Making College Right: Heretical Thoughts & Practical Proposals

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Rich countries generally have stable or diminishing populations and they can better afford to care for the environment. The worst thing for the environment is to have a growing, hungry and impoverished human population trying to live on the land without help of industrial technology. When Chinese and Indian governments give the fight against poverty higher priority than the fight against global warming, they are morally as well as scientifically right.

Second heresy, the mystery of the wet Sahara. This is a mystery that has always fascinated me. At many places in the Sahara desert that are now dry and unpopulated, we find rock-paintings showing people with herds of animals. The paintings are abundant and of amazing artistic quality, comparable with the more famous cave-paintings in France and Spain. The Sahara paintings are more recent than the cave-paintings. They come in a variety of styles and were probably painted over a period of several thousand years.

The latest of them show Egyptian influence and must be contemporaneous with early Egyptian tomb paintings. The best of the paintings date from roughly six thousand years ago. They are strong evidence that the Sahara at that time was wet. There was enough rain to support herds of cows and giraffes, which must have grazed on grass and trees.

There were also some hippopotamuses and elephants. The Sahara then must have been like the Serengeti today. At the same time, roughly six thousand years ago, there were deciduous forests in northern Russia where the trees are now conifers, proving that the climate in the far north was much milder than it is today. There were also trees standing in mountain valleys in Switzerland which are now filled with famous glaciers.

The glaciers that are now shrinking were much smaller six thousand years ago than they are today. Six thousand years ago seems to have been the warmest and wettest period of the interglacial era that began twelve thousand years ago when the last Ice Age ended. First, if the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to continue, shall we arrive at a climate similar to the climate of six thousand years ago when the Sahara was wet? And second, if we could choose between the climate of today with a dry Sahara and the climate of six thousand years ago with a wet Sahara, should we prefer the climate of today?

So my second heresy answers yes to the first question and no to the second. It says the warm climate of six thousand years ago with the wet Sahara is to be preferred, and that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may help to bring it back. Third heresy, the domestication of biotechnology. It was the combination of electronic hardware with punch-card software that allowed a single machine to predict weather, to simulate the evolution of populations of living creatures, and to test the feasibility of hydrogen bombs.

He understood that the descendants of his machine would dominate the operations of science and business and government. But he imagined computers always remaining large and expensive. He imagined them as centralized facilities serving large research laboratories or large industries. He failed to foresee computers growing small enough and cheap enough to be used by housewives for doing income-tax returns or by children for doing homework.

He failed to foresee the final domestication of computers as toys for three-year-olds. He totally failed to foresee the emergence of computer-games as a dominant feature of twenty-first-century life. Because of computer-games, our grandchildren are now growing up with an indelible addiction to computers. For better or for worse, in sickness or in health, till death do us part, humans and computers are now joined together more durably than husbands and wives.

It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations. The first step in this direction was already taken, when genetically modified tropical fish with new and brilliant colors appeared in pet-stores. For biotechnology to become domesticated, the next step is to become user-friendly. Philadelphia excels in orchids and roses, San Diego excels in lizards and snakes. The main problem for a grandparent visiting the reptile show with a grandchild is to get the grandchild somehow out of the building without actually buying a snake.

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now just imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to grow new varieties of roses and orchids. Also there will be kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes, to breed new varieties of pets. Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too.

Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops, which the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those which monoculture farming and industrial development have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art-form as creative as painting or sculpture.

Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora. The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games, designed like computer games for children down to kindergarten age, but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. These games will be messy and possibly dangerous.

Rules and regulations will be needed to make sure that our children do not endanger themselves and others. If domestication of biotechnology is the wave of the future, five important questions need to be answered. First, can it be stopped? Second, ought it to be stopped? Third, if stopping it is either impossible or undesirable, what are the appropriate limits which our society must impose on it?

Fourth, how should the limits be decided? Fifth, how should the limits be enforced, nationally or internationally? In considering each of these questions, it would be helpful to keep in mind the analogy between computer technology and biotechnology. The majority of people using domesticated biotechnology to cause trouble will probably be small fry, like the young computer hackers who spread computer viruses around on the internet.

On the other hand, there is a big difference between a computer virus and a real virus like influenza or HIV. If we allow kids to play around with roses and snakes, we still have to stop them from playing around with viruses. It says that the human development of Open Source software may be recapitulating in a few decades the history of life on earth over billions of years, overaccelerating evolution by a huge factor.

Carl Woese is the world's greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy, that is the evolution of microbes. He explored the ancestry of microbes by tracing the similarities and differences between their genomes. He discovered the large-scale structure of the tree of life, with all living creatures descended from three primordial branches. His main theme is the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years, and the need for a new synthetic biology based on communities and eco-systems rather than on genes and molecules.

Aside from his main theme, he raises another profoundly important question: When did Darwinian evolution begin? By Darwinian evolution he means as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of non-interbreeding species. He presents evidence that Darwinian evolution did not go back to the beginning of life.

The comparison of genomes of ancient lineages of living creatures shows strong evidence of massive transfers of genetic information from one lineage to another. In early times, the process which he calls Horizontal Gene Transfer, the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more prevalent, the further back you go in time. Whatever Carl Woese writes, even in a speculative vein, needs to be taken seriously.

Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information by means of viruses so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared.

Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer. But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species, reserving its intellectual property for its own private use.

With its superior efficiency it continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of the community continued its communal life. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became a second species. And so it went on, until nothing was left of the community, except perhaps the viruses, and all life was divided into species. The Darwinian interlude had begun.

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens , began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere.

Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization.

And now, in the last thirty years, Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, Open Source principles will govern the exchange of genes, and the evolution of life will again be communal. That is my fourth heresy. It is likely that biotechnology will dominate our lives and our economic activities during the second half of the twenty-first century, just as computer technology dominated our lives and our economy during the second half of the twentieth.

