History as myth-making and politics

From John Leo

The scholar who did the most to break this silence was Mary Lefkowitz, a mild-mannered classicist at Wellesley College. Without fully understanding the abuse she would invite by speaking out against Afrocentrism, she accepted an assignment in the fall of 1991 to write a long review of the second volume of Martin Bernal's "Black Athena" for the New Republic magazine. She was shocked to discover that the Bernal volume, and a stack of other nearly fact-free books on Afrocentrism, had made headway in the schools and even in the universities.

She concluded that the Afrocentric authors regarded history as a form of advocacy: Like other postmodernists, they believed that truth is impossible to know—that all "narratives" are socially constructed and thus possess an equal claim to legitimacy. At the time, traditional scholarship was generally under assault, but the classics were particularly vulnerable, because they purported to study the foundational texts of the West. Attacking the classics as a complex system of lies was emotionally important to those who wanted to take Western culture down a peg. Feelings and politics mattered, not scholarship. As Ms. Lefkowitz puts it: "[Bernal] seemed to be saying that the most persuasive narrative was the one with the most desirable result. In effect, he was preaching a kind of affirmative action program for the rewriting of history."

The value of a college education

Maybe it is not as high as you've been told

College Isn’t Worth a Million Dollars

This does not make a strong case for the value of college degrees

MIT Dean Says She Lied on Resume, Quits

MIT Chancellor Phillip L. Clay said in a telephone interview that another MIT dean had received a phone call questioning Jones's credentials, prompting an inquiry that took several days. It found that Jones had claimed to have degrees from Union College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Albany Medical College, but she had no degrees from any of those schools.

I know lying is bad. So i wont't defend her on that score. But she worked for MIT for 28 years. If those degrees were so important, why did no one notice that she was not up to the job?

If she was up to the job, then don't we have to question the value of those credentials?

GWB and his MBA redux


Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants writes:

George W. Bush is the first president to have a master's degree in business administration. Let's hope he's the last.

I like President Bush, and I support most of what he’s trying to do. But I'm amazed, astonished and appalled by the stumbling, bumbling way he often goes about it. The friends as well as the critics of this administration have reason to wonder whether these guys can organize a two car funeral.

RTWT.

Last year i wrote this about Bush and his training at the HBS:

The last couple of years of any administration are difficult. The habits of mind that GWB formed at HBS might make his especially difficult.

This is one of those times i wish i had been wrong.

See also:

The Bush-Rumsfeld legacy

Nontraditional learning

Here’s an New York Times article on the problems at the University of Phoenix:

Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits

The story lays most of the blame on UoP’s for-profit business model. I don’t doubt that the pressure to meet earnings targets made it easy to cut corners. I also think that the distance learning model for education suffers from serious flaws.

After all, from Socrates in ancient Athens, to the first universities in the Middle Ages, to our modern campuses, traditional education has meant gathering students around teachers. The model persists through the ages despite technological, economic, and ideological changes. Maybe there is something intrinsically valuable in that model.

Such ideas are anathema to the flacks of the Next New Thing. By suggesting such I have labeled myself an enemy of the future.

One of the “benefits” of non-traditional universities is that they accelerate the attainment of a degree. This feature is also a bug. Philosopher and psychologist William James wrote that “we learn to swim during the winter, and to skate during the summer.” Or oin the words of Jacques Barzun: “the inner integration of experience takes place slowly and during inactivity.” Speed kills. In the case of these programs what they murder is a real education.

Charles Taylor has an interesting idea about personality. He suggests that an important facet of it is inherently dialogical. We grow and mature inside “webs of interlocution.” One signal advantage of the traditional college education is that the student is immersed in new webs; they initiate new dialogues. Online learning, in contrast, is bereft of such opportunities.

Citizenship and education

Jeffrey Hart offers a definition given by his old professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy:

He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the 'citizen' in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.

Of course, if this is true, then we are doomed. Our institutions of higher learning are in the hands of people who loathe this civilization and are eager to remake it into something else.

Eating our seed corn

James Homes has a good post at the American Thinker on the decline of military education under the twin pressures of Rumselfd and Iraq. This should be a major concern for all Americans.

See also:

Army to cut back on education?


