Going Mad in Academe?

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has an interesting piece on student concerns surrounding Bryn Mawr's proposed "Social Justice Program" (via Maggie's Farm):

Early this summer, FIRE received a case submission from a Bryn Mawr student worried about a proposal for a “Social Justice Pilot Program” gaining momentum on her campus. Conceived in the wake of a campus scandal involving racial slurs published on popular social networking site Facebook.com by a member of the school’s student government, student and faculty proponents of the Social Justice Pilot Program (SJPP) argued that the best way to address perceived intolerance at Bryn Mawr was through adding a “social justice requirement” to the curriculum.

As support for the proposal coalesced, the Social Justice Pilot Program began to take shape. According to an e-mail sent to the student body by the Social Justice Pilot Committee, students would be required to “develop a ‘contract’ to map and document each student’s ‘social justice journey,’ working in collaboration with faculty to ‘critically examine in an ongoing way and in multiple forums the hierarchies and relationships of power that shape our lives and how we shape them.’” Participating in workshops, retreats and approved coursework would serve to fulfill a student’s social justice “credits.” Bryn Mawr’s student newspaper, The Bi-College News, noted in May that under the proposal, “incorporating the social justice requirement into classes would not require a reformatting of curriculum, but rather just a new perspective be taken on some existing classes.” Further e-mails were sent throughout the summer, soliciting student involvement. By all indications, the SJPP had the full support of Bryn Mawr administrators and faculty.

At this point, the worried Bryn Mawr student contacted FIRE. Why? Well, anyone familiar with FIRE’s work will instantly recognize the problem presented by a “social justice” requirement: whatever the intentions of such a requirement, it necessarily violates a student’s fundamental freedom of conscience. That’s because a concept as fundamentally subjective as “social justice” cannot morally be defined and taught, as if it were as static as multiplication tables. Rather, what is and is not socially just is an inherently personal determination, inevitably contingent upon such infinitely variable factors as the sum of one’s life experiences, faith, political ideology, and so on. For a school to present “social justice” as something that can be learned (and graded) is deeply terrifying, as it assumes that only the school’s definition of social justice is acceptable, or that there can be a “right answer” at all. In short, to insist that only an institutional conception of social justice can be correct is both a terrible encroachment upon a student’s individual right to freedom of conscience and simple coercion.

Read the whole thing. Bryn Mawr's president, Nancy Vickers, responded to FIRE's inquiries, and so far it looks like the Social Justice Program will likely not become a requirement. As FIRE notes:

The most important element of President Vickers’ response, besides her demonstrated understanding of the essentiality of freedom of conscience, is learning that the SJPP is in no way mandatory for Bryn Mawr students. That’s a crucial point: If Bryn Mawr isn’t forcing students to participate in the SJPP or accept its conception of social justice, the SJPP is no longer objectionable, as students surely enjoy the basic associational right to participate in programs of their choice.

But check out Victor Davis Hanson, who points to the more everyday madness seen across American academe. In the last few weeks Americans have seen all kinds of campus PC follies, including not just Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's invitation to Columbia, but Irwin Chemerinsky's on-again, off-again job offer to head UCI's new law school, Lawrence Summers' yanked invitation to speak at a UC Davis board of regents dinner, and the unsuccessful attempt to scuttle Stanford's appointment of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to an anti-terrorism task-force at the Hoover Institution:

In each of the above cases, the general public has had to remind these universities that their campuses should welcome thinkers who have distinguished themselves in their fields, regardless of politics and ideology. The liberal Chemerinsky, the Clinton Democrat Summers and the conservative Rumsfeld have all courted controversy -- and all alike met the criterion of eminent achievement.

But the propagandist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not. Unlike Chemerinsky, Rumsfeld and Summers, he used the prestige of an Ivy-League forum solely to popularize his violent views -- and to sugarcoat the mayhem his terrorists inflict on Americans and his promises to wipe out Israel.

Here's a simple tip to the clueless tenured class about why a Larry Summers or Donald Rumsfeld should be welcome to speak, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shunned: former Cabinet secretaries -- yes; homicidal dictators killing Americans -- no.

Things haven't gone entirely mad on America's college campuses, but it's a close run thing, to be sure (Hanson's piece doesn't mention Hofstra's invitation of pro-terror attorney Lynne Stewart to lecture at the law school's "Lawyering at the Edge" conference).

Reflections on Long Beach City College

My school, Long Beach City College, is celebrating its 80th anniversary this week. The Long Beach Press-Telegram wrote a nice editorial on the role of the college in the life of the Long Beach community:

As LBCC turns 80 today, it is important to recognize what has taken place inside those old buildings. The college has made incredible contributions to students, the work force and to the community since it first opened in 1927...[the college] educates students who often cannot afford or are not yet prepared for traditional four-year campuses. Others are ready for the Cal States and UCs, but do not want to go into debt for their first two years of college.

But that is only part of the LBCC story. City College is often the last stop for students at the other end of the scale, those who need the remedial skills they did not - or chose not - to get in high school. Instructors there are charged with the awesome task of getting unprepared students prepared for college-level work.

Read the rest of the editorial. LBCC also has a reputation as having one of the strongest extracurricular programs in the region, and the college's boosters help the campus retain its standard of community leadership as well.

On a personal level, I've been very proud to make my career as a community college instructor at LBCC. Community colleges are not presitigious institutions, and in fact some graduates of Ph.D. programs are often not encouraged to apply at the two-year level, as the community college teaching load is not always conducive to research. Yet, I like the absence of the "publish-or-perish" thing - I read or research what I want, with no demands for publication. It's a trade off between prestige and flexibility, and not a bad one at that.

But sometimes I'm taken back by some of the things people will say about community colleges or my position as a two-year college professor.

Over at FireDogLake the other day, I challenged Christy Hardin Smith's attacks on General Petraeus (in one of my periodic commenting forays into the hard-left blogosphere).

Check out the thread: I obviously went into the hornet's nest and was attacked relentlessly. I was called a "dick" by Hardin Smith. Other commenters likely Googled me to find out where I taught, with one commenter dismissing my community college teaching as speaking to "a lack of ability." Others started denouncing me as "Douglass", with the emphasis on "ass." Still others argued "it's a junior college" and he doesn't teach "upper division" classes. Some even questioned whether I was really an associate professor!

And for what? Why all these ad hominems? For criticizing an attack post on General Petraeus' credibility, a post I said was about as nasty as MoveOn.org?

In any case, no worry. FireDogLake's a bastion of Bush-bashing anti-Americanism and the commenters there are ignorant and shamelessly intolerant.

But let me leave readers with a little more perspective on the communty college tradition from my experience: I'm a rigorous professor, and I have very high expectations for my students. In my international relations and comparative politics courses, I'm training students in political science fundamentals, in the disciplinary literature and methods needed for successful university transfer. Many of my students go on to Berkeley, UCLA, and USC, and other excellent four-year collleges. I seek to challenge my charges - many of whom have come from disadvantaged backgrounds - so they'll be ready for the rigors and competition of elite university life.

My students often thank me for pushing them. Here's an e-mail from a student who transferred to Berkeley awhile back, and was responding to a quick note I sent her to see how she was doing:

It's funny that you write to me now...[I was] just reflecting today on how your classes provided such an excellent foundation for the political science courses...taken so far. I'm actually in my second semester in Berkeley so I still have about a year and a half left until I graduate and go to law school...Academically I think Berkeley is overrated; they hardly require critical thinking or analysis and make us rely heavily on readings and honing the skill of regurgitating them. I wish the grading was more difficult and we weren't babied so much here but I guess the demographics of these students give them more of a sense of entitlement to an A grade than the students in Long Beach. I don't know if I'm making any sense but it's just my analysis of my experience, Berkeley is only difficult to me because it's this little bubble that is so detached from the real world; academically it's very easy if one works hard enough. The professors seem so much more concerned with their own research and reputation that they allow for a system in which the students to learn for a grade as opposed to acquiring real knowledge. I hope your classes are going well; some of the best readings I've ever read for political science came from your course and the same authors always reappear, so I guess I'm saying you made a really good and relevant choice with the readings. The case studies were especially helpful and mirror what we are doing in one of my political science classes now. It was nice hearing from you, thank you for your continued support.

