The University of Louisiana at Lafayette seems
to have instituted this kind of minor, which is a selection of coursework
often about 18 hours of study that are in addition to a student’s major area of
study. Often, courses in these can serve double duty in fulfilling university
requirements past the roughly one-third of hours required for all baccalaureate
students in Louisiana. Noted on completer’s transcripts, this one is said to
cull courses from sociology, cultural anthropology, child and family studies and human
sexuality. As is typical of most minors, it does not require any additional
startup costs, as existing courses and resources are used to deliver it.
Naturally, it has little practical use out in the real world. That’s
not necessarily a bad thing, because while one purpose of a college degree is
to impart a useful skill set, which has particular import in the hard sciences
and related areas such as in business, the other is, to put it maybe tritely, to
broaden horizons. This is accomplished by exposing students to a spectrum of
the human condition, as expressed through a number of different activities and
end-products of them, with the end goal being to get students to understand the
basics and then use those as a jumping off point to encourage them to be able
to think successfully critically about them, to form their own meritorious
ideas, and to explicate them in a way others can understand.
This is why the real and proper university should continue to insist
that all students learn something in areas that, as far as specific employment
and careers go, has little practicality. Taking from my own discipline, from
the introductory course American Government and just one of dozens of areas
within it, students may grumble about things like why they have to know what
powers the states have as opposed to the federal government, how federalism
works, what our civil liberties and rights are and they are determined, which
may government affect and which level of it and how, etc. But in a society
where government is granted fantastic powers, knowing these basics are
essential not only to understanding how government can affect lives, but in how
to use government to maximize an individual’s life prospects. If nothing else,
people are best off when they know how to defend themselves against a system of
government that creates many opportunities for those who maximize the worst
qualities of mankind, and are quite willing to exploit others in the process,
yet designed in the hope that it can control these impulses to allow for
maximization of liberty of all while pursuing genuine common goods.
These life lessons are just the basics. Getting deeper into this area
of behavioral science, for example, if you were to take a class such as my
Political Behavior, one much more specific area of knowledge covered would be
voting behavior and very specifically the study of why people vote the way they
do. Several different explanations for this exist, with obviously no one of
them convincingly more demonstrably valid than others (otherwise, all of them
would not be conjectured). For someone with interest in the question,
understanding them should bring some benefit. But if interest is only passing,
there’s still real value in knowing of them because if you do, then you can
argue intelligently about them, and even act accordingly to what you conclude.
This exercise, repeated in dozens of different ways, is what builds critical
thinking ability – and a more challenging way even than in the hard sciences,
where at least the prior assumptions behind problem solving are known and
agreed to, because in this instance those are missing and must also be analyzed
and argued.
Which is the problem with the incipient “LGBT” (as it’s called in
academia) minor, or, more broadly, in any of the presumed fields of study based
upon the notion of “identity politics” – such as women’s studies,
African-American/black studies, Hispanic/Chicano studies, etc. Even as what
might be considered hard and fast rules such as in the sciences do not exist in
a behavioral or social science such as political science, at least to an
incomplete degree data and right reason allow for general agreement on basics
that allow for diversity in theorizing to proceed from that. For example, one
can argue (very persuasively, given the data extant and logic) that American
government largely is responsive and accountable to the public’s wishes, or
(with a far smaller availability of ammunition both factually and
intellectually) argue it is beholden to some kind of ruling elite of high
economic standing fused into the political system.
But with these areas of identity politics, they dispense with diversity
in views, moving straight to ideologically-based assumptions – unproven by fact
and logic, if not entirely falsifiable by use of fact and logic. (For a recent controversy
illustrating the intellectual perils of this approach, see this.) That even their
basic assumptions have so little analytical basis for rational acceptance beyond
the visceral and emotive creates a “garbage in, garbage out” situation – even
if you can use this knowledge base, such as it is, as a jumping-off point for
inculcating critical thinking ability, it produces a set of conclusions and end
product wholly divorced from the reality of the human condition, rendering it
useless except as a cautionary tale.
As a result, these kinds of courses and programs by their very nature
are less demanding, and fit very neatly into the now almost half-century arc
where academia in general has been complicit in devaluing a university
education. By assigning these vessels academic import and allowing them to
displace studies more relevant and serious intellectually, this cheapens the
actual worth of a university degree. And the rise of this kind of coursework is
not even the main source of the decline, for in more traditional fields of
study, reducing the demands intellectually and in content of their courses has
served the same purpose, magnified.
