NAS Blog

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Emory University history professor Patrick Allitt discusses the research finding that college students are putting in less and less time on their coursework, yet expect (and mostly get) high grades.

I’m particularly glad to have Professor Allitt comment on this because his 2004 book I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student was such an eye-opener, detailing his difficulties in getting students — at a pretty strong university — to take the work seriously. You can read my review of his book here.

I’m pleased to introduce Jason Fertig as a new contributor at NAS.org. Dr. Fertig is an NAS member and assistant professor of management at the University of Southern Indiana. Dr. Fertig brings a depth of perception and lively anecdotes from his own experience in the classroom to speak to some of the  most real issues in higher education today.

He has written three articles for NAS so far:

More Millennials Need to Work at McDonalds advises recent college graduates: get a job, anywhere.

Real Sustainability: Saving Our Sense of Culture asks, “Are we failing to hand down our cultural legacy to the next generation?”

Dangers of Credentialing the College Degree: A Real-Life Example is a case study that illustrates the popular idea that students are entitled to get a passing grade – even if they don’t earn one.

I especially recommend the third article, which received attention from blogs such as Phi Beta Cons and Joanne Jacobs.

Also check out his essay at the Pope Center on the gap year, The Gift of Academic Maturity. Fertig spoke about the gap year this morning on Wisconsin Public Radio.

You can look forward to more NAS articles by Dr. Fertig in the weeks ahead.

Most good teachers had a model. Robert Pinsky had Francis Ferguson; Mark Edmundson had Frank Lears. I was lucky; I had two. My Freshman Comp. teacher was Dr. Idelle Sullens, a Stanford-trained medievalist specializing in 14th century literature. But I was mystified to learn that she had also been a naval officer in World War II and Korea. And rumor had it that she was something called a “Daughter of Bilitis.” But what really fractured my high school brain was seeing Dr. Sullens pull up in her brand new `64 Mustang. That I understood, and it elevated her beyond cool. My disturbing discovery was that one could seem professorial but also be startlingly complicated.

Two years later, it was the Lincolnesque Beat Generation scholar Tom Parkinson. One drowsy afternoon in Berkeley’s Wheeler Auditorium, Parkinson recited Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”with tears streaming down his partially-paralyzed cheeks (he had been shot in the face by a student). I was embarrassed but also feared that this moment was profound in a way I might never understand. How could he so reveal himself? It took years to learn that throughout one’s life, good literature deepens and grows, accumulating, preserving, and incorporating intense personal associations. Now there are poems I can’t read aloud without leaking tears.

Both are gone now, but the spirits of Sullens and Parkinson still gently remind me to be unexpected, singular, complicated, and exposed so that my students will see that one day they can do the same.

Since the NAS report on summer reading, “Beach Books,” U.C. Berkeley has announced its own summer reading recommendations.   The theme is “Education Matters” and, not surprisingly, multicultural “social justice” predominates.  Happily, Benjamin Franklin and The Education of Henry Adams are included.  There is also No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech by Lucinda Roy.  As Chair of the English Department, Roy tutored Seung-Hui Cho in poetry after he was ejected from a course for terrifying classmates.  Post-tutoring, Cho proceeded to murder 32 other human beings before killing himself.  Roy argues that VaTech did not adequately address Cho’s disabilities and alleges multiple institutional failures.  I would argue that VaTech also failed to help students and teachers protect themselves.

My friend the Philosophy professor enjoys alarming his students by telling them “Professor Clemens says that a gun society is a polite society.”  Well, yes.  Gun shows are the most decorous events imaginable because you never know who’s packing.  As Webster’s NRA Dictionary says, “democracy” is two wolves fighting over a lamb; “liberty” is an armed lamb.

Call me perverse but I do enjoy that mine is the only car in the faculty lot with the decals “Wild Alaska,” “NRA  Supports Our Troops,” and “Armed With Pride.”  It’s particularly amusing when I park next to the Volvo whose bumper sticker reads “The Goddess Is Alive and Magic Is Afoot.”

Magic and the Goddess notwithstanding, I wish that more responsible teachers were armed.  I have an in-law who teaches at Virginia Tech; he heard the gunfire.  A local student brought an automatic weapon to acting class; one teacher’s office is regularly trespassed at night (hopefully only by amorous custodians).

