No Solutions to the U.S. News Problem.
I've long maintained that those U.S. News guides exist because so much of higher education has gone down the rat-holes of access, assessment, remediation, and retention, and kids with ambition (or pushy parents?) buy those guides in order to identify institutions where students might pick up a respectable education (or at least validate their ability with a signal.) "The issue, however, is precisely that the U.S. News rankings exist because at the margin, many parents and students seek an experience more like Harvard (or Wisconsin before it went sports-mad) and less like a diploma mill. Institutions of higher education that fail to grasp this point may be reinforcing social stratification."
Let the record show that I was sounding off about those things while still on faculty.Thus, when Chicago State is a dropout factory with a corrupt administration, when Valdosta State sells itself as "endless possibilities for outdoor fun" while sanctioning a student for protesting a parking lot, when Palm Beach State is a dropout factory with thought police, it is these academic gulags that deserve special attention, for operating academic gulags that promise but fail to deliver upward advancement, it matters. To repeat: students at Dartmouth or Berkeley or Northern Illinois know how to stand up for themselves.
And when (to scroll through University Diaries) Louisville or North Carolina or Kentucky or Mississippi State or Tennessee put beer-'n-circus and seat licenses ahead of academics, it matters.
Unfortunately, neither former Yale professor William Deresiewicz, in Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life (breathe!) nor Santa Clara's John M. Ellis, in The Breakdown of Higher Education: How it Happened, The Damage it Does & What Can Be Done does much, either about fixing higher education or about the social stratification that those rankings reinforce.
I'm combining Book Reviews Nos. 7 and 8 in one post both as a way of clearing out a backlog of books to review that has piled up during the past two years plus of corona tyranny, Trumpian excess, and Brewer, Buck and Packer teams that often impress and too often fall short; and because both books made the same impression on me. If a book provides lots of food for thought, there will be lots of marginal notes, and I often note the passages I have flagged on the end-papers, in part as an aid to being able to put together a coherent, or at least somewhat orderly, review later. The total marginal notes in Sheep and Breakdown? Zero.
Professor Deresiewicz's audience might be the people most desperate to hang onto their position in the coastal elite. Thus, he can't shut up about Harvard, or the other usual suspects. He notes, "Notoriously pre-professional places like Penn, Duke, or Washington University, or notoriously anti-intellectual ones like Princeton or Dartmouth, are clearly far worse [than Yale]. But that's precisely what's so frightening. If Yale is the best, then the rest is pretty bleak." That's page 15, and if you're not going to be the grand champion lamb in your high school (sorry, the 4-H kids do a better job than the aspirants to the Ivies), consider yourself, as I note, screwed. "Alas, the community colleges, the land grants, and the mid-majors don't provide a pipeline to the chattering classes. Thus, perhaps, the Ivy obsession among the coastal readers."
It used to be, if you weren't the kind of man who was "clubbable," the Ivies weren't for you. But the urban universities and the state flagships once offered the same sort of education, if you'd but take it. These days, although the sheep might have different principal interests, they're still, well, from a similar flock. Check out pages 38-40. "Now the colleges talk about assembling a well-rounded class by bringing together a variety of 'well-lopsided' students: a junior journalist, a budding astronomer, a future diplomat, a language whiz. Those ten extracurricular activities that a typical admitted student has will not all go in ten different directions. Three or four or five will represent a special area of focus: math or art or student government." And thus, there's enough commonality among the lopsidedness to breed conformity, and all these matriculants now see themselves as rivals for those plum graduate or professional or medical school slots. "The logic and the values are the same across a wide array of schools, even if the level of ambition, or aptitude, or neurosis, or parental wealth is not." Ultimately, what the Ivies produce is the Thomas "World is Flat" phenomenon in which the Chinese, Pakistani, Chicago Hispanic, and Legacy "well-lopsided" high achievers have more in common with each other than they do with (to borrow from Sheep) any randomly chosen Bostonians on the rapid transit.
Although Professor Deresiewicz recognizes the Spielberg Effect, he also concedes that the regional comprehensives, mid-majors, and some of the land grants are not competitive.The notion that you can get an equally good education at Fresno State as at Stanford, as the historian Victor Davis Hanson, who has held positions at both institutions, has claimed, or at Linfield College as at Swarthmore, as [Andrew] Hacker and [Claudia] Dreifus insist, strikes me in both cases as a species of willful anti-elitism. Hanson claims himself that the only difference is the students, but even if that's really true (which I seriously doubt) that's quite a big difference indeed. The students determine the level of classroom discussion and of instruction generally. They're the people you spend almost all of your time interacting with when you're not in class. They shape your values and expectations, for good and ill ("it's hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs"). In fact, it's partly because of the students that I'd warn kids away from the Ivies and their peers.
The U.S. News problem exists, though, partly because potential students understand that having a soul to sell might still be a better circle of hell than dealing with people having so much fun with beer-'n-circus that the notion of a soul never occurs to them. In addition, Professor Deresiewicz suggests students avoid the Ivies and the soulless students by considering ... the hundred or so private liberal arts colleges that are out of the top twenty?? That's clearly the upscale audience that has sent their spawn to Harvard Prep Day Care in the first place, and scant consolation for the parents of promising kids from the wrong zip codes.
Excellent Sheep came out after the 2008 financial bubble popped but before the Trump presidency was a thing. Breakdown is more recent, and although Professor Ellis purports to be tilling different fields than Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes or Allan "Closing of the American Mind" Bloom, he's really in the same place.The problem of a corrupt higher education can't be effectively addressed until we focus on the essential core of the problem. We are only distracted and diverted from that if we are thinking about new regulations to guide the faculty, or seeking to advise them as to how academics ought to behave. The root of the problem is the character and temperament of present-day college faculty. Any solution thate does not directly address and attempt to correct the problem of an overwhelmingly one-party, radical activist professoriate is no more than wishful thinking. The problem is one of personnel, not rules or guidance. Large numbers of people holding professorial titles have neither any real interest in academic work, nor aptitude for it, nor the knowledge required for it.
Where do we go from there, dear reader? What he describes is precisely the framework for the beer-'n-circus nonaggression pact of the subprime party school, keeping the status hierarchy going. On the other hand, there is a possibility of employers bypassing higher education, say, by hiring out of high school and sending trainees to certification courses for specific coding or trading or dispatching skills. When Professor Ellis quotes Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball (and reinforces Cold Spring Shops) with "academia 'has reneged on its contract with society'," perhaps the best course of action for people who will be hard done by the current dispensation to breach, perhaps anticipatorily, that contract.
I see in neither work any argument that the current methods of producing elite leadership have served the public well. Recognizing the problem is the first step toward fixing it. Academia delenda est.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
Let the record show that I was sounding off about those things while still on faculty.Thus, when Chicago State is a dropout factory with a corrupt administration, when Valdosta State sells itself as "endless possibilities for outdoor fun" while sanctioning a student for protesting a parking lot, when Palm Beach State is a dropout factory with thought police, it is these academic gulags that deserve special attention, for operating academic gulags that promise but fail to deliver upward advancement, it matters. To repeat: students at Dartmouth or Berkeley or Northern Illinois know how to stand up for themselves.
And when (to scroll through University Diaries) Louisville or North Carolina or Kentucky or Mississippi State or Tennessee put beer-'n-circus and seat licenses ahead of academics, it matters.
Unfortunately, neither former Yale professor William Deresiewicz, in Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life (breathe!) nor Santa Clara's John M. Ellis, in The Breakdown of Higher Education: How it Happened, The Damage it Does & What Can Be Done does much, either about fixing higher education or about the social stratification that those rankings reinforce.
I'm combining Book Reviews Nos. 7 and 8 in one post both as a way of clearing out a backlog of books to review that has piled up during the past two years plus of corona tyranny, Trumpian excess, and Brewer, Buck and Packer teams that often impress and too often fall short; and because both books made the same impression on me. If a book provides lots of food for thought, there will be lots of marginal notes, and I often note the passages I have flagged on the end-papers, in part as an aid to being able to put together a coherent, or at least somewhat orderly, review later. The total marginal notes in Sheep and Breakdown? Zero.
Professor Deresiewicz's audience might be the people most desperate to hang onto their position in the coastal elite. Thus, he can't shut up about Harvard, or the other usual suspects. He notes, "Notoriously pre-professional places like Penn, Duke, or Washington University, or notoriously anti-intellectual ones like Princeton or Dartmouth, are clearly far worse [than Yale]. But that's precisely what's so frightening. If Yale is the best, then the rest is pretty bleak." That's page 15, and if you're not going to be the grand champion lamb in your high school (sorry, the 4-H kids do a better job than the aspirants to the Ivies), consider yourself, as I note, screwed. "Alas, the community colleges, the land grants, and the mid-majors don't provide a pipeline to the chattering classes. Thus, perhaps, the Ivy obsession among the coastal readers."
