The National Association of Scholars, the self-styled dissident group that fights a perceived liberal bias in academia, has released a new report critical of university summer reading recommendations and so-called common book programs, which assign incoming freshman a  a common text to discuss in orientation seminars.

The report has two chief complaints. The first is that the summer reading and common book selections are overwhelmingly liberal. ‘We found dozens of assigned books that promote liberal causes and dozens that represent a liberal sensibility. We found none that promote conservative causes and only three books that promote any kind of traditionalist sensibility.’

Unfortunately the survey data isn’t included in the report. But it spends enough time criticizing the criteria of selection–it described ‘Multiculturalism/Immigration/Racism’ and ‘Environmentalism/Animal Rights/Food’ as the most popular types of books–to get an idea of what they consider liberal, which seems to be any issue on which more people aligned with the Democratic Party focus on compared to people aligned with the Republican Party. I’m not going to challenge NAS on why they think environmentalism is inherently liberal.

The second complaint is more substantive: the selections are too contemporary–the books assigned haven’t stood the test of intellectual time, proven their relevance over generations, and so on. We can trust that Shakespeare’s sonnets are worth reading–a few hundred years of exhaustive interpretation and enjoyment vouches. But what about some book Dave Eggers or Barbara Ehrenreich wrote five years ago? How can we be sure these books are intellectually worthwhile to assign to every freshman entering a given college?

Let me first get my own orientation out in the open: my own major is one of the most heavy on Great Books, the shorthand for classics of Western thought, in the entire country. I love the Great Books. Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Dante, Joyce: this is my province, and I’d love if more students–especially those outside my own–read more of them. I’m sympathetic to NAS’s desire for them to be more often read (if not the ‘Western Greatness’, imperialism-justifying agenda that sometimes underlies it).

But giving students a classic text straight out of high school, especially with bigger schools that enroll students with wider ranges of academic interests, is sometimes not a good idea. The MO of common book programs for incoming students is to give them a level on which they can immediately connect with their peers, both informally and probably in an orientation seminar before courses start. I imagine the criteria for selection would want to focus, then, on a couple things:

the book’s focus on an issue that most students already know about, to reduce the societal obstacles, especially for lower-income students, that get the students talking and thinking critically with another;

the readability of the book; which is important if you want everybody to in fact read the book, since the program is voluntary; and

that the book’s topic is relevant to most of the students’ lives, since, without the glue of a course, it’s hard to really get something cerebral and rarefied to stick with any group that hasn’t had the chance to get into its world, which takes time.

This is why picking contemporary books is a good thing. A book on the immigration debate or on Barack Obama’s coming-of-age story is something people can connect with–and pivot straight to discussion and argument with other readers on–right away. The style is modern, making it less intimidating for students without experience in epic poetry or Middle English. And it’s about an issue that the reader can’t help but be concerned with–it automatically invests the reader, who probably has opinions on the president or immigration or what the minimum wage law should be.

More fundamentally, the classics aren’t the only books from which critical thinking skills can be hewed. Sure, discussion is helped along if a book is good (and many the report complains about are good). But the essential element of common reading programs is the students themselves; the success of the discussion in turn depends on the creativity and rigor of thought among its participants. (I’ve had both thorough, challenging conversations in class about pop culture and uninspired ones on the highbrow-iest of books.) The schools that choose books that give students common ground are, in a world where not just the upper class goes to college, best suited to foster those conversations.

The prevailing take on California’s political situation these days has two tracks:

1. They’re in big trouble debt-, public services-, and partisanship-wise.

2. They’re the barometer for the rest of the country on all those counts.

Not considering where the state stands relative to other areas, the state certainly satisfies both counts when it comes to funding its public universities. Writing for the Huffington Post, UC-Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi tells us that her state’s marquee higher education expense, the schools comprising the University of California, ‘[have] seen funding per student plummet by 50 percent in the last two years–and by about 20 percent since May 2009‘. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities confirms California’s endemic is one part of a national epidemic: ‘At least 41 states have cut assistance to public colleges and universities, resulting in reductions in faculty and staff in addition to tuition increases.’