Biotechnology could be a great equalizer, spreading wealth over the world wherever there is land and air and water and sunlight. This has nothing to do with the misguided efforts that are now being made to reduce carbon emissions by growing corn and converting it into ethanol. The ethanol program fails to reduce emissions and incidentally hurts poor people all over the world by raising the price of land. After we have mastered biotechnology, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed.

Finally, the last heresy, nuclear weapons, which, to my mind, is in fact the most important. My fifth heresy says the number one danger to ourselves and to the environment is nuclear weapons, and our first priority should be to get rid of them as fast as possible. The world has changed drastically in the last twenty-five years. Some of the changes were for the better and some were for the worse.

The best change, one that I had not dreamed would be possible, was the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union. The worst change, one that I had also not dreamed of, was the launching by the United States of a preventive war. As a result of these changes, the way people think about nuclear weapons has changed, but the essential dangers of nuclear weapons and the possible remedies have hardly changed at all.

They call this the problem of nuclear proliferation. It is a real problem, and it has been a real problem for fifty years. But it is not a problem that we can solve by ourselves. The main problem for us, the problem that is in out power to solve, is our own weapons. We have, between us, about ten thousand nuclear weapons, enough to wipe out a large fraction of the world population.

Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society

The Russian Federation has about as many as the Americans. Other countries much less. These vast accumulations of weapons are far more dangerous to the world as a whole than the small numbers available to Iran or Pakistan. People complain that the Russians are sloppy in taking care of their nuclear weapons, but I will never forget the time I walked into a room in one of our nuclear weapon storage sites and found forty-one hydrogen bombs lying around on the floor, not even tied down.

So, there is some sloppiness on our side too. There are two ways to talk about nuclear weapons. You can talk about religion and morality, saying that nuclear weapons are uniquely evil because they are weapons of genocide, an offense against God, and we have a moral and religious duty to get rid of them. Or you can talk about hard-boiled military requirements, saying that nuclear weapons are ineffective from practical point of view. So I will concentrate on the military argument, to convince you that nuclear weapons are useless for the business of winning wars.

There is nothing sensible we can do with our own nuclear weapons to stop Iran or North Korea or Pakistan from having nuclear weapons too. Our own nukes are useless for any sane military purpose. The basic problem, when we are trying to use nuclear weapons to win a war against a poor country, is that we have all good military targets while they have very few. With nuclear weapons we can kill large numbers of people and make sure that the survivors will view us with enduring hatred, but that does not mean we have won the war.

I conclude that one of the primary aims of our foreign policy should be to get rid of nuclear weapons altogether. We can never know for sure that our enemies or our friends are not hiding a stockpile of weapons somewhere. Nuclear warheads are notoriously easy to hide. That means that all remaining weapons must be clandestine, hidden away, without any large and conspicuously deployed delivery systems. And it means that we know for sure that our own weapons are gone. In my opinion the removal of our own weapons would make the world safer, even if other countries keep some of theirs.

The most tempting possible targets for a surprise attack are, for example, nuclear-armed aircraft carriers, and these targets mostly belong to us. By getting rid of such targets, we substantially reduce the chances of a war beginning on the high seas or in the Persian Gulf. There are two ways to get rid of weapons, either by unilateral action or by multilateral negotiation. Both ways have been tried, sometimes successfully, during the last fifty years.

The nuclear arms race was then racing toward bigger and bigger hydrogen bombs. The Soviet Union was leading with a megaton bomb, advertized as a prototype for a hundred-megaton bomb. We were afraid the next step of the race would be a gigaton bomb, too big to be carried on airplanes or missiles. Gigaton bombs would be deployed in big underwater containers or unmanned submarines and would destroy coastal cities with giant tsunamis. But even the most bloodthirsty Air Force generals and Navy admirals did not want them. President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev negotiated the atmospheric test-ban treaty that put a stop to this madness.

All future nuclear tests had to be underground. And the practical limit to the yield of an underground test is about ten megatons. After this, the arms-race ran quickly in the opposite direction, toward smaller bombs with smaller yields. But President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev missed the opportunity to negotiate a comprehensive test-ban that would have slowed down the nuclear arms-race much more.

This was a unilateral action, taken quietly by Nixon without any fanfare. No international negotiations and no Senate ratification process was needed. Opponents of the decision had no opportunity to raise political objections or introduce procedural delays. Nixon simply declared that the entire United States biological weapons program would be terminated and the stockpiles destroyed. Meselson persuaded Kissinger it was time to get rid of biological weapons, and Kissinger persuaded Nixon.

The generals had to admit that, even if we were attacked with biological weapons, they did not have any realistic plan to use our own biological weapons in response. From a purely military standpoint, our own weapons were useless. Three years after Nixon's action, he negotiated the international convention making biological weapons illegal, and the Soviet Union signed the convention. The convention was unverifiable and the Soviet Union in fact kept a clandestine biological weapons program continuing.

Still we were much better off with the convention than without it. The Soviet program remained hidden, with no open deployment of biological weapons. The threat of terrorist biological weapons remains, but the threat would be much worse if we still had our own biological weapon stockpiles for the terrorists to steal.

My third example of an attempt to get rid of weapons is the one that failed. Reagan was a passionate abolitionist who wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons altogether, and Gorbachev had similar feelings. The two of them escaped from their advisors and began talking privately. They came close to agreeing to abolish all their nuclear weapons of all kinds. There were two reasons why they failed to agree. First, both of them had official advisors who were terrified of any drastic change in the status quo.

Second, Reagan was deeply attached to his Star Wars missile defense program and refused to give it up, while Gorbachev was afraid the Star Wars system could be converted to an offensive first strike mission. Gorbachev's fears were exaggerated but not unreasonable. Reagan's stubbornness about Star Wars cost him the chance to change the course of history. The fourth example of getting rid of weapons was brilliantly successful. Two years before, Gorbachev had allowed Germany to reunify and to demolish the Berlin Wall, and the Cold War had effectively ended.

President Bush decided the time had come to get rid of all the tactical nuke systems in the United States army and United States surface navy. That meant that roughly half of our total deployed weapons were removed in one afternoon by unilateral action. It was the biggest act of nuclear disarmament in history. A few years before this happened, I visited the missile cruiser Princeton in Long Beach harbor. The Princeton is named for the town where I live.

