Politicizing higher education

Buried in the massive, 1,158 page reauthorization bill for the federal Higher Education Act are two most curious views of education and its relationship to the truth. Both views have long been championed by conservative legislators and ideological lobbyists.

One is a requirement for international study programs financed with federal money to operate under what seems to me the equivalent of a Fox News “fair and balanced” curriculum, reflecting “diverse perspectives and a wide range of views,” according to the act. The requirement is designed, says the Chronicle of Higher Education, to end what a research scholar at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, felt was a tendency “to purvey an extreme and one-sided criticism of American foreign policy,” or in other words, your political opponent’s view. This legal requirement for balance is the political equivalent of balancing evolution with creationism. Some Republicans want their political ideology taught as if were a form of non-ideological political analysis. But such analysis already comes in both liberal and conservative trappings. That’s apparently not good enough.

The other curious view of truth and education is a new grant program which gives federal money for the teaching of “traditional American history” and the accomplishments of Western civilization.

This sounds innocuous enough, until you start to think about it and ask the obvious questions. For instance, what is “traditional American history,” and who decides what it might be? The White House has vigorously promoted the notion of a kind of “getting back to basics” when it comes to teaching American history. But it doesn’t say what “traditional American history” is. In an informal search of recent literature on the subject, I could not find a single definition of the term. Is that because the conservative idea of traditional American history might be too inflammatory to be disclosed? Whatever the reason, with no definition of the term, you are left with your own imaginings.

Would traditional American history be required to emphasize English east coast settlers of North America, as it has in the past, and completely overlook the earlier settlements of the Spanish colonists? Would a traditional American history curriculum submerge the accomplishments of women and feminist principles, as it always has, or overlook European genocide of Native Americans, and subtly water down the atrocity of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the Civil Rights Movement? Would anti-Chinese laws passed in many states after the completion of railroad lines in the mid-19th century be covered up as “untraditional.”

I wonder what it would be like to require high school teachers to teach a “traditional history” of Albuquerque? Would they be required to play up the old booster tall tale of Albuquerque sitting on top of an aquifer the size and depth of Lake Superior? Could they even talk about recent U.S. Geological Survey studies that show such a metaphor to be patently untrue?

And what does “extreme and one-sided criticism” of foreign policy mean? Might it mean anything that someone with the power of the federal purse doesn’t agree with? Does it mean that students about to go abroad are better served by being intellectually neutered, having to reflect the “balance” of their “diverse views” indoctrination, rather than trusting and being true to their own perceptions, political views and experience?

The act was passed by both houses of Congress and is now awaiting the president’s signature. In an earlier version, international-studies programs and the traditional history grants were to be supervised by something like a board of censors who would have determine what was traditional and what was diverse. Presumably, if professors held the wrong views, or even strong views, they would not be allowed in the program. The censorship board was scrapped.

Although the Higher Education Act contains many important provisions regarding access and consumer information about tuition and fees, protecting students from highbrow loan sharking, promoting of financial literacy, the disclosure of textbook costs to professors before they order books, the act also contains what the Chronicle says is a “sense of Congress” regarding free speech on campus that was inspired by conservative activist David Horowitz. In saying that students should be allowed to speak their minds and not be “intimidated, harassed, discouraged from speaking out,” the act implies, of course, that such things happen all the time on campuses across the country. If you’re an anti-war activist, I guess you’d say that’s true. If you’re a Republican, though, you’d have to pass a law that makes it look like young conservatives are rounded up, humiliated, isolated or drummed out of classrooms. Which is, of course, total balderdash.

Perhaps the act’s strongest support of academic freedom comes in its rejection of No Child Left Behind in universities, teaching to the test, rather than encouraging the questioning and open-mindedness of true scholarship, rather than ideological tradition.

The act says that nothing in it “shall be construed to permit [the Secretary of Education] to establish any criteria that specifies, defines, or prescribes the standards that accrediting agencies or associations shall use to assess any institution’s success with respect to student achievement.”

That’s one blow, at least, for keeping political intimidation out of scholarship.

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