She told the audience at the historically black college’s graduation last week that the focus on education had been lost by a community with a history in which slaves had risked their lives to learn to read. She spoke of the struggles to integrate America’s schools. But those words were a mere setup to yet again demonizing and pathologizing today’s black youth. “Instead of walking miles every day to school,” she said, “they’re sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper.”

Reducing educational success to choices and blaming dropout rates on false dreams, such claims are a disservice to struggles for justice. Worse, the presumption is that one choice is good and rational, and the other pathological and irrational. The idea that dreaming of a career in hip-hop or athletics doesn’t prepare one to succeed in law or politics is problematic.

The first lady’s shaming message, praising the power of educational bootstraps, echoed her husband’s. At a 2009 speech before the NAACP, President Obama  urged the African-American community to take better advantage of education’s equalizing potential. Irrespective of racism, inequality, or segregation, education was the ticket to freedom and prosperity. Urging students to stay in school and keep up their grades, he said, “No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands, and don’t you forget that.” He wanted students “aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers.”

If only it were that easy.

While the path to colleges is littered with school closures, the hegemony of the testing culture, and divestment from public education—pushing youth of color into the school-to-prison pipeline—the percentage of African-Americans attending colleges and universities is on the rise. That’s no thanks to President Obama, whose administration’s educational policy has done little to rectify persistent inequalities. The rising costs of higher education and the administration’s position on student loans have made it more difficult for African-American families, disproportionately hurt by the recession, to send their kids to college. Still, African-Americans are attending colleges and universities at record levels. Why not celebrate this reality?

The Obamas’ update of the “Moynihan Report” (1965), which identified single-parented homes and a culture of poverty as key factors in persistent inequality, almost always takes place in front of African-American audiences.  The continuation of a politics of respectability, in which the black middle class has criticized the black poor for lacking the values needed to “move the race forward,” has been put on full display by the Obamas.

Paisley Jane Harris, discussing the work of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who first described the term “politics of respectability,” identifies it as part of “uplift politics,” which “had two audiences: African-Americans, who were encouraged to be respectable, and white people, who needed to be shown that African-Americans could be respectable.”  It involved the “promotion of temperance, cleanliness of person and property, thrift, polite manners, and sexual purity. The politics of respectability entailed ‘reform of individual behavior as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform.’”

As with this larger history, white America was a primary audience for Michelle Obama’s commencement speech. That audience invariably finds comfort in speeches that simultaneously blame African-Americans for persistent inequality while celebrating American exceptionalism.

The “postracial” president, hoops fanatic, and BFF of Jay-Z and Beyoncé, slamming ballers and rappers? Hmm. But worse than the irony is the cynical political calculation, the failure to acknowledge the ways society has left African-American youth behind while blaming them for lagging. “Are personal accountability, motivation, and fear of being teased really the biggest causes of dropout rates?” asks Racquel Gates, an assistant professor of media culture at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island. “It certainly couldn’t be outdated textbooks, shortage of pencils and school supplies, overworked teachers, lack of college preparatory materials, etc.”

I am less concerned with the political rhetoric and the clichés than with the links between word and action, between rhetoric and policy.  The focus on choices and aspirations, on dreams and values, obscures the ways that educational policies, institutional choices, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the criminalization of adolescence (see, for instance, the case of Kiera Wilmot), are killing the dreams of black youth.  The closure of schools more than Jeezy’s bling, the lack of well-paying jobs more than LeBron’s cars, and the “race to the bottom” and the wait for superman, more than Shaq’s and Dwight’s cribs, are the true enemies of justice and educational equality.

It would be nice to hear that in a commencement speech.

David J. Leonard is an associate professor and chair of the department of critical culture, gender, and race studies at Washington State University.

Why are completion rates so low in higher education, especially community colleges? One reason, according to a blue-ribbon panel assembled by the Century Foundation, is that higher education has not directly confronted the growing economic and racial separation of students within its ranks. Largely separate sets of institutions for white and minority students—and for rich and poor—are rarely equal, either in K-12 schooling or in higher education.

In recent decades, colleges and universities, to their credit, have greatly increased access, educating a much larger and more economically and racially diverse set of students than in the past. But this positive trend has been accompanied by a troubling undercurrent: increased inequality within the higher-education system. According to research by Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, of Georgetown University, fewer high-income students attend community college than in the past. High-income students outnumber low-income students by 14:1 in the most competitive four-year institutions, yet poor students outnumber wealthy students in community colleges by nearly 2:1. Even within the two-year sector, new research for Century’s panel finds considerable economic and racial separation and reduced outcomes where segregation exists.

At the K-12 level, substantial evidence has established that all students do better in economically and racially integrated schools than they do in high-poverty schools. Policy makers have put in place two sets of responses. After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, schools took steps to desegregate by race, and more recently have sought to attract middle-class students to urban schools through “magnet” programs. On a parallel track, federal policy makers chose to provide extra funds to high-poverty schools through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Furthermore, more than two-thirds of all states provide additional funds—most commonly 25 percent more—for low-income students or those in need of remedial education.

By contrast, in higher education, policy makers have adopted modest affirmative-action programs to integrate selective four-year institutions. But there are no comparable efforts to attract middle-class students to community colleges. And there is no higher-education analogue to state or federal policies that provide extra institutional aid to colleges with higher-need students. Quite the opposite, we shower the most resources on the wealthiest college students and the least on the neediest. The federal tax and research-overhead subsidies at Princeton University, for example, amount to about $54,000 per student, according to the economist Richard Vedder.

Economic and racial stratification is familiar but by no means natural, inevitable, or efficient. In K-12 schooling, low-income students given a chance to attend more-affluent schools rank two years ahead of low-income students at high-poverty schools on the fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress. In higher education, studies have found that students who begin at four-year institutions are 15 to 30 percentage points likelier to receive a bachelor’s degree (controlling for entering preparation levels) than comparable students who begin at community colleges, where student bodies are poorer.

