SLACKING: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation By Adam Kissel, et al

SLACKING

A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation

By Adam Kissel

Prestige no longer ensures substance at Ivy League schools; students must navigate a maze of shallow, politicized courses to uncover the rare gems of a classical education, exposing the need for academic renewal.

With all the news about the Trump administration defunding Ivy League schools like Harvard and Columbia, visiting fellow for higher education reform at The Heritage Foundation Adam Kissel and other scholars have released a new book, SLACKING: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation, which proves that Ivy League universities can no longer be trusted to produce well-educated students. Even a cursory review of the course titles at top schools shows that these $320,000-plus diplomas may confer legacy prestige to graduates, but not necessarily knowledge or wisdom. 

At Cornell, for example, students can take "courses" such as Queer Girlhood, Beyoncé Nation, and Intersectional Disability Studies. The course list at Yale includes Pop Sapphism and Comparative Settler Geographies. At Princeton, a course entirely on shoes. Penn offers Reality TV and Gender and also Decolonizing French Food. What's so tragic about these offerings is that these courses actually fulfill general education requirements. 

In SLACKING, you'll learn:

·    Ivy League colleges can no longer be trusted to produce well-educated students.

·    The core courses in the general education curriculum are often biased, woke, narrow, frivolous, question-begging, or self-indulgent.

·    The question a generation ago was, "Do colleges still require Shakespeare, American history, and Western Civ?" Today, the question is whether they offer any good courses in these areas. (The answer: barely.)

·    The problem is almost all in the humanities and social sciences, not STEM ... but there's one big exception at Cornell.

·    The worst "slacker" courses all meet general education requirements, producing miseducation at the core of a bachelor's degree.

·    A great education is still possible in the Ivies if you know what to look for. Start with recognizable authors other than Karl Marx and consider whether the course offers "the best that has been thought and said in the world."

In SLACKING, Adam Kissel and his colleagues offer a solution. In this valuable book, they dedicate one chapter to each Ivy League college, providing specific information about the coursework that serious students should pursue to extract a real education from these decaying institutions. Every chapter concludes with two course lists, both of which meet the school's general education requirements. One displays the worst collection of courses that an inveterate "slacker" could take to skate through the requirements for entertainment, reinforcement of political biases, and narrow specialization. The other lists the best choice of courses a dedicated striver could take to acquire a well-rounded, content-rich liberal education. The contrast between the two sounds a rousing alarm bell for curriculum reform at America's best-known colleges.

SLACKING proves that it is still possible to earn a great education at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, or Dartmouth, but doing so requires prudence and persistence. 

"This book is a banquet of the absurdities that Ivy League universities serve up to their students under the rubric of general education. Anyone who wonders how the graduates of America’s elite institutions come by their jaundiced view of our country should start here. The few who refuse to 'slack' are limited to the hard sciences and the few remaining excellent courses in the humanities." --Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Kissel is a visiting fellow for higher education reform in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. He is a board member of the University of West Florida, Southern Wesleyan University, and the National Association of Scholars. He also serves on the America 250 Advisory Council on Civics, History, and America's Future. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard, he served in the first Trump administration as deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs.