My letter to Marketplace this a.m.
As a professor at a liberal arts college, I listened with no small interest to David Frum’s attackon Nancy Pelosi’s plans to increase access to higher education this morning on the NPR show, Marketplace. The basis of his argument appears to be that because college students do scarcely better on standardized tests than high school seniors, Americans should not increase access to college. They’re not, Mr. Frum suggests, getting their money’s worth.
My letter to Marketplace this a.m.
As a professor at a liberal arts college, I listened with no small interest to David Frum’s attackon Nancy Pelosi’s plans to increase access to higher education this morning on the NPR show, Marketplace. The basis of his argument appears to be that because college students do scarcely better on standardized tests than high school seniors, Americans should not increase access to college. They’re not, Mr. Frum suggests, getting their money’s worth.
How would I want one of my students to consider Mr. Frum’s piece, I wondered. Under Mr. Frum’s standard, they should know factual details about Mr. Frum and the matters on which he pontificates. If they don’t, they have failed. I would prefer to submit them to a more rigorous challenge. Can they critically analyze the arguments Mr. Frum makes and do they know how to find the factual details necessary to make that analysis?
I, for example, would not fail a student who didn’t know that Mr. Frum, a Republican critic of higher education, was himself a graduate of Yale University and received higher degrees from Yale and Harvard. I would, however, be concerned if they did not know how to obtain such information (google Frum, find his resumeat the American Enterprise Institute). I would also be concerned if they did not understand why knowing this information is helpful for evaluating his arguments. I would hope my students would wonder whether there was something disingenuous about a man who holds a trio of Ivy League degrees arguing that they aren’t worth so much for the children of working Americans. I would hope my students might wonder whether a man with such impressive conservative Republican credentials might be motivated to attack Pelosi’s plans to increase access to higher education for reasons other than his stated concern that American students not be forced to suffer the ineffectiveness of the education Yale and Harvard imposed upon him. Mr. Frum has three children. I would hope my students would wonder what schools they attend.
Similarly, I hope my students would note that Mr. Frum offers no citation for the studies he quotes in support of his argument. I hope they would wonder why Mr. Frum wants to make it difficult for your listeners to evaluate his factual assertions. I would also want them to use the web to track down the report Mr. From refers to and discover that it was sponsored by "a nonprofit organization that advocates for a traditional curriculum and supports conservative student publications on campuses" according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. More importantly, I would hope they realized that Mr. Frum’s argument implicitly defined the purpose and benefit of college education as the capacity to do well on standardized tests – as opposed to, say, the capacity to critical analyze the arguments of politicians and pundits. Since most of our nation’s college graduates will not face a lifetime of standardized tests, but will face unending rhetoric from political partisans about important choices the country faces, I have to confess, I think my definition of the purpose and benefit of a college education is better than Mr. Frum’s.
Perhaps it is parochial of me to hope that my students would also note that Mr. Frum, despite a year’s sojourn in the academy twenty years ago, prefers to pursue employment at the so-called "think tank," the American Enterprise Institute. Such employment provides him a credential, recognized by Marketplace for reasons that are not obvious, to criticize American colleges, without submitting his arguments to the rigors or peer review or his energies to the somewhat demanding project of teaching. It is easy to teach factoids, but teaching students to think critically is, as Mr. Frum’s hero might phrase it, hard work.
Finally, I would hope my students might question Mr. Frum’s authority. They might ask why does Marketplace give such a valuable platform to a man who has been so monumentally wrong about the most important political issue of contemporary American politics? They might wonder why the man who authored the phrase "axis of evil" has not sought to atone for the disaster he promoted by, at the very least, a rather lengthy period of monastic silence, instead of turning the morally questionable power of his own skills as a propagandist to the domestic challenges our country faces. It seems obvious to me that Mr. Frum wants to limit access to higher education because he wants to limit the ability of citizens to evaluate his political agenda and the arguments he makes to further them. He wants, in other words, to keep us stupid. In a perfect world, my students might also ask, why does NPR want to help him?