America’s Anti-Agoge

Donald Vandergriff:

November 18th, 2015 at 5:55 am

Another great one by Mark. I love this one and it is right on target.

Eric:

November 18th, 2015 at 11:44 am

I think you hit on the hit when you give a monetary incentive for the protection of academic freedom. Universities have essentially become “big business,” salaries of university presidents rival CEOs of major corporations. The success indicator is how much money the president can bring into the institutions from industry, government (heavily DoD research contracts)and alumni gifts. Pure sciences and engineering are not a problem as core undergraduate education goes, but most of the social sciences are now larded with tendentious ideological beliefs taken as fact and in the humanities, for example in history departments, there are chairs for women’s history, various minority histories, and labor history while chairs for various regional studies, military history, and business history have gone away in many places. Nothing wrong with studying women’s or minority history but, it is limiting history to a narrow spectrum. I think it will be a difficult fight to make changes as so many academics and bureaucrats are entrenched in the present order.

Nathaniel T. Lauterbach:

November 18th, 2015 at 1:20 pm

Thanks, Mark, for this post. It’s great.
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I think CDR Salamander would agree, too, except that he would go further in essentially firing anything related to the diversity grievance industry. This is even infecting the military academies…
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Nate

Gray Hat:

November 18th, 2015 at 1:48 pm

Excellent both in spirit and in insight.

One correction: tempting though it might be to have recourse to a “cannon,” I think you meant “canon.”

zen:

November 18th, 2015 at 1:57 pm

D’OH!Curse thee, spellcheck! LOL thank you Gray hat, will fix

Tucker Hughes:

November 18th, 2015 at 4:15 pm

Great points! It’s worth noting that some of the more elite colleges have recognized the value of your fourth recommendation. For example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/upshot/top-colleges-that-enroll-rich-middle-class-and-poor.html

I’m not sure that anyone is even trying to tackle all of your recommendations though.

Eddie:

November 19th, 2015 at 1:23 am

Mark,
I have an idea for how your agenda can be implemented.

SCOTUS is set to strike down affirmative action in 2016 (1). A ready-made solution is already working in Texas at the Univ. of Texas that allows the best students from every high school in the state to attend the best state university (2).

“Campus officials attribute the results directly to the new state law granting automatic admission to students in the top 10% of their high school classes without regard to test scores, as well as to more aggressive recruitment activities.”

Republicans enjoy unified control of 25 states, including several with top public institutions (NC, MI, TX, OH, WI, FL) and legislative control over 14 more (PA, VA, MO) or split control (WA, CO).
(3) It is time to use that advantage for something other than corporate giveaways and pursue meaningful reform along the guidelines you are looking for (in other words, the exact opposite of what the buffoon Bobby Jindal did to LSU in Louisiana that angered even Republicans).

This push to enact #1, 2 and 3 of your agenda would perform a public service in splitting the Democratic party from the illiberals, forcing Dem state and local leaders to go on record defending the illiberals or standing up for the Constitution.

It would dull the presidential year turnout advantage for Democrats and allow grown-ups (e.g. Republicans & Democrats not beholden to illiberals) to unite on something taxpayers would be happy about for once.

Most of all, it would give further support to the efforts accelerated by former TX Gov Rick Perry and FL Gov Rick Scott to rethink the value and importance of a 4 year degree (aka the allegedly impossible $10,000 degree that is quite possible and may be actually preferable) (4).

In the mid-term, the onset of CTE (Career Technical Education) amid the desperation of businesses, econ development groups and local leaders to fulfill skilled trades and skilled labor jobs will further deflate the higher-ed bandwagon that has helped inflate the egos and accounts of this anti-Agoge.

(1)
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/30/supreme-court-will-once-again-consider-affirmative-action-college-admissions
(2)
http://fairtest.org/texas-top-10-law-helps-increase-minority-enrollment
(3)
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/19/9565119/democrats-in-deep-trouble
(4)
http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2014/04/18/texass_impossible_10k_degree_marches_on_916.html

Bryan Alexander:

November 22nd, 2015 at 8:27 pm

There’s much I can say about this rich, provocative post. Other commentators have beat me to some of them, so I’ll be as brief as possible:

1. “The kids going to exclusive, elite, universities are very bright for the most part, but even more so they are wealthy.” Definitely. We’re really starting to realign wealth and academic achievement in our Gilded Age 2.0.
2. It’s worth noting that kids (18-22-years old) are now a niche in American higher education. The adult learner is more numerous. But those tend not to be “our future business, academic, judicial and political leaders “.
3. I’m not sure this describes the total curriculum: “the system to educate our future leaders tends to inculcate deep hostility and loathing toward their fellow Americans, extolls anti-empirical, witch-hunting dogmatism as a virtue while rewarding narcissism…” In particular, that doesn’t map closely on to my sense of most STEM curricula. Do you think what you describe is a feature of humanities and non-quantitatively-intensive social sciences, or really is spread across the campus via student life?
4.”Draconian Reduction of University Administrative Positions relative to Tenured Faculty” – this might be a bigger problem than it seems, due to a persistent category error. American higher ed counts all non-teaching and non-researching non-faculty as “staff”, but also as “administration”. Their numbers have expanded over the past generation, but for reasons that are often hard to resist. Think, for instance, of IT departments, which were microscopic in the 1980s, and are now industrial-strength. Consider the student life apparatus, an essential and in-demand feature of traditional-age undergraduate experience. Not to mention librarians, custodians, financial aid officers, registrars, etc. Cutting out a few top-level VPs or deans won’t make much of a dent in the overall “admin” world.
5. “Require Elite universities Receiving Federal Funds to allocate 20% of their Student Body to Students from Middle-Class, Lower Middle Class and Working Class backgrounds, Geographically Balanced” – as much as I like this idea, it runs into the problem that those populations have seen their K-12 teaching suffer of late. Moreover, their communities and families offer less support. Cf Robert Putnam’s deeply disturbing _Our Kids_.

zen:

November 23rd, 2015 at 4:47 pm

Thank you folks!
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Eric – Yes there is a direct correlation with revenue (and “flagship” operations, like football teams)and university administrative behaviors. The creep of corporate/MBA thinking culture is also getting deeply ingrained. Changing the financial incentives will help change behavior.
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Tucker – very glad to read that!
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Eddie – the top 10% plan is also viable due to the assumption that public universities were created to educate the children of the taxpaying public first and aspire to be “public ivies” a distant second. GOP governors could implement many of these ideas to political advantage but I also fear the temptation to gut parts of university education that are working well to satisfy the crazies or crony capitalists will be very hard to resist.
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Bryan – Your point on adult ed is important and I missed that demographic entirely. I do think the political extremism tracks more with humanities and studies students at elite universities, few of whom have to worry about paying bills, now or in the future. STEM tends t keep ideological frenzies marginalized to the departmental periphery – there just are not points of entry for courses on “feminist electrical engineering” or “LGQT particle physics” and most activists of this type are at sea in upper level STEM courses, so they avoid it more. We would have to have a separate discussion of k-12 quality, it is so large a topic, but I will say public systems do graduate some kids who can make the intellectual cut of our top universities but the admissions process is heavily weighted against them, on average, not even including the cost factor