Do Smarts Rule?
Thomas C. Reeves, The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

The Wilson Quarterly is always interesting and intellectually nourishing. The Summer, 2004 issue, under the banner "Do Smarts Rule?" contains three riveting articles on the issue of human intelligence. Few have wanted to discuss I.Q. since the uproar over The Bell Curve. But the experts, we learn, continue to have the highest confidence in their ability to measure what they consider to be a vital quality of human existence.

Steven Lagerfeld, editor of the Wilson Quarterly, notes the modern business world's near worship of raw intelligence. Where once the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit stressed conformity and group-think, now the fashion is to favor brilliant and independent innovators like Bill Gates. But Lagerfeld himself is not so enamored of brilliance. "Brains can produce wonderful things. They gave us Google and cracked the human genetic code. But we tend to forget that big brains also ran Enron, MCI, and scores of short-lived technology company skyrockets." He argues, "Men and women of high intelligence certainly deserve our admiration, but our greatest admiration ought to be reserved for those who combine whatever mental gifts they have with virtues such as humanity, prudence, and wisdom." After all, Albert Speer had an IQ of 128, Hermann Goering scored ten points higher.

In the political world, high IQs, in Lagerfeld's judgment, are often a detriment. John F. Kennedy's 119 paled badly when compared to Richard Nixon's 143, but which of the two had the more popular and effective presidency? "In fact, research suggests that JFK's relatively modest IQ was just about perfect for the presidency, or most other leadership positions. Above that level, a person's ideas and language may become too complex for a mass audience, according to Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis. Other traits matter more." Now there is something for historians to chew over.

In the second article in this series, Linda S. Gottfredson, a professor of education at the University of Delaware, argues that genetically inherited intelligence, "the g factor," is "a universal and reliably measured distinction among humans in their ability to learn, reason, and solve problems . . . . Understanding g's biological basis in the brain is the new frontier in intelligence research today." Experiments in raising I.Q.s have failed, the author reports. "Distinctions in g, or general intelligence, are evidently as much a fact of nature as differences in height, blood pressure, and the like."

The fortunate few are likely to benefit greatly from their gift: People born with high intelligence tend to have better jobs and higher incomes, and they enjoy better health and longevity. "Research roundly affirms what experience suggests: People with higher IQs have a remarkable ability to make their way out of even the most dire environments. This protection, along with the little-appreciated fact that the laws of genetics ensure that parents and children will tend to differ substantially in IQ, guarantees that talent will emerge from even the worst of environments, in turn ensuring considerable social mobility in any free society." I can imagine those findings spurring a host of doctoral dissertations in history.

In "Higher Ed, Inc.," James B. Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida, Gainesville, presents a devastating critique of higher education in contemporary America, contending that what is really going on is a vast charade, designed to raise funds, build enormous, palace-like campuses, and, on the undergraduate level, deliver mere consumer satisfaction. All of this bears little or no relationship to intelligence or true education. "No one," Twitchell writes, "cares what's taught in grades 13-16." This is true at all levels, including the top: "the elites are not as concerned with learning as they are with maintaining selectivity at the front door and safe passage to still-higher education at the back door."

Among the courses taught by Twitchell's English Department that used to be English 101: attitudes toward marriage, business, bestsellers, carnivals, computer games, fashion, horror films, The Simpsons, homophobia, living arrangements, rap music, soap operas, Elvis, sports, theme parks, AIDS, and play. He writes

Hardly anyone in Higher Ed, Inc., cares about what is taught, because that is not our charge. We are not in the business of transmitting what E. D. Hirsch would call cultural literacy; nor are we in the business of teaching the difference between the right word and the almost right word, as Mark Twain might have thought important. We're in the business of creating a total environment, delivering an experience, gaining satisfied customers, and applying the "smart" stamp when they head for the exits.

Historians are no strangers to the "dumbing down" of higher education, of course. Couldn't any of us make a similar list of silly courses offered in our own departments? A larger issue looms: Isn't the evidence overwhelming that in our passion to give virtually everyone a college degree and build larger and more opulent campuses to accommodate this egalitarian desire, educators in all fields have seriously overestimated the ability of the masses to engage in serious education? Indeed, do we even know what a serious, balanced education is any more?

