Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2017, 05:42:41 AM
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POTH asserts research challenges vouchers:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/upshot/dismal-results-from-vouchers-surprise-researchers-as-devos-era-begins.html?mc=aud_dev&mcid=fb-nytimes&mccr=MarchHighADLowMC&mcdt=2017-03&subid=MarchHighADLowMC&ad-keywords=AudDevGate&_r=0&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2F
I have yet to see this challenged.
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Page nine of the article offers potential explanations of the unexpected outcome.
Such as the private schools that accepted the students may not have been the better ones or they did not have time to adjust to state required measurement standards.
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https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/us-secretary-education-betsy-devos-prepared-remarks-brookings-institution
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/theres-one-thing-worse-than-paying-bad-teachers-not-to-work-1518219111
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http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education-credentials-20180211-story.html
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/world/europe/britain-playgrounds-risk.html?emc=edit_th_180311&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=496411930311
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/world/europe/britain-playgrounds-risk.html?emc=edit_th_180311&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=496411930311
I thought it was an article about their Muslim immigration policy.
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I don't really like this idea
The burden is still on the Fed government and not where it should be - > reducing the expanding cost of higher education in MHO
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/a-solution-to-the-student-debt-and-social-security-crises/
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Gutless profs. that are evaluated in the light of student feedback and that don't want to tangle with DEI whiners accusing them of some flavor of DEI transgression address these concerns by ... tucking tail and awarding A's to almost everyone. One irony is that a Harvard A is devolving into a 3 tier, A+, A, A-, de facto scale, albeit one who's lines must be read between and which, I suppose, make a B the new D.
https://jonathanturley.org/2023/10/12/the-incredibles-roughly-80-percent-of-grades-given-at-harvard-are-as/?fbclid=IwAR2Huu6mrqGJlh_dw6TF_AAzhNNlyjkbeLzuF82Xa4XB32RSEZHuS9vU9qQ
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https://americanwirenews.com/harvard-takes-another-big-blow-israeli-billionaire-and-wife-resign-from-executive-board/?utm_campaign=james&utm_content=10%2F13%2F23%20SOE%20PM&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=Get%20response&utm_term=email
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2nd post shared here per Crafty. Schools with diversity officers fare worse with minority students than ones without:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/10/13/think-diversity-officers-help-minority-students-guess-again-n1734812
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BTW BBG, props for resurrecting this thread, which I see lay fallow since 2018 until you resurrected it.
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… until they do:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/morgan-state-university-to-build-a-wall-around-campus-to-keep-out-bad-actors/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=morgan-state-university-to-build-a-wall-around-campus-to-keep-out-bad-actors
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… until they do:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/morgan-state-university-to-build-a-wall-around-campus-to-keep-out-bad-actors/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=morgan-state-university-to-build-a-wall-around-campus-to-keep-out-bad-actors
Good point on the wall hypocrisy.
Also, sad what has happened to Baltimore.
From the article:
"While the university is now building walls to keep some outsiders from entering the facility, it previously celebrated the tearing down of a wall once meant to divide the black university from the surrunding white neighbors."
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… until they do:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/morgan-state-university-to-build-a-wall-around-campus-to-keep-out-bad-actors/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=morgan-state-university-to-build-a-wall-around-campus-to-keep-out-bad-actors
Good point on the wall hypocrisy.
Also, sad what has happened to Baltimore.
From the article:
"While the university is now building walls to keep some outsiders from entering the facility, it previously celebrated the tearing down of a wall once meant to divide the black university from the surrunding white neighbors."
My wife has arcane eye issues that take us to Wilmer Eye Clinic, one of the best in the world. Alas, it’s in B-more & MD makes it difficult for non-residents to get a carry permit and disallows carry at John’s Hopkins and its clinics. It’s a depressing town; we often exit out its west side, which is a freaking run down ghost town.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/harvard-gets-more-bad-news-as-another-billionaire-cuts-ties-over-pro-hamas-remarks-5511255?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2023-10-17&src_cmp=gv-2023-10-17&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=Goodevening&est=C%2BV1P0plk9YCqpCv1S9%2Bx%2FODHI6sGkovOVgDjiN9lnYYpxX3mo6OzZbZ0eOEtqWAmMqr
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“From the river to the sea….”
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1715053793237250439?fbclid=IwAR0Yi9yVPq1yJZ0jObkPpZDNM-H0d1SqRx6AH4tmY0kRvcTPdZSUeHfzPdE
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What can’t be sustained won’t:
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2023/10/19/academia-needs-to-go-extinct-n2629986?fbclid=IwAR0IC1Hlo7tCh2WsxViX1X87S4zYAV4MSdxYcd-G-ijWaJNqfeCdTjwQhxw#google_vignette
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Third post.
Always amuses me: some corporation pays a speaking fee to someone that expresses a heterodox opinion and those on the left will claim the speaker’s soul has been bought and paid for. Donate billions to a left wing cause? Oh my dear no, it impacts nothing at all and is only used for noble and sweet purposes because that’s the type of people they are. Oh, and death to Zionists!
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=24195
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Hamas War Shows Us What American Universities Stand For
Some students celebrate and many presidents equivocate. No wonder trust in higher ed is down.
Jason L. Riley
By
Jason L. Riley
Follow
Oct. 17, 2023 6:15 pm ET
According to a Gallup survey published in July, public confidence in the usefulness of a college education has been in something of a free fall for most of the past decade. In 2015, 57% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher ed. Today, that’s down to 36%.
Moreover, trust in college has fallen broadly. It’s down among men and women, among Democrats and Republicans, and among people with and without a college degree. The cost of attending college, which rose by 169% between 1980 and 2020, according to a Georgetown study, surely is a major factor in this trend. But so are radical campus politics, such as those displayed at some of our most prestigious institutions of learning since Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel earlier this month.
The Israeli civilians who were abducted, tortured and killed—including women, children and senior citizens—weren’t bystanders caught in the crossfire. They were the intended targets. Entire families were executed in their homes. NBC News reported that documents recovered from the bodies of terrorists mapped the locations of elementary schools and youth centers and instructed the gunmen to “kill as many as possible” and “capture hostages.” Denouncing the perpetrators of these wicked acts shouldn’t be difficult, yet the response on too many campuses has been to fault Israel for the atrocities or to equivocate.
A coalition of more than 30 left-wing student groups at Harvard issued an open letter stating that the Israeli “regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” It has taken Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, three tries (and counting) to issue a statement distancing the administration from the letter and making it clear that the university condemns the terrorist attacks. Worse, Ms. Gay acted only after being pressured to do so by former Harvard president Larry Summers and some of the school’s biggest donors.
University of Pennsylvania president M. Elizabeth Magill likewise needed multiple attempts to issue a forceful statement on the terror attacks. She, too, found her moral compass only after megadonors to Penn said they were closing their checkbooks and urging other philanthropists to do the same. “In an updated statement following the backlash, Magill condemned Hamas, and emphasized the University’s position on anti-Semitism,” the Daily Mail reported. “She referred to the violence from Hamas as a ‘terrorist assault,’ a change from her initial statement.”
If your school is so ethically adrift that it needs to emphasize its position on anti-Semitism, something is very wrong. And if Americans increasingly are hesitant to leave impressionable youths in the care of institutions run by people who have trouble rebuking openly genocidal terror campaigns, who can blame them?
Hamas has never hidden its intentions. It is an Islamist organization dedicated to eradicating Israel by killing the Jewish people who live there. Hamas isn’t interested in a “two-state solution” or any other compromise. Its objective, stated explicitly in its founding documents, is the annihilation of the Jewish state. Period.
Ben Sasse, president of the University of Florida, takes Hamas at its word and was one of the few college leaders who was unequivocal in his response to the attacks: “I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard,” he wrote. Apparently, however, calling out evil is harder than you might think, not only for administrators and students but also for faculty members.
A Cornell history professor appearing at a pro-Palestinian rally this week referred to Hamas’s butchery as “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Columbia political scientist Joseph Massad described the attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,400 people, including at least 30 U.S. citizens, as “awesome” and a “major achievement of the resistance.” And CNN reports that a Stanford instructor was suspended after students reported that he singled out Jews in his class by asking them to raise their hands, accused them of being “colonizers,” and played down the significance of the Holocaust’s body count.
Academia has been an incubator of leftist causes going back at least as far as the 1960s. Since that time, however, double standards have proliferated in admissions and faculty hiring. Ideology has become more important than scholarship, and political correctness dominates decision-making to the point that calling an act of terror an act of terror is to risk upsetting significant numbers of students and faculty. Many administrators are captive to those on campus who believe that higher education is about indoctrination and thought control rather than open inquiry, civil engagement and the rational examination of competing viewpoints.
The old joke among college presidents is that A students become their professors, while C students become their donors. We’re starting to see some donors throw their weight around. Let’s hope it continues.
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second
https://nypost.com/2023/09/23/students-at-40-of-baltimore-high-schools-failed-math-proficiency-exam/?fbclid=IwAR1lqgEtUpeObaaUzmTcJUrBDP40yl0Z-Jl3f5ZEssh-Lmv4RYutHD6Rx8E
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-universities-in-connecticut/
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Kinda wish the Progressives of yore that used to be found around here were available to explain the regressive, contradictory embrace of Hamas our kind and gentle—when not mostly peacefully rioting—moral superiors have more than flirted with over the past couple weeks if not longer. I mean hell’s bells, an ascendant Hamas would reward intersectional embrace with a bullet to the back of the head if they were feeling magnanimous that day, or with the rape/torture/abased and painful murder recently on full display were they feeling a wee bit miffed instead. The fact so many supposed Progressives can’t see how poorly they serve their cause by holding hands and skipping with Hamas while remaining utterly oblivious to the fate they’d endure were they to outlive their useful idiocy and land in Islamofascist hands never ceases to amaze.
As that may be, here’s a more fully developed exploration of this theme from the WSJ.
War Destroys Leftist Orthodoxies
Those defending Hamas in the name of anticolonialism are being discredited.
Wars are times of transition, when old ideologies are discredited: slavery, isolationism, appeasement, socialism. Now, like the 1,200 health professionals who claimed during 2020’s protests and riots that racism was a bigger health concern than Covid, another set of progressives touting tired orthodoxies are being discredited before our eyes.
After Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians, a director of diversity and inclusion at Cornell’s business school glorified terrorism, writing about “the resistance being launched by Palestinians.” Remind me why we have DEI departments? At Harvard more than 30 students groups signed a letter claiming Israel was “the only one to blame.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is worried about “the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” Twitter is littered with tweets saying “this is decolonization in action.” All these support an oppression narrative.
Where did these people get such ideas? The universities. Here’s an introductory-level EMR (Ethnicity, Migration, Rights) class at Harvard: “Global Rebellion: Race, Solidarity, and Decolonization.” The course discusses how “to rebel against global white supremacy.” I found similar courses at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke and other top schools. Another Harvard colonialism course studies “decoloniality”—which sounds like a made-up academic term that turns out to involve “anti-oppression” and “de-Westernizing.” Notice how so many grievances mimic Marxist class struggles. Why does radicalizing and dividing students over identity take precedence over, well, real inclusion?
The attacks were “in light of the orgy of occupation.” Those are the words of Mohammed Deif, military commander of Hamas. Iran’s (drone-stricken) Gen. Qassem Soleimani included Hamas in the “Axis of Resistance.” The United Nations has a Special Committee on Decolonization. Sound familiar? Occupation, resistance, decolonization—progressive talking points all.
The economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1947 that the Soviet’s agenda was aided by korisne budale—useful fools, which has since morphed into “useful idiots.” While an overused expression, it fits this time. Those speaking of occupation, resistance and decolonizing are pure and simple useful idiots for terrorism, running interference and providing a rationale for depraved behavior. These witless nitwits have also aided Iran’s attempt to stop Saudi Arabia from joining the Abraham Accords. While many university presidents have since come out against the barbaric attacks, the damage has been done. A Great Discrediting has begun.
Jon Huntsman Jr., a former ambassador to China, emailed the University of Pennsylvania’s president saying his family foundation will “close its checkbook” based on Penn’s “moral relativism” and “race to the bottom.” I’ve heard of alumni of Harvard and elsewhere mailing $1 bills to their alma maters—as in, “That is all you’re going to get.” Hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman asked Harvard for the names of terrorist supporters so his firm could avoid hiring them. Boston University last month had an anti-antiracist backlash. “Defund the police” is becoming a distant memory.
Why, in a since deleted tweet, did Black Lives Matters Chicago promote a picture of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag? Probably because of the group’s misplaced belief in “intersectionality,” which means that progressives gleefully agree with everything seen through that Marxist oppressor lens. This includes phrases like “open-air prison” describing the Gaza Strip, forgetting that Hamas has run the place since 2007. This lens conveniently ignores real human-rights abuses around the world, including in many Mideast countries, and instead targets successful democratic capitalism.
You could cut the hypocrisy with a knife. Progressives use the technology produced by capitalism to call it evil. Feminists side with countries that force women to wear head coverings. Many Middle Eastern countries aren’t known for tolerance, and in some places gay people are tossed from rooftops. But intersectionality demands conformity of thought. Add to this that crypto enthusiasts have been silent on jihadists’ financing terror through $93 million in cryptocurrencies. Even Sen. Elizabeth Warren is upset about that. The intersectional cracks are widening.
The knee-jerk cheerleading of terrorist acts, along with the bankruptcy of many antidemocratic and anticapitalist beliefs, is why a progressive schism is growing. Long-held views are being questioned. Pompous progressive pieties are dying. It’s about time. This is how ideologies land on the ash heap of history.
I was on a Zoom call last week getting updates from a venture-capital friend in Israel. Halfway through, I saw an arm reach in and tap him. He stood up and hugged his son, who came to say goodbye because his reserve unit had been called up. I held it together long enough to tell the soldier to be safe. Is he part of the last line of defense against terrorism? Beyond railing against occupation, Hamas’s Mr. Deif also declared, “in light of American and Western support . . . we’ve decided to put an end to all this.” He may get his wish, though probably not as he intended.
Write to kessler@wsj.com.
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https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1716663869861507283.html?fbclid=IwAR3WTeliQZvOqlzXNoeuYsrIdMxXt6KymVPw20aeG4Xmi0P0fBCDBld0iJc
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https://nypost.com/2023/10/30/metro/columbia-professors-sign-letter-defending-students-who-supported-hamas-military-action/?fbclid=IwAR11cfKDiU_LKZXoBEsWedF2jHARImgUCLjKGdBowyWBfd6PIO1ux2TfHdo
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This could be dropped several places such as Medical Fascism due to the Covid link or Dissonance of the Left due to teacher’s unions supporting suspending school, but suspect it lives best here.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/teachers-across-the-country-warn-that-students-are-not-performing-at-grade-level/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=teachers-across-the-country-warn-that-students-are-not-performing-at-grade-level
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/406875.php
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Will Judges Kill School Choice in Wisconsin?
Progressives tee up a case for the state Supreme Court’s new majority.
By
The Editorial Board
Follow
Nov. 5, 2023 4:12 pm ET
When progressives took control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court with the election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz in April, they began lining up petitions to overturn policies they dislike. One of the first targets is Wisconsin’s school-choice program, which gives more than 50,000 children the chance at a better education.
According to the lawsuit, funded by the progressive Minocqua Brewing Company SuperPac, Wisconsin’s choice program violates the state’s requirement that public funds be used for “public purposes.” The petition for original action at the state Supreme Court calls school choice a “cancer” and a “predatory scheme” and says the state Legislature “has been attacking Wisconsin’s public schools under the guise of providing school choice for over a decade.”
The public purpose argument was litigated in the 1990s and rejected by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in Davis v. Grover in 1992. That court wrote that “education constitutes a valid public purpose” and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program at issue in the suit “contains sufficient and reasonable controls to attain its public purpose.” Lawyers call that settled precedent.
Plaintiffs also argue that school vouchers and charter schools siphon money from districts and thus violate the state’s uniform taxation clause. But the voucher money that moves with students is known as “equalization aid.” This is money from state general revenue to “top up” funding to districts that get less money from local property taxes.
This should be an easy case, but the new 4-3 progressive majority on the Court is cause for worry. If the lawsuit is successful, it could end school choice in Wisconsin without a possibility of appeal because the case is based on state law claims. The result would mean upheaval for 29,000 children in Milwaukee’s voucher program, 4,000 in Racine and 19,000 in the rest of the state. Judges call that a “reliance” interest to consider carefully when considering a precedent.
The Milwaukee and Racine choice programs are means-tested and open to children up to 300% of the federal poverty level. A family of three must earn less than $69,000 a year in Milwaukee or Racine, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, falling to some $50,000 elsewhere in the state.
Of the top 10 schools in reading proficiency in Wisconsin that largely serve low-income children, six are voucher or charter schools, according to the Institute for Reforming Government. In Milwaukee six of the top 10 low-income schools in reading are vouchers or charters.
The real power behind this case is the teachers union. Bob Baxter, executive director of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, says tests scores are a “fallacy” and that “every student that’s in a voucher school suffers.” Students who attend charters “are not learning the curriculum they need to learn in order to be a part of a democratic society,” Mr. Baxter adds. “We believe the right wing wants to crush participation in democracy.”
But the vouchers passed democratically. The real democratic issue here is whether four progressive Justices are going to trample their court’s precedent and the voters and impose their own policy preferences. That would rob poor children of better choices in favor of the unions who financed Justice Protasiewicz’s judicial campaign. Who’s anti-democratic?
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And for some crazy reason the various humanities departments in higher ed tend to only attract left leaning faculty.No way it could have anything to do with pressure like that described below, eh?
https://www.thecollegefix.com/university-broke-state-law-to-hire-black-candidate-over-more-qualified-white-one/?fbclid=IwAR0o3EYweLRhELbvNN-8h-esFQaS2A7qz1UkgDMms2QdJaJaLbFKPcrLP-s
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/jewish-professor-usc-criticized-hamas-110018138.html
but wait, Hamas are murderers who have sworn not to stop until they kill all Jews in Israel or force them out.
no difference.
moral (in)equivalence denied. All are the same - when they're not.
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Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America
Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism.
By John Ellis
Dec. 4, 2023 2:39 pm ET
America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism.
Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.
Children’s test scores have plummeted because college education departments train teachers to prioritize “social justice” over education. Censorship started with one-party campuses shutting down conservative voices. The coddling of criminals originated with academia’s devotion to Michel Foucault’s idea that criminals are victims, not victimizers. The drive to separate children from their parents begins in longstanding campus contempt for the suburban home and nuclear family. Radicalized college journalism departments promote far-left advocacy. Open borders reflect pro-globalism and anti-nation state sentiment among radical professors. DEI started as a campus ruse to justify racial quotas. Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”
Never have college campuses exerted so great or so destructive an influence. Once an indispensable support of our advanced society, academia has become a cancer metastasizing through its vital organs. The radical left is the cause, most obviously through the one-party campuses having graduated an entire generation of young Americans indoctrinated with their ideas.
And there are other ways. Academia has a monopoly on training for the most influential professions. The destructive influence of campus schools of education and journalism already noted is matched in the law, medicine, social work, etc. Academia’s suppression of the Constitution causes still more damage. Hostility to the Constitution leads to banana-republic shenanigans: suppression of antigovernment speech, the press’s acting as mouthpiece for government, law enforcement used to harass opponents of the government.
Higher education by and for political radicals was foreseen and banned by the American Association of University Professors, which in a celebrated 1915 policy statement warned teachers “against taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions.” The AAUP already understood that political indoctrination would stamp out opposing views, which means the end of rational analysis and debate, the essential core of higher education. The 1915 statement is still a recognized professional standard—except that almost everywhere it is ignored, at least until the public is looking.
Optimists see signs of hope in growing public hostility to campus foolishness, but radical control of the campuses becomes more complete every day as older professors retire and are replaced by more radicals. A bellwether: The membership of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education—which represents the enforcers of radical orthodoxy—has tripled in the past three years.
An advanced society can’t tolerate the capture of its educational system by a fringe political sect that despises its Constitution and way of life. We have no choice: We must take back control of higher education from cultural vandals who have learned nothing from the disastrous history of societies that have implemented their ideas.
How can this be done? Not by the colleges themselves, which like things as they are. Not by governing boards, which ought to safeguard academia but have never had the backbone to do it. Not by superficial reforms: Even if we defund DEI, protect visiting speakers from shout-downs and outlaw political litmus tests for professorial appointments, hordes of radical activists will still be in the classrooms, doing as much damage as ever.
Personnel is policy. Effective reform means only one thing: getting those political activists out of the classrooms and replacing them with academic thinkers and teachers. (No, that isn’t the same as replacing left with right.) Nothing less will do. Political activists have been converting money intended for higher education to an unauthorized use—advancing their goal of transforming America. That is tantamount to embezzlement. While we let it continue we are financing our own destruction as a society.
But how can we stop them? State lawmakers can condition continued funding on the legitimate use of that money and install new campus leadership mandated to replace professors who are violating the terms of their employment. Though only possible in red states, this would bring about competition between corrupt institutions and sound ones. Employers would soon notice the difference between educated and indoctrinated young people. Legislatures in Florida, Texas and North Carolina have begun to take steps to reform their universities, but only at Florida’s New College is a crucial restructuring of the faculty under way.
But the only real solution is for more Americans to grasp the depth of the problem and change their behavior accordingly. Most parents and students seem to be on autopilot: Young Jack is 18, so it’s time for college. His family still assumes that students will be taught by professors who are smart, well-informed and with broad sympathies. No longer. Professors are now predominantly closed-minded, ignorant and stupid enough to believe that Marxism works despite overwhelming historical evidence that it doesn’t. If enough parents and students gave serious thought to the question whether this ridiculous version of a college education is still worth four years of a young person’s life and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, corrupt institutions of higher education would collapse, creating the space for better ones to arise.
The biggest threat to our future isn’t climate change, China or the national debt. It is the tyrannical grip that a hopelessly corrupt higher education now has on our national life. If we don’t stop it now, it will eventually destroy the most successful society in world history.
Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.”
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12830975/harvard-claudine-gay-antisemitism-congress-testimony-bill-ackman.html
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Yaron Samid 🇮🇱🇺🇸
@yaronsamid
An American friend has an exceptionally bright son who is being courted by the top universities in the nation, including
@Harvard
This is a letter he wrote to Harvard's admissions committee in response to their having invited his son to apply:
"Dr. [Redacted] -
Thank you for inviting my son [Redacted] to apply to Harvard. He is a strong academic performer and would indeed likely perform well at your institution.
As it so happens, though, my son is Jewish. Through many, many well-documented actions and inactions, Harvard has made it clear that not only is my son not welcome on campus, but in fact would likely be in moderate personal danger. To that extent, we will most definitely not be considering sending our son to Harvard.
Your mission outlines a goal of "...educat[ing] the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society." I look forward to a day where such "education" does not include both passive and active endorsement of hatred towards anyone, including Jews.”
Expect many more of these letters until the president of @Harvard resigns or is fired and real changes are made.
