Department of Re-education, no federal funds will be forthcoming unless you do. You should also eliminate all courses that are not part of the STEM disciplines. The purpose of a higher education is, after all, only to grease the wheels of capitalism. Social sciences, humanities and the arts are therefore unnecessary and can only lead to deviant ideas. Debates on the campus should be limited to exchanges of phrases from the soon-to-be-issued little orange book that all will be required to carry.
If you are in academe, you are guilty of thought and therefore have committed CRT. Dennis Jett, a former career diplomat, is a professor of international affairs at a large public research university in the Northeast. Public criticism of higher education continues to gather momentum; the primary issues are cost, quality and political bias. The objective evidence regarding high and rising cost is compelling and the body of evidence suggesting a secular decline in quality is also growing.
The political bias issue is more controversial, although it is nonetheless important. If society cannot trust the academy to produce nonpartisan scholarship and instruction, why should it support higher education?
Financial support is always dependent on the public's perception with respect to our value added. There is no escaping that rude fact.
In an era of compromised economic prospects and rising global competition, these are not issues that can be ignored without consequence. In our contacts with students, we learn to read their responses to questions about performance; you either learn this or you will be manipulated by students.
When I ask students about their performance, there are some responses that always make me suspicious; an aggressively defensive or indignant response, for example, suggests the student is in denial or is hiding something. If the student admits deficiencies, recognizes an absence of effort or a problem comprehending, this is a good indicator of sincerity. If the student follows through with remedial action, the results generally improve.
Do we appear willing to objectively consider the issues and to reform where necessary? When teaching loads or class sizes are discussed, faculty members studiously avoid the cost question, preferring to focus on how reduced loads and smaller classes will improve quality.
No attempt is made to balance the very real higher costs with the intangible improvements in quality. Worse still, we make no effort to study the outcome after teaching loads or class sizes are reduced; did we really improve quality?
It is hard to escape the conclusion that we really do not want to know the answer to that question. There is cause for hope, however; some insiders are asking the right questions. Unfortunately, these brave souls are at risk of being shouted down by those who believe all the issues are either bogus or a political agenda. For example, a prominent University of Virginia social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, is asking very important questions about his discipline.
By making this stand, Haidt is taking a professional risk for the sake of improving both research and teaching. Since he is a committed liberal and is going outside his own comfort zone to take on this politically incorrect topic, he is to be respected.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how at odds that is with the values expressed by scholars and diversity advocates alike. It also explains why campus diversity programs rarely concern themselves with intellectual diversity; the people who control those programs are committed members of the tribal moral community who believe alternative intellectual perspectives have little diversity value. During an academic conference on the chronic problem of female underrepresentation among math and science faculty at the elite research universities, Larry Summers suggested the disparity might be explained by the greater variance in male IQ scores than in female IQ scores.
Despite the fact that this hypothesis needs to be tested, the event launched the movement that led to his firing. Tribal moral communities obstruct research and they easily turn education into indoctrination.
Furthermore, they explain why higher education stubbornly refuses to reform. The well-established tribal moral communities on campus create very high costs, both in the literal and figurative sense.
We spend insufficient time and effort asking difficult questions about cost, quality and bias. When these questions are raised, some people become very angry and indignant, even enraged that a member of the campus community could suggest there might be a problem. Anger and indignation are aggressive defenses; they suggest the angry person cannot support his or her position with evidence or carefully reasoned argument; it is an unambiguous red flag.
We are very gifted in the art of analyzing the behavior and motivations of other groups and institutions. Furthermore, we are intensely trained in the tools used to conduct complex inquiry; yet, we rarely bring those tools to bear on our own activities. As a consequence, our costs grow out of control, quality declines, and we become progressively more defensive.
These are not behavioral modes with survival value in a technocratic society. It also means some people do not carry their share of the load. They would be surprised to learn that that subject is taboo.
