I've admired John Ellis ever since I read his excellent and sad Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities. Ellis explained to me many of the patterns I was beginning to think I saw in the academic humanities--and put them into perspective in a way that helped me understand why the enterprise of the English department (scholarship and teaching) was coming to seem so bankrupt. It's not that there is no value or purpose in studying and teaching about literature and culture--I read and write and study like my life depends on it, because in some obscure but very real ways, it does--but that the way the academic humanities has come to do those things over the past several decades amounts to an airless, blinkered, and ultimately self-defeating enterprise.

There are all kinds of good reasons for this--and Louis Menand, for one, does a grand job of explaining some of them in his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. That's another post for another time, though. Right now, I'm interested in John Ellis.

Ellis is an emeritus professor at UC Santa Cruz--and began teaching at the University of California in 1966. He's been watching the UC system for a long time--and has a special perspective on the campus unrest that is roiling the university right now as California goes broke and higher ed feels the pinch. Here he is at Minding the Campus, with a piece entitled "How the Campuses Helped Ruin California's Economy":

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year's. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of "the struggle," and of "oppression," and---of course---of racism. "We are all students of color now" said Berkeley's Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented "structural racism." (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations "the best of our tradition of effective civil action." Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that the old "shut it down" cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve.

One group at UCLA stumbled into the truth, though it was a truth they did not understand. At Bruin Plaza a crowd chanted "Who's got the power? We've got the power." In its context this was just another slogan of a mindless day, but the reality is that those people do indeed have the power, and routinely use it in a way that makes them the author of their own troubles. Let me explain.

Ellis's conclusion focuses on the tragic irony of it all:

The irony here really cries out for attention: a large state university system needs a free market economy that hums along in top gear so that the revenue needed to support it can be generated. But California's two unusually well developed state university systems provide enormous local voting power in many Assembly districts for a bitterly anti-capitalist ideology that sabotages the California economy. The campuses are shooting themselves in the foot. The power that those students and faculty chanted about is indeed theirs, and if they used it to elect sensible assemblymen and state senators their problems would be solved by the healthy business climate that would result. The votes that they actually cast are the source of their troubles.

Only one idea for solving the funding crisis was floated on March 4. It was to repeal the state's requirement that taxes can only be raised by a two thirds vote, so that taxes can be raised yet again and more money made available to the campuses. In other words, let's make the funding crisis even worse, by driving out of California even more wealth and wealth creating capacity, and raising the unemployment level even more. "California is not a tax-heavy state," said Assemblyman Joe Coto, whose office is right next door to San Jose State University, which enrolls 31,000 students. And that raises the question: how much longer will the California citizenry want to support a system of higher education that keeps its legislature stuck on stupid? It's not a question for this state alone.

I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, by the way. Rand has a word for people who think the way the campus protesters do. She calls them "looters."

Last month, when it became clear that we were at last seeing real movement on repealing "don't ask, don't tell," I noted that it was a great day for ROTC:

It's high time--and when it's done, it will reverberate very interestingly indeed in higher ed, where a great many private colleges and universities don't allow ROTC on campus because of DADT. The thing is, those campuses for the most part have not allowed ROTC on campus since the Vietnam era -- when the issue wasn't gays serving in the military, but the military itself. Since the 1990s, though, faculties and admins at Columbia and Harvard, among others, have been quite explicit that they don't want campus-based ROTC units because they don't like the military's discriminatory policies. With DADT repealed, those campuses will be challenged to be as good as their words--and will be pressed to bring ROTC back.

Stanford phased out its on-campus army, navy, and air force ROTC units during the early 1970s in response to the Vietnam War and concerns about the academic quality of ROTC courses. Since then, Stanford students wishing to participate in ROTC have had to do so in Berkeley, San Jose, or Santa Clara--which amounts to tremendously long and disruptive commutes for students to take courses and train. In practice, that means that very few Stanford students participate in ROTC--and that the university is creating a barrier to participation that arguably violates the Solomon Amendment and that, more broadly, does a disservice to its own students and to the military's ability to function in close connection with civil society by recruiting educated citizen-soldiers and officers.

"The academic dimensions of this subject were negotiable 40 years ago; and there's no reason to think they won't be negotiable again today," emeritus history professor David Kennedy told the faculty. "To bring the discussion up to the present day, it's our perception--and it's shared by others--that our current policy and practice compelling the one dozen ROTC students at Stanford to go to Berkeley or Santa Clara or San Jose--depending on their service branch--for their ROTC training imposes a pretty unreasonable burden on them that we probably ought to think seriously of doing away with, by bringing that instruction back onto this campus in some form."

