Though the Democrats have been trying mightily to differentiate their brand from the 2001–2009 Bush era, “Race to the Top,” like, the Supreme Court decision and the War on Terror, is another example of how Bush’s legacy is being felt well beyond his administration. Its philosophy is nothing more than a continuation of “No Child Left Behind” initiative (better known by its acronym, which is pronounced “nickelbee”). In a nation where profit is the highest good, education has become run like a business. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it—and so the intangibles of education have been reduced to what can be tested. If a child’s ability to read can’t be measured, then they might as well be illiterate—never mind what they’re reading, or if it expands their mind or helps them to see their world in a new way. Accordingly, teachers are forced to “teach to the test,” making kids into bubble-filling machines rather than thinkers.

This is enforced by the same patently ridiculous bureaucratic logic as, say, making all children into equally good basketball players by lopping off the feet of the tallest: A child in an underprivileged urban school district is expected score at the same level as those in the richer suburbs, and heaven help the teacher who can’t bring up test scores. Failing districts can lose funding, making a hard job even more impossible; they may be required to spend more money that they don’t have on remedial programs; and schools can even be taken over and teachers can even be fired. Nothing in NCLB, however, compels parents to put down the Doritos and make sure their kid does their math homework. Meanwhile, talented teachers, realizing that they’ll be penalized for attempting to teach underperforming children, stay far away from the districts where they’re most needed.

Furthermore, for all of the Bush administration’s “small government” rhetoric, this was all shoved down states’ throats via the quid pro quo of Federal money. In 2001, the government spent a bit over $42 billion on education. By the end of 2007, it was over $54 billion. NCLB spending increased as well, from $17.4 billion to $24.4 billion. All of this cash, however, was only given to the states contingent on implementing Federal standards. The same people who voted Republican because they feared “big government” are, ironically, also voting for increased Federal control over what their kids get taught in school.

Worst of all, high-stakes testing is actually damaging to real education. For students on both ends of the bell curve, it’s disastrous: Those who don’t test well are sacrificed for the good of the rest by being stuck in special-education classes, while bright students, rather than being challenged, are taught to pass the same mediocre test as everyone else. Social studies, phys ed, science, and literature fall by the wayside, since only math and “language arts” are tested. It’s de facto nativist, as well: Those who have recently emigrated to the United States are given a mere three years to learn enough English to take the test.

The NCLB philosophy is even worse for teachers, who are expected to pull up test scores without looking why they’re are so low, such as teenage pregnancy, a lack of childcare, and parents who don’t give a damn about their children’s education. This gives not just an incentive for teachers to rig the test, but basically mandates that they cheat so that they can keep their jobs—the latest example being the Robert M. Hughes charter school in Springfield, MA, which was faced with the choice of increasing its inner-city students’ test scores or being closed.

It’s a given that the future economy, though there probably still won’t be any flying cars, will require more and more educated workers to increase the wealth of the richest one percent. The rhetoric of both the right and the left points to this. To accomplish these ends, both liberal and conservative administrators have put their faith in the same sort of mismanagement: Outcome-based results, standardized tests, increasing Federal control, and the loss of autonomy for teachers. The ones who lose, in the end, are the students and our democracy.

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A bit of historical background: Once upon a time, only a tiny percentage of American teenagers went to high school, let alone college. In 1910 it was only 20%, but by 1940, it was 75%. The reason why wasn’t just industrialization, but the Great Depression: Keeping kids in school and out of the work force kept wages high and prepared them for better-paying jobs down the road. In time, a high school diploma became the minimal standard for being considered educated. An American high school education, however, was something unique: For the first time, ordinary people were being taught not just manual skills and basic math and literacy, but great books, languages, science, and political ideas. European education, on the other hand, was rigorously tracked: Either you were going to be a manual worker, or you were destined for higher things. As a result, the American public educational system wasn’t just a radical experiment in democracy: It became the envy of the world.

Nowadays, thanks to the GI Bill and the postindustrial economy, a college education is considered the éntrée to the middle class. In 1930, there were only 122,000 degrees granted in the entire US (compared to population of 123 million). In 1950, thanks in part to the GI Bill, the number was 432,000. In 1955, there were 2.5 million college students enrolled; by 1966, over 6 million. Today, there are about 16 million, and about 34% of the 18-to-22-year-old population goes directly to college.

The thing is, a great number of these students are unprepared to a degree that would have been inconceivable a generation ago. The undergraduate courses that should be broadening their minds are instead making up for the lack of fundamental education. The dropout rate reflects this: From 20% in the 1960s, it’s now up to an incredible 50%, with almost 1 in 3 leaving their first year.

