On the presidential race: We’ve reached the point where the experts are really wondering whether Trump’s lead is sustainable, and it’s now not inconceivable that he will be the nominee. What the Republican public intellectuals (here at NRO, for example) write against him isn’t touching him. Sure, he’s no fan of limited government and devoid of personal virtue, and his mass-deportation scheme would be ridiculously expensive, completely unworkable, pointlessly cruel, unworthy of the party of Lincoln, and guarantee Republican defeat. When I point that out to the guys at Panera (who are really smart and prosperous), they respond: Sure, we know all that, but we need someone who’ll do something, and the so-called real Republicans won’t, they’ll wimp (not the word really used) out, as they always do, when it counts.
Rod Dreher does well in capturing Trump’s appeal to good men and women worried about our country’s future: “His basic pitch is: the world is run by a******s, and I’m a bigger a****** than everybody else, so I’m going to negotiate a better deal for America.Who could fail to laugh when he made fun of John Kerry as being a bicycle-riding flake who got taken for a ride by the Iranians?” Rod adds, of course, that Trump is a demagogue, and he would never vote for him.
The other Republican candidates (save Ben Carson) are suffering from the medical condition know as “failure to thrive.” Jeb Bush, God bless him, is trying to reinvigorate his brand by going after Trump’s bizarre array of ill-considered views that prey on ill-considered popular resentment. Trump will no longer judge him a “gentleman.” But the trouble might be that, darn it, he is a gentleman, and so a bit shy and otherwise uncomfortable when he attempts to engage in shameless self-promotion. Trump, meanwhile, is as shameless as they come.
It’s also reached the point where, if you gave me 20–1 odds, I’d bet on Bernie Sanders’s being the Democratic nominee. Well, you Democrats respond, if Hillary falters (as is increasingly likely), we’ll be saved by Biden or Biden–Warren. But I’m pretty sure I’ll never see the headline “Saved by Joe Biden.”
So, you say, this update just reinforces what you said before. That’s because I’m getting more right all the time.
A few of you have complained that I haven’t followed up on assessment, competencies and such in higher education. Well, I fear my negativity along these lines (which is now pretty famous thanks to Yuval and the Bradley Foundation) has ticked off the president of my college (who is a great guy but definitely part of the assessment establishment), who — against the naysayers — reminded us that assessment is easy-to-do “peer review.” Our regional accrediting association is run by the member institutions. But that means, he added, by presidents and provosts. So accreditation reflects the class consciousness of administrators thinking strategically, and so their thinking, as Benjamin Ginsberg, among others, has pointed out, is becoming a form of shared intellectual labor of a cognitive elite.
I’m not saying this is good or bad, because, for one thing, it is both good and bad. I agree, in some measure, that accreditation as it now exists may have the virtue of fending off direct regulation by the bureaucratic national government. But it’s also true that faculty chafe at the quasi-technical happytalk of assessment because they believe it’s foreign to (and even belittles) what they should be doing for a living. I certainly have received, at this point, dozens of e-mails and other forms of communication from oppressed professors complaining in bitterly and sometimes wittily ironic ways about the degrading time-suck that assessment is.
I agree that assessment/accreditation should be easy to do, but in fact it isn’t. And it’s getting harder to do all the time. One piece of evidence: An associate provost who’s also a history professor wrote a good article for The Chronicle of Higher Education complaining that nobody really assesses assessment or demonstrates that the actual educating of students is improved by it.
The authoritative response, also appearing in the Chronicle, was written by someone with the job title “director of assessment and regional accreditation.” If accreditation were really all that easy, there might not be whole jobs with that title. The article written by the director didn’t demonstrate anything about the effectiveness of assessment; not even one “metric” was supplied. The only point really made was, in a way, “historical.” In the dark days before the emergence of the culture of assessment, instructors never knew or cared whether students actually learned anything. That, of course, is the narrative of the lowest form of progressivist BS. It is also not true, of course.
It would have been more persuasive, of course, if the authoritative response had been written by a caring and effective professor whose life and work had actually been transformed by the culture of assessment.