“Is College Too Easy?” is the headline of a superb story by Daniel de Vise on page one of today’s Washington Post. In it, de Vise presents in substantial detail data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) that show students study relatively little. Average total time on all academic work amounts to about 27 hours a week, the story says.

Since the typical student is in class at best 32 weeks a year, the total annual hours spent “learning” is on average about 864 (27 x 32), less than one-half the time the student’s parents are spending on their jobs, partly to support the education of their child.  As de Vise notes, five-year-old kids in kindergarten spend about as much time on school work as 20-year-old college students.

And, as the story notes, it wasn’t always that way. In the Dark Ages of 1961 (when this writer was an undergraduate), students typically spent about 40 hours weekly on their studies—more or less the same work week of adult workers.

Where is the “scam?” It comes from the calls from the president and others such as the Lumina and Gates Foundation that nearly everyone should go to college, that the learning gained in college is vital. It comes from the hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants, loans, state government subsidies, and tax-sheltered gifts that are spent on higher education, some to build luxury dorms and rec centers, or provide comfortable seating for tycoons attending ball-throwing contests.

The scam is not confined to students. The faculty are complicit as well, first by creating the lax academic standards, personified by grade inflation, that allow the students to do less for more (largely thanks to subsidies coming from outside the academy). Senior faculty still largely teach what they want and when they want—and often very little. As Mark Bauerlein has pointed out to me, they are not lazy (or at least not many of them), but they are doing trivial, selfish things too often. A large portion of research is seldom cited or read, designed mainly to get faculty tenure or enhance their prestige within a very small subset of the population.  The heavy lifting (large undergraduate survey courses) are often  taught by low-paid adjuncts and grad students. We have a class of academic aristocrats who use the cheap hired help to do a large portion of the core academic function.

And then there is the administration. This is the group of university employees that has grown the fastest, with ever larger and deeper levels of bureaucracy permeating almost every campus.  These folks command a growing share of university resources, but most faculty and many students I know believe, mostly correctly in my opinion, that you could wipe out a huge hunk of these so-called support personnel without damaging the quality of the academic offerings—indeed, you might enhance it. Any examination of pay of top administrators over the past decade or so shows that this group has scooped up a fair number of the dollars dropped out of airplanes (or the equivalent) on student homes and academic campuses. What economists call  rent-seeking is alive and well on academic campuses.

To be sure, this assessment is arguably too harsh. There are still many college students who study 30 hours or more a week and are learning as much or more than their parents or grandparents did while in school. Engineers typically study vastly more than business and communication majors. And some schools seem to have more rigorous standards than others.  According to de Vise, students at Centre College or Washington and Lee study over 20 hours weekly, while those at George Mason (14 hours) or Howard University (11 hours) study  less than the already pathetically low average. And the use of adjuncts to teach mass sections of undergraduates to free up senior faculty for research is rare at liberal-arts colleges. Moreover, much research is truly meaningful and done by hard-working professors whose pay is relatively modest by professional standards.

Still, when something becomes costly or unproductive, people look for cheaper substitutes. Despite being sheltered by massive government subsidies, the process of looking for new models of certifying competence and knowledge is accelerating, and transformative change may be coming to higher education.

First of all, there’s a reason why neither the House nor the Senate vote fell out along straight party lines (as so many pieces of legislation do in this fiercely divisive Congress): It’s because the problem presents no easy solutions. An op-ed piece by Charles Kadlec published in Forbes (clearly no friend of the president), finds an unlikely ally: “Even the Washington Post Editorial Board opposes keeping the current 3.4-percent interest rate:

This isn’t the first election in which this superficially appealing line has appeared; the current 3.4% rate began as a gimmick that Democrats cooked up to help them retake Congress in 2006. It has all of the drawbacks it did then, and more: It’s expensive, it’s poorly targeted, and it diverts attention and money from bigger problems facing federal support of education.”

Sadly, this Democratic legislation, which, bizarrely, both Obama and Romney support, is a “kick-the-can-down-the-road” approach to a massive problem. Nor are the proposed solutions from the right or the left any more reassuring or realistic. My friend and fellow Innovations blogger, conservative economist Richard Vedder has long taken the position that the government should simply get out of the higher-education business (I’m paraphrasing from his provocative book, Going Broke by Degrees). If the government were to do so, and students still wanted to go to college, and needed to borrow in order to do so, then all student loans would be private (currently, according to the College Board, 7 percent). From my perspective, this would be a mess: It would amplify an industry eerily similar to the mortgage industry under the Bush era of reckless, unregulated casino capitalism. Predatory student lenders already exist; in a totally privatized, free-market system, they would multiply, and inevitably students, both graduates and dropouts, would find their financial lives destroyed.

Liberals who anticipate these problems have come up with solutions. Alert to the expansion of the private student-loan sector, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) recently introduced legislation that would allow private student-loan debt to be discharged in bankruptcy, arguing that student-loan debt is no different than credit-card debt. Sounds reasonable? Not according to Thomas Brown, a contributor to Bankstocks.com. He explains the differences:

Private student-loan debt is not like credit card debt. Card lenders have substantial flexibility in changing the terms of their loans—notably, by raising and lowering lending limits—as the balances age and the borrower’s circumstances change. In the case of student borrowers in particular, lenders often grant a low limit initially and then increase it as the borrower establishes a reliable payment history.

Student lending is of course nothing like that. The initial loan balances are much larger than they are with cards, for starters. And the borrower doesn’t begin to repay them until he’s earned his degree, four years hence. The lender thus has no idea which of its credits are good and which are bad until it has already loaned them, in many cases, tens of thousands of dollars.

All of which is to say, education lending is an awfully risky business.

He concludes by predicting that “if Durbin keeps this up, eventually there won’t be a banking industry for him to torment.”

So who’s right? Neither, and that makes a real solution all the more unreachable. Professor Vedder may be right that the federal government ought not to be in the higher-education business. But the fact is that it has been since 1965, when Pell Grants and Stafford Loans were passed into law; pulling the rug out from under those programs all at once now would dramatically affect access to higher education for millions of college-age students. Senator Durbin’s heart may be in the right place when he proposes that private student loans be made bankruptable, but if they are, private lenders will respond by registering the true risk of the loans they issue and raise interest rates accordingly.

Here’s at least a suggestion: In the midst of trashing Senator Durbin’s proposed legislation, Brown presents an interesting idea: “Put colleges themselves on the hook for a portion of unpaid private balances. That would concentrate the minds of admissions departments across the country.” There’s a thought.

Everybody makes mistakes, but this one is revealing in several ways. First, the “New York Times analysis” cited as the source was incompetently done. They actually calculated the following figure: among students who borrowed while in college, what percentage still owed money when they graduated? Not surprisingly, very few college students pay off their student debt while in college. Sarah Turner, a professor at the University of Virginia, seems to have been the first analyst to figure out how the Times managed to mess up. Obviously, the Times could use somebody who knows something about statistics checking these kinds of things.

Second, anybody with serious familiarity with higher education finance would immediately know that that 94 percent number was just way off – as indeed would anybody who just stopped and thought for a minute about the demographics of students who graduate from college.

Third, since any expert on higher education finance would know that number was way off, this mistake underscores the fact that the Times didn’t see any need to cross-check this story with experts in higher education finance – an oversight that we suspect would be less likely to occur regarding a story in the business section or for that matter the sports section.

This is not just a minor factual error. The erroneous idea that nearly all students borrow for college is already being widely repeated. The context in which the statement was made may perhaps shed light on why the number was so appealing to the authors and editors. The story focused on a student who has more debt than almost every other college graduate and who chose to enroll at an institution, Ohio Northern University, where average debt levels exceed those at almost every other college in the country. The story seemed to be striving for maximum drama rather than for an accurate picture of student debt and the very real problems it creates for too many students.

The Times’ reputation as the newspaper of record is a precious asset for the company and for the nation, and we hope they will guard it well.

Naomi Riley puts up a blog that said what I believe many people in higher education have long believed but were largely afraid to say: Black-studies programs in the United States are weak academically; moreover,  employers have apparently not clamored for black-studies graduates, and enrollments are stagnant or falling in many institutions. Ms. Riley did not spend a lot of time researching the issue (which, in her defense, is not terribly unusual with blogs), and she could have eased the uproar a good deal by noting that academic weaknesses are not exclusively confined to black-studies programs. A similar criticism is often made about, say, colleges of education, and other so-called “studies” programs that are allegedly interdisciplinary in nature but often seem to me more nondisciplinary. Black studies is not the only area in the university seemingly driven as much by ideology as by facts and reason. Ms. Riley was crucified, accused of being racist (absurd given her marriage to a black man and mothering two inter-racial children), and after 6,500 people complained fiercely, she was dropped by the Chronicle. The editor said “Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles.” Riley called it “mob rule,” and that got me thinking: Isn’t that a growing problem generally in higher education?

