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TechnoratiLiberal Arts Undervalued by Education Department, Official Says After Quitting
The Education Department is controlled by advisers who have insufficient regard for the liberal arts and instead are intent on judging colleges largely by their ability to provide economically measurable talent for industry, a recently departed top official told The Chronicle.
Diane Auer Jones, who last month resigned as assistant secretary for postsecondary education, said in an interview on Thursday that her departure was driven in large part by her repeated inability to soften the department's treatment of colleges through the accreditation process.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings agrees that colleges should determine their own missions and be judged by them, Ms. Jones said. "But others in the department really had the mind-set of bright-line standards and tests, content-based tests" as gauges of how well colleges were performing, and they were repeatedly able to translate those beliefs into policy decisions, she said.
Ms. Jones announced her resignation on May 14, just one year after taking the job, to become president of the Washington Campus, a consortium of university business schools. At the time, she said her move, made with just eight months left in the Bush administration, was a case of "the perfect job coming at not the perfect time."
Differences Over Accountability Measures
On Thursday, however, she acknowledged that her departure also reflected the intensity of the Education Department's internal and external battles to force colleges to do a better job of proving the value they provide to their students and the taxpayers who finance their operations.
Ms. Spellings formed a study commission that issued a final report in September 2006 complaining that the accreditation process doesn't do enough to help outsiders, including prospective students, evaluate the performance of colleges.
"The growing public demand for increased accountability, quality, and transparency coupled with the changing structure and globalization of higher education requires a transformation of accreditation," the secretary's Commission on the Future of Higher Education said in its report.
Colleges need the approval of an accrediting agency recognized by the government in order for their students to be eligible for federal financial aid. The Education Department, in response to the commission's report, proposed a series of new standards that accrediting agencies would have to meet to maintain their federal recognition. The department's proposals included a suggestion that the accreditors require that colleges use standardized tests as one method for making comparisons between institutions.
Congress blocked those proposed rules last year at the request of college lobbyists, though accreditors and colleges have complained that the Education Department has nevertheless begun requiring that accrediting agencies demand colleges show greater proof of student achievement.
One of the clearest examples, Ms. Jones said, is the department's treatment of the American Academy for Liberal Education, an accrediting agency that serves a group of private, religiously affiliated liberal-arts colleges.
Ms. Spellings last year barred the academy, known as the AALE, from accrediting any new members after her accreditation advisory panel complained that the accreditor was not ensuring that its colleges prove their students were meeting minimum-achievement standards. The advisory panel recommended last December that the restriction be lifted, but Ms. Spellings has not yet acted on that recommendation.
The AALE is being penalized, Ms. Jones said, because department officials don't sufficiently appreciate the academy's efforts to verify quality outside of objective measures such as graduation rates or test scores.
"They were essentially dinged and, I think, blackballed by people who internally said, 'OK, see, there they go; they're telling us that they can't measure their performance, they can't measure student learning,'" Ms. Jones said.
"That was really the essence of what I saw as a misguided attempt to really narrow the focus of higher education and to almost vocationalize all of higher education," she said. "And that's inappropriate."
Limited Advisory Role
While saying she did not want to single out any particular department officials, Ms. Jones acknowledged her rivals in the battle for the ear of Ms. Spellings included Sara Martinez Tucker, the under secretary in charge of higher education and a former executive of AT&T.
Ms. Jones, a former community-college associate professor and lobbyist for Princeton University, said she became assistant secretary with the understanding that the position made her the secretary's primary adviser on higher-education matters. The under secretary's position, she said, had traditionally handled more administrative functions.
And yet, she said, "I never ever was allowed to have a conversation with the secretary to discuss my viewpoint" on accreditation.
Ms. Jones said she began seeking new employment after repeatedly failing to change that dynamic.
"I actually don't think that the secretary and I are in disagreement on accreditation or the direction," Ms. Jones said. "I think that the secretary is a very open-minded person who really wants to get it right. However I think there are others at the department who aren't so introspective."
Ms. Tucker was not available for comment, said Samara Yudof, an Education Department spokeswoman. Ms. Yudof offered no further comment on the statements by Ms. Jones.
But the chairman of the Spellings commission, Charles Miller, a friend of Ms. Spellings from Texas, said Ms. Jones's comments suggest someone who perhaps didn't fully understand the deliberative process within the department.
The AALE is a unique case that doesn't reflect the department's overall approach to accreditation, Mr. Miller said in an interview. "Nobody's trying to make these separations or differences," he said. "It's like somebody imagined a problem, is trying to create a bigger one, and made some public hay out of it."
At the same time, public demand for change in the ways that colleges prove their value is a reality that colleges need to recognize, Mr. Miller said. "People in accreditation are going to have to do some things differently and better on student learning," he said, "or it's going to be done for them."
Ms. Jones's defenders among higher-education leaders are more willing to accept her description of the department as hostile to a liberal-arts approach. "The only people who really understand the forces at work inside the Department of Education are those who have worked there, which would leave both me and Mr. Miller out," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education.
That said, the arguments over the value society places on a liberal-arts education are long-standing and "aren't going to be solved in this administration or the next," Mr. Hartle said.
"Most of us in higher education felt that the Spellings Commission was willing to slight the liberal-arts side of the equation in favor of sort of employment-specific education," he said. "But this is one of those arguments that people have been having for centuries."
© 2008 The Chronicle of Higher Education
6 Comments so far
Show AllDo the neocons want to add "liberal" to Cariln's list of 7 unspeakable obscene words?
There was a time when Americans that majored in Liberal Arts courses actually received more respect than they do today. It was during the pre-Vietnam era, before right-wing propaganda began to blame "drug-crazed" college-students (or long-haired hippies) for all the problems in the world. After the loss of Vietnam, the right-wingers hijacked the republican party completely to spew this propaganda 24/7, 365 days a year, and it was so effective that it got Carter booted out and Reagan and Bush into the WH.
After the right-wing propaganda took over full-time and the majority of the "American family-values" class (middle and working) bought it lock, stock, and barrel, all poor liberal arts majors were stigmatized as drug-users, trouble-makers, losers, and "lazy-bums". Parents and right-wing political authorities (inc. cops) scared all the young girls away from these "poor artists" with the general idea that getting personally involved with them would only lead to poverty, drug-addiction, and prison.
Presently, as it has been ever since the right-wingers and Reaganites took over, the only liberal arts majors that get any respect whatsoever are the ones from wealthy families without money problems. Iow, poor artists get no respect any more.
Gone are the days when Beatniks could have girlfriends from higher class families. Now, all poor artists are treated like bums by everyone, including girls from their own lower and middle-classes. Being a poor artist will get you nowhere today, unless you have an above-average talent at something (music or painting). If you really want a fair chance at the liberal arts today, you have to come from a very wealthy family.
This is a very telling article in so many ways. I am a Liberal Arts major, majoring in Fine Art and Philosophy. In the USA there is clearly a strong bias against people who major in the Liberal Arts, especially by U.S. corporations--especially "fortune 500" corporations. Americans in general dislike and distrust artists, writers, and historians. Liberal Arts majors are not practical, and don't fit neatly into a cookie-cutter corporate dominated society like the USA's where only accountants, engineers, and MBAs matter and are hired. Of course the Cheney administration has done it's very best to further exterminate folks like us as shown by this article--as well as in the Justice Dept where they made a point of aggressively purging lawyers who had "liberal" credentials, and filtered out CVs with liberal "buzzwords" assuming they worked for environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, or social justice organizations.
The USA has for many decades underfunded the Arts, and we can see clearly the result: we have terrible "artists" today: Britney Spears and Snoop Dogg on stage torturing our ears, and Jennifer Lopez and Drew Barrymore starring in our brain dead crap Hollywood films ("Dumb and Dumber" comes to mind). With every passing year the USA devolves lower and lower as a culture, as a society. Little wonder our radio stations mostly play "classic rock" that is FORTY YEARS OLD on the radio: this is a direct result of America's active neglect of musical training and art--art and music funding in particular. Put nothing in, get nothing out. What's the first program schools cut when short on money? Not gym class: art and music is the first to go. That says it all. Europeans don't have such ass-backwards values as USA: look at how much more artistic depth and talent comes out of Europe than USA nowadays, and how much for civil Europeans are than America with it's "McDonald's" franchise culture.
The American establishment has always had a shallow, materialistic bent: the only measure of success in their eyes is how much money you have in the bank and what car you drive. They'll never learn. Art is beyond most Americans comprehension, as are the great ideas--or the relevance of reading history.