It carried 98 Tomahawk cruise missiles in two big boxes, 49 with nuclear warheads and 49 non-nuclear. The captain had to be careful to remember which was which. It was an accident waiting to happen, an easy way for a nuclear war to start at sea. The army tactical nukes were equally dangerous, deployed all over the world in exposed places. Now they are all gone. The army and the surface navy are now both happy to be non-nuclear. They can do their jobs much better without the encumbrance of taking care of nuclear weapons. Nobody now wants to put the nuclear weapons back where they were.

Bush was careful to time his announcement of the action to coincide with the settlement of a big lawsuit against the tobacco industry. So the American media concentrated their attention on the tobacco settlement and the nuclear disarmament slipped by unnoticed. Some time later, Gorbachev responded with a similar withdrawal of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons. These four examples convince me that unilateral action is usually more effective than multilateral negotiation as a way of moving forward to drastic disarmament.

Both ways should certainly be tried, both are needed. The most recent move toward nuclear abolition was started in the year by Max Kampelman, who was with Reagan at Reykjavik and served as Reagan's negotiator of these Arms Control agreements. Kampelman joined with other elder statesmen, including Henry Kissinger, William Perry, Sam Nunn, and George Schultz, who was Reagan's secretary of state, to publish a public statement calling for world-wide nuclear abolition as the goal of the United States foreign policy. They proposed to revive the Reykjavik discussion with Russia and then bring in other countries to reach a multilateral abolition agreement.

In my opinion, they put far too much emphasis on verification and enforcement. It would be better to begin with unilateral moves without enforcement. A world without major open deployments of nuclear weapons would be much safer, even if Israel and Iran keep some stockpiles hidden away.

There is no reasonable way to enforce an agreement if Israel and Iran do not wish to join. Every country should have the right not to join, or to withdraw after six months notice. A withdrawal clause is standard in all arms-control agreements, for very good reasons. The main obstacle to overcome, if we are trying to convince the American public, or the Russian public, to get rid of our nuclear weapons, is the deeply held belief that nuclear weapons give us some kind of security.

This belief is supported by several myths, in particular by the myth that the American nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War Two to an end. Recent studies by the historian Hasegawa and others have convinced me that the myth is false. The crucial evidence is contained in the Imperial rescript addressed by Emperor Hirohito to his armed forces in August , ordering these forces to surrender.

Because Hirohito knew the Japanese history very well. In Japan had defeated China and occupied Manchuria. Then the European powers led by Russia intervened and moved into Manchuria. The Russians occupied Port Arthur. The great emperor Meiji, who had modernized Japan, accepted a humiliating peace. By making a dishonorable peace with the Europeans, Meiji had kept the Russians out of Japan. The language of Hirohito's rescript shows that he had this analogy in his mind when he made the decision to surrender.

His mind was primarily concerned with history and not with technology. The decisive events were not the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but the Russian declaration of war and the Russian invasion of Manchuria. There are several other myths that need to be demolished. There is the myth that, if Hitler had acquired nuclear weapons before we did, he could have used them to conquer the world. There is another myth that the invention of the hydrogen bomb changed the nature of nuclear warfare. In fact, if you look at the weapons we now have in the stockpile, they are almost exactly the same as they would have been if the H-bomb had never been invented.

There is the myth that international agreements to abolish weapons without perfect verification are useless.

But in fact, many international agreements are unverified and even violated and are still useful. A good example is the Rush—Bagot treaty of which kept the frontier between the United States and Canada peaceful. So all those myths are false. After they are demolished, dramatic moves toward a world without nuclear weapons may become possible.

But for this to happen, peace-loving citizens and hard-boiled presidents and soldiers must work together. My time is now at an end, and I won't attempt to summarize the lessons that you may have learned from these five heresies. The main lesson l would like you to take home is that the long-range future is not predetermined.

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The rules of the world-historical game change from decade to decade in unpredictable ways. All our fashionable worries and all our prevailing dogmas will probably be obsolete in twenty years. My heresies will probably also be obsolete. The future is in the hands of our children and grandchildren. We should give them the freedom to find their own heresies. Voice in the Audience. You see, there is a very simple way to close this problem of nuclear weapons. Laughter in the audience, applause.

In this case, this problem will never exist. Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate Encounter, , even I was surprised by how deeply speech codes and the groupthink they help create—and the administrative bloat that promotes both—run in the modern academy. There is no easy solution to this problem, but teaching students to seek out those with differing views for rational debate on important topics would foster their intellectual development. The modern academy teaches students through word and, more powerfully, through example, the exact opposite of independent thought.

Those with the least education talk to the greatest number of people with whom they disagree, while those with the highest level of education talk to the lowest. An academy that takes its intellectual obligations seriously would strive to reverse this trend. Educated people should see it as a duty to poke their heads outside their echo chambers and cultivate the habits of a curious, skeptical mind.

Instead, our campuses create consequences for having divergent or irreverent opinions, legitimize cheap tactics for getting out of meaningful debates, and create awkward and unproductive energy around issues that should be freely discussed. If we could succeed in teaching students the value of actively pursuing intelligent debate with thinkers who do not share their current views, we might begin to reverse the calcification of ideas on campus, and even elevate the tedious national discourse to which we have all become accustomed.

In the state university where I teach, many first-year writing course students admit that they read exactly four books in high school: As a friend recently observed: We need to teach them a radical and simple appreciation of the sentence, the active verb, the named object, the capital, and the period. The first half of a freshman composition course can and should concentrate on just one thing: Yet with their usual inattention to undergraduates, faculty leave orientation to student affairs administrators, who emphasize recreation, vocation, and victimization—not learning.

Faculty must take over student orientation, using it to teach students that they are lucky to attend college and that their attendance is being subsidized by others, that integrity matters, that the life of the mind is vital, that with hard work they will grow smarter while with little work they will flunk out or emerge after four years none the better. Student orientation cannot work without follow-through, so our best rather than our worst faculty must teach first-year courses, which must have high standards and set demanding expectations for the years ahead.

