Category Archives: Education

Faculty Tenure: Crucial or a Vestige?

The granting of tenure to professorial faculty at the nation’s universities is a long and venerable tradition. A professor with tenure has a life-time appointment that can only be revoked if the recipient commits some egregious transgression, which is usually summarized by such formal labels as moral turpitude, gross negligence or dereliction of duty. In effect, the only tenured professors who get the sack are those who have robbed a bank, raped a co-ed or pistol-whipped a colleague. The only exception to these draconian circumstances is when a university program or degree, which encompasses the professor’s academic discipline, is discontinued. But even then, the university usually finds an alternative academic home in which the professor can carry on his duties, his life-time appointment undisturbed. In short, with extraordinarily rare exception, a tenure appointment is indeed a life-time position.

Why would a university agree to make an appointment that so severely restricts its ability to terminate an underperforming, even incompetent employee? The answer goes back to the dawn of the modern university. The role of the faculty, as originally conceived, and as interpreted still to this day, was to discover truth, wisdom and beauty in the subjects that command human interest (e.g., math and science, engineering, medicine, law, humanities, the arts, economics, politics, agriculture, and so on) and to transmit their findings to students and to the society at large. To do so, faculty need to be free to pursue controversial theories, novel ideas and unexplored terrain. Their discoveries may prove discomforting to those who sponsor, donate to or otherwise manage the university, and who therefore – to silence the faculty member – might be in a position to fire, or to influence those who could fire the faculty member. In order to guarantee the faculty member’s academic freedom to pursue knowledge down whatever path it leads him, the system of granting tenure was instituted. The only comparable situation is with federal judgeships as conceived of in the US Constitution.

Well, the reasoning is sound. And it is certainly the case that scores of advances in the subjects listed earlier have been pioneered by faculty research at American universities. So what’s the problem? Why is the tenure system under attack? Here are some reasons:

  • Until roughly 50 years ago, tenure was granted to only a tiny fraction of the population representing the intellectual elite, many of whom did use their unique academic freedom to bring forth sparkling new ideas and inventions. Today there are literally hundreds of thousands of tenured faculty in the United States. Clearly, the ranks of tenured faculty contain far more than just the absolute intellectual cream of American society. Moreover, while many professors (perhaps most) do fine work, the vast majority are not engaged in research that could expose them to the whims of someone who might fire them without cause. The academic freedom that is provided by the cloak of tenure has been granted to far more individuals than the small number who might really need it.
  • Not surprisingly, in a program of this magnitude, there are bound to be abusers. Those of us who spend our lives in academia are sadly all too familiar with colleagues who use tenure as a shield to protect themselves from the consequences of shoddy research, an inadequate amount of research, poor teaching, irresponsible administrative habits, questionable personal behavior and an overall job performance that is the antithesis of what the public would consider elite – and therefore worthy of a life-time appointment.
  • Tenure has served as a poor role model. Tenure-like systems now extend (beyond federal judgeships and academic professorial faculty) – both formally and informally – to public school teachers, many government workers, certain unionized positions and even to corners of the corporate world. Ultimately, there is no good rationale for any of that. But as long as the academic tenure model can be held up as a salutary structure, it serves as an example to be copied.
  • Tenure contributes to the ossification of academia. The number of sexagenarian, septuagenarian and even octogenarian faculty on American campuses is startling. These are not the groups on campus from which innovation originates.
  • Perhaps counter intuitively, tenure reinforces groupthink on campus. The overwhelming dominance of a leftist worldview among campus faculty is well-known, amply discussed by many (e.g., in The Coming Decline of the Academic Left) and no longer in dispute. Well, once the universal mindset is established, the presence of deeply entrenched forces effectively prevents any serious challenge to the dominant mindset. Moreover, those just starting in the system and hoping for tenure themselves have little motivation to rock the boat by challenging prevailing “wisdom.”
  • The dynamic nature of American business includes the freedom to fail. The number of successful businesses built on the wreckage of previous, failed endeavors is astounding. Tenured professors have no freedom to fail. Thus the corresponding motivation to succeed that accompanies creative destruction in business is totally absent in academia. It’s hard to learn from your mistakes if no one ever acknowledges that you have made any.

