DARE TO BE STUPID.

I started this post five years ago, when Hope and Change were still the Orders of the Day, and even then, argued William H. Young for the National Association of Scholars, trendy postmodernism in higher education might have been eating the seed corn.  "Postmodern multicultural higher and public education has produced younger generations with limited capabilities and prospects for taxable income to sustain such obligations." His focus was on the political economy of a welfare state that failed to generate future economic growth -- there being limits on what factor augmenting technical change can get you when the population growth rate is no longer predictably constant. And privilege-shaming mathematicians isn't likely to end well.  Perhaps we could have anticipated somebody like Donald Trump emerging.  Mr Young was working on a series about the connections between the rot in education and the decline of living standards.  "Next week’s article will examine the worsening plight of the middle class," he promised.

But at the house organ for business as usual in higher education, it was all about the vocationalism, and how bad that can be.

With Americans now experiencing acute anxiety over jobs, money, and our larger future, policy analysis and public discussion of higher education—from the White House down—have focused with laserlike intensity on the connections between college and earnings. The U.S. Department of Education has led this effort with its "gainful employment" regulations—ostensibly aimed at for-profit excess, but all too clearly a blunt instrument waiting to be used on all parts of postsecondary education.

I don't recall if that article came out before or after then-president Barack Obama got his dig in at art history majors.  But when things get difficult for higher education, the defenders fall back on precisely the traditions they have been so actively deconstructing or deeming toxic or excessively privileged.

The fact is that society needs many kinds of talent and knowledge development from the nation's colleges. This is a global century, so wherever a student enrolls and whatever the major, college needs to help build citizens' global intelligence—the knowledge and skills to navigate an era of economic interdependence and cross-cultural intersection. This is a science- and technology-fueled century, so everyone needs science, technology, and mathematical savvy and experience. This is a democracy, so students' ability to engage in collaborative civic problem solving is, in the long run, just as important as their capacity to engage in job-related problem solving. This is an economy where innovation is all-important, so students must develop adaptive and problem-solving skills in addition to critical thinking and quantitative capacities.

In short, whatever students choose as their particular majors, we need to ensure that their choices—majors and core studies combined—help them develop all these capacities. We need to make sure, in short, that college provides students with an opportunity-creating education—a liberal and liberating education—and not just with knowledge specific to a particular field.

Even if we focus strictly on the learning needed for success in the economy, employers who advise the Association of American Colleges and Universities' work on educational quality emphasize that the major is only a part of the job-success equation.

Put another way, maybe the Canon and the Curriculum and the Great Books had their value.  "Wage studies that look only at the graduate's choice of major may well accelerate the narrowing of the American mind at the very moment in history when multidimensional learning—liberal learning—has become essential to success."  I believed that, and -- has it already been twenty years -- participated in some campus-wide programming that even got faculty among colleges working together on -- precisely strengthening students' abilities to make connections among disciplinary themes.  Like so much else, that was all great for a few years and then either the funding or the administrative emphasis or something gave up: plus I kept on working with the same people, and after a while, many of us appeared to tire of being punished for being cooperative and returned to our own pastures.

That didn't mean we quit, and Johann Neem put forth the case for the trivium and quadrivium for their own sake and without regard to practical utility.

In a democracy, however, we cannot afford to leave the liberal arts to the elite. In a society in which we expect all people to be effective citizens, all people need to have access to the liberal arts in order to have the knowledge and moral foundation that they need to think about what is a good life and a good society, and the skills necessary to help them work to achieve it here in our democracy. Today’s students need to know a lot about how the human and natural worlds work and they need not just knowledge but the capacity to evaluate — that is to determine the moral value of — different goals, ideas, and policies. This evaluation requires moving well beyond the economic calculus to questions of what is worth it and to understanding our cultural traditions.

Yes, and to have a functioning jive detector. "Gentlemen, nothing that you learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life -- save only this -- that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education."

Better, though, that kids who struggle with difficult stuff, including algebra, not feel marginalized and left out, while the kids who can handle it not be given a false sense of privilege or get too full of themselves.  Yes, this was from five years ago.  But when the theorem of Pythagoras becomes an impediment to anyone not Greek learning plane geometry, well, the rot was setting in five years ago.

I don’t know how many eighth graders should take algebra, but I’m entirely persuaded, first, that we need to be ever vigilant about not lowering our expectations for disadvantaged kids, and second, that we need to be ever vigilant about not lowering our expectations for our most gifted students. Do these goals conflict? I hope not.

(An aside: twenty years ago, I recall our Russian tour guides, probably with their Intourist training showing, referring to "all the elements of the periodic table of Mendeleyev." There was even a wall mural of this tool in St. Petersburg. But Russian chemistry plus Soviet failure equals Soviet failure.)

Meanwhile, we had Victor Hanson calling to account the fabulism of one Barack Hussein Obama.

I had a lot of Obamas in class. They sat in the front of the room, posed long eloquent questions, mellifluously interrupted the lectures with clever refinements and qualifications, often self-referenced all that they had read and done -- and then pow!: you grade their first test and there is simply nothing there: a D or F. It was quite stunning: how could a student be so confident in his rhetoric and so dismal in his performance?

And again, a foreshadowing, if we had but seen it. "To the degree there is a gender crisis, I think it may be more young working-class men without college degrees who simply cannot find jobs in the muscular industries and for whom society apparently has little need."  Ultimately, though, it's about the absence of a working jive detector.  What we get in politics is what we've been getting from the area studies types, diversity weenies, and virtue signallers cluttering the academy.  "It is all bottled piety without truth."

But at Newmark's Door, back on 22 October 2012, comes a warning that the vocationalist pressures on higher education might not be so easily deflected.  "There is a lot of--admittedly mostly anecdotal--evidence that recent job losses are due to deep structural changes in the U.S. economy."  Yes, and there is a premium on technical skills, including mathematical reasoning, amongst those structural changes.