March 23, 2006
The Taliban at Yale
John Fund at the Wall Street Journal continues hammering away at Yale for admitting a Taliban spokesman as an undergraduate and refusing to forthrightly explain and defend their decision:
Given his record as a Taliban apologist, Mr. Hashemi has told friends he is stunned Yale didn't look more closely into his curriculum vitae. "I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay," he told the New York Times. So how did he end up in the Ivy League? Questions start at the State Department's door. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee's border security panel, has asked the State Department and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain exactly how Mr. Hashemi got an F-1 student visa. Yale's decision tree is clearer. Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions until he took the same post at Stanford last year, told the New York Times that Yale had another foreigner of Mr. Hashemi's caliber apply but "we lost him to Harvard" and "I didn't want that to happen again." Mr. Shaw won't return phone calls now, but emails he's exchanged with others offer insights into his thinking.Whether or not Yale cares what the outside world thinks isn't really the point. What is the point? An institution ostensibly dedicated to academic inquiry is unwilling to defend its intellectual positions. It's just one more piece of evidence that their position is indefensible.The day after the New York Times profile appeared, Haym Benaroya, a professor at Rutgers, wrote to Mr. Shaw expressing disbelief that Mr. Hashemi, who has a fourth-grade education and a high school equivalency certificate, could be at Yale. Mr. Shaw replied that he indeed had "non-traditional roots [and] very little formal education but personal accomplishments that had significant impact." Mr. Benaroya was stupefied; did Mr. Shaw mean accomplishments that had a "positive impact, not terroristic and totalitarian impact"? Mr. Shaw responded: "Correct, and potential to make a positive difference in seeking ways towards peace and democracy. An education is a way toward understanding the complex nuances of world politics."
Back in the early 1990s, when he was dean of Yale College, Yale history professor Don Kagan warned about what he called the university's "mutual massage" between value-neutral professors and soft-minded students. He is even more critical now: "The range of debate on campus is more narrow than ever today, and the Taliban incident is a wake-up call that moral relativism is totally unexamined here. The ability of students to even think clearly about patriotism and values is being undermined by faculty members who believe that at heart every problem has a U.S. origin." Mr. Kagan isn't optimistic that Yale will respond to outside pressure. "They have a $15 billion endowment, and I know Yale's governing board is handpicked to lick the boots of the president," he told me. "The only way Yale officials can be embarrassed is if a major donor publicly declares he is no longer giving to them. Otherwise, they simply don't care what the outside world thinks."
Posted by Conor at 01:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 27, 2006
Costs Rising, Quality Falling
William Stuntz is pessimistic about the future of American universities:
Three key American enterprises have seen costs rise much faster than inflation over the past generation, and all three are enterprises in which America leads the world: housing, health care, and higher education. Houses have grown bigger and better, as anyone who has looked at contemporary bathrooms and kitchens knows. Doctors do things they could not imagine a generation ago. Costs may have risen faster than quality, but there is no doubt that quality has risen, and risen substantially.Today's college students do get a whole lot more for their money than their predecessors. The problem is that the new amenities include better dormitories, lavish college funded parties and expensive celebrity guest speakers... not a particularly better education. The hyper-specialization that has enabled advances in scholarship has simultaneously hurt undergraduates, who might know more about, for example, pottery in ancient Sumaria than the modern transition from representational to abstract art.Higher education is similar--on the cost side. Benefit is another story. There is little reason to believe that undergrads and graduate students are better educated today than a generation ago. More likely the opposite. Teaching loads of senior professors have declined; probably teaching quality has declined with it. The culture of research universities has grown ever more contemptuous of students, especially undergraduates, who are seen as an interruption of one's real work rather than the reason for the enterprise. Which means that, year by year, students and their parents pay more for less. That isn't a sustainable business plan.
Posted by Conor at 01:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 21, 2006
Shouted Down
A student at Pomona College, my alma mater, is criticizing the all too common campus occurence of guest speakers being shouted down by protesters:
I attended the debate on Guantanamo Bay last week, and I found myself confronted by something I find very disturbing: a “liberal� protest that ran counter to everything I love about liberalism. The protest, which interrupted the question and answer period of the event, was simply rude and counterproductive.Liberal students on college campuses are far out of the American mainstream on most issues. They can express their views only because people who disagree with them value freedom of expression and tolerate ideas they disagree with. How ironic that these same students, whose views would surely lose out if public discourse turned into a shouting match, do their best to turn it into just that.Now generally I’m all about the liberal protest. I grew up in San Francisco. I’ve been called a terrorist by passersby while marching past police in full riot gear. I love being a liberal because to me being liberal means being open minded and questioning everything: the government, the army, the media, social structures, religion, prejudice, and, above all, myself. Which is why I enjoyed listening to John Yoo so much: he made me think and doubt some of my past assumptions. The question and answer portion presented an opportunity for faculty and students to participate in a dialogue with the presenters. The protesters interrupted this dialogue. They halted the learning process. They purposely stopped a process of discussion and questioning, the essence of liberalism, to make the point that some people here don’t like Bush. What a shocker. Somehow I think Yoo already knew that. And so I have a simple message to those protesters: stop making me look bad. Your actions, made in the name of liberalism, degraded liberalism and the value of protests. Your actions exemplify the type of liberalism that many resent here at Pomona, a liberalism that jumps down the throat of any conservative sentiment and stifles open discourse that everyone could learn from. I’ve seen this liberalism in classrooms, and I’m ashamed that the presenters had to witness it as well.
UPDATE: This piece suggests that the bulk of Pomona students behaved admirably.
Posted by Conor at 06:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
A History Lesson
John Fund is upset with the University of Washington's student senate:
It's well known that college students today aren't as educated in our nation's history as they should be, but it's still hard to grasp the mind-bending political correctness just displayed by the University of Washington's student senate at its campus in Seattle.In my experience student senates don't reflect the views of the student body. Rather, they reflect the disproportionate power wielded by vocal factions of political correctness on campus. (The irony is that disparaging white males on account of their race and gender counts as politically correct these days.)The issue before the Senate this month was a proposed memorial to World War II combat pilot Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, a 1933 engineering graduate of the university, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service commanding the famed "Black Sheep" squadron in the Pacific. The student senate rejected the memorial because "a Marine" is not "an example of the sort of person UW wants to produce."
Digging themselves in deeper, the student opponents of the memorial indicated: "We don't need to honor any more rich white males." Other opponents compared Boyington's actions during World War II with murder.
"I am absolutely bewildered that the Student Senate voted down the resolution," Brent Ludeman, the president of the UW College Republicans, told me. He noted that despite the deficiencies of the UW History Department, the complete ignorance of Boyington's history and reputation by the student body was hard to fathom. After all, "Black Sheep Squadron," a 1970s television show portraying Colonel Boyington's heroism as a pilot and Japanese prisoner of war, still airs frequently on the History Channel. Apparently, though, it's an unusual UW student who'd be willing to learn any U.S. history even if it's spoonfed to him by TV.
As for the sin of honoring a rich white male, Mr. Ludeman points out that Boyington (who died in 1988) was neither rich nor white. He happened to be a Sioux Indian, who wound up raising his three children as a single parent. "Colonel Boyington is luckily not around to see how ignorant students at his alma mater can be today," says Kirby Wilbur, a morning talk show host at Seattle's KVI Radio. Perhaps the trustees and alumni of the school will now help educate them.
Posted by Conor at 03:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 01, 2006
Words Have a Meaning
The always entertaining James Lileks argues that words have a meaning.
The controversy he discusses -- people arguing that male and female bathrooms exclude the transgendered -- is indeed widespread, if only on college campuses. Our own Claremont Colleges are no exception.
This op-ed from The Student Life, a paper I ran as an undergraduate at Pomona College, could benefit from Lileks' sensible lesson. Its author writes:
When an individual’s choice to enter one restroom over another is no longer a simple part of their regular activities, but rather becomes a potentially lethal event that must be feared and planned for on a daily basis, a serious line has been crossed. Gender-neutral bathrooms are no more a convenience for gender-variant people than seatbelts are for the safety of those riding in a car; they are an absolute necessity. To question that logic and the validity of that claim runs tantamount to being an accessory to murder. You may not be pulling the trigger, but you are the one putting the gun to someone’s head and forcing them toward their attacker.If you can bear any more click through to the article--the sentence following the excerpt shows that for this author words are little more than emotional triggers.
Posted by Conor at 03:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack