Episode Transcript
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I am joined in studio by SteveMcGuire from ACTA, the American Council of
Trustees and Alumni, and we aregoing to talk about the good, the
bad, and the ugly of what'sgoing on in colleges these days. Well,
we're mostly going to talk about thebad and the ugly. Welcome Steve,
good to see you here, Thanksfor having me on Ross. So
first, just tell us a littleabout your organization, then we'll talk about
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the issues. Sure, yeah.So ACT stands for three things, academic
excellence, academic freedom, and accountability. So basically, we want students to
go to college, to get anexcellent education, to do so in a
culture of freedom, and to doso at an affordable price. Those are
all good. They sound like greatthings to us, and they all sound
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things that we've been drifting or sprintingaway from for some period of time.
That's right. ACT has been workingon these issues for almost thirty years.
We've seen many successes, we've hada lot of impact over that time,
but nonetheless, the trends that wesee in higher education today are obviously very
concerning. You guys put out pressrelease a couple of weeks back, and
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it talks about a new survey I'lljust quote here showing dangerous levels of civic
illiteracy among college students. So whatdid you find and how did you find
it? Yeah? Thanks, Sowe ran this survey. We've done a
few in the past under the headingof academic excellence. One of the things
that we think students should get whenthey go to college is a solid civic
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education. They should understand a lotabout our political history, they should understand
our political system, and our surveyshowed that students do not know very basic
details about our system of government.So, for instance, we ask them
things like who's the current Speaker ofthe House. Only about a third of
students knew the answer to that question. We asked them basic things about our
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system of government, like how manyyears do members of the House of Representatives
serve? How many years do senatorsserve? And again only about a third
to maybe forty percent of students knowthe answers to these questions. So it's
very concerning. You know, we'vegot an election coming up. Do students
even know how long the people thatthey're electing are going to serve a lot
of them don't. Yeah, Iguess I wish I were surprised. Now
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I'm going to ask a question thatshouldn't need to be asked, but I
really just want to not leave anythingto assumption. Why does it matter?
Well, one of the things thatyou know, colleges have many functions in
our society. A lot of peopleobviously go to college because they want to
be prepared for their career. Wethink colleges also play an important role in
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preparing our students for citizenship when theygo into adulthood. And you look at
things like polarization in our society today. People are concerned about what's happening to
our democracy on both sides of theaisle, and you know, there's a
lot of concern that the current generationdoesn't even necessarily see the value in democracy,
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right. There have been surveys inthe past that have shown a declining
you know, willing to say thatit's important that our country is the democracy.
And so if students don't know,if they don't know our history,
if they don't know the significance ofwhat our country has accomplished, of what
it represents, of how unique ourconstitution is, how lucky we are to
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live under the kind of system ofgovernment that we have, then we're going
to be in danger of losing that, and I think we're seeing signs of
that today, and so I thinkfor our whole country, it's critical that
we focus on shoring up this civiceducation that the students aren't getting. Yeah,
look, I'm with you on allthat. I think if I were
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being very, very detail oriented,i'd probably use the word democracy a little
less than you did and talk abouta republic. A lot of a lot
of people think we are a democracy, and in important and good ways we're
not. So I'm curious that thepeople that you ask these questions or they
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were they all college students, andare they across all the years of college
students, Because one of the thingsI want to get at is is this
a failure of high schools or afailure of colleges or both? Yeah,
that's great, it's definitely both.This is a CA to twelve problem.
ACTA focuses on higher eds. Soour survey looked exclusively at college students.