Since undergraduates constantly turn over, it would take only four years of this regimen to re-instill the culture of learning in our colleges and universities. To get at least some useful mileage out of this often well-meaning but clearly superfluous group: About the same applied to less glamorous sports like softball or rowing. I suggest requiring a weekly minimum of three to four hours attendance at sports and cultural events throughout the academic year. Show students you really do recognize their efforts.

Who knows, it might set a good example for the teaching faculty—they should start showing up, too. Require all undergraduates in American colleges and universities—irrespective of major—to memorize and publicly recite from memory certain classic American texts, in full or excerpted form, as a partial fulfillment of their general education requirement. No activity has been more consistently and universally disparaged in educational circles for more than a century.

True, memorization can be boring. But it also can powerfully sharpen the mind and improve retention and attentiveness. They have made the words and ideas their own. A memorized text becomes a permanent resource, a standard of reckoning, a rich fund of metaphor and allusion, and a pattern of eloquence, in the same way that Shakespeare and the King James Bible provided an intellectual and verbal treasury for the thought and diction of Lincoln.

Even at the college level, and at good schools, most students cannot write even a page of text without committing some error of grammar, usage, or spelling. This is apart from content. The reason is that their teachers—from kindergarten all the way through—have little interest in correcting these errors. Professors have no personal or professional interest in whether their students write well, so they ignore the problems and pass students along. College writing programs have little impact on the problem. But once on the job students quickly discover that the boss is their coauthor as their teacher was not, demanding that they be able to write letters or reports that he can sign without embarrassment—or be fired.

I recommend instituting a writing exam that undergraduates must pass to graduate from college, with rules for grammar and usage defined in advance. Ask students to respond to some essay question in, say, five pages, without outside help. Allow students some very small number of errors, or fail them. Have a nonprofit body—funded by all colleges and universities—that would operate separately from coursework correct and return the papers to students with errors indicated. Allows students to take the test any number of times, but make the number of attempts to pass part of their academic record.

Publicize these results by school, with the goal that they will eventually be factored into U. Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute Pass a federal law that no teacher in a college or university that receives federal funds shall be allowed to award an A to more than 7 percent of the students in any course, and a B to more than an additional 18 percent. Frequently, examples of bias are so blatant that they make the news. Students wanting to make informed choices should not have to rely on word-of-mouth, and faculty accountability should not have to wait for egregious offenses.

The infrastructure for addressing this chronic and serious problem already exists in the form of student evaluations submitted for each course at the end of the quarter or semester. These evaluations typically contain a score or more of specific items and are completed anonymously and sent to an academic dean or department head through a student volunteer. To student evaluations, I suggest including two questions that could easily be adapted to the Likert scale for frequency, likelihood, or agreement, e.

The instructor assigned balanced reading and presented unbiased instruction. Classes taught by tenured professors would not be exempted. The results could be compiled and forwarded, not just to department heads, but to the trustees as well. NAS or another respected organization could publish the results by college and department for use by prospective students and parents in choosing a college. Percentage of applicants accepted, SAT midrange scores, freshman retention rates, graduation rates, enrollment numbers, average class sizes, and student-faculty ratios for most colleges are widely available from a number of sources.

That, in a phrase, is my advice to students at all levels. It is how you learn to learn. It is how you learn. It is how you become driven to absorb vast amounts of information on a topic that fascinates you, including all relevant facts, and how you will be led, eventually, to say something of your own—perhaps something dramatically original—on the topic. My whole career—beginning with high school—was about being obsessed.

I wrote thirty-five- to fifty-page typed papers on William Faulkner and Franz Kaka in high school. Back then we were allowed three spelling errors. If we had a fourth, we flunked. That added a dash at least of discipline to the paper writing exercise. During four undergraduate and three graduate years I took a total of two final exams.

I became obsessed with topics fundamental and arcane. Not exactly bad preparation for being a poetry specialist for the next fifty years. Another semester I followed an intense curiosity about Medieval and Renaissance alchemy. I read about nothing else for twelve weeks. If they follow their hearts—with some careful advice—they will become voracious readers, learners, and producers. Discipline and dedication will come from within. They will love what they do. They will become lifelong self-educators. Anything less leads to a curtailed education and diminished humanity.

Of course I do not always succeed. Some are determined to settle for lesser ambitions.

But I know what focused research can do for those minds willing to undertake it. That, for me, is what education is all about. If you want federal financial aid, your homepage must include a College Report Card listing the following information, for your institution and your three top overlap institutions: Deficient colleges might finally be embarrassed into reallocating resources from shrubs, sports, showcase buildings, sterile research, and porcine administrations to investments more likely to transform students into excellent thinkers, professionals, and citizens.

The principles and practices that create such a culture must be given priority over all others in all aspects of the operations of our public campuses. No ideology, no concern for personal or political sensitivity, and no political perspective should ever be allowed to trump them.

Truth can stand by itself. In my judgment, the greatest scandal of these institutions lies in their eagerness to compromise academic standards for two large groups of yearly admits: Legacy admits are a third problem, but in my experience administrators are usually unwilling to reach down nearly as far to accommodate the typical alumni child. The only solution I can see, making no claim for its political feasibility, is to have at least half of those on the admissions committee consist of tenured faculty members, preferably those drawn from the hard sciences the most meritocratic contingent of most university faculties.

But we do have one working model. It must be doing something right. Extensive faculty input in the admissions process and an admissions philosophy that implements a simple rule: Nelson Ong , Associate Professor of Political Science, College of New Rochelle; Secretary, National Association of Scholars Trustees should examine whether a liberal arts education is being provided in such a way that students can learn what is best in our Western cultural heritage as well as the tensions and competing values in that tradition.

They should not rely on administration reports but interview faculty and do due diligence by reading the reports from NAS and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to see what the issues are regarding core curriculum and intellectual diversity in higher education so that they will know what to look for in their particular universities and colleges.