Over the last year or so, a seemingly altogether different kerfuffle has been brewing in Texas. The University of Texas or its supporters mobilized a frontal attack on the release of data on UT faculty teaching loads, and what was viewed as hostile analysis of it (I bore some of the brunt of that attack for the report I co-authored on faculty productivity and costs), and when 200,000 or so persons complained that know-nothings were trying to destroy the greatness of UT, the Board of Regents appeared to back off meaningful attempts at reform.  After a hiatus, the war has erupted again over the governor’s audacity to oppose a tuition increase at UT, which has nearly triple the endowment of any other public school. Again, it appears that the administration of UT is trying to mobilize public support to try to enact a tuition increase that is perceived important to maintaining the academic good life.

Also, controversy recently emerged from a Wall Street Journal article by Buzz Bissinger that advocated the end of intercollegiate football. This led to a huge response. The most astute came from Sally Schott, who opined “Of course, college football should be banned, along with war, pestilence, famine, disease, leaf blowers and wearing pajama pants in public… unlike college football, the latter six stand some remote eventual chance of riddance.”

Generalizing from this academic menage a trois, the academy loves to use group protests to intimidate or silence those with politically incorrect views, to preserve financial prosperity, and maintain academically dubious programs, be they black studies or high-level intercollegiate football.

Interestingly, some of the time, such as in the case of Naomi Riley, the academy uses intimidation and vicious name-calling to enforce a conformity of expressed views that is the very antithesis of the Enlightenment out of which the modern university sprung. In these cases, the academy argues that the Real World has no right to interfere, and that piddling little things like the First Amendment are irrelevant, since the Academy must be independent of the Real Word in order to function in a vibrant fashion.

Yet, on other occasions, such as when policy and opinion makers threaten revenues or something truly sacrosanct, like football, the Real World is mobilized to shut down proposals for change or innovation.  The groupie jock alums are mobilized to insist that we continue to pursue Greatness by spending more on ball-throwing contests.

Of course, serious scholarship on the African-American experience in America is going on in English, economics, and history departments, dramatically reducing the rationale for separate black-studies programs (side note: I did some pioneering work myself on the exploitation of slaves). Of course, UT’s endowment reportedly rose by well over $2-billion from FY 2010 to FY 2011 alone, and that the use of the interest on this money alone for current operations would allow tuition freezes or even reductions without new spending cuts at UT.  Of course, scandal on top of scandal  in college sports this year mars the academy (the best recent account: David Ridpath’s Tainted Glory).

Yet the academy increasingly says to scholars within its walls: conform or get out, and to others its says, keep giving us money (appropriations, gifts, ticket and sky box purchases) but leave us alone—unless we need you.

At the elementary and secondary level, educators devised a number of strategies to address economic and racial isolation, including programs to allow low-income students to transfer out of high-poverty schools into higher performing middle-class schools, and “magnet” programs to attract middle-class students into higher-poverty schools with special themes or pedagogical approaches   Both sets of strategies are employed in a fairly small number of communities nationally, but where they are implemented, they are associated with superior outcomes for students.

On the 58th anniversary of Brown, it is troubling to recognize that higher-education officials are even further behind K-12 policymakers in taking steps to integrate student bodies.  While elite four-year colleges have instituted programs to recruit and admit additional black and Latino students, there is little that is being done to attract low-income students.  And there are few “magnet” programs being instituted at racially and economically isolated community colleges to attract more middle-class students.

On one level, it is understandable that higher education would be late in addressing economic and racial stratification; whereas primary and secondary schools have long educated a broad cross-section of the American public, the entire higher-education sector was fairly elite until recently. In the early 1950s, around the time Brown was decided, only 14.5 percent of the adult population had even one year of college education, so issues of stratification between higher-education institutions and sectors were not particularly salient.  Today, however, stratification issues loom much larger, as more than half (53.9 percent) of Americans age 25 years or older have at least one year of college, almost four times the share as in the early 1950s.  Wealthy students outnumber low-income students at selective four-year colleges by 14 to 1, but at community colleges, low-income students outnumber students from high-socioeconomic-status families by nearly 2 to 1.  Blacks and Hispanics account for almost three times the share of students at community colleges as they do at selective four-year institutions.

This level of stratification is troubling, because a growing body of evidence suggests that controlling for economic status, race, and academic ability, a given student is much more likely to receive a four-year degree if she starts at a four-year institution than a two-year institution.  Just as it is a disadvantage to attend an economically isolated elementary or secondary school, there is evidence that attending a demographically isolated community college imposes a penalty on students.  As we commemorate the anniversary of Brown, the broadening access to higher education suggests we need to think anew about applying Brown’s meaning to colleges and universities.

In both cases, my positions appear to be at substantial distance from the opinions that prevail in American higher education. And I hasten to add, they are my opinions, not positions taken by the National Association of Scholars. NAS has taken no position on gay marriage or global warming and by its nature can’t. It is an organization that deals with academic standards, the governance of colleges and universities, higher education finance, and public policies that affect scholarship and learning. And it has a membership of some 3,000 mostly academics whose personal views on substantive social and political issues are all over the map.

Academic Freedom and ɯopǝǝɹɟ ɔıɯǝpɐɔɐ

There is, however, a connection between my opinions on gay marriage and climate change and the NAS. Since its founding in 1987, NAS has championed academic freedom. Not, to be sure, the strange inversion of academic freedom—ɯopǝǝɹɟ ɔıɯǝpɐɔɐ—that triumphantly defends the right of faculty members to propagandize their students and to treat scholarship as a subspecies of politics. Rather, NAS has defended the academic freedom of faculty members and students to think and to express their own thoughts in situations where they are pressured to conform to someone else’s political standard.

NAS traces its version of academic freedom most directly to the AAUP’s classic 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. The AAUP revisited those principles in 1940 and 1970 without retreating from their core. But in recent years, via declarations such as Freedom in the Classroom (2007) and Ensuring Academic Freedom in Politically Controversial Academic Personnel Decisions (2011), the AAUP has thrown its weight behind ɯopǝǝɹɟ ɔıɯǝpɐɔɐ. The regnant idea is that the great danger to free inquiry on campus is pressure from censorious outsiders.

But American society has shown very little disposition to get in the way of academics who abuse their professional opportunities. The prevailing political pressures on academics to conform aren’t from zealous trustees, capitalist plutocrats, the Koch brothers, Tea Partiers, or overbearing state legislators. Though all of these occasionally weigh in, the day-to-day reality is that academic freedom is compromised by academic colleagues. The pressure—relentless on many campuses—comes from the custodians of political correctness.

So the NAS finds one of its roles in defending those who are singled out for their failure to conform. These include the graduate students in social work or counseling who refuse to profess the current dogma on homosexuality; the religious dissenters who can’t deny their belief in a god who has ordered the universe; the faculty members who expect allegations of sexual harassment to be adjudicated by impartial procedures; and faculty members who have been ill-treated simply because they are perceived to be conservatives. These are all, in sociological parlance, members of “out-groups.” Their views are not positively valued on most campuses and, in many situations, are clearly unwelcome. The resulting exclusions ought to be a matter of concern for those who care about the integrity of higher education.  But they are seldom of interest to those whose focus is ɯopǝǝɹɟ ɔıɯǝpɐɔɐ.

Same Sex & Warming

President Obama has, of course, just announced that his “evolving views” on gay marriage have just reached their destination: he met ABC’s Robin Roberts in the White House yesterday and said, “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” The President did not offer much explanation for this affirmation, not that much was needed. We all understand the pro-gay marriage argument, which centers on the idea of “equality” and equal treatment under the law. President Obama evoked the idea and connected it to his Christian faith: “The thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the golden rule—you know, treat others the way you want to be treated.  And I think that’s what we need to impart to our kids, and that’s what motivates me as president.”

Meanwhile, a few pages further in today’s New York Times, comes James Hansen’s op-ed, “Game Over for the Climate.” Hansen, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science proponent of global warming theory, tells us that if Canada proceeds to develop its tar sands as a source of petroleum, the resulting release of greenhouse gases will disintegrate the ice sheets, raise the level of the oceans,  drive half the world’s species to extinction, and put civilization “at risk.” Hansen says, “we need to reduce emissions dramatically.”

No surprises here either. President Obama and Dr. Hansen give voice to views that are instantly clear to us. We have all heard the arguments in each case elaborated, with detail and often with passion, countless times. But how often have we heard, let alone dispassionately considered, the counterarguments? Can we suppose that any possible counterarguments are so intellectually weak, factually ill-supported, or ethically compromised that we can afford to ignore them altogether?

In practical terms, that’s what we are teaching our students. I have no statistics on this, but I doubt that one student in a hundred, and perhaps far fewer than that, has ever read a serious secular argument against same-sex marriage, and most would be at a dead loss even to imagine what such an argument would say. The principle of “fairness” has swept everything else out of the way, except for those die-hard religionists who insist dogmatically that God doesn’t countenance the union of same sex couples.

As for global warming, there is a vague awareness that some scientists and others are refusing to get aboard the “climate consensus.” But these folks are dismissed as fringe who are either lost to intellectual eccentricity or who have sold out to special interests who dispute the scientific facts merely to stave off regulations that would decrease their profits from the exploitation of fossil fuels.

Cultivating Ignorance

There is something amiss in this picture. Actually more than one thing. First, a gulf has opened up on both issues between the view that prevails in the academy and the views of great many Americans outside the academy. As we just saw in North Carolina, large numbers of Americans doubt the wisdom of same sex marriage; and as numerous polls show, large numbers of Americans are skeptical of the claims of climate scientists such as Dr. Hanson. The gulf can be explained, of course, with a satisfying shrug: ‘we are smart and informed, and they are dumb and ignorant.’ I rather doubt that explanation, but it does look like the dominant conceit on campus.  In my view, higher education deserves to give us something better. If large numbers of our fellow citizens, after years and years of hearing the same arguments, are unpersuaded, might it be wise to look seriously at the grounds for their skepticism?

Second, there is more than one kind of ignorance. Not knowing what your opponents say and being quick with the reasons why you don’t need to take their views into account is not a very good foundation for advancing your own knowledge. Note that our students are deprived both of the opportunity to understand these particular debates and of the opportunity to see public policy shaped by debate itself. If we have culture war-style polarization, our one-sided form of college instruction is surely a contributing reason.

Third, there is the curious matter of timelines. The advocates of same sex marriage ask us to think almost exclusively in the here-and-now. Not being able to marry is unfair. To whom? To gay couples that want the same benefits that are available to anyone else. And extending those benefits can’t possibly hurt heterosexual couples. The advocates of global warming theory, by contrast, ask us to think almost exclusively in terms of tomorrow—and often a tomorrow that is fifty or a hundred years off. The glaciers will melt; sea levels rise; islands and coast lines drown; deserts expand; etc. Fine: different phenomena are best apprehended on different time lines.

But it seems worth pondering that the timelines that are privileged in both cases are not the only ones that might be relevant. Gay marriage looks rather different through the lens of the human evolutionary past and different as well if one looks to the long term, inter-generational implications of deconstructing heterosexual marriage as the foundation of society. Are we being “fair” to the generations to come by taking steps that will are likely to weaken the bio-social interdependencies of mothers and fathers to each other and to their children?

Gay marriage inevitably alters the definition of marriage and the accompanying social norms, and the effects of these sorts of changes, though incidental to the present, may well be dramatic in several generations. We are, with minimal forethought, altering the way our society sustains and reproduces itself.

And global warming theory looks pretty different if one looks at the geologic record of climate oscillations, or for that matter at the enormous changes demanded by figures such as Dr. Hansen on the basis of a very brief period of scientific inquiry.

My purpose here isn’t to argue or elaborate any of these points. I’m rather concerned that we have shortchanged a generation of students by foreclosing the debates that they ought to have heard and participated in.  Instead we have a vast cohort of students and college graduates who believe, without reason, that these are matters that are settled among all people of good-will who have taken the time to become informed.

