Clarion Call No. 234
RALEIGH — Boston University associate professor of anthropology and higher education commentator Peter Wood delivered the keynote address at the Pope Center for Higher Education Reform’s 2003 conference, “What Has Become of Standards in Higher Education?”

Wood is author of Diversity: Invention of a Concept, published in 2003 by Encounter Books. He is a frequent writer on American culture and issues in higher education whose columns can be seen at National Review Online.

Wood’s address before the Pope Center conference was entitled “Loosestrife: The Flowering of Imbecility in American Education.” Wood opened his talk with a discussion of loosestrife, a summer reed with purplish flowers that can be seen around wetlands and waterways. As Wood explained, the weed has a pleasing appearance. Nevertheless, it is a weed, but more than that, it is not one that is native to North America. Regardless of its pleasing appearance, purple loosestrife is an invader that is choking waterways and crowding out native species. It is a threat.

From there Wood began to cite the facts of the decline of higher education and, worse, the public’s acceptance of lower standards for higher education. He said that we have witnessed a transformation of higher education into a system that prolongs adolescence into “children’s” third decade. Nevertheless, the public has been content to watch this transformation take place, because they have allowed themselves to find it pleasing. “Economically speaking, Americans want low academic standards,” Wood said. “It’s what we purchase.”

According to Wood, “the public has by and large acquiesced in their responsibility” to higher education. Universities have become accustomed to putting identity groups, identity politics, diversity, and the like in front of academic standards. The public has been complicit in allowing universities to partially displace academic standards with racial and ethnic quotas.

Higher education officials, meanwhile, find they can market these low standards better than they ever could market high standards, Wood said. But even when they are questioned about the degradation of their standards, academics “found ways to justify them as high.” So universities began employing phrases such as “celebrate diversity,” “empower learning,” etc.

Preferring to be ‘suckers’

Besides, people do not want to believe that the standards are lower, because they prefer to believe they can handle academic work. Thus those who are affected by the lower academic standards, Wood said, rather than find outrage in them, find comfort.

“The educationist comforts us with the idea that we belong in the company of genius,” Wood said. “Educational loosestrife comforts us with its educational sweetness.”

Wood noted that even before John Dewey, P. T. Barnum discerned that the way to get people to pay money for really dumb spectacles was to dress them up as education. Barnum excelled by selling purposeful exaggerations and trickery, Wood said. He showed that “quite often we know we’re being suckered, and we buy that ticket anyway.”

Wood compared the public’s allowing themselves to be suckered by Barnum to their allowing the Progressives to take control of public education. Wood said Progressivist education had three themes. These were attacks on the three components of traditional learning: attacks on memory, attacks on authority, and attacks on hierarchy.

The decline of memory has brought about educational standards stripped of their most substantial content. Its effects are everywhere, even at the checkout desk, where the clerk is unable to make change without the register telling him the total.

The educational authorities of today are now supposedly the students, who are placed in charge of “finding things out for oneself.” Meanwhile, “educationists teach students to sneer at the greatest authorities of their times as if they were only puppets of their times or purveyors of prejudice,” Wood said. “They teach students instead to trust in their own ignorance.”

Wood discussed other barriers to higher education, including the percentage of high school graduates who attend college and also the recent changes made to the SAT. The main reason we have problems in higher education, Wood said, is because “we don’t think good teaching and rigorous curricula are important.”

Nevertheless, he concluded on a hopeful note. “Citizens are changing,” he noted. The young are rejecting the low standards and are even learning to memorize such things as poems, Wood said. They are even discovering the value of educational authority, he said.

At the conclusion of his talk, Pope Center director George C. Leef presented Wood with the Caldwell Award, named after two pioneers in higher education in North Carolina, David Caldwell and Dr. Joseph Caldwell. Previous recipients of the annual award were Alan Charles Kors, Abigail Thernstrom, and the late Peter Aranson.

Sanders is a policy analyst with the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and an assistant editor at Carolina Journal.