Im-Politic: Maybe American Higher Education Isn’t a Completely Lost Cause?

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academics, cancel culture, Center for Study of Partisanship and Ideology, critical race theory, education, Eric Kaufmann, higher education, humanities, Im-Politic, liberal authoritarianism, political correctness, social sciences, tolerance, wokeness

The late Native-American leader Wilma Mankiller wisely observed that “Whoever controls the education of our children controls the future.” It’s a great way to explain why it’s so important to determine whether the country’s schools at all levels generally have stayed in the business of transmitting knowledge and learning techniques to students, or whether they’re becoming propaganda operations.

Scarily, there’s abundant and seemingly surging evidence of the latter, and though I’m not big on arguing by anecdote, I certainly was alarmed by my stepson’s own recent experiences at Dickinson College, where in his humanities and social science courses, he contended he was both fed a diet of woke-ism and regularly belittled for being a white male.

So when I first heard about a massive new report on “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship,” I was expecting to see a detailed case that American higher education had passed the point of no return on political correctness, critical race theory, and intolerance of dissents from them. Instead, the March study from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology contained a noteworthy amount of evidence that traditional notions of academic freedom – which logically, anyway, go hand-in-hand with non-overtly politicized notions of education – retain surprisingly (to me, anyway) strong support on U.S. campuses.

Not that the study, by University of London political scientist Eric Kaufmann, doesn’t serve up plenty of findings to worry about. But these were some of the most encouraging of the many results compiled and discovered by the author that stood out:

>Of the academics surveyed in various studies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada who consider themselves to have ever been victims of what Kaufmann calls campus authoritarianism, only 0.03 percent report being dismissed from their jobs or being “deplatformed” (barred from forums or debates held either in person or on social media). And the U.S.-specific numbers are probably lower, since elsewhere in the study it’s made clear that academic freedom’s position in the United Kingdom and Canada is much more precarious. (p. 13)

>A much higher but still distinctly minority share (23 percent) of such respondents report being “threatened by disciplinary action for speech.” (p. 13)

>Only seven percent of U.S. respondents in a survey conduced by the author would favor a “campaign to oust” an academic for “dissenting” (i.e., negative) views on the value of diversity. Only eight percent would support similar efforts either regarding a colleague believing traditional parenthood as superior, or one backing a “restrict immigration” position. A higher, but still decidedly minority (18 percent) would support such a campaign against a colleague believing that “a higher share of women and minorities lowers organizational performance.” (p. 23)

These findings cover what Kaufmann calls “hard authoritarianism” in higher education. But he’s also studied forms of “soft authoritianism,” which he defines as “not being hired, promoted, awarded a grant, or published in a journal.” Of course, he notes, “both matter for academic freedom. Active social bullying is more punishing than social ostracism, which is in turn worse than socially avoiding someone or not including them in one’s social circle.” And all can damage careers. But here the picture looks unexpectedly encouraging, too. For example:

>Kaufmann admits that the sample size is very small, but his own poll found that just 22% of US academics “admit they’d discriminate vs a [Donald] Trump supporter in hiring.” He claims, however, to have come up with a methodology that can determine the share of respondents who would act on such views without admitting to them; This figure is a much bigger 40 percent – but still a minority. (p. 139)

>A separate, larger study found that “17% of [U.S.] conservatives and 16% of centrists would discriminate against a leftist hire whereas only 14% of American academic leftists would discriminate against a conservative hire.” Not only are these percentages low, but I interpret them as showing that such prejudices can work both ways – and possibly cancel out each other’s impact to some extent. (p. 146)

>Similarly, and returning to his own surveys of U.S. academics, Kaufmann found that “24% of leftist academics would rate a right-leaning grant lower while just 16% of right-wing academics would rate a left-leaning grant lower. However, in terms of papers, right and left discriminate against each other at a similar rate (13- 14%), and for promotion, right-wing academics are somewhat more likely to discriminate against the left than vice versa (16% vs. 13%).” (p. 150)

>Using his methodology for uncovering concealed biases, the author writes that 26- 48 percent of American left-wing academic staff would discriminate against a right-leaning promotion, grant, or paper and 26-32 percent of those on the right would do so against their left-leaning equivalents. Again, these more controversial numbers are higher, but still represent minorities. (p. 150)

And positive results aren’t simply confined to the realm of actions and potential actions. For example:

>Kaufann’s survey found that Americans academics profess to prioritize “academic freedom” over “social justice” by 58 percent to 26 percent. Moreover, only 38 percent of American academics in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) view themselves as “activists” – and they’re clearly among the most politicized groups on campuses. (pp. 59 and 100)

>Moreover, according to the author, it’s not even clear that “academics are more likely to discriminate on political grounds than professionals in other sectors.” (p. 182) In other words, there may be no special discrimination problem in higher education – although its aforementioned crucial role in “controlling the future” arguably makes its politicization more dangerous.

In this vein, Kaufmann’s report does present evidence that the presence of activist, agitprop-spouting professors is having an outsized and damaging impact on students. Thus he cites a 2019 U.S. study reporting that:

“…55% of students feel that the ‘campus climate prevents me saying things I believe.’ Fully 82% of conservative students said they had self-censored at least once in class, compared to 40% of liberals. On politics, race, gender, and sexuality, about 30-35% of Republican students are reluctant to share their views in class compared to 15- 25% for Democrat students. While these numbers show a substantial chilling effect, they indicate that right-leaning students are somewhat less inhibited in expressing their views than right-leaning academic staff.” (p. 170)

In addition, there’s reason to think that the (largely woke) politicization of American colleges and universities could worsen in the coming years, as Kaufmann presents considerable evidence showing that younger academics tend to be less tolerant and more willing to act on their progressive biases than their older counterparts.