It used to be, if you weren't the kind of man who was "clubbable," the Ivies weren't for you. But the urban universities and the state flagships once offered the same sort of education, if you'd but take it. These days, although the sheep might have different principal interests, they're still, well, from a similar flock. Check out pages 38-40. "Now the colleges talk about assembling a well-rounded class by bringing together a variety of 'well-lopsided' students: a junior journalist, a budding astronomer, a future diplomat, a language whiz. Those ten extracurricular activities that a typical admitted student has will not all go in ten different directions. Three or four or five will represent a special area of focus: math or art or student government." And thus, there's enough commonality among the lopsidedness to breed conformity, and all these matriculants now see themselves as rivals for those plum graduate or professional or medical school slots. "The logic and the values are the same across a wide array of schools, even if the level of ambition, or aptitude, or neurosis, or parental wealth is not." Ultimately, what the Ivies produce is the Thomas "World is Flat" phenomenon in which the Chinese, Pakistani, Chicago Hispanic, and Legacy "well-lopsided" high achievers have more in common with each other than they do with (to borrow from Sheep) any randomly chosen Bostonians on the rapid transit.
Although Professor Deresiewicz recognizes the Spielberg Effect, he also concedes that the regional comprehensives, mid-majors, and some of the land grants are not competitive.The notion that you can get an equally good education at Fresno State as at Stanford, as the historian Victor Davis Hanson, who has held positions at both institutions, has claimed, or at Linfield College as at Swarthmore, as [Andrew] Hacker and [Claudia] Dreifus insist, strikes me in both cases as a species of willful anti-elitism. Hanson claims himself that the only difference is the students, but even if that's really true (which I seriously doubt) that's quite a big difference indeed. The students determine the level of classroom discussion and of instruction generally. They're the people you spend almost all of your time interacting with when you're not in class. They shape your values and expectations, for good and ill ("it's hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs"). In fact, it's partly because of the students that I'd warn kids away from the Ivies and their peers.
The U.S. News problem exists, though, partly because potential students understand that having a soul to sell might still be a better circle of hell than dealing with people having so much fun with beer-'n-circus that the notion of a soul never occurs to them. In addition, Professor Deresiewicz suggests students avoid the Ivies and the soulless students by considering ... the hundred or so private liberal arts colleges that are out of the top twenty?? That's clearly the upscale audience that has sent their spawn to Harvard Prep Day Care in the first place, and scant consolation for the parents of promising kids from the wrong zip codes.
Excellent Sheep came out after the 2008 financial bubble popped but before the Trump presidency was a thing. Breakdown is more recent, and although Professor Ellis purports to be tilling different fields than Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes or Allan "Closing of the American Mind" Bloom, he's really in the same place.The problem of a corrupt higher education can't be effectively addressed until we focus on the essential core of the problem. We are only distracted and diverted from that if we are thinking about new regulations to guide the faculty, or seeking to advise them as to how academics ought to behave. The root of the problem is the character and temperament of present-day college faculty. Any solution thate does not directly address and attempt to correct the problem of an overwhelmingly one-party, radical activist professoriate is no more than wishful thinking. The problem is one of personnel, not rules or guidance. Large numbers of people holding professorial titles have neither any real interest in academic work, nor aptitude for it, nor the knowledge required for it.
Where do we go from there, dear reader? What he describes is precisely the framework for the beer-'n-circus nonaggression pact of the subprime party school, keeping the status hierarchy going. On the other hand, there is a possibility of employers bypassing higher education, say, by hiring out of high school and sending trainees to certification courses for specific coding or trading or dispatching skills. When Professor Ellis quotes Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball (and reinforces Cold Spring Shops) with "academia 'has reneged on its contract with society'," perhaps the best course of action for people who will be hard done by the current dispensation to breach, perhaps anticipatorily, that contract.
I see in neither work any argument that the current methods of producing elite leadership have served the public well. Recognizing the problem is the first step toward fixing it. Academia delenda est.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)