People involved with one group or another always seem to be complaining that theirs has been disadvantage by this or that, especially in down times–it’s just how segments fight over scarce resources. And the woes aired over the steep cuts to public university funding is old hat, public forum-wise. Since states nationwide are cutting nearly every expense by some amount, can’t higher education just step back in line with every other service the government offers? Or aren’t there more corporate benefactors willing to put their name on a School of Engineering or two? This line of thinking, I would bet, is at the bottom of every person’s thoughts on higher education, sympathetic or not to the plight of middle- and lower-class students.

The problem with that line of thinking isn’t its internal logic, which is sound–there is less money around, and other services are hurting for money, too. The problem lies in the scope of thought–we’re thinking too small.  Again, Chancellor Katehi:

The concept of the public university was born nearly 150 years ago when President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862, to build the national workforce to better support economic development. It was the time when the nation learned that democracy is based on valuing human life, respecting the right of the citizen to live a contented, prosperous life, and contribute to the common good. Some 80 years later, the devastation of the Second World War reminded us once again that national security could only be achieved if every citizen has access to knowledge and the power to contribute to a safe and prosperous society. This reminder led to the G. I. Bill of 1944, the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Higher Education Act of 1965. These actions created the underpinnings of the public research university and assigned national importance to the mission of these institutions.

The first two of those landmark acts were signed in the midst of two of America’s greatest wars–ones in which, contrasting with those in Iraq and Afghanistan, many more lives and a much greater share of national resources were sacrificed.  Given that, let’s step back a second: why, in the midst of the Civil War, or the Second World War–challenges both to the foundation and future of American democracy and the security of world peace, respectively, would governments by leaders of both major parties spring for unprecedented expenditures on public higher education?

The primary purpose certainly wasn’t to alleviate economic pain, which would have been an insult to the much deeper pain of mortality cashed in by hundreds of thousands of Americans.  It was because our country’s leaders knew that the future of the country depended on the ability for its young (and old) citizens to train themselves for the next economy; to increase the human capital that propels prosperity.  Education was a vital public good, not an bonus for good times.

Going to need a bigger magnifying glass

Similarly, the second two, although signed in times of comparative peace, were not lavish public purchases.  The National Defense Education Act, fueled by Cold War rivalry, aimed to fortify a generation of American brainpower in battle against a mortal enemy.  Regardless of one’s own take on the war itself, the act was fundamentally forward-looking.  While we can’t determine causality on the question–no single factor ‘won’ the Cold War or established American dominance through the end of the twentieth century–there’s something to be said for the cost of a college education it established, a price that has quadrupled since the legacy of most recent act faded.

That for so long the rationale for American higher education spending was linked directly to domestic prosperity and international strategy shouldn’t elude us today.  Nor should we forget that alleviating the current and increasing pain students and their families feel is a worthy policy end.

‘Lost in this privatized version of government’ where corporations fund new research laboratories and private lenders fund individual educations, Katehi writes, ‘is the sense of communal belonging, of obligation to any social entity larger than the self, and of any responsibility to future generations.’  Those advocating further cuts to higher education–especially those skeptical of the government’s role in the sector–should remember that the foundation the country rests on today, however crumbly, was built by the vision and funded by the laws of previous generations.  The foundation of the next generation’s prosperity rests on our vision.  Right now, when the conversation isn’t about what we need to do but how much we should cut, we have no vision.

Few people follow the arcana of Congressional debate. They attribute all political outcomes to the president, and thus when the outcome is unsatisfactory, the reason must be a failure of presidential willpower.