These are serious criticisms, which call for responses. How might the academic world respond? There are three possible courses of action. First, one could argue that, for all its flaws, tenure protects academic freedom and the latter is so important that it is worth the cost of the ill effects just described. The opposite response would be that the costs are so outrageous that the practice must be halted – tenure should be abolished. Perhaps there is a reasonable course of action in between these extremes. I’ll probably get crucified for suggesting such a course, but the luxury of retirement does afford a certain degree of literary freedom – so consider the following.

There already is a probationary period for faculty who aspire to a tenured position – it’s called an assistant professorship. Generally, it lasts 5-6 years. But many institutions treat it as a pledge period and grant admission to tenured status perfunctorily. Even those institutions that examine an assistant professor’s tenure credentials carefully are wont to “graduate” many who, while they will prove to be solid teachers and researchers, will also work at a level that hardly requires academic freedom. Here’s an alternative:

  • Only those assistant professors who demonstrate extraordinary levels of scholarship, creativity, imagination and leadership would be granted tenure – say 15-20% of the candidate pool.
  • In order to facilitate such a critical decision, the length of the probationary period would be extended to 8-10 years.
  • The best of the rest would be offered renewable, long-term contracts, say 5-10 years.
  • The next coterie would be offered short-term contracts, say 2-4 years.
  • And finally, those who don’t pass muster would be let go.
  • Contracts may or may not be renewed, but if the latter, a long grace period would be standard.
  • Those granted tenure would be called Professor; those offered contracts, Associate Professor.

A successful implementation of this plan would address all the elements of the critique above. The plan could be further improved with two more wrinkles: (i) allow for the extraordinary possibility that an associate professor up for contract renewal would have elevated the quality of his work to such an extent that tenure is now an appropriate consideration; and (ii) institute 10-year reviews of professors, with the possibility of “demotion” to associate professor. Of course (ii) would make the term “tenure” problematic and for that reason I am of mixed mind on (ii).

American universities stand on a precipice. The problems are manifold:

  • The cost of the product they dispense to students is astronomical.
  • Too much of what is called higher education is more accurately described as indoctrination. (See ibid again.)
  • Because of bloated administrative staffs, university budgets are absurdly inflated. The traditional three sources of revenue – state appropriations, federal grants and student tuition/fees – are tapped out.
  • Students are drowning in debt.
  • The value of what students (and their parents) obtain in return for their expenditures and debt is debatable.
  • Too much of the education is provided by adjunct faculty.
  • Universities lag behind K-12 institutions and the private sector in the deployment of technology.
  • Universities are often slow to innovate, and are being challenged by for-profit institutions.
Addressing the tenure issue will not solve all of these problems. But if universities can muster the courage to address the tenure issue in a meaningful way, then perhaps they won’t find some of the other problems to be so intractable.
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An abridged version of this article appeared in Minding the Campus under the title, How to Save Tenure–Cut it Way Back. See:
The article in the form it appears here also appeared in The Intellectual Comservative at:

The Coming Decline of the Academic Left*

It is no secret that what passes for an education at most of the nation’s colleges and universities is suspiciously akin to indoctrination. An asterisk: With the exception of a few areas – specifically, climate and the environment, certain fields within biology and medicine, history of science and the interaction between science and public policy – the rot that infects the rest of academia has been averted in science and engineering schools.[1] A student who seeks a higher education in the unsullied areas of science and engineering can obtain truly the finest technical education that can be found on our planet at innumerable universities throughout the United States.

But when surveying the remaining disciplines in academia, as well as the administrative structures that direct the nation’s academic enterprise, one can say that today’s students are subject there to a less than subtle, mind-numbing, conformist indoctrination. Numerous polls conducted in humanities and social sciences departments – at elite, State and minor universities – reveal a stunning skew between liberals and conservatives at least as distorted as 90%-10%. The inherent bias spills over into classroom presentations, selection of curricula and grading. Moreover, it has been thus for at least two generations.

