NAS Blog

Anyone who’s followed Ashley Thorne’s posts describing the recently discontinued La Raza/Chicano “studies” program in the Tucson public school sytem may well have experienced a sense of the surreal: how on earth did this balkanized, ideological bomb-throwing find its way into any classroom anywhere? Could anyone actually have been serious about a “curriculum” that could only engender ethnic chauvanism and antagonism toward non-hispanics, especially whites? Unfortunately, yes, since the Tucson program is simply an extension/imitation of what’s been going on in academic precincts for quite some time now. Here you can easily find any number of undergraduate courses and “studies” programs devoted to fostering group identity, group chauvnism, group grievance, group entitlement, etc., etc. But as these two pieces (here and here) in the Chronicle of Higher Education illustrate, ethnic studies has apparently been catching some flak, even from within the academy, and the authors respectively write to mount a defense. Of course, they believe, lots of criticism predictably emanates from the incorrigible racism which perdures at all levels of American society, and which was recently made manifest in Arizona’s new statute which effectively terminated the Tucson curriculum. But one of the authors interestingly argues that ethnic studies programs at the college level have been weakened by academic “liberals,” who have used them as a means of celebrating “diversity’ rather than generating political activism and group advocacy (as in “empowerment”). That, he concludes, is where ethnic studies needs to refocus, as the La Raza program was apparently doing so well. As the comments thread indicates, a number of academic observers with first-hand experience of similar programs also think that’s exactly what’s wrong with them.

On college campuses, the “student programmers” could use with a bit of anger management. On my campus there is the obligatory Vagina Monologues sticking to the script of the “angry vaginas” and other pleasant scenes.

My university is also part of the growing movement to “educate” through “Tunnels of Oppression.”

Alas, benighted Lithuania hasn’t caught up with U.S. “higher” education. They actually have a tunnel of oppression that deals with communism under Soviet rule. In the U.S. academy this is known as “historical communism” (to distinguish it from the Real Thing).

At any rate, those of us stuck in the “late stage of capitalism” are disadvantaged by our freedom, yet we may experience “historical communist oppression” through this Communist Theme Park (trip to Lithuania not included):

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.”

Last week I posted a copy of an exam from an introductory sociology class, forwarded to me by a colleague. The test was graded 100%. I quoted the exam at length and noted that sadly “A student who matriculates in this field of study will have nothing in the way of useful skills, but will be convinced that his country is rotten to the core, and that whites and males are evil.” One reader, “progressive scholar,” (who has a blog under that name) commented on my post:

I don’t understand, what is the problem with this exam? It explores many common sociological theories. Not once does it proclaim that a certain way of thinking is right or wrong, nor does it discuss America and how the student should feel about it; in fact, the student actually begins an answer with “some say…”, which means that he or she recognizes that these are just theories, not objective fact.

The questions are asking the student to examine, explain, describe, compare, and analyze. Contrary to your claim, all of these skills are highly desirable in most career fields. Sociology as a discipline emphasizes critical thinking, not blindly following the “old Soviet agitprop of the Fifties”, as you say.

I’m not sure what China and India have to do with this topic, since many universities in both countries offer comprehensive liberal arts and social science programs, including Sociology. I encourage you to do some research on Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Nankai University in China, and the Indian Institute of Technology in India, before assuming that they have eschewed all humanities and social sciences (“hate-America” fields?) in favor of technology, mathematics, and engineering – which are, apparently, fields that really love America.

The respondent is quite right that the exam I made public is quite mainstream in sociology. The problem is, however, that the entire discipline is so corrupt that nobody within the discipline still seems capable of perceiving anything wrong with it.

The exam speaks for itself. It is biased on the face of it because, from beginning to end, its point of view is entirely anti-capitalist, anti-white, anti-male. No other perspective is included, even as a hypothetical.