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2nd post
I lived in Madison for a couple years while spouse 1.0 was in grad school—they had a self-declared communist mayor back then—and swung through the town often before then on the way up to the climbing and camping found an hour or so north of there. It’s difficult to overstate just how mind numbingly, regressively “Progressive” that town and school are (“Berkley of the Midwest”), and I confess it warms my cold heart to see the sorts of raw reality the Wisco legislature is visiting upon that ever so “politically correct” burg:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/uw-madison-employs-one-administrator-for-every-four-undergrads-analysis/?fbclid=IwAR30HCp7PEu5fctsaS2SvvcWZU5oDz-rzFagk7-HOOFP7PZ3r0Apxt0ng1o
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And a 3rd, one of the most cogent I’ve found regarding the ideological stagnation of higher ed, and the path forward in the wake of the rot Oct. 7 atrocities exposed therein:
https://lawliberty.org/addressing-the-rot-in-our-universities/
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Univ of Wisconsin - Madison
offers certifications in DEI
https://www.uwcped.org/courses-certificates/certificates/diversity-equity-inclusion-certificate?utm_source=Website&utm_medium=Partner&utm_campaign=Professional-Certificate-Diversity-Equity-Inclusion
Here is a sample of achievements and contribution to mankind:
https://diversity.wisc.edu/
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Defund the diversity police:
https://www.cato.org/blog/defund-diversity-police
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I’m sure there is no relationship between this funding and the tolerance for the pro-genocide, anti-Semitic protests so many universities host? Nah, utter coincidence….
https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1733202101897965829?fbclid=IwAR2aIWx5UY0kpUqtITnvokdPOs1rxfT31FKsdtv5l8OohJcPiKTS-8QsM4w
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https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/06/this-is-just-the-beginning-pro-palestinian-teach-in-held-at-dozens-of-oakland-schools/?utm_email=15836465257235223411B4A41B&lctg=15836465257235223411B4A41B&active=yesD&utm_source=listrak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mercurynews.com%2F2023%2F12%2F06%2Fthis-is-just-the-beginning-pro-palestinian-teach-in-held-at-dozens-of-oakland-schools%2F&utm_campaign=bang-mult-nl-weekend-morning-report-nl&utm_content=manual&fbclid=IwAR3-zGrwsKYpcLLOHp5WVqHkmC7PAuEyK32iHnAyRtNwbgkU0GwwW8txpGM
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New strains of Poison Ivy discovered:
Harvard, Yale, Penn, Princeton.
- Powerline, the week in pictures
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The Ivy League Mask Falls
Antisemitism is one example of a much deeper rot on campus.
By
The Editorial Board
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Dec. 10, 2023 5:25 pm ET
The furor over antisemitism on campus is a rare and welcome example of accountability at American universities. But it won’t amount to much if the only result is the resignation of a couple of university presidents.
The great benefit of last week’s performance by three elite-school presidents before Congress is that it tore the mask off the intellectual and political corruption of much of the American academy. The world was appalled by the equivocation of the academic leaders when asked if advocating genocide against Jews violated their codes of conduct. But the episode merely revealed the value system that has become endemic at too many prestigious schools.
The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania hid behind concerns about free speech. But as everyone paying attention knows, these schools don’t protect speech they disagree with. They punish it.
Harvard President Claudine Gay has presided over the ouster of professors for speech that violated progressive orthodoxy. As Elise Stefanik wrote on these pages on Friday, Harvard’s Title IX training says using the wrong pronouns qualifies as abuse. Harvard was 248th out of 248, and Penn was 247th, in the annual college ranking by the free-speech Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
But because Jews in Israel are seen in the progressive canon as white oppressors and colonizers, it’s not a clear campus violation to call for murdering Jews because it depends on the context.
The three presidents have apologized for or moderated their comments before Congress, but that was only after the political consequences became clear. Believe what they said the first time. That is what their institutions now stand for.
The resignations of Penn president Elizabeth Magill and board of trustees chairman Scott Bok are best understood as attempts to placate angry donors. That’s fine as far as it goes. But if the accountability ends there, nothing much will change.
The schools may attempt to mollify the fury by adding Jews to the classes deemed oppressed. That may make antisemitism less tolerated on campus. But it won’t change the deeper rot of anti-American, anti-Western instruction that dominates so many campuses. And it won’t root out the “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) policies that use race, gender and sexuality as political weapons to enforce intellectual conformity, dictate tenure decisions, and punish dissenters.
The answers must lie with boards of trustees willing to appoint presidents who will stand up to the DEI censors and require intellectual diversity among the faculty. Donors will also have to follow through on boycotting schools until they do. Too many trustees and donors are happy to settle for getting their names on buildings and their children admitted
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The willingness of academic types and the left—a distinction without a difference—to embrace double standards knows few bounds:
https://nypost.com/2023/12/12/news/harvard-secret-plagiarism-probe-into-president-claudine-gay/?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news_alert&utm_content=20231212?&utm_source=sailthru&lctg=63dbef49978d8a4241034d7e&utm_term=NYP%20-%20News%20Alerts
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Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️
@realchrisrufo
Harvard's decision is the perfect illustration of Gramsci's distinction between the "war of maneuver," in which a combatant can quickly topple a centralized, weakly structured regime, and the "war of position," in which a combatant has to wage a protracted fight against an entrenched bureaucracy that protects itself via a dispersed, hegemonic ideology.
The war of maneuver has failed, but we have exposed the ruling hegemony at Harvard. The university has sacrificed its academic integrity to retain a president who minimized genocidal rhetoric against Jews, oversaw a racist admissions system, ensnared herself in multiple bullying scandals, and plagiarized a large number of her academic papers—all because she is the corporeal representation and ideological enforcer of the DEI regime.
Now it's time for the war of position.
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This comparison is so stark it’s astounding the left is even bothering to carry water for this clown show, though I thank them for continuing to dig their way out of the hole Gay and other Ivy League presidents dug on live TV. I understand the Old Gray Hag, AKA the NYT, is arguing Gay’s plagiarism troubles are merely a misunderstanding over the proper use of quotation marks.
Oh vey….
A Tale of Two Harvard Presidents
In 2006, Harvard president Larry Summers was forced to resign.
His crime, among other things, was a speech he had given the year prior, in which he suggested that gender disparities in science and engineering might be the result of innate differences between men and women. The speech led to a furious backlash, and a no-confidence vote from Harvard faculty.
When Summers became president of Harvard in 2001, he boasted an impressive resume: He had served as the Secretary of the US Treasury, chief economist at the World Bank, and the youngest-ever Harvard economics professor to achieve tenure.
He had published six books and well over 100 academic articles. None of his work had ever been accused of plagiarism.
Fast forward to 2022: Harvard appoints Claudine Gay to serve as its newest president.
At the time, Gay had published a career total of 11 academic articles. For context, Summers published more than that in the single year of 1987.
Gay had never published an academic book. As David Randall of @NASorg noted when she was appointed, "very few professors can even get tenure with so thin a publication record — absent the tailwind from [diversity] quotas."
But Gay was able to ascend to the most prestigious position at the most prestigious university in the world.
Now, thanks to the reporting of @realchrisrufo and @realChrisBrunet, we know that Gay's anemic academic output wasn't even all hers. She lifted entire paragraphs of her work from other authors, without proper attribution.
As we saw with Larry Summers, Harvard presidents have been ousted for far less. But in spite of all that, the Harvard board is unanimously standing by Gay — and the legacy media is circling the wagons.
This is business as usual for modern academia: Political favoritism, racial preferences, and corrupt self-dealing. It's a racket. And if the polls are any indication, Americans are finally beginning to realize as much.
https://x.com/njhochman/status/1735046362331537422?s=12
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" This is business as usual for modern academia: Political favoritism, racial preferences, and corrupt self-dealing. It's a racket. And if the polls are any indication, Americans are finally beginning to realize as much."
reminds me of when I did Ebola screenings for the CDC at Newark NJ international airport.
I had training which included using Federal computer. I posted here at the time how I was clearly and repeatedly advised that any tampering with device, alteration, copying is a Federal crime with penalties of heavy fines and jail time.
This was even a question on this point on post training test.
Then we proceed to see Hillary Clinton store emails on a computer in set up in a bathroom in Nevada (?)
and later have them destroyed and then hear the FBI director tell us no prosecutor would bother to pursue such a case.
Total BS.
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Cambridge, Mass.
I was in Boston last weekend for the Army-Navy game. The day after the game, five days after Harvard President Claudine Gay’s disastrous testimony before Congress, I decided to walk the campus to reminisce about my time at Harvard, where I earned my undergraduate degree in 1987, and reflect about what had gone wrong at this once-great university.
OPINION: FREE EXPRESSION
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Time to Cancel Campus Extremism
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I visited places that held significance to me while I was there: St. Paul’s Catholic Church, my freshman dorm and, of course, Widener Library—a monument to learning, study and contemplation that sits like a temple in the middle of Harvard Yard.
As I did during my undergraduate years, I spent several minutes staring up at the powerful mural by John Singer Sargent, “Death and Victory.” It’s one of two Sargent paintings memorializing the men of Harvard who sacrificed their lives for our country in World War I. I’ve thought about the painting often throughout the years—including when I made the decision to join the Marine Corps.
When I walked upstairs to the famous Widener Reading Room, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Nearly every student in the packed room was wearing a kaffiyeh. Fliers attached to their individual laptops, as well as affixed to some of the lamps in the reading room, read: “No Normalcy During Genocide—Justice for Palestine.” A young woman handed the fliers to all who entered. A large banner spread across one end of the room stated in blazing blood-red letters, “Stop the Genocide in Gaza.”
Curious about what was going on, I was soon in a cordial discussion with two of the organizers of this anti-Israel protest inside of one the world’s great libraries—not outside in Harvard Yard, where such protests belong. They told me they were from Saudi Arabia and the West Bank. I told them I was a U.S. senator who had recently returned from a bipartisan Senate trip to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I mentioned the meetings I had. I expressed my condolences when they told me their relatives had been killed by Israeli military action in Gaza.
One then asked whether I supported a cease-fire in Gaza. I said I didn’t, because I strongly believe Israel had the right both to defend itself and to destroy Hamas given the horrendous attacks it perpetrated against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.
Their tone immediately changed. “You’re a murderer,” one said. “You support genocide,” said the other.
“Excuse me, what did you say?” I asked in disbelief.
They repeated their outrageous charges. I tried to debate them, noting the Israel Defense Forces don’t target civilians, and that the only group attempting to carry out genocide is Hamas. But civil debate with these women was pointless. As I was leaving Widener Library, they pulled out their iPhones and continued taunting: “Do you support genocide? Do you support genocide?” The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee posted some of this exchange on Instagram.
As a U.S. senator who has been through two election campaigns, I’ve had plenty of iPhones aggressively shoved in my face by members of radical groups. Nevertheless, I was shocked and, again, ashamed of my alma mater. All of this—the anti-Israel protests, the big banner, the fliers, the iPhones, the taunting questions—took place inside the Widener Library, a revered place of quiet study for tens of thousands of Harvard students and alumni.
My thoughts then turned to Harvard undergrads. Imagine if you were an 18-year-old Jewish or Israeli student, or even a pro-Israel Catholic like me, and you wanted to study for your chemistry final in the Widener Reading Room on a Sunday morning. Imagine being confronted by this protest, obviously condoned by Harvard’s leadership and commandeered by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the group behind the notorious statement that holds “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.
Would you feel welcome in Harvard’s most famous library? Would you feel rattled, intimidated and harassed by the anti-Israel banner screaming “Stop the Genocide in Gaza”? As Jason Riley has written, “If accusing Israel of genocide isn’t defamation of Jewish people, I don’t know what is.” If you were that 18-year-old student, would you believe the vacuous statement recently put out by the Harvard Corp., after it decided not to fire Ms. Gay, that “disruptions of the classroom experience will not be tolerated”?
If students were handing out fliers and hanging large banners in the Widener Library Reading Room denouncing, say, affirmative action or NCAA rules allowing men to compete in women’s swim meets, Harvard leaders would shut them down in a minute. But an anti-Israel protest by an antisemitic group, commandeering the entire Widener Reading Room during finals? No problem.
Is that what Ms. Gay meant when she testified that “it depends on the context”?
Not all university leadership is so craven, morally bankrupt and afraid of the most vocal, radical sects of their own student bodies. I serve on the board of visitors for the U.S. Naval Academy, which is the No. 1 public university in America. The contrast couldn’t be starker between the service academies and the Ivy League on issues like civil discourse, so-called safe spaces, trigger warnings, American history and our unique and, yes, exceptional place in the world.
America’s so-called elite universities used to be a positive source of our nation’s power, strength and influence. No longer. I believe over the past several weeks a bipartisan consensus has emerged and their weak leaders who have lost their moral compasses. I intend to work with my colleagues in the Senate to do so. (?!?!?)
Mr. Sullivan, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Alaska and a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve
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The term Poison Ivy seems to be sticking, not just for Ivy League but for all their ilk.
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/13/poison-ivy/
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Poison Ivy League? Ouch!!!
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They both don’t share their data:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/12/harvard-president-claudine-gays-research-data-now-under-scrutiny/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=harvard-president-claudine-gays-research-data-now-under-scrutiny
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data again in question. Agree BBG, very suspicious
when someone refuses to share the data something is rotten .
numbers on a page by themselves mean little.
look at government data :wink:
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Tangent: I saw a meme hypothesizing that Gay is the outcome of Obama going tranz.
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Tangent: I saw a meme hypothesizing that Gay is the outcome of Obama going tranz.
Academically, I can't believe they tolerate the blatant plagiarism in a place like that, even if they accept anti-Semitism and genocide speech.
Mentioned before, I think Poison Ivy is a permanent label for woke elite education.
The whole thing reminds me of Yassir Arafat, and even Barack Obama, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, NYT and Wash Post winning Pulitzer Prize for a long series of false narratives, Taylor Swift is 'Man' of the Year. What was once prestigious and revered is becoming less than worthless, a contrary indicator.
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I used to be proud of the prestige of an Ivy League education. (Penn, Columbia) but that faded years ago. Now, with "Poison Ivy League" I have a name for it.
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data again in question. Agree BBG, very suspicious
when someone refuses to share the data something is rotten .
numbers on a page by themselves mean little.
look at government data :wink:
The crazy part is how these nitwits SPRINT to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Without consistency, transparency, replicability, et al higher ed has no product to sell. And these idiots have proven willing to chuck it ALL to preserve a third rate scholar who isn’t even competent enough to cover her tracks.
This abject embrace of and shade thrown at unabashed failure will have consequences. Perverse incentives beget unexpected outcomes. It’s gonna be fun to see what those outcomes are, upon whom they land, and how hard the deserving get smacked for so poorly playing the game.
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/12/22/barack-obama-harvard-claudine-gay/#:~:text=Former%20President%20Barack%20Obama%20reportedly,faced%20calls%20to%20step%20down.
Obama, no longer in politics ha intervened to save the president at Harvard, allegedly. I wonder if it was because of his support of anti-Semitism or because of his support of plagiarism.
Sorry to keep ripping Poison Ivy, I'm not happy with my alma mater either.
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A fine deconstruction of the whole Gay/Harvard mess:
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Conversation
Bill Ackman
@BillAckman
In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.
I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.
How could this be? I wondered.
When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.
A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.
I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.
I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.
Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.
I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.
What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.
Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”
Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.
As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.
In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.
After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.
The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.
The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.
These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.
When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.
The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.
You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe.
To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.
Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.
And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.
I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.
America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.
Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.
An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.
The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.
I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on
@X
that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.
When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community.
I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more.
I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities.
In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock.
Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.
While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.
I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.
All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.
This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty.
The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.
The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?
One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.
Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.
The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.
Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.
The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.
The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?
In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.
The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.
The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.
And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.
It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.
The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.
According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.
Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.
In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.
So what should happen?
The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.
The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.
The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.
The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.
Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?
Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.
Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.
These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.
A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com, which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.
A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.
Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.
We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.
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2nd post. Great piece tearing down the work of Gay’s thesis advisor and source for many of her “scholarly” methods:
https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-king-has-no-clothes-claudine?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR05BRLGmtbTZRrQj8lXVi-_ZTrg6y2YNtXqt4zi5lYZcopmvi0K7gdpNDI
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"Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves. We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it."
The Progs/Woken Dead/DEI folks may have had their nose bloodied (and that is a very important thing for busting the aura of omnipotence!!!) but IMO they have learned nothing. Read Gay's statement of resignation-- and, if I am not mistaken, she still has a tenured professor gig. Their next step will not be to change, but to hunker down, circle the wagons into an ever tighter echo chamber, and obfuscate to the larger world.
The real attack on our part, IMHO, is not to save Harvard from itself, but rather to challenge its validity-- which I am glad to say we are seeing from many of us.
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"Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves. We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it."
The Progs/Woken Dead/DEI folks may have had their nose bloodied (and that is a very important thing for busting the aura of omnipotence!!!) but IMO they have learned nothing. Read Gay's statement of resignation-- and, if I am not mistaken, she still has a tenured professor gig.
Correct on all counts. Moving forward, however, I think these incidents will be well worth citing every time DEI horseshit rears its head.
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Absolutely!
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3rd post:
One of the most important political developments of 2023 was the growing pushback against “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Those DEI programs and the ideology that underpin them are under siege politically and legally, and they are losing. They had grown rapidly, thanks to a mixture of support, indifference and timidity. But that began to ebb last year and will continue to recede in 2024.
The wounded patient was wheeled into the intensive care unit when the Supreme Court undermined a crucial foundation for DEI and related affirmative action programs. The decision came in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a similar case against the University of North Carolina. SCOTUS ruled the universities were illegally discriminating when their admissions favored some minorities and effectively penalized others. Neither public nor private universities had the right to do that.
Those lawsuits were brought against universities on behalf of Asian-Americans, but their victory has reverberated through the world of corporations, non-profits and government agencies. That’s not surprising since those institutions have a host of programs and practices similar to those at Harvard and UNC. They, too, discriminate in hiring and promotion, in hopes their “affirmative” policies will create more inclusive, racially-diverse workplaces. One question sure to reach the High Court is whether these programs are illegal.
The programs also raise practical questions. One is whether they actually achieve their aim of creating more inclusive workplaces. Or do they create more hostile, racially-divided ones and wider public resentment beyond them? Another question is whether institutions committed to these programs can find ways to work around the court decisions and hide their efforts.
The policies used to pursue these goals are sometimes called “reverse discrimination” because they benefit groups, primarily African-Americans, who had long been subjects of pernicious discrimination, segregation, and, indeed, racial hatred.
The terminology of “reverse discrimination” is outdated and misleading. We live more than half a century after the tectonic changes of the mid-1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson and a supportive Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and a series of massive government programs, many of them meant to assist historically-disadvantaged groups. After that long span, the beneficiaries today are the children and grandchildren of those who were harmed by segregation and Jim Crow laws.
The losers are not just the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the beneficiaries of that invidious system. They are often the descendants of people who didn’t live in America during those years. If those descendants are subject to bias today, it is not “reverse discrimination.” It is “discrimination,” plain and simple.
This unadorned description is true no matter who benefits or loses from today’s bias, whether it is based on race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or anything besides merit. Restoring this ideal of equal treatment and equal opportunity would return American to its long-cherished ideals.
Those ideals are far different from equal outcomes, misleadingly called “equity,” as mandated by some government agency. In fact, the switch from America’s traditional goal “equal treatment” to the socialist aspiration of “equity in outcomes” is an ideological sleight-of-hand.
It is true, of course, that America often fell painfully short of its highest ideals. Sometimes it abandoned them entirely, as it did in Jim Crow laws, segregation in housing, employment and public accommodations, and, worst of all, chattel slavery. But our country will not come closer to achieving our ideals or creating a “more perfect Union” by turning its mistakes on their head. It certainly won’t do that now, after several decades of pursuing major programs to remedy past injustices.
Increasingly, that’s the conclusion the public and courts have reached. The left disagrees, and that includes nearly all intellectuals.
The rising resistance to affirmative action and race-based discrimination will have a crushing impact on DEI programs. It will reach well beyond universities to affect corporations, non-profits, and government agencies at the city, state and federal levels. All of them have similar programs. All are at risk.
The widening gyre of the SCOTUS decision has already begun to affect practices at these other institutions. Take the Small Business Administration, which has a loan program known as 8(a). Originally designed to help all disadvantaged people, the SBA decided years ago that some applicants would automatically qualify as “disadvantaged” if they were black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American. That rule would designate the founder of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, as disadvantaged. He is worth about $16.7 billion.
A federal court struck down the SBA’s formulaic approach last summer. The agency temporarily suspended loan applications until it could come up with new rules and application procedures. When it issued them two months later, the message was that potential borrowers had to show how each one had been “disadvantaged.”
SBA has updated the application by adding a plain language fillable questionnaire for applicants to identify social disadvantage. Firms continue to have the option to prepare a social disadvantage narrative.
That’s right: the government is now asking for “social disadvantage narratives,” to be judged by mid-level federal bureaucrats.
The court ruling that upended the SBA minority-loan program is just the beginning. The SCOTUS decision on university admissions will unleash a torrent of legal disputes. Individuals will file suits claiming they lost jobs, admissions, scholarships or promotions to less-qualified candidates because they came from the “wrong” race. Corporate and government programs directed at minorities will be challenged when they include race-based criteria. Ultimately, the courts will have to flesh out the implications and limits of the Supreme Court ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
These cases, plus rising public resistance to DEI, are bound to have a far-reaching impact since the disputed programs are embedded in so many organizations. They are part of a broad push to create more diversity by hiring and promoting the “right kind of minorities,” particularly African Americans. Asian Americans were apparently not the right kind, as the evidence they presented in court showed convincingly. There is an equally strong push to admit favored minorities to academic programs, both as students and faculty. The controversy arises when they fall below the standard metrics used for other candidates. (Many, of course, surpass those metrics and don’t need “affirmative action.”)
Since it is illegal to use race as a basis for hiring, admission and promotion, the institutions that hope to continue using it, as many do, will have to evade detection. They are already working hard to do just that. That’s why thousands of universities have made standardized tests for academic merit “optional.” The officials who handle admissions don’t want courts looking over their shoulders and limiting their autonomy. They certainly don’t want to leave a damning statistical trail if they practice illegal discrimination. Covering up that trail is a major reason standardized tests are now optional. Without them for every candidate, it is harder for courts and litigants to compare the qualifications of those who were admitted and those who weren’t.
It is easy to see how some individuals are helped and others harmed by these efforts to increase “diversity, equity and inclusion.” But it also important to see how these efforts reshape the institutions that implement them. One of the most important is that they create large, entrenched and expensive bureaucracies. The goal of those bureaucracies is to set detailed regulations and then enforce those rules. They are typically given the investigative authority and coercive power to do it.
Since universities have been the focus of so much of this controversy, it is worth considering how DEI programs impact them specifically. The short answer is two ways. One is costly administrative bloat. The other is ideological meddling in every aspect of campus life, from student activities to academic matters that were once the exclusive preserve of faculty.
DEI administrators gain additional power because other administrators agree with them. These fellow administrators typically endorse DEI goals, oppose race neutrality and buttress their colleagues’ authority rather than contesting it. Senior university officials almost always go along, either because they agree or because they know that opposing it would end their upward trajectory. As politicians used tell patronage workers in the old city machines, “You need to go along to get along.” That advice still works for deans and provosts.
Of course, DEI bureaucracies are not the only reason why so many universities are weighed down with more administrators than students or faculty. Far from it. The main reason is that universities, like all institutions, must comply with a tangle of complex federal regulations, nearly all of them established, implemented and enforced by yet another set of bureaucrats —those in Washington.
