Tag: Education

Harvard (as synecdoche)

What we agree about

You have been educated in a wide variety of subjects that make very little difference to your day-to-day life. For at least ten years, and probably longer, it is likely that the state paid for you to be taught various subjects (like history, chemistry, literature, and so on) that are of no vocational value to the vast majority of its citizens. The state saw education as a public good in itself, a basic privilege that we expect all children to receive. So did your teachers. So do you. You might believe that state-funded education should become entirely skills-based at age sixteen. You might believe that taxpayers should fund doctoral studies for arts graduates. But you almost certainly believe that some measure of vocational irrelevance—learning things simply because they interest us and expand our horizons—is important to our intellectual and personal development and that we should all pay taxes in order to fund it.

This point is made powerfully in Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir, Educated. Born into a family of Mormon survivalists, she develops plenty of technical skills in her father’s junkyard but receives no formal schooling no formal schooling and arrives at university aged seventeen knowing nothing of Western art, and without having heard of the Holocaust. Her classmates, and we as readers, regard her as both inexplicable and tragically impoverished for her ignorance, and root for her to become educated, which she eventually does. In the process, we come to realize just how important we think education is, and how far we see learning for its own sake as integral to human flourishing.

Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World (hyperlink added)

The fatal mis-step

Issues of academic misconduct aside, I’d question the judgment of any university president who answers an invitation to argue with the likes of Stefanik. But Stefanik and Rufo did not write Gay’s dissertation, and they did not co-author her scholarly articles. Feel free to deplore the messengers, their vulturine creepiness, and their gleeful opportunism. Their own failings still do not make what they found any less true. In the real world, truth sometimes comes from terrible people with dishonorable motives; if we were to purity-test the motives of every defector who handed us documents during the Cold War, we’d have had to shred incredibly valuable information on the silly grounds that the people who gave it to us weren’t very nice.

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Gay is not the first person whose scholarly work got another look because of sudden political notoriety. Back in 2001, for example, a professor at the University of Colorado named Ward Churchill wrote some ghastly things about the people who died in 9/11, including comparing the victims in the World Trade Center to the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. After this bravura jerkitude came to light, Churchill’s critics pushed for investigation into his published works, and in 2006, the university found that he had engaged in misconduct, including plagiarism and fabrication. It dismissed him the next year.

Tom Nichols at the Atlantic

Jackals descend

When Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu fell, everyone wanted to claim credit. It may be a mark of our decline that the poseurs are now claiming credit for the Gay resignation from Harvard.

Yes, that bad people make an argument from bad motives doesn’t mean they’re wrong. But this kind of posturing and preening turns my stomach anyway:

Rep. Elise Stefanik, taking a victory lap after the announcement of the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay, boasted that this is “just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history.” That is true if by “any college or university” you mean the 20 most famous institutions in the United States and if by “in history” you mean the past six months—if not, then surely Martin Heidegger’s Sieg-heil!-ing his way to the top at Freiburg University in the 1930s limbos right under the admittedly low bar set by Claudine Gay and her enablers at Harvard. But that is how Republicans talk—and think, if I may abuse the word—these days, “the fierce urgency of now” as seen from whatever is three flights of stairs down from the lowest gutter in Palm Beach.

Kevin D. Williamson

Rep. Stefaniak’s trolling question to the Ivy Presidents may have started the ball rolling, but that’s all the credit she gets. Christopher Rufo and Aaron Sibarium get far more — and like him, loathe him, or somewhere in between, Rufo’s a man with some plans.

Discernment needed

This entire saga may establish a new incentive structure for university decision-makers going forward. If you hire someone who does not meet the highest standards of academic rigor or who applies double standards on things like free speech and DEI, you know that they will be under tremendous scrutiny. You know that if the dirt exists, it will surface. So you have an incentive to be a little more discerning about who you elevate.

And if you are a university president, you certainly have an incentive to be more careful about political bias. Do you really want half the country rooting for your downfall? Do you really want that target on your back? In the shadow of Claudine Gay’s resignation, institutional neutrality may come to be seen as a safe harbor.

Aaron Sibarium, Free Beacon reporter who broke some of the news that broke Claudine Gay’s Harvard Presidency.

The Wicked Witch spins her demise

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.

Say whatever else you will about recently-resigned Claudine Gay, but don’t say she doesn’t read (and twist) Christopher Rufo.

Rufo would, indeed does , characterize his project at breaking up the Left’s hegemony in so very many of the nation’s cultural and educational institutions — decolonizing them, if you will — in order to restore public faith in them, not to “unravel” it.

Why Harvard did what it did

From watching the debate over Gay’s resignation, it’s clear that many academics would much prefer to be members of a sectarian institution than a national one — at least if the price of national standing is regarding conservative Americans in any way as critics worth engaging, let alone as stakeholders in their institutions. A sect can hold firmly to uncompromised and unsullied truths, after all, whereas a nation can be wrong or racist or corrupt.