Military Education IV


Military Education III


Military Education II


Military Education I

Business Education

Photon Courier discussed an interesting new book in this post:

MANAGEMENT EDUCATION AND THE ROLE OF TECHNIQUE

PC makes an astute point:

This critique of an excessive reliance on contextless technique in business is, I believe, also applicable to the current excessive dominance of "theory"--ie, specific techniques for things like textual criticism--in the teaching of the humanities.

See also:

Clausewitz

Knowingness

Military education and business

Training Learning and Education

Another good post via the CotC.

The Challenges for Training & Learning

If there is one part of HR that seems constantly under question for its “ROI” potential, credibility or plain effectiveness it is what is usually known as “Training” – or in the new world as “Learning”, “Management Development” etc.

A subject near and dear to my heart. I've discussed it in a multi-part series

Military Education (I,II,III, IV)

and also here

Doctrine and Fad Surfing

Army to cut back on education?

OTB has the story here. I think this is a bad, bad idea.

I've posted a lot on military education (links here). It is not a substitute for experience, but neither can experience substitute for Leavenworth.

James correctly points out that we did this in World War II but is not supportive of Rumsfeld's move.

The World War II experience shows the danger of this move. This is what Lieutenant General Leonard D. Holder, Jr., and historian Williamson Murray wrote in the Spring 1998 issue of the Joint Forces Quarterly:

Despite the tributes U.S. military leaders lavished on the role of PME in preparing them for World War II, education fell into decline after the war. The Cold War with its monolithic dependence on nuclear weapons, which required little adaptation, was one reason. With a constant threat, there was less cause to study the complexities of strategy and war, particularly given the fact that America emphasized deterrence rather than combat. More-over, a generational shift in the l950s brought the junior officers of World War II to command positions. They had joined the military in the 1930s and gone to war as lieutenants and captains with-out
receiving PME and returned home as colonels and generals. As a result, many discounted the role of PME in military professionalism. By the late l950s the services had allowed professional military education to drift.

It should be no surprise, then, that we struggled with the strategic challenges posed by North Vietnam in SE Asia. The senior leadership of the army had not schooled themselves or their officer corps as the WWII generation had. Moreover, they were not prepared to meet the arguments of the Whiz Kids when the quagmire was born.

Give us science, but not too much

This Weekly Standard piece is shocking without being surprising. We've known for years that Alfred Kinsey and his cult winked at pedophilia and treated criminals as unbiased researchers. Their work was fraudulent from beginning to end.

What I think is more interesting is the lack of outrage over the fact that the Kinsey cult continues to promulgate their teachings and glorify their leader under the guise of science.

Look at it this way: When a school board anywhere promotes Intelligent Design or Creationism, the education establishment, the MSM, and most of the blogosphere react with a combination of indignation and mockery. Fair enough. Bad science is in no one's interest.

But that same education establishment has erected a vast sex-ed structure whose foundations are based on bad science and reckless propaganda. (Not just Kinsey, but also works like Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa.) This, apparently, is OK.

The contrasting reactions tell us that more is at work here than devotion to science. Nor can I explain it in terms of relative importance or utility. Very few high school students will ever "use" Darwinian theory in the real world. But teen-age hormones ensure that the "lessons" kids learn (or don't learn or aren't taught) about sex, marriage, and promiscuity matter a great deal.

It matters, more importantly, to society as a whole, not just the students. Early motherhood, broken homes, never-formed homes-all of these contribute to crime and poverty. But we can't address them effectively because those concerns seem so pre-Kinsey.

The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research

B-School and MBAs

Two bloggers weigh in with some telling criticisms.

My MBA Experience

B-School Issues

FWIW: There are two inconsistencies that stand out about business schools. First, they offer a practical degree taught by tenured academics. Second, they provide an education which is put to use in a corporate environment but the schools are run by academic institutions.

Related: Compared to other disciplines, business studies suffer from a dearth of research materials. A scholar writing about the Clinton administration's trade policies, for instance, already has dozens of books and monographs, hundreds of public documents, and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles to work with. You won't find 10% of that volume available for even a high profile company like GE. It's also hard to get at the really important material inside a company.

Military Education IV

Part I
Part II
Part III

Up till now, I've discussed the long-term benefits the military receives from its established education system. But there can be powerful short-term benefits even with newly formed schools.

Ideas don't just move though an organization on their own: they are carried by people. Even when an organization has no formal apparatus for knowledge transfers, they go on. Lessons are learned and imparted but, often, they are the wrong lessons.

