NAS Blog

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.

The careful image campaign that the higher ed establishment has conducted for decades seems to be wearing off, if this Washington Examiner piece is any indication. The writer observes that lots of American students now get their high-cost college degrees, but can’t even do basic math. Many of them can (and will!) hector you about “sustainability,” their concerns about social justice, institutional racism and so on — but they can’t work out the simplest of numerical problems.

A large number of jobs now “require” college degrees, but that requirement rarely has anything to do with actual knowledge. It’s a screening device to keep out supposedly less prepared and trainable high school graduates, but it’s becoming clear that many college graduates are no better.

The current issue of Academic Questions focuses on “sustainability,” that hollow abstraction around which coalesce feel-good connotations of moral superiority and environmental correctness.  At the very least, higher education should foster a scrupulous, continuous, and critical attention to language, yet academia today seems more enamored of rhetoric which is either empty (“student success”) or deceptive (“social justice”).  My own college has an institutional commitment to “diversity,” a word whose apparent meaning changes from document to document even though HR requires all teaching applicants to produce a “Diversity Statement.”  Diversity is a good thing and we’re for it, and, by gosh, you had better be, too, whatever it is!

We also have an institutional commitment to “critical thinking.”  In my experience, most teachers are confident they know what critical thinking is (it’s what they do) but hardly any can provide a definition.  For them, “critical thinking” is just another abstract good thing.  Actually, California State University Chancellor Glenn Dumke’s Executive Order 338 defined “critical thinking instruction” as

. . . designed to achieve an understanding of the relationship of language to logic, which should lead to the ability to analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas, to reason inductively and deductively, and to reach factual or judgmental conclusions based on sound inferences drawn from unambiguous statements of knowledge or belief (1980).

Personally, I favor William Graham Sumner’s succinct definition of critical thinking as “the examination of propositions of any kind which are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to reality or not” (1906).

By either definition, my school’s proud commitment to “Promote academic excellence and critical thinking across all areas and disciplines” is incoherent since critical thinking is not germane in all disciplines.  Music?  Dance?  Literature?  Ornamental horticulture?  The academy’s adoption of language which is, in Peggy Noonan’s words, “bland and indecipherable,” betrays the foundation of verbal communication itself–that, as David Mulroy puts it in The War Against Grammar, “intelligible statements have definite literal meanings.”

“Sustainability,” “diversity,” “social justice,” “critical thinking” are intended to convey feelings, not meanings.  In Disturbing the Peace, Vaclav Havel asks, “Isn’t just such a subtle abuse of the truth, and of language, the real beginning . . . of the misery of the world we live in?”  Perhaps higher education should be promoting clarity rather than sponsoring a new confusion of tongues.

So the Provost sent out a year end wrap-up. For those of you who don’t know, it hasn’t been good year for academe, particularly here in Arizona. The income side of the fiscal picture is a disaster. Have the tough questions been asked in response to this unpleasant picture? Of course not. Instead we get the following: “UA is the center of and model of environmental sustainability, both as a facility and in research excellence.”

In the fall, our UA facility was listed as one of the most environmentally sensitive campuses in the nation in The Sustainable Endowments Institute’s “College Sustainability Report Card 2010.” This citing compliments the National Wildlife Federation’s “Campus Ecology” program that identified our University two years ago as one of six U.S. universities and colleges from more than 1,000 as having exemplary, campus-wide sustainability programs.”

Whoa! I guess big-time partying is now called “Wildlife”. And we are called the Wildcats. Who would have thunk it.

We are proud of our institutional innovative projects that minimize the University’s environmental footprint. It is gratifying to see our students are taking charge of their own future by pushing to make the campus and the surrounding community a greener place to study, work and live.

Cross posted from NAS.org

We are pleased to announce that the current issue of Academic Questions, a special issue on “Sustainability,” is available FREE online! To read it, click here, or click on the article titles below to download the PDF versions. This issue will remain publicly accessible for twelve to eighteen months. We encourage you to forward the above link to potential members and subscribers.

Members, to gain access to other issues of Academic Questions, email nasonweb@nas.org with “AQ access” in the subject line. We’ll email you a unique link which you can use to set up your online AQ account. If you are not a member of NAS, please join us! We welcome everyone who agrees with our principles. Membership is renewable annually and includes a one-year subscription to Academic Questions in print and online.

The Issue at a Glance

Earth Worms: The Eco-Corruption of Higher Education
Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars
Editor’s introduction to this issue

The Roots of Sustainability
Glenn M. Ricketts, National Association of Scholars
In a sweeping history that begins in the 1960s, Prof. Rickets, NAS director of public affairs and tenured historian, investigates how the sustainability movement emerged from the extremes of environmentalism. In considering how these movements diverge, Ricketts points out that what sets “sustainatopians” and environmentalists apart from earlier conservationists is their quasi-mystical claim that “everything is connected to everything else.”

If the Science Is Solid, Why Stoop? An Environmental Scientist Parses Climategate
Stanley W. Trimble, University of California at Berkeley
According to Prof. Trimble—soil scientist, UCLA geography professor, and environmentalist—“Climategate is…the greatest science scandal in my lifetime.” He urges that scientific skepticism is the only responsible academic reaction to current revelations about the research behind “climate change theory.”