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The sample lean towards students who arealready juniors or seniors, so these are
students who've already had a chance.One of the things that Active pushes for
is a solid core curriculum. Wethink that students should be required to take
classes like American history or government.That's something that you know, if a
college requires that, you usually takea course in that as a freshman or
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maybe as a sophomore. Right,and then as you sort of go through
your college education, you start tofocus more and more on what your major
is going to be. You specialize. So if you're surveying mostly juniors and
seniors, unless they're history majors orpolitical science majors, they've probably already received
whatever education in civics their college isgoing to require them to get. And
the fact that most of them can'ttell us very basic details like who's the
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chief Justice of the Supreme Court,you know, that shows you that they're
going to get out of these colleges, you know, not having information that
they really should have to be activeengaged to this. And if you're surveying
a high percentage of juniors and seniors, that means a big percentage of your
sample or people who are old enoughto vote. That's correct. Absolutely,
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Yeah, So it's a little scaryand it's not surprising. I mean,
you've seen the remarkable illiberalism in theclassic use of the word liberal around college
campuses from students and professors alike.They're not about freedom, they're not about
fundamental American principles. They lean towardssupporting socialism over free markets. It's bad
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and it's there are so many differentaspects of it, and all of them
kind of touched on in your missionstatement that you talked about the beginning as
well as this that for the firsttime in my life, I am not
very optimistic. I'm not going tosay I'm deeply pessimistic, but I'm not
very optimistic that America recovers that wecan go through a time of having a
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president with policies like Joe Biden's andI'm not talking about all his health stuff
and policies like Kamala Harris would wantthat are much much more in tune with
what you would expect in France,let's say, some other basically socialist place.
I think there's been so much brainwashingof our young people that they don't
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understand what has made America successful.Yeah. Well, I think from an
educational standpoint, we're definitely looking ata problem that we have to describe as
generational, right. I mean,the people who have answered our survey,
like we just discussed, most ofthem are already almost out of their college
days. And also you mentioned KADAtwelve, right, I mean this is
a cyclical problem, right. Thepeople who are graduating from college are going
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to be the people who become theparents and the teachers of the next generation.
They already know so little about ourhistory and our system of government,
and then they're going to pass onthat ignorance to the next generation. So
this really is a critical issue thatwe need to act on as quickly as
possible and start making advances in termsof having colleges require that students study American
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history in American government, and weneed to have that happening in CA to
twelve as well. We have aproject whatwillthy Learn dot com. We look
at the core curricula of over athousand colleges and universities around the country,
and we found that less than twentypercent of these colleges and universities require their
students to take a single course inAmerican history or government. So it really
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is a deep hole that we've dugourselves into and it's going to take us
a long time to dig ourselves out. But I do think we can do
it. You know, America doeshave an amazing system of government. We
have a long history of commitment tofundamental principles. Right We're one of the
arguably one of the longest lasting democraciesor democratic republics this existed in human history.
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You know, we've obviously gone througha lot of ups and downs,
and you know, yes, interms of the education that our students are
receiving. You know, we're ina valley right now. But I think,
you know, if people, youknow, find the will to do
something about it and acknowledge the problem, I do think that we can turn
this around, right And I thinkwhat it comes down to, just to
reiterate what I said before and goingwith your valley analogy, I think in
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the past, when we were ina valley or in a ditch or in
a something, we had some prettystrong hikers and climbers to pull us out.
And I think there's been an intentionaleffort by the left in education,
especially in higher education, but inrecent years also seeping ind K through twelve
education, trying to train people outof being able to climb out of that
because the commanding heights of education andother parts of culture don't believe in it.
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We're talking with Steve maguire. Heis vice president at the American Council
of Trustees and Alumni ACT and thewebsite is go act to g o acta
dot org. Did you want toadd something to what I just said,
Well, I think, you know, you brought up the point about liberalism
as well earlier, and I thinkthat's important to address as well. Like
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I said, we focus on,you know, the issue of free expression
on campus, and you know,I think that goes hand in hand with
the education. If students don't knowabout the First Amendment, if they don't
understand the significance of the First Amendmentand just how lucky we are to have
it, you know, then it'snot surprising to see that students want to
censor the speech of others, thatthey think that whole categories of speech that
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are protected by the First Amendment shouldin fact not be allowed. If you
look at the encampments and the proteststhat we've seen on campus in the last
year, right, I mean,the ignorance and the intolerance that was evident,
you know, from the students whoare participating in those encampments was astonishing.
