink “etherised” to Wikipedia so students can learn about anaesthics, their development and use in care facilities; ditto British spelling.  And link to “simile.”

Time for an assessment slide to see if students are getting the concepts.

QUESTION:  Eliot employs figures of speech.  Name two.

1. Miscegenation
2. Tropospheric hegemony
3. Simile
4. Smiley
5. Jane Smiley
6. Anthropomorphism
7. Anthropogenic global warming
8. a and d
9. c and e
10. e and e

I’ll have them click, then discuss with their peeps, then click again.  Then I’ll have data and I can grok if my students are getting the concept!

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

Yikes!  Better link “women” to the Women’s Studies Program.  Add another hyperlink to “Michelangelo”  and Google images of David, the Sistine Chapel, The Thinker (wait, is that Michelangelo?  The Thinker).

Dang, only 18 stanzas to go!  I am so teaching now!

Cross-posted from www.nas.org

Yesterday I spoke in an online radio interview on the American Freedom Alliance’s broadcast, the Western Word. The program was on “The Green Movement and Its Discontents,” with myself, Holly Swanson of Operation Green Out! and author of Set Up and Sold Out: Find Out What Green Really Means, and Michael Shaw, president of Freedom Advocates. We three—with the addition of Steve Milloy, author of Green Hell and founder of JunkScience.com, and Claudia Rosett, journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies—will speak this Sunday in Los Angeles at aseminar on the sustainability movement.

The radio program is an hour in length. To listen or download the broadcast (download if you’d like the capability to skip through), click here. My main segment is from 26:18-33:30, with additional subsequent comments. I speak about how the sustainability movement is on the rise in higher education, beginning with organizations such as Second Nature and evident in the curricula of institutions such as Florida Gulf Coast University.

At Florida Gulf Coast University, where the curriculum is centered on the UN’s Earth Charter, students say mandated eco-propaganda actually fosters anti-environmentalism. They are gathering signatures to a petition to present to the administration to ask that the required sustainability course, the “Colloquium,” be made an elective rather than mandated for all.

Among the reasons the petition gives for its request are the following:

• If the course is intended to share opinions and promote discussion, it should offer diverse viewpoints in the required course materials.
• If the course is intended to present scientific information, it should avoid politically motivated material (such as An Inconvenient Truth and The Story of Stuff) and utilize only objective data.
• Presenting subjective opinion as objective science is not desirable in an academic environment.
• If the material presented in the Colloquium course is as important as claimed, students will voluntarily opt to take the course based on their own self-interest.

We at the National Association of Scholars salute these efforts. While there is arguably value in having a core curriculum for all students (now a nearly extinct concept), the purpose of such a curriculum should be to make sure students graduate having taken at least basic courses in core subjects such as mathematics, science, literature, and history. Sustainability and the premises of the Earth Charter are not core subjects, and the FGCU students are right to recognize this. We hope the administration at FGCU gets the message.