I get comments like this from my former students every now and then.

These testimonials are some of the most important rewards of teaching. Community colleges are vital to the lives of their neighborhoods, as the Long Beach Press-Telegram editorial indicates, and as my experiences confirm.

I find it disturbingly ironic that radicals who consider themselves "progressives" are so intent to impugn the credentials of professors at the community college level. In fact, the students who I teach need the best possible instruction possible: If you think about it, I'm one of those "highly qualified" instructors teaching "disadvantage students" in "depressed neighborhoods" (the type of teachers liberals are always demanding when they bash standards-based education).

But facts like this don't get in the way of the pseudo-elitist idiots like those over at FireDogLake and elsewhere. These folks have no clue as to what it's really like in the educational trenches, and frankly, they don't even care.

Classroom Indoctrination

Mark Bauerlein put up a brief but penetrating essay yesterday at RealClearPolitics on feminist theory and classroom indoctrination. Check it out:

"Reclaim Your Rights as a Liberal Educator." That's the title of a short essay in this month's Academe, organ of the American Association of University Professors. The phrase has all the imagination of a slogan unfurled at countless marches, but what it lacks in wit it makes up for in fortitude of the uniquely academic kind. Author Julie Kilmer, women's studies and religion professor at Olivet College, sounds the standard "they're-out-to-get-us" call and rallies her brethren to take back the classroom. We have, too, a vicious aggressor: conservative student groups that confront professors of perceived liberal bias, and they form a national network out to undermine the faculty, who come off as vulnerable and innocent professionals. While the professors uphold "freedom of inquiry to examine the worth of controversial ideas" and "teach college students to use analytical thinking in the development of new ideas," groups such as Students for Academic Freedom do their best to subvert the process. Worst of all, they "encourage students to bring complaints against faculty to administrators." To Kilmer, they are no better than spies, and they prompt her to wonder, "Each time a student is resistant to feminist theories and ideas, should I ask if he or she has been placed in my class to question my teaching? How is my teaching affected if I enter the classroom each day asking, 'Is today the day I will be called to the president's office?"

Bauerlein suggests that the seige mentality among radical feminists is an overreaction arising out of a deep ideology of victimization. Contrary to the mindset of feminist theorists, the balance of power has not shifted to students (many of whom are feared as potential "plants" installed by college administrators to intimidate classroom teaching activists):

Professor Kilmer worries that a student who "is resistant to feminist theories and ideas" may sit in her class as a "plant," someone to incriminate her and send her upstairs for punishment. That's how she interprets uncongenial students, and it's an astounding conversion. In her class, any student who contests feminist notions falls under a cloud of suspicion. The ordinary run of skeptics, obstructionists, gadflies, wiseacres, and sulkers that show up in almost every undergraduate classroom is recast as an ideological cadre. If a student in a marketing class were to dispute the morality of the whole endeavor, no doubt liberal professors would salute him as a noble dissenter. But when he criticizes feminism, he violates a trust. He doesn't just pose intellectual disagreement. He transgresses classroom protocol.

Behold the transformation. An ideology has become a measure of responsibility. A partisan belief is professional etiquette. A controversial outlook is an academic norm. Political bias suffuses the principles of scattered disciplines. Advocacy stands as normal and proper pedagogy. That's the sleight-of-hand, and it activates in far too many decisions in curriculum, grading, hiring, and promotion. I remember a committee meeting to discuss hiring a 19th-century literature specialist when one person announced, "We can only consider people who do race." For her, "doing race" wasn't a political or ideological preference. It was a disciplinary prerequisite.

Read the whole thing. Bauerlein goes further to suggest that classroom indoctrination is the ultimate form of politically correctness. Critical thinking - as demonstrated by the critical dissection and rejection of such radical paradigms - is heresy. If you're not in with the hip pedagogy, you're a problem, a troublemaker, a non-comformist. You're out!

