NAS Blog

That’s the subject of my Clarion Call today.

I like some aspects of the book. Best of all is Wildavsky’s argument that we should abandon educational mercantilism — the notion that nations have to compete to be tops in educational “investment,” university prestige, and similar distractions. Because knowledge is not constrained by national boundaries, we should stop worrying about musty old “us versus them” ideas. Also, Wildavsky doesn’t go for the tendency to bash for-profit higher ed, showing that it fills some important niches.

What I didn’t care for so much was the author’s enthusiasm for the trend toward globalized universities, with lots of American universities setting up campuses in places such as Abu Dhabi. I see that as mostly glitz and conspicuous consumption rather than true educational advance.

One of the most depressing articles I’ve ever read in my entire life describes the problem American students face when pondering a career in science. For years, the conventional wisdom was that our education system was failing to properly educate our children in STEM subjects (science, tech, engineering, and math). However, this article in Miller-McCune directly challenges this assumption.

The authors contend that the real problem facing American students is a lack of careers in science. The case they make is compelling: Although the number of graduates receiving Ph.D.’s has increased, the number of job opportunities has not kept pace. This trend is particularly noticeable in academia, where young Ph.D.’s spend years as post-docs, with only a small chance of ever landing a permanent position as a professor. Indeed, the average age of a scientist who earns his first independent NIH grant– a huge milestone in the medical science field– has risen from a researcher’s late 20s/early 30s to the ripe old age of 42.

One of the biggest causes indicated in this article is the flood of foreigners who are willing to take post-doc positions. It doesn’t take an economist to realize that a massive increase in labor supply will both eat up opportunities and drive down salaries. Post-doc positions, which were once viewed as prestigious, are now treated as temporary, cheap labor. With such a dismal prospect for career advancement and compensation, it’s no wonder that American students would rather get an MBA or MD… or to forgo higher education altogether.

Results-based accountability, for one thing, writes NAS board member Herbert London in his editorial, “Profit vs. Proselytizing: Business Lore and Academic Practice.”

In this week’s Clarion Call, I write about the recent book The Challenge of Bologna, which argues that the European higher education reform process poses a serious challenge that the US needs to meet.

I don’t agree. This top-down “reform” initiative is mostly for the benefit of its participants (education ministers and numerous bureaucrats and consultants who want to look busy and productive) rather than something that will actually make higher education more effective. Moreover, the notion that European countries will somehow gain a big economic advantage over the U.S. as a result of tinkering with higher education is risible. Higher education has very little to do with national (or continental) economic performance, but its leaders speak and write as if it were the key ingredient — rather like the rooster who was certain that his crowing caused the sun to rise.

There is much that we can and should do to make higher education more efficient, but there’s nothing in The Bologna Process we need to copy.

NAS president Peter Wood has published a review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. The book outlines Ravitch’s change of heart regarding education reform. Here is an excerpt from Dr. Wood’s review:

Ignorance is easy. Left to themselves, most children do not become literate. They don’t learn math. They don’t drink in large amounts of history. Basic ideas about how the world works remain beyond their reach. And ignorant children grow up to be ignorant adults—provided they survive the sometimes perilous passage.

To combat this natural frailty, every group of people from time immemorial has organized some way to get the little ones—squirming, distracted, cranky, bored, breathless, or all at once—to pay attention. “This is rock worth chipping, and here’s how to chip it.” “Eat the root, not the leaves.” Civilization eventually acquired a lot of knowledge that seemed worth preserving. To get the children ready for this intellectual inheritance, civilization invented schools. They are an artificial contrivance intended to do a more or less difficult thing: organize the brains of young primates to perform unnatural acts such as reading and long division.