Moreover, new research from California, commissioned by the Century task force, finds that students who attend wealthier and whiter community colleges have higher success rates (controlling for student preparation at the institutional level) than those who attend poorer and more heavily minority two-year institutions.

Why does economic and racial separation appear to affect outcomes at the higher-education level? For one thing, institutions serving low-income and working-class people generally wield less political power and are shortchanged by legislatures. For example, from 1999 to 2009, operating expenditures per pupil increased by almost $4,200 at public research universities, while public community colleges saw just a $1 increase (in 2009 dollars). Research also finds that the economic makeup of the student body can affect the curriculum offered, the level of expectations that faculty have, and the academic culture.

What can be done? Century’s 22-member Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges From Becoming Separate and Unequal, chaired by Anthony Marx,  president of the New York Public Library and a former president of Amherst College, and Eduardo Padrón, president of Miami Dade College, sets out a number of recommendations in its new report, “Bridging the Higher Education Divide: Strengthening Community Colleges and Restoring the American Dream.”

The group, which is supported by the Ford Foundation, endorses the continuing efforts to expand best practices at community colleges but also suggests that policy makers must go further, taking substantial steps to address racial and economic stratification in higher education and to challenge a system in which two-year colleges are asked to educate those students with the greatest needs using the least funds.

In the short term, the federal government should support research on how much more it costs to adequately educate low-income college students compared with their middle-class peers, an analysis that has been widely conducted at the K-12 level. Likewise, the panel calls for greater transparency in public subsidies of wealthy four-year colleges through tax breaks. In the longer term, the task force seeks the creation of state and federal fund streams for higher education, coupled with accountability for outcomes, similar to those at the K-12 level that support institutions with greater numbers of low-income students.

To reduce stratification, the task force backs policies to attract more middle-class students to community colleges (funds for honors programs, guaranteed transfer to four-year institutions, the ability to grant bachelor’s degrees in certain disciplines). For their part, four-year colleges should agree to accept community-college transfers for 5 percent of their junior class and should get public incentives to recruit low-income students out of high school.

Four-year students will benefit from economic and racial diversity, and community-college students will benefit from the political capital and social networks provided by integrated student bodies. These bold steps to bridge the higher-education divide will help colleges strengthen American competitiveness, bolster American democracy, and revive the American dream.

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and is executive director of its Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges From Becoming Separate and Unequal.

Dear Professor Koller,

Because I share your vision of creating a world in which all have access to an excellent and empowering education, I would like to propose a new online course for you to make freely available through the Coursera platform. Its title is “The Implications of Coursera’s For-Profit Business Model for Global Public Education.”

You and your company’s compelling pitch to consumers suggests that the private sector—that is, venture capitalists and not taxpayers—can deliver a more equal world in which income will be based on the skills and knowledge people actually acquire rather than the unnecessarily-scarce credentials for which they are eligible and can afford to pay. It is natural to hope that in this more equal and  more productive world, incomes could rise for everyone willing to acquire the necessary academic knowledge and take the tests to prove it. This, in fact, was exactly what was promised by the original California Master Plan for Higher Education, using taxpayers’ money, when it was adopted, in 1960.

My proposed course would ask students how and why venture capitalists are willing to provide an even greater abundance of knowledge in the service of greater economic and social equality than is the State of California.

As the course progresses, however, students would come to see that reducing income gaps through education is not the main problem that massive-open-online-course providers are trying to solve. That problem is, rather, how and when to price the content that you are giving away in your current (prepublic offering) phase of development.

Free MOOCs weaken the link between scarcity and quality on which the business model of all higher education, both public and private, unfortunately depends. By making your course-completion certificates widely available, you could threaten the ability of public universities to charge as much as they do now for keeping high-quality credentials relatively scarce.

But public colleges that are becoming more expensive and less accessible create a business opportunity for MOOCs, by widening socioeconomic spreads in access (based on selectivity), price (based on tuition), brand (based on reputation), and value (based on expected future earnings). Successful business models in the test-preparation and student-loan industries break down those spreads into ranks and then offer students the opportunity to jump, say, two ranks in a given scale, such as brand or expected income, by overcoming only one gap in another scale, such as SAT scores or tuition payments.

My students would soon see that a solution to Coursera’s pricing problem is to add to the spreads a new, and potentially global, database of performance spreads, based on the nearly continuous testing of students online.

Eventually, the students in my Coursera class would learn that data that they now provide to the company free—perhaps so that it can grade them—will be the private property of Coursera, which can then sell it back to them in the form of “services,” which could include their own performance record but also different “views” comparing it with that of students at better universities, those with higher test scores, or with advanced degrees. The possibilities for renting that information back to Coursera’s own students are endless, as are the possibilities of marketing your data and consulting services to makers of other educational and financial products.

My students would also learn that the foremost obstacle to immense profitability for Coursera’s investors is the need for someone such as the taxpayer to continue to maintain an educational system of high-enough quality and high-enough price so that Coursera can claim to provide something nearly equivalent for less.

Here students would get a lesson in politics: Fortunately for Coursera, there are now five bills pending in Sacramento that would require (in various ways) that the University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges give “full academic credit” for online courses that are “equivalent” to their own.

If some students think California should go slow on MOOCs until we educators better understand their optimal use, I’d have the opportunity to teach them some important lessons about the role of money in politics. They would learn that the governor is involved in rushing MOOC legislation through, as are (almost certainly) the kinds of venture capitalists backing Coursera.

Students in my course would also realize that the business logic of “for free” is that, once all the students of the world can get an “equivalent” education, Coursera will be able to set a price for it. And that price will likely turn out to be much more than the world’s students currently pay for for-profit training institutions.

If my course is as successful as I hope, you may soon be approached by students who will ask:

• Will you and Coursera’s other co-founder, Andrew Ng, be able to resist the pressure from your investors to charge more than zero for educational products that can be dynamically priced in changing markets? Or will you simply sell the company to someone who sees its potential value?
• Will you then reinvest to achieve more global educational and social equality?
• Will you teach students the difference between seeing education as the ability to arbitrage successfully among immediate choices and the many other forms of sustained thought that may be harder to measure, including the type of critical thinking my course would attempt to provoke?

