Please see Patricia J. Williams on the DOE report, “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.” Here is an excerpt from the article, with a key quotation from the report:
“Student achievement, which is inextricably connected to institutional success, must be measured by institutions on a ‘value-added’ basis that takes into account students’ academic baseline when assessing their results.” Crudely put, students would have to be evaluated like a balance sheet. Take the value of what they came in with, then take the value of what they know when they get out. Subtract the former from the latter. The difference is what’s known in the world of soybean futures as “value added.”
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I would add that what people need to realize about academic freedom is that it is not only about publishing your actual research results, or expressing political opinions in or outside of class. It is also having the freedom to choose texts and materials which meet students’ actual educational needs. This is important as regards non “political” skills based courses, as well as in special topics courses for advanced students.
On April Fools’ Day, when I was taken into captivity (do you remember? I was in Parish Prison for fifteen days), one of our local papers published an
important article on academic freedom. An excerpt:
The chairman of the Senate education committee is sponsoring a bill to revamp the way science is taught in public schools, including views that challenge biological evolution.
Sen. Ben Nevers, D-Bogalusa and sponsor of the bill, said Monday that it would be unfair to label his bill as one that would pave the way for the teaching of creationism — the view that life began about 6,000 years ago in a process described in the Bible’s Book of Genesis.
“I believe that students should be exposed to both sides of scientific data and allow them to make their own decisions,” Nevers said Monday.
Note that Nevers thinks there are exactly two “sides” to this question. Our Governor, as we know, believes in “intelligent design,” as does this writer. Note the sophistry in this letter, and its misconstrual – willful, I believe – of both critical thinking and academic freedom. Monday, however, a professor in the sciences wrote to the Times-Picayune saying this:
Any college student having succeeded at a freshmen level general biology course could tell you that the word “theory” has a different meaning for scientists than it does for the general public. A theory to a scientist is defined as a body of interconnected concepts, supported by scientific reasoning and experimental evidence. Theories are a solid foundation for much of science.
The theory of evolution has unfortunately been misunderstood by many, and misconstrued by those seeking to funnel religious debate back into the science classroom. Many religious leaders, including the Pope, agree that there really is no conflict between the theory of evolution and belief in a higher power. Many scientists even follow the idea of “theistic evolution,” asserting that God graced his creations with the ability to change and adapt to their environments.
Any half-hearted attempt at researching scientific literature would find that there is overwhelming evidence to support evolution. The fossil record, carbon dating, DNA sequencing, comparative anatomy and phylogenetic mapping are all methods that have all been used to show the connectedness and the adaptive nature of living things.
A number of “missing links” have also been discovered for humans and other organisms. Archaeopteryx is one of the most stunning examples of a missing link, showing up in fossils repeatedly as a dinosaur with feathers.
Evolution is strongly supported by most of the scientific community and has a rightful place in science texts and classrooms as the only rigorously tested and supported explanation of changes seen in living systems.
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Now let us return to the Spellings report. While debates rage over the teaching of evolution – a battle which in the real world the anti-evolutionists have long since lost – some other policy changes are coming down, with very serious implications.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I sent that article to a colleague of mine because I was reading the Senate minutes, and they are going off the deep end with metrics. They want one metric to be able to quantify “research” across disciplines. Nuts. My colleague pointed out that all of the metrics they were discovered rendered the humanities and arts invisible, but nobody really paid much attention.
A colleague here informs me that there is an AAUP statement on the Spellings report, and here it is:
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/GR/federal/FutureofHigherEd/spellrep.htm
There’s also this post from Larval Subjects on the Spellings report and related issues. Smart.
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/molar-machines-and-the-psychology-of-bureaucrats-an-incoherent-rant/
Thanks for this. In effect the Spellings report is part of a longterm conservative pushback against the liberal academy. As you suggested at Larval Subjects, there’s something of Reich’s authoritarian personality at work, filtered through Hofstadterian anti-intellectualism and Lakoff’s authoritarian father metaphor. It all adds up to a deep yearning for plain certainty and hence, honest revulsion for the liberal ethic of pluralism and open-ended investigation.
Because of the anti-intellectualism part, the fact that the vulgar positivism of universal metrics was decisively demolished over the last hundred years is of no consequence. Like any sort of zealotry, this failure can just be read as a contingent failure of will, not an indictment of the whole project.
As good liberals I think we have to tolerate this sort of garbage and even accept that its toters will be in the ascendant every so often. That’s how democracy works, your side doesn’t always win. As you say, there are plenty of ways to subvert the logic of the project – that should be what we’re good at – and keep doing what we do below the radar. We’ll pop back up when the coast gets cleared by the political cycle, as it seems about to be. The rate of surveillance is still very, very low; we’re just spoiled by having it close to zero.