Monday, January 11, 2021




Leaving the Blight of Higher Education: Farewell Faculty

The previous essay dealt with the moral decline of the student body in higher education—one of the motives behind my recent retirement after three decades of teaching college English. When I began teaching, most of the English faculty members, including the chair who hired me, had earned their doctorates in the late 1970s.

They were oleaginous liberals, naturally, but they were also ladies and gentlemen of actual education and considerable high literacy. They took it for granted that the purpose of a literature program was to bring to life in students the Intuition of Form or Imagination about which George Santayana writes in his Sense of Beauty. According to Santayana, “Imagination…generates as well as abstracts; it observes, combines, and cancels; but it also dreams.”

Imagination, Santayana writes, involves spontaneity; it strives toward “the supremely beautiful.”

As the Old Guard went into retirement, a cohort of new assistant professors filled the department’s tenure-track lines. The new phase of aggressive affirmative-action recruitment ensured that this replacement-generation of instructors, overwhelmingly female, differed starkly in character from its precursor-generation.

The new hires came to the institution from the politically radicalized graduate programs of the state universities. Whereas the Old Guard corresponded to a literary-generalist or dilettante model—terms that I use in a wholly positive way—the arrivistes brought with them only their narrow specialisms, as encrusted in their conformist political dogmas.

Mention Santayana to the Old Guard and chances were good that any given one of them would be familiar with the drift, at least, of the philosopher’s work. Mentioning Santayana to an arriviste produces a blank stare.

Richard Weaver’s notion of “presentism” makes itself relevant to the discussion. By “presentism” Weaver intends a mental restriction that has steadily eroded the modern, liberal view of reality. This mental restriction, as he puts it in his Visions of Order (1964), manifests itself primarily in a “decay of memory.”

Weaver writes, “Wherever we look in the ‘progressive’ world we find encouragements not to remember.” Today it is not an “encouragement,” but rather a demand not to remember, as the monument-defacement and statue-toppling of the times so savagely demonstrate. This anti-historical dementia has fully infiltrated graduate studies and through them has colonized the literary branches of higher education. The unending pageant of neologisms and slogans that now makes up “literary studies” illustrates this anti-developmental development.

The Young Guard of current academia bedecks its office doors with posters and bumper stickers in a perpetual spiral of moral one-upmanship. This moral certitude poisonously inveigles everything that novice college instructors undertake.

I once overheard a conversation between two Young Guards, both female, in the departmental commons. One of them was taking over a course relinquished to her by a retiring Old Guard, a senior-year seminar on Theories of Language. One of the earliest theories of language occurs in Plato’s Cratylus, which the previous instructor had listed as required reading, and likewise essays by Gottfried Herder, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Max Müller. “I had to replace them all,” the young woman sighed to her conversational partner; “they were so old.”

Yes, Plato’s Cratylus is old—a fatal flaw to young professors. So she swapped out the historically informed reading list for a jejune textbook anthology.

She had likely never read the Cratylus, or Herder, or Rousseau, or Müller. She knew Chaucer, but only through the lens of political correctness, and she touted the feminist and race-conscious deconstructions of The Canterbury Tales. In respect of her general ignorance, the newly minted instructor of Middle English resembled her bookless students, at whom academic publishers aim textbook anthologies, with their compendia of short excerpts and mini-articles, none of which appeared in print before 2015, promoting the race-class-gender interpretation of everything.

The Young Guard generally replaces traditional literature with contemporary fiction, just as it replaces thinking with sloganeering.

Where newbies cannot replace the traditional with the contemporary, they lard on “the latest theory.” This predilection varies only slightly from the tactic of hyping the latest model in automobile salesmanship. Only a Neanderthal would drive last year’s model or read the Cratylus. It is imperative to be up to date.

Mandatory up-to-date-ness, precisely as Weaver asserts, finds memory, which recalls the past, annoying. Because memory operates as a basis of consciousness its exclusion amounts to a diminution of consciousness, a type of voluntarily embraced amnesia. Weaver wonders “whether there is not some element of suicidal mood” in the presentist concentration on itself, “or at least an element of self-hatred.” He speculates that the presentist might react to the past as though it were a “reproach.” Weaver’s analysis explains a great deal.

The Young Guard brings other traits. The department once housed me in an office-suite next door to one of the new hires—a female affirmative-action selectee concerning whom a senior colleague confided, “Her promotion to tenure is a foregone conclusion.” It became evident that being the workplace neighbor to Lady Entitlement would try anyone sorely.

She trailed after her a gaggle of undergraduate groupies with whom she carried on loud conversations while leaving her office door wide open. The badinage veered into the crass and vulgar, the loud-mouth instructor and her entourage using the f-word constantly. The same badinage revealed itself as resentment-oriented and self-absorbed.