A few students may come to ask the large, general question that their successful analysis of Coursera’s business logic implies: Should the public be willing to pay for Coursera’s for-profit academic content, just as it does for the cable-TV services that have replaced the public airwaves?

You can give them your answer. When they ask me, I will say: I want to keep public higher education public. From my perspective a large part of Coursera’s appeal lies in your vision of an informational Commons to which access should no longer be restricted based on the scarcity of places at existing universities and colleges.

I personally wish that this part of your vision were coming from the leaders of UC. Instead, they are trying to sell students on paying higher tuition because of the demonstrated role of elite universities in generating income inequality, while also persuading the Legislature to increase “access” (enrollments) so they can generate even greater total revenue from the increasing tuition they charge individual students.

Here I agree with your implicit criticism of public higher education. Public education has all but lost sight of its egalitarian mission.

I disagree, however, with your implicit claim that privately financed MOOCs can fulfill the promise once made, and now abandoned, by public higher education, to be an engine for reducing social and economic hierarchy.

The question is not whether we who teach in public higher education can or should resist the creation of a truly “free” informational Commons, but whether we can keep it public in innovative, egalitarian ways that run counter to what you and your rivals are planning and doing.

What I advocate is government investment in, and protection of, a system of providing common knowledge for the greater good of all in the way that public-university systems once hoped to do. Just possibly, that could be done through platforms such as yours, but only if the information that you are gathering and appropriating for private ownership is socialized on a global scale.

A true educational Commons would be a force for reducing academic hierarchy and income inequality. I’m all for that. You say you are too. But is this what you are telling your partners in finance and university administration?

I will know my course has been successful when my students understand Coursera’s business model as an exciting venture-capital investment opportunity through which to increase privately held wealth and lock in existing educational hierarchies.

Robert Meister
Professor of Political and Social Thought
in the Department of the History of Consciousness
at the University of California at Santa Cruz
and President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

(For a longer version of this letter, see here.)

So she waited. And waited some more. After six months of waiting, Jana politely asked about the manuscript’s status. She didn’t hear back. Two months later, she e-mailed again but with a more urgent tone. This time she received a reply from the editor.  The essence was, “Thank you for your submission. Although the paper seems promising, it does not adequately fit the scope of The Ivy League Business Review. We therefore did not send it out for peer review. Best wishes.”

Jana will be coming up for tenure in two years, and having her paper pointlessly stalled for eight months was a real setback. When she told me about this, it certainly made an impression. I thought, “Boy, I’m glad I know this because I’m certainly never going to send a paper to that journal.” But in point of fact, I was highly unlikely to ever send anything to that journal anyway, because my research doesn’t have anything to do with business. In fact, almost none of our colleagues (we’re both in psychology departments) would be likely to consider submitting anything there. So this potentially invaluable nugget of information would normally go no further.

How many of you can relate similar horror stories of patently unprofessional, or at least wildly inconsiderate, editing or reviewing? I’d guess most of us can, and many of the stories are probably worse. And I’d guess that we often have Jana’s problem of not being able to do much with our tale besides recounting it to a sympathetic listener, assuming we can find one.

Wouldn’t it be better if we could publicly share such experiences with all those who might benefit? That would promote accountability by journals and allow authors to avoid frustrating, career-damaging situations.

I suggest the development of a crowdsourced, “author reviewed” journal-evaluation Web site. The idea is that authors from various disciplines would share their experiences with particular journals, both negative and positive. There would be quantitative information such as time until receiving notice of being reviewed, time until receiving first review, total time from initial submission until final publication, and, of course, acceptance or rejection. And there would also be opportunities for rating or commenting on key issues, like the fairness and constructiveness of editors and reviewers and the efficiency of the journal’s production staff.

As reviews accumulated, it would be possible to make better decisions about where we would and would not submit our work. Authors would be able, if they chose, to eliminate journals with exceptionally high or low acceptance rates. They could forgo journals with slow turnarounds or predominantly negative editor or reviewer ratings. Ideally, this Web site would allow journal searches by many other criteria too, including subject area(s), impact factor,  publication fees, open-access options, database indexing, publisher, review process (e.g., blind or not), etc. This platform would also allow our colleagues, including librarians and administrators, to better evaluate where we are publishing and what journals we most need access to.

Is such a site needed? After all, many journals advertise their impact factors, some even disclose their acceptance rates or speed of publication, and many of us have a decent feel already for the key journals in our field.

But I believe there is a substantial need because our information is incomplete and often vague: “Does that journal consider nonexperimental studies? I think I heard someone at a conference say that they no longer do.” We also don’t know about the information’s veracity: “Does Journal X really have an acceptance rate of 15 percent? How did they calculate that?”

Think of it this way. If you are trying to decide where to go for the best tacos in town, you have Urbanspoon and TripAdvisor to provide hundreds of ratings, many with rich descriptions. But if you want to find the best journal for your manuscript, you may have virtually no information. And, although I like tacos as much as anyone, I hope we agree the journal decision is far more important.

When I share this idea, one question people often ask is, “Won’t this site only attract reviews from those who have had miserable experiences?” I don’t think so, especially if reviewers have some kind of stable identity, even an anonymous one. Just as we discount claims about the “worst tacos in the world” if we see that BeanoBoy has slammed every restaurant in town, we will discount journal reviews from consistently hostile reviewers. Also, mechanisms might be added to allow journals to dispute hostile reviews.

Another question I often hear is, “Won’t the journals and editors try to prevent this? It could make them look terrible.” Again, I don’t see a major problem, because most journals perform well and would look forward to seeing how they stack up and where they most need to improve. Of course, journals with big reputations that treat authors poorly … yes, they will suffer. And they should.

Will authors contribute this kind of information? After waiting eight months, I know Jana would gladly spend five minutes broadcasting her story. And I suspect that, although most of our experiences with journals are not as notable, they still affect us enough that we would want to share them. Often, we would simply provide several ratings and a brief comment, such as “Extremely constructive feedback from editor and reviewer #2!”

The final question is one I can’t answer yet: What organization or people would provide the resources to make this Web site a reality? I’ve been struggling for months to find someone. No luck so far. Is anyone interested?

Robert Deaner is an associate professor of psychology at Grand Valley State University. Most of his current projects involve using evolutionary theory to explore sex differences in human behavior.

If you were given the opportunity of showing some of China’s future leaders one movie that encapsulated the American essence, what would it be?

Koyaanisqatsi is probably not the first movie you would think of. (Probably not even in the first 100.) The somewhat obscure Godfrey Reggio masterpiece was never in the running for mainstream acceptance and box-office gold when it was released, in 1982. Even as a cult classic, it has never attained the same level of acclaim as a Rocky Horror or an Eraserhead.

Koyaanisqatsi is a big-concept movie, and lexicographically, Koyaanisqatsi is a big concept word. In the vein of Schadenfreude or Weltschmerz, Koyaanisqatsi, from the Hopi language, means “life out of balance.” At 86 minutes, the film is a succinct and critical look at the modern American experience, and how development and urbanization have changed the way we live.

With no spoken dialogue, Koyaanisqatsi is a difficult film but a universal one, free of the barriers of context and language that inevitably divide native and non-native English speakers. Accompanied by Philip Glass’s powerful, minimalist score, the scenes take viewers on a sensory roller coaster, rollicking through a slide show of human achievement and folly. The film is a tabula rasa, from which viewers can draw their own conclusions. Most of all, Koyaanisqatsi’s message is one that speaks to all audiences.

Though the film was shot entirely in the United States, by an American director, the similarities to modern China are so striking as to be inescapable. The Brutalist architecture of the condemned Pruitt-Igoe housing project, in St. Louis, could have been airlifted from the outskirts of Beijing. The throngs bustling to and fro—the inhabitants of one of China’s manifold concrete jungles. Income inequality, pollution, degradation of public infrastructure, check, check, and check.

Reggio’s groundbreaking use of time-lapse photography conjures a disorienting and occasionally disturbing visual experience. While the effect is often beautiful, one cannot help grimacing as masses of humanity scurry about like ants in New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Few viewers could avoid feeling squeamish at the eerie similarity between commuters exiting a row of escalators and a sausage factory. All the while, the earth suffers as a silent casualty of human avarice. Reggio, however, is unyielding.

Those who are familiar with the movie might take umbrage at my decision to show it. The film is admittedly bleak, and at least a dozen Chinese students have used the word “uncomfortable” to describe their reaction to it.  Nevertheless, as China races toward development, movies like Koyaanisqatsi provoke important introspection.

It is a popular American narrative to paint China and the United States with a reflexively zero-sum brush. Likewise, it should follow that students at Beijing’s most prestigious university are ferociously nationalistic and scheming for our demise. This, however, is not the case. On the contrary, China’s breakneck development over the past 30 years is not part of a conspiracy seeking global domination, but is born from admiration. China does not seek to overthrow the American dream, but to replicate it for its own people. The hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty are testament to that achievement.

I often joke to my students that after a casual stroll in central Beijing, it is hard to tell who won the Chinese civil war, Mao Zedong or Colonel Sanders. Since the reform and opening of China in 1978, the West has changed China far more than China will ever change the West. Shakespeare and Orwell are voraciously consumed here, but how many Americans have read Tang Xianzu or Lu Xun?  Titanic 3-D, recently in theaters, routinely drew packed audiences, but how many Americans made it to The Flowers of War, China’s elaborate retelling of the Rape of Nanjing?

China’s rise may be frightening to Americans for valid economic, political, and moral reasons. Outsourcing, currency manipulation, self-immolating monks, Falun Gong, Taiwan, Uighurs, corruption—all are loci for fair points of criticism. But the larger story of China’s rise is fundamentally an American success story. From the ruins of Mao’s dystopian nightmare, China has emerged as a valuable and productive member of the global economy. Amid the shrill rhetoric warning of an actual war, Americans probably do not realize the extent of our triumph in the culture wars.

Rather than being dated, the haunting imagery of Koyaanisqatsi has become more valuable with time. It now demonstrably encapsulates both the United States and China. As you may have already guessed, my aim in showing the movie was not a dry exploration of American culture, but to raise fundamental questions among China’s brightest minds about the direction of their own country. It is not a warning, but more a checkpoint. The Chinese word for America is “Meiguo,” which literally means “beautiful country.”

My goal with Koyaanisqatsi was not to smash this myth, but to remind those who watch the film that America’s road to development and prosperity was not without speed bumps. It was and is riddled with points of tensions, contradictions, and—in short—many things that are not so beautiful. I hope that the movie will not just provide a snapshot of the United States but will cause my students to question their own nation’s model of development. Should China’s highest aspiration be merely a Sinified simulacrum of all things Western? China has embraced the Western paradigm of development, but is there perhaps another way?

In the words of Mark, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Jonathan Levine is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in American studies and English at Tsinghua University, in Beijing.

At the start of the spring semester, as with every semester, I told my students that while this was a history course, the most important thing I could teach them in 15 weeks was not the nature of the French revolutionary tradition, but instead to be better writers. Channeling George Orwell, I told my students that slovenliness of writing leads to foolish thoughts. Referring to France’s “mission civilisatrice,” I declared that to write well is not just a crucial skill: It is also a moral duty. They could not hope to think clearly, I intoned, if they could not write clearly. Failing this, I continued, we will also fail as citizens.

As I climbed into higher dudgeon, I said I would hold them to the highest standards—that if their writing was as sloppy at the end of the semester as it was at the start, I would have failed as a teacher. And … well, you get the idea.

To be honest, I’ve mostly failed. It is not, I think, for want of effort. I urge students to hand in rough drafts. Invariably, few take me up on the offer, and those rough drafts I receive I cover in red ink. As for the first batch of papers, I’m no less generous with corrections and suggestions. And just as my comments are in red, so too is the red line of grades: A’s are rare, C’s are common. I’ve drawn the line, and I mean business!