When an organization starts a formal education system, it sends a message that this is important-- not just learning but the specific subjects and viewpoints being taught. And, in some cases, the person doing the teaching becomes a person to be listened to in the larger organization.

That is exactly what happened in 1947 when Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had George Kennan made the Deputy Director of the new National War College.

In February 1946 Kennan was the number 2 man in the Moscow embassy. In response to a query from Washington he wrote a lengthy analysis of Kremlin foreign policy (the famous Long Telegram). Kennan was a realist, not a romantic, when it came to Stalin, a viewpoint Forrestal shared. The Navy Secretary became an advocate for both Kennan and his views.

The appointment to the National War College was a highly visible symbol of Kennan's new importance. As Forrestal's biographers wrote: "The result of such sponsorship from a ranking Cabinet officer was to lift George Kennan out of bureaucratic anonymity to a high place in the policy-making elite."

Symbolically, Forrestal gave Kennan a megaphone. As Kennan acknowledged: "My reputation was made. My voice now carried."

The high profile post also positioned Kennan to take over the State Department's Policy Planning Staff when George Marshall became Secretary of State. From that spot he was at the center of the critical foreign policy debates that defined America's stance in the Cold War. He and his staff created the Marshall Plan. Kennan himself was the intellectual architect of containment and gave it an Atlantic/European emphasis that lasted for the life of the conflict.

By bringing Kennan to the National War College, Forrestal did not just ensure that his ideas would influence the next generation of generals and admirals. He also made it possible for Kennan to shape American strategy in the short-term. The War College proved to be a powerful lever in 1947. Similar leverage is available today to every CEO.

"Fools for Communism"

As Haynes and Klehr note, the world’s final redoubt of communism is not Havana or Pyongyang but American college campuses: "The nostalgic afterlife of communism in the United States has outlived most of the real Communist regimes around the world....A sizable cadre of American intellectuals now openly applaud and apologize for one of the bloodiest ideologies of human history, and instead of being treated as pariahs, they hold distinguished positions in American higher education and cultural life."

Read the rest here.

Another Lesson from the Army Schools (III)

Previous:

Part I

Part II

Since World War II, the US military has used its schools to strengthen our alliances and to integrate allies into our military structure. Students from allied countries can be found at all levels-- from the service academies to the war colleges. Similarly, each branch opens the doors of its war college to members of the other branches.

The benefits are obvious. It is much easier to cooperate with Peru on counter-insurgency if the Peruvian generals have been exposed to American doctrine and methods. The cooperation can be even more effective if some of the officers know each other from their time in the classrooms at Leavenworth or Newport.

In many cases, study at the American military schools helps foreign officers in their quest for promotion. Over the long-term this strengthens the ties with allied forces: the top ranks of their services are populated with graduates of our schools.

You see the same dynamic at work in the history of the FBI. After Hoover established the FBI Academy at Quantico, he admitted students from local police departments. Local cops were exposed to modern methods of law enforcement, training, and investigation. Most of them left with a positive image of the FBI and were more willing to cooperate with the Bureau if that became necessary.

It seems to me that these same advantages could be leveraged by private businesses. Two side benefits of a better internal education system are better integration of suppliers into the total value chain and closer relations with key customers.

Corporations are learning what Baron von Steuben discovered with Washington's army-- Americans need to know why they are told to do something. The same holds true with suppliers. You can bludgeon them into compliance, but things will go much better if you explain. Including some suppliers in your training efforts makes communication quicker and smoother.

By including customers a firm does three things: First, those customers recognize that the firm is serious about the intellectual aspects of strategy, technology, etc. This is a powerful form of brand enhancement. Second, it creates champions inside its clients who are favorably disposed toward it. Third, the cross-pollination between clients, suppliers, and the firm itself will generate more and better ideas.

Paradoxically, the benefit may be more important to small firms than to their resource-heavy competitors. A small advertising agency can't match a mega-network like WPP when it comes to global scale, money, or head count. But it can tailor an education initiative to its clients more easily than Y&R or TBWA. It will also see more immediate results; it takes a long time and a lot of money to educate 300 creatives in marketing strategy.

One cardinal advantage of using education in this way is that it is a competitive dimension that overseas competitors will find hard to match. Proximity counts in education: nothing can match having students all together in the same room.