When after weeks of distraction, I sent a polite email asking that the perpetrator at least shut her door, I received an immediate reply of several thousand self-justifying words, the gist of which was, “go f—k yourself.” The then-chair acceded to my request that he should relocate me, but he never disciplined the foul-mouthed intrusion on communal ear-space.

Another female hire also constantly employed the f-word in casual conversation, but more than that she inserted it regularly into her classroom lectures. She belonged to the film studies program that the department, desperately wanting to increase its attractiveness, had imposed on itself. She screened movies in her classroom to a running commentary.

Every five minutes or so, she would pause, tilt her head, and ask rhetorically, “What the f—k?” She uttered the phrase in a studied way, prolonging the vowel in the last word as if it were the acme of rhetorical wit. The department eventually elected her as chair.

In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch links adult functional illiteracy to the persistence of infantile self-adulation beyond childhood. As Lasch and many others have observed, the narcissist suffers, not from an enlarged ego, but from an embarrassingly stunted ego, which looks for ways to conceal from itself knowledge of its limitations.

The narcissist stands “imprisoned in his pseudo-awareness of himself,” Lasch writes. The narcissist will, in his words, “gladly take refuge in an idée fixe, a neurotic compulsion, [or] a ‘magnificent obsession’—anything to get his mind off his own mind.”

Today’s university has structured itself around a narcissistic principle. Affirmative action would thus endow on the meritless the same status as the meritorious so that underachievers might see themselves as receiving the same “just deserts” as achievers.

In order to function, affirmative action must, in effect, penalize achievers, some of whom get pushed aside arbitrarily in the admissions process or, surviving that, have their grades devalued by inflation and their instruction diminished by the curricular dumbing-down. The affirmative principle invokes as its justification the feel-good motif. The affirmative principle therefore elevates sentiment over objectively measured competence.

Students would rather watch a movie than read a book, not least because reading a book taxes their ability. The instructor wants glowing student evaluations at the end of the semester. She eschews books and repeats a piece of mouthy vileness popular among students, “What the f—k?” She congratulates herself when they applaud, which they do. Everything is cool.

Except that everything is not cool. Programs like film studies and creative writing carry the same inflated price tag as physics and police science, but they offer no return on the investment.

Affirmative action entangles itself Gordian-knot-wise with the stupefaction of the curriculum and the dissolution of standards. Film studies and creative writing attract horde-like enrollments. The upshot of film studies is producing a 3-minute video clip as one’s capstone assignment; of creative writing—publishing a one-and-a-half-page story in The Consolation Review.

In both cases, actual higher education shrinks away. In both cases, the institution defrauds its clientele. Students—say rather their parents or their lenders—pay. The college, through its faculties, flatters and deceives.

That last statement should be linked to an earlier statement. Santayana believed that the study of grammar and poetry formed the person at a higher level. Higher education as classically conceived proposed the attunement of the individual to the cosmic hierarchy, or what Arthur Lovejoy, in a famous study, called The Great Chain of Being.

That sounds grandiose only because, over the last century, a strain of nihilism has relentlessly defamed any Western notion of an elevated view. Lacking that view, however, institutions once accountable now promote into supervisory stations people whose public face consists in the look-at-me exercise of 8th-grade verbal scurrility.

The contemporary university forms nothing. Like the crushing backpack (see Part I), it deforms: It stunts, connives, deprives, confuses, and misleads; it rallies neurosis, corrupts language, lifts incompetence into rank, scorns merit, and pats envy on the back, all the while enriching itself by charging extortionate fees for its systematic malpractice.

A Platonizing Neanderthaler who reads George Santayana and Arthur Lovejoy and takes them seriously, I have remarked my anomalous presence in the marshlands of the contemporary academy for quite some time. As long ago as 1996, then living and teaching in Michigan, I published my report Declining Standards at Michigan Public Universities.

The research for Declining Standards uncovered the fact that Michigan businesses, hiring wave after wave of newly minted baccalaureates from the state institutions of higher education, had to remediate their new employees in such basics as written expression and the fundamentals of arithmetic—out of their own pockets to the extent of tens of millions of dollars a year.

Nothing has changed in a quarter of a century. The state college and university system is more than ever a criminal shuffle and a savage trespass into the heart of civilization.

The Ways in Which Colleges Legally Silence Troublesome Scholars

Radicals on campus do more than just “cancel” speakers. Failure by administrators to stand firm alters the atmosphere at colleges as well as, eventually, our system of government. The most profound consequences may come less from ideological zealots than from our own cowardice to oppose them.

Some colleges now respond to ideological intimidation not by defiantly defending their principles, but by devising furtive techniques to eliminate politically incorrect faculty.