The consequences of this warp in the political spectrum in academia are well known. The students are taught, with conviction and certainty, that:

  • The United States is a deeply flawed nation – stained by a legacy of slavery, discrimination against women, genocidal policies toward the indigenous population, unjustified foreign wars, homophobia and persecution of minorities.
  • America’s unfair system of rapacious capitalism creates unacceptable distortions in income distribution, punishes low-income workers in favor of well-heeled corporate moguls and unscrupulous entrepreneurs, and needlessly subjects the economy to convulsive upheavals such as the 2007-08 financial crisis.
  • The US ignores environmental concerns and is the world’s leasing abuser of fossil-fuel sources of energy.
  • The US’s adherence to Judeo-Christian religious principles and values is no longer – if it ever was – appropriate, and a secular, humanist ethic should rightfully take its place.
  • There is no meaningful American culture; American exceptionalism is a myth; and America is not a “shining city on a hill,” nor a beacon of liberty. Rather it is a multicultural society in which different value systems have equal merit, just one more country among the nations of the Earth.
  • The Constitution is as antiquated as the Bible; neither provides a roadmap for the country’s destiny.
  • The notion of rugged individualism is nonsense; we strive for a society of equals, guided by a benevolent and powerful government that wisely charts a proper course for our citizens.

In short, the only thing exceptional about America is that it has resisted the transformation that European nations have undergone into social welfare states. The above interpretation of the “true” nature of America is widely taught at American universities – sometimes subtly, more commonly openly – as if it is gospel. More insidiously, despite the university’s reputation as a place where a student is exposed to numerous different ideas, the “wisdom” encapsulated above is passed on as if it is irrefutably established truth and students risk grade and opprobrium if they challenge it. This smells more like indoctrination than education to me.

However, the nation’s colleges might be on the cusp of a major crisis which could pose a serious challenge to the leftist domination of campus. It is my purpose here to explain why and what the consequences might be. Actually, the ingredients of the crisis are well known:

  • The graduates of our social sciences and humanities programs are increasingly found wanting in the workplace. Unless they can find employment in a leftist dominated milieu (e.g., government, academia, public sector union, media conglomerate), the American business world finds them ill-equipped to function successfully in what remains of the US entrepreneurial society.
  • The costs of a university indoctrination – er, that is, education – have skyrocketed. In light of the previous bullet, consumers – i.e., the students’ parents – find it increasingly hard to justify the expense.
  • Intense criticism of the faculty is on the rise: they can’t teach; or what they teach is garbage or propaganda; they’re too busy with their “research”; and they are overpaid.
  • Administrative policies make no sense – multiculturalism trumps achievement, political correctness outweighs impartiality.
  • Most damaging, our universities, after a prolonged period of indoctrination, return students to their parents in a form that parents cannot recognize – their opinions, values and behavior have been altered beyond repair. (To be fair, it is encouraging that a not insignificant percentage of college grads manage to resist the brainwashing on campus.)

How are the leftist dominated American universities responding to this crisis? Simple answer: the same as the leftists running our government – namely, double down on the very policies that have caused the crisis in the first place. In this strategy, there is an eerie resemblance to the tactics of the Obama administration. Exactly as our federal government is bankrupting itself by its unsustainable tax and spending profligacy, university presidents keep raising tuition and fees in order to vigorously pursue their expansive and flawed policies. The addiction to spending is the same in both enterprises, but universities can’t print money like the feds. So instead they hike tuition, beg for more financial assistance from federal and state governments, and prostitute themselves in the search for corporate and government grants. As for the tyrannical, leftist mindset that dominates the humanities and social sciences, it grows more and more entrenched.

