Though I didn\u2019t realize it at the time, those were my first encounters with an alternate curriculum that was being promoted on many campuses, a curriculum whose guiding principles seemed to be: 1) anything that could be construed as bigotry and hatred should be construed as bigotry and hatred; and 2) any such instance of bigotry and hatred should be considered part of an epidemic. These principles were being advanced primarily, though not exclusively, by college administrators, whose ranks had grown so remarkably since the early 1990s.<\/p>\n
Everyone knows about the kudzu-like growth of the administrative bureaucracy in higher education over the past three decades. What most don\u2019t know is that at many colleges, the majority of administrators directly involved in the lives of students \u2014 in dorms, conduct hearings, bias-response teams, freshmen \u201corientation\u201d programs, and the like \u2014 got their graduate degrees from education schools.<\/p>\n
Ed schools, such as Teachers College at Columbia, or Penn\u2019s Graduate School of Education, have trained and certified most of the nation\u2019s public-school teachers and administrators for the past half-century. But in the past 20 years especially, ed schools have been offering advanced degrees in things like \u201ceducational leadership,\u201d \u201chigher education management,\u201d and just \u201chigher education\u201d to aspiring college administrators. And this influx of ed school trained bureaucrats has played a decisive role in pushing an already left-leaning academy so far in the direction of ideological fundamentalism that even liberal progressives are sounding the alarm. <\/p>\n
To anyone acquainted with the history and quality of American ed schools, this should come as no surprise. Education schools have long been notorious for two mutually reinforcing characteristics: ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. As early as 1969, Theodore Sizer and Walter Powell hoped that \u201cruthless honesty\u201d would do some good when they complained that at far too many ed schools, the prevailing climate was \u201chardly conducive to open inquiry.\u201d \u201cStudy, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence,\u201d they continued. \u201cUn-intellectualism \u2014 not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice \u2014 is all too prevalent.\u201d Sizer and Powell ought to have known: At the time they were dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.<\/p>\n
More than three decades later, a comprehensive, four-year study of ed schools headed by a former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine, found that the majority of educational-administration programs \u201crange from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country\u2019s leading universities.\u201d Though there were notable exceptions, programs for teaching were described as being, in the main, weak and mediocre. Education researchers seemed unable to achieve even \u201cminimum agreement\u201d about \u201cacceptable research practice,\u201d with the result that there are \u201cno base standards and no quality floor.\u201d Even among ed school faculty members and deans, the study found a broad and despairing recognition that ed school training was frequently \u201csubjective, obscure, faddish, \u2026 inbred, and politically correct.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Remember the old joke: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym educational studies. As far as higher education is concerned, the joke is on us: Though I didn\u2019t realize it at the time, those were my first encounters with an alternate curriculum that was being promoted on many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,79,53,13],"tags":[622,238,351,764],"class_list":["post-47238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-education","category-politics","category-usa","tag-ideology","tag-offensensitivity","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-chU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47238"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47239,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47238\/revisions\/47239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}