I have been out of town for a few days and returned to the office to find a bouquet of items worth noting. Since Peter Wood experimented (in “Sunday Blog”) with a short catalog mentioning several different topics, I thought I’d try my hand at a similar post. Here are my takeaways for the day.
NAS in the News: Teach the Classics vs. Make Students Social Activists
Today NAS President Peter Wood was quoted in both the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) and Inside Higher Ed in articles about the release of the latest HERI survey on faculty attitudes. The survey, “The American College Teacher,” is conducted every three years, and this round shows a nearly 20 percentage point increase (to 57 percent) of college professors who believe it is important to teach students to be agents of social change and a 20 percentage point decrease (to 35 percent) of college professors who deem teaching classical texts as important. It is a surprising turn about in only three years. What caused it? Cary Nelson is quoted in the Chronicle article, saying in effect that it is a reaction to overheated criticism of the academy by right-wingers. Fewer professors want to teach the classics because such teaching has become associated with conservative criticism of the progressive university. Dr. Wood replies that the underlying political views of faculty members probably haven’t changed that much. What’s changed, he says, is that many faculty members who in the past would felt ashamed to express “such an anti-intellectual position” felt liberated by the presidential election. The election gave "a sense of legitimacy to the idea that political action could and should trump traditional forms of intellectual inquiry."
Over at Critical Mass, Erin O’Connor questioned whether social change and the classics really are at odds with each other.
How to be a Virulis Vir in College
Since discovering Google Reader a few months ago, I have subscribed to a dozen or so of my favorite blogs. I enjoy the variety of blogs: news, urban photography, higher ed commentary, theology, cute animals. But the blog whose very existence gives me daily encouragement is The Art of Manliness. Although I am a woman, I am drawn to this website because it seems to strike a cultural chord—of nostalgia for traditional sexual roles of men and women, of a longing for manhood’s revival. The blog favors Teddy Roosevelt and is filled with thoughtful, confident articles such as, “How to Shave Like Your Grandpa,” “Making and Keeping Man Friendships,” “12 Tools Every Man Should Have in His Toolbox,” and “10 Ways to Be a Gentleman at the Gym.” This week on AoM is a post called “Manliness in Higher Education.” The author offers specific ways to demonstrate manliness while in college, through academics, service/leadership, and sports/discipline.
Some of the comments are telling reminders of the reality on campus, where students commonly binge drink, hook up, and snooze through classes instead of challenging themselves. One reader wrote, “I wish I had this sort of wisdom when I first started at university. I totally blew my chance at King’s College London, and I look back on it with absolute dismay now- a chance to spend three years in a great city studying history, which is a passion of mine, with some of the greatest academics in the field, and I totally wasted it.”
Worth Reading
Oops! I’ll Do It Again. And Again. And Again...
By James Bowman, Wall Street Journal
On submitting the highest standardized test scores to for college admission
By Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online
On Middle East studies and Title VI
By David Solway, FrontPageMagazine.com
On truth vs. narrative
New Social Justice Terminology
There’s a social justice retreat called Equiss coming up this spring, sponsored by the University of Arizona. According to the website, “Equiss is offered through The University of Arizona to educate students on how to positively and effectively address issues of injustice, inequity, and inequality on campus and in the broader context of American society.” From the online agenda for the retreat, we learned a couple of new social justice phrases:
P2O = Power, Privilege, and Oppression
Universal Design = Mass production of disability-minded products for use by everyone, not just disabled persons
The retreat will take place near Tucson from May 22 to May 24, 2009. Students from around the country may attend; registration is $175 for the weekend (April 17 deadline). Hurry! Only 50 students can attend!
The Sustainability Prison—er—Prism
In previous observations on the way academics illustrate sustainability, we have noted that the most commonly used diagram is that of three overlapping circles: environment, economy, and society. Supposedly when each category achieves “justice,” we will have a sustainable world. Last year, Peter Wood published an article on Inside Higher Ed called “Sustainability’s Third Circle,” demonstrating that the movement is much more than environmental and insists on political goals based on the modern understanding of social justice.
But Michigan State University’s eco-newsletter Footprints suggests a fourth aspect of sustainability: democracy. According to the author, sustainability’s fourth element “gets to the essential questions of ‘Who decides?’ and ‘How are the decisions made?’ In other words how important is process to finding a balance between the social, environmental and economic?”
While it would appear that looking to democracy would help temper the political enthusiasm characterized by the sustainability movement (open up the issue to debate, reason, competition, etc.), the term “democracy” itself may be used here as an indicator of partisanship. Based on the links the article provides, Footprints seems to advocate a specific type of democracy, “deliberative democracy,” (embraced by the Green Party) which emphasizes citizens’ collective decision-making rather than voting.
Coming soon: sustainability’s dodecahedron of disincentives.