But, to be honest, I mean mostly funny business. Many of the final papers are as garbled as the first papers. As for the good papers, they are mostly the work of students who knew how to write when they arrived. And yet, an odd alchemy begins to crackle and pop. While the tenor of my comments remains as sharp as ever, the paper grades begin to rise toward the heavens. Or, more accurately, the grading standard—the one supposedly locked in that empyrean place—begins to sink earthward.

This has little to do with the papers, and everything to do with me.

I’ve discovered I’m weaving a fairy tale that will let me sleep at night. Not only must I believe I can repair failing writing skills and push against the tides of an increasingly post-literate popular culture, but I must also believe in my relevance as a teacher. But the future of my relevance is yoked to my students’ immediate pasts in our national high schools. By the time my students reach my classes, they’ve been deeply handicapped by a secondary-school system that teaches testing, not writing, and a culture that discourages what we once understood to be thinking.

Our mad rush to testing is, of course, the perverse consequence of our laudable determination to hold schools responsible for our children’s education. But the tests do little more than transform our schools into educational Potemkin villages. Our administrators affirm the necessity of standards, but when they are not lowering the bar, they are busily stripping from their curricula a sustained and serious apprenticeship in writing. As the graduation rate becomes the bottom line for our high schools, the pressure to pass grows irresistible—this is perhaps the most decisive factor in the “grade” the schools in turn receive every year.

Is there a similar logic at work with university professors? That the “grade” we receive in student evaluations, based on the grades we distribute, determines the making or breaking of our classes? Short of transforming my upper-level history classes into writing-composition courses—a class that my history majors do not need for their major any more than my Ph.D. in history trained me to teach—I become the students’ accomplice, not their instructor, and society’s enabler, not its critic.

Yes, this means that truth is a casualty. But we must not lose sight of who is really suffering: our students. Last year the National Assessment of Educational Progress released its “report card” on the performance in 2011 of our nation’s schools. They are flunking. Less than a quarter of high-school students performed at a proficient level of writing; only 3 percent rose to an advanced level. Increasingly, professors are called upon to teach remedial English, but often in courses based on the student’s ability to write (and read) at a proficient or advanced level. Neither student nor professor is willing to confront that truth, so we join hands in ignoring it.

The result, of course, is not the shattering of the illusions fostered by our testing culture, but their reinforcement. As Orwell sighed, we are all complicit in making lies sound respectable.

Robert Zaretsky, a professor of French history at the University of Houston Honors College, is the author of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (Cornell University Press, 2010). His next book, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, will be published this fall by Harvard University Press.

Yet most early- and mid-19th century Americans did not experience their country as some trackless wilderness awaiting their footprints and plows but as a complex social landscape marked by continuous and profound transformations. Consider that the national population grew from four million in 1790 to 31.5 million in 1850, even as the nation embarked on imperialist adventures in Central America and the Caribbean, and roads, canals, and railways linked producers and consumers separated by great distances. Steam power, telegraphy, and photography altered people’s perceptions of time and space, and religious upheavals fractured the once-solid foundation of Christianity. Meanwhile, the growth of cities—vast, crowded, impersonal—challenged traditional arrangements of family life. This is the reality most people knew, and they wanted the fiction they read to reflect, and reflect on, it.

In his remarkable novel The Confidence Man (1857), Herman Melville put it best. “In books of fiction,” he wrote, readers “look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, even for more reality, than real life itself can show.” As a reviewer for Graham’s Magazine noted at the time, the result was fiction on a surprising array of topics. There were “political novels—representing every variety of political opinion—religious novels, to push the doctrine of every religious sect—philanthropic novels, devoted to the championship of every reform—socialist novels … philosophical novels [and] metaphysical novels.” Contemporary fiction thus remains an essential key to understanding the nation’s evolution in these years, and the exploits of the lone man journeying outward, his back to civilization, constitute only a small part of this body of work.

Our national identity relies on the assumption that America was once a more moral and just place than it is today, a fact everywhere evident in early American fiction. But the novels show us something we have avoided uncovering: characters that confront unhappiness, selfishness, and depravity, and thus unsettle the reader about the American past.

We have, in short, canonized certain 19th-century novels because they show us not who we were but because they show who we want to be. “We cannot see what we canonize,” for “the citizen secures himself against genius by icon worship,” wrote the cultural critic Edward Dahlberg.

This has occurred with many of our better-known novelists. Even Melville has the power to disabuse us of our rosy understanding of his time, but too many readers treat him as a beloved American archetype: the iconoclast who went against the American grain. Is Hawthorne’s troubling ambivalence about human agency diluted because he is forced on unwilling high-school juniors as a purveyor of the Puritan past? And what of the seriousness of Twain’s social critique, often mitigated by a reader’s embrace of the sheer comedy of his narratives? We need to understand these novelists not as cultural icons but as citizens deeply engaged in questions of their fellow citizens’ sincerity and their culture’s authenticity.

We also need to hear the voices of their contemporaries—often those less remembered by history—who crafted characters in response to the complexities of the day. In Catharine Sedgwick’s Clarence (1830), one city businessman loses his fortune and is forced to adjust to drudgery while another, a compulsive gambler caught cheating at cards, is asked to pay his debt with his beautiful daughter. Sedgwick’s narrative provides a twist to the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories that were yet to come. In Sarah Willis Parton’s Ruth Hall (1854), a recently widowed woman with two young children struggles to make ends meet in an urban environment defined by the impersonal boarding house and the asylum. Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) revolves around a free African-American woman in New England, the product of an interracial marriage, who is the target of the prejudice and cruelty of those who have hired her as a domestic.

