Six essays can be found here. For example, Tom Lindsay writes,
On both constitutional and prudential grounds, what is required to depoliticize our schools are measures that reduce the federal role in higher education.
Think of higher education as a church, and Federal government involvement in higher education as joining church and state.
Debra Mashek, of the Heterodox Academy (Jonathan Haidt’s project), writes,
In a world as complex as ours, it is unlikely that any one person holds a full and accurate understanding of problems, much less solutions. Intellectual humility compels us to at least question the completeness of our understanding while curiosity compels us to seek out and to try to understand the views of others. Resilience, in turn, helps individuals depersonalize difference. Resilient individuals are well-practiced at questioning and reframing their initial reactions to critique and challenge, and finding ways to read people and their actions with generosity and compassion.
It sounds to me like we should raise the status of the Intellectual Dark Web and lower the status of politically active professors.
None of them will do any good because none of them understand that politics on campus isn’t about politics. What’s going on is a zero sum competition for positional status.
American colleges are a window into the post scarcity world that is to come. No matter how abundant material goods become, social status will still be a scarce resource, and place in social hierarchies will always be zero sum.
‘Politics’ is the vocabulary used in the competition, but it’s not what the competition is about. What is called ‘Politics’ is just competitive hissy fits powered by status anxiety.
Any attempt to push things in a different direction will circle back to become the same thing, because the urge for zero sum status competition remains. The only way to change that is, to borrow a line from the Buddhists, break the chain of being. Get everyone to give up the notion that college is where status competition takes place, and that social hierarchies there don’t matter.
Good luck with that.
There are still scarce resources. Real estate where people want to live. Good schools for your kids. Access to prime career paths. “Status” is linked to these. If you don’t have status you are unlikely to win the tournament for those scarce things.
I can’t see how you make those scarce resources more abundant without political/social solutions. You can’t really “opt out” of the game because the solutions that get cooked up at these places are enforced on the rest of us.
There is an abundance of things you can order on Amazon, but that’s a pretty small part of peoples lives. Even people in ghettos have plenty of that, but they still consider their lives bad.
I realize you’re probably being partly facetious and this isn’t the main point of the post, but I don’t think society-wide status is a dial we can just turn up and down at will.
In fact, I think the tendency to view society level problems like that is something that separates the progressive left from the more market oriented right. I still think this (the first 3/4 at least) is one of the best introductions to the concept that I’ve seen, I have all my liberal friends who are interested in better understanding their ideological opponents start here.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets.html
Since most top colleges have been discriminating against conservatives and Reps for many years in their hiring, the USA would be better off with them being hugely reduced in power.
Yes, there should be “affirmative action”, by the colleges, to get more Rep professors.
a) End gov’t loans to educational institutions who have been discriminating “in practice”, against Reps (use black affirmative action prior discrimination cases)
b) End non-profit status for Harvard, Yale, etc., based on their discrimination.
c) Support, with big gov’t money and guaranteed loans for the students, all colleges (including profit) who DO have more than 30% conservatives (/Reps) AND 30% liberals (/Dems).
Have gov’t jobs that now require a college BA require also that it be a college which hasn’t been discriminating … so stop hiring Harvard, Yale, Stanford grads.
(Stanford with Hoover is an interesting case).
This is very anti-Libertarian. But to develop cooperation between Dems and Reps in education, Reps need to do a Tit for Tat strategy. Dems have been discriminating, they need to be gov’t tax break punished for this when Reps have the power to do so.
Conservatives in the IDW, and elsewhere, are ready to act as scholars, looking for truth.
But truth also has to able to be said, like “Individual IQs and other characteristics are most important for success, not group averages, even if a ranking of American group IQs would be: Jews, Asians, Whites, Hispanics, Blacks” (I’m not sure where Native Americans are.) And, as more inter-group marriages happen, more folk like Obama will be outside these groups, and show that individuals matter more than group averages.
The Federal Government has a near perfect track record of getting academic institutions to back down when threatening to hit them in their wallets. Money talks. The big cases are Rumsfeld v. FAIR and Bob Jones University v. U.S.. That power is very, very broad for private institutions (there may be some tricky issues with “coercion” for state, public institutions, but that’s not important.)
So the Congress could, if it really wanted to, forcibly de-politicize the academies (and a lot of other institutions). But any actions that would have even a slim hope of success would be correctly perceived as truly radical changes (e.g., quotas by party registration, like the membership of bipartisan commissions are allocated, and so forth.)
The interesting thing to notice is that there appears to be a big disconnect between how much non-progressives are complaining about polarization and ideological discrimination and effective censorship, and what powers they would be willing to yield to remedy the situation short of norm begging (which looks like special pleading).