They are, in fact, not informed at all.  As John Stuart Mill put it, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

I blame the rise of ɯopǝǝɹɟ ɔıɯǝpɐɔɐ. We have indulged and cosseted a handful of popular ideologies and convinced ourselves that the hard discipline of demanding that ideas—all ideas— be debated on their merits is too much trouble when we already know the answers we want. What we need is genuine academic freedom, and for that the dissenters will have to be welcomed back to the seminar table.

Additional data: About $85-billion in student loans are delinquent, the New York Fed said. That’s about 14 percent of borrowers. However, that understates because many borrowers, such as those who are still students or have just graduated, don’t have to make loan payments. Among borrowers required to pay back their loans, about 27 percent are delinquent. But the DOE figures only look at defaults over a two-year span. Data examined by The Chronicle showed that 20 percent of government loans that went into repayment starting in 1995 were in default. The rate was 31 percent for those at a two-year colleges and 40 percent for those attending a for-profit colleges.

This is a lot of information to digest, but the article is invaluable for its precision. It’s also frightening, since it places the anecdotes from my last post into an equally dismal macroeconomic context. Where we go from here is a difficult and challenging question. It has to start with the intrinsic value of a college and post-graduate education in the U.S., particularly in the wake of a deep and prolonged recession. How many recessions will it take before Americans take seriously the catch phrase “jobless recovery”? The jobs that come back after a recession are, generally speaking, worse than the jobs that preceded the recession. In academia, adjuncts tend to replace professors. The recent, wildly popular Chronicle article, “From Graduate School to Welfare” (756 comments when I last checked) drives home the point, telling the stories of ABD’s and Ph.D.’s who are on some form of federal assistance (food stamps, Medicaid). We could be witnessing the implosion of the American higher-education system. More specific to student loans, I want to look at the liberal solution—going beyond reducing the interest rates on student debt but allowing them to be bankrupted—as well as conservative solutions, which take the position that low-interest student loans only encourage colleges to continue raising tuition and encourage students to borrow more money. It’s going to be very hard in the coming months to discuss this issue in any other than an extremely partisan way, but I hope to find a window.

Warren denied the charge—and there is no evidence that she in fact benefited from a racial preference in hiring—but her weak responses only dug the hole deeper, Chris Cillizza of the Post noted. Her case highlights four weaknesses in affirmative-action policies—and also suggests a way out.

First, Warren’s explanation for why she listed herself as a Native American—which denied any connection to the way in which diversity policies might benefit her—raised eyebrows. Warren argued that she wanted to be identified in directories as Native American in order to meet people like herself, and get invited to lunches, which may be true, but seems willfully oblivious of the way in which legal directories are used by employers to identify candidates who will add diversity. As Amy Davidson notes in the New Yorker, “What makes her identification with the tribe feel scattershot, if not outright opportunistic, is that she reportedly only listed herself publicly that way from about 1986 until the mid-1990s, in her first academic posts, and then stopped doing so after getting [her] appointment at Harvard.”

Warren’s strained explanation of why she listed herself as Native American seemed to undercut her greatest strength: that unlike most politicians, worried about offending wealthy donors, she is a straight-shooter, willing to tell it like it is. Her questionable explanation is unfortunately typical of discussions of affirmative action. Years ago, for example, when a conservative opponent of affirmative action leaked the lower median test scores of black students at Georgetown Law School, school leaders, rather than defending the diversity program outright, suggested unpersuasively that the discrepancy might be explained by the superior essays of minority students.

Second, the fact that Warren identified as Native American even though she was one-32nd Cherokee, reminded voters that in practice, affirmative action often benefits more advantaged members of any given minority group. At selective colleges, for example, one study found that 86 percent of black students were middle- or upper-middle-class. (The whites were even wealthier.) That someone who is technically Native American, but whose ties are weak, could benefit from affirmative action helps feed suspicion that programs rarely help the most disadvantaged minority group members. (Harvard Law School, when criticized for having no minority women in 1996, responded that “Elizabeth Warren is Native American.”)

Third, the tenuous relationship to the Cherokees highlights a growing weakness of affirmative action: that with skyrocketing inter-marriage rates, the number of beneficiaries with relatively weak ties will increase. The great moral authority behind affirmative-action policies comes from the fact that they benefit those who inherit the disadvantages associated with horrendous crimes, such as slavery, segregation, and the decimation of Native Americans. But as the Pew Foundation reported in February, 15 percent of new American marriages are inter-racial, double the proportion of three decades ago, increasing the number of Americans who, like Warren, can claim weak minority membership.