But people are fed up. In the same way that frustrated citizens rose up to challenge the profligate spending of federal and state governments, parents and students will rise up to protest the out of control spending and leftward drift of the nation’s universities. Let’s call it the Stench Revolution – a revolt against the foul propaganda that emanates from leftist humanities and social sciences departments. The conservative political revolt in America against the decades-old leftward drift of the nation – typified by the TEA Party – has resulted in some signature successes: more robust and influential conservative think tanks (Heritage, Cato, Manhattan Institute); talk radio; Fox News; grassroots public organizations like Americans for Progress or the Club for Growth. I predict that an analogous movement will occur in regard to academia. The result will be: the growth of conservative academic online sites (like this one); more balanced professional organizations like the NAS; more Hillsdale and Grove City Colleges; more public figures like David Horowitz and Dennis Prager who expose the treachery on campus. It will be a long, laborious process, but there is no alternative if traditionalists wish to restore our universities to their former state as bastions of truth and knowledge, which is disseminated objectively.
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* This essay appeared in the Manhattan Institute’s online journal, “Minding the Campus” at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2012/05/the_coming_decline_of_the_academic_left.html

[1] Actually, there are other corners of academia that have also eluded the indoctrination mode to a substantial extent, e.g., business schools, professional schools and agricultural schools.
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Law Schools Run Amok

A review of Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and Overlawyered America by Walter Olson

I have argued in this blog that the progressive movement in America achieved success by following the game plan of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who advocated: capture the culture, the politics will follow. The Left implemented Gramsci’s scheme by slowly – over several generations – gaining control of virtually all the opinion-molding organs of American society. These included: the media, academia, the K-12 educational establishment, foundations, libraries, unions, government bureaucracies, seminaries, a host of NGOs, the upper echelons of large corporations and – the one germane to this review – the elite law schools. With these institutions firmly, if not overwhelmingly, under the sway of statist thought and action, it is not surprising that America’s culture and politics have drifted inexorably left in the last half century.[1] In Schools for Misrule, Walter Olson examines the leftward march of the nation’s prestigious law schools and the attendant deleterious effects on American society.

I will discuss the content of the book momentarily. But first I wish to highlight a claim made, albeit implicitly, by Olson in the book. Namely, of all the institutions that succumbed to leftist thought during the twentieth century, it was the surrender of the elite law schools that did the most damage to society. It is my goal to assess the worthiness of that assertion, and I encourage the reader to ponder the matter as I describe the salient features of Olson’s penetrating study.

Olson’s work is comprehensive and detailed. He traces, in mostly a chronological fashion, how progressive philosophy and leftist ideology at first seeped into and eventually flooded the halls of American law schools. He begins by pointing out that law schools became well established on American campuses precisely during the so-called Progressive Era, 1890-1914. The law schools’ newfound prominence dovetailed nicely with the advent of professional licensure in America. By that I mean the process by which the heretofore free-for-all entry of individuals into numerous professions and vocations began to be subject to government (or government-sanctioned) certification. This became common a century ago in various American businesses and industries – from meat slaughtering to pharmacy, from barbering to chauffeuring, from teaching to medicine. Well, there was no reason to exempt lawyering from the process. And so the country’s law schools became the gatekeepers for the nation’s legal profession. Thus the faculty at the nation’s law schools – especially, those of the elite variety – obtained control over the training and philosophical outlook of the nation’s lawyers. Since we are a country under the rule of law, those who control the lawyers thereby control the law and thus the country to a great extent.

Having established the seminal power of the legal academy, Olson then traces the history of American law schools via two series of developments: first, various quantum leaps at the schools themselves in the nature of their curricula and structure; and second, how the former resulted in many radical legal ploys that shook the nation. Within the first of these, perhaps the most striking was in the 1950s when Yale Law School announced that it would no longer require its students to take a course in Property. Now it is widely acknowledged that when Jefferson enunciated our natural rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” it was well understood that happiness was to include, if not be a euphemism for “property.” The right to property is sacred in American law. Yale’s dropping it from its curriculum sent a powerful signal of the leftward drift of legal academia.

