Monthly Archives: September 2015

Producing Educated Citizens–or Worker Bees?

A recent, lengthy post at Talking Points Memo blames conservatives, liberals and accrediting agencies for a decline in the excellence of American higher education–a decline that is widely remarked upon.

First comes conservatives seeking a corporate transformation or restructuring of higher education. One option comes through the rise of for-profit private colleges, offering a game plan of expensive tuition and pricey administrators, delivered mostly with low cost adjunct professors in often cookie-cutter, interchangeable curriculum delivered online.

This is Fordism coming to higher education… The other option is traditional schools adopting this model; employing business leaders to run schools and developing cost containment policies aimed mostly at standardizing curriculum. It is top-down decision-making premised upon treating faculty no differently than an assembly line worker….The result: a market-driven product devoid of innovation, creativity, and intellectual challenge.

Liberals come second, often joined by religious conservatives, bent on enforcing political correctness on campus and in producing a curriculum that offends no one. Captured in the Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” there is a push to insulate students from ideas and words that they do not like. Across the country schools are adopting policies demanding trigger warnings or alerting faculty to forms of microaggression that students find objectionable. The result is not only an erosion of academic freedom but a curriculum that is uninteresting and devoid of learning.

Finally comes the accrediting agencies who have taken the assessment lessons from K-12 and are imposing them on higher education. They demand schools measure and test students and curriculum by developing a complex process of goals, objectives, rubrics.

I would add to these indictments a more foundational issue: until we reach agreement on what we mean by education, we will never be able to focus on the question of how best to provide it.

Far too many “education reformers” at all levels fail to recognize the fundamental difference between genuine education and job training–between intellectual flowering and the inculcation of skills needed by the marketplace. It doesn’t help that state legislatures and Commissions on Higher Education focus on graduation rates and  employment metrics to the exclusion of all else.

Evidently, if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count.

It’s probably heresy for a Professor to say this, but not every high school graduate is a candidate for college. There is nothing wrong with job training–it’s important and entirely legitimate– and such training can meet the needs of a number of students. If we were to reserve the university experience for young people who display intellectual curiosity, a capacity for serious scholarship and/or a demonstrable passion for the life of the mind, both the institutions and their graduates would benefit.

As a bonus, we could trim those bloated administrations, disabuse ourselves of the notion that educational institutions should be “run like businesses,” and stop coddling students who demand protection against ideas they find threatening.

Ideas can be right or wrong, comforting or offensive–but to find any idea “threatening” is a signal that one is unfit to be educated.

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Electing Our Future/Why Should I Care?

Media attention is already firmly focused on 2016 and the presidential race, and that’s understandable, given the amount of cluelessness and buffoonery being displayed by the current crop of “candidates” (note the quotation marks, because, really–who can take some of these people seriously?).

Most recently, Ben Carson has replaced Donald Trump as  the preferred mouthpiece for bigotry and unintended irony : almost immediately after defending his offensive stereotyping of all Muslims, he defended his own scientific ignorance by complaining that people were denigrating him for his faith. You really can’t make this shit up.

As fascinating as all this continues to be, 2016 is next year. Indianapolis will hold municipal elections this year. 2015. And those of you reading this who live in Indy need to pay attention to that election, because in a very real sense, we will be electing our future. Monday night, at Central Library, a large group of civic organizations held the first of three planned events intended to provide voters with the information needed to understand how and why local government affects them.

Take some time and view the embedded video, courtesy of WFYI. You’ll be more informed for the investment!

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Complicated Problems, Bumper-Sticker Solutions

A recent column in the New York Times reminded me (as if such a reminder was needed!) of American lawmakers’ penchant for “solving” problems by passing “quick and dirty” laws that may placate a constituency, but do little to actually solve the problem at hand–and often do considerable collateral damage.

A particularly pernicious example is the one highlighted by the Times, 

a wave of laws around the country restricting where people convicted of sex offenses may live — in many cases, no closer than 2,500 feet from schools, playgrounds, parks or other areas where children gather. In some places, these “predator-free zones” put an entire town or county off limits, sometimes for life, even for those whose offenses had nothing to do with children.