In Caroline Chesebro’s Isa, a Pilgrimage (1852), a free-thinking woman who writes for a philosophical magazine rejects conventional marriage and moves with her lover to Europe to escape Americans’ small-mindedness, her trials as a female intellectual comparable to the Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller’s. George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1844) depicts in graphic detail the transgressions, sexual and otherwise, of wealthy Philadelphia gentlemen who meet secretly to indulge their perverse fantasies, even as their daylight hours are given to the accumulation of more wealth. In Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), a Southern, mixed race family tries to make a new life in a Northern city, only to confront prejudice and outright physical violence. Finally, consider Rebecca Harding Davis’s Margret Howth (1862), in which an idealistic socialist’s plans to create a utopia in a mill town comes to naught when the factory he is about to purchase as part of his community is torched by a worker disgruntled at its original owner.

No pastoral idylls on the Western frontier or the wave-capped seas here, or easily achieved dreams of rejuvenation in this brave new world. But 19^th-century readers were more likely to see themselves in these characters than in Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, or Captain Ahab. Moreover, many of these novels show the dominant tension on these shores since the Puritans’ arrival: that between the rights of the individual and the demands of the community. The country’s deification of the individual, epitomized in texts like Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance,” did not go unchallenged, for many novelists criticized the persistence of slavery and racism, the denial of equal rights to women, the exploitation of the laboring classes, and the hypocrisy and tribalism of religion.

We might have a similar reaction, for the characters in many early American novels are remarkably like us. They are inward-looking urbanites concerned with moral survival in a seemingly immoral capitalist society. They are modern people with no choice but to wrestle with the complexities of their civilization, people who cannot turn their backs and escape into the west. Read Sedgwick, Fanny Fern, Wilson, Webb, and Lippard, and you’ll see America afresh, not filtered through reading lists or through a century and a half of literary criticism. You’ll see early America in its true glory: a society thrown continuously into turmoil by new technologies, new ideas, and new peoples arriving from across the Atlantic; a citizenry obsessed with the free market and accepting of brutal working conditions; and a nation divided by class, race, gender, politics, religion, and philosophy.

Philip F. Gura is a professor of American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of  Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Tim Foley

We are puzzled by Marc Sageman’s assertion that terrorism research is stagnant.

We wholeheartedly agree that several issues regularly hinder progress. While both qualitative and quantitative research on terrorism are necessary, scholarship has gone too far in the direction of quantitative methods. A prejudice in favor of elegant models and statistics, sometimes based on poor-quality data, is not unique to terrorism research. It reflects a fashion in social science more broadly.

It is also true that there is no single academic discipline of terrorism research, which is defined by its multidisciplinary nature. Terrorists are influenced by relations among nations and their immediate communities; by the identities they choose, the groups they join in the digital or analog worlds, the costs of the choices they make, their individual psychology. They come from a wide variety of countries, backgrounds, and languages. Expertise from a variety of disciplines is essential to understand the phenomenon.

The scholars who “took the bait” as federal money poured in, as Sageman puts it, were responding to a genuine need. In their zeal to protect the public, government officials may have overreacted to their perceptions of the Al Qaeda threat. But contrary to Sageman’s claim, few serious terrorism experts ever saw Al Qaeda as an existential threat to the West. Our role as scholars is to discover and understand what influences the changing nature of terrorism and the impact it will have.

Sageman’s essay also decries the split between academe and the intelligence agencies that study terrorism and train analysts. But as Thomas Hegghammer, of Stanford University, tweeted in response, the article gets at only part of the problem: “academe’s prejudice against terrorist research. Few uni’s want to do it, so agencies have to train in-house.” Gregory Johnsen, a leading expert on Yemen, responded: “If you research terrorist groups you will likely kill your academic career before it starts.”

Many social scientists do seem to view terrorism as a figment of the imaginations of terrorist researchers. No question, most domestic extremists in the United States have been inept and foolish. But the vast majority of conflicts today involve violent, nonstate actors.

Sageman raises another issue deserving attention: Scholarship deemed “serious” usually involves quantitative studies, which are only as accurate as the data on which they rely. Even poorly conducted quantitative analysis has an air of rigor to it. And ethnographic research takes an extraordinary amount of time, patience, and effort. Nor is it easy to win approval of the boards that protect human subjects: Even if those subjects are wielding Kalashnikovs, we must demonstrate that our interviews will not harm them psychologically or legally.

How can we fix those problems? Certainly not by crudely calling an entire field of study “stagnant.”

Our main problem with Sageman’s article is not that his concerns are unwarranted but that he appears oblivious to the kinds of research actually being done to determine who becomes a terrorist, why, and how many there are in the West. We see a field in ferment, not stagnation, with the entry of more young scholars trained in an ever-wider variety of disciplines.

There are far too many studies to cite, but consider a few. A recent article by Hegghammer in the American Political Science Review shows that Western jihadists are more likely to join jihads in foreign countries than they are to fight at home, as the Boston attackers did—even though Al Qaeda leaders are promoting “stay home” terrorism. When jihadists in the West do remain at home, more often than not they are radicalized by veterans of foreign jihads or by their own trips abroad. According to Hegghammer’s research, if the suspects in the Boston bombings truly radicalized themselves, they would be unusual. Hegghammer developed his own database, which he admits is a first pass at the problem. Were a government agency to provide better data, his findings would presumably be more robust.

A study by Paul Gill and colleagues at the International Center for the Study of Terrorism, at Pennsylvania State University, has traced the behavioral signals that individuals who turn to violence reveal and reliably delineates different behavioral profiles among lone-actor terrorists.

There is also a growing literature about the radicalization of groups. Two studies—one by James W. Pennebaker and another by Margaret G. Hermann and Azamat Sakiev—have shown that, in the period before an attack, violent groups in Yemen changed their rhetoric in measurable ways. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Laura Grossman have identified six indicators of jihadist radicalization in the United States and Britain, including a tendency to adopt legalistic interpretations of Islam and to attempt to impose religious beliefs on others.

Also relevant are studies of foreign groups attacking the United States, including work by Gary LaFree, Sue-Ming Yang, and Martha Crenshaw. They examined 16,916 attacks attributed to foreign terrorists deemed dangerous to the United States from 1970 to 2004: Just 3 percent were directed at the United States.

