Peter Wood offers thoughts on master narratives, higher education, and the age of Obama:

Congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama. The National Association of Scholars looks forward to working with your administration to improve American higher education.

We expect we will differ with you on some points, but on one essential point we sense common ground. You understand the profound importance of higher education. And your election underscores that the ideas and attitudes fostered by the academy have consequences for the larger culture. So too the pattern of motivation laid down in years of schooling and the view of the world that comes to seem compellingly true because it is backed by both intellectual authority and shared experience.

We have long been critical of the widespread failure to realize the deep significance of what happens in higher education among those who give lip service to traditional values. It is too soon to know whether this election cycle will shake tendencies to trivialize the importance of those years in the lives of young men and women when they first encounter thoughtful discourse about the nature of human society, but a reassessment is certainly overdue. For many students, college sets in place their sense of what the larger world is really like. They have the opportunity to examine--critically--matters that at earlier stages of their lies seemed simply true and in need of no argument. It is the time and place in the lives of many when they decide once and for all which of the great narratives will be their own.

Will it be the diversity narrative? That's the one that emphasizes that who we are most fundamentally depends on our race, ethnicity, gender, and that our nation's history is mainly a matter of identity groups overcoming their oppression. Will it be the cosmopolitan narrative? That's the one that emphasizes a personal liberation from the small-minded, parochial views of our natal communities, and one's new identity as a "citizen of the world." Contemporary college life offers several other great narratives. Sustainability is the newest. That's the one in which we find our life's work in forestalling the impending ruination of earth caused by the heedless exploitation of the older generations.

Somewhere far down the list of possibilities is the narrative that emphasizes the exceptional nature of American society and its radical break with prior human history in developing institutions that foster personal freedom. Today, the main role played by this great narrative is to be the foil to the others. The diversity narrative mocks it as a lie intended to disguise centuries of group oppression. The cosmopolitan narrative smiles derisively at its naive simplicity. The sustainability narrative groans in embarrassment that such profligate freedom could ever have been unleashed to cut down forests, plow the long-grass prairie, and pollute the waters and skies.

Wood is particularly smart on this last point:

A year ago, two professors at a Harvard symposium presented data they said showed that most professors are actually moderate. (NAS president Steve Balch raised an eyebrow at their methods.) The University System of Georgia released a study in August that purported to show that students see little bias in class. (I found fault with that study.) A new book, Closed Minds? by three George Mason professors argues that campuses are not "saturated by politics" at all; rather professors shy away from political controversy. (NAS's Glenn Ricketts has doubts.) This week New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen took notice of the George Mason book and other research to argue the case that the faculty, though overwhelmingly liberal, don't force their views on students.

I've never thought "indoctrinate" was the right word for the transmission of values and worldview that occurs on campus. Although there are plenty of professors who are eager to persuade students of the merits of their own political outlook and are willing to transgress the traditional boundary between instruction and advocacy, the real issue is not so much the pontificating professor as it is the campus as a self-enclosed social world in which some narratives have high status. The student eager to show that he or she "gets it" and isn't some sort of clueless dolt adopts the postures that need to be adopted.

We could say these are just postures destined to be as readily discarded as they were donned. We could say that, but then we have to think about why it is that students in large numbers aren't learning that diffuse range of intellectual and social skills that were once synonymous with earning a college degree.

To do so, we need to weigh such factors as the abandonment of a coherent curriculum in most colleges and universities in favor of the current mishmash of aimless majors, identity group studies, and nonce courses. This amorphous curriculum is not a happenstance of history or the marketplace. It was a central demand of the academic left as it as took power in the humanities and social sciences. If students don't know much about the larger narratives of western or American history, this is the fundamental reason. If their grasp of philosophy, literature, and science is refracted through identity politics, that is likewise the result of what the NAS has called the dissolution of general education. ("I studied African philosophy, gay literature, and the exclusion of women from science.")

But it is more than just entropy in the curriculum that leaves students indifferent to that range of intellectual and social skills that were once the prized distillation of a liberal education. It is rather the dimming of desire for such achievement.