Some of the other major changes in law school curricula/structure that Olson discusses include: the almost obsessive focus on torts pioneered by William Prosser, the long-time Berkeley law dean; the compulsive emphasis on the training of law school students to be litigators rather than people steeped in a knowledge of the law who could put that knowledge to use in many different ways; the setting up of special “centers” in the schools, about the activities of which it would be difficult to distinguish from those of organized lobbying entities; and among these, law clinics – generously supported by liberal foundations – pursuing what is commonly called public interest law, thereby converting an academic enterprise into a hyper-political, “community organizing” type of operation. Naturally, Olson views all of this through the lens of a severe critic of the nation’s legal academy.

The above developments in law school curricula and structure heralded the belief – by those who ran the show – that ultimate legal authority should be vested in the hands of the judiciary, not the legislature – and that when necessary, law should be executed from the bench rather than from the White House or Governors’ mansions. This led to the birth of all manner of specious legal doctrines, causes, and actions. Olson discusses: the explosion in class action law suits; the emphasis on product liability; advocacy research by law school faculty; promotion of welfare; reparations for blacks…er, that is, African-Americans; Indian…er, that is, native American sovereignty; the rights of the poor; environmental rights; animal rights; endangered species; homeless advocacy; rule by injunction; and subservience of US law to international law. In every one of these quests, the overwhelming slant was to the left. Moreover, while pursuing these radical causes, our law schools trained legions of lawyers who went on to be trial lawyers, public defenders prosecutors, judges, Congressional aides – and of course Congressman if not presidents. These constituted a broad cadre of shock troops for the left who are thoroughly steeped in progressive ideology, who have no exposure to any other thought processes, who have no idea how programmed they are, who inflict their opinions on a cowed American public and who perpetuate their ideas and replicate themselves continually.

Olson’s style is actually quite engaging. Although he treats deadly serious issues with the earnestness that they deserve, he manages to maintain an understated, even restrained tone, which if anything makes his arguments more dramatic. Here is a typical example of his ability to gently, if sarcastically, find a silver lining behind a nasty cloud.

Are students being indoctrinated? (Sorry ‘ensured’ of having a ‘commitment to social justice’ fully ‘instilled’ in them…or encouraged to ‘struggle’ with implications of ‘lawyering within an unjust system.’) Well, the subject of indoctrination in the modern law school turns out to have generated a bit of an academic literature itself. Unfortunately, the theme of the literature is that schools are falling down on the duty to indoctrinate and need to be doing a much better job of it. The overall law school experience, complains one report, tends ‘to undermine student activism.’ For one thing, the work demands on students are so extreme that little time is left for marches and rallies. But the problems go further. You’re ‘taught to see that there are two equal sides of any issue,’ as a student complains in one widely cited volume. ‘Two equal sides’ is assuredly a misstatement; no law professor ever would or has presented both sides of all issues as truly equal. But it captures a kernel of truth about standard law training, which is that it conveys the skill of looking for ways in which the other guy – even a polluter, harasser or bigot – might have something of a case. In being forced to rationalize positions directly opposed to their own, one book laments, ‘most altruistic-oriented students are confronted with a perspective that seriously upsets their view of justice.’

Finally, why do I assert that Olson implicitly indicts the law schools as the worst malefactors in the liberal conquest of America? Primarily because of these passages in the final chapter of the book, entitled Conclusions:

“Irving Kristol famously discerned in modern American society the emergence of a new class, its standing founded more on educational achievement and cultural fluency than on older forms of wealth or social position, its specialty the manipulation of ideas and symbols rather than physical labor or the ownership of the means of production. Estranged from and suspicious of the world of property and business, the new class (Kristol argued) is instead friendly toward the continued expansion of governmental activity, in part because it is itself relatively successful in influencing the actions of government. In particular, it is skilled in argument, and it often achieves (whether in its voting patterns or in its likes and dislikes generally) a kind of class solidarity at least as cohesive and impressive as that of, say, business managers or factory workers.

According to Kristol and others who took up his analysis, the characteristic redoubts of the new class include the universities, journalism, and the media, the public sector itself, and the professions, especially law. But has ever an institution been developed that is as powerful an engine of the new class ethos as the one that sits astride all four of these sectors – the modern elite law school?”

So is he right? Was the Left’s conquest of the elite law schools the most consequential step in the liberal takeover of American culture and politics? I am not convinced. Tomes have been written about: the erosion of traditional American values by our pornographic media; the promotion of social justice – i.e., cultural Marxism – by major foundations; the constriction of our freedoms by an expansive, out-of-control federal bureaucracy; and the crony capitalism, which undermines faith in our capitalistic system, practiced by large corporate entities in cahoots with the government. Were any of these less destructive than the law schools? Actually, for my money, the greatest damage has been inflicted by the K-12 educational establishment. The brainwashing of our children, the theft of their ability to appreciate how exceptionally wonderful American history really is, and the conversion of our youth into economically illiterate, historically dense, sexually active, eco-freaks is a massive crime that steals their souls and prevents the country from snapping out of the leftist trance into which we have been hypnotized. This is not to minimize the havoc wrought by the elite law schools, nor does it diminish the clarity of Olson’s analysis. It just means that as much damage as the law schools have done, other segments of the leftist machine have done as much if not more.


[1] Ah, but what about Reagan and the Gingrich Congressional revolution? Alas, these were brief interludes in which sanity was partially restored. But under Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, both Bushes, Clinton and Obama, the trend has been unmistakably and unhesitatingly left. The crucial issue is whether the trend is also reversible.
[2] This review also appeared in The Intellectual Conservative at:

21st Century University Students

In an article in The American Thinker in fall 2009, I described the difficulties that a professor with conservative views encounters on American campuses. For example, during eleven years in a senior administrative position, I trod the ever-present minefield of liberal dogma that thoroughly permeates the campus. Since that time, I stepped down from my administrative post and formally retired, but I am continuing to teach mathematics courses – largely to engineering and science majors. This fall, in my first teaching assignment in twelve years, I delivered a post-calculus course to approximately 200 sophomores and juniors. My goal here is to describe the nature of today’s students – at least as represented by the two hundred with whom I interacted, point out some differences from students in the 1990s and earlier, reflect on how the differences mirror societal changes, and finally to speculate on the implications these differences portend for the nation.

Here are the salient characteristics that I see in today’s university students, together with an indication of how their attitude/behavior differs from those of previous generations.

  • Despite a great diversity in race, sex and ethnic origin, there is a remarkable consistency in how students approach problem solving, differentiate what they think is important from what they see as trivial, and also how they interact with each other and with the faculty member. This consistency was highlighted by almost unbelievable similarities that I saw in their exam papers: almost all make the exact same mistakes, concentrate their study on the same right – or wrong – topics, and ask questions that reveal a scarily uniform train of thought. This is of course an exaggeration, but there were times when I wondered whether they were all cloned from a common model. Certainly, the diversity of thought and behavior was far greater among students in previous generations.
  • Related, but not identical, was a lack of creativity and originality that I observed. This was surprising because in terms of academic performance, the students were strong. The university has been working diligently for more than 20 years to upgrade the quality of the student body. And as far as I can tell, it has succeeded. The scores on my exams – the level of which was comparable to those I administered 15 years ago – were higher. But the students achieved the higher scores by careful attention to method, lots of studying, working collaboratively when appropriate, memorization of technique and by dint, perhaps, of a higher level of innate intelligence. What I didn’t see was the unusual student who solved a problem by a clever, innovative method, distinct from the procedures learned from me or the text. Average performance might have been lower a generation ago, but I rarely failed to see a clever solution (by an unexpected method) on at least one student’s paper for each exam. Not today!
  • Also related, but distinct from the previous two points, I saw few (if any) students whose prime objective in the course was to learn well a distinctive branch of mathematics. In the past I always encountered students – not always the best – who seemed to enjoy learning a new mathematical subject and who would approach me for suggestions on what they could do (beyond class) to enhance their knowledge of the subject. I saw none of that this past fall. The prime goal, even for the best students, seemed to be to earn the highest grade possible and their entire approach to the course was in pursuit of that objective. Getting good grades was always important, but for today’s students it seems to be the only objective. In a related vein, one senses that they are at the university primarily to collect a degree – which they see as a ticket to a job or a graduate program – and little attention is paid to the accumulation of knowledge, wisdom or moral values.
  • On the plus side, my students were virtually always well-behaved, respectful, polite and pleasant to interact with in person. This was a welcome change from some of the surly and immature behavior that I too often witnessed (admittedly decreasingly) over the years from the 60s to the 90s.
  • In a somewhat similar, but definitely less encouraging spirit, I found today’s students too deferential. They seem to have too much respect for authority. They never challenged anything I said, questioned my judgment or doubted that I was an oracle dispensing the concrete pieces of information that they required. I sense that they are used to being told what to do by their superiors, that they rarely question the content of the “wisdom” that their elders supply, but rather they are programmed to believe what they are told and to follow orders. I might be overstating this but there was not an iconoclast in the bunch.
  • Finally, twelve years ago, students didn’t send emails to faculty. Now they have no hesitation whatsoever. And they send the most outrageous messages. They whine about missing quizzes because of illness and demand a makeup, plead for advance information on upcoming exams and demand redress for their poor and undeserved fate on exams. They don’t complain about the syllabus, my teaching style, the amount of material to be covered – only about exams and their grade. But as we shall see below, this is completely consistent with what I described above.