That an academic field has not provided all the answers to fundamental questions about human behavior is not evidence of stagnation. The experience of other disciplines suggests that progress will be made as scholars painstakingly build on one another’s work. The National Institute of Justice has recognized that, and it is now financing studies on domestic radicalization.

It is also important to point out that Start, the center for terrorism research at the University of Maryland that Sageman cites as producing one of the few global databases (what he calls “crude” descriptions of terrorist incidents), also promotes qualitative studies. According to Start, about 30 percent of its projects include a qualitative component. Next on Start’s (and others’) agenda is integrating multiple levels of analysis—world events, community and individual factors, organization activities, small-group dynamics, social network, discourse, content, and more.

Moreover, an increasing number of universities are responding to the change in the security environment. In addition to the two terrorism centers Sageman mentions (Start and Create, at the University of Southern California), Penn State’s center brings together researchers from around the United States and abroad to learn about its research. Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell are setting up major programs to bridge the academic-practitioner divide.

Research is likely to be financed by federal sponsors today only if it can demonstrate its relevance to policy and operational concerns. At a time when political scientists are struggling to retain what little funds they receive from the National Science Foundation, the challenge of effectively “translating” academic research into policy has never been more urgent. Sageman is correct that it can best happen with greater dialogue between academics and those given the task of responding to terrorism.

We also agree that it would be good to include in the mix more ethnographic studies of how, why, and where individuals have turned to terrorism, rather than inferring their motivations from their actions or public statements. We feel strongly that former terrorists can be interviewed safely and effectively, and that students can be taught how to do so. But that requires financing sources to recognize that a multiplicity of methodologies is needed. As the military strategist Bernard Brodie once warned, elegant methods can be seductive, even when they are inappropriate.

Perhaps it is finally time to make terrorism studies a more formal area of scholarship.

John Horgan is director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University. Jessica Stern is a former member of the National Security Council staff, a member of the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law, and a fellow at Harvard University.

Why not let him e-guest-lecture? (Michael Sandel of Harvard via Flickr/CC)

Are MOOCs and other online materials a threat to quality public higher education, and to our role as professors? The members of the philosophy department at San Jose State University think so. They recently issued an open letter to Michael Sandel, of Harvard University, objecting to his role in encouraging the use of MOOCs at public universities. The controversy stems from San Jose State’s contract with edX, a company that provides MOOCs, including one based on Sandel’s course on justice at Harvard. San Jose State has agreed to use materials provided by edX, but the philosophy department has refused to use Sandel’s online lectures in its courses.

I am a political theorist at a large public university, and this term, for the first time, I am teaching my course, “Introduction to Political Theory,” as a hybrid. I am using Sandel’s course on justice—not the MOOC, but essentially the same materials that are publicly available at justiceharvard.org—to provide much of the online portion of the course.  Though this is still an experiment, many of the arguments presented by the San Jose State philosophy professors do not ring true in light of my experience.

We should begin by distinguishing two issues. The philosophy professors state that they have felt pressured by their administration to use the materials from Sandel’s course. The administration denies exerting any such pressure. Whatever the truth of the matter, that is an issue of academic freedom, and not about the pedagogical merits of using MOOCs and other online materials.  I certainly agree that professors should be responsible for the content and pedagogy in their own courses.

The real issue, then, is whether the availability and use of online materials, whether through MOOCs or through other channels, is a threat to quality education, especially at public universities. Many of the arguments presented in the letter presuppose an either/or, all-or-nothing approach when it comes to face-to-face versus online teaching.  But the whole point of a hybrid, or blended, course is that it combines both. And it is difficult to see why it makes a great deal of difference whether the online content is delivered via a MOOC or not.

Nothing will ever replace the face-to-face discussions that occur in the classroom. But in many traditional, on-campus courses, little discussion occurs. In a lecture course with hundreds, or even just scores, of students, much of the time in the classroom is inevitably spent with the professor lecturing and the students (hopefully) taking notes—or at least listening attentively. In courses with a significant lecture component, the advantages of using online lectures are undeniable. I know from my own experience that, if my attention wanes for a few moments, it is very convenient to simply go back and play a portion again.  One can do the same if one doesn’t quite understand something the first time. And one need not miss material to take a bathroom break.

The availability of high-quality online lectures is an opportunity to rethink how we spend our time in the classroom. If an online lecture presents the material, or walks students through an argument, we are freed to spend more time discussing the aspects of the material that are most difficult—or most interesting. We can do other kinds of activities that we might not have time for if we felt obliged to present the material in the traditional way. Yes, hybrid courses usually involve less face-to-face time, but that time can be better and more effectively spent.

The philosophy professors also seem to assume that only professors at elite universities can provide online lectures and other materials, and that public-university professors will inevitably be reduced to being “consumers” of this material. But why should that be the case? Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can produce and make publicly available material that others might find helpful. A great deal already exists on YouTube and elsewhere. And as MOOCs become more commonplace, some enterprising computer programmer can be counted on to offer software or a Web site that makes it easier for individual professors, or institutions with modest means, to produce MOOCs.

I believe that at some point each of us, the experts in our respective fields, should be providing online lectures, if not entire MOOCs, that the rest of us can use. We should look upon online lectures and similar materials as a way to draw on others’ expertise. As it is, I read some of the secondary literature on a theorist whose work I teach. Why not let the students hear a lecture on that thinker by a colleague at another university whose work I find so helpful in preparing my own lectures? Why not give students direct access to the deep knowledge of the genuine specialists on each of the works or thinkers that we cover?  Yes, the students could read the secondary literature too, but surely there are advantages to lectures. Otherwise, why do we provide them in the classroom?

One should hope that eventually there would be a wide variety of lectures available online from which professors and students could choose. These might be available through a MOOC, or YouTube, or both. The “downright scary” prospect envisioned by the San Jose State professors of the exact same course being taught in various departments across the country need not come to pass. That depends on whether others provide alternative material, and whether professors uniformly choose the same materials. The scary prospect can be avoided if each of us picks and chooses among a wide array of alternatives, crafting our own distinctive combination of materials.