The result is a pervasive regulatory web on every campus, requiring hundreds of administrators to ensure compliance and provide the federal government with data to prove it. That web is even thicker at university research hospitals, which grew out of the biological sciences and soon became profit centers in their own right.
For now, there is little hope of significantly reducing this blob of government regulations and the bureaucracies associated with them. But there is one important exception: programs involving DEI and affirmative action. Opponents of those programs now believe they can be cut. Supporters see the same trend and fear it means the loss of opportunities for historically-disadvantaged groups.
This debate won’t end soon, but the bureaucracies that implement these race-based programs might. DEI is still alive, but it’s on feeding tubes in the ICU. Its initials might soon be transposed to “die.”
By
Charles Lipson
Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma professor of political science emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security, and a Spectator contributing writer.
https://thespectator.com/topic/code-red-dei-is-in-the-icu/
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4th post. Gay likely to keep her $900K salary:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/claudine-gay-likely-to-keep-900k-salary-despite-resigning-in-disgrace/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=claudine-gay-likely-to-keep-900k-salary-despite-resigning-in-disgrace
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Perplexing piece regarding Progressive efforts to inculcate anti-Israeli hatred in school kids.
I can't help but notice that outcomes of inculcating hatred early and often as well as a concurrent effort to eschew the tools of reasoned discourse show up in higher ed on a regular basis, with one major outcome being students arriving at college that have yet to grasp basic math, English, and science concepts, leading to all sorts of remedial needs and efforts. Bottom line appears to be that, for many on the Progressive left, the little ability to manifest little more than autistic screeching when one's beliefs are challenged is a feature rather than a bug, with narrowly read nitwits able only to accuse you of racism or some other DEI sin should you point out a hole among many in their argument being one result.
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-manipulation-of-innocence?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR1U0z4TJzcu_svG-QvcSW4qAY7-Vx7iUzPCgqvszWjLlAqEeUZSdERCDiQ
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When I taught physics at Yale in the 1980s and ’90s, my colleagues and I took pride in our position on “science hill,” looking down on the humanities scholars in the intellectual valleys below as they were inundated in postmodernism and deconstructionism.
This same attitude motivated the mathematician Alan Sokal to publish his famous 1996 article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in the cultural-studies journal Social Text. He asserted, among other things that “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct” and that “the scientific community . . . cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.”
Mr. Sokal’s paper was a hoax, designed to demonstrate that postmodernism was nonsense. But today postmodern cultural theory is being infused into the very institutions one might expect to be scientific gatekeepers. Hard-science journals publish the same sort of bunk with no hint of irony:
• In November 2022 the Journal of Chemical Education published “A Special Topics Class in Chemistry on Feminism and Science as a Tool to Disrupt the Dysconscious Racism in STEM.” From the abstract: “This article presents an argument on the importance of teaching science with a feminist framework and defines it by acknowledging that all knowledge is historically situated and is influenced by social power and politics.” The course promises “to explore the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism. To problematize time as a linear social construct, the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized.”
• In March 2022 Physical Review Physics Education Research published “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study.” From the abstract: “Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures.” The paper criticizes “the use of whiteboards as a primary pedagogical tool” on the grounds that they “play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization. . . . They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”
• A January 2023 paper presented at the Joint Mathematics Meeting, the world’s biggest gathering of mathematicians, was titled “Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Structural Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice.”
Undergraduates are being exposed to this stuff as well. Rice University offers a course called “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter,” in which “students will apply chemical tools and analysis to understand Black life in the U.S. and students will implement African American sensibilities to analyze chemistry.” The course catalog notes that “no prior knowledge of chemistry or African American studies is required for engagement in this course.”
Such ideas haven’t totally colonized scientific journals and pedagogy, but they are beginning to appear almost everywhere and are getting support and encouragement from the scientific establishment. There are also indications that dissent isn’t welcome. When a group of physicists led by Charles Reichhardt wrote to the American Physical Society, publisher of the Physics Education Research journal, to object to the “observing whiteness” article, APS invited a response, then refused to publish it on the grounds that its arguments, which were scientific and quantitative, were based on “the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued.”
“This is akin to stating that an astronomer must first accept astrology as true before critiquing it,” the dissenters wrote in the final version of their critique, which they had to publish in a different journal, European Review.
That sounds like an exaggeration, but in 2021 Mount Royal University in Canada fired a tenured professor, Frances Widdowson, for questioning whether indigenous “star knowledge” belonged in an astronomy curriculum. The same year, New Zealand‘s Education Ministry decreed that Māori indigenous “ways of knowing” would have equal standing with science in science classes. The Royal Society of New Zealand investigated two scientists for questioning this policy; they were exculpated but resigned. The University of Auckland removed another scientist who questioned the policy from teaching two biology classes.
In 2020, Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society published an article by physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein titled “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics.” Ms. Prescod-Weinstein wrote: “Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression.” This sentence, which dramatically misrepresents Einstein’s theory of general relativity, wouldn’t have been out of place in Mr. Sokal’s 1996 spoof.
Had an article like this appeared in 1996, it would have been dismissed outside the postmodernist fringe. But last year Mr. Sokal himself, noting that the article was No. 56 in the Altmetric ranking of most-discussed scholarly articles for 2020, felt the need to write a 20-page single-spaced rebuttal. The joke turns out to be on all of us—and it isn’t funny.
Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of “The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos.”
https://apple.news/AoNrOPBq0RO6_XhaqoZUs5w
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:-o :-o :-o
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/opinion-why-pushing-stem-majors-is-turning-out-to-be-a-terrible-investment/ar-AA1mGDM9?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=c885260ffe4f4164bce3835f1d51f10b&ei=78
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Not sure there is enough popcorn available to get through this effort:
https://nypost.com/2024/01/08/opinion/bill-ackmans-war-to-make-universities-accountable-has-the-left-panicked/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR2qcyURPEdsahPAwEz-oF4rdJ3u7KExUCDjMMtZxtOJDIXwPIqILaK89wI
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https://www.thecollegefix.com/umich-now-has-more-than-500-jobs-dedicated-to-dei-payroll-costs-exceed-30-million/
But tuitions and subsidies must keep going up while enrollment tanks.
My view of "higher education" has tanked. Poison Ivy inflicts all these schools, and the private colleges too with VERY few exceptions.
They say they teach critical thinking, not just memorize facts, so why aren't the students thinking critically about the hogwash they are "taught"?
In fact, they are PREVENTED from thinking critically and hearing different views.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20303/equity-grade-inflation
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Is not grade inflation based on DEI a civil rights issue?
Maybe hard to prove but I would think this practice could/should be legally challenged.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDzlpSPve64
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No Task Force Can Save Harvard
What hope is there for an institution where nobody can be fired for promoting antisemitism and other stupid and wicked ideas?
By Dominic Green
Jan. 25, 2024 5:15 pm
Harvard is the Boeing 737 MAX of higher education. A great American brand is squandering the public’s trust. Failures of quality control are damaging its market dominance. Like any corporation, Harvard is looking for new management and working to burnish its image. Unlike most corporations, Harvard has no idea what it is doing. Boeing still has engineers; Harvard has only professors. When the wheels came off at Chrysler in 1978, the company brought in Lee Iacocca. Harvard has brought in Derek Penslar.
Mr. Penslar is a professor of Jewish history. He calls Israel a “settler colonial” state and compares the Jewish state’s establishment to France’s colonial takeover of Algeria. In August he signed an academic petition called “The Elephant in the Room.” It endorsed the conspiracy theory that the Netanyahu government’s proposals for judicial reform mask a plan to “ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.” It asserted that Israel imposes a “regime of apartheid” on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and accused the country of “Jewish supremacism.”
“Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question” is the name of a book by white supremacist David Duke. If you go far enough left, you go far right without knowing it. Mr. Penslar leads Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and has been named a co-chairman of the university’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism. The latter appointment was an “unforced error,” Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, told the Journal Wednesday.
The spontaneous campus celebrations after Hamas’s massacre, rape and kidnapping of Israelis on Oct. 7 meant that Harvard could no longer ignore its problem with Jews, and especially the Jewish state. Prodded by donors and shamed by the media, the university’s then-president, Claudine Gay, commissioned a committee.
Then Ms. Gay told lawmakers that calling for the genocide of Jews was sometimes acceptable at Harvard, depending on the “context.” The head of the advisory committee, Rabbi David Wolpe, resigned. He said Harvard was gripped by an ideology “that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil.” Like a real president sending in the Navy SEALs, temporary president Alan Garber launched the task force, jointly commanded by Mr. Penslar and a social scientist from Harvard Business School who researches driverless cars.
I’m an inmate of the open-air asylum that is Cambridge, Mass., and some of my best friends are professors. All of them are from the shrinking minority of classical liberals and liberal conservatives. We meet in private, lest their colleagues spot them. They know the battle of ideas is lost. The ship of fools was hijacked decades ago by the radical left. It floats down the River Charles on a tide of donor cash, dissenters thrown overboard.
Like the real America, Harvard is federal by design but paralyzed by the administrative state. Each of its undergraduate colleges and professional schools has its own fundraising machinery and endowment. Each has its boutique DEI commissariat that corrupts the academic hiring process and pollutes the intellectual atmosphere with what Rabbi Wolpe calls the “toxicity of intellectual slovenliness.” The president and the Harvard Corp. resemble the U.S. government before the creation of the Federal Reserve and the New Deal: strong enough to speak on everyone’s behalf but struggling to impose their orders.
I’m told that Mr. Penslar’s faculty colleagues are rallying in his support and preparing that deadliest of academic weapons, a letter that everyone signs to prove his independence of mind. I’m also told that when the advisory committee asked for data on anti-Jewish speech and conduct at Harvard, none was available. The same went for “Islamophobia,” which is obligatorily regarded as being a problem of equal magnitude, even though it isn’t.
Here are a couple of questions for the task force to investigate. Among all America’s sectors of public life, only its elite universities feature mass protests, incitement and even physical assaults against Jews. Could this be related to the subversion of the academy by the left? Is there a correlation between high levels of foreign donations and the addition of Jew-baiting to the curriculum?
In Florida, Republicans have used their funding leverage to expel the DEI merchants from the temple of learning at Sarasota’s New College. Market forces are closing liberal-arts colleges whose ideological mania outstrips their endowments and brands. But as Princeton dropout F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, the rich are different. At Chrysler, Iacocca worked with the federal government on a bailout, then rapidly rebuilt the company from the bottom up.
Harvard knows better. It already takes hundreds of millions from the federal government, but it can’t rebuild itself quickly. Its reputation sinks, but it is buoyed by its wealth. Donor campaigns can pressure some of Harvard’s schools to raise standards in hiring. Administrations can tell professors to keep politics out of the classroom, but they can’t keep the professors out. Radical politics are now as much a part of the job as the tweed coat and pipe used to be.
In the old days, ships were quarantined for 40 days in times of plague to avoid infecting the landlubbers. Harvard needs to be quarantined for 40 years. That’s how long it’ll take for the latest recipients of tenure to vacate their plush perches. They might be fired for making students feel “unsafe” by suggesting that a man can’t become a woman. They can’t be fired for promoting stupid or wicked ideas. Their colleagues gave them tenure for doing just that. It’s Claudine Gays and Derek Penslars all the way down.
I paid good money for my Harvard master’s degree. My principal is dwindling by the day. My children aren’t applying to Harvard or Yale. Don’t send your kids and your checks. Do your homework. Invest in new institutions whose curricula give real value. If your alma mater has become the mother of all leftists, practice some tough love. Truth is the daughter of time, but investor preferences can hurry it along. As the Gandhi bumper sticker on the professorial Subaru Forester says, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society
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No Task Force Can Save Harvard
What hope is there for an institution where nobody can be fired for promoting antisemitism and other stupid and wicked ideas?
By Dominic Green
Jan. 25, 2024 5:15 pm
Harvard is the Boeing 737 MAX of higher education. A great American brand is squandering the public’s trust. Failures of quality control are damaging its market dominance. Like any corporation, Harvard is looking for new management and working to burnish its image. Unlike most corporations, Harvard has no idea what it is doing. Boeing still has engineers; Harvard has only professors. When the wheels came off at Chrysler in 1978, the company brought in Lee Iacocca. Harvard has brought in Derek Penslar....
Great piece. Though my institution is not as far gone, a touch of PTSD reared its head as I read it.
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‘An employee or staff member of a school . . . may not provide instruction’ on Christopher Columbus or ‘a President of the United States who owned an enslaved person.’
Jan. 26, 2024 6:16 pm ET
From House Bill No. 1017, introduced in the Indiana Legislature Jan. 8 by Rep. Vernon Smith, a Gary Democrat:
Sec. 5. (a) Except as provided in subsection (b), a school, an employee or staff member of a school, or a third party vendor used by a school to provide instruction may not provide instruction to a student in kindergarten through grade 12 concerning:
(1) Christopher Columbus; or
(2) a President of the United States who owned an enslaved person.
(b) Instruction concerning a person described in subsection (a)(1) or (a)(2) is permitted if the instruction concerns the person’s involvement in the:
(1) institution of slavery;
(2) harmful effects of colonialism; or
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(3) decimation of indigenous populations throughout the world.
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Love to read the whole piece given how good this excerpt is, but I refuse to register with the Old Gray Hag.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/01/26/college-is-all-about-curiosity-and-that-requires-free-speech/
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2nd post.
Palestinian activist uses Princeton issued administrative no contact order to student reporter covering protest. Every adult along the way not only abdicated acting like an advocate for free inquiry, but also further turned the screws:
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/01/25/princeton-allegedly-told-student-journalist-not-to-write-about-activist-who-got-no-contact-order-against-journalist/
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This piece with links to numerous primary sources charts cancel culture from its mid-80s “political correctness” genesis to what it has shamelessly morphed into now:
https://quillette.com/2024/01/23/looking-back-on-a-decade-of-cancel-culture/
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Behind an educrat paywall so pasted in full below. It’s somewhat heartening to see items like the appearing in the in-house journal of the professortariat, though it’s more than a day late and dollar short:
By Keith E. Whittington
JANUARY 26, 2024
Barnard College has become the site of the latest flare-up in an ongoing struggle between faculty and university leaders for the control of university communication platforms. On October 23, the department of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies posted a statement of solidarity: “We support the Palestinian people who have resisted settler colonial war, occupation, and apartheid for over 75 years, while deploring Hamas’s recent killing of Israeli civilians.” The statement was to be followed by links to resources for understanding the “genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing that we are now witnessing.”
Shortly afterward, the university removed the statement from the departmental website. The move was in pursuit of the university’s “website governance policy” (established in November, after the department’s initial statement), which specifies that all subdomains of barnard.edu Internet domain are property of the college and all of its content “constitutes speech made by the College as an institution.” Barnard resources such as “College letterhead, College website, College-sponsored campus communication tools or systems” may not be used to “post political statements.”
Members of the department created a private website where they republished their statement of solidarity and protested the “increasing curtailment of free speech and academic freedom at colleges and universities across the U.S.” They and their supporters issued a public letter decrying the “overt act of censorship” by the university in removing the statement from the departmental website. The New York Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to Barnard’s president characterizing the website policy as a form of “prior restraint” inconsistent with academic freedom.
Barnard is hardly alone in debating such issues. Princeton University recently tabled a policy aimed at formalizing procedures for units of the university to issue political statements. The University of California system has been mired in a debate over whether to ban such statements, which would supplement a longstanding policy against the use of “university equipment” for “political purposes or activities.” Institutions across the country have been having similar debates. The events since October 7 have provided a new context for those debates, but the issue has been brewing for years.
It is a fundamental tenet of American principles of academic freedom that individual scholars must be afforded the fullest freedom to engage in research and publish scholarship and to introduce controversial but germane material into their classes without fear of university reprisal or censorship. Likewise, members of the faculty are not to suffer institutional consequences for their private political expression or activities.
Given these longstanding principles, Barnard College unsurprisingly exempts from its restrictions on “political activity” the creation and publication of faculty research or “academic materials” and allows the posting of research and “academic resources” on its website. It likewise protects political activity “in a personal capacity” that is “not attributable, in reality or perception, to the College.” There are no doubt some gray areas in such policies, and it is essential that universities apply them in a consistent and content-neutral fashion.
On the whole, academic freedom and the freedom of expression of professors will be better protected if institutional actors like academic units and university presidents refrain from issuing political statements and units of the university avoid using their tools of communication for political expression.
For decades, universities have sought to protect individual professors from demands that they be disciplined for expressing controversial opinions by emphasizing that those professors only speak for themselves in their personal capacity. The institution houses individuals with a wide array of conflicting views, and none of those individuals speak for the institution as such. If a politician or donor is unhappy with something that an individual on campus has said, there is no proper institutional response to the private activities of those individuals. The university as such is concerned only with its institutional operations, and not with the private lives of its employees.
For departments qua departments to issue political statements is to assert that those sentiments are not just personal, but professional.
Institutional statements put that modus vivendi at risk. Universities cannot distance themselves from political expression that professors might engage in while conducting their teaching duties or in utilizing university resources like web pages and social-media accounts. When professors use their privileged access to university-provided platforms to express political opinions, the university is forced to take ownership of the resulting speech. Professors who act in their role as university employees are necessarily liable for discipline for that conduct. Professors shield themselves from those repercussions by speaking as private individuals and not as employees.
Institutional speech will necessarily be held against the institution. If the institution engages in controversial political activities, other political actors can and will push back. As colleges attempt to navigate an increasingly hostile political environment, silence is often golden. If individual units on campus can easily go rogue and engage in institutional speech on their own initiative, it is the university that will suffer the political consequences. An individual department posting controversial political statements on its official website invites political retaliation not only against itself but against the university as a whole. Self-preservation dictates that the university be able to control its own institutional speech.
Another set of concerns involves the direct pressure put on individual scholars by the proliferation of institutional political statements. Individual members of the faculty are free to engage in individual political expression or to associate with others to express themselves collectively, and universities should be diligent in protecting the freedom of individual professors to do so. But individual members of the faculty also have the freedom to remain silent on matters of controversy and to choose their own time and manner of expressing their political views. They should not, as a condition of employment at a university, be dragooned into the political activities of others. Departmental statements make that impossible. Dissenting individuals are forced either to hold their tongue and allow statements to be issued in their name or to wade into a political controversy when they would prefer not to do so. Faculty members can always speak in their own name. That is an exercise of free expression. To attempt to speak in the name of others is rather an infringement on free expression.
For departments qua departments to issue political statements is to assert that those sentiments are not just personal, but professional. As such, they may also become professionally relevant to evaluation of current and future members of the faculty. It is an important protection of the academic freedom of individuals that institutions not take the personal political views and activities of professors into account when making decisions regarding hiring and promotion. It is possible to construct a firewall protecting professors from being punished for their political opinions by distinguishing such personal activities from professional activities. If, however, a department as such has specific political views, then the political views of prospective members of the faculty are suddenly professionally relevant and cannot be regarded as off-limits. Junior faculty would justly worry that their professional future will be damaged if they do not go along with the political activities of their senior colleagues. Dissenting members of the faculty will justly believe that they are made outsiders to their own department as a consequence of their political beliefs.
Universities protect a realm of academic freedom and free expression by limiting the domain of institutional speech. The institution as such does not weigh in on either scholarly or political controversies. Individual members of the faculty should be left free to develop and express their own views — because the university does not elevate orthodoxies. When universities cross that line and expand the realm of institutional speech, they threaten to shrink the freedom of the scholars who work within those universities.
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=56988ef2a35f158944f618fd528ebd1e_65ba60ea_6d25b5f&selDate=20240131
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This is a big deal. Colleges will have to spend more time delivering remedia education … or lowering standards lest racism be claimed when the inevitable disparate outcomes occur. Employers will also have to invest more in training … or outsource jobs to machines, AI, etc. And hey, will those that foisted the Covid scam be held accountable? Not much indication they will in the piece below:
America is facing a STEM and data education crisis
The Hill News / by Elena Gerstmann and Laura Albert / February 03, 2024 at 11:21AM
The legislation would authorize $10 million annually for schools at all levels, from pre-K to college, to increase access to data science and literacy education.
Math scores of K-12 students in the U.S. plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hopes that these scores would rebound among teenagers after the pandemic have proven vain. In 2023, U.S. News & World Report reported that math scores among teenagers are the worst they’ve been since the 1970s.
The New York Times likewise reports that U.S. students’ performance in math plunged in a 2023 global exam. Although scores fell across the globe, there was a 13-point drop among 15-year-olds in the U.S. — a much sharper drop than observed in other countries. U.S. students fell behind peers in similar industrialized democracies such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany, and trail far behind students in the highest-scoring countries, including Singapore, South Korea and Estonia.
These results provided the first global comparison since 2020.
This should sound alarm bells for parents, teachers, lawmakers, the teenagers of the world and all who will listen. This country is in the midst of a STEM and data literacy crisis. We may not feel the effects now, but they will be felt immensely in the future. This crisis threatens our science and technology leadership as well as our economic security.
Declining math scores among America’s youth point to a data literacy crisis that threatens our shared security and prosperity. Data literacy is the ability to read, understand, interpret, engage with, and communicate data. The data-literate can evaluate the quality and reliability of data, ask informed questions, and effectively communicate data-driven findings.
Preparing today’s children to make tomorrow’s scientific breakthroughs for a better future requires a new national commitment that demands the attention, action and commitment of policymakers and leaders in Washington, D.C., and beyond.
The Mathematical and Statistical Modeling Education Act and the Data Science and Literacy Act are important pieces of legislation. If enacted, they would help modernize secondary mathematical and STEM education to better prepare students for more advanced STEM educational and career opportunities. The legislation would authorize $10 million annually for schools at all levels, from pre-K to college, to increase access to data science and literacy education. These bills would make data science literacy a primary strategy to increase representation and diversity in emerging technology.
Although $10 million won’t immediately change the world, it will make a big difference. It sets forth a path for national commitment to become a data-literate society. By restructuring how parents, stakeholders, educators and our children think about and study math and science, we can better connect them to the significant and practical needs of modern society.
We need a data-literate workforce, data-literate policymakers and, ultimately, a data-literate population. To get there, we must start in schools and on campuses.
The Society for Human Resource Management said the country has a need to “boost STEM education to be prepared for the nearly 3.5 million STEM jobs that need to be staffed by 2025.”
In recent years, many universities have added or expanded programs around data science, analytics, computer science and similar disciplines. But that’s not enough. Meaningful data literacy that can shape the trajectory of future generations requires building data literacy into the fabric of our educational systems at the start of a child’s education. We must integrate data- and analytics-driven technologies into classrooms and curricula to inspire the next generation.
It is not easy to implement such a systemic educational change is not easy. We are all aware of the breadth and depth of the issues facing schools and children worldwide. Without a guiding light to lead us and show us the types of meaningful career opportunities and societal imperatives that await our children and grandchildren, America is at risk of being unprepared and vulnerable in the years to come.
First, we must properly educate students and ingrain in their education the importance of STEM and data literacy. Even if we do that, however, few prospective STEM students understand how their skills can be transferred and powerful enough to solve societal problems.
Operations research, one of the fastest-growing STEM fields, enables students to use their data skills to save lives, save money and solve problems. Though its name might not have significant meaning to you, operations research is a dynamic and significant field that turns data into decisions. As of late, there has been an abundance of new applications of operations research, such as humanitarian logistics, disrupting human trafficking and addressing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If more young people, motivated by STEM, understood the impact of operations research and analytics, and more people in academia could advise them about meaningful and rewarding career paths in this incredible field, there’s little doubt these students would eagerly seek out operations research and analytics programs, as well as careers in science and technology.
