A local CBS affiliate in Nashville thinks it has uncovered a scandal: Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, has been exposed — via “hidden-camera video” no less! — saying things in private that Larry Arnn often says in public, in this case that the people who become public-school teachers tend to come from low-performing academic backgrounds. From News 5 Nashville:
Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Michigan’s ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, also takes aim at diversity efforts in higher education, claiming people in those positions have education degrees because they are “easy” and “you don’t have to know anything.”
. . .“The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
The thing is, Larry Arnn is right about this. Our friends from CBS should check out . . . CBS, which notes a strange outcome: Education majors enter college with the lowest standardized-test scores, but they finish college with the highest grades. Students majoring in math and science enter with relatively high test scores and finish up with relatively low grades. Why? Because education programs are not very academically rigorous. Drop a 3.9 GPA education major into a physics program and chances are that he isn’t going to finish at all. “Dr.” Jill Biden probably would have had a tough timing earning a doctorate in, say, mathematics.
The scandal isn’t that Larry Arnn says these things. The scandal is that these things are true.
Side note: The CBS reporter, Phil Williams, describes Hillsdale as “ultraconservative.” I wonder what he thinks that means? For comparison, Williams is a graduate of Middle Tennessee State University, which didn’t manage to admit its first black student until 118 years after Hillsdale did, Hillsdale having been open to African Americans from its founding by abolitionists in 1844. Hillsdale was also the second U.S. college to grant four-year degrees to women. It is true that Hillsdale emphasizes classical and Christian education, and that Larry Arnn is what you would call a “movement conservative.” I suppose Hillsdale is “ultraconservative” if your yardstick is Bryn Mawr, but why should we accept that as our norm?
(Disclosure: I once taught a seminar at Hillsdale as a Pulliam fellow. As I recall, the students were pretty good, and we didn’t talk much about politics.)