The changes in student attitudes and behavior are not accidental. Today’s university students are a product of a government school system, which teaches them that modern society (including its political, economic and even its cultural components) is too complex to be understood by the average citizen and its direction must be entrusted to professionals and experts. They are taught according to an increasingly uniform national curriculum that belittles non-conformity and drums into their heads the primacy of multiculturalism, global climate change, egalitarianism, central planning, secularism and the illegitimacy of any exceptionalism – American or otherwise. Finally, they are imbued with the idea that their highest objective should be to get credentialed and connected so that they can enter the Ruling Class so aptly described by Angelo Cordevilla in the American Spectator last summer. They are also a product of a society that reinforces the baneful lessons they are taught in school; a society in which: lack of feasance to the prevailing wisdom is punished by marginalization and scorn; morals are relative and no value system is more worthy than any other; deference to professional authority is encouraged and individual curiosity, initiative and responsibility is demeaned; and respect is due to those who help one to gain entry to the Ruling Class, while contempt is reserved for those who stand in one’s way.

It does not augur well. While I suspect that many of today’s students will make good managers, bureaucrats and competent engineers and scientists, I wonder how many Mark Zuckerbergs or Sergei Brins we shall produce.

Compared to the unkempt, undisciplined and unruly students that I taught 35 years ago, today’s students are a delight – hard-working, self-disciplined and pleasant. But unfortunately also a bit boring and predictable, except when they are tenaciously arguing for a higher grade. Two hundred more will arrive at my lectern at the end of January. I am trying to decide whether to supply them with the link to this article.
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This article also apperared in The Intellectual Conservative at

Obama Needn’t Federalize Higher Education; It Already Is Federalized

While we are all focused on health care, and cap and trade waits in the wings, we shouldn’t forget the third leg of Obama’s trio of nasty tricks to ‘change’ America—education reform. One might argue that George W Bush already federalized public school education with his infamous No Child Left Behind legislation. Whether one believes its consequences have been positive or negative, one cannot dispute that NCLB has effectively given the federal government control over critical parts of the public school curriculum. State and local officials understand very well that they must teach and test what the feds want, or they won’t be able to feed at the federal education trough—to whose content they are hopelessly addicted.

But I wish to focus on higher education here, and to argue that by virtually the same means—that is, by dangling dollars—the federal government controls the operation, enrollment, budget, facilities and curriculum of our esteemed institutions of higher education to a greater degree than most would acknowledge. I can cite the pervasive role of the feds in student loan programs, the federal regulations that govern the physical environment of our schools and the earmarks that support some of the most arcane education projects. But the coup de grace is the following startling fact. We have reached the point that for many institutions of higher education, the amount of revenue that they derive from either of their two traditional sources—tuition and either state funds (public institutions) or endowments (private institutions)—is eclipsed by the funds secured from the feds through government grants and research contracts.

Much of this has been accomplished without any special enabling legislation. It takes place within the budgets of various federal departments and agencies—e.g., Defense, Commerce, Interior, NASA, NSF, and others. But with or without specific legislation, like all the massive intrusions by the federal government into areas of our society and economy, it has been carried out lawfully, with the public’s support. Of course in doing so, we the people have ignored the most basic law—the Law of Unintended Consequences. And indeed the examples of unintended ill side effects of the federal usurpation of higher education are legion:

·       The vast majority of federal grant money is directed toward faculty research projects at the nation’s universities. The inevitable result has been a dramatic decline in the percentage of faculty time devoted to teaching. The unintended effect—the quality of education suffers.

·       Federal grants are complicated and time-consuming to administer. Thus, the number of university administrators has skyrocketed. These people contribute little toward the university’s mission.

·       It is no great secret that the lion’s share of federal grant monies is directed toward the sciences (physical, life, social and medical). Humanities lag far behind thereby engendering weaker academic credentials and a commensurate loss of self-respect in those quarters.

·       State support of public higher education continues to decline. No State can compete with the feds. Thus local control of our public universities diminishes.

·       As with any other federally-assisted venture, the huge influx of federal funds drives up costs. Inflation in higher education fees has swamped cost of living increases for years.

·       The one who pays the freight gets to call the tune. Faculty, students and administrators increasingly have to dance to Uncle Sam’s tunes. A simple example is the straightjacket that university researchers feel they are in because of federal export control rules that apply to all faculty activities supported by government research contracts.

·       State universities’ Boards of Trustees and private institutions’ Boards of Overseers have seen their powers curtailed. They are fearful of bucking the feds.

·       It might only be indirectly, but increased federal influence in higher education eventually leads to a say in the most important decision the university makes—namely, faculty tenure. These decisions are increasingly dependent on a faculty member’s ability to secure federal funding—opening the process to influences other than scholarly merit.

·       Naturally, faculty—and the university in general—devote enormous amounts of time, energy and resources to the securing of federal grants. This is time taken from teaching and research—supposedly the university’s primary mission.

·       We are all aware of rampant corruption in Medicare, Social Security and virtually every other huge federal program. Do you think that federal support of higher education is immune? Suffice it to say that universities now routinely employ lobbyists to further their cause on Capitol Hill.

All of the above, while perhaps unexpected, are not controversial allegations. The next two certainly are:

·       The university—like the media, legal profession, foundations and public schools—has become an almost exclusive province of the left. Progressivism, relativism, secularism, multiculturalism, pacifism and environmentalism dominate campus thought. Federal government money and influence only fosters that dominance.

·       There is absolutely no justification whatsoever in the Constitution for the federal government’s interference in higher education. But no one seems to care about that.

I believe I have heard or seen each of the above items—even the last two—in public venues in the last few years. But here is one that I am familiar with from my own university that I have never seen discussed. The selection of campus capital projects and facilities maintenance programs is determined to a surprising extent by the university’s perception of their likelihood of attracting federal matching monies. Well, it is primarily only sexy new buildings and research labs that can do so. Therefore, a disproportionate share of these projects is steered toward the realm of new buildings, hi-tech labs and ultra-modern recreational facilities. The basic infrastructure is left to decay. It has been estimated that the deferred maintenance costs at my institution are nearing one billion dollars. While the safety indicators and educational environment in our classrooms and office buildings atrophy, we leverage funds from the feds to build fancy new buildings whose need is questionable. So, as with the country’s crumbling bridges, roads and tunnels, the university’s infrastructure decays while we chase federal dollars for glitzy buildings, climate change projects, diversity programs and other wasteful outlays in order to satisfy Uncle Sam’s dubious priorities.
 
This piece also appeared in The American Thinker under the title, ‘Federalized Higher Education’; see: