The Maze of Higher Ed

By Mary Grabar, March 19, 2013

This first appeared here.  I would like to thank Mary for allowing me to publish her work.  You might wish to receive her commentaries by asking to be on her mailing list.  RK

The 25th anniversary celebration of the National Association of Scholars had the title and theme, “A Mighty Maze: Charting the Future of American Higher Education,” inspired by the lines from Alexander Pope’s poem “An Essay on Man”:

Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan.

Looking upon the landscape of academe, Dissident Prof has too often been reminded, however, of The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?  Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images. . . .

But after a weekend catching up with old friends and making new ones in New York City at the NAS conference, Dissident Prof was more inclined to Pope's vision.  There's nothing like getting together with hundreds of other scholars and supporters who believe in the eternal verities and in the value of continuing the project of Western civilization. 

Although outnumbered by the radical left that has taken over our universities, NAS offers a plan through the maze of political correctness, academic activism, speech codes, and the general degeneration of thinking. 

Ashley Thorne gives a good overview of the two-day event here on the home page of the organization. 

Dissident Prof offers additional observations, namely about NAS's detractors.

On the first day, the article, “National Scholars’ Group Turns 25, Showing Its Age,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, was met with humor at the conference, with panelists quipping about how the author, Peter Schmidt, ”had declared [NAS's] death." 

If many of the members are on the upside of 50, it is because the gatekeepers have deliberately kept out those who disagree with their radical vision.  How this is done is described in the new Dissident Prof book Exiled.  Were such discrimination and then ridicule for lack of “achievement” or representation in the field done for any other group, there would be outcry.  But the new way of addressing criticisms of the academy is to simply use the power of numbers and ridicule.  It is a slightly more sophisticated form of mob bullying, as perfected by Saul Alinsky.

Schmidt’s description of NAS's mission and message is one thing he got right in the article: “that colleges should be meritocracies focused on teaching, research, reasoned discourse, and the scientific method, and should resist tailoring their policies and instruction to conform with anyone’s political views.”

But then Schmidt takes the same position of the leftist class that NAS counters:  "It is a message rooted in romanticized recollections of how America’s colleges operated in the middle of the 20th century, before the advent of affirmative action, ethnic-studies departments, and other products of the 1960s that the association regards as anathema.” 

It's the same I got in the early 1990s in graduate school when I read such bizarre things as that there is no such thing as reasoned discourse and objective scholarly investigation, and that to claim that there is is to reveal one's Western, patriarchal perspective.  The oppressed, in contrast, like to act collectively, on feelings (i.e., in the "women's ways of knowing").

For Schmidt NAS clings to a “romanticized past,” a standard that never really existed.  And the motivations for those clinging to the romanticized past have to do with fear of “affirmative action, ethnic-studies departments."  Hence, Schmidt succeeds in dismissing NAS’s claim even as he pretends to simply describe it.  The complaint about the lack of willingness to engage in debate is met with lack of willingness to engage in debate.

Schmidt furthermore cites critics of the organization, and at that Cary Nelson, former president of the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, who a few years earlier had been an invited panelist to the NAS conference, where he used terms of abuse like "fascist" and "reactionary" to describe the organization in his opening remarks, and where he insulted an undergraduate who had stepped up to the mic to ask about the biased readings in her journalism class. 

The currently 66-year-old Nelson is quoted as saying in the Chronicle, “’If I had to be blunt, I would say the NAS is composed of old men playing a broken record.’”

Schmidt apparently did attend the conference enough to write an article about a session titled “The Illiberal Arts: Politicization and Academic Decline.”  Again, he did not address the issue of academic decline, but cast aspersions upon a report on Bowdoin College because of the source of funding.  Schmidt goes into some detail to explore how the idea for the study came about during a golf game in an article titled “National Association of Scholars Joins Investor in Teeing Up a Critique of Bowdoin.”

This article too was full of innuendo, while it ignored the substance of the panel.  Opponents like to accuse conservatives of cherry-picking radical professors when it comes to critiquing academia, yet when a thorough study is undertaken they dismiss it.  Noting that the Bowdoin study was to be representative, Schmidt then claimed that “much of the weekend conference . . . was devoted to lamenting the state of liberal education at the nation’s colleges.”  His descriptions of the sessions were intended to accuse and imply less than noble motivations for critique: “colleges were accused of prodding students to advance liberal concepts of social justice and of neglecting instruction about Western civilization and in favor of multiculturalism” and “of lowering their standards to enroll racially and ethnically diverse student bodies. . . .”

What was left out was the quite reasonable claim that one has to know one’s own culture (Western) before she can learn about another’s (an argument that would seem to be in support of real multiculturalism) and that “social justice” masquerades for Marxism.  Completely left out are the studies (again with evidence) that affirmative action programs hurt the very students they are intended to benefit.  Panelists cited statistics that show those admitted to programs for which they are unprepared or unqualified drop out at higher rates than others and are often perceived as not as highly qualified academically.  The actual evidence and studies presented was ignored.

Even the humor was taken out of context in order to fulfill Schmidt’s mission of discrediting NAS.  The video segments of students that were shown give support to the need for reform.  Snippets of out-of-control students spurred on by an assistant provost during a protest showed that often students follow their elders. 

At Bowdoin, the stepping forth into a circle to declare one’s identity after an alleged racial harassment incident was disturbing. Watch the entire, sad video here, where students say things like "I am black and gay and I am Bowdoin" and "I don't know who I am but I love you all and I am Bowdoin." I’ve written in other places about how students are emotionally manipulated and are denied the skills to think for themselves.  Rather than forming arguments, students can only declare “I black and gay” and then the nonsensical “and I am Bowdoin.” 

So after showing a segment to the NAS attendees, Michael Toscano led off by identifying himself as Italian-American.  It was funny coming as it did after the Bowdoin video.  Others followed suit. Ashley Thorne introduced herself as a red-head.  Members understood the triviality of such statements and laughed along.  Schmidt, however, apparently didn’t get it, for he simply reported, “Ashley Thorne, director of the NAS’s Center for the Study of the Curriculum, made a point of introducing herself to the audience as ‘a redhead.’”

Schmidt also didn't get the ridiculousness of courses, like “Walt Disney,” “Tattoos in American Popular Culture,” and “Fly Fishing” that fulfill liberal arts curriculum courses that were described or else just chose to ignore that criticism.  Also ignored was the figure of $42,816 annual tuition for such trivia. 

Over dinner Dissident Prof heard the story of a recent law school graduate who had accrued over $200,000 in student loan debt, a debt he would not pay over a lifetime of skimping, given the salary he was making.  We have students with heads full of information about tattoos and gender identity and working at Star Bucks.  Yet the left keeps pushing college for all (while Dissident Prof hears stories of welders making $7,000 a week in the North Dakota oil fields).

Do those like Cary Nelson simply want to maintain their lifestyles of teaching their own pet trivialities unmolested by groups like NAS?

It seems so.  That they don't like the challenge that NAS presents is evident by the reporting in journals of "higher education."