That’s my view as an anthropologist. Schooling is, inevitably, difficult—and more difficult for some children than for others. The difficulty is a mystery only if you begin with the assumption that children are just so bursting with curiosity that, absent some external check on their eagerness, they will take to the alphabet as readily as infants take to climbing and crawling. But we are climbers and crawlers by nature and alphabet spelunkers only by outside intervention. When we learn to read, we are at one end of a long cultural rope that extends back though history beyond Shakespeare’s Stratford Grammar School, past Aristotle troubling young Alexander, to whatever lessons were taught in the cuneiform academy for Sumer’s scribes. Literacy has always been an achievement—and often a precarious one.

I mention this by way of coming alongside a book of groaning frustration by one of America’s best-known advocates of school reform.

Read the review in its entirety at NAS.org or The American Conservative.

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As everyone knows, state funding of higher education is notoriously unreliable. After a nationwide surge in direct spending to universities (the boom years), the bust has arrived. Big surprise.

While direct appropriations to state universities have foundered, the state and federal money spent on students increased. This follows public choice theory: politicians spend money to gain the greatest number of votes. There are far more students (and their parents) who vote than there are institutions who want government money.

This is good for those students who use the money wisely and it is good for “school choice”: unlike K-12, students can choose their state college or university. Universities with declining enrollments moan and groan when students head to their competitors. To wit: my own university consists of two campuses: one with skyrocketing enrollment, the other in perpetual decline.

No doubt the news for those wedded to the status quo is bad. Nevertheless, recent trends in nontraditional education have taken off during this crisis. Even before the fiscal bust, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and many others noted that colleges had gotten flabby–not with money but with their way of delivering education in the 21st century.

Campuses facing fiscal difficulty need to get aggressive with educational innovation. Online learning is up (again). Philanthropist Bill Gates is expressing interest in putting his money into improving online education. For the first time, I am using a free online textbook funded by the federal government and distinguished foundations.

Institutions with enrollment and/or funding shortfalls are turning to for-profit alliances. One of the biggest surprises: the National Labor College has formed a for-profit joint venture that retains faculty unionization (NLC is dedicated to promoting unionism). “Bread-and-butter” union faculty ought to take notice: Change or die.

Here’s to a new year hoping that my own institution (Southern Illinois University) starts lighting candles rather than cursing the darkness.

The State of the University, Ashley Thorne, NAS

What President Obama’s State of the Union address means for the future of higher education.

Howard Zinn, Silent, Peter Wood, NAS

Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, has died.

Early Vacations and Entitled Students, Glenn Ricketts, NAS

Has self-esteem education gone way too far?

Rubik’s Cube or Kaleidoscope? The AAUP’s Academic Freedom Scholarship, Ashley Thorne, NAS

NAS congratulates the AAUP on the launch of its new Journal of Academic Freedom.

Core Curriculum for Civic Literacy, Erin O’Connor, Critical Mass

On Donald Lazere’s proposal for a collegiate core curriculum training undergraduates in civil literacy.

So Your Freedom-Loving Child is Going to College, Part 1
So Your Freedom-Loving Child is Going to College, Part 2, Steven Horwitz, the Freeman

How do you pick the right school?

Losing Liberal Arts, Valerie Saturen, In These Times

“If a liberal arts education becomes a luxury, the implications for civil society are profound.”

If you are a double major in Classical Languages and English Literature at the University of Wyoming, you are saddled with a required diversity class on “literature by and about women, not men.”  The course that Marine Lance Corporal Aaron Graham wants to transfer, my Literature By and About Men class, thus does not meet the Cowboys’ standards for diversity.  Remarkably, Wyoming describes itself as a “welcoming community.”  Welcome, Lance Corporal, to institutionalized sexism in academia where men cannot be studied, only opposed; men cannot be analyzed, only condemned; men cannot be understood, only mocked and despised.

Wyoming is no maverick.  I had a fight just getting my course approved.  The University of California bridled at accepting a course about men and uniquely male experience.  That’s understandable because anyone raised on Family Guy, The Simpsons, American Dad, beer commercials, sitcoms, gender feminism, and the glut of misandristic Hollywood films (misandristic appears not even to be a word in most dictionaries) naturally thinks that males must be roped, tied, and broken of their stupid, pathetic, and predatory ways.

