The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn

The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn

The greatest tragedy of progressive education is not the students' lack of skills, but of teachable character.

Very Troubling! Students Know Best How to be Taught?

Socratic Backfire?

 

by Kaustuv Basu 

Some students didn't take well to Steven Maranville’s teaching style at Utah Valley University. They complained that in the professor’s “capstone” business course, he asked them questions in class even when they didn't raise their hands. They also didn't like it when he made them work in teams.

Those complaints against him led the university denying him tenure – a decision amounting to firing, according to a lawsuit Maranville filed against the university this month. Maranville, his lawyer and the university aren't talking about the case, although the suit details the dispute.

Maranville and his attorney did not return phone calls, but the allegations in the lawsuit raises questions that have been raised and debated about the value of student evaluations and opinions, how negative evaluations play into the career trajectory of affected professors and whether students today will accept teaching approaches such as the Socratic method.

Read more: Inside Higher Ed

A Tottering Technocracy

by Victor Davis Hanson

Higher education is no longer affordable for many families, and does not guarantee well-rounded, well-educated graduates. A university debt bubble, in Fannie and Freddie fashion — together with the rise of no-frills private online certificate-granting institutions — is undermining traditional higher education. The symptoms are unmistakable: tuition spiraling far ahead of inflation; elite faculty excused from teaching to publish esoteric articles in little-read journals; legions of poorly compensated part-time instructors and graduate-student assistants subsidizing the privileged class; political orthodoxy as an unspoken requisite for membership in the club. An administrator is deemed successful largely for promoting “diversity” — rarely on the basis of whether costs stabilized, graduation rates increased, the need for remediation declined, or post-graduation jobs were assured on his watch. This warped system, which grew out of the bountiful 1960s, is now a vestigial organ, an odd-looking thing without an easily definable purpose. When will the bubble burst? If the four-year university cannot ensure its graduates that they will necessarily have a better-paying job and know more than the products of an upfront credentialing factory, why incur the $200,000 cost and put up with the political indoctrination?

This is only one of many brilliant paragraphs in the essay. Read the whole essay here.

The New Easy Path at University

The Race to the Bottom

by Schumpeter

IN MY day people who wanted an easy time at university studied geography or land management. Now, in the United States at least, the soft-option of choice is business studies. Business students of various sorts are the most numerous group on American campuses, accounting for 20%, or more than 325,000, of all bachelor degrees. They are also, according to a long article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by far the idlest and most ignorant.

Read more.

Tyranny on America's Private College Campus, Part 2

Professor Paquette Responds

In April, Hamilton College American history professor Robert Paquette published an NAS article describing how the campus left insulates itself and bullies dissenters. As evidence, he cited the case of his former colleague Chris Hill, a libertarian teacher/scholar who was eliminated early from consideration for a tenure-track position.

A few weeks later, Hamilton's Dean of the Faculty Joseph Urgo wrote Paquette a letter reprimanding him, demanding that the article be removed from the NAS website, and denying Paquette the right to serve on faculty search committees.

National media took notice of the controversy this summer. Mark Bauerlein has a mult-part series at The Chronicle on questions surrounding the incident, and Scott Jaschik published "When Faculty Aren't Supposed to Talk" at Inside Higher Ed.

Yesterday Professor Robert Paquette responded to the controversy in a new article, "Dictatorships and Double Standards, Part II."

Tyranny on America's Private College Campus

Hamilton College to Prof. Paquette: Shut Up

A faculty member has landed in hot water for an article he published on the NAS website. In April, Hamilton College history professor Robert Paquette published “Dictatorships and Double Standards” on the National Association of Scholars website. A few weeks after the article appeared, Hamilton’s Dean of the Faculty Joseph Urgo wrote Paquette a letter reprimanding him, demanding that the article be removed from the NAS website, and denying Paquette the right to serve on faculty search committees.

This is the first instance we know of in which an academic official has sought to censor the NAS website—so naturally we are taking a keen interest in the proceedings. We have of course not removed Paquette’s article. (As a small act of defiance, we intend to link it frequently.) Paquette has also promised us a “Dictatorships and Double Standards, Part 2.”