Military Education and Business II

(Part I is here)

One key difference between civilian and military education is the military's recognition of the importance of the collective effects of a common curriculum and philosophy. Those who pass through the military schools end up with a shared mindset that is both conceptual (doctrine) and experiential.

One prime benefit of this is that communications can be both clearer and faster. When speed matters, as it does in modern combat operations, speed of communications is more important than the technical specifications of weapon systems. (See more here.)

While business does not move at the pace of combat operations, speed and clarity of communications still matter for strategic planning and execution. It is surprising, therefore, that so few corporations have taken in-house education seriously.

For one thing, strategic thinking is not something that comes automatically via on the job training in a functional department. Outside "professional" education sometimes deals with strategy, but when it does it tends to do so from the perspective of a particular discipline, function or profession. HR people see strategy as employee empowerment and retention. Quality people see it at TQM or Six Sigma. Finance sees only balance sheets, portfolios and shareholder value. None of these are an enterprise strategy and they don't equal one if added together.

In fact, a disparate list of internal initiatives, each "owned" and promoted by a department head, is really the negation of strategy.

The problem is compounded by the fact that at many firms some executives received their OJT and previous strategic experience at a different company. The marketing executive might have recently been with a consulting outfit, the head of finance might have come over from a competitor. They don't just bring differing viewpoints, they also bring completely different ways of doing things and approaching strategy. When outsiders are mixed with their homegrown peers, it is easy for strategic discussions to generate more heat than light and leave fuzzy areas when it comes to implementation.

The problem is even worse when a company has to integrate managers from a merger or acquisition. Then there is a sudden wholesale mixing of protocols and procedures that can take years to sort out. (Take a look at AOL-Time Warner or Citibank-Travelers).

In all these cases, there would be real value in something like the Army's Command and Staff College or the Naval War College. It could shape mindsets in a valuable way and improve the quality of strategic thinking. Moreover, when outsiders are brought into a company, it would offer a formal mechanism to uncover the new ways of thinking they bring with them.

Part III is here.

See also Doctrine and Fad Surfing

Military Schools and Business Education

Michael Howard has suggested that the military profession is not only physically demanding, but is also the most intellectually demanding:

There are two great difficulties with which the professional soldier, sailor or airman has to contend in equipping himself as a commander. First, his profession is almost unique in that he may have to exercise it only once in a lifetime, if indeed that often. It is as if a surgeon had to practise throughout his life on dummies for one real operation; or a barrister appeared only once or twice in court towards the close of his career; or a professional swimmer had to spend his life practising on dry land for an Olympic championship on which the fortunes of his entire nation depended. Second, the complex problem of running an army at all is liable to occupy hi mind and skill so completely that it is very easy to forget what it is being run for. The difficulties encountered in the administration, discipline, maintenance and supply of an organization the size of a fair-sized town are enough to occupy the senior officer to the exclusion of any thinking about his real business: the conduct of war. It is not surprising that there has often been a high proportion of failures among senior commanders at the beginning of any war. These unfortunate men may take too long to adjust themselves to reality, through lack of hard preliminary thinking about what war would really be like, or they may have had their minds so far shaped by a lifetime of pure administration that they have ceased to for all practical purposes to be soldiers.

We must remember as well, that war does not just test the knowledge of generals. On the individual level it tests character as well. Equally important is the premium war places on how well officers work together. Modern military studies have emphasized the importance of tempo during combat operations. The German victories in 1940 owed everything to their ability to read, rethink, and readjust faster than the French. This same factor helps to account for the overwhelming nature of the US victories in Iraq.

The military education system is designed with these challenges in mind. That makes it an interesting subject in its own right. But, here i want to compare it to corporate education. Some of the salient points:

1. There is a lot of it. The generals we see on TV have been to civilian graduate schools, specialized branch schools, and the Army War College. These are full-time positions where officers attend classes for months or even a full year.

This is in stark contrast to corporate life where executive education is heavily front-loaded. Usually the average manager has completed 75% or more of their formal business education before they join the corporation.

2. Key parts of the military's system are in-house; they shape the curriculum, especially at the highest levels.

Corporate education is usually outsourced and generic. The MBA and other executive education programs are usually offered by colleges. In-house, customized programs are most often seen at lower-level training programs for the rank-and-file.

