What if we hired college professors based on their SAT scores?
George Leef just turned up at National Review pushing this very dumb idea. Leef is the director of editorial content at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and if you want to know where he's coming from, the first sentence of his NR piece gives us a hint.
The diversity mania that has swept over American education for the last 50 years or so has had a malign effect on the quality of professors. Many of those hired to fill quotas for certain groups are, to be blunt, not especially qualified. Moreover, such hiring violates the law against discrimination.
Thing is, we could dismiss Leef as one right winger with a dumb idea, but it's not just Leef's personal individual dumb idea. Let's trace it. He's referencing a piece by David Randall published at Leef's own shop, "It's time to mandate merit." Randall is the executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars, and what he is pushing is their model bill, the Faculty Merit Act. Which is a dumb bill.
Who are these people?
The National Association of Scholars is a long-standing right wing outfit that was culture panicking before it was cool. They were founded in 1987 to preserve the "Western intellectual heritage" and "to confront the rise of campus political correctness," originally called Campus Coalition for Democracy. They get funding from all the usuals-- Alliance Defending Freedom, Bradley, Koch, Scaife, Olin, etc etc etc. Founder and long time president was Stephen Balch, who has made a career out of operating in these Let's Make Colleges Not Liberal circles. Current president Peter Wyatt Wood is a regular columnist for National Review.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Reagan adviser, has been in the group, as has Chester Finn. Go figure.
Leef's opening idea-- that a lefty education ideas like multiculturalism, gender studies and affirmative action are 1960s radical notions that caused institutions like universities to become a threat to Western civilization and general white conservatism-- that's a long-standing belief of NAS, periodically updated to include CRT and DEI. NAS has launched a variety of battles to oppose things like the AP History framework and anything DEI-ish and climate change talk. They often worm their way into state level stuff, like back in 2001 when they tried to commandeer Colorado's teacher training system.
In 2022, NAS decided to launch a whole new initiative under the heading of Civics Alliance, an attempt to ride the wave of culture panic into some new controls that included a variety of pre-fab policies for new board members who wanted to make sure that White kids weren't being discriminated against.
Their mission statement manages to squeeze a whole lot of right wing alarm bells into one paragraph:
We oppose all racism and support traditional American pluralism, e pluribus unum—out of many, one. These beliefs are not those of the radical New Civics activists, which espouse identity politics with overlapping ideologies of critical race theory, multiculturalism, and so-called “antiracism.” Unfortunately, these dogmas would ruin our country by destroying our unity, our liberty, and the national culture that sustains them. They have replaced traditional civics, where historical dates and documents are taught, with a New Civics based on the new tribalism of identity politics. Their favored pedagogy is service-learning, alternately called action civics, civic engagement, civic learning, community engagement, project-based civics, and global civics. These all replace civics literacy with a form of left-wing activism that adapts techniques from Alinsky-style community organizing for use in the classroom.
Well-meaning folks, they warn, might adopt the new wolves in sheep's clothing, but "Well-intentioned reformers must not collaborate with those promoting an ideology that would destroy America."
Civics Alliance drew a real crowd to sign off on their We Want letter-- folks from the Claremont Institute, Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Great Hearts Institute for Education, Heartland Institute,
The Federalist, Eagle Forum. And plenty of familiar names. Jeremy Tate (Classical Learning Test), Sandra Stotsky, Chris Rufo, Nicole Neily (Parents Defending Education), Katharin Gorka, Max Eden, our old friend Rebecca Friedrichs, and of course George Leef. And that doesn't even scratch the surface.
What does the proposed bill actually say?
CA appears to have set itself out to be a source of model legislation and policy, so the Faculty Merit Act is just one among many others, like the Campus Intellectual Diversity Act and the Human Nature Act (an anti-LGBTQ bill).
The introduction of the bill re-asserts that administrator and faculty hiring is rife with political discrimination in hiring, which is itself just a "fig leaf" for discrimination by race and sex. "Faculty merit has declined precipitously as a result." It varies by discipline, of course-- "the average professor of ethnic studies is as acute as the average professor of physics."
How are we to turn back this tide of affirmative action mediocrity in hiring for college professors? Clearly, the solution is standardized testing.
Our model Faculty Merit Act promotes academic transparency by requiring all parts of a state university system to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position, of every applicant selected for a first interview, and every applicant selected for a final interview. The Act also requires the university to post the average standardized test score of the faculty in every department.
Yes, the best way to judge that 30-year old aspiring political science professor is to look at the scores from the test they took when they were 17. This is such a dumb idea, and the creators of this dumb bill almost admit it.
A standardized test is only a rough proxy for academic merit—especially as the College Board has weakened its tests. Some professors will have a greater ability to teach and do research than appears on a SAT score. But standardized tests do provide some measure of general intelligence.
Do they? Do they really? Because the SATs offer roughly zero measure of teaching and researching skill. In his article, Randall argues
a standardized test score isn’t a bad proxy for student merit in undergraduate admissions, and it isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit in the hiring process. If the public and policymakers can see that a faculty search had 300 applicants, that the standardized test scores dropped during each round of the selection process, and that the person who got the job had a lower SAT score than 290 other applicants, then they can see that something is wrong.
Will they? Because I'm pretty sure that a standardized test score is a terrible proxy for faculty merit. Leef quotes this same section and follows it with "This is a very good idea." No, this is a very dumb idea. But the second part really captures the real intent of the policy, which is to get the public riled up against these slacker liberal professors who, these guys are certain, have terrible test scores. Says the bill language:
The public also will learn something by comparing the average standardized test score of different departments. If Ethnic Studies professors have standardized test scores two standardized deviations below those of physics professors, then the public will have better means to assess the claims of the professoriate to intellectual capacity that merits public deference.
In other words, we have a list here of departments that we think shouldn't exist, and we feel certain that the professors in these departments tanked their SAT scores back in the day, so if we can publish the proof of their intellectual ineptitude, we could erode the support that would keep us from axing them. Also, and "perhaps most importantly," it would provide statistical information that guys who didn't get that job could use to sue the school.
The actual list of retired scores included in the bill is the ACT, the Classic Learning Test, the Law School Admissions Test, the Medical College Admissions Test, the Graduate Record Examinations, and the SAT. Also, the school has to swear they coughed up all the applicable scores or they will be subject to charges of perjury. The language of the bill hits all the particulars of the ideas covered above.
The whole exercise takes me back to the early days of the Big Standardized Test, when reformsters were just so certain that they knew about the Trouble With K-12 Education and that test results would provide the biggest lid-blowing digitized Gotcha ever. NAS/CA are already certain that all those damn squishy liberal non-white hires are a pack of inferiors who need to have their inferiority stripped naked to the world so that public opinion can chase them away from the University.
That's not a particularly admirable goal, but really, the whole proposal is a just a dumb idea. The notion that an SAT score makes a major statement about someone's merit, especially years and years later is just bizarre. "Well, Dr. Wisdompants, we're sure your PhD work is fine and all, and your work as a graduate teaching assistant is swell, along with these letters of recommendation from you last teaching positions-- that's all well and good, but what we really want to see is your SAT scores."
Or maybe they're picking up on student conversations. "Yes, Professor Bigbrains runs a good class, and I am learning like crazy in there. The professor really knows the field and really knows how to make it understandable to us. But damn-- have you seen their SAT scores??!!"
The Faculty Merit Act is just dumb. It's a dumb idea that wants to turn dumb policy into a dumb law and some National Review editor should feel dumb for giving it any space. If this dumb bill shows its face in your state, do be sure to call out its dumbness and note that whoever attached their name to it is just not a serious person.