For instance, the professor who composed the test might have asked why corruption is endemic in the Third World and why developing economies are often wrecked by indigenous dictators, such as President Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Students could have been called on to compare and contrast how Adam Smith and Karl Marx would view Third World development. But no, the only questions asked, and the only answers acceptable, are limited to the view that all the ills of the world are the fault of capitalist, white, male America.

In response to the question regarding the “matrix of domination,” the student focuses exclusively on whites dominating blacks. He or she does not discuss, for example, black-on-white crime statistics available from the FBI. Nor does the student evaluate (or was he or she asked to evaluate) high black crime rates or high school dropout rates in light of decades of affirmative action.

Nor does the student mention that males have lost more jobs than females in the recession, or that females outnumber men in college (58% of attendees are female, whereas 42% are male). Such inconvenient facts as the nation having a black president and a female Speaker of the House are omitted. Are these not positions of power and domination? Rather, the “correct” but empirically false answer – since the exam was graded 100% – is that whites dominate blacks, and males dominate females.

The exam’s unremitting bias is also on display in the question on immigration. The professor does not ask students to consider the possibility that restricting illegal immigration, which brings many criminals and welfare cases to the U.S., might be in the national interest.

But, then, what does one expect now of sociology? True critical, nuanced thinking? Hardly.

In short, the exam’s questions and answers – no doubt greatly encouraged and perhaps prompted by the professor – are transparently one-sided. They contain not even a hint of competing ideas.

Reposted from Minding the Campus

Recently, a colleague forwarded to me a copy of an exam from an introductory sociology class found lying in a room at a public college in the east. It was graded 100%. The exam deserves to be quoted at length, as parts of it are virtually indistinguishable from the old Soviet agitprop of the Fifties:

Question: How does the United States “steal” the resources of other (third world) [sic] countries?Answer: We steal through exploitation. Our multinationals are aware that indigenous people in developing nations have been coaxed off their plots and forced into slums. Because it is lucrative, our multinationals offer them extremely low wage labor (sic) that cannot be turned down.

Question: Why is the U.S. on shaky moral ground when it comes to preventing illegal immigration?

Answer: Some say that it is wrong of the United States to prevent illegal immigration because the same people we are denying entry to, (sic) we have exploited for the purpose of keeping the American wheel spinning.

Question: Why is it necessary to examine the theory of cumulative advantage when it comes to affirmative action?

Answer: Because it is unfair to discredit the many members of minority groups that have (sic) been offered more life chances through the program.

Question: What is the interactionist approach to gender?

Answer: The majority of multi-gender encounters are male-dominated. for (sic) example, while involved in conversation, the male is much more likely to interrupt. Most likely because the male believes the female’s expressed thoughts are inferior to his own.

Question: Please briefly explain the matrix of domination.

Answer: the (sic) belief that domination has more than one dimension. For example, Males (sic) are dominant over females, whites over blacks, and affluent over impoverished.

This exam was part of the curriculum in a for-credit class at an accredited degree-granting institution. Introductory sociology courses like this one are frequently required, even for non-majors. A student who matriculates in this field of study will have nothing in the way of useful skills, but will be convinced that his country is rotten to the core, and that whites and males are evil.

China encourages its brightest students to study mathematics and engineering. India has become known as a hotbed of tech-savvy computer programmers. Meanwhile, the U.S. spends billions to teach postmodern, left-wing misinformation as objective “fact.”

It seems rather foolish to remain optimistic about the future of this nation when millions of its most “educated” are systematically being taught to loathe it.

Professor Louis Bergonzi of the University of Illinois has written an article in Music Educators Journal arguing for increased emphasis on the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) students and teachers in high school music classes. Bergonzi has set up a Google discussion group to this end.

Bergonzi notes that 90% of LGBT students have been harassed and that 60 percent feel unsafe.  He complains that love songs are heterosexually oriented and that males have been excluded from all-female choruses.  He notes that LGBT teachers are forced to “edit” stories of personal experiences and cannot discuss Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality.