What brought this about? We could hypothesize that the increased enrollment is drawn from the people who, decades ago, wouldn’t dream of college and would have instead been shunted into the trades. Lacking the brains for higher education, they are doomed to fail. But that would be saying that some people are second-class minds, destined to be a permanent underclass—which should be anathema to anyone who calls themselves an “educator.” Besides, these kids have graduated from high school—and the diploma that signifies college readiness hasn’t changed in the past forty years—or has it? What is making so many high school graduates (and, statistically speaking, Latino and African-American students in particular) so woefully academically under-prepared for college?

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I profoundly disagree with this philosophy. To divide college students into de facto vocational and academic tracks—the latter of which will inevitably be the métier of the elite—is profoundly classist. Having taught at both Tier I and Tier Zero schools, I can say that the majority of students, no matter which school they attend or how well-prepared they are for college, are intellectually curious. They want to learn. To limit their opportunities and say that something like Classics shouldn’t be made available at a public university, is to put those who, for one reason or another, can’t attend an elite school in an intellectual ghetto. To say that some people simply have second-class minds is the antithesis of liberalism.

What they don’t tell you in the admissions brochures is that the real advantage of going to a big-name school like Harvard or Brown or Stanford is the cachet for your resumé or CV and the opportunity to network with the people who were born winners. You don’t necessarily get a better education—I did just fine at state university because I made an effort to take challenging courses with good professors and double-majored in History and Classics—but you do get acculturated into the cultural style of the ruling class, if that’s what you care to do.

Finally, it is a sad reality that the public education system, based as it is on standardized testing, has entirely failed American students. I have had freshmen who breezed through high school but who cannot coherently string two sentences together. My history class is not only where they will learn to contextualize their world, but also where they will learn to organize their thoughts on paper—which is, to my mind at least, not only an essential credential to earn the adjective “educated,” but a life skill. Writing is not something they will learn in an accounting or computer science class. Teaching these skills to students who have suffered from twelve years of benign neglect is a hard job, but all things considered, I feel that, in the end, I make more of a difference in my students’ lives teaching in a low-ranked college than in a place where the vast majority of students come from relatively privileged backgrounds.

The great advantage of the U.S. higher educational system, and the reason why we are so respected the world over, is our egalitarianism. Unlike the European system, we believe in a liberal education for everyone. To do anything else is to establish a class system of the sort that should be anathema to anyone who calls themselves an American.

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A brief refresher on the facts: Professor Gates returned from a trip to China to find his front door jammed. He and his driver attempted to get it open. A concerned neighbor got a passer-by to call 911 and report a possible break-in. Though the police report claimed the caller described two black men, the caller never mentioned that either of the men was African-American (you can hear her, being a properly educated young lady, tip-toeing around the issue of race, despite being prompted by the dispatcher). Sergeant Crowley responded to the call.

What happened then differs according to who you ask: Crowley claimed that Gates was simultaneously insulting and threatening some sort of action for Crowley’s supposedly biased conduct, and that he gave the professor ample warnings to calm down. Gates claimed that Crowley was a “rogue policeman” who arrested him for standing up for his rights and demanding his badge number. Both accounts, however, agree that Gates did eventually comply with Crowley’s request to continue the conversation outside, where he was arrested; that he did show some identification (though a Harvard ID is not legal, Massachusetts law is also very vague on what one must show an officer); and that Gates’ behavior had everything to do with his indignant reaction to being asked for ID in his own home, which, in turn, is rooted in the relationship in America between black men and the police.

Another few points I’d like to add from my personal experience growing up in Brooklyn, NY: Cops generally don’t tolerate any form of disrespect from the public at large. If the officer feels he has to call dispatch and get a whole lot of his colleagues called to your front lawn, you’re likely going to jail. Also, the police really like calling for backup.

The aftermath is where things get interesting. The Harvard Crimson ran the story, which was picked up by the AP. Public outcry was immediate. Crowley was excoriated for his actions. President Obama himself acted against type by speaking publicly without benefit of having all the information at hand, saying that “the Cambridge police. . . acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.” The President’s popularity immediately began its current nosedive amongst Middle America. On the other side of the aisle, Starbucks liberals whipped their cappuccino consciences up into a self-righteous froth: I myself witnessed random Cambridge bicyclists shouting epithets at passing cop cars (as soon as they’d safely turned away onto narrow one-way streets).

The matter was settled, or at least buried, at the July 24 “Beer Summit” at which Obama had a Budweiser, thus causing his popularity to drop even more, Gates had a Sam Adams Light, and Crowley, demonstrating the best taste of the bunch, had a Blue Moon. (Apparently, they were limited to domestic choices. If I were Crowley, I would have chosen a Stone Arrogant Bastard.) Neither party admitted fault: Crowley said they “agreed to disagree,” while Gates pulled a Barthes and said that no one was really the author of the narrative that society constructed. Crowley’s reaction to the unwanted publicity is nowhere recorded: I imagine his superiors pushing him kicking and screaming into the national media spotlight with instructions to make nice-nice, when, from his his point of view, all he was doing was his job.

It is not my place to assign blame to either party, comment on what proper police procedure should be, or to address the larger problem of how law enforcement treats African-Americans and how that community in turn sees law enforcement. Rather, what strikes me is how much this was a no-win situation for Crowley, who every credible report paints as being the ideal of the sort of racially-neutral police professional (insofar as such a thing exists outside fairy tales) you’d want patrolling a diverse neighborhood such as Cambridge.

No, what I want to point out here is not who’s right and wrong, but the irony of how the power and connections inherent to being a well-known Harvard professor who’s friends with the President transformed the expected narrative of “white cop and black perpetrator.” Most people arrested for disorderly conduct, no matter how justified their outrage, don’t get a public statement from the White House. Nor does the furor result in well-publicized brews in the Rose Garden. If Gates was anyone else, this would have never happened.

What this story is really about is not race, but class and power: The working-class cop didn’t stand any chance once he earned the ire of the Establishment than would, say, a Palestinian trying to push past an Israeli soldier to visit his sick mother in Gaza. I am far from being a police apologist, nor will I ever maintain that African-Americans are universally fairly treated by the police. However, I can’t help but feel kind of bad for Crowley.

That the narrative could be so inverted is one of the magical things about the Ivory Tower: It’s one of the places where our assumptions get questioned and turned upside down—sometimes just for the heck of it. It’s a place where people continually question if they’re doing the right thing, and where the answers have consequences. It’s where the last can become first and the meek can inherit the earth, where being different (if it’s the right sort of different) is prized and rewarded. But this doesn’t mitigate the fact that redistributing power and privilege according to a more-just system still means that some people will have power and privilege, and some won’t.

Obama may be revolutionary as the first African-American President, but, like Clinton and the Bushes before him, he was first part of the privileged social network with its roots in Harvard and Yale. That a black man from comparative obscurity (or a poor white man like Clinton) could gain admission to these circles is part of what is so beautiful about a true meritocracy. Yet, it’s important to remember that even in such an enlightened system of redistributing power, the inequalities inherent in having power and not having power still hold true. Despite Crowley’s badge and gun, his power was nothing compared to that a fifty-something black man who walked with a cane—who just happens to be one of the leading public intellectuals of our time.

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There seems to be a minor war going on against liberal education, and especially grad degrees in the humanities. The New York Times (and particularly Stanley Fish) are doing their best to convince the reading public that, outside of elite schools, nobody has any business studying arts and letters. For instance, one recent headline read, “In Tough Times, Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” I’m convinced this is reverse psychology, since the letters and comments on the Times site universally tell the writers that they’re a bunch of out-of-touch elitists, and that if the Wall Street business-majors had studied a little history, we wouldn’t be in this mess. In that spirit, I’m going to tell you why I’m glad I spent a significant chunk of my life in grad school, and why you shouldn’t hesitate to do so, as well.

First, let me dismiss the argument against my discipline being “useless”: One of my professors once told me a story about a UK colleague of his. Because universities there are so reliant on the government, they also have to put up with ministerial busybodies showing up on audits and asking what’s the use of a medieval history degree. In response, his colleague stammered something about being able to think broadly, analyze disparate data, and synthesize it into a coherent form. No, my professor said—you have to use their logic against them. The reason why medieval history (or philosophy, or literature) is important is because people want to know it. In other words, it’s justified by its market value. Chaucer, Milton, and Tolstoy put asses in seats—and that is all people like the auditor know on earth, and all they need to know.

In fact, if you want to talk practicality, the Master’s is the new Bachelor’s degree. With the cheapening and ubiquity of the BA, you need something else to say you’re truly educated. When I first went on the job market, I landed jobs in the New York publishing world because my MA said that, despite my state university degree, I could reason, I could write, that I was intellectually curious, that I wanted to learn new things, and that I can see a project through. While simply going to college used to be enough in the ’50s and ’60s, these days you need a little extra.