But, if that tactic isn’t going to work (it won’t) and the political conseqeunces of failure and the stakes of continued escalation are huge (they are), then it seems rational to be willing to apply proportionate (i.e. ‘radical’) means to critical, polity-preserving ends.
My own guess is that things will proceed along one of two paths. The more likely path is that the US will effectively become a One Party State and follow the European trend of effectively outlawing most right wing opinion as hate speech, and what’s left of a “right wing opposition” will be maybe some people arguing to tinker with certain tax deductions.
The other, much more unlikely possibility, is what you might call a “Boromir Right” emerges that rejects the current non-progressive elite’s calls for restraint and shyness from new radical initiatives using state power to level the playing field. Boromir may be the hopeful, happy scenario, and alternative flavors of this option could easily be a much more intransigent movement willing to play hardball (e.g., actually willing to impeach judges, pack the courts, watch the government shut down for months or years unless and until it gets its way, etc.), or even a more vengeful and fatalistic “Scorched Earth / Burn it all down / By Any Means Necessary” party.
Almost by necessity, today’s elites are not by nature scorched earth / BAMN types, and there is never any genuinely “populist” political movement not led by elites. So, this outcome probably won’t happen, even if quite a lot of people might want it to.
Dark web should be the top of yjay argument pyramid, as the issue generator. That is, if it means anything at all. The group that collects all the parts first, and considers theory second, not ignoring the complete effects.
Random thoughts:
(1) The US university system is beyond repair. Only being kept afloat by government cash infusions through grants, loans, contracts, and student lending. And true to your observations, the government is subsidizing demand while at the same time restricting supply via accreditation requirements. Accreditation should be performed by independent 3rd parties outside of academia or not at all. Currently academics serve in the accrediting agencies which pervert the process into little more than featherbedding for administrators and barriers to entry for innovative alternative approaches.
(2) Civil service reform should focus on replacing use of educational credentials in the hiring process with performance on an objective examination of knowledge and skills similar to the GRE or the GMAT. Most local, state, and federal jobs require an extended learning period to master and incumbents are likely to spend entire careers in them, so it is extremely important that actual mastery of basic skills and learning ability be used to fill positions rather than just having a degree (even with a GPA cutoff). Rather than requiring so many credits in different subjects, occupational qualifications should be rewrittent to require passage of an objective exam demonstrating mastery of the topic concerned.
(3) UK style studies are superior to the US in that you can graduate in 3 years, courses are generally shorter, involve little busy work, are lecture based, and are typically graded solely by performance on an objective final exam. If one could get past the accreditation barriers, introducing a UK style option to the US would bring competition to the market.
(4) A new form of antitrust should be introduced to prevent universities from limiting the amount of course credits that can be earned elsewhere. Students should be encouraged to shop for good professors even if they have to go off campus to get access to them. US universities offer their own online classes which are usually nothing more than cheap cash cows. Instead students should be encouraged to seek international professors who are willing to teach for cash via skype. You can easily find tutors online from India who will assist your elementary student learn math, why not for college credit? We should push to globalize education through technology.
(5) The Department of Defense is actually a leader in the field of higher education in this regard. They offer DSST exams which wikipedia explains: “DSST (formerly DANTES Subject Standardized Tests) are credit-by-examination tests originated by the United States Department of Defense’s Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support (DANTES) program. The program is an extensive series of 30+ examinations in college subject areas that are comparable to the final or end-of-course examinations in undergraduate college courses. These tests are frequently used in conjunction with CLEP (College Level Examination Program) tests by students pursuing college degrees in non-traditional formats. Whereas CLEP tests are almost exclusively used for lower level credit at regionally accredited institutions, DSST’s are available for both upper and lower level credit.” This should be a model. DSSTs should be offered to the public and universities that accept student loan money should be required to accept passing scores for full credit.
(6) Why would anyone want to hire a college graduate anyway? I do not see any persuasive evidence that individuals exposed to the academic environment emerge any better human beings than anyone else, and possibly less so on average.
(6) Why would anyone want to hire a college graduate anyway? I do not see any persuasive evidence that individuals exposed to the academic environment emerge any better human beings than anyone else, and possibly less so on average.
Employment at large corporations selects for conformity. I have no clue why people think employers are going to stop hiring these people anytime soon. The front page of my daily corporate e-mail would be indistinguishable from some universities newsletter.
“empowering the individual states to certify their schools for receipt of Title IV federal funding”
I understand the logic behind localism, but this is an example of false localism: the federal government has to provide money to whatever states say is a school. It might be good to switch such funding to a formula-based system allocating it to states, like much gas tax revenue is, but the idea that states should just be allowed to call in federal funding on a per pupil basis strikes me as wrong and likely to lead to bad outcomes. This reminds me of the incentives for some transportation projects where the federal government picks up the tab for a particular project, which leads to waste and cronyism. States will be able to absorb more federal money into their economies by just accrediting lots of large schools of dubious quality. It also strikes me as wrong: taxpayers from wealthy states like New York and California will on net pay into the pool of funding, but they will have no say in how it is spent when a poor state like Mississippi sets up a school.
