What’s Really a Problem: Evaluating America’s Campuses

Universities are traditionally laboratories for the fertile, if bizarre, imaginations of young people. Universities are places in which new ideas can be auditioned. Sometimes, they’re simply entertaining jokes. Other times, they may represent breakthroughs which can be applied in the real world.

For this reason, universities are almost synonymous with tolerance. Students need the freedom to experiment with new thoughts. Was Martin Schongauer a communist? Most probably not. But if an undergraduate wants to write a persuasive essay claiming that he was, the university is the right place to do that.

There is, however, a point at which the freedom to experiment becomes its opposite: a disincentive to a creative life of the mind. In a consumer model of education, students become customers, and instead of provoking them to wrestle with complex and challenging ideas, universities make them comfortable with familiar ideas.

A student who wants to explore challenging concepts is a student with the self-discipline to work at that task. By contrast, a student who’s arrived at the university to have a four-year experience of campus life doesn’t want to be bothered with the intellectual effort required to parse the thoughts of a Kant or a Schopenhauer.

So some of the usual campus weirdness and oddity is harmless. But when college administrators begin to cater to students instead of challenging them, damage is being done both to the individual and to society, as author Tom Nichols writes:

This is a deeper problem than the usual stunts, fads, and intellectual silliness on campuses that capture the public imagination from time to time. There will always be a certain amount of foolishness to a lot of campus life. As a Tufts University professor, Dan Drezner, has written, “One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are.” College life, especially at the most elite schools, is insulated from society, and when young people and intellectuals are walled off from the real world, strange things can happen.

When institutions entertain students instead of educating them, the net amount of educating declines. Students need to accumulate information and skills - knowing that and knowing how.

Under the banner of social justice, some aspects of higher education have been reduced to confirming students in their already-held beliefs. In such systems, they gain neither knowledge nor skills, as scholar Robert Bork writes:

The result of our egalitarian passion is that Americans, white as well as black, have allowed themselves to become progressively less competent. That fact is attested to in myriad ways: SAT scores keep declining; American students fall well behind the students of many other nations on international science and mathematics tests; even college students frequently lack basic historical and geographical knowledge. Our system of public education at the primary and secondary levels is not performing as well as it did half a century ago, and in places its performance is a disgrace. Universities must offer remedial courses to bring their entering freshmen up to the point they should have reached in mid-high school. Less and less of the four years of college can be spent on what we used to think of as college level studies. Intellectual rigor inevitably suffers as grades are inflated and graduate students are substituted for professors in teaching undergraduates.

Sometimes standardized tests like the ACT or SAT are recalibrated, but there’s no hiding the fact that intellectual activity among some college students is declining.

The good news is that, for students shrewd enough to avoid social justice and political correctness, an education can still be gotten at most universities and colleges. There are professors who are still subject matter specialists, and there are still classes in which students wrestle with significant texts like Parmenides, Xenophanes, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, John Locke, Edmund Burke, etc.

As the mind struggles with complex text, it grows and becomes stronger; in avoiding social justice, it encounters justice simpliciter.

Students who are willing to see beyond mere career training will find that, in obscure and even deliberately hidden corners of the university, the life of the mind still persists. Their imaginations can be fueled as they encounter academic rigor.

What is now needed is for more students to take this path, sharpening their minds instead of accumulating experiences.

Higher Education and Its Changing Role in American Society: Upholding Civilization or Undermining It?

Colleges and universities were a part of the United States even before the nation began in 1776. By the time the country was founded, it featured several institutions of higher learning.

The role which those schools play and played in American culture has changed over the centuries and decades. They started as academies for a small percentage of the population. The majority of people had no interest in attending college, whether or not it was possible for them.

The bulk of the citizens could achieve a comfortable middle class standard of living without a university education, and, in those previous centuries, secondary educations were good enough to provide a stimulating life of the mind.

In that era, a rigorous curriculum in a broad array of subjects was available to those who pursued learning up to, but not into, college. Without going to a university, students could immerse their minds in the Greek and Roman classics, gain a working knowledge of Latin and a smattering of Greek, explore Shakespeare, and learn both ancient and modern history. In the natural sciences, chemistry, physics, and biology were available at advanced, if less well attended, levels. Arithmetic, mathematics, geometry, and trigonometry were taught at levels up to, and including, differential and integral calculus.

When a university education was needed for only a few professions, there was a greater emphasis within the university on developing the mind, rather than merely training for a profession, as scholar Tom Nicols writes:

Before World War II, most people did not finish high school and few went to college. In this earlier time, admissions to top schools were dominated by privileged families, although sometimes young men and a very few women could scrape up the money for tuition or earn a scholarship. It was an exclusive experience often governed as much by social class as by merit. Still, college attendance was an indication of potential, and graduation was a mark of achievement. A university degree was rare, serving as one of the signposts dividing experts and knowers from the rest of society.