But perhaps most revealing was Kaufmann’s decision to end his analytical section on an unmistakably bright note: “Fair-minded leftist academics outnumber the hard-authoritarian left by a factor of two or three (even in SSH fields), and offer an important base from which to build a future consensus in favor of academic freedom.” And if someone who’s investigated the subject so thoroughly, and clearly began with such grave concerns, can see reasons for hope – albeit with the need for continued vigilance and pushback – who am I to disagree?

Im-Politic: An Overlooked Reason to Rethink the Four-Year College Model

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adolescence, college, education, Financial Times, higher education, Im-Politic, Oren Cass, students

I feel hesitant to write about what is or isn’t going on on college campuses these days because it’s been quite a while since my own student days; my visits in recent decades have been limited to short trips either to give guest talks or lectures or to drop off and pick up my son when he was an undergrad or to take in an occasional basketball game at George Washington U.; and although I have some friends and acquaintances in academe, we don’t often seem to discuss campus life and how it has or hasn’t changed over time.

So sure – I’ve covered subjects like the dangerous direct and indirect Chinese government presence in American colleges and universities, and about some of the conflicts that have broken out over how to deal with historical figures with racially charged records. (See, e.g., here.)  But I can only recall one instance of even briefly mentioning the crucial matter of how well these institutions are or aren’t educating students and otherwise preparing them to be successful adults and informed citizens.

I’m focused on this matter today, however, because of two recent developments that seem amply to justify the deepest skepticism about the model of undergraduate education that’s become dominant in recent decades. The first entails the much remarked on force with which the CCP Virus has driven so much instruction on-line, and all the questions that this shift have intensified about the constantly surging costs and therefore value of a four-year degree – which of course includes the cost of campus physical plants that provide so many services that have little to do with education.

The second was the appearance last week of a Financial Times column that’s brilliantly alluded to a strong resulting suspicion of mine that keeps growing, and that surely is widely shared, if still rarely voiced explicitly. As author Oren Cass wrote in a piece covering many of higher education’s woes:

“It’s easy enough to disprove the economic claim that attending college promises them success, but much harder to refute the cultural message equating ‘not college material’ with ‘loser’. Worse, we advertise the college experience as an amusement park entitlement — a rite of passage filled with sports and parties, sex and alcohol, activities calendars overseen by cruise-ship directors called ‘campus life co-ordinators’, and, oh, classes that you should try to attend, all paid for by someone else or at some other time. Try convincing a teenager it would really be smarter to forgo that experience for a few years of hard work, an industry credential and some savings in the bank.”

And he further derides colleges today as “four-year summer camps” and “private playgrounds” for the children of the wealthy.

That second swipe unintentionally reminds us that major distinctions need to be made between private and public universities, and that therefore a latter day version of “Animal House” probably isn’t what most undergrads whatever their school are living.

But beyond the exaggeration and oversimplification, Cass points the way to a possibility that deserves full consideration, and it seems best expressed as a question. Let’s leave aside all the controversies raging today about political correctness and safe spaces and snowflakes and academic propagandizing. Let’s also table for now the serious and necessary discussion concerning whether higher education’s emphasis should be more vocational and professional and technical, or more purely academic.

The question remains – and it’s actually a series of questions: If a society wanted to transmit most effectively to its college-age youth the widest range of the knowledge and skills and experiences considered essential for later life both public and private, would it really be placing these late teens and early twenty-somethings in environments that are largely isolated physically? Where the basics of life are literally served up to them on a platter? Where none of the chores and responsibilities of independent adulthood need to be carried out or met? Where all of the adults present are products of the same cloistered set ups? Whose ideal of the community of scholars – however typically honored in the breach – is barely one step removed, at least in the West, from the medieval monastery? And would that society structure this system so as to ensure that so many of these coddled youth would be those whose talent or birth or some combination of these and other advantages tended to push them into lives of outsized power and influence?

Following on: Could such a cloistered situation reasonably be expected to engender anything deserving the term “personal growth,” or reinforce any desirable form of maturation? Isn’t it far likelier that it’s fostered the kind of entitled sensibilities that never fail to harm any human community, and in fact the kind of narcissism and extended adolescence that seems so widespread among my own Baby Boomers – the first generation during which a system once reserved for the upper classes was extended to the broad middle – and succeeding cohorts?

Of course no society in its right mind would knowingly engage in practices so described, or expect anything but counterproductive, and even perverse, results. Just as obvious, this portrait of campus life is too broadbrush and shouldn’t tar the reputations of all those students who work their way diligently through four-year colleges needing to balance the requirements of classroom and jobs, of generations before them faced with the same challenges and strapped with the often inevitable debts, and of students who have donated big chunks of time and continue to volunteer for all manner of worthy community service projects.

Yet can anyone seriously deny that a nation-wide gap dividing town and gown is exactly what’s been created and cultivated in higher education for decades now? Or that its excessive width – indeed the imperative of rethinking the very goal of immersing near-adults in an environment defining itself, however undeservedly, as higher brow than its surroundings – is becoming ever clearer from the abundant evidence that many of even the less completely pampered undergrads leave academe lacking everything from critical thinking skills to the ability to function in the workplace without time-consuming supervision? (See, e.g., here.)

I am far from knowing what model should or will replace it, though I sense that the very breadth of higher education’s failure is a glaring sign that more than one alternative is in the offing. I’d also be surprised if lots of time and trial and error weren’t needed to devise them, and if some version of the current four-year community of scholars model didn’t survive as the best match for some students – as it is now.