Using a MOOC for a hybrid course is like adopting a textbook. You can use all of it, or just parts. You can use its exercises and tests, or not. You can still choose what to emphasize in the classroom, and still make your own assignments.

In the end, the crucial thing is that the instructor remains in the driver’s seat—and that takes us back to academic freedom. As long as individual professors are choosing what material to assign or recommend, running their in-class discussions and adding material that they think is not adequately covered in the online lectures, choosing the assignments and tests, and grading those tests, there is no threat to the professoriate, or to the quality of education at universities, public or otherwise.

Andrew Valls is an associate professor of political science at Oregon State University.

As I write, we await the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which could limit affirmative action. In March the court announced that it would also hear arguments in a second affirmative-action case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, which will decide if voters in Michigan were within their constitutional rights when they approved a ballot measure banning the use of race in college admissions. By taking on those two cases, the court seems to be signaling that it believes something is not quite right about how we use race-based affirmative action.

Whatever the court decides in those cases, it’s clear that at some point, our national debate over race and affirmative action shifted from a primary concern over when and how colleges might use the policies to help students overcome past and present economic, social, and cultural barriers to a belief that such policies should be used only if they don’t keep middle-class white students from attending the college of their choice. In the process, we have ignored the fact that the fewer numbers of black, Latino, and Native American students there are on a college campus, the greater the likelihood that white students will racially harass them.

Those were the findings of a June 2012 research brief issued by the University of California at Los Angeles’s Higher Education Research Institute, which found that on campuses with the lowest diversity, racial harassment is a consistent and growing feature of college life. That should trouble us.

According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, since February there have been numerous instances of racial harassment on campuses, such as Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, where 19 incidents were reported in a one-month period. The college is 88 percent white. In March the liberal and historically progressive Oberlin College suspended classes after a series of racial incidents during the previous month brought the campus to a standstill. Oberlin’s student body is 72 percent white. A month before, students at Emory University were forced to apologize after they aired a student-produced television show asking viewers to identify “which students on campus shouldn’t be here and are only at the school because of affirmative action.” The segment went on to make light of lynchings, tarring-and-featherings, and cross burnings. According to admission information, while 41 percent of Emory students are white, only 15 percent are black or Latino.

In one of the most disturbing signs that low diversity on campuses is a problem, a group of students at Towson University calling themselves members of the White Students Union announced in March that they would begin nightly patrols to protect white students from “black-on-white crime”—even though college officials say Towson has one of the lowest crime rates in Maryland. When asked why he had formed the group, the organizer responded that “diversity is not strength.” Whites make up 68 percent of the students at Towson.

Hopefully we have not actually reached the point as a country when we would agree that overwhelmingly white campuses are more desirable than racially diverse campuses, or that white-student aggression toward black students is a matter to be taken in stride.

Moreover, although we rarely mention it when discussing affirmative action, racial harassment has an impact on more than just students. In May the first and only black professor of head-and-neck surgery at the University of California at Los Angeles sued the university for racial discrimination. His accusation? That he was depicted as a gorilla being sodomized by his white superior in a slide presentation to the medical-center staff.

I don’t think we fully understand what it is about the presence of certain racial groups that leads to instances of harassment by whites. But we do know that some groups covered by affirmative-action policies have not been subjected to the same kind of continuing challenges to their admission to college. Just consider the fact that since 1967, when affirmative action was extended to women by executive order, that group has probably benefited more than any other. Preferences for women have not triggered anywhere near the kind of legal controversy as racial preferences have. And while there have been affirmative-action cases about employment issues, centering on male plaintiffs’ claiming to have been discriminated against in favor of female workers, we have yet to have such a case reach the Supreme Court that focuses on college admissions. In the discussion about affirmative action and higher education, race matters most.

Indeed, according to a 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center, support for the idea of affirmative action differs widely depending on how the question is posed. When respondents were asked if they broadly supported affirmative-action programs to help blacks, women, and other minorities get better jobs and education, 70 percent said they did. However, support dropped to 46 percent when people were asked if such programs should give blacks preferential treatment. Put clearly, the vast majority of people agree with the idea of affirmative action in the abstract, but have an issue with black students’ specifically benefiting from it.

Looking at that finding in light of the increase of racial harassment on predominantly white campuses, we can only conclude: As long as there are too few minority students to stand out, some white students feel as if there are too many to tolerate.

Which brings me to a recent incident that I have come to believe is a metaphor for the ignorance, fear, and hysteria dominating cultural conversations about race and affirmative action. Some weeks ago, my husband and I were on the way home in our Prius when we stopped at a local store to buy a few things. I stayed in the car.

A few moments later, the back door opened, and someone threw some unbagged groceries in the back seat. The next thing I knew, a young white woman jumped into the driver’s seat and tried to start the car, which just requires pushing a button on the dashboard. I was initially too stunned to say anything, but when she noticed me sitting in the passenger seat, she panicked and began swatting at me, asking what I wanted, and shouting at me to get out of her car.

I was just at the point of getting it together to tell her that she was sitting in my car when she jumped out and started screaming for help. Of course, she began to attract lots of attention, and a few people were making their way over when, literally in mid-scream, she noticed that her car (also a Prius) was parked behind ours. She stopped screaming, opened the back door, took out her groceries, jumped in her car, and drove off without a word of apology.

I can’t know for sure, but given the frequency of racial profiling of drivers by the police, or the much-publicized fear of black people invading middle-class homes, I was left to wonder if her reaction would have been the same if I had been a white woman.

Though confusing one car for another is something that might happen fairly regularly, the extreme escalation and overreaction of the young woman has come to represent for me a microcosm of how an African-American presence can expose fears and reveal underdeveloped racial attitudes both in academe and beyond.

It is time for us to be less compelled by the stories of white people who feel they have been robbed of what they are entitled to, and more concerned with the students on campuses who are suffering racial harassment. If we take those students seriously, perhaps we can begin to focus on troubling the conscience of the many, instead of easing the discomfort of a few.

Noliwe M. Rooks is an associate professor of African studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University. Among her books is White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African-American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education (Beacon Press, 2006).