And yet you know, to thoseof us who work in higher ed,
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not all that surprising, right,you know, you bring up the
ideology, and you know, justone last point on that is, you
know, if colleges aren't requiring studentsto take classes and things like American history
and government, they're going to fillthose credit hours with something else, right,
And so it's really you know,in large part on the faculty they
would rather teach, you know,sort of their pet ideological project than give
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students the basics that they need toknow to be successful citizens. Yeah,
there is so much to say there. First of all, I was I
was required to take a basically governmentcitizenship citizenship class in high school, not
in college. I went to ColumbiaUniversity, so so nothing happened recently surprised
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me at all. I think italso didn't surprise me. There's another organization
that you probably work pretty closely withfrom time to time called fire Out and
do a lot of good work withfree speech on college campuses. And I
think it was fire somebody did arating of colleges by freedom of speech,
and I think Harvard was dead last, absolutely, And a lot of the
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best schools have the most restrictions onfree speech. But this happens going back
to the ideology thing, when youallow leftist professors to teach young, muddleheaded
soon to be adults that certain wordsare functionally equivalent to violence, right,
And once you do that, onceyou convince somebody that there's no difference between
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something you say and literally bashing someonein head, then of course they're going
to go restrict it. That's right. Yeah, I mean, you know,
we should really emphasize that the blamehere does not fall on the students,
right. The students are responding towhat they've been taught in first K
to twelve and then in college.The responsibility really lies with the faculty and
the administrators who are running the schools. They're the ones who make the decisions
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about what's going to be taught.And you know, faculty in particular emphasize
their academic freedom and that they shouldhave independence and autonomy. And of course,
to a large degree that's true.If they're working within their area of
expertise and they're the experts, youknow, we should hope that they would,
you know, teach students what theyneed to know in these subject areas.
But you know, I think it'simportant too to distinguish between say,
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courses in something like chemistry and coursesin something like you know, gender studies,
or you know, even in ahistory department. And you know,
one of the problems that we faceis that of the some of the departments
that we have in our universities areessentially wholly devoted to a kind of ideological
agenda as opposed to pursuit of thetruth or you know, teaching students,
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you know, basic facts about history. And so it really is a problem
that the universities, you know,have created. And I think more and
more Americans are starting to recognize this, and they see that, oh,
you know, I thought I wassending my son to college so that he
could, like I said earlier,be prepared for his career, be prepared
for citizenship, maybe take some liberalarts courses and think about what it means
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to lead a good life. Andinstead, you know, the students coming
home at Thanksgiving and suddenly is atotally different person and you know, believes
all kinds of things that really don'tserve you know, our country. A
listener wants to know if there havebeen similar surveys in prior decades, if
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you have anything to compare this toand whether students are more ignorant now than
before or if they've always been likethis. So ACTA has been doing these
surveys periodically over the years, andthe results are basically consistent with what we've
found. So there are you know, some indications of decline in certain areas.
I mean, I think certainly lookingat things like free speech, you
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know, and what students have sortof come to think should be excluded and
not counted as acceptable under free speechhas changed in the last you know,
ten fifteen years or so. Butoverall, this is an ongoing problem and
one that our colleges and universities havejust so far neglected to address. Now
we've got the two hundred and fiftiethanniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming up
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in a couple of years. Soone of the reasons that we commissioned this
survey now is ACTA wants to startto make a push for a renewed focus
on the need to improve the pecificeducation that we're offering saments. My guess,
just from living life, not somuch from looking at data, is
that the level of ignorance among youngpeople has not increased very much. Is
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probably increased a little, but thelevel of intolerance among young people and lack
of respect for other people's freedoms hasprobably increased massively. Yes, I think
that's true, and there's data tosuggest that it's actually getting worse. Again,
you know, the idea that it'sa generational problem. There's certainly data
survey data out there to suggest thatsort of the current crop of people who
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are graduating out of PhD programs andmoving into you know, starting out as
assistant professors and that sort of thing, that they themselves are more intolerant as
a group overall than the current generation. So again, it just points to
the need to address this as immediatelyas possible. I absolutely believe it,
and that that fits perfectly with theknown data that the most highly educated people
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in America these days tend to leanleft, and a lot of people think
it must mean that you you know, if you lean left, you're smart,
But no, that's not what itmeans. So the new study by
ACTA, which you can see atgo ACTA, g O A, c
t A dot org UH is entitledactor releases alarming new survey showing dangerous level
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of civic illiteracy among college students,Steve McGuire's vice president at ACTA. Thanks
so much for joining me in studio. Enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having
me on. Really appreciate it.