This article really exposes the cultural war of the business establishment against the Liberal Arts. And while this conflict has been going on for many decades, it started to really intensify in 1980 with Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton--and then really exploded into butt-nasty in-your-face genocidal animosity with Bush/Cheney.
As an artist and free thinker, I always found it a bit odd that engineers and business types always had such an insecure animosity towards liberal arts majors. I had directly encountered it countless times in person. After all, they got their corporate job and their yuppie lifestyle: isn't that what they wanted all along? Why the uncomfortably wanting animosity?
America has always mocked and insulted the liberal arts, without of course even knowing what the phrase means. Look up 'liberal arts' in the Oxford English Dictionary, from which all English dictionaries derive. The word by about Shakespeare's time began to signify the kinds of activities by which people developed and cultivated themselves after the work of survival was taken care of (food/clothes/housing etc.)---in a phrase, it meant the exercise of FREEDOM. A 'liberal' believes that LIFE IS MORE THAN WORK, MORE THAN MONEY, MORE THAN BUSINESS....And the fact is that the liberal arts are almost the only way to really know you are free. The Nazis produced excellent technology---any schmuck can. The only difference between a free society and all others is the exercise of free individual expression. That's what my WWII veteran Dad fought for---not "progress in math and science"....And yet, because this tends to produce complex people who are not especially predictable, they are the "enemy" of the businessman, religious zealot and politician, who want above all a predictable (and captive) worker, citizen and consumer....Think of that massive death machine the Roman Empire---what survives today that's worth a damn? The ugly ruins of the Coliseum? Out of all that we have---the poems of Catullus....Now in America you can hardly play a quiet guitar on the street without a swarm of police goons all over you....and that's why so very little of this country is worth a damn anymore. How about "Support Your Local Artists Week"?
T R U E __ S T O R Y
A bunch of engineers were hooting at the absolute incompetence of this once powerful manager, and the discussion went downward as he was described as having a "Religion" degree, and finally was called a "liberal Arts" major.
At that point I had to laugh, as I was similarly credited, although in Physics ( with a later addition of a EE ). The bunch was dumbfounded to learn that I was also a damn "liberal Arts" major, and was quite proud of the diversity and breadth of knowledge.
Those engineers has always thought of me as "one of them", but probably suspected something was a bit odd about me, being more vocal about everything, and writing up a passionate storm with my emails. I suspect that my story didn't really change any of their opinions, as they likely didn't much like having their prejudices known back at them, even as a soft ball.
Namaste « Presence »
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world » — Gandhi
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed » — Gandhi
« We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself » — ML King
Becoming a whole person doesn't interest our business controlled culture.
The mass of people move toward wholeness, in themselves and in their actions toward others, by learning at least something about philosophy, history, the arts --all of which comprise a liberal arts education.
Our present education system is designed not by educators but by profit-crazy business interests; self-unexamined assholes who are perfectly pleased to foster a corruption of civilization's deepest purpose - wholer persons -- in order to gain more and more power and money.
The general educational curricula are mostly designed to yield the equivalent of human cogs in a profit machine that surpresses development of consciousness in the many, in favor of conferring obscene profits and undemocratic political power to a soulless, materialist elite that simply demands more and more and more proft, privilege, and power.
De-emphasis of the schooled humanities (including crucial basic civics courses) in secondary and uiversity education, was accelerated as never before under the so-called Reagan Revolution. Whatever you might think about Ronald Reagan personally, the Value Revolution that his popular claptrap enabled, led to a systematic deconstruction in the US of western civilization's hard won Enlightenment principles --spearheaded principally by Ayn Rand type intellectuals.
We are all ego atoms, these intellectuals say; and the better atoms among us, the true heroes of human civilization, are distinguished by their personal ability to bend Nature, including the mass of other, 'less gifted' humans, to their heroic personal will. <><><>
Of course, this is nothing but Social Darwinsim, neo-nazism, psychopathological individualism. Yet most Americans have little understanding of how extensively these anti-civilizing ideas have trickled-down from rightwing think tanks and from sychophantic political leaders, into the officialized popular culture -- including, most disastrously,into education theory and practice.
If progressives (i.e., normal humans) ever manage to regain some measure of ascendancy over the America political process, a first task will be to challenge this kind of unhinged ego ideation, and decisively restore exposure to Enlightenment principles -- to the process we call formal Education.