RUTHFULLY YOURS

Amid despair, there is still hope that the West will find the anti-toxin to cure what ails us.

By now almost every American has heard the lamentation about American primary and secondary education: our children are failing to meet even minimal standards of performance. However, it was widely believed that higher education is different. If one relies on the claims made by almost all colleges, students are expected to synthesize knowledge, interpret data and make arguments coherently. But in a newly published book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the authors contend that student performance on basic skills generally do not improve during their college years.

The authors, sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, found that more than a third of the college seniors in their study (more than 2000 were in the study population) were no better at reasoning and writing than they had been in their first semester.

If one were to consider the findings in this study, the conclusions are hardly surprising. On average, students do not invest much time in studying. Many students avoided demanding courses. Students in science and math, social science and humanities tended to make stronger gains in their writing and reasoning skills than those majoring in education, business, communication and social work.

Despite claims of methodological bias, the professors engaged in this study without a preconceived idea of student attainment. But the evidence drove them to incontrovertible conclusions, conclusions I might add, that were borne out by my 38 years in the Academy.

At least 45 percent of students in the sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in College Learning Assessment performance during the first two years of their four year program. In addition, 36 percent of students did not show any significant improvement over four years. Hence the title of the book, Academically Adrift.

Clearly many, if not most of those in the study will graduate, but having a degree does not mean these students have developed higher-order cognitive skills, presumably the goal of a college education.

For many, the college experience is a rite of passage having more to do with social development than learning. Very few institutions place more than modest academic demands on their students. The so-called core curriculum has increased exponentially, including popular culture courses, to accommodate the lack of student seriousness.

While we should not ignore the fact that limited learning in colleges has a long and venerable history, students today are competing with others across the globe. As President Obama noted in his State of The Union address our competitive edge is dependent on innovation and technical acumen which emerge from institutions of higher learning.

In fact, the changing global context facing contemporary college graduates suggests that “limited learning” qualifies as a major problem and impediment to future economic success. Yet curiously, none of the actors in this higher education system are interested primarily in undergraduates’ academic growth. Administrators are concerned with retention, admissions and, of course, the bottom line. Professors are eager to pursue their own scholarship and professional interests.

Decades ago Thorstein Veblen argued that most college students are “trained in incapacity.” If one were to rely on the Arum, Roksa study, it doesn’t appear as if students today are trained in any way, shape or form. The university experience has become a trivialized way to enter adulthood or perhaps attenuate adolescence. But on one point there isn’t doubt: undergraduates are actually learning very little and if one were to consider this learning a precondition for competitiveness, the United States if falling behind other nations, even as the number of graduates increases.

I used to assume that decline of Western civilization was manifest in the unwillingness of elites to discriminate. The idea of “the discriminating man,” the one who weighs concerns and assets, has been transmogrified into “the sensitive man,” the one who resists criticism.

Of course arbitrary discrimination based on superficial concerns, e.g. skin color, should be opposed. But this is rarely the case. We live in an era in which any attempt at judgment is cause for arousal. To suggest that the willful integration of homosexuals into the military services will destroy morale and the very spirit needed to maintain discipline is regarded as hogwash, the view of some antiquated past without universal understanding ^[1]. A collapse of monumental proportions has been engineered and there is scarcely a word of protest across the land. Is that because almost everyone buys into the prevailing judgment or is it because so many do not want to be the target of opprobrium?

Whatever the proposition, discrimination has suffered yet another blow. But while an unwillingness to take a stance is one dimension of civilizational decline, it does not compare in passion or intensity to preemptive capitulation, a desire to support the very movements that exist to undermine the West. In fact, the more extreme the movement, the more you find ardent defenders. For example, jihadists in the United States and Europe state without equivocation a desire to create caliphates across the globe and to introduce sharia ^[2] as legal precedent.

Remarkably those on the left, who once renounced orthodoxies of any kind, now embrace the totalistic dimensions of Islam. They insist that the full panoply of civil rights provisions be given to foreign combatants (read: terrorists). They contend that the Islamic faith promotes peace, even when every school boy knows Islam is designed to place the non-believer in a position of submission.

The Danish government that once stood up to Islamic intimidation has seemingly collapsed ^[3]. Now one minister after another finds some justification ^[4] for Islamic violence; a rationalization that makes defense of Western traditions untenable. And this is rapidly becoming the European defense model as judicial officials opt to maintain order rather than confront extremists.

Can the West withstand this dual attack? My answer is “yes,” if the West awakens from its ideological slumber and attempts to slaughter the dragon of intimidation.

As Adam Smith noted, “there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation ^[5]” and, I might add, in a civilization. “The future is unknowable,” as Winston Churchill pointed out in A History of The English Speaking Peoples ^[6], “but the past should give us hope.”

As I see it, overcoming war, poverty, tragedy, brutality and murder suggests that mankind possesses the instinct for self-preservation even if it isn’t immediately apparent. We root for self-realization even as we fail to see our failures. Can history resort to a turning back, a dark ages where standards of any kind are in disarray except the standards of might making right?

For a time, like the one we are in, it may seem that way, but recovery may be around the corner as an anti-toxin for what ails us. History has a way of being pliable and unpredictable, stretching out before us unimagined scenarios of replenishment just as the hour is darkest. That is the condition that offers hope amid the sundry examples of contemporary despair.