In a new Martin Center policy brief, Scholastic Gag Orders: NDAs, Mandatory Arbitration, and the Legal Threat to Academics, I explore how non-disparagement agreements (NDAs) and mandatory arbitration (MA) provide a veil of legally enforced secrecy, shielding administrations from negative publicity, professional censure, and legitimate oversight, as they cleanse their faculty of ideologically heterodox professors.

Both mechanisms hide conduct that would incur professional and public condemnation. They even shift legal liability from leaders who breach agreements and ethics to terminated scholars, including possible criminal punishments.

More than academic freedom is threatened. The public judiciary is used to enforce institutional takeovers. Not only are shared governance, faculty assemblies, and oversight by governing boards compromised, but freedom of expression and even judicial integrity.

Non-disparagement agreements exist only to curtail academic freedom and conceal other ethical culpability. Non-disclosure agreements may be legitimate but are often used to tie the hands of academics like non-disparagement agreements.

Using NDAs, universities can terminate professors without warning, cutting them off from grievance procedures and oversight bodies. Salary and benefits may then be temporarily restored only upon renouncing legal claims, waiving statutory and constitutional rights, and above all silence.

Law itself is enlisted and inverted into an instrument of extortion. Dismissed professors become legally punishable for mentioning institutions’ contractual and ethical breaches. Colleagues, students, alumni, donors—even oversight bodies—are all kept in the dark.

Like any restriction on free expression, the scope is ambiguous and broad enough to intimidate professors from defending their reputations or criticizing such practices in professional publications. So ashamed are colleges of using them, that NDAs invariably prohibit divulging their own existence.

Ironically, NDAs appear less likely to be used by liberal than conservative institutions, notably Evangelical Christian colleges, to disguise their capitulation to leftist pressure. Fearing controversy and avoiding public debate, these institutions make “routine use of non-disclosure agreements that stop current and former staff and board members from discussing sensitive matters.”

NDAs used as “hush money” have been used at Liberty University, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Patrick Henry College. “I am appalled by Evangelical Christian use of non-disclosure agreements to prevent further discussion of concerns,” Robert Gagnon of Houston Baptist University writes. “I expect this of left-wing ‘liberal’ denominational structures, not Evangelical institutions.”

Citing a common pretext, an SBTS trustee comments, “[Professors] allegedly were being terminated for financial reasons, but if that’s the case, why silence them?”

Mandatory arbitration (MA) clauses (often disguised) similarly conceal wrongdoing. Here, too, professors are summarily dismissed, cut off from their salaries, courts, grievance procedures, oversight bodies, and, most importantly, collegial and public opinion. They can object only in secret proceedings run by lawyers who can suppress ethical issues because proceedings are closed and unrecorded, and public disclosure is punishable. Here again, unethical conduct is concealed from students, donors, alumni, senates, trustees, accreditors, and the public.

Even in non-academic contexts, MA is harshly criticized for enabling crushing settlements against individuals (who may not even be present to defend themselves) in secret, while depriving them of statutory and constitutional rights by eliminating virtually all due process protections. Perhaps defensible in commercial disputes among businesses, imposing this practice on individuals (originally prohibited) is questionable.

MA is especially “predatory” in academic settings because professors can be airbrushed out of an institution and gagged.

In academia, material settlements are trivial compared to the benefits provided by the procedure. The institution wins before the process ever begins because the secrecy protects its reputation, regardless of how many professional, legal, moral, or religious principles it transgresses.

When self-interest is at stake, high-minded pretenses about debating ideas and “critical thinking” give way to functionaries quietly stabbing scholars in the back.
Even professors who decline to claim damages for unjust dismissals cannot be certain that any public criticism will not trigger an arbitration procedure against them by the institution. In absentia, public comments could mean exorbitant damage awards and legal fees.

Arbitrators have both means and incentives to collude with administrations and twist the knife on recalcitrant faculty who go public with damaging information. Criticizing a college’s ethics, including the arbitration procedure itself, undermines both the college’s credibility and the arbitration firm’s principal selling point.

Faculty governance and oversight are also casualties. Administrations become absolute by suppressing dissent or criticism, rendering faculty voiceless—and governing boards and accreditors impotent. No controversy can ever again surface.

Here, too, Christian colleges have devised their own unique subterfuge, disguising arbitration with a halo of religious-therapeutic sanctimony called “Christian conciliation.”

Claiming to “conciliate” disagreements and promising less “adversarial” procedures that elevate adversaries spiritually (“change their attitudes and behavior”), the therapeutic camouflage further displaces principles of open justice. Administrations jumping onto the MA bandwagon for self-interested reasons can advertise it as moral redemption for those they plan to injure, who lose any recourse against arbitrary or punitive judgments.

