Part of a symposium on the educational impact of Obama and the New Progressivism.
Bruce S. Thornton
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6618 education from an Obama presidency? The answer is easy: none. What we will get is just more of the same. The ideology that underlies Obama’s “progressive” political philosophy in areas such as health care, the economy, or defense has in fact long dominated America’s colleges and universities.
Indeed, this ideology has been entrenched for so long that the last eight years under Bush passed with barely a ripple on the vast ocean of politicized mediocrity. The slight improvements in campus life that did occur––rollbacks on unconstitutional speech codes, for example, or exposures of politicized curricula––were the work not primarily of Republican politicians, but of organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.To take one example, affirmative action policies have been only slightly modified by recent Supreme Court decisions, and so we can expect these policies to continue. In other words, an Obama presidency will most likely not expand or strengthen them because they are already working quite well for someone with his political perspective. The fact is, admissions and hiring processes have incorporated subjective criteria––essays documenting “challenges” the student has faced, for example––that can outweigh more objective criteria such as test scores or GPA. Something like “overcoming racism” or other proxies for racial identity can be put in the scales and thus deliver the same result as an unconstitutional quota. So too with hiring. On my campus, despite a California state initiative banning the use of race in hiring decisions, our recruitment procedures are rife with explicit racial awareness. We still gather data on the race and sex of applicants, we still record the race and gender of search committee members, and we still must have an “Equal Employment Opportunity” commissar whose imprimatur is needed for a hire to proceed. All the state initiative achieved was the substitution of the title “EEO officer” for what used to be called the “Affirmative Action officer.”
http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=1225&theme=home&loc=b