Whether U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s keynote address at N.C. Central University’s 125th commencement ceremony illustrated what is wrong with the liberal stranglehold on higher education, or properly embraces an emerging social paradigm, likely depends on your own politics.
“The most valuable attribute in the world you are about to enter is not critical thinking, or fluency in another language, or an amazing understanding of U.S. history, or chemistry, or math, as important as every single one of those skills are,” Duncan told the 660 graduates.
“It’s about whether you are capable of truly seeing the world through another’s eyes, or willing to walk a mile in their shoes,” said Duncan, a senior member of President Obama’s cabinet who was forged in the smelter of Chicago politics.
“You cannot be a good person simply by following the rules anymore,” he said. “Of all of the skills a person can have today, no matter what their passion or profession might be, the one thing that is most vital to becoming a true social entrepreneur is empathy.”
To achieve the leftist grail of interconnectedness, Duncan believes, colleges and universities must transform students into “change-makers,” which, he said, is “the new literacy. And empathy is the foundation of that new way of being.”
In other words, regardless of the hyperinflated costs one pays to obtain a degree that is an official representation of a high level of education, learning is now to universities what longhand letter writing is to Information Age communication — a nice-to-know but subordinate pursuit.
Instead, Duncan directs our attention to a shiny new bauble with certain appeal for those susceptible to that ephemeral touchstone of liberal orthodoxy by which the heart screams “WE MUST DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING, NOW!”
Of course, when tidal sensitivities of the collective hold sway over the head in government policy, it often results in disastrous economic and policy outcomes in the guise of a solution.
Now, one might forgive Duncan for straying into leftist social theory about doing good for our fellow man by metamorphosing into a social entrepreneur. After all, it was a graduation speech.
Commencement is a time to gush hyperbole and bathe celebratory graduates in warm-fuzzies, to nudge them from one last, cozy moment in the Ivory Tower nest into a real world. But most people understand in that world that fertile flights of idealism are no substitute for critical thinking and analysis.
To be fair, Duncan’s remarks were inspired by his stated admiration for Our Kids, the latest book by Robert Putnam, a public policy professor of the communitarian persuasion at Harvard University whose previous tome, Bowling Alone, was a best-seller.
It was interesting, perhaps coincidental, that Duncan chose a book titled Our Kids from which to bracket much of his commencement message, and echo the thought.
“They’re your sons and daughters,” he told assembled friends and families of the graduates, “but in a very real way, they are our kids as well.”
I don’t know about you, but I find it creepy and foreboding when bureaucrats, especially a federal cabinet official, assert equal rights of ownership and parenting to my progeny. Whether they are dangerously misguided in their intentions or convinced that the power of government has a rightful seat at my table, overreach is inevitable.
Given the help I’ve had as a single father, I am deeply grateful to have had a support network lend valuable assistance over these last 19 years.
But mutually agreeable and negotiated acts of kindness with individuals of my choosing are a social compact far different from turning child-rearing responsibilities over to an authoritarian village, the village idiots, or, especially, the state.
Elsewhere in his speech, Duncan expressed alarm over growing gaps in income, opportunity, and achievement. Those, he believes, create class segregation that numbs the haves to a sense of empathy for the have-nots. Naturally, he envisions a government role to reverse that.
Yet nowhere in his speech did Duncan discuss the lack of personal responsibility or generational welfare self-esteem gaps that lure and trap many of the able-bodied have-nots.
He did not mention failing public schools, lack of school choice in devastated inner cities, or protectionist unions that preserve the jobs of crummy teachers and condemn entire communities to the ills he asks social entrepreneurs to remedy.
Nor, understandably, did he broach costly and fruitless central government planning and policies under a federal department that should be eradicated rather than allowed to continue to hold local and state tax dollars hostage to coerce states into adopting uniform, often politicized, programs and regulations.
I agree with Duncan, and it is consistent with my Christian beliefs, that it is of social value to be a servant, to be our brother’s keeper, that to whom much is given much is required.
Where we would diverge is in the notion that it is the business of government schools to accrue the power to dictate to a captive audience the terms of that commitment.
Dan E. Way (@danway_carolina) is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.