In college such discussions abound.  For example, one cannot read Plato’s Protagoras without noticing the opening discussion of Socrates’s admiration of Alcibiades.  However, I would hope that at the high school level teachers keep discussion of their sexual tastes away from the lectern. And while it has previously disturbed me that my college business students have failed to learn basic grammar in high school,  I feel better now that I know that their music teachers have vetted their sexual orientations.

Pete Chagnon of One News Now, a Christian-oriented site, has blogged his criticisms of Bergonzi’s article (h/t Jim Crum). Chagnon notes that Bergonzi’s bio on the University of Illinois Website ends with a remark to the effect that he sees schools as agencies of “social progress”.  Chagnon quotes Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute to the effect that this is but one more example of social justice teaching.

Crosspost from www.NAS.org

Two weeks ago I published an article about a Marxist journal that has seized authority in the education world. The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS) is published by the UK-based Institute for Education Policy Studies (IEPS), “an independent Radical Left/Socialist/Marxist institute for developing policy analysis and development of education policy.” It takes its cues from Che Guevara and Paulo Freire.

Articles from JCEPS are required reading in some ed schools, and the editorial advisory board has representatives from universities in eighteen countries. In posting the NAS article on JCEPS, I thought that simply calling the journal what it is would be enough to discredit it. I wrote:

While it is appropriate to study the now discredited but historically important ideas of Marxism in political science, philosophy, and economics courses, education schools have no need for radical ideology. Ed schools should be preparing teachers to train the minds of the next generation, not to arm them with socialist politics. To do so cheats both future teachers and their future students out of the sound, unbiased education they deserve.

I assumed that most people would agree that Marxist politics have no place in the classroom, and that the JCEPS folks would be reluctant to own their radical left agenda. I was wrong. Since the article appeared on the NAS website, apologists for the journal have been coming out of the woodwork. We seem to have secured the attention of some of the last remaining Marxists on earth. One commenter, who seems not to be a native speaker of English, wrote:

Definitely, education should be explicitly involved in struggles for equity and justice, especially at the current situation. Therefore, it’s very meaningful to arouse teachers and students’ critical consciousness, as Professor Peter McLaren does.

School and society shouldn’t be separated. No matter it is in John Dewey’s mind “school is society”, or in other scholar’s essay “society is school”, schools have close relationship with society. George Counts once insisted that it was a great ideal that people should mainly focus on educating the children and care little about others, however, he thought that schools and teachers had to think about the injustice since the then unequal society greatly influenced teachers and students in 1930s.

As for the current situation which is much worse than in 1930s in many aspects, the “ivory tower” ideal had gone and would never come back, colleges and universities are more and more involved in the society economically and politically, students have to fight for the equality, and teachers are forced to fight for their right they deserved.

There are inequity and injustice in society, so it’s teachers’ responsibility to arouse their students consciousness to seek for the equity and justice. Those behind it are the ones who give up their responsibilities or the ones who own privilege, because they dare not to change the society or don’t want to give up their privilege. [emphasis mine]

Another person, ironically self-nicknamed “Cassiodorus” after the devout Christian who kept alive the flame of liberal learning after the fall of Rome, added:

Marxism isn’t discredited anywhere, education isn’t unbiased, and “radical” refers to the notion of examining the roots (“radical,” from the Latin radix, or root) of everyday practice, something which should be done more often in schools.  The rest of this is a rather amateurish collection of soundbites on a number of subjects, the least understood of which is critical pedagogy. [emphasis mine]

This is a delightful bit of self-delusion.  Marxism isn’t discredited anywhere?  Marxism is discredited just about everywhere, but if “Cassiodorus” needs a for instance, I can testify firsthand that Marxism is discredited in Novokuznetsk and other parts of Russia where I have stayed.  From his nom de plume, I would think Cassiodorus is implicitly acknowledging this reality.  His “Rome” would appear to be the Soviet State and the nations it held captive.  He is keeping the holy flame of Marxism alive in an age dominated by the barbarian idea of human freedom.

“Ferlaz” also chimed in:

In Argentina we are creating a new educational movement based on the critical pedagogies, especially the works of Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren.