Protecting children from sexual abuse is, of course, a paramount concern. But there is not a single piece of evidence that these laws actually do that. For one thing, the vast majority of child sexual abuse is committed not by strangers but by acquaintances or relatives. And residency laws drive tens of thousands of people to the fringes of society, forcing them to live in motels, out of cars or under bridges. The laws apply to many and sometimes all sex offenders, regardless of whether they were convicted for molesting a child or for public urination.

I vividly remember a friend’s anguish when his younger brother–who had just turned eighteen–was placed on Indiana’s sex offender registry for “molesting” his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, despite her protests that she had initiated their voluntary encounter.

I understand the desire to “do something” when a genuine molestation occurs. I understand the pressure on lawmakers to respond to a parent’s demand for action (particularly when that parent is politically active or connected). But at some point, everyone needs to take a deep breath and recognize the unintended–and pernicious– consequences of “solutions” created by people who fail to understand the complexity and dimensions of the problem.

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If We REALLY Ran Government Like a Business….

I get so annoyed when people say that government should be “run like a business.” Government isn’t a business; the statement betrays a total lack of understanding of what government is and does.

Government should, however, be run in a businesslike fashion–and a Congressman from Minnesota has made a proposal borrowed from the world of business that I absolutely agree should be applied to government as well. According to the Political Animal blog, 

Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.) introduced a bill Friday that would prevent members of Congress from getting paid in the event of a government shutdown.

“It’s time to put an end to government by crisis management,” Nolan said in a statement. “And it’s time for Congress to start living in the real world — where you either do your job — or you don’t get paid. If hundreds of thousands of other federal employees are to go without their salaries — twisting slowly in the wind in a government shutdown — then the Congress should not be paid either.”

Under Nolan’s bill, members of Congress would go unpaid for the duration of the shutdown. He introduced similar legislation during the 16-day government shutdown in 2013 that left 800,000 federal workers furloughed without pay. While his bill never got off the ground, Nolan donated the money he was paid over the shutdown to charities in his district.

As anyone who follows the news is aware, the Crazy Caucus–led by Senator Ted Cruz–is threatening to shut down the government once again if they don’t get their way; this time, “getting their way” means defunding Planned Parenthood and denying basic medical care to millions of poor women (and poor men, who rely on Planned Parenthood for STD testing, among other things).

When union workers strike, they don’t get paid by their employers. Why should We The People–who employ these bozos–continue to pay them while they are refusing to do their jobs?

It’s bad enough that they work a three or four day week for wages hard-working Americans can only dream of. As the blogger, David Atkins, concludes:

If Republicans want to run government like a business, this would be a good way to start. If you don’t do the work you’re supposed to do you don’t get paid.

Makes perfect sense to me.

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Think “It Can’t Happen Here”? It Does.

According to recent media reports, a former Kansas state employee has filed a federal wrongful termination lawsuit, alleging that the employee’s dismissal was founded on her refusal to attend bible and prayer services in Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office.

The defendants have admitted that regular evangelical church services were held in Secretary of State Kobach’s office–led by a “voluntary minister” with something called the “Capitol Commission,” a ministry focused solely on evangelizing Kansas’ government leaders.

I guess they missed that whole “no religious test for public office” part of the U.S. Constitution.

Coming on the heels of Kentucky’s Kim Davis (“I won’t do my job unless I can impose my religious views on others”) controversy, the news from Kansas has prompted a number of Hoosiers to shake their heads and make sympathetic noises–tsk-tsking not just about Kentucky and Kansas but also about presumed behaviors in other “backward” Bible Belt states.

As if it weren’t happening right here in Indiana.

I have former students working in the Pence Administration, and their stories are consistent and every bit as disturbing as those coming out of Kansas. These students report (nervously, after extracting sworn promises not to identify them or their agencies) receiving persistent email “invitations” to attend prayer meetings in the Governor’s office, being required to hire otherwise unqualified personnel who “go to the right church,” being criticized for the absence of bibles on their desks…and dealing with superiors who have no experience with or interest in governance and even less tolerance for public servants unwilling to approach their positions as “ministries.”

Several of those former students have left government, and they aren’t alone. (Although our crack media has failed to note or report on the matter, I’m told the turnover of agency executives during the Pence Administration has far exceeded the usual rate.)

If we still had reporters, an investigation of this Administration’s preoccupation with religion and its imposition of constitutionally forbidden religious tests would make interesting reading.

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