At one Cow Palace gun show, I bought MACE and a billy club for my division’s office staff.  Diminutive Rosa is alone in the evening; more than once she has had to face deranged, medicated, or otherwise menacing students.  Rosa is a tough cookie, straight outta Compton (wore a bullet-proof vest to high school), but even she gets rattled.  Better if she had training, a concealed carry permit, and a Beretta.  All campus personnel should at least handle guns so that they are not afraid of them.  To the gentle and nonviolent, this no doubt sounds like macho posturing but I grew up shooting, BB gun to 30.06 and .303, Enfield to M-1 carbine, Ruger .22 to S&W .357 magnum.

I always carry a Kershaw Blur, but I’d like to be better equipped to protect my students and colleagues.  Our campus emergency plan tells us to freeze if there is an “active shooter.”  Better it if it read, “keep moving, don’t be a target, shoot back.”  Freeze?  Our victim culture is ideal for the psychopaths who desire helpless victims.

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

CNN has a story on the rise of the counter-hookup culture on college campuses. The article highlights the decision of one young woman to refrain from hooking up because she “felt so empty then.” CNN also notes the Princeton-based Love and Fidelity Network, of which Robert P. George is an advisory board member.

Last year NAS published an review of three new “hook-up culture” books by Wendy Shalit in Academic Questions. Two of the three books she reviews are mentioned in the CNN article. Shalit is the author of A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (1999), Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good (2007), and The Good Girl Revolution: Young Rebels with Self-Esteem and High Standards (2008). Her website is www.girlsgonemild.com

Fighting tuition increases is the innocent face of radical activism on campus. While the mainstream media reports that students are meekly rallying over the cost of college, Jay Schalin shows the dark side of recent campus protests, led by angry college students who want to transform civil society according to redistributive principles.

Duke University, according to FIRE, has adopted a new “sexual misconduct” policy that can find a student guilty of non-consensual sex merely because he or she is considered “powerful” on campus.

The policy — which FIRE describes as “vastly overbroad, illogical, impractical, but also insane” –

• claims that “perceived power differentials may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion”
• transforms students of both sexes into unwitting rapists simply because of the “atmosphere” or because one or more students are “intoxicated,” no matter the degree, and
• establishes unfair rules for judging sexual misconduct accusations.

Rape and sexual misconduct are grave offenses. But what’s wrong with Duke that it can’t rationally address them? As FIRE’s Robert Shibley sensibly concludes, “students deserve a policy under which true offenders will be punished but the innocent have nothing to fear.”

Last week, Jonathan Bean wrote about tunnels of oppression on campus. Here’s a firsthand account of one such tunnel by Marc Seelinger, a conservative student at UNC-Chapel Hill. He writes:

Walking down the hall, we were confronted by two police officers, who lined us up against a wall and began checking IDs. However, they did not of course check everyone’s ID, just mine (the “Towel-Head”) and the “Wet-backer,” who upon being unable to produce ID, they promptly arrested. I will also note that the two officers had clearly defined and greatly exaggerated Southern accents. This was one of my main critiques of the Tunnel. Rather than provoking a substantive discussion about policy issues, the Tunnelers preferred to set up caricatures, straw men, and gross generalizations. In this case, they characterized those officers who legally enforce immigration laws as nothing but stupid, Southern hicks who hate Mexicans. There is, of course, plenty of room to debate immigration laws, but characterizing the current situation in this way was quite childish.

At the end, Seelinger reflects on the tunnel and concludes that it provided “valuable insight into the liberal mind.” He suggests the tunnel add “a section on political and intellectual oppression.”

John Leo, editor of Minding the Campus, published an article on National Review Online called “Code Words.” He links Glenn Beck’s warning about “social justice” to other code words of the campus left, such as “cultural competence” and “sustainability,” words that sound like wholesome ideas but which really have hidden political meanings.

On campus today students are urged to embrace fashionable ideologies; we need to know what lies behind these terms. Leo quotes NAS president Peter Wood’s article “What Does ‘Sustainability’ Have to Do with Student Loans?” which begins to unpack some of the nebulous buzzwords.