This article only serves to confirm that we are on the correct path of struggle. This educational movement is not intended to build ideological blocs but returning to education because their political neutrality is also a way of doing politics.

This article ends endorsing own knowledge of the dominant classes, their ideologies and worldviews deny the possibility of conflict as natural and accepting the hegemonic discourse.

From Argentina, from the popular schools for youth and adults in factories recovered by their workers shouted: Che lives!, As in Peter McLaren’s page.

The grammar here is too shaky to figure out exactly what is making “ferlaz” so excited.  Che, the murderous thug of the Cuban revolution, is fortunately long dead.  He enjoys only the kind of immortality conferred by T-shirts and dorm-room posters.

It does seem to me of absorbing interest that the great folly of Marxism—having burned through the twentieth century as a fire that killed more than 90 million people, enslaved countless others, and brought more misery and oppression into the world than any other political doctrine in human history—still has its proud defenders.  And they are in schools of education.

By now, most of the world has heard of “Climategate”– the e-mail scandal surrounding the Hadley Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK. (If you are unfamiliar with the story, you can catch up with this Wikipedia article.) In short, hackers broke into the university’s e-mail system and posted on the internet private communications between climate researchers, and the e-mails are far from flattering. Besides gloating over the death of a climate change skeptic, the e-mails show concerted efforts by the researchers to manipulate temperature data, to block public access to their data, and (perhaps most disturbingly) to exclude skeptical or critical researchers from the peer review process. While it may be too early to describe this behavior as “scientific fraud,” it is certainly appropriate to label it “unethical.”

The New York Times‘s John Tierney wrote an excellent piece about this scandal and its implications for climate change advocates. Tierney points out that the climate researchers involved became “so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate[d] their certitude — and ultimately undermine[d] their own cause.”

What this situation also reveals is that scientists who become public policy advocates can lose the most important characteristic they have: objectivity. Scientists must accept data for what it is, not what they wish it to be. Scientists must deal with contradictory data, not ignore it. And most importantly, scientists must be transparent with their research and the conclusions they draw, not secretive. However, these ethical principles become far more difficult to uphold when scientists become activists.

To be sure, “Climategate” does not disprove global climate change, but it absolutely raises the suspicions of a general public who is often leery of science to begin with. Furthermore, scandals such as this damage not only the researchers involved but the entire scientific endeavor itself.

Scientists who become public policy advocates must walk a fine line.  Unfortunately, the researchers at East Anglia crossed that line.

This week in Frontpage Magazine Michelle Malkin has an article, “Hollywood and Howard Zinn’s Marxist Education Project.” Here’s an excerpt:

Zinn’s objective is not to impart knowledge, but to instigate “change” and nurture a political “counterforce” (an echo of fellow radical academic and Hugo Chavez admirer Bill Ayers’ proclamation of education as the “motor-force of revolution”). Teachers are not supposed to teach facts in the school of Zinn. “There is no such thing as pure fact,” Zinn asserts. Educators are not supposed to emphasize individual academic achievement. They are supposed to “empower” student collectivism by emphasizing “the role of working people, women, people of color and organized social movements.” School officials are not facilitators of intellectual inquiry, but leaders of “social struggle.”

Zinn and company have launched a nationwide education project in conjunction with the documentary. “A people’s history requires a people’s pedagogy to match,” Zinn preaches. The project is a collaboration between two “social justice” activist groups, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

[...]

No part of the school curriculum is immune from the social justice makeover crew. Zinn’s partners at Rethinking Schools have even issued teaching guides to “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers” — which rejects the traditional white male patriarchal methods of teaching computation and statistics in favor of p.c.-ified number-crunching [see NAS's articles on this, "Social Changelings" and "Mathematical Deceptions"].

[...]

Our students will continue to come in dead last in international testing. But no worries. With Howard Zinn and Hollywood leftists in charge, empty-headed young global citizens will have heavier guilt, wider social consciences and more hatred for America than any other students in the world.