The most debilitating feature of NDAs and MA is the admission of intellectual inadequacy by institutions of learning. When self-interest is at stake, high-minded pretenses about debating ideas and “critical thinking” give way to functionaries quietly stabbing scholars in the back and stopping the mouths of critics with legal threats. This behavior by university leaders confirms how our colleges have become havens for “people who don’t really belong in academia but…abuse it for their own selfish purposes.”

New global ranking system shows Australian universities are ahead of the pack

Whether it’s purchasing power parity or the Happiness Index, global comparisons require benchmarking. Sport does this well with World Cups and the Olympics, or better still the single ranking familiar to tennis and golf aficionados.

The problem with universities is there are around a dozen rankings. Each is a variable mix of research, reputation and teaching metrics, leading to quite different and confusing results.

University rankings certainly have their critics, who point to the potential to mislead students and distort research priorities. Our newly developed Aggregate Ranking of Top Universities (ARTU) overcomes the flaws of singling out performance in any one ranking.

Read more: Beyond the black hole of global university rankings: rediscovering the true value of knowledge and ideas
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This aggregated ranking helps to broaden the range of assessment — from research citations (frequency referred to in the academic literature) and impact, through to reputation, and qualitative as well as quantitative measures. It also helps address the inherent imperfections of any one of the individual ranking systems, when seen on their own.

The ARTU orders universities by cumulative performance over the mainstream scoring systems. Condensing the three most influential — the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education (THE) and Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) — gives a single broad overview of a university’s position.

How does Australia fare?

Australia now has 13 universities in the global top 200. That’s an increase from just eight two years ago.

Australia ranks fourth in the world in 2020, after the US, UK and Germany. Indeed per head of population, Australia is well ahead of these nations, and second behind the Netherlands for nations of more than 10 million.

This is no new entrant fluke, as Australia has seven universities in the top 100. That’s 7% of the best universities for 0.3% of the world’s population (or 1.6% of global GDP). Two Australian institutions, Monash and UNSW, are among the five that jumped more than 20 places within the top 100 between 2012 and 2020.

Asia on the rise

Although rankings are compiled annually, performance is a lagging indicator assessed over several years. For instance, research citations can be judged between five to 11 years later.

On the one hand, this should help cushion our pandemic-affected universities from precipitous falls over the next few years. On the other, it conspires against rapid rises up the global ladder.

This makes the ascendancy of East Asian universities, and in particular those from China, all the more remarkable. The top two Chinese universities now come in at 18th and 27th internationally, ahead of Australia’s lead, the University of Melbourne at 29th. The next four Chinese universities have risen more than 100 spots since 2012 to crack the top 75. This is especially impressive given that research is largely judged on English-language outputs.

Australia has fared well in this battle of the old versus new order. Long-established universities benefit from major endowments, philanthropy and long-run reputation. Australia’s universities in the top 200 have an average age of 78, compared to over two centuries for overseas unis in top 200.

China has this disadvantage too. But China does have the benefit of a booming economy, which drives top-down investment in cutting-edge technologies and academic excellence through STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) research at scale.

A measure of the value of international students

It can be argued that Australian universities thrived on the back of 28 years of growth, a desirable location, political stability and relatively open borders to knowledge-based entrants. But the standout contribution has been from international students. In absolute terms universities in Australia have the second-highest number after the US.

Simply put, the margin between international and domestic student income covers the indirect costs of strategic investment in research, teaching and other areas. Australian universities need to raise around an additional dollar in support and infrastructure spending for every dollar won in grant income. And all this while fulfilling the core mission of educating local students, with 43% of 25-to-34-year-olds now having a bachelor degree, up from 34% in 2010.

But coronavirus has laid bare the Achilles heel in this business model. Closed borders and geopolitical shifts have delivered a major blow to cross-subsidisation, as well as to the international collaboration so crucial for team-based research addressing the world’s grand challenges.

Vaccines now offer some light at the end of the tunnel, but it will be many years before the world resembles its former self, if ever. Trust in science and an R&D-led economy argue for a major role for universities in the recovery from COVID-19. But the only certainty is uncertainty.

So expect considerable volatility in higher education. How well our universities stack up will depend in part on how international competitors fare, and in particular their relative economies and resourcefulness. Australia looks well positioned here, but will need to weather the threats posed by contraction, domestic constraints and a challenging business model.

Rankings are not perfect. They do not assess all aspects of the mission of Australian universities and are rightly subject to criticism, often from institutions not doing so well. But rankings are the best surrogate measure of global standing that we have and they are here to stay, whether we like them or loathe them.

As the aggregate scoreboard for top universities around the globe, ARTU is well placed to track the shake-up from COVID-19 as it plays out in our universities over the next five to ten years.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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