Among the silly arguments you hear from higher-ed bigwigs is that getting a college degree is protection against unemployment. Today’s Inside Higher Ed has such a piece. The writer even calls it “insurance.” Nonsense. A great many college graduates are unemployed, while a great many people without degrees have held their employment throughout this long, long recession. Among those who were laid off, that happened because the need for the work they did had declined, no matter what their level of education.

If everyone got a college degree, would that mean no more unemployment?

The egalitarians have a new cause — students of Asian ancestry who, as a group, aren’t doing as well as other groups of Asians. While Asians as a whole may be a “model minority” there are wide disparities between groups. You know how that affects those who see every group “imbalance” as a reason for government action. I write about this new issue on Minding the Campus.

Will we ever get past the group mania? It keeps a lot of people busy in useless jobs.

The author of the paper abstract below is a professor of “the social foundations of education” at the University of Alabama.

“Coming Out Crip” in Inclusive Education
by Nirmala Erevelles
Erevelles draws simultaneously on the theoretical tools of both disability studies and queer theory, exploring ways in which both heterosexist and ableist ideologies operate (often overlapping and intersecting) as discourses of exclusion in schools. She argues that the regressive rhetoric of inclusion currently in vogue does little to critique how “Other” students, not just students with recognizable disabilities, are excluded by the normative discourses of schooling. Furthermore, Erevelles argues that for inclusive education to reclaim its transformative imperative, it would have to reimagine its original intent of (re)claiming disability by producing a refreshing new script that explores the radical possibilities of “coming out crip.”

Taxpayers in Alabama might ponder whether they’re getting their money’s worth.

In today’s Pope Center piece, Jane Shaw returns to a controversial political-science course at NC State and suggests how the professor might improve it by focusing more on basic information his students need and tossing the current issues he had relied upon for much of the course’s content.

A new discovery — Cronk News takes an irreverent, satirical look at higher ed. Here is a tasty sample. Try it, you’ll like it!

Earlier this week, Andy Kessler gave three cheers to the new partnership between Georgia Tech and Udacity achievement in the WSJ — but I’m not sure that he was right to hoist the MOOCification of the field of computer science as the standard for the rest of academia to follow.

Kessler quickly turned from praising Georgia Tech to castigating a few schools that chose not to jump aboard the MOOC bandwagon: Duke University, Amherst College, and San Jose State University. As a Tar Heel, my beef is definitely not with his criticism of Duke. As much as it pains me to admit, however, I think Kessler is off the mark — the Duke faculty may actually be right.

For one thing, he omitted a crucial detail: The online MS, or MOOMS, is still very much distinct from the on-campus MS degree. Georgia Tech does not consider the MOOMS degree to be anything other than vocational. It’s a credential that signals to employers that the graduate is proficient in a certain area of computer science — although it’s not clear that the credential will work, since Georgia Tech was upfront about the fact that MOOMS job placements are uncertain at best.

Putting the employability question aside, it’s not clear that the vocational model for computer science is even applicable to the humanities — a claim Kessler posited, but never explored beyond dismissing Amherst’s decision to stick with “learning through close colloquy.” The end of a liberal-arts education is to grapple with, as Matthew Arnold put it, “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” This pursuit has intrinsic value that can’t be easily quantified. The challenge for potential humanities MOOCs, then, is great — especially since Georgia Tech didn’t think it could include a research component for the MOOMS degree in computer science, a far more quantifiable field than, say, English.

Kessler also ignored the importance that one’s peers play in education. It’s more fundamental than football games or the other trappings we associate with “those four luxurious and indolent years” in college. There is empirical support for the idea that the level of “connectedness” or community determines the success of a class — traditional or non-traditional. Meeting even once face-to-face is a major factor in improving that sense of connectedness for online classes. These results mirror survey data and research of business practices in our new virtual world. Given the size of MOOCs, it seems like this will pose an inherent problem for this particular mode of education delivery.

We must remember that that great conservative standby — the law of unintended consequences — is still in play. Peter Lawler pointed out that the rise of MOOCs may actually strengthen the current incumbents (e.g., Harvard and the Ivies) at the expense of state schools. Large endowments shelter schools like Duke and Princeton from budgetary pressures to transition from the classroom to the Web — protection that public state schools don’t have. And if higher education is nothing more than signaling, as Bryan Caplan argues, then the incentive for students to conform (i.e., attend elite universities) won’t go away. Instead of upending those incumbents, MOOCs could solidify their status within higher education.

Kessler is right that more experimentation is needed — especially before we give MOOCs two, let alone three, cheers.

A few weeks ago I discussed an introductory political-science course (American Politicis and Government) at North Carolina State University that was clearly biased in its choice of examples. Just about every supplementary reading for the online course was on the left. When I informed the professor, he responded, “Online readings are selected to provoke discussion,” adding that he finds most of the student discussion to be “from a conservative direction.” (Amazing!)