Watch to see if Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and others will follow suit.

An Inconvenient Tax - Official Trailer from Life Is My Movie Entertainment on Vimeo.

An Inconvenient Tax premieres, aptly enough, on April 15. This film explains how our convoluted and excessively complex tax code came to be, looks at how it has been thoroughly abused by politicians, and offers several viable ways to effect meaningful reform. It could not be more timely--and it transcends the partisan bickering that tends to define debates about taxation to focus on what we are all losing, and what we could all gain from some serious change.

Watch the trailer, and if you want to see this film, please contribute to the fund-raising campaign launched yesterday at Kickstarter.com, and urge your friends to do the same. Every little bit helps. Your gift is tax-deductible--and will help raise the $20,000 needed to ensure that this film reaches the widest possible public. Kickstarter campaigns are on clocks--the deadline for raising that amount is April 15--and if the film doesn't make it, all donations will be returned.

Full disclosure: An Inconvenient Tax is produced in association with the Moving Picture Institute (MPI), which is also running the Kickstarter campaign. As I've mentioned here before, I am closely involved with MPI's work.

Peer review is what makes the academic world go round. At once the practice of scholarly independence and the means of self-policing, it's both the mechanism of academic freedom and the justification for it. At least that's how the story goes.

The problem is that peer review has been appropriated for purposes other than the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and truth. It has become a means of establishing and enforcing not only professional status (through enforced intellectual conformity) but quasi-religious belief (as the process is used to produce moral dogma rather than to question, discover, debate, and learn). And that makes it a very problematic process indeed.

At Spiked Online, Frank Furedi lays it all out in elegant, damning detail. He is particularly good on the rise of advocacy science. Excerpt:

In numerous areas, most notably in climate science, research has become a cause and is increasingly both politicised and moralised. Consequently, in climate research, peer review is sometimes looked upon as a moral project, where decisions are influenced not simply by science but by a higher cause. The scandal surrounding 'Climategate' is as much about the abuse of the system of peer review as it is about the rights and wrongs of the various claims made by advocacy researchers in and around the IPCC and the UEA.

[...]

Increasingly, peer review is cited as kind of unquestioned and unquestionable authority for settling what are in fact political disputes. Consequently, the findings of peer review are looked upon, not simply as statements about the quality of research or of a scientific finding, but as the foundation for far-reaching policies that affect everything from the global economy to our individual lifestyles.

[...]

Climate alarmists do not simply boast of their monopoly over peer-reviewed outlets – they also do their best to call into question peer-reviewed outlets that dare to publish research that challenges any aspect of their moral crusade. When Cambridge University Press published Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, it faced bitter criticism from campaigners who hinted that something had gone wrong with the publisher’s system of review. Stephen Schneider, a professor in environmental studies, asked why 'a publisher with so excellent a reputation in natural sciences (it even published the IPCC reports) publish[ed] a polemic under its imprimatur', and demanded to know if Cambridge University Press had 'the book completely reviewed?' It seems that as far as Schneider is concerned, it is simply unthinkable that a publication that questions the prevailing consensus could have been properly reviewed.

The zealous policing of peer review by campaigners is directly encouraged by the IPCC itself. As Reiner Grundman argued in (the peer-reviewed journal) Environmental Politics, the IPCC 'characterises outside critics as unscientific as they do not publish in peer-reviewed literature'. With so many moral resources invested in the authority of peer review, it is not surprising that some supporters of the IPCC consensus adopt an almost casual attitude towards the violation of academic protocols. The leaked 'Climategate' emails show how one UEA scientist, Dr Keith Briffa, wrote to a colleague to ask for help in keeping a paper that he did not like out of an academic journal that he edits. US climate scientist Michael Mann has proposed that a journal should be ostracised for daring to publish a paper criticising his work. 'I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal', he argued. Phil Jones, the central figure in the Climategate scandal, promised to keep two research papers out of the IPCC report. 'I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is', he said.

[...]

While the IPCC insists that its critics should be judged by the most rigorous standards of peer review, it has a more relaxed attitude towards its own publications. In recent weeks there have been a series of damaging revelations about how conclusions drawn by the IPCC's 2007 report were based on speculation and anecdotes. So claims made about disappearing mountain ice were cobbled together from information drawn from a student's dissertation and an article published in a mountaineering magazine. Other claims were based on information from newsletters, press releases and reports produced by environmentalist advocacy groups.