But for most – and even for many of the most academically inclined – higher education seems certain ultimately to much more closely integrate the classroom world and the broader world that graduates will enter. And I’m equally certain that, once this transition is well underway, most will look back and wonder why anyone thought they should have been kept so far apart to begin with.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The U.S. and its Universities Remain Asleep at the Switch on the China Tech Threat

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Argonne National Laboratory, China, higher education, Hoover Institution, John Pomfret, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, science, technology, technology transfer, universities

The word “blockbuster” has been so overused and misused by the national media during the Trump era that it’s impact has been watered down. Yet a new report by the California-based Hoover Institution definitely deserves that description – for it details the shocking and dangerous extent to which the U.S. government’s science and technology research arms, along with many of America’s top universities, have in recent years been merrily working, and no doubt sharing crucial defense-related technology, with individuals tightly connected with China’s military.

You can read an excellent summary of the report here by John Pomfret, a former longtime Washington Post China correspondent who’s turned into a full-time scholar of U.S. relations with the People’s Republic. But there are six points that I think deserve special attention.

First,even anyone who didn’t know that the Chinese institutions from which the Chinese researchers have come are called by China’s regime itself “Seven Sons of National Defense,” two of the names alone should be kind of a giveaway: Beiing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Unless anyone at any of the American universities involved doesn’t know that any activity in China with an aerospace component isn’t largely military in nature?

Second, the research projects themselves being conducted by teams of scientists from these U.S. and Chinese institutions haven’t been given names with obvious military implications. But any American authorities with a tech background should be aware of this dimension. Take “Effect of gallium addition on the microstructure and micromechanical properties of constituents in Nb-Si based alloys.” Gallium is a metal used mainly in micro-electronics manufacturing. Among its properties: It can “produce laser light directly from electricity….” Nothing military to see there! Ditto for the role played by gallium arsenide its role in making semiconductors for pressure sensors for touch switches.

“Nb” is niobium, another metal, is useful for making “superalloys for heat resistant equipment” – and therefore is handy for producing items like jet engines. And of course “Si”, or silicon, is a core building block of semiconductors themselves.

Nor is that work the only research that should have raised eyebrows. In 2018, an entity called the China-US International Cooperation Project (about which a Google search turned up squadoosh) and the Harbin Institute of Technology jointly funded a Master’s thesis on the “Modeling and Analysis of Energy Characteristics and Equivalent Carbon Emissions of CNC Centerless Grinding Machine.”

These types of machine tools are critical for defense manufacturing – including in aerospace – because they can make sure that metal surfaces of parts and components of complex manufactured devices have smooth enough surfaces to operate friction-free – an especially important goal to achieve when producing weapons that need to be highly reliable even in the most challenging situations. Indeed, when these grinders get advanced enough, their overseas sale is regulated for national security reasons by the U.S. government. Why on earth would that same government be helping the Chinese find out anything new about them?

Possibly most obvious – and therefore possibly most maddening – of all: Why did a researcher at the University of Virginia co-author with three colleagues affiliated with Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics a 2018 article titled “Research Progress of Adaptive Control for Hyper-Sonic Vehicle in Near Space”? Did he and the University of Virginia think we’ve arrived already at the United Federation of Planets phase of human history?

Third, as indicated above, the list of American universities involved in these potentially dangerous activities is as long as the inividual schools are highly regarded. It includes Virginia, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas, the University of North Carolina, Purdue University, Arizona State University, the University of Minnesota, George Washington University, the University of California-Irvine, and Georgia Tech.

Fourth, the list of U.S. government agencies involved is impressive, too. It includes the National Institutes of Health, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation.

Fifth, U.S. universities aren’t close to getting a handle on making sure that the research they sponsor in various ways doesn’t strengthen the Chinese military – and therefore undermine U.S. national security. As the Hoover authors point out:

“Only now is the US research community awakening to the intensity and scope of [the China challenge] and its military or dual-use dimensions. However, in the absence of external regulatory or policy mandates, US research institutions have been slow to adapt their due diligence and risk management frameworks. Weak institutional reporting mechanisms and compliance cultures have permitted some collaborations to go unknown, unreported, or underreported. Even among vetted collaborations, conflicts of commitment, unreported or misreported elements, or other activities that undermine the integrity of US scientific research and exceed the scope of collaboration agreements occur. In short, prevailing due diligence and risk management practices for screening and tracking potential collaborations with PRC entities fall far short of what circumstances require.”

Sixth, as must be obvious, the U.S. government isn’t doing much better. Specifically, according to the Hoover study, official U.S. responses (as with those of universities) focus too tightly on whether current laws and regulations aimed dealing with these threats are being violated, without considering whether these restrictions are still adequate. Moreover, Washington seems to view its processes of granting visas as the predominant way to fend off the Chinese threat. As noted by the Hoover authors, however, “collaborations with US partners may move online or to sites outside of the United States.”

So although the Trump administration is far more keenly aware of this problem than its predecessors, clearly is still has a very long way to go.

The Hoover authors are very careful to say that they’re not urging a complete ban on U.S. scientific and technological cooperation with China, and fully acknowledge that the nation has enjoyed major benefits from its academic and research-related openness. Indeed, they lay out a strategy for the research community to avoid handing China many of the keys to America’s scientific and technological kingdoms – in hopes that a heavier government hand can be avoided. Unfortunately, they make such a strong case that both the public and private research communities have been so far behind the eight ball in this respect, that it’s hard to see how anything short of sweeping official measures can deal adequately with the kind of systemic threat posed by China.

Im-Politic: A Case for Reparations

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African Americans, education, GI Bill, higher education, housing, Im-Politic, immigrants, inequalty, mortgages, race relations, racism, reparations, wealth gap, white privilege, World War II

Here’s a RealityChek post I never thought I’d write, leading off with two ideas I never thought I’d consider: First, I’m warming a lot toward the idea of the U.S. government paying some kind of taxpayer-funded reparations to African Americans in compensation for at least one cut-and-dried historical episode of economically costly racism. Second, a main reason is that I and my family – and millions and millions of others like us – have benefited economically, and considerably, from the white privilege reinforced by this episode.

I’m still somewhat wary of a main possible result of reparations – that payment will generate an ever growing list of demands for more payments. I also remain concerned that reparations will ease much of the moral pressure felt by white and others who oppose reparations to eliminate sources of racial economic inequality ranging from lousy and inequitably funded public schools to discriminatory mortgage practices.

But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that these worries reflect overly simplistic “slippery slope”-type arguments to which I’ve objected in the context of other issues. Specifically, they too easily become excuses for avoiding many necessary actions. For they imply that citizens and political leaders are devoid of the judgment needed to make the kinds of distinctions any complex community or society needs to be able to identify in order to remain even minimally functional.

More important, a little research I conducted the other day brought to my attention an instance of massive, systemic racism that took place many decades after emancipation. It came in the form of the discriminatory implementation of the GI Bill of 1944, which denied more than a million black World War II veterans vital most of the opportunities created by the law to establish a foothold in the nation’s middle class, and beyond.

If you’ll remember, opening unprecedented economic opportunity to the men and women that risked their lives to save their country and indeed the world was the whole point of the legislation. The means chosen were low-interest mortgages and equally generous loans for buying businesses and farms, and stipends to finance higher education expenses. Given the importance of homes and other assets in amassing significant amounts of wealth, and of college and many vocational degrees in generating middle-class-and-beyond income levels, the strategy made perfect sense. And it worked like a charm for most of the white veterans who used it.

Inexcusably, however, as this account makes clear, most black World War II veterans were excluded from these programs by a combination of state-level official and informal barriers to participation. Just as important, the effects of this discrimination also hobbled the economic prospects of the descendents of these African American servicemen and women. One major piece of evidence – the decades-old yawning racial wealth gap, which results largely from the long limited home-owning opportunities available to African Americans.

And here’s where the story gets personal – for me and others whose ancestors only came to the United States in the late-19^th and early 20^th centuries. It’s absolutely true that our grandparents or parents never owned slaves, overwhelmingly had no hand in maintaining systemic American racism, and largely arrived from their homelands with little more than the clothes on their backs. It’s also true that many and even most worked like the dickens to achieve their share of the American Dream, and that many were the victims of at least informal discrimination at some point in their lives.

This history was long the principal basis for my own insistence that, if any reparations were to be paid, I sure didn’t owe any.

Getting down to my case, my father, and his peers in the ranks of my relatives and friends, also came from economically modest backgrounds and generally worked like the dickens. My own father was blessed with the most powerful mind I’ve ever encountered, and owed much of his success to this brainpower as well (as did so many others of course).

He didn’t buy his first home until 1963, and so just missed the chance for GI Bill mortgage assistance. But there’s an excellent chance that, despite his intellect and other talents, he’d have never gone to college without the financial aid provided by the legislation – which enabled him to attend full-time and not have to worry about helping to pay the family bills. Certainly, my grandparents never encouraged him to continue his education beyond high school. Without college, of course, there would have been no law school (at night, on top of working full-time), and without his law degree, my own upbringing mightn’t have been so comfortable, and my own higher education opportunities might have been very different.

Again, my father was so brilliant, and so driven, that I’m sure he would have achieved considerable professional success without the GI Bill. I’m similarly confident that the same applies to any number of his peers. But it’s entirely possible that they wouldn’t overall have achieved as much success. And on the whole nowhere near as quickly. More important, their GI Bill benefits relieved or at least partly relieved my father and millions of other white veterans of having to make the kinds of often difficult choices and accept the kinds of often family-straining tradeoffs that confronted black veterans denied these benefits.

As a result, some amount of reparations based on the economic impact of GI Bill discrimination seems justified to me, along with including GI Bill beneficiaries like me as payers.

Obviously, critical details would need to be worked out, along with the question of what other kinds of reparations should be considered and paid. But the GI Bill’s history amounts to a clear instance of the federal government, and many sub-federal governments, systematically awarding to one group of Americans benefits whose effects have lasted many generations, and just as systematically excluding another class of Americans with equally valid claims. And even though subsequent veterans aid programs have been put into effect much more admirably, this clearcut discrimination, moreover, has had lasting, damaging effects.

What could be more fair and ethical than openly acknowledging this inequity, and providing compensation to the victims? And seriously discussing other cmparaable wrongs that might be at least partly righted in this way?  

Im-Politic: On a Parkland Applicant, Harvard Flunks the Character Test

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adolescents, character, college admissions, colleges, Earl Warren, Florida, forgiveness, gun violence, Harvard University, higher education, Hugo Black, Im-Politic, Japanese internment, Ku Kux Klan, Kyle Kashuv, Parkland, racism, school shootings, Supreme Court, universities, World War II

The more I read and think about Harvard University’s decision to rescind admission to Kyle Kashuv because this survivor of the Parkland, Florida high school mass shooting last year made a variety of racist and other offensive and bigoted remarks in a digital document two years ago, when he was all of sixteen years old, the more outraged I get. And the more convinced I become that Harvard pounced upon an excuse to respond to pressure to punish Kashuv for refusal to jump aboard the gun control bandwagon.

Let’s get one aspect of this incident clear right away. Kashuv’s remarks were genuinely appalling. But for any fair-minded observer, the mitigating factors are overwhelming. He was in mid-adolescence – when even good kids often get tempted to do and say lots of stupid and even cruel things. His remarks were so loopy that they even included anti-semitic slurs – even though Kashuv is Jewish. They were made in private digital communications to a handful of apparently equally stupid friends and other schoolmates – i.e. no one has ever accused him of voicing such sentiments in public, an act that would create actual victims. He has admitted responsibility and apologized profusely. Further, nothing known about him so far – and clearly, folks have been looking, since he was outed by a fellow Marjory Stoneham Douglas student who apparently opposed his views on guns – indicates that these remarks ever reflected his actual views, much less do so now.

In fact, overall, Kashuv’s behavior has been far more honorable than Harvard’s handling of his character issues. To its credit, the university first responded to “media reports discussing offensive statements allegedly authored” by Kashuv by noting the morals clause that’s one of its admissions considerations and asking for “a full accounting” so that the matter could be “considered.” (The best source for these and the following Kashuv and Harvard statements is Kashuv’s Twitter feed:  @KyleKashuv.   

But Harvard’s professed open-mindedness was actually a sham, as is clear from its June 3 letter to Kishuv following his apology and explanation, and rejecting his appeal. The admissions dean William R. Fitzsimmons told Kashuv that he and his colleagues “appreciated [his] candor and…expressions of regret” and “discussed [them] at length.” And they bounced him anyway.

It’s disturbing enough that Harvard refused to accept a lengthy apology for a 16-year old’s misdeeds, an equally lengthy promise to learn and grow, and evidence of actually acting on this promise (in the form of reaching out to the university’s diversity office for guidance and counseling). At least as disturbing is seeing this inflexibility at an educational institution – which presumably is in the business of human improvement and focuses on teenagers, who surely represent many of the most improvable individuals on the planet.

As Kashuv himself has wisely noted, Harvard’s actions also raise broad moral questions about whether “we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistake brand you as irredeemable.” I’d add that the odds of making offensive comments in particular have risen dramatically in recent years, since the amped up coarsening of culture and society is bound to trickle (and even flood) down to the young. Moreover, given how unpopular his guns views tend to be in the left-leaning political cultures on so many college campuses, and especially at so-called elite institutions like Harvard, the school’s treatment of Kashuv reeks of a politicized admissions process.

At the same time, the potential practical consequences of such gun jumping (no pun intended) should be sobering. I’m thinking in particular of Hugo Black. This mid-twentieth century Supreme Court Justice belonged to the Ku Kux Klan as a young adult. He was never especially apologetic, either. But on the High Court, he became one of its staunchest proponents of racial integration and a singular champion of free speech and other individual liberties – for Americans regardless of color.

And don’t forget Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Court during much of Black’s tenure. As Attorney General and Governor of California during World War II, he was instrumental in carrying out the federal policy of indiscriminately throwing Japanese-Americans into internment camps solely because of their race or ethnicity. Not until his memoirs were published posthumously is there any public record of regret for these actions. Yet as Chief Justice, he became an even more powerful force than Black for racial justice and civil liberties.

The main – and screamingly obvious lessons – it seems to me are:

First, people can evolve even as adults, much less from their childhood and adolescent selves.

Second, the case for affording the benefit of the doubt, especially when the offender is young, and forgiveness is sought, is impressive.

And third, to understand these truths, you sure don’t need a Harvard education.

Im-Politic: Why Prioritizing Dead White Guys’ Literature Isn’t Bigoted

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academia, critical thinking, culture wars, education, higher education, identity politics, Im-Politic, literature, racism, scholarship, The Washington Post, Trump, Viet Thanh Nguyen

One of the most dispiriting findings in recent years about the state of the nation concerns evidence that colleges are failing to achieve a fundamental goal: improving students’ critical thinking skills. (Click here, here, and here, for some leading studies showing that these institutions have failed to teach undergraduates “how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event,” in the words of a typical description of the conclusions. Here’s a dissenting view.)

And if Viet Thanh Nguyen, a University of Southern California professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist to boot, is the slightest bit typical, then it’s painfully obvious that a main reason for this sorry record is that way too many college faculty lack these skills themselves.

As presented in a Washington Post article yesterday, Nguyen’s argument is…well, it’s actually hard to tell what his argument is. As best as I can surmise, he’s upset that, in too many instances, American college students are discouraged from reading non-western literature, and that young literary scholars are discouraged (by continuing bleak job prospects stemming from intolerant appointment committees) from researching and writing on these works.

He cites his own experiences trying to climb the academic career ladder, as well as a controversy that’s just broken out at Barnard College in New York City over the demands of “some English majors” for “greater diversity in their curriculum.”

At the same time, Nguyen makes clear that since such issues became a bone of contention in the late-1980s and 1990s, reformers who “demanded more space for works by women, people of color, the working class, the queer and the non-white” have “triumphed.” In fact, their victory had taken place by the late-1990s.

The author’s belief that these “culture wars” are flaring anew on campuses, and that a Donald Trump-fueled revival of “white identity politics” is mainly responsible, is also puzzling – to say the least. After all, neither the President nor his more extreme, racially motivated supporters seem to have many supporters in the ranks of U.S. professors or higher education administrators. Nor does there seem to be any scarcity of courses and degree programs in non-western literature and culture in American academia.

So Nguyen’s article flunks three basic texts of critical thinking – advancing a coherent argument, providing serious evidence on its behalf, and refuting major evidence-based counter-arguments.

Nguyen’s real beef seems to be somewhat narrower, but no less important:  A charge that higher ed’s English and American literature curricula, especially in courses covering their seminal works (i.e., their canon), don’t make enough room for non-white and female writers. But here he falls short of meeting another important critical thinking challenge: placing objects or ideas in their proper categories. Here’s what I mean.

The study of literature obviously has to include a study of the entire environment in which that literature is created – including its history, economy, social structure, other aspects of its culture, etc. But first and foremost the study of literature is the study of an art form (which can be both fictional and non-fictional in nature). Therefore, it’s primarily concerned with how and why and how this literature’s aesthetic features have evolved; how successfully and skillfully, and creatively or derivatively, various authors achieved their goals and sent their messages; what the artistry of these works can tell us about how their creators perceived and interpreted, both knowingly and unwittingly, the various elements of their environments, characteristics of human psychology, and the crucial ideas that have molded the human experience; how these factors in turn influenced these authors; what their works reveal about these circumstances; and what, if anything, they can teach us today.