Operations research and analytics practitioners and educators must rally to help those around us understand the need for more thoughtful and effective educational resources and guidance.
It is imperative that our country commit to preparing the workforce of tomorrow with sufficient data literacy skills to ensure economic prosperity for future generations.
Elena Gerstmann is executive director of INFORMS, where Laura Albert served as a past president.
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4443710-america-is-facing-a-stem-and-data-education-crisis/
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Dartmouth Sees the Value of the SAT
The Ivy league college follows the evidence and reinstates test scores in admissions.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 5, 2024 6:37 pm ET
What do you know: Standards make a comeback in the Ivy League, as Dartmouth College says it is reinstating standardized tests as an admissions requirement. Like many of its peers, the college had made the SAT and ACT optional in 2020.
“The evidence supporting our reactivation of a required testing policy is clear,” the college said Monday. “We believe a standardized testing requirement will improve—not detract from—our ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to our campus.”
On commission from President Sian Leah Beilock, Dartmouth faculty studied the role of standardized tests in admissions and produced a report finding them to be an “essential method by which Admissions can identify applicants who will succeed at Dartmouth.” Test scores are more useful than a high-school GPA, they found.
The report found that test scores “better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants.” Without test scores, admissions officers must “place more weight on other factors that have been shown to be biased toward higher-income students,” such as “guidance counselor recommendations and non-academic ratings.”
Dartmouth considers scores in the context of the socioeconomic status of a student’s high school or community. Some lower-income students who didn’t report scores because they believed them too low might have benefited from sending the scores.
The faculty researchers also found that a test-optional policy does “not necessarily increase the proportion of less-advantaged students in the applicant pool.” Colleges made the SAT and ACT optional in an effort to appear more equitable, but they likely did the opposite. Students who face socioeconomic disadvantages need more opportunities to demonstrate academic ability.
The University of California also commissioned a 2020 report on test scores in admissions but ignored its own advice that they were useful, non-discriminatory measures. Dartmouth is so far the only Ivy League school to make the tests mandatory again, though Yale says it will issue a long-term policy this winter and Princeton’s website says the admissions office “continue to assess” the role of test scores. They would be wise to follow the Big Green.
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In 2016 Scholastic canceled the children’s book “A Birthday Cake for George Washington” two weeks after publishing it. The book’s images of smiling enslaved people set off a social-media tsunami and a petition demanding cancellation. It didn’t matter that the illustrator was black, or that the editor, Andrea Pinkney, was black and also a towering figure in the children’s book world.
What mattered was that a social-media mob could force a major publisher to stop distributing a book. When the news broke, one of my editors phoned. I had a contract with him for a children’s book about slavery, and though he’d approved the final draft, he was nervous. It didn’t matter that my manuscript did the opposite of sugarcoating slavery. It didn’t matter that I had won awards for “Lillian’s Right to Vote,” one of many books I’d written on racial justice. My editor worried about public perception of a book “by a white male author, edited by a white male editor, about a white male slave owner.” Seventeen months later, after many pointless revisions, the contract was canceled. No book.
Scholastic’s cancellation marked the beginning of a brave new children’s book world, as detailed in PEN America’s 2023 report, “Booklash.” So-called progressive activists discovered they had power through social media, and they wielded it, assailing book after book with charges of offensiveness and demands for cancellation. Children’s publishers now live in fear of these activists, terrified of showing up on their radar with a book or author that could be deemed “problematic”—meaning out of alignment with the activists’ puritanical code.
According to that code, an author’s identity must match a book’s subject matter. Further, certain books can harm children, the activists believe, and books they deem harmful must be removed. If that sounds eerily similar to the right-wing activists’ mission, it’s because it is. The only difference is that while right-wing activists merely want certain books removed from particular schools, left-wing activists want the books they target annihilated.
In 2017 an initially much-praised book of mine about the atom bomb was attacked with the inaccurate charge of having “erased” American Indians. The social-media mob weighed in and the book went from getting rave reviews and being predicted as a Caldecott Medalist to fading into obscurity. I wrote an essay describing my experience, which was published in February 2019. Two months later, Debbie Reese, the blogger who had led the campaign, attacked me again—in her Arbuthnot Lecture, awarded to her by the powerful American Library Association—for not withdrawing my book after what she called her “criticism” of it.
One month later, I wound up on a sort of blacklist on a blog called Reading While White. The contributors—liberal white people who call out other liberal white people for racism—accused me and some other white authors, with no evidence, of “racism—in words, works, and deeds.”
That same year, Time Magazine named one of my books, “The Sad Little Fact,” a Best Book. The Washington Post named my biography of Justice Thurgood Marshall a Best Book. Yet since then I’ve amassed a pile of rejections on a wide range of topics. Editors tell me they can’t publish anything by me about “people of color or women”—the subjects of my most popular works. Editors say publishers mainly want books about “marginalized people,” but the authors’ identities must match the subject matter. My former main editor praised my writing but suggested that if he gave me a contract he would be taking away a “slot” from “previously underrepresented minorities.”
It is mind-blowing that this happened to me—an author who devoted his career to promoting diversity long before it became publishers’ singular focus. And it’s ironic that most of the people behind the pile-ons, petitions and cancellations are white—and privileged. Even more ironic: Many victims of cancel culture are “previously underrepresented minorities”—nonwhite, gay or lesbian authors, who have tended to self-cancel after being targeted by social-media pile-ons. Among them are Kosoko Jackson, E.E. Charlton-Trujillo and Amélie Wen Zhao.
This isn’t progress. The campaign to bring diversity to children’s books must be separated from cancel culture, from social-media mobs, from the vitriolic intolerance toward any dissenting opinions that veer at all from the new orthodoxy.
I say this as a lifelong liberal, whose books have been removed from library shelves in right-wing school districts. This happened last year in Florida to my 2005 book about Roberto Clemente. Note that because I am white, I wouldn’t be able to publish a book about Clemente today, thanks to “progressive” activists’ illiberal code.
My career will likely suffer more damage because of what I’ve written here. So be it. Many of those leading the charge to cancel books and authors have done so to promote or protect their careers. Some things are more important than protecting one’s own career, such as protecting everyone’s right to be heard.
Mr. Winter is author of “Banned Book.”
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Hell, perhaps they should get rid of classes altogether and just vend sheepskins while they are at it.
No more 'D' or 'F' grades? Grade inflation is masking a looming crisis of ignorance
Oregon university eliminates failing grades
•28The Hill News by Liberty Vittert, Opinion Contributor / Feb 6, 2024 at 9:11 AM//keep unread//hide
I told my students on the first day of class this semester that I do not accept late work under any circumstances. Instead, I’m going to treat them like adults. They can drop their worst two homework grades during the semester, so they are to use those drops wisely. After that, they are out of luck.
The second week of school, I received no fewer than 15 emails from different students asking for extensions.
What is wrong with students today? For one thing, they have learned from experience that professors will roll over and give them better grades and no consequences for poor or late work.
This is the educators’ fault, of course. We have created a generation with no concept of what it takes or what it means to succeed.
Take the Oregon university that just announced it will no longer give students failing letter grades. That's right — no more "D" and "F" grades, because failing grades supposedly mask students' “demonstrated abilities.” If you fail, then no grade goes on your record. This is their plan to mask your demonstrated inability to keep up and do the work.
This is how our educational establishment is choosing to fail our kids upward. And there will be consequences for all of us.
Do you want your nurse to know what drugs can and cannot be mixed together? Do you care if your doctor can distinguish different parts of the anatomy inside your heart? Do you care if the engineer who built the bridge you are driving over can do basic physics? If we keep going this way then you’re going to be out of luck, and it seems that educators have done a great job of keeping that information from you.
We educators are failing an entire generation of kids, and you, their parents, probably don’t even know about it. This is partly because these students have been bringing home As and Bs for mediocre and failing work ever since kindergarten.
According to Gallup, over 90 percent of parents believe their children are performing at grade level. But based on their test scores, only about 50 percent are. This disconnect is a direct result of grade inflation, and now, with the removal of failing grades, it is just going to get worse.
This complete degradation of the concept of a GPA and basic standards of success comes at a time when some top colleges are realizing what a mistake it has been to remove standardized testing. MIT removed its requirement for the SAT/ACT in 2020, only to reinstate it in 2022. Dartmouth has just done the same. Why? Because colleges need a reliable, objective metric by which to determine whether applicants will succeed or wash out. There's no way of guessing whether their grades are reflective of their actual ability or performance.
The urge to give everyone an "A" is understandable. Good parents would do anything for their children. They want to alleviate their stress, and in any way they can. But part of growing up is to learn to fail — and frankly, this is a large part of what college is for.
If we have no metrics to measure success (and failure), then we are truly doing our children a disservice. We will not be here forever to coddle our children. At some point, they have to become productive citizens capable of earning a living. We owe it to them to teach them what it means to earn something.
The goal of a public education is to give all children, regardless of socioeconomic status, a chance at social and economic mobility — to break the cycle of whatever their socioeconomic status is at birth. Unfortunately, the kids who are going to be most hurt by this are the poorest.
When it comes time to get a real job, and they can’t cut it because the education system has spent two decades failing them upward, they will end up jobless and hopeless, wondering how this could be when they were "A" students all along.
Liberty Vittert is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4444824-no-more-d-or-f-grades-grade-inflation-is-masking-a-looming-crisis-of-ignorance/
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Piece links to a paper discussing an increase in university hiring of research scientists (4 to 15 percent of college staff, IIRC) with a corresponding decrease in productivity as this science staff is pulled from more productive roles in the private sector, with an inability to apply research findings due to the brain drain schools underwrite. Hmm, let’s mull all the brain octane applied to the “climate change” scam in this context….
Here’s the money shot:
Arora et al. present detailed empirical evidence causally linking the productivity slowdown to the expansion of government science. Government science has yielded smaller-than-expected productivity improvements due to significant trade-offs. Subsidies have moved heads out of firms and into universities and for many firms this shift of talent has not only reduced the firms’ capacity to generate ideas (crowding out) but has also impaired their ability to adopt academic innovations. As the authors write:
…productivity growth may have slowed down because the potential users—private corporations—lack the absorptive capacity to understand and use those ideas.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/02/is-science-a-public-good.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=is-science-a-public-good
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History, From Ukraine to Utah
A new state law may equip students to resist lies like the ones Vladimir Putin has been purveying.
By Peter W. Wood
Feb. 22, 2024 5:06 pm ET
Vladimir Putin has a history lesson for the West. In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Mr. Putin reiterated his belief that Russia has a right to Ukraine, which he says was founded by Russia in the year 862. Americans, apart from specialists in Eastern European history, likely have no idea what Putin means.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” we are often reminded by people who like to quote George Santayana. The truth is that those who never learned history are prey to all sorts of mad ideas that serve someone else’s political agenda. Usually that agenda involves forfeiting one’s independent judgment.
That’s the best reason that American colleges and universities should teach the history of Western civilization. Without that solid base, the past will be a fog in which it is impossible to distinguish fact from fiction.
Unfortunately American higher education has allowed that fog to roll into its classrooms. Whether through the “1619 Project” or postcolonial studies, DEI or LGBTQ studies, American colleges today are swathed in fictions meant to turn students into angry activists. The idea of cultivating in students the intellectual discernment needed to tell the difference between manipulative fables and hard realities has been shunted aside. Many faculty congratulate themselves when they liberate students from their naive belief that history has any facts at all. Often the history taught on campus isn’t history but the narratives most useful for pressing students into the pursuit of someone else’s idea of social justice.
Here and there some history professors defy their profession’s descent into the recruitment of partisans for anti-Western causes. These holdouts realize that Western history is neither a tale of unending oppression nor a tale of triumphant virtue. It’s a complicated mixture of achievement, failure, moral advancement and retreat. Told dispassionately and objectively, that history gives us our best hope of achieving personal freedom and collective liberty. The history of the West teaches us how to be independent.
Those history professors who defy the current fashions stand in need of public support. This is why the Utah Legislature has introduced a bill, the School of General Education Act, that mandates that students in the state’s public universities take classes that cover Western and American history, and the basics of philosophy and literature. Utah also recently passed a ban on DEI training.
These steps won’t by themselves shield students from leftist propaganda disguised as education. The faculty who want to pursue that kind of indoctrination will still be on campus teaching doubtful courses. But if the Utah bill passes, professors will suddenly be faced with students who know enough history to see through the propaganda.
Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars.
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Well lookie here at the abject tax funded propaganda our educators are being "trained" in:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/02/dhs-is-training-teachers-to-develop-student-disinformation-informers-i-know-i-took-the-training/
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A fine indictment of the “diversity” industrial complex:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/universities-are-making-us-dumber
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-school-choice-primary-races-greg-abbott-education-savings-accounts-7ac4e448?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
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https://ncnewsline.com/2024/01/30/proposed-unc-system-policy-would-set-new-requirements-for-instruction-in-us-history-and-government/?emci=e22a4894-f1d7-ee11-85f9-002248223794&emdi=f5db1b13-02d8-ee11-85f9-002248223794&ceid=244814
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https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2024/03/george-masons-orwellian-just-societies-requirement/
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third
No More DEI at the University of Florida
The school closes up the diversity and equity bureaucracy.
By
The Editorial Board
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March 1, 2024 6:39 pm ET
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Wonder Land: College Presidents' spineless response to antisemitic protests are the culmination of academia’s plummet the past 50 years which has included grade inflation, speech codes, trigger warnings and ultimately cancel culture. Images: AP/AFP/Getty Images/Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly
A handful of states have been trying to extricate their public universities from the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) quagmire. Florida demonstrated on Friday how to do it the easy way by shutting down the DEI bureaucracy.
The University of Florida said it is dismissing all DEI staff, closing its DEI office and halting DEI contracts with outside vendors. The school also announced the laid-off staff would get 12 weeks of severance, and that the $5 million saved from the cost of DEI would go to a “faculty recruitment fund.” That’s a wrap, folks.
The dismissals are intended to bring the university into compliance with a 2023 Florida Board of Governors regulation that says state universities can’t “expend any state or federal funds” to “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The University of Florida’s approach is notable because it comes without the backdoor attempts to continue DEI programs under other names.
In an administrative memo, the school said those whose jobs are eliminated are “allowed and encouraged to apply . . . for expedited consideration for different positions currently posted with the university.” That’s a good message: The university takes care of its people as long as they are ready to do the work the school needs for academic success.
It’s encouraging to see a major university get back to its core mission of educating young people in math, physics, engineering, literature and the arts. A special cheer for the end of diversity contractors, the recently growing army of consultants-for-hire who have created an industry instructing universities and companies in the politicized language of identity politics, racial affinity groups, and how to impose hiring quotas without calling them quotas.
In a Weekend Interview with James Taranto in these pages in January, University of Florida President Ben Sasse said he supports “the aspirational best parts of diversity and inclusion.” The problem, he said, “is the E,” meaning the substitution of “equity” for “equality,” which supplants the American idea that equal opportunity is the key to a just society.
The era of DEI arose rapidly in recent years, and it has burrowed itself into institutions across American life. It will take leadership to remove it. Kudos to Florida’s government and now its namesake university for ending what has become a divisive political power grab using race, gender and pronouns as cudgels. Who wants to step up next?
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Given the current climate, recent gaffes, and the beating higher ed has taken with a compliant administration in office, this piece looks at what might happen in higher ed should Trump win. It’s interesting for what is doesn’t say, mostly ‘cause were this gent to do a full court press on what all leaves higher ed exposed to legitimate complaint he’d be cancelled, but it is a bit more directly stated than is the norm:
If Trump Wins ...
His allies are preparing to overhaul higher education. The sector is woefully ill-prepared to defend itself.
By Steven Brint
MARCH 6, 2024\
What if Donald Trump is re-elected as president? As unpleasant as it may be to contemplate, it’s an increasingly likely possibility that would be a disaster for higher education. Trump leads Biden, according to recent polling. And yet the sector’s response, so far, has been to sleepwalk into the election. It’s time for us to wake up.
For well over a year now, a small army of think-tankers, consultants, congressional aides, and campaign staffers have been at work crafting higher-education policies in anticipation of a Trump restoration. These efforts, if enacted into law, would radically change higher education in this country. Even more worrisome, Republican politicians have recently shown their skill at calling attention to campus problems that resonate strongly with the public. A Trump presidency with a Republican legislative majority could remake higher education as we’ve known it.
Given the stakes, it is time to look more closely at what Trump’s re-election could mean, and to be clear-eyed about the weaknesses a second Trump administration would exploit. Put simply, changes in academic leadership style will be necessary if the sector is to defend itself effectively.
The December 5 congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses offers a preview of what’s to come. When we pull ourselves away from the partisan melee and the fallout, including the resignation of two Ivy League presidents, we can see the outlines of a thus far one-sided battle. The maladroit responses of the presidents provided the necessary pretext for advancing the Republicans’ attempt to punish parts of the academic enterprise they disdain and to redirect university efforts along the lines they champion. But the right’s interest goes well beyond anything discussed by the three university presidents who were grilled by Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Consider Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind Republican attacks on critical race theory and anti-racism programs (and now a board member at New College of Florida). He sees universities as having succumbed to “race and sex narcissism” and as having turned their backs on the “pursuit of truth.” He dismisses the idea that universities can reform themselves: Administrators are too “weak,” he argues, and are thus prone to “emotional or social manipulation” by faculty activists. For Rufo, the way forward is to use state power to bring about what he sees as the necessary changes. Triumphant at the resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard University’s president, he wasted no time in announcing a “plagiarism hunting” fund aimed at exposing “the rot in the Ivy League.” But that’s just the beginning of what Rufo has in mind.
In a panel discussion last May at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Rufo laid out his agenda: (1) mobilization of the Department of Justice to investigate elite universities for admissions procedures that violate the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action; (2) penalties for universities where the department finds free expression to be curtailed by social-justice priorities; (3) the closing of certain departments, particularly ethnic and gender studies, where “ideological capture” is, he believes, most widespread; (4) new hiring procedures that emphasize the importance of a “multiplicity of perspectives”; and (5) termination of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. His ideal for undergraduate education is a “classically liberal” curriculum, focused on great works.
Rufo has also made clear that new accountability mechanisms will be required to achieve these ends. The locus of authority will be the agencies of government, including not only the Departments of Education and Justice (purged of people sympathetic to the social concerns of universities, of course), but also reformed regional accreditors whose criteria for re-accreditation would reflect the new priorities. Universities are highly dependent on the federal government for research and financial-aid funding. The threat of defunding is therefore a powerful instrument in the hands of those like Rufo who have big-stick sanctions in mind. Accreditation has been a recurring target of the right. On the campaign trail last year, Ron DeSantis called accrediting agencies “cartels” and promised an alternative system that would say, “We will not accredit you if you do DEI.” Trump has promised to “fire” accreditors, telling supporters, “Our secret weapon will be the college-accreditation system.”
The current accreditation system is a frequent target of Republican plans, but it is not the only one. Proposals for increasing the tax on university endowments, eliminating diversity statements in hiring and admissions, restricting international collaborations, and reducing regulations on for-profit and online colleges are also circulating in Washington. Plans to reduce the size and cost of our higher-education system are widespread. The Cato Institute’s 2022 higher-education handbook for policymakers, for example, argues that “the federal presence in higher education is ultimately self-defeating, fueling huge price inflation and overconsumption. The solution is to avoid the superficial thinking that all ‘education’ is good and to let people freely decide what education they need and how they will pay for it.”
On January 20, 2025, a newly elected Trump administration would assume the presidency armed with policies produced by a network of think tanks and research centers, including the Heritage Foundation, the Goldwater Institute, and Chris Rufo’s home base, the Manhattan Institute. Heritage has been instrumental in providing agendas for Republican politicians for more than 40 years. Its “Project 2025” brings together a coalition of over 100 conservative groups, including Turning Point USA, the National Association of Scholars, and Hillsdale College, and it has already released a nearly 900-page document, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” detailing the operations of federal agencies with the goal of coalescing “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Project 2025 is described as a “plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors” and as the “last opportunity to save our republic.” The precise details for how exactly to deconstruct higher education are murky, but they will almost certainly parallel those that are already circulating in the public domain.
These proposals are tied together by the now-familiar populist narrative that pits “unaccountable elites” against “ordinary Americans.” As Project 2025 explains, “Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge-fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high-school football game in Waco, Tex. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people.”
In a manner consistent with this framing, conservatives are determined to point their pitchforks at the most prestigious universities first, perhaps on the assumption that the rest of higher education will fall in line once the giants are humbled. As U.S. Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, chair of the Republican Study Committee, put it in a recorded call with business leaders, the hearing with the university presidents was just the first prong of attack. “The second step is the investigation, the subpoenas, gathering all of the documents and the records from these universities to prove the point,” Banks reportedly said. “That they’re not just allowing this behavior to occur, they’re fostering it and creating an unsafe environment for Jewish students on their campus because of it.” His third step? “Defund these universities by cracking down on not backing their student loans, taxing their endowments, and forcing the administration to actually conduct civil-rights investigations.” Rufo has spoken of directing the Departments of Justice and Education to “relentlessly degrade the status and prestige” of elite institutions. House investigations of several Ivy League universities are already underway.
As the criticisms of higher education have mounted, the weaknesses of its self-defense playbook have become evident.
In addition to the think-tank populists, Republicans in Congress will also have a say. Judging from the “College Cost Reduction Act,” introduced in January by Rep. Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who leads the House education committee, the congressional push will be directed toward three goals: capping the maximum loan amounts students can obtain, providing additional aid for low-income students who make consistent progress toward their degrees, and reforming accreditation by prioritizing student achievement and post-college employment measures. The anticipated additions to Pell Grants would be offset by penalizing colleges whose students fail to make timely loan repayments. The bill includes provisions that would incentivize colleges to close programs whose students are encumbered by loans they cannot repay and to expand programs whose students tend to fare well in the labor market in the years after graduation. In other words, the Foxx bill would place a heavy hand on the balance sheets against the arts, humanities, and softer social sciences.
And, of course, Trump will have his own ideas about what should be done. We can predict many of the priorities from those expressed in his last budget proposal to Congress. His administration called for a 7.8-percent cut from the Department of Education budget, with sharp reductions for public-service loan forgiveness. The National Institutes of Health budget was slated for a 7-percent cut; the National Science Foundation faced a 6-percent cut. Trump also attempted to eliminate all funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, something he repeatedly attempted — and was unable to achieve.
More recently, candidate Trump has offered two concrete, if far-fetched, policy proposals. The first is for an entirely new system of accreditation heavily weighted toward evaluating colleges on the basis of job placement, evidence of student learning, and curricula that focus on “the American tradition and Western civilization.” The second is for a federally funded tuition-free, open-access online university. He has christened this leviathan the “American Academy.” It would be funded primarily by taxes on existing universities’ endowments, with the focus, naturally, on the largest endowments.
Of course, not everything Republicans hope to achieve will be achievable. It will be a heavy lift to bring the regional accreditors into the Republican policy orbit, given that any national-level policy changes would require revision and reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, an endeavor that would not move quickly (if at all). And if Trump is re-elected, his American Academy seems doomed from the start — not only by its prohibitive cost but by how closely it resembles the late, unlamented Trump University, which closed its doors in 2010 and was forced to pay out $25 million to students it defrauded.