More Californians Renouncing English at Home

Today's Los Angeles Times reports on data from the Census Bureau indicating that 43 percent of those in California, and 53 percent in Los Angeles County, speak a language other than English at home:

Bienvenidos. Huan ying. Dobro pozhalovat.

In California, "welcome" is more of an international affair than ever -- with nearly 43% of residents speaking a language other than English at home, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. The trend was even more pronounced in Los Angeles, where more than 53% of residents speak another language at home.

Spanish is by far the most common, but Californians also converse in Korean, Thai, Russian, Hmong, Armenian and dozens of other languages.

The census numbers are likely to fuel a decades-long debate in California over immigrants continuing to use their native tongue. There have been battles over bilingual education, foreign-language ballots and English-only restrictions on business signs.

While immigration is the driving force for the state's linguistic diversity, experts said people often speak another language out of choice rather than necessity.

Some do so to get ahead professionally, while others want to maintain connections with their homelands.

The article provides this interesting example of the trend:

Yadira Quezada, 30, speaks mostly English at work, where she coordinates an after-school program for elementary students in Los Angeles.

But at home, she speaks only Spanish. She and her husband are fluent in English, but they don't want their four sons to lose their Spanish or to sound like "gringos" when they speak it.

There may be advantages to such practices, although the article notes unfavorable trends associated with insufficient language assimilation:

The downside is that many people who speak other languages at home are not proficient in English -- making them more likely to earn low wages and live in poor neighborhoods....

Among people living below the poverty line, 56% speak a language other than English in the home, compared with 41% for those above the poverty line, according to the census report.

"Isolation is problematic," said Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, chairman of UCLA's Department of Asian American Studies. "While it reflects the strong ties to the home country, it also suggests that folks in this situation are inherently more cut off from society and less able to participate and take advantage of opportunities here."

And the isolation is also felt by some English speakers living in areas where foreign languages are prevalent. Dental office administrator Mia Bonavita, 39, recently moved from San Diego to Monterey Park, where business at many stores is done in Chinese. Bonavita says the language barrier is difficult.

"I feel like an outsider," she said. "It's difficult to get to know your neighbors."

The linguistic diversity also affects the schools, where educators struggle to meet students' needs.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, there are more than 265,000 English learners who speak 91 languages. The district has a special translation unit, but must rely on parents and community members for some languages.

Southern California has numerous ethnic enclaves where speaking English is not a necessity, including parts of the San Gabriel Valley, Little Saigon, East L.A. and Koreatown. And some residents there say the lack of English hasn't diminished their lives.

I've written much on immigration issues and cultural assimilation.

My main concerns - amid our recent national immigration debate - have focused on illegal immigration (border lawlessness and the entitlement culture of immigrant rights activists) and threats from multiculturalism to the maintenance of a common national identity.

On the latter, I agree with Samuel Huntington, when he writes about the "Hispanic challenge":

The extent and nature of this [late-20th century] immigration differ fundamentally from those of previous immigration, and the assimilation successes of the past are unlikely to be duplicated with the contemporary flood of immigrants from Latin America. This reality poses a fundamental question: Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish).

I have tremendous respect for ethnic diveristy (and I live it daily in my classrooms and neighborhoods).

Yet, I remain convinced - like Huntington - that America's many strengths are rooted in the nation's Anglo-Protestant cultural heritage. That heritage is a powerful glue binding our disparate ethnic enclaves into one society, but at some point a fabric frays, and the binds that hold together may fail.

Teaching Struggling Students

Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times discusses the everyday hardships of students, and the difficulties such problems present for life inside the classroom:

A friend sent me an e-mail the other day. He teaches third grade at a public school in San Bernardino County, and as he was getting ready for the start of a new year, he found tucked into a folder a note that he had scribbled to himself in the middle of a previous school year.

The words were inspired by one of the more mundane bits of class management, but as he began the work, the reality of the task began to sink in.

