NAS President's Three-peat

This past week, the president of NAS, Peter Wood, took the first steps to establishing a legacy on the “Innovations” page of The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE): Wood posted three articles within one week, potentially placing him among the most widely read, non-staff authors at CHE. At the very least, Wood can claim the title of a CHE major leaguer whose three-peat (three-Pete?) was accomplished with the aid of an ideational troika that included diversity, sex, and ‘discalculia’—topics that definitely have some sex appeal in today’s university.

Wood’s first posting, “Do College Administrator’s Misappropriate ‘Diversity’?" (August 18), revisited themes which he had previously entertained in his 2004 book, Diversity: the Invention of a Concept. His CHE essay entails a review of a new book by a Johns Hopkins political science professor, Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: the Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford, 2011). Ginsberg offers a critique of the administrative bloat in today’s university, much as you might find in the page of Academic Questions, but the political scientist prefers to depict the faculty as victims, rather than co-conspirators who have been undone by their own duplicity.

Ginsberg looks upon the professoriate as benign in outlook, put-upon by administrators who are often ignorant of and indifferent to the higher calling of the university, and far more sinned against than sinning. This is, in my view, a considerable simplification of reality in both directions.
[…]
Notably absent from the equation is any meaningful number of faculty members who could present a cogent critique of the administrators’ PC premises. Ginsberg brushes this possibility aside with the observation, “Faculty generally explain the academy’s ideological imbalance, especially at elite universities, as a natural consequence of the fact that liberals are smarter than conservatives.”

Yes, many do say things like that. It’s arrogant. It’s false. And there is a consequence: The mono-ideological faculty find themselves defenseless against administrators who appropriate the rhetoric of diversity, social justice, sustainability, etc. as a rationale for diverting the lion’s share of university resources to non-academic and sub-intellectual enterprises. If the university had a few more conservative voices, perhaps those administrators would at least have to defend their actions rather than wave the bloody shirt of racism or sexism every time some asks for a bit of accountability.

* * * * *
On Wednesday, Wood explored the inherent contradictions of recent Department of Education regulations concerning a new, much lower standard of evidence to be used in sexual harassment complaints: 50.01% of the evidence should support a winning complaint. As Wood explains in his essay [“Higher Sex Ed” (August 23)], FIRE, the AAUP, and NAS all spoke against this new measure of sufficient proof of such harassment. At the same time, the libertine attitude that pervades American campuses sends a very mixed message to would-be assailants. Without belaboring the evidence, surely it is stating the obvious to claim that “students entering college today arrive from a culture that is already drenched in cheap eroticism.” At the same time, “character education” occasionally gets referenced as a necessary element in the formation of young people. As Wood points out, there are, in fact, sound secular reasons to promote a genuine academic discourse concerning human sexuality and its effects on society—if the academy was earnest about real diversity of opinion.

[I]f we were really serious about helping our students attain good character, we would surely have to find some way to reintroduce into college life some serious interest in concepts like sexual modesty and self-restraint. To the extent that these ideas currently have any play, they are to be found in sectarian colleges and universities—which tends to make them even less attractive to secular institutions. But there are solid secular reasons for providing students with some ideas about how and why they might seek alternatives to the ethic of self-gratification as their main guide to sexuality. Rochelle Gurstein’s The Repeal of Reticence: America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art (1999) is one place to start. Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (2000) is another.

Drawing counsel from the Bard of Avon, Wood believes moderation would be a more appropriate response to the current fetishes of the undergraduate curricula.

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is ultimately about moderation. We do not want to live in a society of either complete license or grim-minded enforcement of rules... [but] if we really want to foster better attitudes towards sexuality, we might begin by being a little less eager to mainstream The Jill Kelly Poems, or confer a share of a public university’s prestige on the Adam & Eve sex toy company, or offer lewd public performances as part of an academic class. Eros, who is after all a god, is profaned by such stuff.

* * * * *
Then, yesterday, Wood tackled the often nonsensical efforts of educators to teach the disciplines of science and math, without requiring knowledge of either subject. In his essay entitled “Unnumbered” (August 24), Wood explains how science and math “appreciation” are now deemed sufficient. Wood’s review covers a lot of ground, including: a July 19 report by the National Research Council, Framework for K-12 Science Education; a discussion of the recent Common Core standards; last month’s New York Times coverage of the disheartening results on New York state math exams, with reference to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (2009); the diagnosis of a novel “neurocognitive disorder” that hinders a student from learning mathematical concepts; and a number of other references. But, for all of these signs of the times, Wood offers a prophetically clear way forward—one of the most innovative, albeit fanciful, suggestions yet to be considered by the educational establishment.

Congress [could] pass and the President sign a bill declaring that in 2020, nine years from now, no student who scores less than “proficient” on the mathematics portion of the National Assessment of Education Progress will be eligible for a federal student grant or loan.

This would leave plenty of time for students who are now in school to work up to that standard. We might make provision for those who get test jitters—say, three chances to pass. Those who don’t meet the standard would, of course, be perfectly eligible to attend college, but without federal assistance.

My thought experiment comes with predictions:
1. The rate of math “proficiency” would zoom, well before 2020.
2. Educrats would do all in their power to dumb down the test and hollow out the meaning of “proficient.”
3. Schools would declare the standard onerous and destructive; and then miraculously make it work.
4. Colleges would find a large new source of students both capable of and eager to study the sciences.
5. The incidence of “dyscalculia” would drop precipitously
There could be other consequences that I suspect might happen but that I’d predict with less confidence:
6. The racial achievement gap might narrow.
7. The movement towards separating academically-oriented programs from career-oriented training might accelerate.

Perhaps he’s outnumbered, but Wood has the right idea, if “standards and accountability” are ever to mean anything more than maintenance of the status quo.