More Dreams Deferred

Over the last decade or so, the courts have chipped away at affirmative action programs in a whole host of areas. The cases which have gotten the most attention have been those which involve college admissions. This is no surprise, since no country places a greater faith in the power of educational opportunity than this one.

Using race/ethnicity as one among several criteria for college admissions became a way of leveling the educational playing field for under-represented groups on campus. It acknowledged that certain groups of people faced steeper obstacles getting into college than others. The courts, however, began more and more to disagree with that rationale.

So ten years ago, officials in Texas came up with an interesting solution to the dilemma. They created a mechanism through which the top 10% of the graduating class from every Texas high school would, more or less, be guaranteed a spot in one of the state's Tier 1 institutions. Underneath this entirely race-blind quota system was the deeply unhappy truth that public education is so thoroughly segregated in Texas that the enrollment of minorities in those Tier 1 universities would go up dramatically.

And it did, and the Texas model seemed to offer a way of providing access to higher education while neatly skirting the increasingly sticky discussion of race and affirmative action.

Until now. The Times reports today that legislation pending in Austin will terminate the experiment. Surburban legislators have been furious that some of their (largely white and above-average income) constituents' kids are being denied entrance into Tier 1 schools in favor of poor kids (black, hispanic and white) from urban and rural districts. Now they apparently have enough votes to end the program. (In fairness, they are being aided in this by the colleges and universities involved who find the quota system restrictive to their own admission plans).

There are several obvious ironies to observe here, not the least of which is the spectacle of a nation telling poor kids to get ahead by getting an education and then refusing in every conceivable way to make that possible. But what struck me was that this news underscores the way suburban school districts were pitted against urban and rural ones. The same was true some years ago in Ohio when a collection of urban and rural districts sued the state, claiming the way schools were being funded was unconstitutional. (They won; but the state was firmly in the grip of Republicans and the legislature simply refused to address the court's ruling).

This is really myopic, since more and more we are recognizing the way metropolitan regions share interests and problems across the urban/suburban/rural divide. Questions like transportation, open-space preservation, food production, clean air and water, and economic development, transcend political and demographic boundaries, and the places that deal effectively with these issues will be those places that recognize that fact. In Texas, alas, suburbanites still don't seem to realize that the whole state has a vested interest in giving better educational access to all its kids.

ECONOMIC STIMULUS FOR ACADEMICS

The economic crisis is hitting home, even at rich universities like mine. My department is replacing three full-time, tenure line positions in modern American history with one non-tenure line two-year lectureship. Harvard's School of Arts and Sciences has announced, in classic Harvard fashion, a "hiring pause." (The usual and customary phrase "hiring freeze" is, I guess, too cold, given that even after a devastating hit by the market, Harvard still has a $27 billion dollar endowment). Many universities have canceled searches altogether. By the best estimate, in my primary field, history, fifteen percent of faculty searches this year were canceled nationwide. Grim indeed.

In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, education historian and op-ed writer par excellence, Jon Zimmerman makes a persuasive case that the economic stimulus package should include doctorates. He looks to the New Deal's creation of jobs for newly minted Ph.Ds and underemployed professors in the arts, historical preservation and research, archiving, and national parks. The whole piece is worth a read.

When asked why the government should sponsor artists and writers, New Deal official Harry Hopkins responded, "Hell, they've got to eat like other people." Hopkins' quip reminds me of a sign that a job seeker carried at a recent conference of historians: "Will Teach 20th Century U.S. For Food."

But he probably won't - at least not at the university level. That's why we need to design other jobs, to put his skills to good use.

After all, our society has already invested untold sums in educating young scholars. And "investment" is the mantra of the day. As Obama keeps reminding us, his goal is not simply to put people to work. It's to invest in a better future, by making improvements in infrastructure, renewable energy and, yes, education.

For our underemployed academics, of course, the investment has already happened. The only question is whether we will save it, or squander it, and how.

One point to add to Zimmerman's argument. The economic engine of dying rustbelt cities for the last forty years has been "meds and eds"--that is hospitals and higher education. As those sectors contract, the economic effects go well beyond a few underemployed Ph.D.s to the whole metropolitan economy. Stimulate education!

TALKING ABOUT MY GENERATION

Is the academy destined to become a haven for bland, apolitical scholars?

The NYT reported today on a study of political beliefs among academics by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. Gross and Simmons found a generational gap between academics who came of age in the 1960s and those who came of age in the 1990s. The former are more likely to self-identify as liberal and consider themselves as activists. A majority of the latter call themselves moderates.

