Today’s News and Observer carries a letter that takes issue with my op-ed of last Friday, wherein I suggested that whomever is chosen as the new president of the UNC system ought to be someone who a) would institute a system for attempting to evaluate the educational value added by a UNC degree and b) who is not in the thrall of the mania for diversity.

The writer says:

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“First, Leef seemed unaware that powerful new means of assessing the “value added” by a college education have been developed in recent years, including the College Learning Assessment Project of the Council for Aid to Education. A major conference on this topic was held last summer on the Blue Ridge here in North Carolina, at which it became clear that faculty of many colleges, public and private, are taking the lead in using such assessment methods to improve student learning.”

But the writer seems to confuse holding a conference on this or “taking the lead” and actually doing it. Whether the College Learning Assessment Project would be good I don’t know, but my point was that the new UNC president should do something along these lines. That isn’t happening currently

“Second, Leef dismissed the educational importance of efforts to achieve greater diversity on campuses. But studies by William Bowen of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and others have amply demonstrated the contribution that well-devised efforts for diversity can makes to the education of all students. Diversity is by no means “entirely irrelevant” to excellence in higher education.”

Sorry, but the Bowen research has been smashed to smithereens by many scholars, among them Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in their UCLA Law Review article “Reflections on the Shape of the River” (June, 1999). As for the notion that it is educationally good for all students to have a more “diverse” campus — the defense that the Univ. of Michigan put up in Grutter v. Bollinger — that too has been shredded. The “research” that supposedly proved the point has been subjected to overwhelming criticism.

“I trust that the new president of UNC will be aware of the good work that is being done in these and other areas, and use it to good advantage in advancing the education of North Carolina students.”

W. Robert Connor

Hillsborough

(The writer, president of the Teagle Foundation, is a former director of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park.)

Anybody know what the Teagle Foundation is?

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