This push downwards in standards came because, for so long, higher
education in America was a seller’s market. While this trend started as a
result of changes in social attitudes from the 1960s with a desire to get a
college deferment to avoid the draft as the vanguard, the main impetus came
from the almost simultaneous happenstances of a college degree mutating into a
proof of ability and cheap money to pursue them.
By the early 1970s, broad-based
intelligence testing had been declared unconstitutional and employers
began to substitute possessing a higher education degree as some kind of
proof of intelligence to do a job. Only a few years before, widespread student
lending for college began through the federal government, and, about the time
this court decision arrived, that was supplemented through the Pell Grant
program. In other words, demand quickly increased sharply for degreed people,
and plenty of government subsidizing was available. This touched off a boom in
college growth: in the 1970s enrollment increased nearly 50 percent over the
decade and by the end of the century was 250 percent higher than in 1965.
States responded by also increasing taxpayer dollars going into public
institutions of higher learning.
With students streaming in the doors, not a whole lot of accountability
was required from colleges. Whatever they threw out there would get taken
because students needed degrees – but not because the vast majority had a
thirst for knowledge; rather, because they needed the credentialing. This idea
of a university education not as an improving and transformative experience but
as a hoop to jump through began to predominate among the student body and,
sadly, in the minds of many in the faculty, who increasingly saw their role as
facilitating achievement of this on behalf of the student as more a priority
than in presenting a challenging path to develop their capacities for learning
and retention of useful facts and for critical thinking skills.
Especially susceptible to this new attitude were in the areas with the
least direct connection to market forces – the social sciences, liberal arts,
and humanities. This vacuum allowed the ideas that there should be offered areas
of study related to the identity politics cluster. And it appealed to many
faculty members because, frankly, the less demanding they are of students, the
less work it is for them to do for the same paycheck, and/or to allow them more
free time to pursue other things such as research.
However, in this century the tide has reversed. Fueled by cheap money
with few forces of accountability on them, colleges now find they threaten to
price themselves out of a global marketplace. At the same time, budgetary
pressures caused governments to roll back support and/or increasingly tie it to
some measures of accountability. These trends were exacerbated in Louisiana by
the overbuilt
condition of its baccalaureate-and-above institutions that had until
recently featured in most instances almost non-existent admissions standards.
So, this has amplified downward pressure on educational rigor in areas
largely insulated from the market even as state policy-makers have tried to
improve matters through recent imposition of recent accountability measures. In
Louisiana, budgetary pressures have had the salutary effect of reducing the
subsidization for education, which means those majors and minors whose
graduates face the most uncertain future employment prospects
disproportionately would lose students. At the same time, accountability
measures are weighed to producing graduates, meaning the path to least
resistance comes in reducing standards; the easier you make it to gain
credentialing, the more consumers you will attract and graduate to reap, if not
preserve, financial rewards.
But this is not educating, merely credentialing. And in a shrinking
marketplace with uncertain rewards, the incentive becomes to rush to the bottom
in order to preserve institutional power, particularly that derived from higher
personnel numbers. So in this environment it is entirely predictable that this
kind of minor would come to fruition. It encourages enrollments in courses of
weak merit, which should produce higher grades helpful for credentialing,
thereby student retention and eventual graduation, and thus ultimately in
capturing taxpayer subsidies.
The presence of the LGBT minor by itself is not an isolated example of
this new attitude at one place at one time. In my own more than two decades
teaching in Louisiana higher education, I have been told by an administrator (blessedly
put out to pasture years back) that I needed to dumb down my courses to “serve”
the student population assigned to a university with its particular admission
standards, and informed by another that minimizing student complaints over
course demands and low grades was more important than quality considerations.
At the state’s flagship campus, one faculty
member was disciplined because she was considered too demanding.
1 comment:
Regardless whether an LGBT minor is a worthy path for any particular student, or even whether it is worthy of inclusion at a university at all, I find it interesting that such a thing honoring LGBT is attacked most viciously in the same part of the country that has historically had the worst problems accepting other innocent minorities. Maybe the south could use a heavy dose of tolerance and respect for its minorities, rather than always scapegoating them. You wonder why so many people down here carry around antiquated prejudices, and yet they are still heaping hatred at minorities any chance they get.
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