I used to watch students line up to sell the books assigned in their classes, even before the final examinations, and wonder if we faculty members had given them a broad and solid introduction to knowledge and instilled in them a genuine and lifelong passion for learning. I always felt sorry for almost all of the young people happily chatting in those long lines, especially those with high intelligence.

NAS4:55 PM

Hammering DeLay
K.C. Johnson, Brooklyn College—CUNY

Over the past few years, national observers have discovered why Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has earned the nickname "The Hammer." The House Majority Leader has a well-deserved reputation for crafting public policies that serve the partisan needs of the GOP, even if doing so crosses ethical lines (the House Ethics Committee has admonished him twice in 2004 for violating the lower chamber's rules) or political fair play (the DeLay-orchestrated redistricting of Texas' congressional districts might cost as many as eight House Democrats their seats). It is, to put it simply, not easy to outsmart Tom DeLay.

Yet it appears as if the Brooklyn College administration has done just that. In 1998, Congress passed an amendment to the Higher Education Act requiring that colleges and universities make a "good faith effort" to promote student voting and participation in the electoral process. The measure certainly is needed: in the 2000 election, only 37 percent of citizens between the ages of 18 and 24 voted, while in some municipalities-ranging from Brunswick, Maine to Tucson, Arizona-local officials actively discouraged students from registering to vote. DeLay considered the amendment acceptable, since polls from the time showed the youth vote trending Republican. Perhaps, some Members of Congress mused, the measure might even encourage colleges to devote more attention to civics education, in which previous generations of students learned about the foundations of American democracy.

Brooklyn's "good faith effort" to implement the amendment's provisions included a September 29 webcast to promote political participation coordinated by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), a national organization that has shaped the college's academic agenda since September 2001. Though the AAC&U includes over 700 accredited institutions, a small group of ideologues control its publications and programs. They conceal their intentions behind heavy doses of jargon impenetrable to people outside of the academy or by using banal, unobjectionable phrases such as "liberal learning," "inclusive excellence," "student-centered learning," or "education for the 21st century."

AAC&U administrators operate under the (highly dubious) premise that middle-class and working-class students enter college so inculcated with racist and sexist sentiments that colleges need to abandon the traditional purpose of providing students with a knowledge base from the disciplines of the liberal arts and instead embrace an educational agenda centered on purging these students of their allegedly anti-"diversity" beliefs.

On issues relating to political participation, the AAC&U's rhetoric is actually quite revealing. The group's publications never describe the United States as a "democracy." Instead, they employ the phrase "diverse democracy." Along with every other democracy in the world, the United States is, of course, a "diverse democracy." It's also a Western Hemisphere, constitutional, representative, and 228-year-old democracy. So why does the AAC&U always employ the adjective "diverse"? Because in a "diverse democracy," colleges train "global" rather than American citizens. As Brooklyn Provost Roberta S. Matthews has explained, a "global citizen," unlike an American citizen, is one "sensitized" to issues of race, class, and gender-and all the political positions that such "sensitivity" implies.

Given this background, it should come as no surprise that the college-sponsored and AAC&U coordinated event contained a one-sided ideological message. Moderator Linda Williams, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, describes herself as a specialist in issues of race, class, and gender. Panelists included an ideologically neutral statistician and the associate director of a group called "Democracy Matters," who defined "democracy" as supporting campaign finance reform and a left-wing social agenda. None of the panelists represented a Republican, or even a centrist or center-left Democratic perspective. The webcast exclusively encouraged students who agreed with the AAC&U's positions on social issues to participate in the political process.

Two weeks after the AAC&U event, Brooklyn College invited Howard Zinn to speak. Zinn is a professor emeritus of political science at Boston University who attracted national notice as author of A People's History of the United States. He sports a long history of radical activism, and regarding current international events, he urges the United States to withdraw all military forces from the Middle East and to "put pressure on Israel, by threatening withdrawal of needed economic support, to get out of the occupied territories, evacuate the settlements, and come to a no-aggression agreement with the Palestinian state." Since Zinn openly admits to writing history that would be useful for activists, most professional historians regard his work as simplistic, though his book has had enormous influence marketed to the general public.

