Government Relations: I've Seen the Future
By Mark F. Smith
In March 1919, journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from a visit to the Soviet Union and proclaimed, “I have seen the future, and it works.” Now, before conservative activist David Horowitz and his sympathizers can say that the AAUP has revealed its true colors, let me make clear that I have come to bury Steffens’s sentiment, not praise it. The future he welcomed emphatically did not work. Unfortunately, there are other futures being advocated today that raise disturbing questions.
Fundamentalist political activists, for example, continue to try to impose their ideological and religious beliefs on the development of science policy. Recent efforts to influence basic biology curricula and research on sexuality and global warming are reminiscent of attempts by Soviet agronomist T. D. Lysenko in the 1940s to intrude socialist orthodoxy on scientific disciplines to devastating effect: the entire Soviet genetics enterprise was crippled for decades.
Right now in the United States, proponents of the “Academic Bill of Rights” aim to force political orthodoxy on the higher education curriculum. Despite defeat in state after state, these individuals continue to use government agencies to denounce free thought and critical thinking in the academy. At the federal level, Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania warned a recent convention of independent college and university administrators that Republican leaders of Congress have been “remarkably restrained” given that the “majority of Republicans” believe higher education is on the left. “There’s no question about that,” he said. “We do, and it is.” Even a former university president and U.S. secretary of education, a man who should know better, joined in the chorus. In December, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee told the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education that “the greatest threat to broader public support and funding for higher education” is the “growing political one-sidedness which has infected most campuses, and an absence of true diversity of opinion.”
Similarly, officials of the federal government continue to apply business notions of accountability to higher education and to advocate standardized testing and curricula. It seems that the Commission on the Future of Higher Education has such a program in mind. Standardized testing implies a national curriculum. To require all the institutions that make up American higher education—religious schools, small residential liberal arts colleges, state universities, community colleges, and major research institutions—to teach the same quantifiable material would destroy the diversity of our system, which remains the envy of the world.
To argue that there should be no differences between the University of Wisconsin, Calvin College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Northern Virginia Community College is the height of perversity. Even if higher education were to adopt a corporate mentality, its leaders would presumably not want to obliterate one of the system’s fundamental strengths: the diversity among institutions and institutional missions.
The history of higher education in the United States has been marked by bold predictions of fundamental change, which have often distracted us from actual changes taking place every day. I’m sure everyone remembers the prognostications about the boundless future of the digital economy and its inevitable transformation of higher education. Just how many years ago did business guru Peter Drucker predict the demise of the residential campus within twenty-five years?
Luckily, we still have time to resist these dystopian visions. If faculty members combine their voices to articulate the values and importance of higher education, they will make a difference. They are resisting attempts to impose ideological and religious values on science. Faculty are helping defeat misguided attempts to impose the Academic Bill of Rights and other violations of academic freedom on higher education. They are going to meetings of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education and making suggestions about real accountability for policy makers and educators alike. Working together, we can meet the challenges ahead and build a future that not only works, but is worthwhile.
On a personal note, this column is my final one. By the time it is published, I will have left the AAUP for another position. I want to thank the readers who have helped make the last decade so rewarding for me. Keep up the good fight.
Mark Smith was AAUP director of government relations until March.
|