During the question-and-answer period, a young man asked the CEO—Hamilton College, class of —what courses he thought proved most important in making him a successful entrepreneur. Without hesitation he responded: Many if not most faculty regard grading papers as an obligation perhaps only preferable to having a colonoscopy. Reinstitute composition courses in elite colleges where necessary. Research whether the writing instructors are English professors who hold intensive conferences, one-on-one with students.

Other than broad themes of poverty and education, what might their common denominator be? The answer is that all five were written by first-rate scholars toiling not under the auspices of an exceptional university or college, but rather under the auspices of an exceptional think tank. Faculty with talent and inclination for the kind of inquiry described here—complex but accessible analyses, offered perhaps with a bit of bite—ought to be encouraged to spend a year or two at points in their careers at think tanks, even those with clear-cut ideological viewpoints.

Needless to say, faculty daredevils taking such plunges should not later be made to suffer in terms of promotion and compensation. Before approving a new building, however, even if it comes with a lot of donor funding, the savvy trustee will ask two crucial questions: What will it cost to maintain this building and how fully are existing buildings being used? A new building is a gift that keeps on taking: So, the next question: Do we really need it?

Nine failed to meet the guidelines for use of the most expensive of all space—laboratories. Penn State has had a lot to confess lately, but its strategic plan deserves special mention:. Classroom space at University Park, for example, is near fully utilized between This raises an issue that is even more serious than squandered money. With virtually no classes on Friday afternoon, and an 8: Eliminating these pernicious boxes that fail to take into account our increasingly multiracial demography will.

The applicant who conceivably, in that rare case, demonstrates a disadvantage due to race may justifiably warrant extra consideration in the college admissions process. This cure is not perfect. But it improves upon the current system that simply pigeon-holes applicants based on their racial or ethnic group membership, both of which are entirely irrelevant to their merits; and, worse, may be inaccurate in the extreme.

Just ask Elizabeth Warren. This course would be a survey of the history, religion, culture, economy, diplomacy, and other aspects of how America came to be a separate nation and what the Founding Fathers believed our unique place in the world to be. No left-wing psychobabble allowed!

Tell the story straight up—using the words of the Founders themselves as much as possible. A college student lives within a social environment as well as an academic environment. If a curriculum purports to educate students in such fields as mathematics, the sciences, English, history, languages, and other traditional disciplines it should include a list of well-defined core courses covering a broad base of knowledge. And these courses should be taught primarily by full-time faculty rather than by an amalgamation of teaching assistants, adjuncts, and temporary appointments.

Parents and prospective students should never be afraid to ask questions regarding these matters, financial aid, or any other aspect of college life. Ideally, a prospective student would be able to spend the night in a dorm, visit a class, and have at least one in-depth conversation with a full-time faculty member. We can decide what texts to use, what requirements to specify, and what themes to emphasize. And we can discuss matters other than race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. To ensure that they actually do the reading, I divide the assignment into segments, for which they prepare written summaries.

And it helps to remind them that Abraham Lincoln on his own initiative read the entire multivolume history by candlelight—this is a handy way to deflect the whining about how ha-a-a-r-rd it is to read Gibbon. The Gibbon assignment leads to other angles: What kind of reading did people do in his day? I enjoy telling students that Pope was just about their age when he composed the work, suffered severe physical disabilities, and, due to his Catholicism, was barred from a university education—none of which stopped him from mastering Greek, Latin, and the English literary canon or becoming the most celebrated writer of his time.

And this is in a course that also covers Aristotle, Rousseau, Burke, Marx, executives, political parties, revolution, and bureaucracy. Everything about college and the process leading to it makes students believe that their innermost feelings are of the utmost importance. It will be a long, perhaps impossible, project to get college freshmen out of these bad habits. But the first step is asking them to take themselves out of the equation. The writing should include a general thesis backed up by specific quotations or examples from third parties.

The only way to make eighteen-year-olds into intelligible writers and speakers is to force them to look beyond themselves. At some schools standards exist that identify what constitutes an A, B, or C, but rarely do institutions enforce them. Blinders are oftentimes in place to ignore evidence of plagiarism. One instructor may award an A for completing all course units, while another sees the same work and assigns a C for just meeting the objectives. If one instructor teaching, say, Introduction to Accounting, consistently awards higher grades than his colleagues teaching the same course, this discrepancy can be explored.

Care should be taken to ensure that content, structure, style, and mechanics are addressed. While too many comments can discourage students, sufficient commentary is required to uphold academic integrity. Now a research physicist at IBM, she was recently featured by Forbes magazine as one of thirty outstanding scientists under thirty.

Jessie was obviously an unusual child, but not as unusual as you might think. There are many young students bright and mature enough to enter college early, and the SAT provides an ideal screening device to find those who are academically ready. Young students scoring very high on the SAT should be seriously considered for early entrance, especially when interviews and essays reveal them to be eager to move on and learn. There is no good reason to set arbitrary age and credential requirements such as a high school diploma on college entrance.

Rothman , Poetry Concentration Director, MFA in Creative Writing, Western State Colorado University Literary prosody—the study of meter, rhyme, stanza forms, lyrical forms, and all other aspects of what is sometimes called the music of poetry—used to be standard fare in all serious poetry curricula, both critical and creative. This attention to versecraft began with Plato and Aristotle and continues up to the present, in which poets and serious critics still wrestle with and over it.

Among academics and in English and language departments, however, literary prosody has virtually disappeared. It is never mentioned in job listings I check regularly and there are no dedicated lines, let alone chairs in the field—and it is a field, not merely a subject. Books and scholarly articles are difficult to publish, and extended discussions, let alone full courses, on prosody hardly exist in English department curricula, even at the graduate level. Despite this decline, poets with the more discerning critics and a small but dedicated band of scholars continue to study and practice verse as verse, investigating prosody in practical, historical, and theoretical terms.

Giving prosody its due in literary study would be a boon to all involved. Students should learn to engage in civil disagreement, listen with respect, and be able to walk into the classroom with one opinion and walk out with another. As a first step, we might practice that during faculty meetings.

