Harvard is still, ridiculously, the most prestigious U.S. university, and the fish rots from the head down. (I learned that at Harvard, in “Ichthyology 101.”) Honeycutt feels it necessary to write repeatedly, some version of “there are praiseworthy things happening in higher education.” I view that as sophistry from an academic who is too timid to state the throbbing truth: “Let’s face it: higher education is another victim of ideological capture. It can’t be fixed, not as long as those who run it are too biased to see its outrageous domination by the political left as even a problem.”
The essay begins,
“Last month, Education Secretary Linda McMahon issued a “Call to Action” asking every U.S. college and university to publicly describe how they will strengthen free speech, intellectual pluralism, academic rigor, affordability, and other areas on their campuses. Whatever one thinks of the administration’s approach, the implicit underlying question is a legitimate one: if trust and confidence are low, what would actually restore it?”
Gee, that’s a tough one. How about institutions insisting that classes teach rather than indoctrinate, admitting students based on their ability and achievements rather than their color and ethnicity, actually giving out grades that range from A to F so academic excellence can be recognized, resisting taking political positions, aggressively encouraging free speech and academic freedom, not seeking to undermine American values and culture, and not charging obscene tuition in the process? How about that?
It ends with this:
“Higher education’s problem isn’t that Americans see it inaccurately. It’s what Americans will see when they take an even closer look. Trust and confidence will not be restored by making the status quo easier to explain, but rather by making the reality easier to defend.”
Translation: Higher education sucks, and the more one examines it, the more awful it is. But we knew that. Didn’t we?
IMO, Joseph Sobran nails it: “In 100 Years We Have Gone From Teaching Latin And Greek In High School To Teaching Remedial English In College.”
His reward? That’s RAYcist!
PWS
That is a fantastic quote. Poor Joe Sobran. All I know is the conventional wisdom, is that he was sh*tcanned from…National Review (?) for something he wrote, and could not land on his feet, and spiralled downward steadily after that.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Well, you first have to get rid of the accreditation bodies. They enforced this liberal system on everyone. If you don’t have enough diversity of student body or faculty, your accreditation is at risk. If you don’t document your efforts to indoctrinate students on DEI, your accreditation is at risk. If you allow conservative students into teacher ed programs, your accreditation is at risk.
What accreditation bodies do NOT do is check to see if the students are learning anything you claim they are. I was told that I couldn’t use nationally normed standardized final exams as assessment tools because ‘that isn’t assessment’. I have to pick a random assignment and give each student a 1-5 on 7 different themes instead. The other people assessing the other sections of the class can pick a different assignment and assign a 1-5 for each student on the different themes based on whatever criteria they like. The accreditation head then adds the numbers up for each student in all the sections and gives the class a average numerical score. This obviously does nothing to tell me how well the students are learning anything, but that is what ‘professional assessment’ is and what the accreditation bodies want.
You will never find a math or science faculty member on an accreditation body visitation team. Those faculty are kept busy teaching extra classes and aren’t given time to serve on any bodies like that. The visitation team also won’t ever speak to any science or engineering faculty and will only speak to a math faculty if they are a ‘math education’ person. The team will never ask to see a final exam, or any exam actually. The only assignments they view are art projects and posters created by the education students.
Staff all the accreditation teams by recently retired engineering professors. Things will change fast.
Long ago in a fit of absent mindedness I wrote up some musings about how to improve things by using competitive exams for students entering college and then also administering competitive exams again at the end for exit exams. It was on the “Chronicle of Higher Eduation” chat board, which no longer runs and has apparently “gone away” and is not well archived at the wayback.machine.
To summarize…
The goal would be, in part, getting some good estimate of “value added” during the college years.
Ideally there would be substantial cash prizes for various categories such as (1) highest score entering, (2) highest score exiting, (3) most improved during college–something like that. When creating this system, it would take careful attention to design competitions to produce the correct incentives. The test results would be publicly available (perhaps at the discretion of the individual student).
The objective is to get the students to work as hard as they can on the entrance exam and then again on the exit exam. If the incentives are correct the average student would be unlikley to say “Oh, I didn’t really work hard on the entrance exam because I didn’t really care about the $50,000 prize.”
Yes, we all know the blowhards…” I could have gotten straight A’s, I could have run that marathon, I could be a self-made millionaire by now…” The tests should measure real performance in a controlled environment.
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It’s relevant that Peter Thiel (as I understand it) didn’t try to reform higher education. Instead, he provided competitive fellowships in which the winner would skip college entirely and begin working in tech / business immediately.
We can consider that to imply that there is a “blob.” The blob wins when reformers try to change things–it resists change.
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It’s also relevant, in some sick and twisted way, that a self-taught Charlie Kirk was (allegedly) assassinated by a college student while speaking on a college campus.
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I am reminded of James Lindsay’s assertion (at New Discourses) that the university has become “an activist church.”
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Apologies for repeating myself with the following assertion: management guru Peter Drucker claimed that the USA had created a system in which no person could reach the top of any occupational hierarchy without going to college. He asserted that labor union leader Walter Reuther was the last person to manage it before it was somehow made impossible.
If you explore the implications of this, it’s necessary to have attended college and graduated. Perhaps it’s not necessary to have learned a lot during the process. It depends on the
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This is a topic of great interest to me, despite the fact that my own performance as a sturdent in high school and college has been very uneven. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not an exemplar, but smart enough to tell that there is something wrong.
Richard Vedder argues that the market will take care of it–_Let colleges die_. And it will keep the rest of them on their toes.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
I just read the substack post. It is worse than that post represents. Asking faculty if they are Democrat or Republican is a terrible way to measure this. You will find that most ‘Republican’ faculty at universities support abortion on demand until birth. A better way to measure this is to ask if they voted for Donald Trump as president. I suspect your number will come in under 5%. If you ask it in a room full of other faculty, the number will be under 2%.
The land acknowledgement bullshit came from Universities
Oh it is worse than you think. People were surprised that I disagreed with the McGirt decision. I disagreed, but not for the reason they think. The McGirt decision didn’t do a thing to improve Tribal sovereignty. It claimed the land was still reservations, but the cities and land still belong to the state. All McGirt did was transfer felonies involving tribal members from state to federal court. So, it was a win for the federal government, not the tribes.
If all that land is still reservation land, then all the property there is tribal property. All the cities and county units need to be disbanded and all government properties (police departments, schools, etc) need to be transferred to the tribes. The tribal governments need to take over, issue new land titles to the property owners, establish local governments, citizenship, voting regulations, etc for the newly affected areas. The tribes would need to work out how to govern their land with a large foreign population living on it and owning houses and businesses in it. Citizen naturalization would need to be worked out, with perhaps a two-tiered citizenship due to federal laws on tribal citizenship. That is what McGirt should have done if the land is still a tribal reservation as stated by the Supreme Court. The fact that none of that happened showed that this decision was merely a power grab by the feds.
I was asked if I would want that to happen and I said I would. I really don’t have a problem living under my local tribal governments. I expect that, were that to happen, that I would be given a title to the land that I currently own from the tribe, would pay taxes to the tribe, and be given some path to a citizenship status where I could vote for the leaders that govern my area. I actually would prefer that my local tribal government would be the highest authority under the federal government. I have only been in the same room with my state governor twice, and never was even able to shake his hand. The tribal chiefs and governors are much more accessible to the people.
Now, ask the land acknowledgement people if they are willing to live under those circumstances. Do away with the state governments and live under the tribal governments. Ask them to put it in writing.