First they went after K-12 with "No Child Left Behind". Now, this administration is quietly trying to dismantle Higher Education. And, surprise,surprise....it involves Big Swinging Dick's Shooting Pardner....and Lynne Cheney's former Top Aide.
In the latest move in its multifaceted effort to remake higher education accreditation, and higher education in general, the Bush administration has appointed to the Education Department’s panel that reviews accrediting agencies a critic who has advocated more or less junking the current federal system of academic quality review.
Department officials have come to view accreditation, higher education’s system of self-regulation and quality control, as an important pressure point for carrying out many of the recommendations of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. That’s because accrediting agencies have influence over the vast majority of colleges and programs, and because the department, through the NACIQI panel, has the ability to judge the performance of accreditors. That approval is crucial, because without it, an accreditor’s stamp of approval of a college does not carry with it the all-important right for the institution’s students to receive federal financial aid.
..Over the past year, the department panel has already begun altering the standards it uses to judge accreditors, urging them to set "bright line" minimum standards for the colleges they oversee to meet, to prove how successfully they are educating their students.
Four of the panel’s 15 members are Texans. While that has come to be seen (or at least stereotyped) as standard operating procedure in the Bush administration, that works out to 27 percent of the panel’s members, when 7 percent of college students nationally are from Texas. - Inside Higher Education "Staking the Deck" - May 1, 2007
Take three recent appointees
Andrea Fischer Newman, a University of Michigan regent.
She served as a Vice Chair of the George W. Bush for President campaign in Michigan and as a co-chair of the Bush for President Finance Committee in Michigan in the 2000 Presidential election. In 2004, Newman was a "Pioneer" fundraiser for the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign. She is a member of the Federal Service Impasses Panel, appointed by President George W. Bush in February 2002. The panel resolves labor disputes between the federal government and its unions.
H. James Towey, president of Pennsylvania’s Saint Vincent College. (In Murtha's District, by the way...)
Towey was until 2006 director of the White House Office of Faith-Based & Community Initiatives
Pamela Willeford (one of the Texans)
Willeford headed the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board while Bush was governor and served the president as U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein from 2003-6. She has also been a "major contributor" to Bush’s gubernatorial inauguration celebrations and served as a co-chair of his 1999 gubernatorial inauguration committee(Willeford also has the most entertaining biographical detail of any of the panel’s members, new or old: She was the third member of the hunting team last year when Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly shot the other member of the trio.)
Three members (20 percent of NACIQI’s total) represent for-profit higher education, at a time when about 7 percent of all students attend institutions in that sector.
But for some college officials, the selection of Anne Neal, who worked as a lawyer in the Reagan White House and as a top aide to Lynne V. Cheney at the National Endowment for the Humanities under President George H.W. Bush, crosses beyond appropriate political and even partisan appointment-making into ideological intrusion.
That’s because Neal has so outspokenly criticized accreditation — to the point of calling for an end to the current system of federal recognition of accreditors that she will now be a part of. In a 2003 report by the organization she heads, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Neal and a co-author argued bluntly that "accreditation has not served to ensure quality, has not protected the curriculum from serious degradation, and gives students, parents, and public decision-makers almost no useful information about institutions of higher education."
The solution to that perceived failure, they argued, is that the "federal government should sever the connection between accreditation and eligibility for student financial aid." - Inside Higher Ed "Stacking the Deck"
Is this a similar case to Attorneygate? It has a certain similar smell.
College leaders do not seem to share the department’s view that the appointees are well-rounded. In a wide-ranging letter (pdf) this month to Congressional leaders laying out their priorities for legislation extending the Higher Education Act, 15 major higher education groups included an item relating to ideological balance on the accreditation advisory committee.
Acknowledging the current selection process, the groups suggested that "the NACIQI appointment process should be consistent with the general procedure for nominations to other federal advisory boards such as the Advisory Committee on Federal Student Aid. Having nominations from the Congress as well as the Secretary would assure that a greater diversity of views is reflected in the panel’s deliberations than is now the case." - Inside Higher Ed
And what is this American Council of Trustees & Alumni that Anne D. Neal heads? Well....