As we tell the new grad students at the beginning of every fall, the ostensible aim of an advanced degree is “professionalization,” that is, indoctrination into the norms of the lemon party we call academia rather than the personal development and fulfillment we chased as undergrads. Everyone who has been in grad school for more than five minutes knows that is bullshit. Even though older professors speak of someone “leaving the profession” in the same way that parents speak of their childless friends’ miscarriages, the fact is if you get a Ph.D and don’t wind up with a tenure-track job, you haven’t failed at life. In fact, those who don’t wind up happier and more fulfilled. As one colleague noted on a medieval history mailing list, “As a humanities Ph.D, I can take a massive amount of confusing information, sift out what’s important, and present it in a coherent way.” This is something no computer, and an awful lot of supposedly educated people, can’t do.

What about those of us who do want to teach college? Well, if you know anything about the academic job market, you know that the promised Baby Boomer retirements never materialized, and that college administrators, working with the same logic as corporate HR, have outsourced as much labor as possible to a hungry proletariat of adjunct professors who will work for less money and no benefits. The irony is that this is the very reason that more people need to go back to grad school, at least for Master’s degrees. You see, adjuncts can’t teach graduate seminars or supervise MA theses. More people going to grad school in the humanities—even if they’re only going to teach high school or are taking a year or two between their Bachelor’s and law school—means more jobs for those of us who do want to make academia a career.

Besides all that, grad school has been a great experience. If I hadn’t gone back to get my Ph.D, I’d have never went to Paris on a Fulbright grant, never have been able to fence at a 120-year-old salle des armes, and never sat in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale handling eight-hundred-year-old manuscripts. I’ve had fascinating late-night conversations over beers, trips to conferences in interesting places, and, thanks to my school’s generous funding, a smidgen of job security. I know that I can get up in front of a class and hold them rapt by making obscure historical events relevant to their day-to-day lives, translate a book from sixteenth-century Italian, and master a body of literature on an esoteric subject. These are things you don’t get to do in a cubicle.

On the “meeting fascinating people” subject, an advanced degree in the humanities may not bring you too much extra income, but it can help you meet someone who does. I haven’t taken this to the logical conclusion since I’m in a long-term relationship (with a political scientist) but I seem a lot more interesting to high-powered New York corporate-type women when I mention my Ph.D or passing familiarity with conversational French. It used to be (as Betty Friedan complained) that women went to colleges to meet boys with bright futures; in the post-feminist world, enlightened males shouldn’t have any problem writing and teaching part-time, changing the baby, and having dinner and a shoulder rub ready for their lawyer or executive sweeties when she comes home.

Many people believe in reincarnation; I think we only get one chance at this thing. Unlike a foreclosed McMansion or over-financed Ford Explorer, they can’t take your knowledge and experience from you. I knew that if I hadn’t gone back to grad school, I’d have spent my last days in a nursing home, toothlessly mumbling Latin to myself and wishing I’d at least tried to see it through. As a historian, I know the past is full of could-have-beens. And that’s what I’ve learned most from graduate school—to not let my life be one of them.

The post Why You Should Go Back to Grad School appeared first on The Faster Times.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Ken, but my friends call me Professor Mondschein. My training is as a historian—I’ll skip over the details, since they’re kind of dull—but I’m also a freelance writer (besides running the fencing club). If you’ve taken a class with me before, it might have been my column, “A History of Single Life” on Nerve.com. You might even remember my former e-zine CorporateMofo. If you’ve had me before and decided to sign up for another course, thank you; if this is your first time, welcome!

What is this column about? Well, I’ll start by saying what we won’t be talking about: We won’t be putting people down, espousing radical politics, or talking about overthrowing the current regime. We’ve all invested in the system, and I, for one, would like tenure one day. That’s not to say that we can’t be critical of higher education in America, but if we’re going to start digging under the foundations of the Ivory Tower, we should be examining it to see what’s holding it up, not trying to undermine the thing to bring it all to the ground. The former is a worthwhile inquiry; the latter would just bring a lot of rubble crashing down on our heads.

Rather, what I hope we can do is explore, in a fair and balanced way, how academia and the idea of the academic expert are used in public discourse. What’s the place of the public intellectual? What does academic freedom mean? How do political concerns show up in academic work? How do guys like Larry Summers go back and forth from the Ivy League to the government, and why do their ideas become policy? Is there a sort of elite groupthink in higher education? What’s the relation between ideas in the Ivory Tower and the direction we take as a society? What does this mean for social justice—and even how we define these ideas?

“Academic Politics” is an important subject, and not just for your gen-ed distributions. From the New York Times op-eds to The Daily Show, the pursuit of those who pursue knowledge is a major thread in our collective narrative. That’s all the more reason why we should spend some time picking it apart.

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