He also asked me what I would recommend instead. I did some research and came up with a proposal: Use current examples, not for the purpose of debating them, but for the purpose of illustrating political science concepts. Now what could be easier than that?

Emily Yavitch, a student at San Diego State, writes today at The College Fix about the GOP’s problem reaching college-age voters. The crux of her message? Republicans need to get smarter when it comes to the use of technology, image, and social media.

My liberal friends are always posting clever, politically related pictures, quotes and memes on social media.

For example, they were among the tens of thousands of people across the nation who changed their Facebook profile picture to red-colored equal signs when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on same-sex marriage in late March.

Where were College Republicans with an official and clever little icon to post in support of traditional marriage? Nowhere to be found.

So I changed my profile picture to that of a man and a woman, which sparked quite a dialogue. How cool would it have been if that were more widespread?

This week, the College Republican National Committee released a postmortem on what went wrong with the youth vote in the November election, during which “President Barack Obama won 5 million more votes than Gov. Mitt Romney among voters under the age of 30 … enough to ensure his re-election.”

To earn more youth votes to the Republican ticket come 2016, the 95-page report cites numerous ideas and strategies, among them improved social media campaigns.

Gee, you think?!

I know that people my age use their smartphones much more than “at least once a week,” and nearly everybody uses various apps/texting “multiple times per day,” as the report stated.

It seemed odd the notion was startling to College Republican leaders…

Read the rest of Ms. Yavitch’s article at The College Fix.

Republicans often mock Democrats for their focus on style over substance. But maybe the GOP would benefit from a few style lessons from the left. Do you agree?

It’s hard not to like Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State, at least a little. He doesn’t have the boring, business-like seriosity of many university presidents. His $1.9 million salary (which made him the third-top-earning public-university president in academic year 2011–12) is big, but he is an impressive fund-raiser. We may not like it, but that’s what presidents do these days, and he fits the president’s role to a T.

Wearing a jaunty bow tie, the president was used to saying things out of school, and perhaps it was inevitable that he would eventually run into a buzz saw. Campuses are jittery with tension about what to say and how to say it. He didn’t sin the greatest of “political correctness” sins when he criticized Catholics, especially Notre Dame Catholics, since they are not the most favored groups around, but his language was totally inappropriate. He was, simply, too cavalier. In the end, he left under pressure, following a reprimand from the board of trustees.

I don’t think he was fired; I think he has that type of dominating personality that leads him, when irritated, to take his marbles and go home. As Inside Higher Ed points out, he has headed six universities (the first, West Virginia University, at age 37) and has sometimes left abruptly. At 69 years of age, he’s probably going to resurface in the world of higher education (or raising money for a nonprofit organization).

What does this tell us? Just that, in the world of universities, where reputation is almost everything, presidents can’t embarrass the university without repercussions. Gee did that. It will be interesting to see if his successor raises funds nearly as well.

Jay — I just wanted to plug my review (paywalled) of Gross’s book. I too picked up on a lot of condescension toward conservatives, but I also think the author makes a very serious attempt to answer the question of why liberals dominate academia. He brings up stereotypes about the Right, but in many cases he evaluates them empirically and dismisses them. Here’s what I wrote about his treatment of the IQ and personality explanations:

The most common liberal theory — that professors are liberal because smart people in general are liberal (duh!) — doesn’t hold water, either. There is a statistical connection between high intelligence and self-identification as “liberal,” but Gross’s research shows that it’s not nearly strong enough to explain the strong leftward tilt of the professoriate. And though Gross doesn’t mention it, I found a strange fact lurking in recent General Social Survey data: Americans who score very well on a vocabulary test aren’t much less likely to call themselves conservative than the general population — they’re just more likely to identify as liberal and less likely to identify as moderate. So even if intelligence can help to explain the strong presence of liberals in academia, it can’t explain the absence of conservatives.

A related (and similarly self-serving) theory some liberals present is that personality is to blame: Liberals are more scientific, more open-minded, more willing to sacrifice riches to pursue the life of the mind, and so on. Some of these stereotypes are true, but only some, and only to a limited degree. Conservatives are more distrustful of science than liberals and less open to new experiences, but they’re not much more likely to value moneymaking (and it’s moderates who value moneymaking the most). At any rate, the differences are not dramatic enough to explain more than a fraction of professors’ liberalism.

Why is academia exceedingly liberal? According to one left-leaning academic, it’s because “the job of being a professor has been ‘imprinted’ with liberalism and thus few non-liberals are attracted to it.” That’s George Leef’s description of the main theme of University of British Columbia sociologist Neil Gross’s new book, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?   

While Gross professes objectivity, George shows how instead, in a most partisan-like manner, the sociologist trots out lots of the old unproven stereotypes about conservatives being knuckle-dragging throwbacks who can’t handle the mental demands of academia. Such as:

Academic work, he [Gross] argues, is more appealing to those who are open-minded, tolerant, and patient thinkers. Most conservatives, however, are supposedly too dogmatic and authoritarian to have much interest in such a career.

