Miller, chls

<p style=" font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-size: 0.9em; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"> ==

inside higher ed

<a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones">https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones</a>

<h2 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title">Connecting the Dots</h2>

<div class="meta">Submitted by Alan Jones on June 16, 2006 - </div>

By all objective measures, the dawning of the 21st century should be a golden era for American higher education. A recent issue of The Economist described America’s system of higher education as “the best in the world” and provided convincing documentation for its claim. A recent <a href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3671/is_200504/ai_n13641838" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">review article</a> [1] by Jonathan Cole, provost at Columbia University, meticulously documents the preeminence of U.S. higher education in the world today as an established fact.

Perhaps sensing the current domestic political climate, however, Cole uses his analysis as the basis for sounding a strong cautionary note. “The United States paid a heavy price when the leaders of its research universities in the 1950’s failed to defend the leader of the Manhattan Project J. Robert Oppenheimer; the double Nobel Prize chemist Linus Pauling; and the China expert Owen Lattimore. But a wave of repression in American universities today is apt to have even more dramatic consequences for the nation than the repression of the Cold War.”

This broad-based and even global acclaim for higher education in the United States is strangely at odds with the concentrated political attacks that Cole warns us about and that the academy is currently experiencing. It is particularly out of step with the dark and dysfunctional picture of the academy painted by David Horowitz and his <a href="http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21302" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Center for the Study of Popular Culture.</a> [2] If Horowitz were simply a disaffected political crank, as many have hitherto regarded him, then his views on the academy could be easily dismissed. Such dismissal would seem to be all the more in order following his disastrous testimony before the legislative subcommittee in Pennsylvania in which he was <a href="http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/01/11/retract" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">forced to recant as unsubstantiated</a> [3] several of the cases that he had been widely circulating as documentation of alleged malfeasance in the academy.

Oddly, however, his campaign goes on. Horowitz, with assistance from Karl Rove and the former House majority whip, Tom DeLay, has briefed Republican members of Congress on his Academic Bill of Rights campaign and DeLay has even <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0106-30.htm" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">distributed copies</a> [4] of Horowitz’s political primer The Art of Political Warfare: How Republicans Can Fight to Win to all Republican members of Congress. Rove refers to Horowitz’s pamphlet as “a perfect pocket guide to winning on the political battlefield."

In a more recent development, last fall, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings appointed a Commission on Higher Education. Spellings, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/25/AR2006012501891.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">described as a protégé of Rove,</a> [5] gained considerable attention as the principal architect of President Bush’s controversial “No Child Left Behind” initiative. Among the proposals being discussed by Spellings’s new commission is one that calls for <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/31/accredit" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">scrapping the current system of accreditation,</a> [6] which is done by independent regional bodies, in favor of a National Accreditation Foundation that would be created by Congress and the president.

The current system of institutional review through independent accreditation boards is one of the hallmarks of American higher education and is one of the most important structural safeguards of the academy’s ability to ensure academic quality and intellectual excellence. The introduction of oversight by an inherently partisan political body in lieu of the currently independent accreditation process is a peculiar remedy if the perceived ailment in the academy is political bias. Carol Geary Schneider, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, <a href="http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/20/spellings" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">has said</a> [7] that “the commission is sending out firebolts, one after another." To chair this extraordinary committee Secretary Spellings chose Charles Miller, a former chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents and, historically, a large contributor to the President’s election campaigns.

</div>