When career training was less central to the university’s mission than it is now, other concerns could be more central: non-utilitarian scientific progress, the growth of individual freedom and political liberty, respect for the impartial rule of law, the traditions of rationality and skepticism, the study of culture, and the preservation of the great works and traditions of Western Civilization.

The university was clear to itself, and to the world, about its mission: to foster the life of the mind.

In a breathtakingly ironic oxymoron, the twenty-first century university is lurching toward anti-intellectualism: sometimes explicitly so, in the mocking of scholarly apparatuses like footnotes and bibliographies, and in the mocking of scholarly pursuits like the catalogues of Indo-European roots and their cognates in various World Languages.

But more often, the university’s anti-intellectualism is covert, because the institution still wants to demand the respect which is accorded to academic rigor. The trend is subversive, in the sense that an intellectual institution is infiltrated by individuals whose mission is to advance anti-intellectualism.

Thus arise the pseudo-sciences and pseudo-disciplines: courses and classes which have no intellectual or academic foundation. Thus, too, occurs the dilution of what had been rigorous academic pursuits: e.g., post-secondary studies of economics drift away from the meticulous precision of equations and graphs, and dissolve into a pool of slogans borrowed from popular politics.

The university’s goal is no longer to provide an individual with a stimulating life of the mind. To fill that vacuum, two alternative goals expand: career training and politicization applied to what had formerly been the objects of academic study, as scholar Robert Bork writes.

Universities now threaten to abandon those ideals and to instruct the rest of society to abandon them as well. As the universities lose respect for intellect, that attitude spreads not only to lower schools but to the society at large. It is perhaps unclear whether the universities are instructing the culture at large in the joys of anti-intellectualism or whether the universities have been infected by a culture already lobotomized by television. Probably the influence runs both ways. The universities have an independent reason to abandon intellect: the barrier that rationality places in the way of politicization.

In former times, a graduate who’d studied economics was considered to be a specialist in a quasi-mathematical study of human decisions, human actions, and the psychology which drives them. Now, however, someone with a college degree in economics is assumed to be someone who has opinions relevant to current partisan policy debates.

Whether the university undid itself, or whether electronic mass communication has undone it, the result is a declining life of the mind in America.

A College Education Or a College Experience: Instead of Learning, There Are Lots of Activities

Graduating high school students, and freshmen at the university, are presented with a vision of college life: sports, social groups, political activism, seminars about ‘sensitivity’ and ‘awareness,’ and a smorgasbord classes and courses related to linking emotional reactions about current events.

The common-sense value of a university degree is correspondingly declining. A diploma guarantees less and less, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:

This is because attendance at a postsecondary institution no longer guarantees a “college education.” Instead, colleges and universities now provide a full-service experience of “going to college.” These are not remotely the same thing, and students now graduate believing they know a lot more than they actually do. Today, when an expert says, “Well, I went to college,” it’s hard to blame the public for answering, “Who hasn’t?” Americans with college degrees now broadly think of themselves as “educated” when in reality the best that many of them can say is that they’ve continued on in some kind of classroom setting after high school, with wildly varying results.

While post-secondary institutions are abandoning solid content and instead providing a social experience, primary and secondary schools have rejected rigorous curriculum for a different reason. Educational achievement has been exchanged for exercising one’s social identity.

In the face of a real and serious achievement gap, some educational theorists are providing, not the tools which help students take advantage of opportunities, but rather meditations on race and gender.

To seriously address poverty and the demographic trends which maintain it, primary and secondary schools can help students to build skills in mathematics and basic literacy, moving eventually into the nature sciences, history, and geography.

Whether well-intentioned or cynical, trends which dilute the content of academic disciplines and divert energy toward social sentiments do not help, and in fact hurt, those demographic segments which such trends claim to assist. As Robert Bork writes:

Feminism, Afrocentrism, and the self-esteem movement, three other products of the egalitarian passion, divert resources from real education and miseducate. The United States spends more on education than do other Western industrialized nations, and gets less in return. This is not only harmful to individuals and to our competitiveness internationally, it is a likely source of considerable social unrest and antagonism. The failures of public education have had a devastating impact on poor black children. They are often not given even the most rudimentary education that might enable them to compete in the American economy. A growing uneducated black underclass, without prospects for a decent life, is creating social chaos and will create more.

To advance against the achievement gap, and generally to help various socioeconomic and demographic groups, schools need to offer functional skills to students: reading and writing, proficiency at arithmetic and basic algebra, and familiarity with natural sciences and history.

A solid curricular foundation enables students either to succeed at the university, or to enter apprenticeship programs, or the workforce directly.

Off to College! Or is College Off?

A large percentage of American high school graduates go to some form of post-secondary education. Some of those post-secondary institutions are quite focused on specific forms of training, and issue a professional certification to successful students.

But the four-year experience at a college or university is not supposed to be training - it’s supposed to be an education. It’s supposed to instill self-discipline, the habits of rigorous thought, and a respect for specialized bodies of knowledge.

How well are our colleges and universities achieving this goal? According to scholar Tom Nichols, not so well:

Higher education is supposed to cure us of the false belief that everyone is as smart as everyone else. Unfortunately, in the twenty-first century the effect of widespread college attendance is just the opposite: the great number of people who have been in or near a college think of themselves as the educated peers of even the most accomplished scholars and experts. College is no longer a time devoted to learning and personal maturation; instead, the stampede of young Americans into college and the consequent competition for their tuition dollars have produced a consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right.

Colleges and universities are entrusted with society’s two greatest treasures: ideas and young people. The task for educational institutions is to bring the ‘ideas’ and the ‘young people’ into contact, and into engagement, with each other.

The continued existence of civilization and culture depend on this task. If young people are to eventually have meaningful debates and disagreements about foundational ideas, they must first have explored those ideas and the authors who put them onto paper.

For young people to think consequentially about liberty, for example, they will have had to explore the writings of John Locke, Thomas Paine, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and others. The educators should not, and do not, expect that the students will automatically agree or disagree with these texts. But the students should wrestle with these texts.

Someone who has not read widely and extensively is not able to analyze civilization or contribute much to it. As scholar Robert Bork writes,

If, as Brigette Berger has quite plausibly asserted, “the fate of the modern university and the fate of Western civilization are inextricably intertwined,” our prospects at the moment do not seem bright. Universities are central cultural institutions. Their preservation of the great works and traditions of Western civilization, including the traditions of rationality and skepticism, have been crucial to the growth of individual freedom, respect for the rule of law, and scientific progress.

An honest critique of current colleges and universities reveals that some of them offer mere training instead of education; others offer a pleasant social experience; a few offer credentials which help their graduate find jobs; and there are those which encourage passionate but sadly uninformed socio-political engagement.

It is still possible to get an education - instead of training - but it requires a students to carefully navigate a college or university, to challenge the mind, to find the courses and classes which wrestle with ideas and texts. But this type of education is not encouraged by the institutions themselves, nor by a student’s peers, nor by the general impressions given by the media and by those segments of society which have already lost the penchant for contemplative and reflective thought.

Testing the Untestable: Standardized Testing and Higher-Level Thought

The perpetual thorn in the flesh of modern education is the standardized, high-stakes test. It is deeply flawed, and yet it is necessary.

It is necessary because there are more than 20,000 high schools in the United States, and there is a need to measure and evaluate students across all of them. The admissions process for colleges and universities has a practical need for a practical way to assess students.

Standardized testing is essentially flawed, yet it remains the best option, because any other conceivable procedure would be even more deeply flawed.

The flaw - or, to be more kind, limit - in any form of standardized testing is that it is forced to choose between more accurately measuring low-level knowledge or less accurately measuring high-level knowledge. Bloom’s taxonomy may be used to roughly approximate what is meant by ‘low’ or ‘high’ level knowledge in this context.

It would be a great advantage to accurately measure higher-level thought, but it is exactly this type of thinking which is most difficult to measure.

Todd Farley, an employee at the Educational Testing Corporation (ETC), explained from an insider’s perspective the processes used to write tests and process the millions of answer sheets. ETC is the parent of Educational Testing Service (ETS), which produces a whole alphabet soup of tests: AP, SAT, GRE, PSAT, NMSQT, and others.

Farley explains that, when such tests venture away from low-level knowledge, they don’t accurately measure higher-level thought.

In the words of Joseph Farrell and Gary Lawrence, attempts at assessing higher-level knowledge don’t establish “whether a student had any real competence about the subject.” Instead, such tests merely verify “that certain ‘keywords’ or concepts occured in student responses, whether or not the student actually understood their meaning.”

Standardized tests can do very well at measuring a student’s ability to do arithmetic calculations and master basic facts in history. Such tests can well measure a student’s efforts at simple examples of English spelling and grammar - including punctuation and capitalization.

Questions about analysis, synthesis, application, and evaluation - e.g., the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy - are, however, intrinsically ambiguous and arguable. Such questions cannot be structured for large-scale standardized testing.

Joseph Farrell and Gary Lawrence write:

Recall the critiques addressed so far with respect to some questions, namely, that the test-taker - particularly the more informed one - is put into the position of having to read the mind of the test-maker, which, as it turns out, is not one mind, but several. The test-taker, in other words, must guess at a consensus of minds, not just at one mind. Finally, the test is “pre-tested,” or to use Farley’s term, “validated,” as the test is given to a group of people to compile individual statistics for each question. Once these statistics have been compiled, they are gathered into a descriptive manual along with much other descriptive and technical matter about the test: for example, its aims, the formulas used in computing the statistics, instructions to the prospective user on how to administer the test,” and so on.

Farley offers, as do Farrell and Lawrence, numerous examples of individual test questions. Another scholar, Banesh Hoffmann, gives further instances, e.g. a question about ‘intentionally’ and ‘intensionally’ - or various uses of the word ‘emperor.’

It is demonstrable that, in many cases, badly-formed questions favor the less knowledgeable student. The more well-informed student is aware of nuances and counterexamples which speak against the answer which the test’s author hoped to elicit.

Perhaps the best tactic would be to explicitly define standardized testing as limited to lower-level history, mathematics, and English mechanics. A thorough mastery of these would be one goal of secondary education.

A second goal of secondary education would be those higher level skills which do not lend themselves to mass testing. These critical thinking skills are best learned and practiced in extended reading assignments, in classroom discussion, and in essay-writing.

Schools should not abandon teaching these skills merely because they can’t be well tested. University admissions should be based more on the lower-level skills, because they can be more accurately measured.

College Admissions: the Quest for Objective Assessment

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, American universities have wrestled with the question of how to assess applicants. Of the many variables and many data points on an application, which most effectively reveal a student’s achievements and aptitudes? And how are they to be interpreted?

Admissions departments were faced with large increases in enrollment after WW2. This necessitated new ways of processing applications.

The numbers of applications and enrollments continued to increase throughout the remainder of the century.

New admissions processes were often less personal. A century earlier, great weight was laid on letters of recommendations. Teachers and other adults wrote letters describing not only a student’s academic successes and aptitudes, but also personal character.

In the new era of mass processing, grades on transcripts, and results from standardized tests, came into being and took on greater significance.

The hope and intent was for a more objective measurement. To some extent, that hope was fulfilled.

But, as in the case of every system, clever eyes soon began to find loopholes. Standardized tests could be taken over and over again to get better results. Special “prep courses” gave students test-taking strategies which had less to do with academic knowledge and more to do with the structure of the test questions. Tests were offered on a mix-and-match basis, whereby a student could take the best results, on each part of a test, from different administrations of the test and paste them together to make a single result.

Grades on high school transcripts could also be gerrymandered. Students enrolled under “Section 504” plans could be given modified or accommodated assignments (e.g., extra time on tests, or the opportunity to re-take quizzes on which low scores had been earned). In more than a few instances, however, this was not noted on transcripts, and so admissions officers were left to assume that the grades had been normally earned.

Likewise, essays submitted with applications are supposed to the original and unaided work of the student, yet there is a booming business among coaches who work with students to craft such writing samples.

There is, then, an endless dance, move followed by countermove, as admissions officers seek objective measurements of students, and as students and their parents work to manipulate whichever measuring system they encounter.

In Praise of Books

Literacy is the core of education. The ability to interact with text is at the heart of learning, whether the subject matter is mathematics, natural science, foreign language, or history.

The nature of text is that it is public and fixed. Any two different people can look at a book, and they will bring different perspectives to the text and form different interpretations of it: but the letters on the page are exactly the same for both readers.

But text, and thereby education itself, is being undermined by simplest maneuver: withhold books from students.

By keeping books away from students - or students away from books - , those who wish to damage education can turn text into a subjective, relativized, and fluid experience instead of a publicly accessible artifact. Tom DeWeese reports:

In New York City, administrators at the Life Sciences Secondary School have ordered all textbooks rounded up and removed. Books, they say, are antiquated. Instead, technology is to be the new god of learning.

Physical books are being replaced by data files, which can be changed continuously. A student might read a paragraph in an online history resource; when the student wishes to read that passage again a week or two later, it’s changed, and the text now reads differently.

One of the core skills which educators seek to instill is the ability of students to support theses by means of evidence. Evidence is the citation of text. But how does one cite a constantly changing fluid text?

The books were piled up in the hallway of the school. Next stop – the trash bin. Most were in good condition, including hundreds of math, algebra, geometry and various English literature text books. Also strewn around the floor were copies of Romeo and Juliet and A Street Car named Desire.

Not only has text ceased to be fixed, so that one may refer to it, but it also has become private: your copy of Hamlet or War and Peace might be different than mine.

Mechanically printed physical texts offer a standard to which common reference can be made. We can trade our differing interpretations and views by reference to, and with reference to, the fixed public text. This creates meaningful debate and dialogue.

But if my copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls has been edited to better “suit” me, based on the cookies in my browser, and your copy has been likewise altered, then any basis for intelligible dialogue has been removed.