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The last two weeks focused on changes in diplomacy and media since the New Millennium, and this essay will deal with developments in higher education.  To fully appreciate the changes we are witnessing and will continue to witness in colleges and universities in the future, it is necessary to start right at the beginning of instructed learning.  The history of education begins with what might be termed the apprentice-master relationship.  From the earliest time, a master craftsman took on a young apprentice and through hands-on learning, trained them in the skills they possessed.

A classic example is seen in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris which took hundreds of years to build.  The mason specialist apprenticed his son or other young man who took over for him when he retired or died, who then trained his son and so forth and so on.  The cathedral does not appear to be the work of divergent elements because in each case, the servant became as the master.  This one-to-one form of learning was prevalent for a couple of thousand of years in every domain, up until the rise of the universities in the Medieval Ages. But even then, the traditional didactic lecture format we know today grew primarily out of the lack of books.  The professor ‘read’ their works before a group of students who would write them down.  Even today, in the Latvian language as well as many others, the literal translation of giving a lecture is to ‘read’ a lecture.  This lecturing methodology in higher education changed very little through the centuries, up to second half of the twentieth century.                 

In should also be noted that individuals originally went to a university, particularly in the United States, to study theology. Virtually all of the Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale started as training schools for pastors.  Practicing law and even medicine was still seen as a task best served in the apprentice-master structure.  It is also worth noting that that in none of these venues of education was grades used.  An individual was learning to be able to practice their particular trade, and they either knew it or they did not know it.  The incorporation of grades into education is a rather recent phenomenon, being introduced by the United States Military Academy in the late 1800s.  West Point did it for the purpose of determining class rank that was used by the Army as a basis for later assignment selection.                                                           

To take just a slight road of departure on this point, I have had some rather heated discussions on this matter with other academicians, but it is my sincere belief that grades serve almost no practical purpose to learning.  I do agree that testing and assessment for the purpose of measuring learning has value.  These should be used as guides and aides to both student and teacher to improve the learning process.  But the competition that arises out of assigning some numerical or alphabetical designation to an individual’s academic knowledge is completely and purely for social benefit – it has no pedagogical benefit at all.  Grades were not used for thousands of years in the apprentice-master relationship, nor hundreds of years in the rise of the university system, and people learned in these systems very well, thank you.  I do not just believe this – I practice it as well.  My own children understood while they were growing up that I placed virtually no value on their grades, but was greatly interested in what they were learning.  

Today, when I begin a course I always begin by telling my students, “You are here to learn, not to just get a grade.  But for those who have a problem with this, tell me now what grade you want, write in on a piece of paper with your name and that is grade you will receive in my class.  I am not kidding.  Once we have dispensed with the foolishness of thinking that the quantity of our knowledge can be expressed in some numerical figure, we can begin the real process of learning for learning sake.” The real learners emerge at this point and we have a thrilling ride together on the road to discovery.  The others attend the class, oblivious to the joy of inquiry, only later waking up from their mental fog and wondering perhaps what they had missed. The administration of Stockholm School of Economics in Riga has given up on me awarding grades, and now all my students simply receive either a pass/fail for my courses. (Sorry for the soap box, but this issue is truly a hot spot with me.)                                                

The twentieth century began with the emergence of higher education in fields which they that had not been before, such as business, the arts, and even some trades.  Harvard Business School, for example, invented the MBA degree in 1908 and even introduced their case-study approach to teaching about the same time.  The Julliard School of Music opened in 1905, primarily to keep prospective US musicians in the US and not travel to study in Europe.  Katharine Gibbs started a school in New York to train young women to become secretaries in 1911, as this field was totally dominated by men.  Through the first half of the twentieth century, two tracts of post-secondary education developed.  The first was the training of teachers.  These began as what were known as Normal Schools and then later as Teacher Colleges.  They were inexpensive, for the most part, and served a very direct purpose – providing primary and secondary public school teachers.  The second tract was the prestigious and much more expensive university education, centered primarily on what was known as a liberal (in the sense of general or overall) education. The line of demarcation was shattered, however, after WWII when the GI Bill was passed which allowed thousands and thousands of veterans to study at formally prestigious institutions.  Teacher colleges, to be competitive for this influx of students, broadened their curriculums and most eventually became universities themselves.  For the first time in history, the dream of university education was now within the reach of almost everyone.

For the first half of the twentieth century, almost everyone agreed what receiving a university degree signified.  An individual awarded a bachelor’s degree had learned the essential elements of his or her particular specialty or major, and should they wish to continue their studies, they would be seeking to master it, (hence the name, Master’s Degree), and if they continued to study, would know it well enough to teach others in which they would receive a Ph.D. (literally, Philosophy Doctorate, meaning that an individual knew the philosophy behind the field and therefore could see the entire scope of it.) All this began to unravel during the tumultuous 1960s, when the idea developed that universities should not just dispense academic knowledge but also be an agent of social construction (or deconstruction, as it appeared then.)  Black Studies (later to become African-American Studies), Feminist Studies, Gay/Lesbian Studies, and Ethnic Studies Departments would spring up in campus after campus across the nation.  The idea of studying Dead White Guys suddenly seemed so passé.  Further, the concept that an individual had to develop a certain expertise within a field was seen as less important as that an individual had the correct overall social orientation, which became known as Political Correctness or PC.     

The unshakeable, unbreakable code of PC is tolerance.  It is in this great tradition that Ward Churchill, a tenured professor from the University of Colorado with the Ethnic Studies Department (of course), would be invited to speak at Hamilton College in New York two weeks ago.  Mr. Churchill (he does not hold a Ph.D.) is best known for his insights into the 9-11 attacks, claiming that the United States deserved these attacks and that further, he hopes that more would be coming.  Not surprisingly, these comments have not been received favorably by the general public, resulting in the withdrawal of the invitation to Hamilton, yet the academic community is circling the wagons in defending this idiot in the name of academic freedom.                              

At the same time, this beloved tolerance means tolerance toward the right opinions.  Consider the storm (or as the dean of engineering at the University of Washington called it, “an intellectual tsunami”) over some comments made in a closed-door, off-the-record academic conference by the president of Harvard University, Larry Summers.  Summers was the former Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton and one of the most respected economists in America.  Before his comments, he warned his audience several times that he was going to be deliberately “provocative,” and then suggested that there might be genetic differences between men and women which would account for males pursuing careers in math and the sciences in greater numbers than females.     

                                                                               
Now, the fact that there are thousands (and I literally mean THOUSANDS) of peer-reviewed academic papers in the fields of psychology, genetics, neuroscience, macroeconomics, sociology, anthropology, and other fields attesting to differences between men and women in various cognitive functions apparently counts for nothing.  Summers broke a law of political correctness and became what George Orwell described in his novel 1984 as a Thought Criminal. The Correct Political Thinking mandates that all differences between men and women MUST be explained by discrimination and not biology.  When Summers spoke, an MIT feminist biologist stormed out of the room for fear of fainting and said later if she had stayed any longer she would have vomited (funny, none of the men reacted that way…). In no time, one hundred faculty members of Harvard demanded Summers apologize. The National Organization for Women demanded that he resign.  Last week three university professors, from MIT, Stanford and Princeton published an editorial in the Boston Globe declaring that the topic of male/female genetic differences is off limits.  Orwell could not have written this scenario better.                                   

My own personal experience with PC is that I finally had to give up trying to get my papers published in academic journals in the United States because I was continually rejected due to incorrect PC grammar and thought. Yet as disgusting as Orwellian Political Correctness is, it is not even the major problem with American universities.  What flew under the radar of the general public was another development in higher education that took place starting in the 1970s, and that was the growth of what could be called the Business of Education.  As public funding for higher education decreased, schools found that they only had two sources of revenue, increased tuition and outside funding.  With additional students, the higher tuition would raise income levels substantially, but this meant lowering the bar of admissions standards.  Also, foundations and government grants only went to schools that proved they were on the cutting edge, so professors were pressured greatly to research and publish.  Publish or Die is not just an idle motto – the modern university system lives by it.  [One American professor admitted to me that a primary consideration in conducting research was to secure funding for a future research project!]                  

What this meant in both cases, however, was that the undergraduate education would greatly suffer.  Students found that their classrooms were overcrowded, with many students unqualified to be there in the first place, and the professors were being replaced by grad students, teaching in the place of the professor.  Today, a bachelor’s degree, particularly in the humanities or social sciences, is not much more valued than a high school diploma in many cases.  It would be nice to say that Christian colleges and universities have avoided this trap, but with the exception of Dordt College, Geneva College, and a few others, this is not the case. The proliferation of training programs in business developed out of necessity because the business world recognized the universities were no longer teaching what they needed their managers and technicians to know.   

So where does that leave us at the brink of the New Millennium?  Universities are no longer citadels of learning where young, eager minds seek to pursue truth, but have largely become commercial businesses, designed to produce a product known as Political Correctness for the Greater Social Good of Society.  But all this will change. In fact, even in the Larry Summers affair, the critics are feeling the heat of so much attention brought on by their actions and even the New York Times has noted that they have become “unreasonable opponents of academy inquiry and openness,” with Harvard “ridiculed as a center of close-minded political correctness.”  (I could not have said that better myself.)  And this is only the beginning.  I predict that within ten years, we will not recognize the university that exists today.  For one thing, the institutions of bricks and mortar will give way to the information superhighway of the Internet. This decentralizing will eventually wear down PC thinking as students are free to make more and more choices about the direction of their education. 

This is already happening.  Over ninety percent of all universities offer some form of distant learning with their curriculum.  There are now 244 colleges and universities that offer degrees completely on-line.  The University of Phoenix, for example, has 240,180 students enrolled, making it by far the largest institution of higher learning in the country.  These schools offer greater flexibility and variety than in-residence schools could ever hope to match.  To be competitive, schools will be forced to have to offer a more divergent range of opinion.  Education will stay Big Business, but at least it will have a better product line.