The American Scholar

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

-- Emerson, The American Scholar

This is something I've wanted to write about it since it hit the news last week, but I've only gotten to it today, spurred on by a good post on this matter by Marty Lederman. What happened is this: Congress passed an entirely reasonable law, establishing minimum qualifications for nominees for the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As usual, the President decided to issue a signing statement, essentially declaring his intention to ignore the law. (For the late Thorstein Veblen's comments on the FEMA hiring procedures, see the post below.) Here are the criteria established by Congress:

(A) a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security; and

(B) not less than 5 years of executive leadership and management experience in the public or private sector.

The President, apparently, feels these restrictions are too stringent, and would unduly limit the candidate pool. Here is Lederman:

According to the President, this provision apparently transgresses the Appointments Clause because it "purports to limit" -- purports to limit! -- "the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office." Accordingly, "[t]he executive branch shall construe [the qualification] in a manner consistent with the Appointments Clause of the Constitution."

This is simply mind-boggling.

Mind-boggling indeed. I won't go into all the reasons for the mind-bogglingness of it (Lederman has handled this already). Instead, what occurred to me was that such a test ought to be established for the office of the Presidency. The Presidency, like the jobs of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, head football coach at Notre Dame, and even the mind-numbing copywriting jobs I used to do back in the days of the New Economy, are not entry level jobs, and we would surely all have been better off with someone who could at least have passed a basic U.S. Civics class, or be able to identify China on a map.

But that's all just conjecture -- but conjecture that led me to another thought. A couple of weeks ago, Jeff Jacoby wrote an alarmist column (which I linked to, in a post designed (surely unsuccessfully, for laughs) about the "Dumbing Down of Democracy," in which he lamented the results of a study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which supposedly revealed the startling fact that Americans don't know much about American history. Regardless of how true the statement probably is (did anybody doubt it?), there are some things about this that deserve closer scrutiny.

First of all, since this news comes to us from the likes of Jacoby, the study is at least vaguely scented, if not reeking, with "agenda." Just have a look at his conclusion about some of the schools that did badly (among them: Yale, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, etc.):

For as much as $40,000 a year, students enrolled at such schools can count on a lavish exposure to every reigning value of politically-correct liberalism, from diversity to secularism to gay rights to global warming. But they stand an excellent chance of leaving at the end of four years knowing even less about America's history and civic institutions than they did when they arrived.

Leaving aside the possibility (which Jacoby obviously leaves to the side) that diversity, secularism, gay rights, and global warming might have something to do with American civic life, we might only say this: there are more things to be learned at college than are dreamt of in the conservative philosophy. The poor, put-upon students at these liberal-elite universities, it just so happens, are not forced to choose between "Civic Literacy" (meaning, by the way, American Civic Literacy, but we'll leave that for a moment) and whatever this supposed leftist agenda is all about. Jacoby, when he says such things, sounds a lot like an adherent to the school of David Horowitz (this site has to be seen to be believed -- look at the articles! Look at the ads!), whose wild delusions of persecution have led him to spearhead the movement to invent this evil conspiracy of liberal academics. While I suppose it's possible that there is a course dedicated to "global warming" at Johns Hopkins, it probably falls within some department with a less liberal-sounding name, like -- I don't know -- "science"? I know from personal experience, and any idiot should know from being alive in America -- at least any idiot who wants to criticize academia -- that Johns Hopkins has been routinely turning out many of the top scientists and medical doctors in the world. Its hosptial, medical school, and graduate research departments are world renowned. And, as apparently the Jeff Jacobys of the world fail to understand, when one is majoring in molecular biology and biochemistry, or studying to learn how to cure cancer, or save the lives of soldiers through surgery, or any of that other irrelevant stuff that doctors do, there simply isn't much time left over to fixate on the names of the battles in the Civil War.

How about Yale? I can also tell you from personal experience (and plenty of people can surely vouch for this one as well) that there is a great deal of important learning and scholarship going on there, despite what you might assume from looking at some prominent graduates. But not everyone there is studying U.S. History or Political Science. If you surveyed those people, I imagine you would be rather impressed with the results. And if you surveyed the English department, you might be impressed with what they know about literature, philosophy, intellectual history.

I don't disagree with the basic premise of Jacoby's argument: We would probably be better off as a democracy with better "literacy" concerning what democracy means, where it comes from, and what has happened here in America over the years. I'm sure nobody disputes this. But it seems to me the basics of American History and Government should be taught earlier than college, no matter what. The curriculum of a single year of AP U.S. History, if taught with any rigor at all, would get you a pretty high score on the test.

But that is also more or less besides the point I'd like to make, which we can get at by looking at some of the specifics of the test itself. Looking over the categories, it is not surprising to find particularly low scores on questions involving the market economy, budgetary issues, etc. These are surely more specialized (and, they involve math, which would be a problem for some of us in the other departments). Jacoby gets riled about the names and dates of battles. That is fair enough, and, like I said, knowledge is good, and we ought to have more of it and distribute it around. But what struck me are the following: only 25% could answer correctly questions concerning Plato's Republic; only 24.9% on classical thought; 22.5% on the nature of society; 14.4% on traditional just war criteria; and, most distressing of all, 19% seem to understand the notion of the public good. These last two are the most troubling to me. I wish, like anyone in academics, like anyone anywhere, that we could muster a voting population with a command of the facts and theories of life in the world. But as much as I'd like our students to distinguish between Gettysburg and Yorktown, King George and George W. Bush (though there's not much to distinguish there), I'll take a population any day that understands just war theory and the notion of the public good. If you know these things, you'll name fewer battles for the next generation to remember.

At any rate, surely we should expect our leaders to score highly -- in all categories, but these last two in particular. My guess is that if you gave them the test, they'd flunk it too. The President at least, with his seemingly endless list of indefensible acts (this last signing statement being just a drop in the bucket), has demonstrated that he knows nothing -- neither history, nor civics, nor just war theory, nor anything about what it means to strive for the public good.