The first post-September 11 expression of the link between the neo-conservative political agenda and the attack on critical thinking about the Middle East was a report issued by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) in November 2001 entitled ‘Defending civilization: how our universities are failing America and what can be done about it’. As the title suggests, ACTA maintained that criticism of the Bush administration’s war on Afghanistan on campuses across the country was tantamount to negligence in ‘defending civilization’ and proof that ‘our universities are failing America’. ACTA alleged that American universities were brought to this sorry state by inadequate teaching of western culture and American history. Consequently, students and faculty did not understand what was at stake in the fight against terrorism and were undermining the defence of civilization by asking too many questions.
ACTA was founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney. Former Democratic presidential candidate Senator Joseph Lieberman is a member of its national council. Although she is no longer officially active in ACTA, a lengthy quote by Ms. Cheney appears on the cover of the report, giving the document the appearance of a quasi-official statement of government policy. - SourceWatch
Here's a bit of a speech "Academic Bias, By the Numbers", given by Anne Neal to Temple University, and in testimony before a select committee in the Pennsylvania legislature.
In recent months, members of the academy have themselves conceded challenges. The Association of American Colleges and Universities has issued a statement on Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility that states: "Some departments fail to ensure that their curricula include the full diversity of legitimate intellectual perspectives appropriate to their disciplines. And individual faculty members sometimes express their personal views to students in ways that intimidate them....[T]here is room for improvement." Columbia president Lee Bollinger, after outside pressure, in early 2005 admitted students had legitimate complaints about intimidation in the classroom and issued new and revised grievance guidelines. David Ward, President of the American Council on Education, has admitted to the press that some institutions have no grievance procedures in place and should have.
Meanwhile, surveys by Klein, Rothman, McGinnis and others documenting the politically monolithic character of the faculty have mounted, with no countervailing data of any kind. A study released in late December by Professor Dan Klein found that social science professors are overwhelmingly Democratic, that Democratic professors in those disciplines are more homogeneous in their thinking than Republicans; and that Republican scholars are more likely to work outside the academy than their Democratic counterparts. On the question of political affiliation, the survey showed an immense imbalance in the breakdown of Democrats to Republicans ranging from 21.1:1 among anthropologists; 9:1:1 among political and legal philosophers; 8.5:1 amongst historians; and 5.6 to 1 amongst political scientists. A 2005 study by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte, Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty, found that 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent conservative. According to the study, the most one-sided departments are English literature, philosophy, political science, and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than five percent call themselves conservative.
"The American College Teacher" a major study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, that has never been challenged, features some questions on politics. The last survey, in 2001, found that 5.3 percent of faculty members were far left, 42.3 percent were liberal, 34.3 percent were middle of the road, 17.7 percent were conservative, and 0.3 percent were far right. Those figures are only marginally different from the previous survey, in 1998.
According to a paper published last fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, politically active professors at top law schools overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats. The study by Northwestern Professor John McGinnis and two co-authors, which covers the faculties of the top 21 law schools listed in the 2002 U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings, finds that just under a third of the professors at those institutions contributed at least $200 to a federal political campaign in the past 11 years. Of that politically active group, 81 percent contributed "wholly or predominantly" to Democratic campaigns, while just 15 percent did the same for Republicans.
...However, in the face of years and years and years of denial by many in the academy, legislators must not bury their heads in the sand, must not shrink from holding hearings to educate the public as you so boldly do today, and most importantly, must not shrink from making it crystal clear that universities ensure the free exchange of ideas and classrooms free of political abuse—if they wish for government to stay out of their business.
That is why I am calling on you today to act.
Faced with growing legislative pressure on this issue, the higher education establishment issued the ACE statement, figured it would pretend to have a quick conversion, endorse intellectual diversity, get those "yahoo" legislators off their backs and go back to business as usual. Do not let them get away with this charade.
It is now incumbent on you to keep the pressure on, step in—in a way that is sensitive to academic freedom and shared governance—and demand action.
As legislators, responsible for public funding and oversight of Pennsylvania’s institutions of higher learning, we submit it is up to you to ensure that those institutions are fostering an atmosphere in the classroom dedicated to valid educational ends.- FrontPageMag.com
So...with people like this wielding such power over higher education in this country, why should we trust that they will not withhold or threaten to withhold accredidation to an institution (and thus losing Federal funding) because they deem it "too liberal", "too Democrat" or "not religious enough" under the guise of "poor performance", just like the US Attorneys.
This is scary, evil shit.