Fourth, Warren defended her identification as a Native American by telling a story of her grandfather’s “high cheekbones.” The reference to facial features underlines the creepiest aspect of racial preference programs. In Brazil, the president defended affirmative action, saying that “scientific criteria” could be used to determine racial heritage. The U.S. has tried to avoid that problem by relying on self-identification, but at some point, cases like Warren’s raise questions about the feasibility of that system as well.

In short, the Warren episode reminded many people of all the things that make them uneasy about affirmative action. But on the bright side, her case also points to a progressive alternative: affirmative action based on class. Warren grew up in a working-class family (her father was a janitor), and polls indicate Americans support giving a leg up to college applicants who come from economically disadvantaged families and have overcome odds. You can defend that policy plainly and openly, and do not have to resort to reasoning that strains credulity, as Elizabeth Warren has in recent days.

That is, as far as I know, a one of a kind incident, but a broader and nearly as troubling trend has recently been documented by the Washington Post. An article published on April 1 by Ylan Q. Mui, discloses some remarkable information. We all know the magic number when it comes to student-loan debt: $1-trillion nationwide. But Mui notes that “new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that Americans 60 and older still owe about $36-billion in student loans, providing a rare window into the dynamics of student debt. More than 10 percent of those loans are delinquent. As a result, consumer advocates say, it is not uncommon for Social Security checks to be garnished or for debt collectors to harass borrowers in their 80s over student loans that are decades old.”

Both of these reports are obviously appalling, as are other trends. I’ll review the information on the percentage of loans that are, in effect, in default, in forbearance, or delinquent—though finding accurate data on that subject is maddeningly difficult. And there’s also a commonly practiced unofficial means of getting forbearance: students not in college have a six-month grace period before their loans come due. Many simply re-enroll, regardless of whether they want to pursue a degree, because being enrolled puts off the date at which they must begin to repay their loans. This data, needless to say, is impossible to find, but it hardly furthers the genuine purpose of higher education. If a student is in college only to stay one step ahead of debt collection and garnishment, how does that advance America’s position in the global education competition that both candidates talk about?

The Chronicle’s change of heart took me greatly by surprise. As a writer whose contributions to these pages have often  been assailed, I’ve come to trust that The Chronicle is pretty sturdy in its defense of the principle that dissenters from academe’s typical left-wing orthodoxies should be heard, and that dialogue–even if sometimes caustic–is better than enforced silence.

So my first response is personal: I feel less sure that The Chronicle will champion that principle the next time I address a controversial topic. If someone mounts a campaign of vilification against me, will I too be dismissed? There are and never were any guarantees against that happening, but the danger seems a lot greater. Whatever else Riley’s dismissal means, it communicates to the mob that The Chronicle is susceptible to its pressure tactics.  That guarantees one thing: that it will try again.

The story of Riley’s article is being widely told, but it won’t hurt to recapitulate it.  On April 30, she posted a brief article, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations,” to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog. The reaction was fury. Hundreds of people posted replies, several fellow Chronicle bloggers have weighed in, and a petition was mounted calling on The Chronicle to dismiss Riley.

I come late to the witch burning because I was away and missed both the original post and the gathering throng of those who found it needful to declare their outrage.  The declarations proving insufficiently purgative, some demanded action. Ms. Riley, according to these critics, should be punished for expressing views beyond the bounds of civilized discourse. Riley posted a follow-up article defending her original post and exacerbating the indignation of her critics.

Mark Bauerlein, also posting on Brainstorm, offered one of the few sensible comments on the affair. In “Naomi Riley and Her Respondents,” he observes “the disproportionate nature of the responses.” Some of the rhetoric in these responses was fever-pitch, and even the less hyperbolic writers seem a little carried away. My fellow Innovations blogger, Marybeth Gasman, for instance, wrote, “I am also deeply offended by Naomi Schaefer Riley’s uninformed, dismissive, and downright racist portrayal of the work of black-studies scholars.”

I’m not close to Riley, but I’ve known her for about 10 years; I read her books; and spent time with her at conferences.  She is by no stretch a racist, and while not herself an academic, has spent much of her career reporting on higher education.