If we learn the art of truly listening to and even enjoying opinions different than our own, we will be more likely to pass on that skill to our students. And diversity of thought is the best antidote to the diversity of identity movement that tends to dehumanize minorities by expecting them to think according to their stereotypes.

This is one way to confront classroom bias and to ensure quality teaching without overstepping the boundaries of a legitimate definition of academic freedom. Such a rule would enable prospective students and their parents to pick more suitable schools and majors and give students more guidance about registering for courses. It would make the transfer process easier. It would potentially give employers more insight into prospective employees: And it would make the act of investigation so much easier for reform-minded educational researchers, who are often stymied in their attempts to see what is really going on inside college and university classrooms.

Some universities have already taken this step, and the state of Texas even passed a law in that requires its universities to post syllabi and CVs online for public viewing. Political Correctness and Organizational Self-Destruction It grieves me to say that the best way to reform American higher education is to reform American lower education.

The modal student comes to us already formed, having absorbed the politically correct ideology in which he has been marinated. He bring us his views, fully believing that he has created them on his own, and never reflecting on the fact that these beliefs are exactly the same as those of everyone else. Passive, dependent, shallow, and increasingly stupid, they do not feel that reason and evidence are rocks on which they can ground their assertions.

Rather, they look to see what they can say on the basis of what will not get them into trouble. The political sea change that I like to believe we are going through will create a large number of parents who will lose their tolerance for this kind of educational commandeering.

They will know that children educated in this way will be helpless in the world they are likely to face. Hence, they will choose otherwise if they have an alternative. One thing that could be done to reform higher education? Give them that option. For students raised in a secular age, devotional art provides an opening into metaphysics.

Fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish portraiture defines contemporary conceptions of human glory: The Old Masters restate archetypal stories from the Bible and antiquity with innumerable interpretations of mood and design. This extraordinary corpus speaks to students with a force and clarity that postmodernism fails to negate. First, however, students need to learn that it exists and is much more than a relic of a discredited canon. Shakely , Board of Directors, The Nittany Valley Society As you alight the steps from your last class of the day you instinctively attend to your iPhone.

A few missed calls. You get a few hundred words in before the iPhone is ringing, nagging again. Then your iPad reminders kick in, finally and irrevocably pulling you from your reading, and from the evening. This is our life now, for many professors as well as for students.

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There is so little room for quiet or leisure or silence. Of course, reasoned the Greek, given leisure a man will employ it in thinking and finding out about things. Leisure and the pursuit of knowledge, the connection was inevitable Can we build physical, explicit spaces for leisure on our campuses? Where no devices are allowed? Where questing is the goal? Where eternal rather than ephemeral labors are sought?

Professors should encourage students to make the most of the college experience by intentionally retreating from noise. The gift of a college education is the opportunity to retreat from the world prior to commencing lives within it. A bit of the wisdom of the Greeks is calling to us, if only we have a moment to think it over. Shaw , President, John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy Every elementary education department should require its majors to take a phonics course. Not just in reading. Many education schools produce graduates who have little knowledge of specific techniques for teaching reading.

Research has confirmed that it is not nearly as effective as a phonics-based method. There are already a few colleges where transcripts include this kind of information. Most but not all students would oppose such a truth in grading proposal. But university administrators and state legislators, whose prime concern is graduation rates, would not feel especially threatened.

Employers and graduate and professional schools would be able to make better hiring and admissions decisions. Business groups and boards of trustees might be convinced to support truth in grading. Faculty would be divided. Those faculty who now give As to three-quarters of their students would work to defeat the proposal. But they would have a hard time explaining why future employers and graduate schools should not be able to tell whether 20 percent or 80 percent of a class got As. Nor would these faculty be able to claim their right to assign grades is being challenged.

Francis College, Brooklyn, New York The great deficiency of contemporary students is their lack of general knowledge.

Heresy, Yes–Conspiracy, No - Wikipedia

Most rarely read a newspaper let alone a book and fewer still read for pleasure. Unaware of history or geography, even students with high SAT scores have difficulty placing ideas or events in any context. First, I ask students who register for my courses to read an accessible novel on the topic over the summer or during break.

This expands their base knowledge and vocabulary, and introduces them to different viewpoints in the op-ed pages. We discuss the current events that relate to the course content for a few minutes each week. Third, I require students to purchase a short paperback historical atlas and use it to make sense of reading assignments.

In talking about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for instance, students study the map of Illinois that extends from Lake Michigan to below the Mason-Dixon line. Fourth, I ask students to talk to their extended family about current events and the events discussed in class. They are sometimes engaged by recognizing that class topics have a connection to their own family histories. This state of affairs is so obvious it requires little effort to confirm—all we need do is look around. The view is devastating: Real change, I suspect, would begin with the individual, not the institution, and with ad hoc groups of like-minded individuals, not formally constituted organizations.

Individuals are, at least hypothetically, mobile; institutions tend invariably to self-preservation at best and inertia at worst. Consequently, my sole possible recommendation to redeem an educational disaster is unimpressively modest: This will seem distressingly like a presidential bromide. But there is nothing to be said against hope and change if the hope is based on empirical realism and the change is truly beneficial.

Naval Science was taught by Navy line officers fresh from sea duty with the Fleet. The argument is a familiar one, and this fellow neatly sums it up: They should come face-to-face with balancing books, meeting payroll, and grappling with hiring and firing decisions all while trying to make a business grow. They should learn what it takes to succeed, and how it feels to fail. To those who point out that the Chinese attempted something along the same lines during the Cultural Revolution, when intellectuals were sent en masse into the countryside to learn from the peasants, I say, absolutely, and so what?

We can do it better! Our intention would be not to humiliate and disgrace, but to enlighten! Require an MA or MS degree in a subject taught in K—12 for admission to a doctoral program in education. This requirement would upgrade the caliber of doctoral students in one stroke.