Rachel Maddow offered a perfect example of the phenomenon the other night. She delivered her fantasy version of the speech President Obama should have given. It was filled with unequivocal liberal rhetoric. I was struck by this portion, explaining how she would pass an energy bill:

The United States Senate will pass an energy bill. This year. The Senate version of the bill will not expand offshore drilling. The earlier targets in that bill for energy efficiency and for renewable energy-sources will be doubled or tripled.

If Senators use the filibuster to stop the bill, we will pass it by reconciliation, which still ensures a majority vote. If there are elements of the bill that cannot procedurally be passed by reconciliation, if those elements can be instituted by executive order, I will institute them by executive order.

In reality, you can’t pass any of the climate bill by reconciliation. Democrats didn’t write reconciliation instructions permitting them to do so, and very little of its could be passed through reconciliation, which only allows budgetary decisions. Maddow’s response is to pass the rest by executive order. But you can’t change those laws through executive order, either. That’s not how our system of government works, nor is it how our system should work.

If Maddow’s speech had to hew to the reality of Senate rules and the Constitution, she’d be left where Obama is: ineffectually pleading to get whatever she can get out of a Senate that has nowhere near enough votes to pass even a stripped-down cap and trade bill. It may be nice to imagine that all political difficulties could be swept away by a president who just spoke with enough force and determination. It’s a recurrent liberal fantasy —Michael Moore imagined such a speech a few months ago, Michael Douglas delivers such a speech in “The American President.” I would love to eliminate the filibuster and create more accountable parties. But even if that happens, there will be a legislative branch that has a strong say in what passes or doesn’t pass. And that’s good! We wouldn’t want to live in a world where a president can remake vast swaths of policy merely be decreeing it.

It’s amazing what frustration can do to the thinking-process of someone smart enough to win a Rhodes Scholarship. (Or what the desire to attract and retain viewers can do to a former scholar’s propensity for nuanced arguments.)

According to HuffPost College, an academic who charged over two decades ago that the SAT favors white students by the way it words questions is finally getting the attention his claim merits:

[Roy Freedle]’s long-term project was widely greeted with dismissals and criticism from those in academia. But a recent paper in the Harvard Educational Review corroborates Freedle’s original thesis and calls for the testing industry to look further into the claim.

The Washington Post has more on Freedle’s initial findings, which identified a difference between “hard” and “easy” questions on the SAT:

Hard [SAT] questions, those that produced more wrong answers, tended to have longer, less common words. Easy questions tended to have shorter, more common words. Freedle thought this was key to the relative success African American students had with the harder ones. Simpler words tended to have more meanings, and in some cases different meanings in white middle class neighborhoods than they had in underprivileged minority neighborhoods, he concluded. This, he said, could help explain why African American students did worse on questions with common words than on questions that depended on harder, but less ambiguous words they studied at school.

The New York Times hosted a virtual debate on whether parents should be held criminally responsible for their childrens’ drinking (and that of their friends); and whether current ’social host’ laws should be reconsidered:

How effective are these laws, which can impose fines or jail time for parents? Some parents believe it is better to have teenagers party at home so that adults can monitor the event and take away the car keys than have kids drinking elsewhere unsupervised. Is this a bad idea? Is there an alternative to social host laws?

A sampling of the responses:

Parents who sanction teenage drinking parties are making a huge mistake. These parents are encouraging the very behavior they are attempting to control. Even worse, they are communicating disrespect for legal authority to young people who are just forming their attitudes about how to behave in society.

It is better to have young adults consume alcohol within the confines of a home where they can be monitored and driven home by parents or designated drivers, as opposed to having them go to unsupervised parties to get drunk. In many cultures outside of the U.S. parents routinely serve their children alcohol at home. Wine and beer are considered part of the diet.

Social host laws are needed to communicate clearly that underage drinking is not acceptable. While a parent may have the intention of limiting a teenager’s (and his or her friends’) exposure to drunk driving by hosting a party, exposing teenagers to alcohol even in that setting can result in harm, like alcohol poisoning, sexual abuse, violence, drunk driving and more).