Try raising this issue on your campus. Make a careful intellectual argument for a post-partisan university. Fearless and totally honest introspection leads to self-improvement and, after all, self-improvement is why we committed ourselves to a lifetime of study.
Imagine what kind of working environment you would find in a post-partisan university. Inside Higher Ed recently reported on four University of Pittsburgh professors critiquing the latest survey suggesting ideological one-sidedness in the academy. According to the Pitt quartet, self-selection accounts for findings that the faculty of elite disproportionately tilts to the Left.
Yet the Pitt quartet's line of reasoning -- that faculty ideological imbalance reflects the academy functioning as it should -- has appeared with regularity, and has been, unintentionally, most revealing. Indeed, the very defense offered by the academic Establishment, rather than the statistical surveys themselves, has gone a long way toward proving the case of critics who say that the academy lacks sufficient intellectual diversity.
The larger issue is that tapping into the female half of the population has allowed the military to draw on some great talent, which it would otherwise be denied.
The same argument applies to gays who are admittedly a much smaller percentage of the population. But women are allowed to fill most jobs, and they bring intelligence, dedication, and hard work that the military — which has a hard time filling its all-volunteer ranks in wartime — badly needs.
Same with homosexuals. In recent years, the Army in particular has been forced to lower its standards to attract enough recruits. That suggests that we can hardly afford to discharge soldiers for their sexual preference — unless they act in undisciplined ways e.
Despite the criticisms against my article, my sense is that most active-duty personnel are in fact comfortable with lifting the gay ban. McPeak favor keeping it in place are fighting a losing — and needless — battle. But in the military was integrated. That was seven years before the Supreme Court integrated the nation's schools and 18 years before progress in the political realm made it possible to end segregation in the South. All this military progress was made notwithstanding the fact the military culture is largely a Southern culture.
In short, because of its pragmatic focus, the military -- rigid in other areas -- in this crucial terrain of social conflict has shown itself to be historically more flexible, progressive and ready to adapt than the democratic political process itself. Then what is the military's problem with including gays, other than prejudice?
It is a sign of the force of political correctness in our culture that there is probably not one among a hundred readers of these words who could answer that question. Because of the embargo that political correctness puts on even considering the arguments of the other side, the conventional "wisdom" is that an institution that pioneered integration is run by individuals -- many of whom are themselves minorities -- who are more prejudiced against gays than they were against blacks.
And by years! Is this an argument that any self-respecting pundit -- in other circumstances -- would even want to be associated with? Yet it is precisely the argument that all proponents of including gays in the military currently make. For all such advocates, including my friend Sullivan, the "don't ask, don't tell" policy is just a hypocritical attempt to appease lingering social prejudice. That's the voice of political correctness.
In fact, there is a military argument against the inclusion of gays in combat, which has nothing to do with social prejudice. It may or may not be a sound argument. I am not a military expert, and any opinion I have about the armed forces is necessarily based on intuition rather than experience.
I certainly am open to counter arguments. It's just that nobody on the inclusion side is offering any. Sullivan's argument in the Times article is more interesting than most in that it credits the Army with having important agendas that are worthy of respect.
He observes that the current policy of "don't ask, don't tell" creates a standing loophole for anyone who wants to leave the service. This is bad for the military, and an argument for changing the policy. That's well and good, but hardly persuasive for a service that relies on volunteers. To make a credible argument for changing the policy, Andrew and others will have to address the military rationale for the policy itself.
An essential part of the military mind is that the members of fighting units don't think for themselves but do as they are told.
They work as a unit in which each performs an appointed task. The mission objective -- not personal consideration -- guides their actions. Works Cited Horowitz, David. New York: Pearson, James J. Lindsay, Jerome Johnson, E.
The Washington Post. Powers, Rod. Get Access. Satisfactory Essays. Homosexuality In The Military Essay. Read More. Better Essays. Sexuality in the Military. Best Essays. The Fight for Gay Rights. Who Should Be the Determining Factor? Good Essays.
Gay Marriage Should be Legal.
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