On Education

It would also necessitate the availability of academically relevant summer coursework, tuition for which should be paid in part by the state or local board of education, not only by teachers themselves. The quality of the bulk of education research in many areas, for example, mathematics and written composition, varies greatly. I therefore add a second recommendation: Require boards of trustees to request a report on the strengths and weaknesses of their doctoral programs in education and on the quality of the dissertations and research done at their universities, using evaluators from universities or research institutes in other states.

The rate of repayment could be tied to salary. Many common reading programs make poor book choices. Committees in charge of common readings should select books that have stood the test of time, reflect human nature accurately and memorably, and correspond with college-level reading standards.

Themes of character, redemption, hubris, or the meaning of life usually offer better reads than works focused on grievance, multiculturalism, sexuality, or environmentalism. Assigned readings should also exemplify elegance of language, a degree of complexity, and moral seriousness. Fiction is a good choice, but other genres can work. Making common readings mandatory—enforcing this with a campus-wide test—will ensure that all students know the text. Colleges can craft the program to maximize student participation by hosting dramatic readings think Melville, Shakespeare , expert lectures, and author impersonators think Twain, Lincoln.

Colleges can also pick a yearlong theme inspired by the reading and devote campus-wide events on that theme. Students, prospective students, and their parents love the idea of paying less for attending college. Moreover, some economists say that investing more in educating youngsters from low-income families will increase the ability of American workers to compete in the global marketplace.

They need loans that give them an incentive to get good enough college educations to qualify for jobs—well-paying jobs that enable them to pay off their loans. The flaw in the federal guaranteed student-loan program from its inception has been its exclusive concern with whether students come from low-income families. To reform the federal student-loan program, the Department of Education should start targeting student loans, giving cheaper loans to needy students with good prospects for repaying the loans they take out.

Some loans should continue at a 6. Differential loan rates would reduce student defaults, thereby reducing the credit problems that defaulting students get into as well as the cost of these defaults to American taxpayers. A side effect of targeted loans would be to improve the educational atmosphere of American colleges. When students know that the interest rates on their loans are at stake each year, they are more likely to take their classes seriously and less likely to waste time partying and accumulating bad credit ratings by maxing out multiple credit cards on balances they cannot pay.

Trimble , Professor Emeritus of Geography, University of California at Los Angeles As an undergraduate and graduate student in s, I became convinced that students should be able to give a confidential evaluation of their classes. Although scientific evidence already existed suggesting that classes where students learned the least received the highest ratings, we persevered.

Student evaluations became almost ubiquitous within a decade. That students were not the idealistic and objective audience we anticipated soon became apparent. Evaluations largely became popularity contests: The instruments of evaluation were often poorly designed, frequently asking questions students were incapable of judging.

The university average was something over 7. Administrators were soon using evaluations for such personnel decisions as tenure and promotion. Often it was the only evaluation used. Self-preservation is a powerful force. This effected a slow erosion in institutional standards. By the s, I understood that we had created a Frankenstein monster.

In a rare period of idealism, I searched the literature on student evaluations and crafted a fifteen-page memo—complete with graphs, figures, and references—describing the problems and suggesting improvements. I sent the memo to several upper-level administrators and did hear back from the dean, who promised to include me in any future reform of the evaluation. Attendance and participation should count for at least 15 percent in a humanities or social science course and at least 10 percent in any natural science course.

Furthermore, students should be expected to attend every class, unless there is a compelling reason for an absence. Why such a policy? Above all, a cavalier attitude towards attendance and participation reflects institutional indifference to the enterprise of teaching. Parents ought to have tangible evidence that American colleges and universities aspire to more than being vast playgrounds for young adults. Aside from picking the president and perhaps other key officials and approving budgets and contracts, a good board exercises important oversight responsibilities, safeguarding the interests of key concerned outside constituencies taxpayers, alumni, major benefactors.

While some boards are excessively activist and interfere in routine decision-making, more commonly they are expensive rubber stamps for administrations, failing to curb abuses and monumental errors of judgment. One reason for this is that trustees typically receive campus information mainly from the president, who seldom presents all sides of brewing campus issues and sometimes even keeps trustees in the dark about scandal. One low-cost way to alleviate this problem is to give trustees their own employee, arguably the secretary to the board, whose major job is to funnel information to the trustees independent of what the administration provides.

To be sure, trustees often lack the sophistication or competence to evaluate academic issues, so the proposal is not without risks, but—on balance—is worth a try. The modern world is filled with situations in which we must be able to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and our intuitions are poorly developed to do this wisely. To accomplish this, colleges would need to find enough competent instructors to do this—no small task. Logic and Critical Thinking The aim of this course is to introduce you to the methods and principles of good reasoning.

It will develop your ability to identify truth-preserving patterns of argument, evaluate evidence, and effectively communicate your ideas. Common Core for K—12 Citizens Taking a leaf from the German gymnasium or French baccalaureate system, all pre-university students should have their education directed according to a core curriculum from the age of six to the age of eighteen.

The core curriculum must have some basic compulsory subjects to be pursued to the completion of high school: If we are to create autonomous individuals prepared to vote and participate responsibly in democracy, the benefits of civic education are obvious. Mathematics is necessary for anyone considering a higher degree in the sciences, economics, and business studies. Science and scientific methodology are responsible for some of the greatest achievements of the human mind, and we cannot ignore our place in the universe or fail to be moved by the discoveries concerning the cosmos.

One Hundred Great Ideas for Higher Education

Foreign languages must be learned in an increasingly global economy and our growing political and cultural interdependence, but they remain a basic necessity for anyone pursuing research in the humanities—history, archaeology, the social sciences, and comparative literature. The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination. A brief excerpt of the stated learning objectives must suffice:. Examine the history of racial formations and social construction. Evaluate major theories on white privilege, prejudice, and discrimination. Define and analyze the dimensions of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism.

Analyze patriarchy and the system of sexism. Identify ways to dismantle systems of oppression and become agents of change. There is no more hiding from the truth. The claims of a highly politicized academy, as contained in studies like Academically Adrift and A Crisis of Competence: And the irony is that we now can prove it through yet another sacrosanct higher education concept: Watson , Philip M. This can be done readily in most social sciences and humanities disciplines. Even most natural science disciplines could assign more primary source readings to good effect.