That said, when I finally read her original article, I thought it had the characteristics of something she had dashed off. There are shoddy dissertations, trivial scholarship, and ideological claptrap in many parts of higher education. Her decision to use the titles and brief descriptions of several recent Ph.D. dissertations in “black studies” to indict the whole field of black studies erred in both overgeneralizing and undergeneralizing. It overgeneralized by portraying black studies as a whole as meretricious. It undergeneralized by treating a handful of doubtful-looking dissertation titles as evidence of weakness in just black studies and not as part of the larger problem of faulty standards in the humanities and social sciences generally.

Riley may have concluded too much on the basis of too little. Her article, however,  was offered as a “for instance” comment, not a work of social science, and it took its place beside hundreds of other such comments on The Chronicle’s opinion blogs, very few of which are grounded in much research, and none of which are peer reviewed. This is opinion, after all, not scholarship aimed at lasting contribution to an academic discipline.

So why did Riley’s opinion arouse such fury? It fell within the category of unspeakable observations in higher education—unspeakable because to voice them is almost certain to provoke outrage. The outrage is all the hotter because many people share Riley’s view that “black studies” and its variants are intellectually shallow and academically superfluous. To criticize, let alone mock, fields like this touches on higher education’s troubled conscience.

And higher education’s conscience is troubled because of the history behind such fields. Their rise owes less to signal intellectual accomplishments than to university administrators seeking to appease vocal constituencies. We have a collective pretense that the fields (black studies being the preeminent example) that combine identity group solidarity, a program of social change, and a fair amount of advocacy are “real” academic disciplines. It is impolite to call such pretenses into question because doing so unsettles some of the tacit agreements that undergird identity politics in American higher education.

Despite its origins in such administrative concordats, black studies has produced some substantial and important scholarship.  It would have been wise of Riley to register that. But her squib was meant plainly as a provocation and it didn’t tarry to take into account the complications that attend any effort to capture a complex reality.

Riley’s short essay might best be thought of as a contribution to that time-honored sport of satirizing academic self-importance. Senator William Proxmire had his Golden Fleece Awards; Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus lampooned ponderous German scholarship; Dr. Casaubon’s fatuous quest for The Key to All Mythologies blights the life of his young bride in Middlemarch; any number of academic novels of the last few decades poke fun at the combination of triviality, cocksuredness, and grandiose claims that are endemic to academic life.

Judging by the over-the-top reactions, including The Chronicle‘s decision to fire her, Riley’s arrow hit its mark.

I am not eager to go down the same path. I like writing for The Chronicle, not least because doing so does put me into genuine dialogue with people who often disagree with me. If they choose to read what I say, they get to consider some ideas that are not as widely discussed on campus as they should be. And I get to think through some challenging responses.

But that leaves the problem: Was Riley fired because of what she said, how she said it, or how she handled the initial criticisms? In my view she rather unskillfully and imprudently pointed out a real problem. Excellent scholarship on black history, black literature, and black culture doesn’t need to be cabined in “black studies” departments. It could and should be integrated with the relevant disciplines. In that particular sense, black studies as a separate field is superfluous. There was a time when the regular disciplines presented barriers to scholarship on black history, literature, sociology, etc. but that time is long gone. Racism, social hierarchy, oppression, and group identity are mainstream subjects for scholarly investigation in all of the humanities and social sciences.

Could she have said something like this and kept her position as a contributor to The Chronicle? I think so. But maybe I’ll find out for myself.

In any case, The Chronicle’s decision to let her go is disheartening, and points to an even larger problem: the stifling of genuine dissent. Riley’s offending essay was perhaps an easy target for outrage since it is written in a tone of casual contempt for endeavors that many in higher education take with sententious seriousness. That tone of casual contempt is, however, endemic on campus. But it is typically pointed to other targets: conservatives, Republicans, free-market enthusiasts, Tea Party enthusiasts, adherents of traditional religions, doubters of man-made global warming, supporters of traditional marriage, and so on. Deployed on those topics, it is a tone that occasions no special notice.  Flippancy on matters of race, however, is apparently a firing offense.

The silencing of dissenting voices in the press–even flippant voices on serious subjects–should be a matter of common concern that cuts across political and cultural affinities. With Riley’s dismissal, our zone of free exchange of ideas just got a little smaller. And that benefits no one, including those who mistakenly think they just scored a win.