A second Trump administration would begin by distinguishing policy goals that could be enacted through executive orders from those that require congressional or state legislation. On the congressional side, it would not be difficult to find ambitious lawmakers eager to push legislation. Judging from their public statements, J.D. Vance, Tom Cotton, Dan Crenshaw, Elise Stefanik, and Virginia Foxx are already champing at the bit. White House and foundation policy shops will produce and distribute talking points. If history is any guide, these talking points will include cherry-picked data to provide a thin veneer of rationality. Those talking points will then be rehearsed doggedly in committee meetings and floor debates. Democrats would of course take to friendly airwaves to denounce the legislation, and rallies would be held on college campuses in opposition. But, in the end, if Republicans have the votes, some of the new policies would prevail.
Higher education has a playbook for self-defense, as we saw during the first Trump administration. And yet as the criticisms of higher education have mounted, the weaknesses of that playbook have become evident. The weaknesses include university presidents — particularly their reflexive reliance on policies and processes unconnected to deeply held values, their evasiveness in the face of tough questioning, and their failure to understand and respond to the demands of political theater. All of these attributes were on stark display during the December 5 antisemitism hearing. The transcript shows that Claudine Gay referenced Harvard policies and processes nearly 30 times while largely ignoring the results of these policies. She evaded answering pointed questions over a dozen times. Missing were compelling examples supporting her many references to her university’s “robust” disciplinary policies or illustrating how a vibrant culture of open expression actually exists on the Harvard campus. Instead, she relied on terse statements about her “deep commitment to free expression” and the importance of “preserving the security of our community.”
These bloodless responses made for a stark contrast to the emotionally charged language of her inquisitors. The hearing began with a short video showing hate-filled chanting and acts of intimidation. Representatives vividly described anti-Semitic actions on campus, including Jewish students being pushed, spat upon, and punched. Republicans passionately condemned the “moral rot” at the heart of the academic enterprise and the “poison fruits” of institutional culture. There were also many accusations of or references to murder, barbarism, and mania.
The message was clear: Republicans have learned to capitalize on dramatic events as a springboard to more far-reaching policy changes. Universities have been a punching bag on the right for decades, but rarely have so many cameras and notepads been present to record such a perfect representation of the Republican narrative.
Those who advance to top positions in universities are generally expert managers. Many also have the capacity to charm donors. They are less likely to be practiced politicians or to be deeply immersed in the intellectual life of their institutions. In part this is because of the division of labor between outward-facing presidents and inward-facing provosts and deans. It is also results from the development of separate administrative tracks where the high-stakes issues are finance and budgeting, regulatory bodies, conflict abatement, reputation management, and enrollment management — not the research and teaching mission.
It would be a mistake to call most of today’s university presidents academic leaders. They are managers of complex organizations whose product lines range from athletics to zoology. They are subject to pressure from state legislatures, donors, regulatory bodies, professional associations, faculty interest groups, parents, and prospective students. Given the complexity of the role, university boards have over time concluded that outstanding scholars rarely make outstanding university managers. When I examined the careers of university presidents several years ago as part of research for a book (Two Cheers for Higher Education), I found that only about half of the top 50 research universities and a sprinkling of liberal-arts colleges recruited presidents who had excelled as scientists and scholars. The rest hired candidates with modest academic careers, candidates who had worked their way up through the administrative bureaucracy without ever professing, or candidates whose careers had been spent in political life or business.
At the nation’s largest and most-selective universities there is a playbook for how to handle nearly every situation a president encounters, including data breaches, athletics scandals, and student suicides. Because of the many units a president presides over, and the diversity of the constituency for each, such playbooks are necessary. Presidents learn to speak publicly only about the recognitions their faculties and students obtain. Prizes, graduations, and record-breaking fund-raising campaigns deserve speeches. Everything else is not for public consumption. When controversies arise, presidents put together task forces. They consult legal counsel before acting; they defer to counsel when resources or reputations may be at risk. They learn what is expected at ceremonial occasions and how to perform these duties. They are briefed on how to interact with legislators and how to deflect uncomfortable questions. They learn to promise to look into matters without necessarily intending to do so. They have speechwriters to write their speeches, assistants to troubleshoot and mollify, and deans and department chairs to interact with the faculty and students. Most of the time this managerial approach works. But when it comes to combating a well-organized political party determined to degrade academic institutions, managerialism invites disaster. If the presidential playbook isn’t thoroughly revised, higher education will face a diminished future should Trump and Republicans regain power in 2025.
What, then, can be done to avoid this unhappy outcome?
First, universities will need to decide which of the policies that are currently under attack should be preserved or strengthened and which may require reform — or abandonment. Republicans have attacked university endowments, science funding, the teaching of critical race theory, diversity policies, and academic-freedom protections. Some of these commitments will be easy to defend. How can the U.S. compete effectively without robust academic R&D? Congress has so far agreed, but the case must continue to be made effectively.
Other policies will require better defenses than have been offered thus far. Diversity policies are at the top of this list. The idea that the civic mission of universities centers on the racial and gender diversity of faculty and student bodies is relatively new. It became a fixture of liberal thinking only two decades ago when the first diversity statements were required and as DEI offices began to catch on. The decline of Republican support for higher education shares this timeline. Diversity, equity, and inclusion caught on with campus leaders after affirmative action was hamstrung by the courts. On some campuses, it has proved to be a poor substitute because it is forced into the pretense that all diversity matters even when university practices belie the claim. The Israel-Hamas conflict and the December 5 congressional hearings exposed the subterfuge.
As an antidote to the attacks on DEI, presidents can begin to extol again the broader civic mission of universities. That broader vision includes research that provides far-seeing insight into the world we inhabit; studies that help solve a wide range of community problems; the development of new technologies to bring jobs and new wealth to states and regions; lectures and performances that bring cultural enrichment to local communities; and the cultivation of future leaders from among the undergraduate and graduate student bodies.
DEI policies are part of this package, but only part. And because they are controversial, they should be defended with concrete evidence of their effectiveness. Do DEI offices have measurable effects on the sense of belonging or the level of achievement of students from underrepresented groups? Have they helped to retain diverse faculty? If so, how large are these effects? And what costs, if any, have the offices incurred in terms of campus free speech? It is surprising that studies like this are in such short supply.
It is tempting to think that elite institutions should begin to focus again on recruiting distinguished scholars and scientists for leadership roles (as opposed to those who have lesser academic records but lengthier management experience). After all, excellent scholars might be more likely to speak with knowledge and conviction about the intellectual and educational accomplishments of their institutions, having contributed to those accomplishments themselves.
But what is more essential for presidents is the ability to recognize when they are actors in a political arena and to have the presence of mind to meet such moments. If a member of Congress asks for the percentage of conservative faculty members at Harvard, the right answer should come naturally. The right answer is not the one Claudine Gay gave: “I do not have that statistic. We don’t collect that data.” The right answer challenges the premise and is conveyed openly rather than at arm’s length: Academically talented conservatives usually prefer to go into business, legal, or medical careers, and Harvard would welcome qualified conservatives who wish to give up the higher salaries in those fields for the opportunity to research and teach at a world-class university.
Harvard is looking for a new president. One of the criteria should be the capacity to provide the public with straight talk and with concrete examples illustrating why their institutions make a difference and are worthy of public support. In the current environment, and given the stakes, the tight-lipped and evasive answers of today’s academic managers just won’t cut it.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
LEADERSHIP & GOVERNANCEPOLITICAL INFLUENCE & ACTIVISM
Steven Brint
Steven Brint is a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California at Riverside and the director of the Colleges & Universities 2000 Project.
https://archive.is/2024.03.06-191642/https://www.chronicle.com/article/if-trump-wins
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As the saying goes, "reading this backwards" sounds really fg good to me!!!
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I would really like to see a shift away from 1 sided-ideological discussion within University. Some classes felt like leftist-indoctrination, and University as a whole was a dissapointing experience.
The objective should be critical thinking and the pursuit of truth, regardless of political inclination. If the truth lands on the right or left, then it shouldn't be distorted in favor of one side or another, just left alone.
While I found the ideological indoctrination distasteful, I'd also like to keep the pendulum shifting to something resembling *conservative indoctrination*. What I'd really like to see is intellectual diversity encouraged within Universities, because open and diverse discussions across ideological boundaries facilitates the pursuit of knowledge and truth.
No one should feel like their grades or employment are at risk for challenging the dominant ideology within an institution.
Peter Boghossian was a teacher and friend of mine who lost his job simply because he encouraged an unbiased, critical thought-approach to education and exposing a biased peer review process within the gender studies department. The irony is that he was a democrat, but portrayed as some sort of nazi by them as result.
His firing, as well as Bret Weinstein and Jordan Peterson's expulsion represent a definite departure from the pursuit of free thought and open discussion: which serve as the foundation of the pursuit of knowledge and truth.
These freedoms and principles are the very things that separate our country from authoritarian regimes like China or Russia, and give it strength, and it's very concerning to see them degraded within higher learning institutions.
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I would take that further and say that there should be a core curriculum based upon the fundamentals of Western Civilization and basic scientific literacy.
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https://nypost.com/2024/03/07/us-news/harvard-ethics-complaint-over-42m-to-officials-law-firm/?fbclid=IwAR34jzb36qCtsXyIgCxq_OpgHjfIwO0PuGszOK1Q4XfS6T06wbfopZG0uBc
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2024/03/10/firefighters-who-booed-at-letitia-james-will-be-sent-to-woke-re-education-sessions-n2636310
won't work.
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Add Alabama to the growing list of states that have passed universal school choice via education savings accounts, or ESAs. Parents should send their thanks to Gov. Kay Ivey, who signed a bill Thursday to create ESAs worth $7,000 per student, starting with lower-income families, but opening to everyone in 2027-28.
This is a major victory for Alabama and a turnaround from last year. In her 2023 state of the state address, Ms. Ivey called for more school choice, yet lawmakers in Montgomery let an ESA bill die without a floor vote. This year she elevated the issue, naming universal ESAs her “number one legislative priority.” In a matter of weeks, the bill sailed through the House (69-34) and Senate (23-9).
“While our state has a strong public education system, all Alabama families will soon have the right to choose their children’s schools,” Ms. Ivey said Wednesday, calling that a “monumental achievement.” State Sen. Arthur Orr and Rep. Danny Garrett were also instrumental to the legislative victory.
ESA money can be used for private-school tuition or other education expenses, and homeschoolers will be eligible for $2,000. The law funds the system initially at $100 million a year, enough to serve a multiple of the roughly 3,000 students in Alabama’s current tax-credit scholarship program.
The tax-credit scholarships are open only to families making up to 250% of the federal poverty level. But everybody will be eligible for an ESA, which widens the opportunity for students, as well as the political constituency to support it and to add funding if needed over time.
The Alabama Education Association teachers union has decried school choice, which is no surprise. But K-12 spending per pupil in the state “grew by 15.5% over the past five years,” the Alabama Policy Institute said in a recent report. “What have parents gotten from record spending? Alabama’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress remain near or below where they were more than two decades ago.”
Fundamental to school choice is that it’s a choice. Parents who are happy with their public schools can stay put. But those who aren’t happy deserve other options, and kudos to Ms. Ivey and Alabama for supplying them.
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https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/13/penn-tries-to-punish-and-purge-thought-criminal-amy-wax/
Penn Tries to Punish and Purge Thought Criminal Amy Wax
Wax's crime is precisely in keeping her mind free—in having and speaking her thoughts born of observations, research, and reasoning, regardless of the political correctness police.
By Teresa R. Manning
March 13, 2024
Every day, American higher education becomes more of an embarrassing intellectual wasteland. Exhibit A is the University of Pennsylvania’s supposed disciplinary action against distinguished faculty member, law professor Amy Wax. Professor Wax is an alumna of Yale College, Columbia University, and both Harvard’s Law School and Medical School. Her scholarship is widely cited, and she’s won numerous teaching awards. Whatever one thinks of her cultural critiques, she is an obvious intellectual powerhouse. So why is Penn disciplining her?
Since at least 2017, Wax has been viewed as controversial. That’s when she and San Diego law professor Larry Alexander published an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer advocating for middle-class, or “bourgeois” values. They noted that the American upper middle class still lives these values: they complete high school before marrying, they marry before having children, and they work full-time and respect authority. Others now call this the “success sequence.”
But in our politically charged times (that is, times when the political left runs everything from education to entertainment, from government to business), such common-sense views from prestigious professors are verboten. “Racist!” was the predictable denunciation, and Wax probably made Penn’s hitlist at that moment.
But unlike most faculty who conform to political correctness to get hired, to get tenure, and then to get their kids admitted, Wax continued to speak her mind. After all, her research interests are primarily societal trends such as welfare, immigration, and work and family issues. In these areas, therefore, her need for and claim to academic freedom—the right to follow where research leads—is strongest.
She proceeded to do an interview with Brown University Professor Glenn Loury where she noted that minority students were not well prepared for law school and therefore did not have high class rankings, stating she had “never seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of a class and rarely, rarely in the top half.” The response was more outrage. She then spoke on immigration at the 2019 National Conservatism conference, where she said that Western countries, including America, should favor immigrants from other Western nations to maintain cultural cohesion. But in the anti-Western West, only people in places like Japan and China can say such things: Asia can be for Asians, but the West cannot be for Westerners.
All this candid talk dismayed Penn Law. Like almost every other American law school, Penn is run by left-of-center ideologues. So Dean Theodore W. Ruger began an investigation—read an inquisition—to see if Wax had breached “university standards” with “racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic statements.” But how can a university claim to honor free thought and speech if it investigates and disciplines those who think and speak freely? It can’t. So Penn Law is scrambling for pretexts to discipline Wax—when her real crime is wrong think. That means Penn Law enforcing thought control, not “university standards.”
So the pretexts for disciplining Wax include an on-campus statement from 10 years ago when she expressed relief at a name she could easily pronounce, allegedly saying it was “a nice American name.” This is apparently Count One against her, though Wax does not remember the incident (though she admits she has mispronounced student names). Count Two is also some 10 years ago and again unremembered by Wax: A minority student claims that Wax told her she had benefited from affirmative action; the student took offense. Given the absence of any record in the intervening years, Wax has apparently never uttered this sentiment since. She also denies having said it. She points out, however, that supporters of affirmative action say it brings benefits. If so, can’t people say that someone benefits? And if such a statement is offensive—violating “university standards”—is a affirmative action itself offensive?
So what is really going on here?
The real story is that with a few limited exceptions, such as Hillsdale or Patrick Henry College, American higher education has been hijacked by Stalinist ideologues who see college as more time for student mind control (and soul control … while student debt is social control). For decades, Democrats have outnumbered Republicans on faculty by ratios of more than 50 to one, with many departments having zero Republicans. To illustrate the climate, College Republicans at the University of Iowa announced a “Coming Out Day” in 2011, to which Anthropology Professor Ellen Lewin emailed a response with the subject line: “F*** YOU REPUBLICANS.”
So college is more about promoting left-wing politics (including sexual degeneracy) than imparting knowledge.
As a result, graduates are mostly ignoramuses who know little about their country except that they’re supposed to hate it (left-wing orders!) They also hate people who want to save America—like Professor Wax.
Administrators and academics have additional reasons to target Wax: She is the real doctor in a room of charlatans. Her very presence exposes other professors as conformist political operatives—not thinkers, much less critical thinkers like Wax. For this reason, Wax must be punished.
If college were about cultivating a life of the mind or an appetite for knowledge and understanding, it would welcome people of different perspectives—dissenters—so everyone could learn from one another. But the opposite is true: universities have purged independent minds from campus, and they are most dogmatic and anti-Western on matters of race and culture. Any hint that Western culture and peoples should be preserved is heresy. In fact, the professoriate wonders: How did Amy Wax get this far? And last this long? We got rid of her kind forever ago!
Wax’s crime is precisely in keeping her mind free—in having and speaking her thoughts born of observations, research, and reasoning, regardless of the political correctness police. In short, to the wasteland that is now academia, she is a thought criminal.
And she is about to become yet one more of academia’s hundreds of victims—students as well as faculty—of cancel culture if Penn Law succeeds in purging her.
When casualties for thought crimes mount this way, one knows that the barbarians have been inside the gate for a long, long time, even as the public is only just now waking up.
In truth, the only corrective now for American higher education is probably a moratorium on public funding for all colleges and universities—say, five years—until an audit of these bad actor institutions can be done. Was their political purge lawful? Why are graduates ignorant and in debt? Why are taxpayers bailing everyone out? Why are real teachers and scholars like Amy Wax threats?
Penn’s attempt to punish and purge Amy Wax is just the latest reminder of how overdue a correction like this is.
Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of Scholars and a former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School, George Mason University.
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Hey, with upper admin so focussed on proper pronoun use and suppressing unpopular speech they need a little help with incidental things ... like ensuring student safety. I see one student quoted her is named Rebekah, which leaves me wondering if there is an antiseptic element in play here:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/03/parents-of-students-at-uc-berkeley-hire-private-security-to-patrol-campus/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=parents-of-students-at-uc-berkeley-hire-private-security-to-patrol-campus
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A UCLA medical degree now requires essentially a minor in “Progressive” trope regurgitation. Imagine all the lives that would be lost if they focused on teaching medicine instead :
https://nypost.com/2024/03/20/lifestyle/ucla-medical-school-trains-future-doctors-to-be-climate-activists-leaked-docs-show/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR0QBeYgS6m_xVKTp6iJi5hy8TZXkJCl0iqH4664l_wfa_9zFQTw5mpZVr0
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:cry: :cry: :cry:
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It’s good seeing the price rise on schools trafficking in this foolishness:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/03/arizona-state-u-conservative-prof-sues-school-over-mandatory-dei-training/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=arizona-state-u-conservative-prof-sues-school-over-mandatory-dei-training
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Learn how to blow up pipelines as part of your studies at Harvard:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/04/harvard-facing-accusations-of-promoting-eco-terrorism-for-screening-how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline-film/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=harvard-facing-accusations-of-promoting-eco-terrorism-for-screening-how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline-film
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Couple interesting pieces re the latest plagiarism scandals to emerge in higher ed. For those who don’t know, “protected class” is educrat speak for minorities identified as worthy of extra protections. Every time I’d embark on a performance management effort for an underperforming employee the first question HR would ask is “are they a member of a protected class?”
Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems “protected” is turning into a synonym for underperforming scholar:
https://www.karlstack.com/p/lisa-cooks-new-plagiarism-scandal?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR0l4o_eKH6kZUTQVc9MQ3fDTluc5B1bS6fiT8MjMJ_Kocac-TrE8YUIM4M_aem_ATR_vR4aNGK7i5XdRCcS3k_snAv21r2O3O7N78Kk3ND7HA9OSzAVlSP9vLwkTXG_qbUw32DAE4Nc-VQmPeNpk1q5
https://www.dailywire.com/news/trouble-at-the-fed
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A Gazan on why campus protests hurt more than help:
https://www.newsweek.com/message-gazan-campus-protesters-youre-hurting-palestinian-cause-opinion-1894313?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR05mN1lxE2f11ByQIEgdPdQOryz4d4_El_8-L8KWB8EQ30KaGCyb_G_nDg_aem_AYZ5-KQgUPVnrD7X4OhNC9w889rr9vZ84KpcdqWnBBX5Wf6GohVuW72BI2ClHf5ERYfoEina9ZnusPP4oR5vKb0P
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Minouche Shafik
was married to .... drum roll...:
Shafik married economist Mohamed El-Erian in 1990 during their time working for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, respectively.[77][78] In 2002, Shafik married her second husband, scientist Raffael Jovine
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Bermuda # 5 at one billion dollars
Now where in the hell does Bermuda get such money?
Clearly it is being funneled/laundered from another foreign source.
https://investigativeeconomics.substack.com/p/foreign-contributions-to-universities
we need to expose where these schools get their money.
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America needs college presidents/administrators willing to take stands like this:
https://hxstem.substack.com/p/from-the-desk-of-president-john-habidacus?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true
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Student surveys at America's elite universities.
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"For most people, politics is about fitting in." - Nate Silver
https://www.natesilver.net/p/for-most-people-politics-is-about
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I see some signs that some circled wagons have opted to leave the enclosure, but it is indeed few and hardly enough to to reverse things:
POSTED ON MAY 14, 2024 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN ACADEMIC LEFT, HIGHER EDUCATION
CAN OUR UNIVERSITIES BE FIXED?
Last Friday evening I had the occasion to team up in Los Angeles with Dean Pete Peterson of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy (where I just finished a very congenial semester filling the large shoes of the late Ted McAllister) to discuss the state of higher education before an audience of about 90 citizens alarmed at the current scene. Our conversation was unscripted and spontaneous, but here are some highlights, in service of setting up some further reflections in due course:
Dean Peterson: Universities have long leaned left, but it seems universities have gotten a lot worse in the last few years. Is this correct? How and why has this happened?
Me: Universities have leaned left for decades—actually for centuries. In one sense universities ought to be “left,” in the sense that universities should be critical institutions, challenging the conventional wisdom, and thus being agents of progress, rightly understood, when they produce new innovations in science and the humanities. Recall that Thomas Aquinas was a dangerous radical at the University of Paris in the 13th century, but when a challenge survives subsequent criticism and the test of time, it deepens and extends our civilization. And thus, you can draw a straight line from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Jefferson—the “two Tommys,” as I like to say to students—and you can make out important continuities between parts of Tommy Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and the second paragraph of Tommy Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.
The problem is that today’s universities have gone from being critical institutions to being fully adversarial institutions, with contempt for both Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Jefferson (and everyone else who built our civilization step by step) because the thinkers and statesmen who preceded us are presumed to be obsolete and unenlightened, if not somehow evil and oppressive. The late philosopher Roger Scruton liked to call this the “culture of repudiation,” in which there is no achievement of the West that today’s left doesn’t want to destroy. Thus universities now have large portions of their faculty and curriculum actively and persistently undermining the foundations of our civilization just as termites undermine the foundations and frames of buildings.
Dean Peterson: Can universities be fixed? Is there hope for reform? What should we look or hope for?
Me: It is possible that the current moment, with the shocking anti-Semitism on display at leading universities right now, is an inflection point. By coincidence, we are having this conversation on May 10. May 10 was the day on which Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940, at one of Europe’s very worst moments. People recall his speeches from that point on, though I believe his greatest speech came two years before, after the Munich agreement. Churchill’s climax invoked the famous line from the Book of Daniel: “Thou art weighed in the balance, and found wanting.”
More and more Americans have come to this point of view about our universities: they have been weighed in the balance, and found wanting, because they have become badly unbalanced. There is considerable survey evidence of the loss of confidence or esteem for our universities, even among Democrats, who run our universities.
There aren’t a lot of Churchills among our university leadership class these days, but I do get the sense that some people in university leadership are starting to understand that the appeasement of the campus left needs to stop. We see a few hopeful signs here and there. First, a few Ivy League universities have actually hired some high-profile conservatives for important positions recently. The few adults still in the room are finally realizing they have a big problem, and where it comes from. Second, we’re seeing more and more states disband the politicized DEI offices in their public universities. Third and most significant is the establishment of new programs and centers for civic education in leading public universities in several states, which are going to be in several cases very substantial entities, deliberately conservative in their outlook and curriculum.
What this represents is the introduction of real intellectual competition on campus, and as fans of competition this is the most hopeful thing happening. One of the causes of the sharp skew in universities has been that the number of conservative faculty, always historically small to begin with, has dwindled precipitously over the last generation, deepening the intellectual bubble of university life. This may be about to reverse itself in many places. And conservatives do not need anything near equal representation on faculties to make a large difference for a very simple reason: one of us is worth twenty of them. It takes a while to explain why this is so, but it is true. A campus counter-revolution is underway.
Much more to come on this topic.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/05/can-our-universities-be-fixed.php
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so where is the DEI
2/3 of professors think NYPD restoring order was bad idea
while
2/3 of Americans think the exact opposite:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/67-percent-in-new-poll-concerned-campus-protests-will-lead-to-violence/ar-BB1m44ti?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Diversity my ass!
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https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-davis-hanson/victor-davis-hanson-can-the-current-universities-be-saved-3045458/?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=latest&utm_source=post_3053509&utm_term=VICTOR%20DAVIS%20HANSON%3A%20Can%20the%20current%20universities%20be%20saved%3F
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Education savings accounts are also considered, with links to source data. Graph heavy so only link below:
https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/fiscal-effects-school-choice
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Universities receive public funds, ostensibly for research, that are then retasked for other purposes:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/how_elite_universities_use_your_money.html
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For a couple years I was my institution’s “administrative officer” at a small satellite campus, which basically meant I was dean, provost, registrar, whatever all rolled into one for this small campus. I thank my lucky stars there wasn’t a “provost for climate change” position I have had to represent as I’d have contemplated sepbuku if forced to wear that stupid mantle:
Penn creates climate change vice provost role
COLLEGE FIX STAFF •JUNE 3, 2024
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Will lead efforts to confront ‘existential challenge of climate change’
The University of Pennsylvania now employs a vice provost solely focused on climate change.
The “Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action” is tasked with “support[ing] Penn’s leadership in addressing the climate crisis,” according to the campus newspaper.
“This would include responsibilities such as implementing the campus-wide Climate and Sustainability Action Plan, leading academic programs in climate science and policy and enhancing education and training focused on climate mitigation and adaptation,” The Daily Pennsylvanian reported.
The Philadelphia Ivy League university has identified fighting climate change as a core part of its “strategic framework.”
Penn’s framework states:
Every person at Penn and all that we do has some nexus to the existential challenge of climate change. We must, in an all-in University effort, do more. From leading energy science and policy across disciplines to designing and caring for the built environment, Penn will seek additional ways to support and recruit the best minds; fuel initiatives that advance understanding and promise solutions; and adopt institutional best practices for the sake of our future and our planet.
Interim President Larry Jameson provided further comments on the new position as well as another new job, a vice provost for the arts.
“We promised to lead on the great challenges of the world, and climate change may just be the greatest challenge we all face,” President Jameson stated in Penn Today. “And at a moment when it is critical that people come together through deeper understanding and empathy for others, the arts are core to creating connection and fostering common humanity.”
“The most tangible goal of this program is to reduce the temperature of the planet and to protect the planet’s inhabitants and ecosystem while we get there,” Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives David Asch stated in Penn Today.
The university also covers the issue of climate change in various courses.
Classes offered in the past include “White Nationalism in the age of Climate Change” and “Imagining Environmental Justice,” as previously reported by The College Fix.
Its “Climate Week” in September featured a dance “dedicated to Monarch butterflies,” as The Fix previously reported.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/penn-creates-climate-change-vice-provost-role/
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My alma mater. :oops:
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Is the tide turning in higher ed, particularly at the elite schools?
Rich Students Disproportionally Play the Radical: Should We Fund Elite Universities?
June 11, 2024
By RICHARD K. VEDDER
عباد ديرانية / Wikimedia Commons
Columbia University, April 2024
Also published in Minding the Campus Mon. June 10, 2024
My friend, John Fund, a distinguished journalist and political commentator, has brought to my attention a fine study done by the Washington Monthly, showing that virulent anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests have occurred disproportionately at elite colleges where most students come from relatively rich families.
You heard a lot about pro-Palestinian demonstrations, building occupation, and tent encampments at schools like Columbia or Northwestern, but little or no mention of protests at schools where those attending are primarily from working-class families with a high proportion of first-generation students or at historically black colleges and universities.
The Washington Monthly examined this exhaustively and confirmed that the less selective public universities had far less protest activity than the elite and richly endowed private schools. This is in marked contrast to the widespread Vietnam War era protests, which were prominent at state schools, most tragically, at Kent State University, where four people died.
As one who has studied, taught, or guest lectured at schools of all stripes—I estimate on between 300 and 400 American campuses—I sense the zeitgeist of America’s collegiate villages varies enormously, consistent with the Washington Monthly study.
Many members of the campus community at the most elite schools think they are what Glenn Loury, in his spectacular new memoir Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, calls masters of the universe—among the chosen persons classified as the best, brightest, smartest. They think they are today’s philosopher kings, destined to lead the nation in the future just as their professors and alumni did and do today.
The crisis in higher education today is that the academy’s perceptions have likely never been more divergent from those of American society as a whole.
The noble wunderkind idealists inhabiting the Harvards and Columbias of the world believe they have almost a divine right to behave as they wish, ignoring not only the rule of law but also accepted boundaries of protest in the democratic polity in which they live. Worse, they lately have displayed a despicable hatred or contempt towards a group of people based on their religion and traditions, also known as racism—evaluating people on group characteristics instead of their own worth as individuals.
But, the excessive disconnect between the real world and college is beginning to have seriously negative consequences.
Universities are utterly dependent on public support. This dependence is somewhat less pronounced for richly endowed schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Northwestern, Duke, and Stanford. However, even these institutions face significant challenges, particularly with the potential imposition of larger endowment taxes. The indication that rich alums will be withholding millions, maybe billions, in support hurts the elite schools, as does a decline in applications, making them less selective, less elitist, and less the home of the chosen ones and instead the home of what that great American philosopher Leona Helmsley once memorably called, “the little people.”
I suspect we are in the early, not late, stages of the impact of the abrupt decline in public support for universities. Waning student interest and the very real birth dearth already provide a bleak future for enrollments and governmental subsidies. When progressive icons like the New York Times and the Washington Post start critically editorializing about some of the practices of the self-appointed collegiate establishment, you know higher education is in trouble.
Both market forces—subdued as they are given massive public and private subsidies—and even governmental actions should bring corrective actions that may lead to improvements: lesser control of campus activities by leftist faculty, administrative, and student leaders. Colleges may be saved by crackdowns initiated by alumni and governing boards of private elite institutions as well as politicians and trustees of state universities.
Already, encouraging signs are appearing. MIT says faculty will no longer be asked to sign loyalty oaths to the woke supremacy commitments to support “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Decidedly, non-elitist Yeshiva University reports booming enrollments as abled—and often rich—Jewish students flee what they see as anti-Semitic hotbeds—Harvard and Columbia.
Spineless, unprincipled, and often academically dubious presidents of schools selected in a self-congratulatory affirmation of racial and ethnic inclusiveness are being defrocked from positions of dominance. And, as the public increasingly says no to campus wokeness, once religious and academically traditional schools are flourishing.
Maybe sanity will prevail, and higher education will come through wiser, rededicated to principles of free expression, civil debate, and respect for the rule of both formal and collegiate forms of the rule of law.
RICHARD K. VEDDER is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Economics at Ohio University, and author of Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14954
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Failed mayor to teach (another!) college course. In related news, Emperor Nero will teach a course on civic fire prevention:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/ousted-chicago-mayor-lori-lightfoot-to-teach-public-policy-at-u-michigan/
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Will Chevron pull all the bureaucratic interpretations of federal laws out of the hands of educrats and into the hands of colleges?
Supreme Court’s Chevron Ruling Is a Major Victory for American Higher Education
July 9, 2024
By RICHARD K. VEDDER
The Supreme Court’s recent Chevron ruling, while rightly focusing on central issues like presidential immunity, also brought a potential boon for American higher education. This decision, which I believe holds promise for the future, has yet to be fully grasped by the higher education establishment.
Specifically, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court invalidated the doctrine of Chevron deference prevailing since 1984. In the Chevron case, the Court dramatically curtailed the power of courts to rein in the actions of independent agencies and executive departments to overturn federal administrative diktats, which some think led to the creation of the modern administrative state.
The recent Supreme Court decision has had a profound effect on universities. As Jon Fansmith, the chief lobbyist for the American Council of Education, aptly pointed out, “Almost every aspect of running a modern campus is dictated in some way by federal regulations or guidance—whether that’s how you make staffing, compensation, training, or enrollment decisions, all the way down to the level of what you put on your website.”
I contend that the golden age of American higher education came in the generation before the rise in federal higher education activism, which began after obtaining statutory authority with the Higher Education Act of 1965 but most notably after the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1978.
America’s role in creating the world’s best universities dates back to before 1965, when both private dollars and state governments helped finance the planet’s best universities. Aside from obtaining resources, these schools benefited from competition and academic diversity—different kinds of schools, some progressive, some conservative, some religious, others militantly agnostic. We did not have stultifying schools teaching a uniform curriculum with little diversity, the model in much of the rest of the world.
But as Fansmith says, the Feds took that away, especially strongly beginning with the Obama Administration in 2009.
The modern federal administrative state has robbed most universities of much of their individuality, with a few schools of the Hillsdale or Grove City College variety that have completely severed ties with the Feds escaping that fate, generally with great success. The modern-day Department of Education’s sins include the lamentable declaration of war against college men and Anglo-Saxon rules of judicial conduct with the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that led most colleges into adopting an almost “guilty until proven innocent” attitude regarding allegations of male student sexual misconduct. The jihad towards men has contributed to a significant decline in male enrollment.
A second significant sin came with the Obama era: “gainful employment rules” applied against for-profit colleges, not against mediocre or worse public colleges, and were designed to annihilate a small but often vibrant sector.
But the biggest problem relates to the terrible federal student loan program. In its best days, the program was a disaster, as it is the primary culprit in the tuition fee explosion of modern times. But with the Biden loan forgiveness programs, it has taken on unjust and costly dimensions of truly Titanic proportions. Aside from its policy inappropriateness, the contempt for the rule of law shown by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in the light of adverse court rulings has been shocking.
The Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision may have great, long-term positive effects on higher education by giving the courts greater ability to block outrageous administrative fatwas that contradict American legal traditions. Yet that outcome is far from assured. Judicial adherence to stare decisis—deferring to Supreme Court decisions—is somewhat spotty.
Interestingly, when the Chevron case was decided in 1984, conservatives were mostly happy since it was seen as curtailing the power of liberal judges. Yet today’s conservatives also love its reversal because it reduces the power of agencies adhering to a predominantly liberal administrative agenda. The political orientation of both judges and powerful bureaucratic apparatchiks changes with time.
To be sure, the fate of America’s universities depends on many things, and not all their ails are federally inflicted. To cite just one example, the rise in debilitating grade inflation roughly coincides with the growth in federal involvement, and while there may be links between those two things, they are not obvious or strong. Still, my tentative assessment is that the Supreme Court’s recent action improved the environment where higher learning occurs in America.
RICHARD K. VEDDER is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Economics at Ohio University, and author of Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14986
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This is all sorts of galling. One of the hats I wear involves coordinating protection for minors attending summer programs on campus, while my father was an educator in IL, finishing his time there as a principal where he had his share of jaw dropping teachers union stories.
Here we find all sorts of pressures to limit reporting of sexual abuse by teachers, with the Trump administration attempting to collect complete data (likely one of the reasons his Secretary of Education faced so much resistance) to the Biden admin seeking to walk that effort back, no doubt as a “favor” to the teachers union:
Forbidden Fruit and the Classroom: The Huge American Sex-Abuse Scandal That Educators Scandalously Suppress
By James Varney, RealClearInvestigations
July 10, 2024
Every day millions of parents put their children under the care of public school teachers, administrators, and support staff. Their trust, however, is frequently broken by predators in authority in what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history.
Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.
For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.
AP
Betsy DeVos, former Education Secretary: "They’ve papered them over, acted like it’s not an issue.”
AP
“In any given year they have failed to report thousands of these situations, and instead they’ve papered them over, acted like it’s not an issue,” former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told RealClearInvestigations. Stunned by a 2018 Chicago Tribune investigation that found 523 incident reports of sexual misconduct by employees of the city’s schools during the past decade, DeVos during the Trump administration launched the process of including specific questions about such cases in the Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection, a process it undertakes every two years. Previously, the Office for Civil Rights asked only general questions about sexual misconduct incidents, without a breakdown of alleged perpetrators.
The Biden administration initially sought to remove those questions, saying it wanted to avoid data duplication, but it backtracked after fierce criticism it was doing so as a sop to teachers unions. Consequently, the question will be included on future questionnaires, but, as of today, the Department of Education “has no data,” a spokesperson told RCI. These days, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, even a cursory review of local news reporting brings disquieting revelations of teachers accused of or arrested for alleged sexual relations with a student. In just the past month:
In California, multiple students filed a lawsuit against a male music teacher who had taught at three different schools in the San Jose area. The teacher is already serving prison time for previous convictions in sexual misconduct cases with students.
In New Jersey, a female middle school teacher was arrested for an alleged ongoing sexual relationship with a student.
In Texas, a male teacher was arrested for allegedly having a sexual affair with a 12-year-old student.
In Illinois, a female substitute teacher faces charges of “grooming and predatory criminal sexual assault” for an alleged relationship with a sixth-grader.
In Washington, the arrest of a male high school teacher on charges of sexual misconduct with a minor represented a repeat nightmare for a school district that previously had a psychologist convicted on the same charges.
Just last weekend, a 36-year-old New Jersey teacher was arrested on multiple assault charges involving a sexual relationship with a teenage student.
These stories hold a lurid appeal to some. Sensational accounts of seductions of students by teachers, typically by high school female teachers, are tabloid catnip. The topic has provided material for standup comics, Hollywood writers, and pop tunes that didn't begin or end with Van Halen’s 1984 hit “Hot For Teacher.”
Hot for teacher: From the "Little Rascals" to Van Halen, pop culture glosses over the dangerous liaisons of teacher-student relationships.
"Love Business"/Our Gang short (1931)/YouTube
But experts who track the problem don't take the problem lightly. Pointing to research from Hofstra University that found roughly 1 in 10 students in K-12 schools have suffered “some form of sexual misconduct by an educator,” Terri Miller, head of the advocacy group SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation), said the number of victims is staggering.
“The rate of educator sexual misconduct is 10 times higher in one year’s time than in five decades of abuse by clergy,” Miller said, noting that in 2021 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reported it had received nearly 4,300 sexual abuse allegations. “Another striking contrast is we are not mandated to send our children to church; we are mandated to send them to school.”
The extent of the problem may shock many Americans. The topic has long been shrouded by a curtain held by various actors in the drama: schools reluctant to go public with embarrassing and possibly criminal activity, unions fighting for members’ privacy and sometimes state laws that protect it, and a government reluctant to ask hard questions that would gather reliable data.
But the cases and tactics often used to cover them up have become common enough to earn an ugly nickname: “passing the trash.”
“DOE does not and never has tracked sexual misconduct committed by adults against students,” said Billie-Jo Grant, a professor at California Poly State University who is one of the nation’s top researchers on the topic.
“DOE has never aggressively worked to stop teachers' unions and administrators from passing the trash,” she told RCI. “DOE does not hold accountable the many enablers who have created a pool of mobile molesters in our schools nationwide. Your questions should include why? Why? Why?”
Chicago Tribune
One headline that galvanized federal action, followed by foot-dragging.
Chicago Tribune
Grant and Miller attended a Department of Education conference on the topic in D.C. in October 2019, and it was out of that meeting that its Office for Civil Rights decided to ask more specific questions in its Civil Rights Data Collection, according to Miller.
SESAME
Terri Miller: “The rate of educator sexual misconduct is 10 times higher in one year’s time than in five decades of abuse by clergy."
SESAME
And while the government may be groping toward more clarity, as a DOE official acknowledged having “no data” the Department would make public, he insisted the matter is viewed with concern.
In 2004, then-Hofstra professor Carol Shakeshaft did a report for the DOE that assessed the data available on the topic. From a handful of regional studies and media reports, Shakeshaft’s report found some broad parameters of the problem.
For example, while stories involving female teachers may be more titillating and gain more media attention, about two-thirds of the predators in schools are male. While no region seems to be immune from the problem, about half of the reported incidents occurred in southern states, Shakeshaft’s report found. Most of the victims are female (56%), and the majority of incidents involve high schools (62%).
The problem is not confined to public schools, although the public school student population dwarfs that of private and parochial schools. Incidents of sexual misconduct at tony schools like New York’s Horace Mann, or at St. George’s in Rhode Island are but two of the most publicized examples of the problem.
Protecting kids in school from inappropriate or criminal sexual activity involving employees and students would seem a surefire winner, but instead DeVos and her team found it was a political football. Union contracts and in many cases state law protect the privacy of employees. What that meant, DeVos explained, is that even if credible allegations of sexual misconduct were leveled against an employee, unless authorities were called in or an arrest made the alleged perpetrator was often free to leave one school and work in another.
The definitions of what constitutes sexual misconduct could be broadly construed, and the proliferation of social media has not only loosened the boundaries of contact between school employees and students, but provided more opportunities for wrongdoers.
Still, for the most severe conduct, the Trump administration finally introduced on the 2020-21 school year questionnaire specific questions regarding “a school staff member and rape or attempted rape.” Answers for the initial year were optional, as is common with new reporting requirements, and the DOE declined to make the results public. But, in any case, those figures would be hopelessly incomplete because of the widespread school closures that were part of the COVID response.
Even with the new questions, Miller wondered how clear the picture provided might be, because for now OCR is asking only about incidents that occurred on school grounds.
“That means incidents that happen in a car, or an apartment, or anywhere off-campus, won’t be included, and that’s where the majority of these attacks happen,” she said.
The same problem had confronted one of DeVos’ top lieutenants, Kimberly Richey, when she served as chief counsel to the school system in Oklahoma. Even in a deeply conservative state, Richey found few supporters when, surprised by how many complaints were reaching her desk, she approached lawmakers in Norman about changes.
“I met with resistance from the very beginning,” she said. “And I had complaints, 95 percent of the time coming from parents, about a school or a teacher, and when I contacted them the teacher would immediately resign, travel five miles to the next district and start working there.”
Janet Barresi/YouTube
Janet Barresi, Oklahoma: School administrators and board members are more vociferous opponents of reform than teachers unions.
Janet Barresi/YouTube
Several people who spoke with RCI said teachers unions’ contracts were a major obstacle to both moving forward with credible allegations of sexual misconduct and blocking future school employment for alleged perpetrators. Neither the American Federation of Teachers nor the National Education Association responded to questions from RCI about this topic.
Teachers aren’t the only obstacles to reform. While Superintendent of Public Education in Oklahoma from 2011-2015, Janet Barresi said, state groups lobbying on behalf of school administrators and board members were much more vociferous opponents than teachers unions of laws that would force schools to disclose information about prior allegations and cases involving school employees.
“If the system would be more open and honest about all this, then parents would feel more relieved and it would get rid of a great deal of rumor and conjecture,” Barresi said.
It is those employee protections that produce the pattern known as “passing the trash,” several experts told RCI. This is particularly relevant in cases where state or local law enforcement agencies are never notified of allegations. A school may launch an investigation after a parent or student files a complaint, but that investigation would cease when the employee resigned, and then state law or bargaining agreements often prohibit officials administrators from relaying such information to any new school where the alleged perpetrator applied or began working.
Miller said SESAME has model legislation states could pass to confront the problem, but thus far the group has found limited success.
The Enough Abuse Campaign, which did not respond to RCI’s questions, notes that age-of-consent laws and the definitions of what constitutes sexual misconduct have created a complicated legal and regulatory map. Still, the campaign seems more optimistic about legislative progress than SESAME, declaring that “over 75 percent of states have now passed legislation specifically outlawing educator sexual misconduct,” in recognition of the power imbalance that exists in a teacher/student relationship.
And there are some signs lawmakers are grasping the enormity of the issue.
On July 1, an Oklahoma law went into effect mandating any verbal or social media contact between school employees and students be done on platforms the school controls, which state Rep. Sherrie Conley called a “long overdue” regulation.
Similarly, in Michigan, state Rep. Brad Paquette, himself a teacher, has proposed legislation appointing a state ombudsman to deal with sexual misconduct complaints.
gophouse.org
Brad Paquette, Michigan teacher and lawmaker: "You see these headlines all over the place and it’s unacceptable."
gophouse.org
“It’s just a beginning but we have to start somewhere,” Paquette told RCI. “I first heard back in 2012 or 2013, when I started teaching, that I had to join the union because I might have an accusation filed against me. But I thought, ‘No, I should be fired if I did something wrong.’”
“I think we need to be engaged aggressively to root out the problem,” he said. “There’s no good reason for us to take a lax approach. You see these headlines all over the place and it’s unacceptable. People need to start asking questions.”
While Richey said she did not recall any credible allegations crossing her desk during a brief stint as an attorney with Virginia schools, Paquette’s “everywhere” assessment seems on the mark.
In Texas, for example, the online site Texas Scorecard started looking at the issue in 2022 after administrators in Prosper, a swanky Dallas suburb, attempted to cover up alleged repeated sexual offenses by a school bus driver. Since then, Texas Scorecard has kept an unofficial tally of such incidents, and the Lone Star State has had more than 100 cases every year since.
The Prosper superintendent is currently under investigation by Texas agencies, in part for the 2022 coverup, as Texas law requires officials to report any credible allegations of child abuse within 48 hours. In May, two Prosper high school coaches were arrested for allegedly covering up another sexual assault that involved students.
Separating student-on-student sexual misconduct is key to understanding how deep the problem may run with school employees, according to Grant and other experts. For example, in the more general questions DOE’s OCR would ask regarding improper incidents that fall under Title IX, troubling trends emerged. For 2015-2016, there were 9,649 incidents of sexual violence, and of that figure 394 cases were categorized as rape or attempted rape. In 2017-2018, those numbers skyrocketed, with overall incidents rising by 43% to 13,799 and the most serious category 74% to 685.
amosguiora.com
Amos Guiora: “It is so goddamn egregious what they have done to protect people who do this."
amosguiora.com
As alarming as that trend may be, there is no way of knowing how many of those cases involved school employees, and Richey suspects that, given how the questionnaire was traditionally perceived, the majority of them are student-on-student.
Nevertheless, Grant pointed to multiple studies that came to similar conclusions to that reached in the 2004 Hofstra report. That study found that 9.6% of the U.S. student body fall victim to educator sexual misconduct.
Looking at California data from 2010-2021, Grant of Cal-Poly found 2,497 “school employees disciplined, reprimanded or arrested for sexually abusing K-12 students.” Between 2012 and 2018, the DOE received 280 complaints of adult-on-student sexual harassment in Chicago Public Schools. A Texas study from 2008 to 2016 found 1,415 Lone Star State educators “sanctioned for sexual misconduct.”
These academic papers and sometimes salacious news accounts of teacher/student relationships do send up flares from time to time. In 2007, the Associated Press declared that “sexual misconduct plagues U.S. schools,” after its investigation “found more than 2,500 cases over five years in which educators were punished for actions from bizarre to sadistic.” In December 2023, Business Insider looked at the issue and concluded “shoddy investigations, quiet resignations, and a culture of secrecy have protected predators, not students.”
Last year, the Defense of Freedom Institute released a report titled “catching the trash” that concluded sexual misconduct by school employees has raged in the school system for decades.
“Various actors – school and district personnel, teacher unions, and the federal department charged with enforcing laws against sexual assault in public schools – bear responsibility for a systemic failure in preventing, and responding to, sexual assaults in public schools,” the report said.
Pointing to the Biden administration’s attempt to remove specific questions about the issue from the OCR questionnaire, report author Paul Zimmerman told RCI the public should not expect much daylight on the topic in the near future.
“The Biden administration has gone dark on this, they’re not interested in pressing this issue as evidenced by trying to discontinue the efforts made on this front by the previous administration,” he said.
These political bumps, and the wreckage the COVID shutdowns unleashed on education in America, means there is no way of tackling the problem’s dimensions, let alone the problem itself. “It takes so long to get these numbers that in the end they’re not that helpful,” he said.
The best way to block the passage of trash is through the SESAME Act, which DOE has cited as “model legislation” for states. To date, only a handful of states have passed the act, most recently Illinois in 2023. It requires the prohibition of non-disclosure agreements in personal or collectively bargained contracts, as well as deep background checks on all applicants.
Only such thorough steps will break what Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah who has worked with Miller and SESAME, calls “the complicity of silence.” While the parameters of the problem may be hard to find, Guiora said he was stunned when he recently published what he acknowledged is a niche book on a West Virginia teacher exposed years late as a pedophile murderer. The limited book sold out on Amazon and his podcast has now topped 1 million views.
“That tells you that what’s happening is something that is touching a chord,” he said. “It is so goddamn egregious what they have done to protect people who do this. Lawmakers will have to break the institutional complicity that surrounds this or they’ll just be protecting the perpetrators.”
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/07/10/forbidden_fruit_and_the_classroom_the_huge_american_sex-abuse_scandal_that_educators_scandalously_hush_up_1042969.html
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/108372-education-as-we-know-it-is-gone-2024-07-11?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1My7O2f-K7zNgz1zAk7deEC0y12A8zdna21YEUoE3wcIitb7U-oFBE01E_aem_6l6IdChJh0G2zBAj-Lo3Ww
Witness (HT BBG)
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicago-teachers-union-fails-to-turn-68k-per-student-into-even-1-academic-win/
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Tee hee, looks like academic types at the old day job and elsewhere are contemplating the unthinkable:
What if Donald Trump is re-elected as president? As unpleasant as it may be to contemplate, it’s an increasingly likely possibility that would be a disaster for higher education. Trump leads Biden, according to recent polling. And yet the sector’s response, so far, has been to sleepwalk into the election. It’s time for us to wake up.
For well over a year now, a small army of think-tankers, consultants, congressional aides, and campaign staffers have been at work crafting higher-education policies in anticipation of a Trump restoration. These efforts, if enacted into law, would radically change higher education in this country. Even more worrisome, Republican politicians have recently shown their skill at calling attention to campus problems that resonate strongly with the public. A Trump presidency with a Republican legislative majority could remake higher education as we’ve known it.
Given the stakes, it is time to look more closely at what Trump’s re-election could mean, and to be clear-eyed about the weaknesses a second Trump administration would exploit. Put simply, changes in academic leadership style will be necessary if the sector is to defend itself effectively.
The December 5 congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses offers a preview of what’s to come. When we pull ourselves away from the partisan melee and the fallout, including the resignation of two Ivy League presidents, we can see the outlines of a thus far one-sided battle. The maladroit responses of the presidents provided the necessary pretext for advancing the Republicans’ attempt to punish parts of the academic enterprise they disdain and to redirect university efforts along the lines they champion. But the right’s interest goes well beyond anything discussed by the three university presidents who were grilled by Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Consider Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind Republican attacks on critical race theory and antiracism programs (and now a board member at New College of Florida). He sees universities as having succumbed to “race and sex narcissism” and as having turned their backs on the “pursuit of truth.” He dismisses the idea that universities can reform themselves: Administrators are too “weak,” he argues, and are thus prone to “emotional or social manipulation” by faculty activists. For Rufo, the way forward is to use state power to bring about what he sees as the necessary changes. Triumphant at the resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard University’s president, he wasted no time in announcing a “plagiarism hunting” fund aimed at exposing “the rot in the Ivy League.” But that’s just the beginning of what Rufo has in mind.
In a panel discussion last May at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Rufo laid out his agenda: (1) mobilization of the Department of Justice to investigate elite universities for admissions procedures that violate the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action; (2) penalties for universities where the department finds free expression to be curtailed by social-justice priorities; (3) the closing of certain departments, particularly ethnic and gender studies, where “ideological capture” is, he believes, most widespread; (4) new hiring procedures that emphasize the importance of a “multiplicity of perspectives”; and (5) termination of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. His ideal for undergraduate education is a “classically liberal” curriculum, focused on great works.
Rufo has also made clear that new accountability mechanisms will be required to achieve these ends. The locus of authority will be the agencies of government, including not only the Departments of Education and Justice (purged of people sympathetic to the social concerns of universities, of course), but also reformed regional accreditors whose criteria for re-accreditation would reflect the new priorities. Universities are highly dependent on the federal government for research and financial-aid funding. The threat of defunding is therefore a powerful instrument in the hands of those like Rufo who have big-stick sanctions in mind. Accreditation has been a recurring target of the right. On the campaign trail last year, Ron DeSantis called accrediting agencies “cartels” and promised an alternative system that would say, “We will not accredit you if you do DEI.” Trump has promised to “fire” accreditors, telling supporters, “Our secret weapon will be the college-accreditation system.”
The current accreditation system is a frequent target of Republican plans, but it is not the only one. Proposals for increasing the tax on university endowments, eliminating diversity statements in hiring and admissions, restricting international collaborations, and reducing regulations on for-profit and online colleges are also circulating in Washington. Plans to reduce the size and cost of our higher-education system are widespread. The Cato Institute’s 2022 higher-education handbook for policymakers, for example, argues that “the federal presence in higher education is ultimately self-defeating, fueling huge price inflation and overconsumption. The solution is to avoid the superficial thinking that all ‘education’ is good and to let people freely decide what education they need and how they will pay for it.”
On January 20, 2025, a newly elected Trump administration would assume the presidency armed with policies produced by a network of think tanks and research centers, including the Heritage Foundation, the Goldwater Institute, and Chris Rufo’s home base, the Manhattan Institute. Heritage has been instrumental in providing agendas for Republican politicians for more than 40 years. Its “Project 2025” brings together a coalition of over 100 conservative groups, including Turning Point USA, the National Association of Scholars, and Hillsdale College, and it has already released a nearly 900-page document, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” detailing the operations of federal agencies with the goal of coalescing “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Project 2025 is described as a “plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors” and as the “last opportunity to save our republic.” The precise details for how exactly to deconstruct higher education are murky, but they will almost certainly parallel those that are already circulating in the public domain.
These proposals are tied together by the now-familiar populist narrative that pits “unaccountable elites” against “ordinary Americans.” As Project 2025 explains, “Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge-fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high-school football game in Waco, Tex. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people.”
In a manner consistent with this framing, conservatives are determined to point their pitchforks at the most prestigious universities first, perhaps on the assumption that the rest of higher education will fall in line once the giants are humbled. As U.S. Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, a member of the Republican Study Committee, put it in a recorded call with business leaders, the hearing with the university presidents was just the first prong of attack. “The second step is the investigation, the subpoenas, gathering all of the documents and the records from these universities to prove the point,” Banks reportedly said. “That they’re not just allowing this behavior to occur, they’re fostering it and creating an unsafe environment for Jewish students on their campus because of it.” His third step? “Defund these universities by cracking down on not backing their student loans, taxing their endowments, and forcing the administration to actually conduct civil-rights investigations.” Rufo has spoken of directing the Departments of Justice and Education to “relentlessly degrade the status and prestige” of elite institutions. House investigations of several Ivy League universities are already underway.
As the criticisms of higher education have mounted, the weaknesses of its self-defense playbook have become evident.
In addition to the think-tank populists, Republicans in Congress will also have a say. Judging from the “College Cost Reduction Act,” introduced in January by Rep. Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who leads the House education committee, the congressional push will be directed toward three goals: capping the maximum loan amounts students can obtain, providing additional aid for low-income students who make consistent progress toward their degrees, and reforming accreditation by prioritizing student achievement and post-college employment measures. The anticipated additions to Pell Grants would be offset by penalizing colleges whose students fail to make timely loan repayments. The bill includes provisions that would incentivize colleges to close programs whose students are encumbered by loans they cannot repay and to expand programs whose students tend to fare well in the labor market in the years after graduation. In other words, the Foxx bill would place a heavy hand on the balance sheets against the arts, humanities, and softer social sciences.
And, of course, Trump will have his own ideas about what should be done. We can predict many of the priorities from those expressed in his last budget proposal to Congress. His administration called for a 7.8-percent cut from the Department of Education budget, with sharp reductions for public-service loan forgiveness. The National Institutes of Health budget was slated for a 7-percent cut; the National Science Foundation faced a 6-percent cut. Trump also attempted to eliminate all funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, something he repeatedly attempted — and was unable to achieve.
More recently, candidate Trump has offered two concrete, if far-fetched, policy proposals. The first is for an entirely new system of accreditation heavily weighted toward evaluating colleges on the basis of job placement, evidence of student learning, and curricula that focus on “the American tradition and Western civilization.” The second is for a federally funded tuition-free, open-access online university. He has christened this leviathan the “American Academy.” It would be funded primarily by taxes on existing universities’ endowments, with the focus, naturally, on the largest endowments.
Of course, not everything Republicans hope to achieve will be achievable. It will be a heavy lift to bring the regional accreditors into the Republican policy orbit, given that any national-level policy changes would require revision and reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, an endeavor that would not move quickly (if at all). And if Trump is re-elected, his American Academy seems doomed from the start — not only by its prohibitive cost but by how closely it resembles the late, unlamented Trump University, which closed its doors in 2010 and was forced to pay out $25 million to students it defrauded.
A second Trump administration would begin by distinguishing policy goals that could be enacted through executive orders from those that require congressional or state legislation. On the congressional side, it would not be difficult to find ambitious lawmakers eager to push legislation. Judging from their public statements, J.D. Vance, Tom Cotton, Dan Crenshaw, Elise Stefanik, and Virginia Foxx are already champing at the bit. White House and foundation policy shops will produce and distribute talking points. If history is any guide, these talking points will include cherry-picked data to provide a thin veneer of rationality. Those talking points will then be rehearsed doggedly in committee meetings and floor debates. Democrats would of course take to friendly airwaves to denounce the legislation, and rallies would be held on college campuses in opposition. But, in the end, if Republicans have the votes, some of the new policies would prevail.
Higher education has a playbook for self-defense, as we saw during the first Trump administration. And yet as the criticisms of higher education have mounted, the weaknesses of that playbook have become evident. The weaknesses include university presidents — particularly their reflexive reliance on policies and processes unconnected to deeply held values, their evasiveness in the face of tough questioning, and their failure to understand and respond to the demands of political theater. All of these attributes were on stark display during the December 5 antisemitism hearing. The transcript shows that Claudine Gay referenced Harvard policies and processes nearly 30 times while largely ignoring the results of these policies. She evaded answering pointed questions over a dozen times. Missing were compelling examples supporting her many references to her university’s “robust” disciplinary policies or illustrating how a vibrant culture of open expression actually exists on the Harvard campus. Instead, she relied on terse statements about her “deep commitment to free expression” and the importance of “preserving the security of our community.”
These bloodless responses made for a stark contrast to the emotionally charged language of her inquisitors. The hearing began with a short video showing hate-filled chanting and acts of intimidation. Representatives vividly described antisemitic actions on campus, including Jewish students being pushed, spat upon, and punched. Republicans passionately condemned the “moral rot” at the heart of the academic enterprise and the “poison fruits” of institutional culture. There were also many accusations of or references to murder, barbarism, and mania.
The message was clear: Republicans have learned to capitalize on dramatic events as a springboard to more far-reaching policy changes. Universities have been a punching bag on the right for decades, but rarely have so many cameras and notepads been present to record such a perfect representation of the Republican narrative.
Those who advance to top positions in universities are generally expert managers. Many also have the capacity to charm donors. They are less likely to be practiced politicians or to be deeply immersed in the intellectual life of their institutions. In part this is because of the division of labor between outward-facing presidents and inward-facing provosts and deans. It also results from the development of separate administrative tracks where the high-stakes issues are finance and budgeting, regulatory bodies, conflict abatement, reputation management, and enrollment management — not the research and teaching mission.
It would be a mistake to call most of today’s university presidents academic leaders. They are managers of complex organizations whose product lines range from athletics to zoology. They are subject to pressure from state legislatures, donors, regulatory bodies, professional associations, faculty interest groups, parents, and prospective students. Given the complexity of the role, university boards have over time concluded that outstanding scholars rarely make outstanding university managers. When I examined the careers of university presidents several years ago as part of research for a book (Two Cheers for Higher Education), I found that only about half of the top 50 research universities and a sprinkling of liberal-arts colleges recruited presidents who had excelled as scientists and scholars. The rest hired candidates with modest academic careers, candidates who had worked their way up through the administrative bureaucracy without ever professing, or candidates whose careers had been spent in political life or business.
At the nation’s largest and most-selective universities there is a playbook for how to handle nearly every situation a president encounters, including data breaches, athletics scandals, and student suicides. Because of the many units a president presides over, and the diversity of the constituency for each, such playbooks are necessary. Presidents learn to speak publicly only about the recognitions their faculties and students obtain. Prizes, graduations, and record-breaking fund-raising campaigns deserve speeches. Everything else is not for public consumption. When controversies arise, presidents put together task forces. They consult legal counsel before acting; they defer to counsel when resources or reputations may be at risk. They learn what is expected at ceremonial occasions and how to perform these duties. They are briefed on how to interact with legislators and how to deflect uncomfortable questions. They learn to promise to look into matters without necessarily intending to do so. They have speechwriters to write their speeches, assistants to troubleshoot and mollify, and deans and department chairs to interact with the faculty and students. Most of the time this managerial approach works. But when it comes to combating a well-organized political party determined to degrade academic institutions, managerialism invites disaster. If the presidential playbook isn’t thoroughly revised, higher education will face a diminished future should Trump and Republicans regain power in 2025.
What, then, can be done to avoid this unhappy outcome?
First, universities will need to decide which of the policies that are currently under attack should be preserved or strengthened and which may require reform — or abandonment. Republicans have attacked university endowments, science funding, the teaching of critical race theory, diversity policies, and academic-freedom protections. Some of these commitments will be easy to defend. How can the U.S. compete effectively without robust academic R&D? Congress has so far agreed, but the case must continue to be made effectively.
Other policies will require better defenses than have been offered thus far. Diversity policies are at the top of this list. The idea that the civic mission of universities centers on the racial and gender diversity of faculty and student bodies is relatively new. It became a fixture of liberal thinking only two decades ago when the first diversity statements were required and as DEI offices began to catch on. The decline of Republican support for higher education shares this timeline. Diversity, equity, and inclusion caught on with campus leaders after affirmative action was hamstrung by the courts. On some campuses, it has proved to be a poor substitute because it is forced into the pretense that all diversity matters even when university practices belie the claim. The Israel-Hamas conflict and the December 5 congressional hearings exposed the subterfuge.
As an antidote to the attacks on DEI, presidents can begin to extol again the broader civic mission of universities. That broader vision includes research that provides far-seeing insight into the world we inhabit; studies that help solve a wide range of community problems; the development of new technologies to bring jobs and new wealth to states and regions; lectures and performances that bring cultural enrichment to local communities; and the cultivation of future leaders from among the undergraduate and graduate student bodies.
DEI policies are part of this package, but only part. And because they are controversial, they should be defended with concrete evidence of their effectiveness. Do DEI offices have measurable effects on the sense of belonging or the level of achievement of students from underrepresented groups? Have they helped to retain diverse faculty? If so, how large are these effects? And what costs, if any, have the offices incurred in terms of campus free speech? It is surprising that studies like this are in such short supply.
It is tempting to think that elite institutions should begin to focus again on recruiting distinguished scholars and scientists for leadership roles (as opposed to those who have lesser academic records but lengthier management experience). After all, excellent scholars might be more likely to speak with knowledge and conviction about the intellectual and educational accomplishments of their institutions, having contributed to those accomplishments themselves.
But what is more essential for presidents is the ability to recognize when they are actors in a political arena and to have the presence of mind to meet such moments. If a member of Congress asks for the percentage of conservative faculty members at Harvard, the right answer should come naturally. The right answer is not the one Claudine Gay gave: “I do not have that statistic. We don’t collect that data.” The right answer challenges the premise and is conveyed openly rather than at arm’s length: Academically talented conservatives usually prefer to go into business, legal, or medical careers, and Harvard would welcome qualified conservatives who wish to give up the higher salaries in those fields for the opportunity to research and teach at a world-class university.
Harvard is looking for a new president. One of the criteria should be the capacity to provide the public with straight talk and with concrete examples illustrating why their institutions make a difference and are worthy of public support. In the current environment, and given the stakes, the tight-lipped and evasive answers of today’s academic managers just won’t cut it.
https://archive.is/vxd7p
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=e29fe31f201f4f2330df59ffb6aa46d1_66a0fc92_6d25b5f&selDate=20240724
History test bodes ill for government of the people
Many young voters lack basic knowledge
BY SEAN SALAI THE WASHINGTON TIMES
An academic survey shows that, like a 1960 hit song, college students don’t know much about history … or civics, government or politics.
Far from the “Wonderful World” crooned by Sam Cooke, educators and public policy experts say the results portend an alarming disengagement from the U.S. political system as the November elections loom.
“Many Americans choose to pay not much attention to political life and don’t have a strong understanding of American history,” said Bradley Jackson, vice president of policy for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “In the absence of that understanding, civil life will erode and decline, creating more potential for disunity and polarization.”
His nonprofit group, which advocates for the liberal arts, found in its recent survey of 3,026 undergraduates that 60% did not know the length of the terms of U.S. senators (six years) and representatives (two years).
Only 35% knew that Mike Johnson was the speaker of the House, 27% knew that Vice President Kamala Harris was the president of the Senate, and 37% knew that John G. Roberts Jr. was the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Mr. Bradley, who teaches political science at American University, said the findings echo the results of several other
surveys ACTA has conducted since 2000.
Other higher education insiders interviewed by The Washington Times said the ACTA survey confirms years of research linking poor civics knowledge to disinterest, discontent and distrust among young voters.
Some said the trend has contributed to a rise in low-information voters deciding elections and in historically illiterate politicians gaining power with extremist rhetoric.
“Before we single out America’s youth, I suggest that all federal and state legislators take the history and civics test required for naturalization,” said Brendan Gillis, director of teaching and learning at the American Historical Association. “In order not to embarrass individuals, we can report the results in the aggregate by legislative body.”
Mr. Gillis said the ACTA findings spotlight the necessity of professional development resources for K-12 social studies teachers to cover hot-button topics free from outside political pressure.
Others criticized the ACTA report and its recommendation that all colleges require a course in U.S. history and government. They said K-12 public schools should be the ones to teach political literacy because many voters never attend college.
“College is not the place to learn the basics, and a college course should not be remedial,” said Robert Weissberg, a retired University of Illinois professor who started teaching American politics in the 1960s. “Student ignorance reflects how professional educators have taught some to disdain ‘mere facts.’”
The ACTA survey, conducted by College Pulse from May 10 to June 19, posed 35 multiple-choice questions in an online panel to students from all 50 states.
One question: “Which branch of the government has the power to declare war?”
Only 32% correctly identified the legislative branch, and 48% named the executive branch. Another 5% said the judicial branch could declare war, 3% pegged the Pentagon and 11% were unsure.
Another question asked where presidential impeachment trials take place.
ACTA noted that only 32% correctly answered that the Senate conducts the trials even though the students lived “through two recent presidential impeachment trials” of President Trump.
Some academics challenged the value of the questions.
“The ACTA conclusion that the bullet-point findings from their survey encapsulate ‘core principles and values’ of American democracy and history borders on the absurd,” said Robert Heineman, a political scientist and former department chair at Alfred University in New York. “These are essentially questions of detail.”
Elesha Coffman, a cultural historian at Baylor University, said her lessons do not address the survey questions.
“I would rather help my students grasp large trends — the trajectory of enslavement, emancipation, Jim Crow and civil rights, for example — than make sure they know the numbers of constitutional amendments or which speech was the source of a particular phrase,” Ms. Coffman said. “The how and the why of history matter more than bare facts without context.”
Others said that students weaned on digital media instinctively tune out any information they can find in a quick internet search.
“We adults need to realize that our education system still relies too much on rote memorization, ironically producing kids so bored that they can’t remember squat,” said Woody Holton, a U.S. history professor at the University of South Carolina.
Other key findings in the ACTA survey:
• 31% of undergraduates correctly answered that James Madison was the “father of the Constitution.”
• Just 23% correctly answered that the phrase “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” came from the Gettysburg Address.
• Only 28% correctly identifi ed the 13th Amendment as the government action that outlawed the practice of slavery.
Connor Boyack, creator of the free market Tuttle Twins franchise and author of a U.S. history book for children, said the findings show K-12 education must evolve beyond “rote memorization of random facts” to connect ideas to students’ lives.
“No wonder the kids ‘pump and dump,’ learning information for a test … only to soon forget it and move on with their lives,” said Mr. Boyack, president of the Libertas Institute in Utah. “Results such as these spell doom for our country’s future if there’s not a massive course correction soon.”
Just a handful of the ACTA survey questions went beyond factual topics.
Question 33 asked: “If the United States were invaded by Russia as Ukraine has been, what would you do?”
Forty-three percent said they would “stay and fight,” and 57% said they would “flee the country.”
Donald Critchlow, director of Arizona State University’s Center for American Institutions, said such findings underline the danger of failing to teach young people a “shared culture and history.”
“If our youth don’t know that history, the nation is vulnerable to external enemies and internal chaos,” said Mr. Critchlow, who teaches American history.
Policy experts have cited multiple reasons for the surge of political negativity among young people, such as the idea that the two major political parties do not represent their interests and mounting despair about their financial prospects as college costs rise and wages stagnate.
Conservatives have blamed woke academics for teaching “divisive topics” about race and gender identity that stigmatize straight White males as oppressors.
“Basic knowledge about American history and government does not align with their agenda to topple our constitutional republic and replace it with a communist regime,” said Sheri Few, president of the right-leaning U.S. Parents Involved in Education. “If we are to save our republic, patriotism must return to America’s classrooms.”
On the other side, liberal academics have accused conservatives of minimizing America’s painful legacy of slavery to exclude minorities from the conversation.
“What part of America’s history will be taught, and who will decide that? Across America, organizations like The Heritage Foundation and so-called leaders like [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis are whitewashing American history and denying students the full picture of America,” said Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.
Historians say polarization has driven up anger toward a political system that few young people understand.
“If we don’t understand government, we can’t govern ourselves,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian of education at the University of Pennsylvania. “Of course, students should have learned all of this material well before they got to college. But they haven’t, so higher education needs to pick up the slack.”
“A society that is built on the concept of democratic self-governance cannot survive without an educated citizenry,” said Wilfred McClay, a U.S. history professor at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan.