There is a powerful double standard at work here: the IPCC attacks its critics for relying on 'grey literature' – that is, non-peer-reviewed literature – and yet it has relied on anecdotes and speculation in its reports. We shouldn't be too surprised about this double standard, because, fundamentally, the IPCC is not simply concerned with presenting the facts but with interpreting them, giving them meaning, giving them momentum. It continually makes conceptual leaps from facts to meaning, from findings to politics. Of course there is nothing wrong with being in the meaning business, just so long as you are honest about it and do not present yourself as the pure, impartial voice of science.

It shouldn't be surprising that those involved in the corruption of peer review should also be happy to use anecdotes and speculation as the moral equivalent of hard scientific data. However, it is important to understand that these people fervently believe in their cause and are convinced that, far from deceiving the public, they are preserving and protecting a higher truth. Like the authors of the British government's dodgy dossier on Iraq, they are convinced they are absolutely right. And it is this sense of righteousness that allows them not to let the absence of a few facts stand in the way of promoting their arguments as either hard intelligence or peer-reviewed science. It was the moral conviction of former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld that allowed him to respond to a question about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by stating that 'the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. And in a similar manner, the absence of evidence does not deter climate alarmists from practising their art.

The philosophy of the Noble Lie – revealing a 'higher truth' with little regard for meaningful facts – allows people to stretch the truth in good conscience. One apologist for the sordid Climategate affair has reminded the public to 'not forget the context in which many of these emails were sent'. Apparently, 'this is a saga that goes back to a time before the current political and media concern about climate change'. He reminds us that this was before Al Gore got his Nobel Prize and when ‘well-funded climate sceptics routinely spread disinformation’. From this perspective, the 'context' lightens the burden of moral reproach. Climategate is an understandable if not 100 per cent justified response to the 'context'. Which is precisely how Noble Lies are hatched.

More generally, Furedi's comments about how conscience operates within the Noble Lie--ratifying the abandonment of a moral compass in the name of doing the right thing--reminds me of the discussions we've had on this blog about conscience, leadership, and school vouchers.

The questions I have are these: Can peer review be cleaned up? If so, how? If not, what could possibly take its place?

Retention is a real problem in higher ed--barring elite private schools, most institutions in this country shed students like water, managing on average to graduate only 60-70% (sometimes far less) of freshmen within six years (tour WhatWillTheyLearn.com for more on this). College learning outcomes are a real problem as well--as numerous studies have shown, graduating seniors can't pass a basic high-school level history test, are civically illiterate, and struggle with such elemental skills as reading comprehension and basic algebra.

What makes things worse, to my mind, is that there doesn't seem to be much attempt to think about these two problems together--efforts to increase retention just don't, for the most part, take into account that educational quality must not be sacrificed in the name of simply getting students to the finish line. One could even argue that the problems we are seeing with lack of curricular focus and poor overall educational quality are owing--at least in part--to pressure to keep students enrolled.

Diane Auer Jones makes an analogous point in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

With so much focus on college retention and graduation rates—and so little focus on educational quality—I can't help but wonder if the "new" humanities focus isn't yet another attempt to dumb down an already dumb curriculum so that more students can have fun and get through.

History is hard if we actually must memorize dates and understand the social, economic, scientific, and cultural context in which various actions occured and decisions were made. Foreign language is hard if we must learn how to communicate clearly and correctly in another language (especially when we can't construct a complete sentence in our first language). Mathematics is hard if we must use higher-order algorithms to derive correct answers. Literature is hard if we must master a college-level vocabulary and read for content. Science is hard if we must design and carry out controlled experiments that build upon current theory and evidence to defend or refute our hypotheses.

So, when we can't get students to do the hard stuff, it might just be easier to have them dribble on and on about what they think or what they feel and call it a day.

The question is, though, does this sort of education constitute a higher education and does it well prepare a student—and especially a first-generation college student—to succeed in the competitive global marketplace? It is time to stop treating students like consumers and to go back to treating them like students. Students may not like it if they have to perform higher order mathematical functions and get the right answer, or if they have to become proficient in a second language, or even if they have to read classical pieces of literature upon which Eastern or Western civilizations were based, but as the adults in charge, we need to ensure that a diploma on the wall means that the recipient is capable of reading, writing, and performing arithmetic at a level worthy of the sheepskin.

I urge higher education leaders to initiate a serious discussion about what constitutes a rigorous liberal-arts education—and what does not—and to be sure that liberal arts does not become the new euphemism for social promotion in higher education. After all, a solid, rigorous liberal-arts education provides the best hope that the next generation will be empowered to solve the problems of tomorrow, which we can't begin to anticipate today.