I am not a child of the 1960s (except in the broadest sense that everyone in our time lives in the era's shadow). The whole world wasn't watching me and my generation. I inadvertently drooled through Kennedy's last year, learned to walk just a few months before LBJ took office, and was forbidden from watching the evening news coverage of the Vietnam War. I was too young to join the 60s protests, occupy campus buildings, and party with the counterculture. I don't really remember 1968, other than watching the Detroit Tigers win the World Series, and that's not because I spent the year in a smoky haze of pot. I didn't inhale.

But I am not a child of fin-de-siecle America either. As a young academic at a rich university, I found myself uncomfortable in the 1990s, in an era that was the zenith of neoliberalism, when income inequality was taken for granted, when students from super-rich families believed that they were "middle class," when hyper-professionalization ran amuck through undergraduate and graduate education, and when uncritical acceptance of market values shaped even people with whom I share many common political and social values.

In age, I am closer to the younger scholars, but politically I am closer to the older ones.

In many respects, the implications of Gross and Simmons's study are depressing--and not because I hold some romantic brief for the 60s generation. In both print and in public forums, I have pointed out many of the blind spots of boomer politics and scholarship. One of the greatest failures of the 60s left was that it was too suspicious of power, deeply anti-institutional, and too uncritical about grassroots resistance, local control, and the power of the "people." The left's suspicion of organized politics, in particular, exacted a high price. To paraphrase Todd Gitlin (in one of his better moments) while the right was taking over government and the media, the left was taking over English departments.

Don't get me wrong: I am not calling for the reassertion of liberal or leftist hegemony in the university. Overall, academia is not diverse enough politically for my taste. I am all for robust debate among people of differing political vantage points. I have many colleagues whose politics I find problematic, but we share the common goal of fostering intellectual discussion and training our students to examine their assumptions, whatever they may be, with rigor. My political skills are sharper because I spend time with people who disagree with my politics--forcing me to express my ideas more clearly, carefully, and subtly. There's nothing more intellectually deadening than spending all your time preaching to the choir.

But the trend that Gross and Simmons identify: the dominance of political moderation among academics, bodes ill for the intellectual life of the university. Moderation spells blandness to me. The one thing to be said about boomer academics is that, even when they are wrong, they are passionate. They argue like it matters--and sometimes it does. Passion is an essential ingredient of their intellectual life--and it should be of ours too. I'll take scholarship that tries to engage the central problematics of our day--that has political implications--over bland, if technically competent work, that eschews risks.

The leftists and left-liberals of the 60s generation believed that the university could be the seedbed of revolution. They were naive--and wrong. But I hope that as they pass into retirement that their passion for engaged scholarship, for bringing the world into the ivory tower and climbing out of the ivory tower and spending time in the messy, non-academic world does not disappear into a sea of blandness. That would be a real loss.

DISHONORING THE DEGREE

Late on Friday afternoon, I got a phone call from one of my students. Let's call him George. The conversation began with a compliment. "Thanks Prof. S for the great semester," followed by an interesting bit of autobiography. "I am a liberal arts major, but I am going to medical school next year." So far, so good.

But then the ask. What follows was appalling.

"I'm calling because I'm one tenth of a point away from graduating Magna Cum Laude. You gave me an A- in your course and if you change the grade to A, I'll graduate with high honors." George's exams and final paper were graded by one of my highly competent (and probably exceedingly generous) TAs. It's possible (but not probable) that his grade was unjust. In any case, George did not claim that he had been treated unfairly. In this respect, at least, he was honest. In all of my years of teaching, I have only modified a TA's grade once, when the student presented me with unassailable evidence that her TA had a personal beef with her and, as a result, had given her an unwarranted grade.

Back to George: I was probably too soft on the kid. Rather than berating him for last-minute grade grubbing, or going to the registrar and lowering his grade for impudence, I gave him my conventional line on grade changes, namely that if he wants me to reconsider a grade, he needs to offer me an intellectual rationale, put it in writing, and take the risk that I might be a harsher grader than my teaching assistant. I haven't heard from him since. I'm sure that he went on in his search for the weakest link. I hope he didn't succeed.

Were it not for the Buckley Amendment, which protects students' privacy, I would have shouted his name from the rooftops and through the blogosphere from sea to shining sea. Instead, to you George, I wish you a most unhappy graduation. I hope that someday your cheating catches up to you. May you struggle mightily through your medical school courses (which are graded on a curve with little recourse for aggrieved grade grubbers). Should you graduate and pass your board certifications without cheating, may you find a medical position that doesn't require contact with patients, but if so, may your practice be marred by countless, costly, time-wasting malpractice suits. Good bye.

I'M A LOSER BABY...