Aaron, however, read serious literature by David Lloyd, Faulkner, Sam Shepard (“The Real Gabby Hayes”), Amy Clampitt, Philip Larkin, Christina Hoff Summers, Hemingway, Camille Paglia, Harry Crews, Steven Pinker, Homer, Harvey Mansfield, Isaac Clemens, Leonard Gardner, Thomas van Nortwick, Robert Hayden, James Dickey, Leonard Sax, Vergil, Harvey Swados, Tennyson, Joan Didion (“John Wayne:  A Love Song”), et al.  Aaron viewed Seven Samurai, Ghost Dog, Deliverance, Fight Club, and “I am the Lord thy God . . .” from Decalogue. Aaron studied lessons about “Boys,” “Fathers,” “Sons,” “Men and War,” “Male Codes,” “The Man of Letters,” “Love and Marriage,” and “Manly Aging, Manly Death.”

Too bad, pardner!  Those readings, those films, those topics are not worthy of study at the University of Wyoming because Wyoming has an agenda:   “. . . women, not men.”  This is not welcoming, not inclusive, and not education; it’s galloping gender discrimination.

The same day I heard of Aaron’s dilemma, I also heard of a new academic direction for men:  male studies.  As one of my gender feminist colleagues frequently asserts:  “Equity must be addressed!”  How right she is.  Cowboy up, Wyoming—time to plant this locoweed up on Boot Hill.

NBC: Yale President Responds to T-Shirt Controversy

“I think of all Harvard men as sissies” from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book This Side of Paradise (which I’m currently reading) was deemed offensive to homosexuals. Also check out FIRE’s coverage of this case.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Yale, the (High School) Musical

Yale redeems itself with an awesome (albeit long) admissions video.

Slate: The Opening of the Academic Mind (via Minding the Campus)

A book review of Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas. “Professors, the people most visibly responsible for the creation of new ideas, have, over the last century, become all too consummate professionals,  initiates in a system committed to its own protection and perpetuation.”

Joanne Jacobs: More Students Refuse to State a Race

“‘We shouldn’t be judged by our race,’ said senior Jessica Mae Belcher, 17, whose roots are African and Cherokee. She prefers ‘none of the above’ because ‘we’re all different, but we’re all the same, too.’” See also McClatchy:

Doug Craig, who’s been principal at Laguna Creek for 10 years, appreciates the students’ desire to be judged on their merits, not their race.

“I’d love to look at individual kids and leave it at that, but we wouldn’t even know there was an achievement gap if we didn’t measure our kids,” he said. “There must be a systemic reason and we need to figure out what causes it and how to fix it.”

Stanford Review: The Man-Made Myth

“Email and poster bombardments encouraging students to live sustainably (with the goal of cutting CO2 emissions) are based on flawed reasoning. [...] We have grown up in a society in which the myth of man-made global warming is so thoroughly pervasive, doubt is heretical. But science proves human carbon dioxide emissions are not responsible for global warming.”

Stanford Review: ES 10 Students Take on Climate Change Skeptics (via Campus Reform)

“While much of the layman world still debates the reality of human-induced global warming, the scientific community treats it as unquestionable fact. And, like scientists, says Head TA Jess McNally, in ES10 ‘We don’t debate climate change; it is just something we teach.’”

“ES10 is environmental ed, and so, it should result in a change of behaviors.”

New York Times: Professor is a Label That Leans Left

College professors are liberal because of typecasting – the same reason why nurses are women and cops are conservative.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: The Poetry is in the Proof

Why liberal arts students should learn mathematical proofs.

Minding the Campus: What is the AAUP Up To?

A review of Cary Nelson’s No University is an Island. “Nelson’s position on teaching social justice points to a related problem. He provides a ringing defense of academic freedom, but is reticent to discuss the legitimate limits to this freedom.”