Under the Green Thumb: Totalitarian Sustainability on Campus
Adam Kissel
Mr. Kissel offers a compelling indictment of the totalitarian tendencies within the sustainability movement on campus, whose proponents relentlessly argue that saving the earth outweighs every civil liberty.

Corroding the Curriculum: Sustainability v. Education
Austin Williams, Future Cities Project
In The Enemies of Progress: The Dangers of Sustainability (Societas, 2008), British architect Austin Williams called sustainability “an insidiously dangerous concept at odds with progress.” In his Academic Questions essay Williams examines the sustainability agenda in education in the United Kingdom (with parallel examples from the United States) and reveals that sustainability curricula are propagandistic and motivated by envy, status seeking, and financial gain, particularly among the less distinguished academic institutions.

Is Sustainability Sustainable?
Daniel Bonevac, University of Texas at Austin
What is “sustainability”? The sustainability movement has smugly produced hundreds of definitions, but can any of them withstand genuine analytical scrutiny? Philosophy professor Daniel Bonevac strives to answer that question and finds that many of the definitions by sustainability advocates rest on impossibilities or appear to be well-argued abstractions lacking substance. He concludes that sustainability is a bucket with no bottom.

Pluralism Lost: Sustainability’s Unfortunate Fall
Edward T. “Terry” Wimberley, Florida Gulf Coast University
Dr. Wimberley, a professor of ecological studies at Florida Gulf Coast University and supporter of the concept of sustainability, offers an unflinching account of what happened in a very short amount of time when one university carried its commitment to sustainability beyond the bounds of fair-minded intellectual pluralism.

Art and Delusion: Unreality in Art School
Ross Neher, Pratt Institute
Pratt painting instructor Ross Neher shares an inside look at the contemporary art school and observes that institutional obeisance at the altar of postmodern theory has only worked to widen the gap between an art student’s dreams of success as an artist and the harsh realities of the postgraduation world.

Bibliotherapy: Literature as Exploration Reconsidered
Stewart Justman, University of Montana, Missoula
Stewart Justman, Liberal Studies Program director at the University of Montana, Missoula, examines Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration, a popular textbook used since 1938 (in five successive editions) in high school English classrooms across America. Prof. Justman discusses how the one-time college roommate of Margaret Mead managed to transform teaching literature into a form of student therapy that encourages students to find their own meaning in texts.

Letters of an Old School New Critic
Robert B. Heilman: His Life in Letters
Edited by Edward Alexander, Richard Dunn, and Paul Jaussen
Reviewed by James A. Grimshaw, Jr.

Poems by Benjamin A. Plotinsky and David J. Rothman
“Jennifer Cheevy” by Benjamin A. Plotinsky, City Journal
“Three Voices” by David J. Rothman, Conundrum Press

Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest
Compiled, with commentary, by Peter Wood

LETTERS

Children today are getting a strong message from their schools, extra-curricular activities, and popular culture: “You need to help your parents live greener.” Reinforcing this message are campaigns such as GreenMyParents, which trains kids to “grade their parents” on their energy and water use and demand pay for their services.

In “Indoctrinate Our Kids and Green My Parents,” I argued that such teaching subverts parents’ authority, breaks down the family, and undermines one of the great purposes of education – to hand down civilization’s legacy to the next generation.

University Talk radio interviewed me on this here. My segment is from 13:47 to 29:27.

In honor of Earth Day, Peter Wood examines the sustainability movement’s Bookchin-born theory that “everything is connected to everything else.” An excerpt:

What about that idea that that human social relations and the relation of humanity to the natural world belong on the same plane of analysis?  Is it true?  The answer is rather important, since pretty much the entire sustainability movement assumes that it is true.  The reason that the sustainability movement can range freely from concern over pollution and global warming to issues of economic organization and matters such as racism and women’s rights is that it treats all of these as not merely connected by UNESCO-style chains of cause-and-effect but also by a pseudo principle that, deep down, these are all instances of a single phenomenon:  oppression.  To cure the oppression of Mother Earth, we must simultaneously rid the world of man’s inhumanity to man.

The shape of satire is circular; what a satire mocks can never be shown as improving because satire’s aim is to expose, ridicule, and thereby correct, similar folly in reality.  Nothing changes in Gulliver’s Travels or Candide because Swift and Voltaire want us to change and the world to change.

Fine satire can devastate its object.  I just finished watching 2081, The Moving Picture Institute’s film of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.” Vonnegut imagines a world in which the familiar “progressive” goals of “equity” and “social justice” and “self-esteem” have been achieved . . . with a vengeance.  Vonnegut’s 2000-word reductio begins

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Equality of opportunity has become equality of outcome.  Strong people (and ballerinas) must wear weights; handsome people must wear masks; smart people must wear radios in their ears which shriek every few seconds “to keep people . . . from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”

Screenwriter/Director Chandler Tuttle and Producer Thor Halvorssen have created a tight, well-cast, well-acted, 25 minute visualization of what Richard Bernstein called “the dictatorship of virtue.”  I give the film an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

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“).

On April 22, as Nancy Kennon alerts us at Family Security Matters,  students young and older will be guided in discussions or activities about protecting the environment. Parents, young adults and education watchdogs should scrutinize whether school and campus activists use Earth Day to indoctrinate students in ideological “green think.”