Hot off the wires: Phyllis Schlafly has branded critics of her honorary degree as a bunch of losers. Ouch. I'm mortally wounded.

!!! OUTRAGE IN ST LOUIS

Let me add three exclamation points to Kathy G's detailed post at Crooked Timber on Washington University's outrageous decision to award an honorary degree to the odious, profoundly anti-intellectual Phyllis Schlafly. Feminists of the world unite against this travesty!

DEVALUING DEGREES

Last May, a prominent conservative activist wrote a column blaming the brutal murders at Virginia Tech on course offerings in the school's English department. It's a vicious piece of writing that ends with a cold-hearted description of Virginia Tech's memorial service for the slain students, faculty, and staff. Read closely: "At the campus-wide convocation to honor the victims, Professor Nikki Giovanni read what purported to be a poem. On behalf of the English Department, she declaimed: 'We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it.' Maybe others will render a different verdict and ask why taxpayers are paying professors at Virginia Tech to teach worthless and psychologically destructive courses." So wrote Phyllis Schlafly on May 9, 2007.

Ten days from now, Phyllis Schlafly will march with the proud graduates of Washington University in St. Louis, one of the Rustbelt's greatest universities. There she will be awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters.

I am appalled.

Don't jump to any hasty conclusions about political correctness. I strongly support academic freedom. I believe that universities should foster debate in the classroom. My job as a professor is not to foist my politics on my undergraduates. I teach about Phyllis Schlafly and present her ideas thoroughly and carefully in my lecture on feminism and its critics. I present what I dare say is a fair and balanced account of the rise of the Goldwater movement, which launched Schlafly to national prominence. Over the years, I have assigned books and articles by people on the right, left, and center whose ideas I sometimes find problematic, sometimes abhorrent.

But I do not think that any self-respecting institution of higher education should offer a doctorate in humane letters to a woman who holds views that are antithetical to the very principles of higher education. If Eagle Forum University awarded Schlafly an honorary degree, I would not complain. But Washington University?

Phyllis Schlafly has never had much good to say about higher education in the United States. Echoing the now hackneyed conservative critique of higher ed, she sees campuses as a seething pit of political correctness and leftism. "Colleges and universities," she asserted in 2003, "have hired highly-paid itinerant facilitators to train incoming freshmen to feel guilty if they are white and to think politically correct thoughts about race and diversity." Poor freshmen, she argued, are subject to "Soviet-style re-education sessions." Here is an appalling abuse of history, comparing orientation sessions at American liberal arts schools with Stalin's gulags. Statements like this alone should disqualify Schlafly from the honorary doctorate.

Schlafly believes that elite institutions, including Washington University, stock their classes with foreign students because they are "so profitable." But worse than that, admitting foreign students furthers the pernicious agenda of left-wing political correctness. She is unsparing: "Foreign students on untracked visas fit right in with the prevailing college ideologies of multiculturalism and diversity. As enforced by the campus thought police, multiculturalism means that all cultures (except our Western Judeo-Christian civilization) are equally good, and diversity means preferring immigrants from non-Western countries."

Schlafly is also a foe of science. She has long denounced the teaching of evolution. From a 2004 column: "Liberals see the political value to teaching evolution in school, as it makes teachers and children think they are no more special than animals. Childhood joy and ambition can turn into depression as children learn to reject that they were created in the image of God." I have to admit that this is the first time that I have encountered the argument that Darwin is bad for students' self esteem.

Schlafly is most famous, of course, for her vicious criticism of feminists. She opposed the opening of VMI to women as an example of radical feminism run amuck: "The radical feminists just can't stand it that any institution in America is permitted to motivate and train real men to manifest the uniquely masculine attributes. Feminists want to gender-neutralize all men so they can intimidate and control them. The feminists' longtime, self-proclaimed goal is an androgynous society. Repudiating constitutional intent, history, tradition and human nature, they seek to forbid us, in public or private life, to recognize the differences between men and women."

Not surprisingly, Schlafly weighed in on the recent controversy involving then Harvard President Larry Summers: : "When will American men learn how to stand up to the nagging by the intolerant, uncivil feminists whose sport is to humiliate men? Men should stop treating feminists like ladies, and instead treat them like the men they say they want to be."

Phyllis Schlafly has spent her entire career engaging in calumny and slander. Much of her writing defies reason and eschews dialogue. There is little humane in her thought. She is not a woman of letters. It goes without saying that Schlafly has been one of the most influential political figures in modern American history. Historians have already recognized her contribution to the transformation of modern American politics. But that does not make her worthy of one of academia's highest honors. She does not belong in the community of scholars who will convene at Washington University on May 16.