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It’s to forestall that potential future [when elites will no longer see the Ivies as the default for their kids], not to reward the muckraking of conservatives, that Harvard presumably decided to sacrifice its plagiarist president. The Ivy League believes in its progressive doctrines, but not as much as it believes in its own indispensability, its permanent role as an incubator of privilege and influence. And Harvard’s critics can probably force more change the more that centuries-old power seems to be at risk.

Ross Douthat

How to get ahead in ed

The way to get ahead in economics, Robert Solow quipped, is to provide a “brilliant argument in favor of an absurd conclusion.” Has anything changed?… more »

Arts & Letters Daily, ~ 1/2/24

Yawn! That’s the way to get a PhD in almost any field any more. My personal experience with this was writing a law journal “Note,” which was to be an original contribution to legal thought, rather like a doctoral thesis. I glommed onto a church-state issue that was particularly on my mind in those days and, based on a dubious and thinly-supported premise, concluded … well, something I now think was foolish.

I frequently think that people with earned doctorates, over-invested in defending their indefensible theses, are a source of much evil in the world — particularly when those doctorates are in “theology.”

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Leveling and conformity

Anthony Kronman, former Dean of Yale Law School, got triggered by an episode at Yale that to a lesser mind would have provoked merely a bit of tongue-clucking about “precious snowflakes” or some such thing. In his mind, it triggered deeper reflection, which I missed on first reading of Bret Stephens’ review column of Kronman’s forthcoming book:

Yale has been ground zero for recent campus unrest, including … the decision to drop the term “master” because, to some, it carried “a painful and unwelcome connotation.”

It’s this last decision that seems to have triggered [Anthony] Kronman’s alarm. The word “master” … means … a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction — masterliness — and whose spirit is fundamentally aristocratic. Great universities are meant to nurture that spirit, not only for its own sake, but also as an essential counterweight to the leveling and conformist tendencies of democratic politics that Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosed as the most insidious threats to American civilization.

What’s happening on campuses today [is] a reaction against this aristocratic spirit … It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few. And it is being undertaken for the sake of a radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special.

“In endless pronouncements of tiresome sweetness, the faculty and administrators of America’s colleges and universities today insist on the overriding importance of creating a culture of inclusion on campus,” Kronman writes.

“They stress the need to respect and honor the feelings of others, especially those belonging to traditionally disadvantaged groups, as an essential means to this end. In this way they give credence to the idea that feelings are trumps with a decisive authority of their own. That in turn emboldens their students to argue that their feelings are reason enough to keep certain speakers away. But this dissolves the community of conversation that the grown-ups on campus are charged to protect.”

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I said earlier that Kronman’s book is brave, but in that respect I may be giving him too much credit. Much of his illustrious career is now safely behind him; he can write as he pleases. Would an untenured professor have the guts to say what he does? The answer to the question underscores the urgency of his warning.

Bret Stephens

The urge to pick on Ivy League schools often is itself a leveling and conformist tendency, but not when picking on them is for their squandering a tradition of rigor and excellence, and that’s what Kronman apparently has done.

It boggles my mind to imagine someone smart enough to get into Yale sheltering in place, avoiding the storms of real challenge and growth, as if the transaction were merely commercial, a pricier version of buying a degree at an online diploma mill. Who wants to live a life of fraud and humbuggery with bought credentials?

More disturbing, I think, is the answer to “where else in our millieu do we see Tocqueville’s leveling and conformist tendency?”

It’s bad enough that we are competing in a marketplace full of people who are “the real deal,” who work their tails off to attain mastery. Worse still is that we’re selling our souls for some damned pottage.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Education as counter-hegemonic

Over on the Porch, much of the talk is about education. Two recent posts there highlight some of the changes in higher education of which, it often seems, many are unaware because the change has been over maybe five decades or more.

For instance, Ted McAllister, one of the less active Porchers, riffs briefly on Pepperdine’s substitution of “first year” for “freshman:”

I’m struck by how thoroughly universities have largely given up any sense that they should serve as repositories of tradition, of heritage, of inherited wisdom, replaced by an embarrassingly old-fashioned and moralizing (and hence not morally serious) crusade to be institutions of social transformation.

Jason Peters focuses not on the crusade to be institutions of social transformation, but the pervasive money orientation of the whole enterprise:

What makes all of this so disheartening is that it is cast in monetary terms in the first place—and exclusively. Clearly the value of an education must be realized in dollars. Education is no longer an end but a means only—and a vulgar one. In such talk as we meet here it is impossible to make sense of knowledge “acted upon, informed, or . . . impregnated by Reason.”

“Repositories of tradition, of heritage, of inherited wisdom” are deeply counter-cultural in a consumerist society. We need our institutions of higher learning to be such repositories, not agents of faddish social transformation.