by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
First Principles<\/em><\/p>\n Part two of a symposium on the educational impact of Obama and the New Progressivism. Read\u00a0part one<\/a>\u00a0on the economic prospects and\u00a0part three<\/a>\u00a0on culture.<\/strong><\/p>\n What changes might we expect in higher education from an Obama presidency? The answer is easy: none. What we will get is just more of the same. The ideology that underlies Obama\u2019s \u201cprogressive\u201d political philosophy in areas such as health care, the economy, or defense has in fact long dominated America\u2019s colleges and universities. Indeed, this ideology has been entrenched for so long that the last eight years under Bush passed with barely a ripple on the vast ocean of politicized mediocrity. The slight improvements in campus life that did occur \u2014 rollbacks on unconstitutional speech codes, for example, or exposures of politicized curricula \u2014 were the work not primarily of Republican politicians, but of organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.<\/p>\n To take one example, affirmative action policies have been only slightly modified by recent Supreme Court decisions, and so we can expect these policies to continue. In other words, an Obama presidency will most likely not expand or strengthen them because they are already working quite well for someone with his political perspective. The fact is, admissions and hiring processes have incorporated subjective criteria \u2014 essays documenting \u201cchallenges\u201d the student has faced, for example \u2014 that can outweigh more objective criteria such as test scores or GPA. Something like \u201covercoming racism\u201d or other proxies for racial identity can be put in the scales and thus deliver the same result as an unconstitutional quota. So too with hiring. On my campus, despite a California state initiative banning the use of race in hiring decisions, our recruitment procedures are rife with explicit racial awareness. We still gather data on the race and sex of applicants, we still record the race and gender of search committee members, and we still must have an \u201cEqual Employment Opportunity\u201d commissar whose imprimatur is needed for a hire to proceed. All the state initiative achieved was the substitution of the title \u201cEEO officer\u201d for what used to be called the \u201cAffirmative Action officer.\u201d<\/p>\n Likewise with the Big-Brother intrusions into campus life created by sexual harassment law. Eight years of a Republican administration did nothing to mitigate the self-censorship and damage to academic freedom fostered by a law that enshrines the subjective, transient perspectives of the thin-skinned, malevolent, or neurotic as the determiner of actionable sexual harassment. The machinery of these laws \u2014 the campus inquisitions, re-education programs, and disciplinary mechanisms \u2014 is firmly in place and needs no help from Obama in order to keep performing their most important function: policing and punishing politically incorrect speech.<\/p>\n These stealth affirmative action and Orwellian sexual harassment policies, however, serve the deeper ideology that now controls the university at every level, regardless of which party is in power. That ideology is \u201cdiversity.\u201d The scare-quotes are necessary because what is called \u201cdiversity\u201d on most college campuses is quite the opposite: the imposition of a unified leftist orthodoxy on every level of the university, including hiring, promotion, programs, and curricula. In the imposition of \u201cdiversity,\u201d superficial differences of skin color, ethnicity, sex, or sexual preference are used as camouflage for a uniform leftist-progressive world-view. That\u2019s why registered Democrats in many university departments outnumber Republicans 9 or 10\u20131, when one can even find a Republican to count. So much for the university\u2019s traditional mission to foster independent thought, critical analysis of received wisdom, and a diversity of intellectual viewpoints and perspectives, let alone Matthew Arnold\u2019s goal of promoting \u201cthe free play of the mind on all subjects.\u201d Ask the ousted Harvard President Lawrence Summers how that worked out for him.<\/p>\n Once again, Obama only has to let continue the same process of politicization that has been developing since the Sixties and that informs his own political ideology. The orthodox dogma that underlay Obama\u2019s campaign rhetoric \u2014 all the world\u2019s ills can be traced to American misdeeds, Western crimes like racism, imperialism and colonialism, or the greed of lupine capitalists exploiting the Third World \u201cother\u201d and ravaging the environment \u2014 this dogma can be heard every day in thousands of classrooms across the land. Whole departments such as Women\u2019s Studies, Culture Studies, and Ethnic Studies exist to preach this doctrine of Western criminality. In the traditional disciplines such as History or English, the same melodrama of Western wickedness informs the courses taught, the books chosen for class, and the perspective shaping the presentation of the material. As a result, most students will graduate with scant knowledge of the great tradition of English literature or even the basic facts of American history. Anybody who doubts this should go down to his local college bookstore and scan the titles ordered for classes.<\/p>\n If we turn to K-12 education, the picture is pretty much the same. Again, the Bush years marked a strengthening of trends boding ill for any attempt to improve the dismal condition of these schools. The No Child Left Behind Act, while laudable in its aims of holding schools accountable for their failure, has increased the reach of the Federal government into what should be the purview of the state or local governments. Moreover, what was lost in the pursuit of these goals was an awareness that the remedy (and money) was going to be put in the hands of those responsible for the problem in the first place \u2014 the education industry. After all, the monopoly on teacher training and certification enjoyed by Schools of Education is what accounts for the deterioration and dysfunction of American education. Lacking any real content, given that the only useful preparation for a teacher is in the subject matter to be taught, Ed Schools have been prey to every lunatic fad that pops up in the pseudo-sciences like psychology or sociology. Whole language reading instruction, the \u201cNew Math,\u201d will-o\u2019-the-wisps like \u201cself esteem\u201d or \u201cvalues clarification,\u201d and hundreds of other pedagogical equivalents of phrenology or mesmerism have compensated for the simple fact that teaching is an art, not a science, and as such will be learned by actually teaching under the supervision of an experienced and successful teacher, not by sitting in classrooms listening to the latest pop-psychological bunkum about \u201clearning styles\u201d and such.<\/p>\n The real solution lies in breaking the Ed-School monopoly, and opening schools up to market-based competition and accountability through vouchers and charter schools. Bush did little or nothing in this regard, because the political power of the Ed Schools and teachers\u2019 unions is simply too great. And of course, teachers were some of Obama\u2019s most ardent supporters, so we can forget about any improving change coming from the new administration. But will Obama make things worse? How much worse can it get? Again, the ideology of the schools has long been compatible with that of our new President. The progressive world-view and the gospel of \u201csocial justice\u201d already dominate the curriculum. Romantic environmentalism, global-warming voodoo, Darwinian fairy-tales, ethnic-cheerleading for victims \u201cof color,\u201d multicultural noble-savage fantasies, Disneyesque myths about American Indians, and donning the hair-shirt of American and Western guilt all comprise the typical grade-school curriculum. These progressive nostrums have displaced the teaching of basic skills, classic literature, and the facts of American history. \u00a92009 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton First Principles Part two of a symposium on the educational impact of Obama and the New Progressivism. Read\u00a0part one\u00a0on the economic prospects and\u00a0part three\u00a0on culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,722],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Jq","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3300,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-race-card\/","url_meta":{"origin":2816,"position":0},"title":"Obama’s Race Card","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 7, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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\nThe Obama administration doesn\u2019t have to do anything, then, because the educational system we have is already the one he wants. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s any accident that Obama\u2019s candidacy was so popular with young people, who are the worst educated and most uninformed cohort in American history. Given that the youth vote helped him to elect him, why would he change the system that helped create them?<\/p>\n