"Here I am -- another month of teaching gone by -- contemplating our school's monthly awards: Perfect Attendance, Outstanding Citizen, Outstanding Scholar, Superior Writer, Great Reader. . . [and] all I can think of is: How about an award for Psychological Survivor, Emotional Duress Survivor? In other words, awards for just coping with life."

When my friend wrote his note, he was teaching a class of 30 fifth-graders, and it was easy for the lives of the students, whom he had slowly gotten to know, to overshadow any consideration of monthly achievement. Here are a few of his descriptions:

* A girl who was once locked in a dark closet for eight hours by a baby sitter. The child talked longingly of her dad, who was in prison;

* A girl who was sexually abused at a very young age and taught to steal money from purses at age 2;

* A girl still coping with her grandmother's near-fatal car accident. She brought in newspaper clippings of the accident along with some shaved hair from her grandmother...

Here - and elsewhere, in classrooms across America - some form of psychological trauma in children's lives trumps whatever cards educators and politicians are trying to play. Some of the trauma is the result of poverty, to be sure. In my friend's district, for instance, three-quarters of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches, and in his note he described gang stories and tales of parental drug abuse and violence.

But poverty is only part of the problem, which is really more about the complicated existences that all children lead. So why do politicians and school boards spend so much time discussing budgets and testing and oversight and accountability?

No doubt they are easier to talk about than the emotional lives of children who are often left to struggle by themselves (or, if they are lucky, with a teacher) through matters of grief, abuse, divorce and special needs. It's no wonder then that so many teachers feel that what they are up against on a daily basis is often ignored.

I would bet that the great majority of teachers - with the exception, perhaps, of those teaching in the most affluent, advantaged neighborhoods - would be able to share similar stories of students' personal hardships and educational challenges.

As a teacher of many students from very diverse and underprivileged backgrounds, I've had students time and again who had been victims of domestic violence, who were recovering from stroke or other debilitating diseases, who had been on welfare with multiple kids and inadequate child care, or those who had tragically lost loved ones to murderous violence in the inner city.

Situations like these are not infrequent, and they make the teaching life stimulating and rewarding, especially when one is able to make a real difference in the life-chances of students.

One thing I noticed about the Curwen article is his reporting avoids pleas for extenuating treatment. Student confessions of hardship are often accompanied by appeals to sympathy. But educational standards must never erode in the face of ever-growing student struggles - in my opinion, at least.

Teachers should make every effort to treat students equally and maintain a rigorous curriculum. Helping students succeed despite their troubles should be paramount. Publicizing and attempting to make available student success resources at the school can help, but in the end, some kids may not be as successful as they might, at least until they can change the life circumstances that make schooling a hard knocks enterprise for them.

SAT Scores and Tattooed Avril Wannabes

The College Board announced a national decline in average SAT scores this week.

I wasn't planing on writing about it, but considering the discussion of satire around here lately, I thought I'd share this hillarious post by Harvey over at IMAO:

Average scores on the reading and math sections of the SAT test declined slightly this year, indicating that America's teenagers are dumber than ever. This news was greeted by jubilation from Democrats across the country.

Harvey notes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's statement:

The fact is, Democrats have nothing to offer the average intelligent, self-sufficient person. All we can do is take advantage of drooling idiots who want to put their lives in the hands of the Nanny State. Our only shot at political power is the votes of people who are too dumb to think for themselves. This time, it's the jackpot. Think for themselves? Hell, these pierced & tatted Avril wanna-be's can barely think at all!

Read the whole thing. Pelosi apparently danced a little jig upon hearing the news. Yet, as Harvey explains:

... some people objected to being called "mega-tard-tastic" just because of piss-poor standardized test scores. Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Upton (Miss South Carolina) explained her point of view.

Lauren Upton, of course, has become famous around the blogosphere with her response to the fact that just 1 in 5 people can find the U.S. on a world map:

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because…. some.. people out there… in our nation….. don’t have maps and I believe that our education, like such as in South Africa and the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should.. uh….our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S….. er, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children…..

Here's Upton's YouTube:

According to Harvey, upon hearing Upton's answer, Speaker Pelosi danced another jig.

Great stuff!