The students, institution, and faculty all benefit. The institution benefits for many reasons, notably that this approach encourages, if not requires, departments to hire thoughtful faculty members who love discussing books more than they love careerist strategizing. The faculty benefit because of an academic culture that encourages and rewards the type of life that originally drew them to the academy. This approach requires wrestling conventional departments into submission and engaging teachers competent with the materials.

Once the main battles are won, the victors will draw several good students for every one lost to less demanding pursuits. With scant exception, most provide little of intellectual value while pushing youngsters deeper into debt. These add nothing of intellectual value.

Third, further eliminate all administrators whose job lacks a clear-cut relationship to promoting academic achievement. There you have it—Creative Destruction on a grand scale. Much that these defunct colleges and universities once accomplished can be done better and cheaper elsewhere. Two, how do we address the massive unemployment for all the millions whose livelihood once depended on the local campus?

I have ideas, all good ones, but let me just say that America has survived, even benefited from comparable upheavals. Obviously, things have gotten out of control since then. Here are three suggestions on how to cut costs while simultaneously improving education:. This would also force students to choose majors with some intellectual heft. Cut the number of administrators. A general rule of employing no more than one administrator for every ten teachers ought to do it.

One way to accomplish this: Stop the proliferation of unnecessary requirements. You do need it to be truly educated, in my humble opinion, but in all fairness Shakespeare managed quite well without it. There will be four immediate effects:. There will be a massive reduction in paper costs, moralistic Powerpoint presentations, vacuous spreadsheets, and fatuous offset schemes that pontificate about saving the planet. In other words, energy bills will shrink a hundredfold. The productivity of academic staff, i. They will have to legitimize themselves on the basis of academic rigor and teaching excellence, as opposed to the dubious merits of a Carbon Management Certificate.

This framework is actually not that ambitious, but given that environmentalism is so entrenched in campus discourse, it is also highly improbable. Were it to come to pass, we could focus on the quality of our admissions, rather than navel-gaze about our emissions. Students who wish to work in journalism would be far better served by spending four years studying something that matters in order graduate from college knowing something about something.

Knowing something about something is a fine and rare thing in a journalist, and there is a great demand in the profession for people with at least an undergraduate-level command of science, statistics, economics, and foreign languages. Of course, students smart enough to get decent grades majoring in science or economics will have career prospects that in most cases compensate them far better than does journalism, which means that wages would need to rise to get these matriculates into the industry.

Which is to say that abolishing the journalism major would in one elegant blow improve both undergraduate education and the profession of journalism. Other candidates for extermination include undergraduate business and public relations degrees; and students in colleges of education should probably be put into reeducation camps. Trinity graduates were in high demand across Texas and beyond, principally because they demonstrated mastery of a subject area and had acquired skills in teaching their area of content.

My efforts to implement that approach at FGCU were met with stiff faculty resistance and even stiffer resistance from administrators who were depending upon all those undergraduate education majors to populate our student body and on the basis of university enrollment to generate additional state contributions to our higher education effort. In effect, I ran into a cultural barrier in which education faculty colluded with administrators to protect their turf and their jobs. Recognizing that I had encountered an irresistible force, I surrendered in frustration. This outcome was tragic and typical in many regards.

Our current model of teacher preparation is guaranteed to produce inadequately prepared teachers who will send inadequately prepared students into our university classrooms and the workforce. As bad as this outcome is, another component of teacher education is equally problematic: The effort will take years. Despite the investment required, the prospects of better educated and more socially and politically diverse education faculty and students more than justifies our time and effort. But not to be required or expected to read—thoughtfully, critically, and in their entirety—Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear?

Something about knowing what it means to be a human, moral, and thinking being. About where we fit in our community, our civilization, the universe. About how we think about our lives, and prepare for our deaths. Ars longa, vita brevis. To instill an appreciation for the fragile nature of democracy, colleges should adopt a course that examines the rise and fall of democratic societies. The course should also help students examine why republics fail and how citizens can contribute to the preservation of a free society.

There is no precise formula for how to teach this course. One approach could focus on the fall of democracies in modern times. Many students are drawn to the human drama surrounding early struggles for freedom in Athens, Rome, and Britain. The decline of the Roman Republic provides a vivid illustration of how sporadic political violence can rapidly cascade into lawlessness. Examining the struggles for freedom in Greece, Rome, and Britain helps students understand that democratic societies can, and sometimes do, lapse back into despotism.

Foster Academic Diversity Conservative think tanks should attempt to diversify academia by encouraging talented conservatives to join the professoriate.

One of the most prominent and arguably tragic features of higher education is the lack of ideological diversity among the professoriate. For undergraduates interested in the social sciences, an education rooted in a single ideological worldview—liberal or conservative—is by definition incomplete. To combat the ideological imbalance, prominent right-leaning think tanks should take concrete steps to encourage conservative students to seek careers in higher education. Conservative organizations can broaden the ideological diversity of the faculty simply by promoting the paths available to young conservatives.

For conservatives interested in investigating public policy controversies, for example, political science is a relatively friendly field. Its affinity for quantitative methodology and a vibrant enclave of non-leftist practitioners means that diligent scholars can conduct serious research and still secure tenure. Conservative organizations can also provide targeted funding opportunities for students to travel to professional conferences. Once they begin to consider higher education careers, conservative students will need to become familiar with the norms and expectations of academic life.

This provides role models and gives aspiring graduate students clues about where to pursue a Ph. Cut undergraduate education from four years to two. Oxford and Cambridge have only three years, and most Oxbridgers consider that one year too many. Four years marinates students in two years of entertaining sloth, creating unwanted habits much more difficult to remove than unwanted hair.

Imagine how many eyes will open up like—swock! Rhetoric will slyly include basic grammar and drills such as parsing sentences—in addition to basic training in prose styles.

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