The true localism would just be ending the federal funding.
Interesting, when you rank US education compared to other countries the higher you go the better US schools seem to do. It goes from grad school at the top to kindergarten at the bottom.
But that is the same way the federal government is involved with education. It goes from the feds virtually financing and other heavy direct and indirect involvement with grad schools to have virtually nothing to do with education at the lowest levels.
Simperingly, this contrast directs with all of the comments I see here that seems to be completely devoid of any factual basis.
Can anyone show me some facts or data that will contradict my rough observation?
Dear Spencer,
That is a very good question!
I’m not qualified to judge but you are are right about the rankings. The USA still has an impressive number of the “Best Research Universities on the Planet.” A few decades ago, Henry Rosovsky said the US had “Two Thirds of the Best” universities in the world. The number probably has declined–but very gradually.
Why are American universities ranked so highly? What enables them to do well?
Money, political stability, competition for faculty, Anglosphere advantages (English language), the domestication of the “German Research Model” in American soil, competitive funding, recruitment of bright and ambitious foreigners. links between academia and industry, the “land grant model” –lots of things contribute.
Jonathan R. Cole wrote a book about _The Great American University_–probably worth reading. It’s a long book, which I’ve only glanced at.
It seems to me that political correctness especially flourishes in the hot house environment of the small residential liberal arts college, especially those in the Northeast. Someone concluded this–perhaps it is reported at Heterodox Academy.
ok, it’s not quite on topic, but try “the blue shift of the New England professoriate” at heterodox academy.
Regarding elementary and secondary education, it may be much better for college prep tracks in Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia, etc. France has a demanding national curriculum, says ED Hirsch.
Much of the problem is that the American curricula is partially devoid of content. The citation probably is ED Hirsch, _The schools we need (and why we still don’t have them)), ca. 1996.
Hirsch remarked that when he was teaching at Virginia a Swiss colleague despaired of his children’s education in the USA and thought about taking the kids back to Switzerland. Anecdotal, admittedly.
In the best high schools in the USA the kids are smart and sharp and learning a considerable amount, but it’s because of the genetic endowment (smart parents), class background, household effects, concerted cultivation, sending kids to math camp or maker camp in the summer, etc. That’s my guess.
Well Federal involvement at the elementary school level with the No Child Left Behind Act was severely criticized.
I don’t think we can easily get good results from more federal involvement without
(1) objective measures of what we seek to accomplish,
*and*
(2) good policy instruments.
And I don’t think we can get agreement over what we actually seek to accomplish.
The USA is too diverse for that, and too decentralized. So I don’t know what the answer is.
Much (not all) of the problem is “producer interests.” The “producer interests” tend to hijack most initiatives. My sense is that producer interests demonstrate a real talent for mopping up any increments in money / external resources. Prof. Arnold had a post about this within the last year or so, discussing the situation in Maryland in particular. (see reference at the end of this comment)
The best clear explanation of this (Producer Interests) that I’m familiar with is Lieberman’s _Public education: An autopsy_. The whole thing is readable free online through ERIC or a similar service (last time I checked). Read especially the pages on “producer interests” which you can find through text search, indexing, etc.
I am far from a policy wonk, and not qualified to judge policies. My guess is that we need more objective measures of “value added” by schools.
This could be done if we were really determined to do it. More information would emerge, gradually. Private firms could invent and administer better tests. Tournaments would help, with prizes from philanthropists. It would be great if schools could develop a market niche for “getting better results with the kids who enter.” With the exception of Roman Catholic schools and some of the KIPP type programs, I’m not sure schools have that reputation.
Catholic Schools tend to be more authoritarian, with the option to kick out malefactors and anyone who might be suspected to be a “program wrecker.” For what it’s worth, the late Peter Drucker thought Catholic schools had a ethos of “moral community” to promote learning, rather than “helping the less privileged).
KIPP type schools probably rely heavily on self-selection.
As Scott Alexander likes to say, most of what we see is selection bias. In the part of the country I’m familiar with (Upstate New York), the best schools are in the “best” suburbs, which are de facto exclusionary mostly on the basis of real estate prices, and home to the upper middle class with their ethos of “concerted cultivation.”
The recent book _The dream hoarders_ has a decent discussion of this.
Again, I’m speculating. Everything I have said is just my best guess.
Apologies if this is repetition from last year. See the askblog 9 Feb 2017, “Montgomery County (MD) Politics) and the comments therein.