Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said higher education would be a focus of her legislative agenda this year. Her comments, along with other Arkansas developments and a brilliant book on the value of higher education, converged for me today.
Sanders’ sneering view of a liberal arts education, despite her own OBU degree, has long been obvious. She embroidered on it in her state of the state speech this week.
She proposes a greater emphasis on vocational training miniature of a four-year college degree. Fine, but she also continues to starve four-year college budgets and seems to disdain what’s being taught there.
“For far too long, students have been told a lie that the only way to be successful is to get a four-year degree right out of high school,” Sanders said.
She wants to fire college and university instructors who “waste time indoctrinating” students during class time.
“Arkansas students go to our colleges and universities to be educated, not to be bombarded with anti-American, historically illiterate woke nonsense,” Sanders said.
No specifics offered, but you can guess she approves of the model of her former boss, Donald Trump, who wants to penalize critics by lawsuit or loss of license, no matter how factual the criticism. Already Sanders bars perceived enemies from her extremely constrained media access.
Then there’s U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, another politician fond of decrying the “woke.” As the up-to-date chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee he urged the CIA nominee, David Ratcliffe, to engage in more manly, “aggressive” spycraft and less of that tedious compilation of facts and figures from the media and other sources. Cotton, in miniature, says he wants more spies out stealing stuff.
The New York Times quoted the senator as saying he had seen too many intelligence reports based on news accounts or diplomatic cables.
“Those sources are not unimportant, but without clandestine intelligence, we might as well get briefed by the State Department or a think tank, or just read the newspaper,” Mr. Cotton said.
I’d urge Sanders and Cotton to read “Book and Dagger” by Elise Graham, a gripping account of how “scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of World War II.” I finished it today. Quite timely.
The U.S. built an intelligence agency from scratch in World War II on the backs of some pointy-headed Ivy League professors and researchers with a knack for assembling crucial information from hidden but public sources and drawing valuable, sometimes war-decisive conclusions from that work. Humanities scholars hunted down German spies and converted them to double agents. Literature professors, librarians and historians did undercover work — unburdened by an venerable way of doing things and also understanding the value of academic inquiry in avoiding confirmation bias (which made Hitler a loser in Normandy) and ferreting out the likes of aircraft readiness from ball bearing manufacturing statistics.
I’d like to quote liberally from Graham’s conclusion because it responds to both Sanders’ anti-humanities bias and Cotton’s preference for derring-do over archival digging.
She notes that the professors of the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA) had been spies and detectives through their research without knowing it and discovered up-to-date aspects of their potential when they went to war.
The war won and much of what Hitler wanted to destroy preserved by efforts of these scholars, Graham continues:
“And yet we also belong, in the 21st Century, to a time of profound disdain for the humanities that is prompting us to turn away from the very fields that this book has shown are so important. Research shows, for instance, that declining enrollments in university humanity departments (estimates of the rate of that decline differ, but most people agree that it’s steep) are happening not because a humanities degree is a bad bet in the job market — it’s not — but because students think a humanities degree is a bad bet in the job market. Here as elsewhere, stories matter. And what’s most concerning is the fact that we’ve chosen to tell ourselves a story about the worthlessness of the humanities that doesn’t reflect reality, and yet shapes all kinds of decisions we make about our world: cutting library budgets, telling archives to digitize, then throw out, their records, telling young people that some things aren’t worth learning.”
Enough. Read the book. You’ll be amazed at many of the nuggets. Such as the discovery that some daring spy action during the war that got the Allies a copy of the Nazis’ Enigma code machine was perhaps unnecessary. A complete description of it had been available for years in the British patent office.
Two codas:
ONE: I resume a book club with college friends next week to study “Anna Karenina” after spending last year’s sessions on “The Brothers Karamazov.” What’s the value of plowing through these Russian doorstops? Intellectual inquiry? Understanding of a foreign culture? If nothing else, it’s been an enjoyable exposure to the divergent views of a group that includes distinguished academics, financiers and a couple of honest-to-goodness billionaires (one of whom studied for a Ph.D. in philosophy before turning to high finance and bitcoin.) Harris didn’t carry the room, but at least I wasn’t the only outlier.
TWO: Breaking news says that the election-denying, would-be-insurrectionist U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford has been tapped by House Speaker Mike Johnson as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Oxymoron, anyone?