As George shows, you almost wonder why Gross had to write an entire book about this topic to get his message across. A bumper sticker, such as “Conservatives is stoopid,” would have been equally penetrating, scholarly, and deep.

That’s the title of a terrific City Journal article by Heather Mac Donald. She’s writing about the diversity mania gripping the University of California system. Top UC administrators just can’t bring themselves to say “no” to the demands of the diversiphiles, who take advantage of that to throw their weight around and plunder the budget.

The College Fix reports on the latest from Princeton:

Princeton University has declared gun violence a ”public health epidemic.”

“In the context of public health, an epidemic is what we face,” said Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman last week.

Tilghman, in her speech at the “Culture of Violence Summit,” hosted May 28 at the Ivy League university, went on to compare gun violence to smoking in public, pollution and car accidents involving children.

It’s not hard to see what the purpose of this language is. Like restrictions on smoking, or regulations on seat belts — the language of “public health” is meant to frame violence in a way that enhances the cause of increasing gun control.

Here’s the linguistic formula: Public health = grounds for more government regulation.

Read the full story here.

An article some months ago in The Atlantic Monthly revealed how a certain high school turned around its dismal record in student writing simply by going back to basics. The school had tried a number of reforms recommended by both conservatives and liberals — firing bad teachers, using technology, and offering after-school programs — but nothing worked until they went to ground zero: day by day instruction in grammar, parts of speech, and complex sentences with dependent clauses.

The light went on when one teacher assigned the class to write a sentence beginning with “Although George.” The class must have been reading Of Mice and Men, a high-school favorite. Many wrote something like “Although George and Lenny were friends.” Period. The teacher realized that her students didn’t know how to construct a dependent clause and how to use coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. Many of the teachers had thought the students were just not smart enough for high school, because even when they talked they couldn’t seem to go beyond simple sentences. The truth was, they couldn’t write or even construct their thoughts because they didn’t understand how language works. All the teachers wondered how their students could possibly have arrived in high school without knowing the parts of speech. If they weren’t being disingenuous, not only did the teaching profession lose contact with the basics, it forgot how it lost contact and where it put them in the first place.

Another example of the hypocrisy of academics on the subject of free speech: Paul Tudor Jones, a trustee of the University of Virginia and a well-known investor, said on a panel that there will never be “as many great women investors or traders as men — period, end of story.” The reason is that they have children and their closeness to their children keeps them from the intensity required for trading. Interesting point. Now, 80 faculty members at UVa have written a letter to the UVa provost, beseeching the administration to respond to the “false and injurious” statements made by Jones. (The Washington Post has been covering the story.)

Providence College professor Tony Esolen is a medievalist who has unique and colorful ways of expressing important and original ideas, as anybody who watched his Prager U. performance in Jason Fertig’s post below can attest. In this article, he explains how the idea of diversity has been turned on its head. A brief sample:

I can think of no play more drearily predictable than Tony Kushner’s dainty foray into political porno-twaddle, Angels in America; but that will count as “diverse,” whereas Aeschylus’ The Eumenides, a foundational play for Western civilization, seems to arrive to us from another world, a strange planet of blood vengeance and subterranean deities. You can read Aeschylus twenty times and grow less and less “familiar” with the work, as you see more and more with each new reading.    

You may doubt that claim and if so, you’ve got to read Smartness as Property: A Critical Exploration of Intersections Between Whiteness and Disability Studies available here. It’s a 2011 paper by two profs, one at Berkeley and the other at Columbia.

I don’t think I’d want either of them teaching arithmetic to second graders.

On Minding the Campus, Helen Smith has an illuminating essay in which she tries to account for the steady decline of men on campuses. A big factor is the hostile climate that men find unless they manage to show that they are enthusiasts for the feminist/progressive worldview that many faculty members aggressively promote. The essay contains some good anecdotes to refute the notion that college campuses are warm, safe, caring places where every student is treated with dignity.

Why does the college bubble persist, despite so much evidence that the old common wisdom about getting a college degree at any cost no longer holds? One reason the message is not getting through to the great majority of Americans is that the mainstream establishment — political, academic, and media — keeps spreading the word (and the subsidies) to encourage more college attendance. ABC, CBS, and the White House can still outshout the NRO, the Center for College Affordability, and the Pope Center. And the occasional bubble article that makes its way into the New York Times or Wall Street Journal still doesn’t make its way to Main Street, where the residents are more likely to read the regional mainstream rag (if they read at all) to form their opinions. 

But occasionally, those of us in the reform movement open a few eyes to the overselling of higher ed. Here’s one woman’s article about how being exposed to new information changed her long-held views about whether college is the right choice for everybody.