Neither the AAC&U event nor the Zinn speech had much effect in and of themselves. During the time that I was in attendance, college employees outnumbered students at the AAC&U webcast. And Zinn is so extreme that any undecided student who attended his speech most likely would have departed the event an ardent Bush supporter.

The events, however, form part of a broader, disturbing pattern on campus. Any institution that accepts principles of true intellectual inquiry would welcome figures such as Zinn or the AAC&U panelists to campus as part of a balanced debate on important issues affecting the academy. This ideal does not apply to Brooklyn's current campus situation, in which the administration and its supporters have endorsed a variety of initiatives geared toward implementing curricular and personnel policies reflecting only one side of controversial contemporary political and social issues.

The extent of Brooklyn's transformation comes in a recent proposal for revamping the college's Core curriculum to provide an "enhanced emphasis on global studies." To my knowledge, no university grants a Ph.D. degree in "global studies," raising the question of why the college administration finds this untested concept so attractive. In theory, everyone supports students' learning more about international matters in an increasingly globalized world. But any expectation that existing "Global Studies" departments contain offerings in politics, diplomacy, the law, business, religion, and intellectual life in the United States and Western Europe would be in error. Instead, these departments feature courses oriented towards race, class, gender, and cultural studies, often containing obvious biases against the Western heritage, contemporary U.S. foreign policy, and the Israeli position in the Middle East.

As example of the field's "scholarship," the Global Studies Association's 2004 conference featured papers on such topics as the need for "regime change" in the United States, in light of the fact that "the U.S. Government, at least over the past 50 years, has been the chief terrorist and sponsor of terrorism in the world"; or a call for "militant action" to restore open admissions and remedial education at CUNY's senior colleges, abolition of which reflected "the direct cost to education of the prison-industrial-military complex."

Last May, in a breathtaking change in the college's priorities, Faculty Council passed a resolution calling not only for a "global studies" perspective to inform all courses in the new Core curriculum, but also for job applicants who demonstrate an expertise in "global studies" to receive priority in all new faculty hires, in every department, at the college. The First Amendment prevents Brooklyn College, as a public institution, from basing hiring decisions on a candidate's political beliefs. In light of the Faculty Council resolution, however, any search committee ideologue can avoid legal difficulties by querying an applicant as to whether he or she would feel comfortable introducing a "global studies" perspective in the classroom -- knowing that, because this field features scholarship urging "regime change" in the 2004 election and "militant action" to restore remediation at Brooklyn College, only applicants of one point of view could answer in the affirmative. Some might consider this new mandate the equivalent of the college imposing an ideological litmus test in the personnel process.

For several generations, the principle of academic freedom, based on the idea that professors' specialized training entitles them to authority in making curricular and personnel decisions free from governmental interference, has been the norm on the nation's college campuses. Reflecting this tradition, college administrators, quite correctly, have dismissed figures showing that faculty in the humanities and social sciences contain disproportionate numbers of Democrats and self-described Leftists, arguing that no difference should exist between how Democrats and Republicans teach a course in U.S. history, political philosophy, English literature, or macroeconomics.

But when the central purpose of a college education seems to become influencing students' opinions about contemporary political, social, and diplomatic events, the partisan and ideological imbalance among the faculty becomes very relevant; it is unrealistic to expect that a college oriented around the promotion of a particular ideological agenda can long escape interference from hostile legislators. And as the Texas Democrats have come to understand too well, when that political interference comes, the hammer wielded by political figures such as Tom DeLay can be very fierce indeed.

What can NAS members do about the situation? Why not ask relevant politicians, such as Congressman Vito Fossella, or New York State Senator John Marchi, both of whose districts include areas that send students to Brooklyn College, what steps they plan to take to ensure that the college returns to its traditional message of providing a quality -- objective -- education for all?

NAS12:15 PM