To apply Nguyen’s complaint and this definition of literature to the American canon, there can be no doubt that throughout its history, the nation’s population has consisted of many racial and ethnic groups (and more than one gender). There’s no doubt also that the various forms of contact these groups and genders have had with each other have influenced the worldviews, and therefore the literary output generated by each.

But there’s also no doubt that the influence of white males of European descent has been dominant, and that this dominance was especially pronounced in the nation’s formative years and decades – when the ideas and values and perspectives that have (so far) contributed the most to American culture (and other elements of its environment) began crystallizing. And the degree of injustice in part responsible for this group’s dominance has no intrinsic bearing on its role and its lasting influence. Nor does the inarguable fact that the influence of these white European-descended men itself consists both of admirable and shameful aspects.

So it makes perfect sense that American literature courses, especially at the more general level, to date have emphasized the works of these white males. By extension, it makes perfect sense that much less emphasis has been placed on the works of authors from other groups. Indeed, Nguyen himself explains why: In his words, these authors have been “submerged, overlooked and forgotten.”

Now, if the aim is the entirely worthy objective of learning more about these marginalized groups as such, then of course exposure of their literature is essential. But the greatest responsibility for achieving this goal logically belongs with other academic disciplines – which focus on the histories, social structures, broader cultures, etc. of these groups. Acquaintance with their literature is also needed to understand how these groups have influenced the dominant culture.

And of course, as greater opportunities have opened up for marginalized groups, their output inevitably has become more influential as well, and requires more attention in order for purely literary studies to remain truly representative and accurate. For example, it’s clearly not now legitimate to study American literature as a whole since the early or mid-twentieth century without recognizing the substantial role played by female, African-American, and Jewish authors.

More recently, writers from other groups have gained significant audiences and critical acclaim. Their works will surely wind up making lasting notable and lasting contributions to the nation’s culture. As a result, they should surely be spotlighted prominently in future curricula, and in particular in survey-type as opposed to more specialized courses. In addition, scholars right now should by all means be debating which works should qualify for this status. But it’s far too early for academia to reach an intellectually respectable consensus on the matter.

Moreover, this more recent prominence of previously marginalized groups creates no valid reason for concluding that their contributions to the national canon have so far been comparable with the contributions of the dominant group for most of U.S. history. Think of it this way: As stated above, Jewish authors have played an important role in American literature since roughly the middle of the twentieth century. But it would be utterly misleading to argue that Jewish authors played an important role in American literature before then.

One interesting wrinkle here – how to handle the likelihood that any number of overlooked works by submerged American groups fully measure up in artistic terms to the acknowledged classics. These works need to be found because, by definition, they would contain major insights into all the crucial issues addressed by great literature. Scholars should be searching for them and describing their virtues, and their discovery should be deeply appreciated by everyone who appreciates the value of great literature.

But because prologue cannot be past, even in these cases (and if readers have any examples or candidates, feel free to let me know about them), it would be essential — and intellectually honest — to specify that their effect on the nation’s literary and broader cultural life would need to be potential and prospective. Claiming a marked effect on the American story to date would amount to speculation or wishful thinking at best, and cheerleading at worst – none of which should have any place in genuine scholarship.

Im-Politic: A New China Threat to U.S. Higher Education

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China, Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, colleges, Confucius Institutes, foreign students, higher education, Im-Politic, Norman Matloff, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, universities

A few weeks ago, a tweet of mine on the infiltration of China’s dictatorial regime on U.S. college campuses got a huge (for me) amount of feedback. I was responding to this New York Review of Books article titled “Should the Chinese Government Be in American Classrooms?” and I asked in turn, “This is even a question?”

After all, the piece dealt with the spread of so-called Confucius Institutes throughout American higher education (as well as, shockingly, into the nation’s primary and secondary schools). These organizations purport simply to be teaching Chinese language and culture. But as the article explains:

“[T]heir curriculum is largely shaped by Chinese [government] guidelines. Moreover, they have often been set up in secretive agreements with host institutions, which has caused Western scholars to question whether their universities are ceding undue control to a foreign government—in this instance, a foreign government well known for aggressively propagandizing its official views, censoring dissenting opinions, and imprisoning those who express them.”

So it sounds to me like an open-and-shut case for closing all of them down. But this past week, Norman Matloff, the University of California-Davis computer scientist who’s one of the leading U.S. authorities on America’s Chinese immigrant community, spotlighted another emerging threat from the People’s Republic to the nation’s colleges and universities: the mounting numbers of students they’ve been admitting from China.

The main ideas behind educating Chinese (and other foreigners) look great on paper and often work out well in practice. Americans clearly hope (and even expect) that exposure to these quintessentially free institutions will wind up injecting these newcomers with democratic values – which they hopefully will spread, either consciously or not, in their home countries upon their return. And of course U.S. educators rightly and reasonably hope that native-born students and teachers will benefit from the resulting new opportunities to learn firsthand about foreign countries.

But as made clear in a New York Times piece from last week mentioned in Matloff’s excellent blog, the Chinese government, again, is being imported along with these Chinese students. According to Times reporter Stephanie Saul, these students “often bring to campus…the watchful eyes and occasionally heavy hand of the Chinese government, manifested through its ties to many of the 150-odd chapters of the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations. The groups have worked in tandem with Beijing to promote a pro-Chinese agenda and tamp down anti-Chinese speech on Western campuses.”

It would be nice to think that American higher education, with its historic commitment to free inquiry, would have pushed back strongly against these practices – and even kicked off campuses any students found colluding with Beijing. But such optimism seems to be totally unjustified. Although the Associations’ pressures have by and large been resisted, according to Saul, their presence evidently continues to be tolerated. One likely reason: Chinese students tend to come from wealthy families, and to pay full-freight tuition and other costs – which financially strained public and private institutions value highly.

In other words, although U.S. higher education’s Chinese students policies aim in part to turn these youth into freer thinkers, the Chinese presence is turning these institutions more receptive to a major contemporary Chinese norm: Money talks.

Im-Politic: Beyond Parody with Uber-Pundit Thomas Friedman

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China, corruption, foreign students, higher education, Im-Politic, Immigration, Muslims, Reuters, tech workers, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, travel ban, Trump

Last March, I took one look at a column by Thomas Friedman on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s trade policies and concluded that the multiple New York Times Pulitzer winner must have been hacked. Any other interpretation would have meant that Friedman was either stunningly ignorant about these subjects or (at best) willfully ignorant.

A year later, it’s painfully obvious that either some impostor is still publishing pieces with The Times, or that Friedman is still reality-challenged. His March 29 offering contains the same kinds of trade fakeonomics and crackpot geopolitics as that piece I spotlighted last March. But even worse this time around are some out-and-out howlers about major implications of the Trump administration’s travel ban proposals.

According to Friedman, President Trump wants to “make it harder for people to immigrate to America, particularly Muslims. This…signals the smartest math and science students in the world to start their start-ups overseas and not in America. “

As evidence, Friedman writes that “NBC News reported last week that applications from foreign students, notably from China, India and the Middle East, ‘are down this year at nearly 40 percent of schools that answered a recent survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.’”

In other words, could any Trump policy be more catastrophically dumb, especially over the long-term? The trouble is, when you look at these matters in any depth whatever, you realize how deeply silly these claims and fears are. In the first place, the idea that foreign students on U.S. college campuses are all or mainly or even disproportionately academic superstars is completely fallacious. And nowhere is it more fallacious than in the case of Chinese students.

For anyone knowing anything about contemporary China knows that it’s become one of the world’s leading plutocracies. The wealthy generally either make (or keep or lose) their fortunes depending on their connections with or via help from the Chinese government, or are comprised of political leaders themselves who have exploited their power and contacts to become millionaires many times over. Given the astronomical costs of American higher education (especially by the standards of even the typical Chinese urban – meaning relatively well-off – family), it could not be clearer that the main distinguishing characteristic of Chinese students on U.S. campuses is family money, not brains.

The money angle is further strengthened by admissions practices of so many American colleges and universities. After all, even well-endowed schools prize foreign students to a great extent because they’re wealthy enough to pay “full freight.” That is, they don’t need financial aid. Indeed, they’re profit centers. In fact, as I reported last October, a Reuters investigation found out that many Chinese students have gained access to American colleges and universities through payments to these institutions that can only be called corruption. In other words, their parents have bought their way in. Would most of this bribery be necessary if the kids were such geniuses?

Moreover, if you think that the money issue is confined to China, think again. For an expensive American college education is also far beyond the reach of most families in most of the rest of the world, too – especially the developing world.

As for the world’s math and science whizzes, especially from the Muslim world, avoiding the United States and choosing other regions and countries to open up businesses, ask yourself the simple question, “Like where?” Economically speaking, America’s growth prospects continue looking brighter – as they have for most of the current global recovery – than those of other major economies. The United States also offers among the world’s best levels of intellectual property protection.

And as for tech whizzes from the Muslim world, does Friedman really think they’re going to be increasingly welcome in, say, Europe, given its understandable anxieties about Islamic extremism and global terrorism? Japan and South Korea, it’s widely known, aren’t welcoming to any immigrants. And the idea that China, which has long battled Muslim separatists in its western regions, is going to open its doors wider just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Canada and Australia are unmistakably examples of national economies that are both successful and immigration- (and refugee-) friendly. But I’ll take my chances on America retaining its competitive edge over them for many decades to come.

These kinds of gargantuan goofs and omissions would be bad enough coming from a run-of-the-mill journalist or even pundits. Coming from Friedman, they are nothing less than appalling. For his almost uniquely lofty status stems for the most part from his (supposedly) unique knowledge of how the world works in the most fundamental senses. Indeed, he’s especially well known for writing books purporting to know what the world’s becoming in the same fundamental senses. Columns like his latest indicate that Friedman at best should spend more time learning about the present than predicting the future.

Im-Politic: America Keeps Importing Corruption from China

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admissions process, China, colleges, corruption, education, higher education, Im-Politic, meritocracy, Reuters, universities

Sorry for the recent hiatus! Those darned computer problems!

Luckily, although today’s subject is based on a news story more than a week old, it will be incredibly timely for as long as the problem it describes is with us. Simply put, Reuters has reported – complete with devastating evidence – that China is corrupting the U.S. college admissions process. And the findings should prompt Americans and especially their leaders to start asking much more searching questions about the People’s Republic’s growing role in the nation’s economy and society than they’ve been posing so far.

As is no doubt known by anyone who’s sent a kid to college lately (or who keeps up with China-related developments), the population of students from the PRC on American college and university campuses has been surging for years. China’s nouveaux riches and Communist Party leaders (two classes with lots of overlap) increasingly want to give their kids the benefit of an American education. And since they’re able to pay full freight, American higher education has been only to happy to welcome them.

This practice has disturbing enough overtones – especially when you find it in taxpayer-supported public institutions. But assuming that the Chinese students involved meet a school’s academic standards, or come close, it’s not outright corrupt – at least no more so than the longstanding admission of children of wealthy actual or prospective American donors or influential alumni even when they’d otherwise be uncompelling candidates.

As the Reuters investigation shows, however, at least one Chinese “education company” has paid thousands of dollars in perks or cash to admissions officers at top U.S. universities “to help students apply to American schools.” The perks consisted of travel expenses for “workshops” held in China to advise students whose families are clients of Shanghai-based Dipont Education Management Group “on how to successfully apply to U.S. colleges.”

In theory, that can be excused. (Although one Boston University researcher quoted in the article claimed that such behavior, too, raises major ethical problems.) But not the payments – which consisted of “honoraria” for attendance that went right into the pockets of U.S. admissions officers, which amounted to $4,500 per head in the last two years, and typically in the form of hundred-dollar bills.

Moreover, the seven schools that have confirmed that their employees have been on the take from China aren’t only or even mostly smaller private institutions that, especially since the Great Recession, have been struggling financially. They’re Carleton College, Hamilton College, Lafayette College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tulane University, the University of Vermont, and the University of Rochester.

In addition, the following schools declined to comment or did not respond at all about the travel expenses or the honoria when contacted by Reuters about the article’s allegations: Davidson College, Wesleyan University, Claremont McKenna College, Colorado College, Harvey Mudd College, Syracuse University, and Texas Christian University.

Nothing reported by Reuters about the Chinese practices should surprise any knowledgeable readers. After all, a perfect storm of skyrocketing national wealth, the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power, and the millennia-old absence of rule of law has produced in China a society that arguably is the most corrupt in contemporary history. Nor should it be news that the United States is full of individuals, organizations, and institutions that are happy to play along.

Here’s what Americans should be asking, though: Given the undeniable reality of systemic Chinese corruption, why are any Chinese organizations permitted any contact with the admissions offices of any American institutions of higher learning? Indeed, given Chinese corruption and the importance of fund-raising in U.S. higher education, why are any Chinese organizations permitted any contact with any American colleges or universities that may have an impact on admissions.

And, as suggested, the main reason for barring the Chinese has nothing to do with the supposed purity of American morals. Instead, it’s a matter of recognizing how extensively home-grown pollution has already stained this supposedly meritocratic system, and wondering why a well-known foreign source of corruption needs to be invited in.

In fact, the same question should be raised about China’s growing economic footprint in the United States (on top of crucial national security and economic concerns). For any Chinese actor large enough to consider buying into America has surely succeeded at least in part due to its mastery of the country’s kleptocratic politics. Does business in the United States really need immense new injections of graft and cronyism from abroad?

Openness to foreign individuals, organizations, capital, goods, technology, cultures, and other influences unquestionably has been a tremendous boon to the United States throughout its history (and a decisive one when it comes to immigration). But not all foreign countries are created equal, and the example of China strongly suggests that some systems are at best incompatible with and at worst dangerous to America’s well being. China’s undermining of U.S. higher education’s integrity signals loud and clear that the actual downside of permitting Chinese participation is already outweighing any conceivable benefits – and that more wide-ranging official U.S. discrimination is needed in order to choke off similar Chinese threats in other spheres of American life.

Im-Politic: Ignorant Pundit-izing About Education? Or Worse?

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education, education spending, higher education, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, OECD, vocational education

Here’s some startling evidence both that lots of pundits don’t think seriously about their pundit-izing, and that lots of Mainstream Media publications and broadcast don’t seriously edit their pundits.

It comes from this morning’s New York Times column from Nicholas Kristof about America’s failings in education. No one who’s even halfway informed can reasonably doubt them, especially on the primary and secondary level. But what the author clearly intended as one of his stop-the-presses facts instead shows how complicated the situation really is, and particularly how diffficuilt it is to settle on policy solutions.

Way up in his fourth paragraph, Kristof breaks the news that, among industrialized countries, the United States has now fallen behind Russia in terms of the percentage of adults with a university education. Sounds awful, right?  And all the more so given that America used to be Number One.

But think about this for more than two seconds. Russia? Is the author holding that country up as an economic success story? As a success story of any kind? Of course not. But it just goes to show: It clearly takes much more than producing lots of B.A.-and-beyond-holders to achieve the kinds of goals all people of good will want to achieve.

More reasons for doubting the paramountcy of college graduation rates come from looking at the actual data highlighted by Kristof – which come from a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international organization made up of the world’s high-income countries.

According to the study, for example, from 2000 to 2012, Spaniards went from being slightly less well educated than Germans to slightly more. But would anyone in his right mind want to live in Spain during that period rather than in Germany? France also out-performed Germany during this period – which raises the same question. And here’s a shocker – so did Greece!

Although the United States has slipped in the ranks of countries sampled, it has way out-performed Germany in turning out college graduates. Yet many liberals like Kristof have long lauded Germany as a country that’s done much better than the United States in generating not only prosperity but broadly based prosperity. Meanwhile, Japan has pulled ahead of the United States, too, in this gauge of higher education. Isn’t its economy supposed to be completely dead in the water, according to the conventional wisdom? (Whether that’s true is another matter.)

The OECD report also presents some figures for developing countries. Guess which one ranks dead last among all countries studied? China. It’s well behind even such economic laggards as Mexico, Hungary, and – yes – Greece.

The mediocrity of Germany’s university education level reveals one limitation to Kristof’s analysis even the most casual observer will recognize: There’s growing doubt in America regarding the economic value of a college education nowadays. And Germany has excelled in providing vocational education for its youth.

But the broader disparity between the prevalence of college degrees and national economic success reveals a more important limitation. It indicates that the truly decisive ingredient for enduring national prosperity and all the benefits it brings is a country’s ability to organize its people, institutions, and resources in genuinely productive ways. Expanding the availability of college and graduate-level education could be one measure that fosters this goal (as well as the worthy ends of producing better citizens, expanding individuals’ horizons, and the like). But it seems far from even the most important step.

Finally, although Kristof rightly criticizes America’s property tax-dominated method for funding public primary and secondary education, he seems completely unaware of all the sad examples showing that money is no panacea. Even adjusting for regional costs differences, for example, the District of Columbia leads the nation in spending per public school pupil by state. It sure doesn’t lead the nation in educational results.

But even in the highly unlikely event that Kristof didn’t know any of this, is it really imaginable that all of his editors were completely clueless? Ponder that question the next time you read a Mainstream Media figure bewailing his industry’s loss of public credibility – and audience.