NAS Blog

In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I review Richard DeMillo’s book Abelard to Apple. In the last few years, there have been quite a few books written on the theme of impending, revolutionary change in higher education and I think DeMillo’s may be the most persuasive. It’s also very well written and chock-full of fascinating history and details. Highly recommended.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I discuss the recent book Uneducated Guesses by Howard Wainer — specifically his analysis of the impact of colleges adopting “SAT optional” policies. Wainer finds that when schools do that, the students who decide not to report their scores will be academically weaker ones. The competence of the student body declines somewhat. Those who argue that SAT scores provide no useful information seem to be mistaken.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Jay Schalin advances an alternative to the standard college experience, an experience that all too often leaves students with no more skill and knowledge than when they left high school. That alternative is apprenticeship combined with academic study. He points to one such program and suggests that the idea could gain wide acceptance as it satisfies the needs of both students and future employers.

No, but it’s responsible for much that is wrong in higher education, argues Naomi Schaefer Riley in her recent book The Faculty Lounges. In today’s Pope Center piece, Duke Cheston reviews the book. He agrees with the author’s conclusion that tenure has high costs but does little to uphold academic freedom, its principal justification.

For Father’s Day, my daughter Kate sent me a t-shirt featuring David Pelham’s dust jacket of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (Penguin, 1962).  Director Stanley Kubrick turned Burgess’s cautionary tale into a surreal film masterpiece (Warner Bros., 1971) with graphic scenes of violence, sex, gangs, rape, and aversive conditioning, choreographed and set to thundering, Moog-synthesized Beethoven (and “Singin’ In the Rain”).

The film, now reissued on Blu-Ray for its 40^th anniversary, has a turbulent history.  Originally rated X, Kubrick had to re-cut it for an R but also withdrew the film from distribution in the UK where it was re-released only in 2000, after his death.  The American edition of the book which inspired Kubrick had itself been bowdlerized by the publisher (Norton) who amputated the final chapter creating a dark, ambiguous conclusion where Burgess’s 21^st chapter offered a consoling one.

Once, Kubrick’s opus was required viewing in my class about what a human being is and isn’t.   When Burgess/Kubrick’s sociopathic narrator, Alex, is arrested, he is subjected to aversive conditioning and becomes incapable of violent action (the conditioning also destroys his ability to enjoy “Ludwig Van”).  He is now “a clockwork orange,” what you get when you treat something organic as if it were a programmable machine; Alex’s prison chaplain protests that “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”  Voila, Kubrick’s film was perfect for the class, but, like Kubrick, I too withdrew it after one student became hysterical during the viewing, curling into a fetal position and shaking for an hour after class.  Apparently, Alex’s “ultra-violent” acts but ingenuous “of-course-you-understand” intimacy remain disturbing, even dangerous, enhanced by the timeless music, John Alcott’s cinematography, and Kubrick’s notoriously clinical eye.  The opening 90-second dolly back shot still chills the blood. Yet, cold as Kubrick’s films feel, he was an eminently sane man presenting a perennial dilemma–freedom vs. order.  In an interview with film historian Michel Ciment, he said

I think that when Rousseau transferred the concept of original sin from man to society, he was responsible for a lot of misguided social thinking which followed. I don’t think that man is what he is because of an imperfectly structured society, but rather that society is imperfectly structured because of the nature of man. No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.”

Indeed . . . .  If only the outcomes-and-assessment-addled mandarins who run our “imperfectly structured” education system would take Kubrick’s words to heart, the job of rebuilding the humane studies might finally begin.

I posted this as a comment on Richard Kahlenberg’s Innovations blog post, “The College-for-All Debate“:

Peter Wood and I debated Education Sector’s Kevin Carey last week in a four-day online debate through Minnesota Public Radio. The assertion was: The drive to increase college enrollment threatens to lower academic standards.

You can find our debate here and the MPR forum (with comments by the moderator and readers) here.

Some main points from our closing statement:
1. Everyone should have access to college, but not everyone should go to college.
2. Most-educated is not the same as best-educated.
3. If almost everyone goes to college, a degree won’t signify any particularly noteworthy achievement.
4. A society that recognizes the laws of human nature – that each person is unique and that a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work – can then begin to help its rising generations to choose their paths. Such a recognition can also save higher education from trivializing itself into irrelevance.

In this Minding the Campus essay, my Pope Center colleague Jane Shaw ruminates on a scenario in which the higher ed bubble substantially deflates. It is tongue-in-cheek, but the prospect for a great shake-up in the business of post-secondary education is very real. If students and their families figure out that getting a college degree is often a huge expense for little tangible benefit and if better alternatives look credible, there could be a sea change in the world of higher education.

My former student Joshua, now ambivalently quartered at UC Santa Cruz (home of the fightin’ Banana Slugs and currently under Federal investigation for systemic anti-Semitism), has an article in Literary Matters about cheating.  Not students cheating; students who feel cheated.  He’s found a couple of excellent literature classes (Cervantes) but most just use books as a vector for stone-cold political ideology.

When he was at Monterey Peninsula College, Josh was the midwife who helped deliver a great books program to a college that had been out to axe all its literature courses.  In my Intro. to Lit., class he heard me refer to Robert Hutchins’s metaphor for Western literature as a “Great Conversation,” and in Literary Matters he writes

“Within weeks other members of the class and I were meeting on our own time to discuss the Great Books. We read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. We read Sappho. We felt and spoke as if we had rediscovered some long-forgotten treasure abandoned by the generation before [my emphasis].”

Josh devoured a copy of Hutchins’s The Great Conversation that he found (where else?) in the college library discard pile.  He says, “. . . the students I came into contact with seemed to react as I had. We felt we’d missed out on something essential by not being exposed to these works earlier.”

An Iraq War veteran, Josh notes that he was

inspired by The Iliad.  I read the Robert Fagles trans­lation and understood, finally, that this poem was not only about the Trojan War, but also about humanity and warfare. It might have been any war. It might be every war.”

In a similar vein, my current student Lisa says that “Before last semester I had never even read a book entirely. I realized how much I really enjoy it. Reading has opened up a whole new world for me. I am glad I finally got introduced into this world . . . .”

That they both say “finally” speaks volumes about K-16 education today.  Thankfully, The Great Conversation lives on, and it’s encouraging that more and more students, such as Josh and Lisa, are growing tired of being excluded from the dialogue.

Today both Peter Wood and Jason Fertig observed that Paul Krugman, whom Peter calls one of the “stalwarts of the left,”  has gone on record to doubt the value of the college degree as the best path to prosperity for the majority of Americans.

Krugman began his recent op-ed:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

Krugman goes on to argue that more education does not necessarily lead to a stronger national economy, an argument that NAS and our friends at the Pope Center and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity have been making for some time.

Peter and Jason note that when someone as prominently on the left as Krugman acknowledges that the value of the college degree is weaker than it’s cracked up to be, we must be nearing some broader consensus about higher education’s worth.