3. Performance at military schools is a factor in promotion decisions. Both Eisenhower and Marshall finished first in their class at Leavenworth which helped marked them for eventual high command. Patton, Bradley, and Mark Clark all had outstanding records at mid-career schools.

Academic performance counts at the entry-level in corporations. But usually only there. Few mid-career executives find themselves in classes where they are graded and where the grades count toward promotion.

4. Military school faculties include officers who are marked for high command. Adm. Raymond Spruance, the victory at Midway, served two tours at the Naval War College in the 1930s. In the two years prior to Pearl Harbor, two of the nine men who would command US field armies were teaching at the Army War College. This is after the war in Europe had started and during an immense expansion of the US military.

Again, this is a key difference from the typical business model. High flyers do not spend a year or two in the training department as a step toward the CEO post.

5. The military school system is not just a means of pushing information and procedures down into the ranks. They also serve as centers for the creation of intellectual capital. In the 1930s the Naval War College helped create and refine the carrier doctrine the USN used in the Pacific War. In the 1980s, John Lehman created Strategic Studies Groups at the NWC. As he described them, "This elite group of midgrade officers, navy and marine, is selected from the fleet to spend a year working on strategy. Each year a new SSG is formed, and changing perspectives help to keep the strategy from solidifying into dogma."

****

There is no corporation that invests as heavily in education as do the armed services. For all the talk about the importance of intellectual capital, the private sector, as a whole, approaches education it in a haphazard fashion and spends comparatively little. At the same time, it is telling that the large corporation which is famous for its education system--GE-- is also one of the most successful big companies in history.

It is also telling that one of the last strategic reassessments of the Welch era-- the rejection of the "#1 or #2 in every market" requirement-- had its genesis in a remark made by a colonel at the Army War College.

UPDATE: James Joyner comments here.

See Part II here.

Case Studies

One of the real problems with business education is the heavy use of prepackaged case studies. While they purport to hone critical thinking skills, they also impart false lessons. Future managers come to believe that the information in front of them is complete, reliable, and predictive. The only thing left to do is exercise some thinking and then make a decision.

In real life it will never be that simple. Numbers are shaky and dirty data is a persistent problem. In the beginning there won't be enough critical information on the matter at hand. At the same time , there will be a flood of trivial and irrelevant material that demands attention.

It is tempting to wait until more data and better data can be obtained. Unfortunately, time is often a critical competitive dimension.

"Contra College"

Aaron has another good essay; this one looks at college, class, and education. No point in trying to excerpt it, it is too good not to read the whole thing.

On the value of "elite" diplomas, the work of Alan Krueger is interesting. Here is a brief discussion of one of the economics paper he co-authored which found that there is no economic value:

They find that school selectivity, measured by the average SAT score of the students at a school, doesn't pay off in a higher income over time. "Students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges," the researchers write.

For at least a generation, college costs have risen faster than inflation. Students and parents spend savings and take on debt in order to attend expensive, elite colleges to get a leg up on the competition. Yet, it appears that elite colleges do not deliver that advantage.

If a private business acted this way, they would be in the sights of class-action lawyers and probably subject to congressional hearings. Certainly "60 Minutes" or "Dateline" would do their best to "investigate".

Higher Education


Many if not most of our "elite" universities believe themselves to be morally superior to our armed forces. Some will not permit ROTC on campus (see here for more on that issue.) Their tenured faculty is a hospitable home to people like Dr. De Genova at Columbia ("one million Mogadishus").

Right now, the Left is so deeply dug-in there that the Academy is the equivalent of French-occupied territory.

Doesn't have to be that way. The ROTC issue is the easiest to address. Harvard and the rest are receive tens of millions of dollars in federal money-- research grants, student loans, student grants. That means that Congress can require that they admit ROTC on campus or cease to be eligible for those programs. Why Republicans have passed on this issue is a puzzle.

The problem of the anti-American faculty is not as easily dealt with. Legislation is out of the question, and Columbia doesn't care about public opinion: they only care about the opinions of their faculty, donors, and prospective students.

Although, in some political races it might be fun to make a candidate defend the statements of professors from his alma mater, especially if said candidate attempted to make his education an issue or was a fund-raiser for the schools endowment. It may or may not get traction, but it would be a way to send a message that would eventually get the schools attention.