We aren’t the only ones taking notice of Hamilton College’s heavy-handed response. Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein wrote about the letter in a Chronicle of Higher Education blog post (afternoon update: "An Episode at Hamilton, Part 2") and has promised more to come. Bauerlein cites Urgo’s ultimatum to Paquette whom he prohibited from serving on faculty search committees “until and unless your colleagues can convince the Dean’s office that you will adhere to College policies regarding faculty recruitment.”

Scott Jaschik took up the story in an article on Inside Higher Ed, “When Faculty Aren’t Supposed to Talk.” Jaschik asks, “But what is a breach [of confidence] and can a breach be punished?” He quotes Paquette saying that “information in my NAS piece was either obvious or a matter of public record long before I wrote the piece.”

Malleus Maleficarum

What’s all this about? Paquette’s article pretty much speaks for itself, but the short form is this: Paquette discusses the tyranny of intellectual majorities on campus who use “slash and burn” techniques to eliminate the representation of disfavored views. His case in point is the treatment of Christopher Hill, a junior faculty member in the history department at Hamilton who was sidelined at the very first stage of the search when a tenure track position opened up. Hill is a self-described libertarian and Paquette cited evidence that diversity preferences and suspicions about Hill’s political views played a role in that adverse decision.

Read the whole NAS article by Peter Wood.  

Below are the final two paragraphs from Robert Paquette's NAS article.

 

Dictatorships and Double Standards

Instead of trying to see the world better or more truly as it is by renouncing ideology, campus radicals claim that everyone has it, only theirs is superior to yours because it is enlisted in the service of the downtrodden. Ideologues, like ideologies, insulate themselves from testing. Try vigorously interrogating members of the diversity cartel in a departmental meeting as to why the standards by which they are judging a Professor Hill or some other poor chap appear not to have been applied in their own case or in previous cases involving ideological soul-mates. Pointing out the inconsistencies yielded by the slipperiness of situational ethics might just get you frog-marched to the dean’s office to face demands for “personnel action.” Your conveniently sensitive colleagues, after all, having worked endlessly on committees and at faculty meetings to install the apparatus of intimidation, can now charge you with having created with a sharp retort or pointed criticism “a hostile environment.” Self-censorship, let it be stressed, stretches on many college campuses from faculty, to staff, to students. The best and brightest conservative students in thinking about viable career options don’t forget what they saw on campus or what they endured in classrooms as undergraduates.

Colleges, even elite private liberal arts colleges, exist by a social contract invested by public faith. If the crises of our time worsen, the populist upsurge represented by the Tea Partiers may swell. Well might they begin to fix a penetrating gaze on the state of this country’s institutions of higher education. I, for one, would welcome sanitizing light.

Robert L. Paquette is Publius Virgilius Rogers professor of American history at Hamilton College and co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.

On the Devaluation of Education

Doug Wilson aptly writes,

Almost thirty percent of American 25-year-olds and higher currently have a B.A. If true educational reform in higher ed takes root, over the course of a generation, we should be able to cut that number in half. If we don't cut that number in half, we will continue to "cut in half" our educational expectations. For example, if we said that our goal was to send every eighteen-year-old to basketball camp, and in the grip of a bizarre ideological frenzy, we insisted that we were going to reach the achievable goal of "every American learning how to dunk the ball," then there are only two possible outcomes. The first will be that reality will eventually set in, and we give up that fantasy, admitting that it was a fantasy. The second is what we are currently doing, especially in the humanities, and that is the achievable goal of lowering the net.

Read his essay on correcting the devaluing of education in "How Not to Lower the Net."

The Danger of Education Failure

"An Unsuccessful Education Can Ruin You"

October 30, 2009 By Ashley Thorne

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article, "Course Reminds Budding Ph.D.'s of the Damage They Can Do," about a seminar taught at the CUNY Graduate Center on the ethics of teaching. Steven M. Cahn teaches the class, and he seeks to dispel the notion that all education is innocuous:

"People often think that education works either to improve you or to leave you as you were," Mr. Cahn says. "But that's not right. An unsuccessful education can ruin you. It can kill your interest in a topic. It can make you a less-good thinker. It can leave you less open to rational argument. So we do good and bad as teachers—it's not just good or nothing."

Read the whole article.