NAS Blog

Yesterday, good news, since we were elated to acknowledge FIRE’s victory for academic freedom at a California community college. Today, back to the more familiar bad news, since a federal judge has upheld the right of Eastern Michigan University to expel Julea Ward, an evangelical Christian student who was training as a high school guidance counselor. Ward, as we’ve reported previously, was just shy of graduating from EMU’s counseling program when she was mugged by PC ideology. Because of her religious convictions, she could not agree to counsel prospective homosexual clients in the affirmative manner required by EMU’s program. Should such a case arise, she said, she’d simply refer gay clients to other counselors able to accomodate their needs. Oh no, said EMU, that’s not good enough, not by a mile. Sign this paper, or out you go. I can’t, she insisted; you’ re gone, they replied. Supported by the Alliance Defense Fund (read the ADF’s press release here and an Inside Higher Education article here), she sued the school, contending that her First Amendment rights had been violated. Ordinarily, you’d expect First Amendment claims to weigh especially heavily in a case such as this, but the judge, alas, bought the university’s argument about needing latitude in designing its curricula and programs, and the courts have always deferred in such instances, etc., etc. This isn’t about thought control, insisted the counseling program’s directors, it’s simply a matter of recognizing the need to deal with a wide variety of clients, including those with beliefs different from one’s own. Who could disagree? Maybe I’m cynical, but I somehow don’t think a gay atheist will be required to declare that he’s willing to counsel Southern Baptists in a manner that affirms their beliefs. ADF is appealing the case, and we wish them well. Increasingly though, it seems that the acceptable parameters for discussing homosexuality on campus these days are narrowly one-dimensional. And if you don’t see the issue that way and you’re a faculty member without tenure, or if you’re a student and want your degree in counseling or social work, better keep quiet or go elsewhere.

Philosophy professor James Otteson weighs in with some thoughtful comments here.

You decide.

University presidents Nicholas Butler and Dwight Eisenhower staunchly resisted it, but alas, as Mal Kline notes, to no avail.

Our friend Christina Sommers has frequently piqued the wrath of academic feminists by arguing that public education, far from favoring boys as legend has it, is loaded heavily against them and in favor of girls all through the K-12 years. See, for example, her book The War Against Boys, which makes that case very convincingly. In this article in today’s American, the AEI magazine, Sommers illustrates how the “war” continues in the New York City school system’s program for gifted students. Despite the fact that, statistically, there are approximately equivalent numbers of academically talented boys and girls, the selection process, especially the heavily verbal rather than quantitative orientation of the qualifying exams, is decidedly skewed in favor of girls. Not surprisingly, nearly three-fifths of the students selected for the special programs are girls. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with providing talented girls with every opportunity to realize their potential. But equally talented boys are currently getting the very short end of the stick. It’s simply one more example, Sommers concludes, of the fact that boys of every variety have been relegated to second-class status by feminist-dominated school systems. To my mind, the greatest irony lies in the fact that, despite the increasing dominance of academic, leadership and social awards by girls, many of them also graduate from high school with a strong sense of grievance and victimhood. Thus, the typically upscale suburbanite valedictorian on her way to an Ivy League school next Fall, with lots of scholarship support in hand, will often as not give an address explaining how things are so heavily stacked against women, and she fully expects to encounter massive discrimination in the years ahead. Her college experience, alas, isn’t likely to dispel that outlook.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah just paid a visit to President Obama, almost  two years after the deadline by which the kingdom’s educational curriculum was to have been overhauled. This reform has not take place, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom wrote to the president last week.

As the National Review reports, this meeting was aimed at getting the two nations to coordinate in confronting terrorism and should also have been used by the president to personally persuade King Abdullah to fulfill his promise of textbook reform.

As NR notes,

Saudi textbooks teach, along with many other noxious lessons, that Jews and Christians are “enemies,” and they dogmatically instruct that various groups of “unbelievers” — apostates (which includes Muslim moderates who reject Saudi Wahhabi doctrine), polytheists (which includes Shiites), and Jews — should be killed. Under the Saudi Education Ministry’s method of rote learning, these teachings amount to indoctrination, starting in first grade and continuing through high school, where militant jihad on behalf of “truth” is taught as a sacred duty. These textbooks are used not only in Saudi Arabia but in Saudi-funded schools around the world.

It remains to be seen whether the president broached the matter to any avail with the Saudi king.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Jay Schalin takes a look at the conventional wisdom that a sure-fire way for states or countries to boost their economies is by putting more resources into higher education. He concludes that the conventional wisdom is mostly wrong. Education, like everything else, is subject to diminishing returns and we’re probably well past the point where additional benefits are less than additional costs.

The incomparable Victor Davis Hanson thinks so, evincing evidence that ethnic centers have the run of our institutions, and economics and political science departments determine policy.

And so goes the nation, resembling for all the world “a faculty bull session over coffee.”

Steven Rhoads, NAS member and Political Science professor at the University of Virginia, writes [along with co-authors Laura Webber and Diana Van Fleet]at the Chronicle of Higher Education about the “hook-up” sexual culture now so widespread on many college campuses (and high schools as well, according to what one informed local counselor tells me). The subject has been examined here before, when we published Wendy Shalit’s call for the recovery of some minimum standard of modesty in the dorms. Good luck with that, since I doubt that there is much on campus these days that hasn’t been exposed, practiced, discussed or attempted. Most undergraduates, their sap rising, have long been accustomed to inhabiting the same buildings , the same floors, using the same common bathrooms and, more recently, the same dorm rooms. Beyond that, many undergraduate newspapers feature a regular “sex columnist,” who usually doesn’t devote a lot of space to modesty. Not much then, seems to stand in the way of the “hookup” culture, and, as Shalit discovered, the burden is on those uneasy with it to remove themselves by choice: there are few institutional props that even encourage, much less accomodate them. We’re certainly not in Kansas anymore.

Rhoads and his co-authors share Shalit’s negative take on casual, random sexual encounters, but offer some intriguing empirical research results rather than simply subjective disapproval. On the basis of extensive survey questionaires, they find that young college women in particular, perhaps to their surprise, are increasingly unedified and troubled when they reflect on their “hookup” experiences. Not quite what they expected, it seems. It’s worth reading, especially for the lively comments thread which follows.

Michael Glenwood for The Chronicle

In this Chronicle article, Mark Bauerlein, Mohamad Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey and Stanley Trimble discuss the vast outpouring of academic research that is mostly redundant and wasteful.

No surprise there. We heavily subsidize academic research and as any good economist will tell you, when you subsidize anything, you get too much of it and much of the output will be of low quality.

I recall seeing a 60 Minutes segment many years ago on the effects of art subsidies in The Netherlands — the government had warehouses filled with paintings no one would buy. Instead of warehouses filled with bad paintings, we have journals filled with research no one would pay for. Academic research is no more intrinsically good than is art and if you sever the connection between production and voluntary financial support, you wind up wasting resources.