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Battle over school vouchers fuels funding in state elections
By Kimberlee Kruesi ASSOCIATED PRESS NASHVILLE, TENN. | Millions of dollars are being spent this year to steer voters toward candidates for Republican-led legislatures who not only support school vouchers, but will also become key figures in implementing school choice programs in states across the U.S.
Most recently, national pro-voucher advocates declared victory after spending more than $4.5 million in Tennessee’s primary election to defend and elect legislative candidates they say will support school choice proposals in 2025 when state lawmakers are slated to return to the Capitol to enact policy.
Meanwhile, at least $14.8 million was spent by similar advocacy groups in the Texas primary election earlier in May to oust and replace voucher opponents. In Idaho, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on candidates who both opposed and supported school vouchers in the rural Western state.
The spending spree is backed by the nation’s most high-profile voucher influencers, including the School Freedom Fund, a pro-voucher group tied to Club for Growth; the American Federation for Children, which was founded by Secretary Betsy DeVos, former Trump administration education secretary under; and Americans for Prosperity, the Koch family’s well-heeled free-market group.
Their focus is often on primary elections because in Republican-dominated states, primaries are seen as the most competitive hurdle to getting elected.
“Make no mistake — if you call yourself a Republican and oppose school freedom, you should expect to lose your next primary,” said David McIntosh, president of the School Freedom Fund, in a statement shortly after Tennessee’s primary. “As we continue to hear from different governors, we plan on repeating our results from Tennessee and Texas across the country. The school freedom revolution is just beginning.”
Thirty-two states have implemented some sort of voucher program in the U.S., and some have been in place for decades, often with strict income requirements or narrowly tailored for students with disabilities.
Yet over the years, there’s been a noticeable push among Republican leaders to make available taxpayer-funded vouchers, or scholarships that can follow a child regardless of income to any public or private school. About a dozen states have such programs. But proposals are being considered in many more, with varying degrees of legislative support.
Idaho, Tennessee and Texas all weighed sweeping school voucher proposals over the past year, but faced resistance not only from Democrats — who don’t hold as much political power — but also Republican members wary of directing public education dollars away from their districts.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, was forced to abandon his plans for universal school choice earlier this year after divisions inside the GOP-controlled Statehouse failed to come to a consensus on specifics.
The failure prompted Mr. Lee to break with his previous stance of remaining quiet during GOP primary elections and instead publicly pick favorites this year in a handful of legislative races.
Additionally, outside groups such as Club for Growth, American Federation for Children, Americans for Prosperity Action, and others poured $4.5 million across 16 House and Senate legislative races. Three of the open primaries saw almost $1 million spent in each of the races.
Club for Growth spent the majority of the money, pouring $3.6 million across five races and ultimately winning four of those seats.
Mr. Lee didn’t endorse any opponents of a sitting Republican incumbent, but he did throw support behind candidates in four open legislative seats — three of which were successful.
The modest gains for Mr. Lee’s cause came at a big political cost.
After Mr. Lee endorsed state Sen. Jon Lundberg, this year’s voucher bill sponsor, former President Donald Trump backed Mr. Lundberg’s opponent, Bobby Harshbarger, son of Rep. Diane Harshbarger. After Mr. Harshbarger was declared the winner, Mr. Trump swiped at Mr. Lee on social media, calling him a RINO, or “Republican in name only,” even though he endorsed Mr. Lee in his 2022 reelection.
Mr. Lee has so far brushed aside the criticism, and instead released a statement declaring that Republican primary voters “sent a clear message: It’s time to deliver school choice for Tennessee families.”
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The Miami Teachers Union Election
After DeSantis boosts competition, an upstart alternative wants to cut dues and quit politics.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Photo: Dylan Townsend/Zuma Press
Florida’s biggest teachers union might be about to lose its job, as it faces a certification election under a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Roughly 24,000 mail ballots went out this month and are due back by Sept. 24. Whatever the result, this is healthy competition, as an upstart alternative pledges to cut dues in half and refrain from politicking.
United Teachers of Dade (UTD) represents school employees in Miami-Dade County. Mr. DeSantis’s law, signed last year, requires public unions to prove their popularity to keep power. If a union can’t show that 60% of its bargaining unit is dues-paying members, it must hold an election to keep its certification. Last year UTD came close, 56%, but fell short by about 878. To continue representing Miami teachers, it now needs to win 50% of returned ballots.
Teachers and school staff who don’t like UTD can vote for no union, or they can cast ballots for a new group that promises to serve their interests better. That’s the Miami-Dade Education Coalition (MDEC), led by teachers dissatisfied with the status quo. UTD members who are full-time teachers pay about $1,000 a year in dues, and a good chunk goes to affiliates, which include national unions such as the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
UTD also makes political endorsements, and no prizes for guessing which party it wants in power. Two years ago UTD’s president, Karla Hernández-Mats, even ran for Lieutenant Governor as the running mate of Democrat Charlie Crist, who lost handily to Mr. DeSantis.
MDEC wants to halve dues, keep funds local, and stay out of polarizing politics. “Somebody has to do better than what it is right now,” says Renee Zayas, a high-school teacher who is MDEC’s vice president. While UTD’s leader made more than $200,000 in 2022, MDEC says it won’t pay officers more than the median teacher salary.
To qualify for the ballot, MDEC needed signatures from 10% of the bargaining unit, or 2,368, which it achieved. That’s far from the 50% it would take to win the election, and UTD has the advantage of size and organization. But the mere fact that a challenger made the ballot should give UTD pause. “We’re getting a lot of teachers that are very excited about finally being able to see a change,” says Ms. Zayas.
Mr. DeSantis’s law is also having similar effects elsewhere. Dozens of unions have been decertified in the past year, including SEIU and AFSCME affiliates, some of which hadn’t managed to sign up more than 25% or even 10% of their eligible workers as dues-paying members, according to a database kept by South Florida public radio site WLRN.
Bringing more worker democracy into union representation, as Mr. DeSantis’s law does, isn’t anti-union. It’s a way of making sure that workers are represented by unions that actually care about their interests.
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Good for Ron and Florida.
This could never happen in the North.
Beware the union government complex. Especially public unions.
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All sorts of less lettered left wing professors have uttered all manner of ugly speech with few consequences meted out. Utter unpopular right wing views you can support? Show her the door!
Penn Will ‘Eviscerate Academic Freedom as We Know It’
Cato Recent Op-eds / by Andrew Gillen / Oct 22, 2024 at 9:35 AM
Andrew Gillen
Amy Wax has provided a perfect test case for accessing the state of academic freedom. On paper, just about any college would be lucky to have her. She earned both an MD and a JD, argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court, and then became a law professor at a top college for three decades. But in practice, the university where she teaches—the University of Pennsylvania (Penn)—is trying its best to get rid of her. Penn recently decided to strip her of a chaired professorship, suspend her for a year at half pay, and deny her summer pay for the rest of her life. What did Wax do to deserve such punishment? She said politically incorrect things about race and culture.
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The most controversial undisputed remarks centered around statements that she had not seen many black students graduate at the top of the law school where she teaches and that to preserve American culture and values, the country should limit immigration from cultures that are vastly different. There are also several alleged statements that are either disputed or distorted by selective editing to appear more inflammatory.
The reason this is a perfect test case for academic freedom is that all other claims against her have been disproven. Some are claiming that she discriminated against minorities, but these claims are misinformation. Penn commissioned an independent investigation by Daniel Rodriguez, a former dean at Northwestern University Law School, which cleared her of the charges. As Aaron Sibarium summarizes, the investigation found “the most serious charges against Wax were baseless. There was ‘no evidence’ she had ‘breach[ed] the anonymity of exams,’ ‘graded minority students differently,’ ‘denied them access to professional opportunities,’ or ‘singled them out for special ridicule.’” Thus, her punishment is based solely on her speech. As Wax said, “This is a game-changer, because it’s a pure case of speech … If they succeed in punishing me for that, it will eviscerate academic freedom as we know it.”
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In an era when political forces right and left are all too eager to sanitize campuses of voices and views they dislike, faculty nationwide must be able to rely on the time-tested principles of academic freedom.
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There is certainly an interesting conversation to be had about whether Wax’s statements were correct or incorrect. Regarding the relative performance of black students at Penn, it used affirmative action for years, which entailed granting admission to less qualified black students, so it would not be a surprise if those students underperformed their peers. There is an entire literature on this phenomenon; see, for example, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr.’s Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. Of course other scholars, such as Matthew Chingos, dispute the idea. The fact that Penn claims she is wrong while refusing to release the data to show it indicates that Wax’s observation is probably correct.
But whether or not Wax is right about the performance of black students at Penn, the larger point is that her statement was a perfectly reasonable claim to make and should be handled the way any other academic dispute is, by different teams of researchers formulating theories and testing them with data to see who is right—or more likely, under what circumstances each is right. What shouldn’t happen is for those on one side to face punishment for making their case. To their great credit, many who think Wax is wrong oppose punishing her. Prominent examples include John McWhorter and Zaid Jilani.
But sadly, many people and organizations are abandoning long-held principles like free speech and academic freedom for short-term ideological gain. For example, Jeffrey Sachs called out the hypocrisy of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which has raised no objection to Wax being disciplined by a top college, while objecting to an obscure college firing a professor who supports those trying to commit genocide against Jews, with one student claiming she was “using her classroom as a political platform for spreading personal bias since October 7, and that it had become ‘the most uncomfortable classroom environment I have ever stepped foot in.’”
Judging by AAUP’s stance, it appears as though statements supporting the attempted genocide of Jews warrant the protection of academic freedom, while statements about racial matters like mismatch, on which there are academic books written, do not warrant the protection of academic freedom.
The hypocrisy of the AAUP is even more galling given that it created one of the foundational documents on academic freedom that states professors “should be free from institutional censorship or discipline.”
There is simply no convincing way to square the AAUP’s claimed support for academic freedom with their tacit support of Wax’s punishment. The AAUP’s defenders are attempting to claim Wax was afforded due process in a faculty-driven manner. This is false.
As Glenn Loury writes, it is merely “using pretextual arguments to punish her for thought crimes.” FIRE notes, Penn used “dubious procedural efforts — which stripped Wax of many of the due process protections tenure affords.” Aaron Sibarium documents that Penn “ignored the results of an outside investigation that found ‘no evidence’ Wax had treated students unfairly—then launched a second investigation,” which never even contacted Wax to discuss the charges against her. And the “faculty driven” process was headed by a woke ideologue who argues that professors that resist “core values like diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) should be stripped of tenure and fired.
So, to recap, Penn 1) ignored investigations that cleared Wax, while launching new ones until it got the desired conclusion, 2) stripped Wax of the due process protections of tenure, 3) stacked the judge and jury against her by making sure it was composed of those that think it is kosher to fire their ideological opponents. If this is the AAUP’s idea of upholding academic freedom, no one should ever take them seriously in the future.
So, what has this case revealed about the state of academic freedom? The statement by FIRE—reproduced in its entirety—is spot on:
After years of promising it would find a way to punish professor Amy Wax for her controversial views on race and gender, Penn delivered today — despite zero evidence Wax ever discriminated against her students.
Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn’s willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor. After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook.
But academic freedom is designed to protect controversial faculty from being punished for their speech or opinions. In an era when political forces right and left are all too eager to sanitize campuses of voices and views they dislike, faculty nationwide must be able to rely on the time-tested principles of academic freedom.
Wax is the canary in the coal mine. If Wax’s punishment stands, academic freedom is effectively dead on American campuses.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/penn-will-eviscerate-academic-freedom-we-know-it
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My alma mater :cry: :cry: :cry:
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My alma mater :cry: :cry: :cry:
Is your read as stark as the one presented? It looks to me like Penn is crusing for a bruising without much of an evidentiary advantage....
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Not following this one closely, but the final line makes sense to me:
"Wax is the canary in the coal mine. If Wax’s punishment stands, academic freedom is effectively dead on American campuses."
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/i-m-a-college-president-universities-aren-t-ready-for-what-s-coming/ar-AA1sOoes?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=af3702aee40e49919819fda649997fcc&ei=10
I can't find the poll O'Reilly spoke of in podcast past few days that found
78% of college professors are crats
8% are Rs
and 14 % claim neither or won't say.
This is consistent with previous polls that showed rations of 10:1
So I have no idea what Roth is talking about. Is it not clear the left is already speaking out with indoctrination from within higher education?
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Think about this the next time you look at your federal tax deductions:
https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/24/your-tax-dollars-are-funding-terrorist-apologists-at-ivy-league-universities/
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IMO child abuse is documented below, and those "educators" participating in it should be terminated, prosecuted, and lose their teaching certifications, too boot:
The Kindergarten Intifada
There is a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children against Israel. A Free Press investigation.
By Abigail Shrier
October 31, 2024
In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles—met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students.
But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion?
“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”
Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.”
The crowd burst into approving laughter.
The Free Press obtained a video of the United Teachers Los Angeles meeting. You can watch it here:
Seated at a keffiyeh-draped table, Gochez said, “Some of the things that we can do as teachers is to organize. We just have to be really intelligent on how we do that. We have to know that we’re under the microscope. We have to know that Zionists and others are going to try to catch us in any way that they can to get us into trouble.”
He continued: “If you organize students, it’s at your own risk, but I think it’s something that’s necessary we have to do.” He told the audience of educators that he once caught a “Zionist teacher” looking through his files. Gochez warned the crowd to be wary of “admin trying to be all chummy with you. You got to be very careful with that, even sometimes our own students.”
John Adams Middle School teacher and panelist William Shattuc agreed, a keffiyeh around his neck. “We know that good history education is political education. And when we are coming up against political movements, like the movement for Zionism, that we disagree with, that we’re in conflict with—they [Zionists] have their own form of political education and they employ their own tools of censorship.”
What are the “tools of censorship” employed by Zionists? Apparently, they include accusing teachers who rail against Israel in the classroom of antisemitism.
“They try to say antisemitism, which is really ridiculous, right?” said Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, ethnic studies teacher at Edward R. Roybal Learning Center in Los Angeles. Cardona recently received a National Education Association Foundation Award for excellence in teaching. “What they do is they conflate. Part of that is by putting the star on their flag,” Cardona said, referring to the Jewish Star of David. “Religion has nothing to do with it.”
But, she insists, that the course she teaches, and whose curriculum she helped develop—ethnic studies—is fundamentally incompatible with supporting Israel. “ ‘Are you pro-Israel—are you for genocide?’ And if anybody were to say, ‘Okay, sure,’ that’s really not ethnic studies.” (Gochez, Shattuc, and Cardona did not return requests for comment.)
It’s tempting to dismiss this as one more bull session among radical teachers leading a far-left public-sector union. If only.
Four years ago, I was among the first journalists to expose the widespread incursion of gender ideology into our schools. Once-fringe beliefs about gender swiftly took over large swaths of society partly thanks to their inclusion in school curricula and lessons.
Today, extensive interviews with parents, teachers, and non-profit organizations that monitor the radicalism and indoctrination in schools convinced me that demonization of Israel in American primary and secondary schools is no passing fad. Nor is it confined to elite private schools serving hyper-progressive families. As one Catholic parent who exposes radicalism in schools nationwide on the Substack Undercover Mother said to me: “They’ve moved on from BLM to gender unicorn to the new thing: anti-Israel activism. Anti-Israel activism is the new gender ideology in the schools.”
Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology. And very few educators are standing against it.
Much of the anti-Israel vituperation slides into classrooms through a subject called ethnic studies. In 2021, California became the first state to adopt it as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Legislatures of more than a dozen states have already followed suit, incorporating ethnic studies into K–12 curricula.
The above was shown to students at Lowell High School as part of their Ethnic Studies class. (Image obtained by The Free Press)
In principle, these laws require schools to teach the histories and cultures of African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and Native Americans. In practice, they grant teachers license to incorporate lessons that often divide civilization into “oppressed” and “oppressor.” A primary fixation of ethnic studies is demonizing Israel.
Activist-led organizations readily supply instructional materials. Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA; creators of the Teach Palestine Project), Teaching While Muslim, Jewish Voice for Peace, Unión del Barrio, and the Zinn Education Project regularly furnish distorted histories with eliminationist rhetoric against Israel.
Especially in the year since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, the anti-Israel materials have become pervasive. It’s not surprising that they are found in world history and current events lessons. But demonization of Israel is now taught in art, English, math, physics, and social-emotional learning classes.
Anti-Israel activism spreads through online curricula that are password protected, eluding parental oversight. It is pushed by teachers unions, furnished by activist organizations, and communicated to children through deception. (“We just happen to be at the same place at the same time.”) Anti-Israel radicals willingly stake their jobs for their cause.
“So how do we do all this without getting fired?” Gochez asked his assembled audience of public school teachers. “That’s the million-dollar question. And I don’t know how in the hell we have not been fired yet because I know for sure they have tried, but we have to organize. That’s the bottom line. If they come after one of us, the district has to know that it will be a bigger headache for them to try to touch one of us than it would be to just leave us alone.”
All for the sake of indoctrinating other people’s children.
Jewish Students Fend for Themselves
Ella Hassner. (Yadid Levy for The Free Press)
Last year, Ella Hassner was a senior at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, California. In the weeks and months after October 7, she says, her school erupted with anti-Israel propaganda.
To combat the anti-Israel posters that appeared in classrooms and hallways, the school’s Jewish club received approval from the principal to put up posters of the hostages. Within thirty minutes, the posters were torn down, Ella, who has U.S.-Israeli citizenship and is now 18 years old, told me. Another Jewish student I spoke to, “Benny,” confirmed this, adding that he and his friends had witnessed one teacher tearing the posters down.
Teachers regularly pushed the idea to students—in class and on social media, where they were followed by their students—that “Zionists” were committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. A large majority of American Jews, 85 percent, support the State of Israel. Zionism refers to the movement that established a modern Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. Given the quantity of anti-Israel propaganda flooding American K–12 schools, it’s perhaps unsurprising that children would turn against their Jewish classmates.
This past year saw a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in K–12 schools. Students verbally attacked Jewish classmates in terms that echoed the very charges laid by their teachers against the State of Israel. “Baby killer” and “Violent Zionist” became popular epithets.
Two girls in Ella’s class began to harass her, she told me. A subsequent school district investigation report, obtained by The Free Press, confirms her account. The girls said to her: “Your people are terrorists.” The girls created posts on social media that claimed “Israeli babies are not real humans,” and attacked Ella’s family, tagging Ella’s younger brother.
Ella filed a “bullying report” with the school in February. Although the principal had personally witnessed some of the behavior, he and the associate superintendent consulted the school district’s legal counsel and decided “that the complaint would not be investigated by the district,” according to the investigation report.
In February, the school hosted the annual district-wide vocal talent show. Several students sang songs celebrating their ethnic heritage. Ella and a female friend sang their approved song, “Someone Like You” by Adele, and then added another: a Hebrew pop anthem, “Yesh Bi Ahava,” which translates to “There’s Love Inside Me.” They announced the song was “dedicated to their families in Israel.”
Classmates said to Ella Hassner, “Your people are terrorists.” The same girls created posts on social media that claimed “Israeli babies are not real humans,” and attacked Ella’s family, tagging Ella’s younger brother. (Yadid Levy for The Free Press)
Ella says the associate superintendent pulled the duo aside after the performance and said the staff and other students were greatly upset and offended by the Hebrew song and the dedication. According to the district investigation report, the associate superintendent also informed the girls that “she would be following up with the principal the following week to discuss the matter.” The investigation found that the district did not take disciplinary action against Ella. (In response to request for comment, a spokeswoman from the district stated that the district could not discuss specific cases. She also wrote that staff was “made aware of several allegations of antisemitism. We took each complaint seriously and responded with great care to make sure our community of students, staff and families felt safe.”)
In March of 2024, Ella stood at a town hall with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna and recounted many of these incidents to get them on record. (Khanna said there should be “zero tolerance” for what Ella described and offered to help if the district did not respond to her complaints.)
Ella ended her town hall speech with the advice that she gives her younger siblings: If anyone mistreats them for being Jewish, “they should come to me, not to the school.” Conversations with seventeen Jewish parents whose children attend public school in Northern California suggest that that is an understandable reaction.
Since October 7 of last year, hundreds of incidents involving the harassment of Jewish K–12 students have been reported to Act Now K12, a grassroots effort to catalog and combat antisemitism in Northern California schools. Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley, Viviane Safrin of San Francisco, and Maya Bronicki of Santa Clara County—all mothers of Jewish children in public schools—helped spearhead the effort to track the escalating antisemitism tearing through school districts in Northern California. Bronicki says two hundred incidents were reported last school year in Santa Clara County alone.
Jewish families reported incidents like this one:
An Israeli American girl walked into her first period French class at Cupertino High School to find that many of the other students and the teacher were wearing a Palestinian flag or keffiyeh in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, on the occasion of the Middle Eastern club’s pro-Palestine day. The club handed out a map of Israel labeled only as “Palestine.”
In another incident, a 12-year-old middle school student at a charter school in San Jose arrived visibly upset on the first school day following the October 7 Hamas massacre. According to a complaint against the school district later filed by her parents in federal district court, the girl had close family members in Israel whose whereabouts were unknown. The girl asked her world history teacher if she could go to the bathroom to collect herself.
The history classroom “was decorated with maps of the modern Middle East in which Israel was erased.” The history teacher knew the girl was Israeli American because she had identified herself as such at the start of the year during an icebreaker exercise. He told her she could not go “until she read aloud to the entire class a passage he had selected to the effect that in the past, Palestinians and Jews had gotten along,” according to the complaint. “The requirement to publicly espouse a position that was at odds with present reality was overwhelmingly oppressive and humiliating.” She read the passage aloud, as directed.
The next day at lunch, two female classmates wearing hijabs approached her, according to the complaint, “and demanded ‘What do your people think about the conflict?’ ” When the girl tried to answer, they screamed, “You’re lying—Jews are terrorists.” One demanded: “Do you know that your family in Israel is living on stolen land?”
A few days later, two boys chased her around the school yelling, “We want you to die.” Kids began to refer to her as “Jew.” They would say, “Hi, Jew” or “Hey Jew.” If she protested, they said they thought it was funny.
The rest of the kids isolated and ignored her when they weren’t whispering about her, the complaint alleges. She lost all but one friend. Her parents met several times with school faculty; according to the complaint, they did nothing to ensure her safety or improve the girl’s situation.
A Jewish ninth grader, “Sam,” attends a Bay Area high school where, after October 7 of last year, posters declaring, “Ceasefire Now!” and “Free Palestine” began appearing on the walls. Because Sam’s family considers itself very progressive, Sam was not bothered by the posters.
Then one of Sam’s friends sent him a long diatribe that read in part (spelling from the original), “I would just like to say that u are an ignorant ass white ass privileged boy u are so privileged to not b one of those children being killed rn in Gaza…solidarity and indigenous solidarity is something you could never understand as you have grown up your whole life with no culture and money and you been brainwashed by isreali and western media the world stands with Palestine and frankly it’s embarrassing to be anything different, when mostly all people of color stand with Palestine and you stand with ISREAL, that’s how yk ur in the wrong bud oppressed people stand with oppressed people in solidarity SOMETHING YOU COULDD NEVER UNDERSTAND.” The text concluded: “FREE PALESTINE TILL ITS BACKWARDS BITCH!!!!”
I spoke to Sam’s mother, and her perception was that the message didn’t sound like her son’s friend. The jargon and gist appeared to come from adults. Only the self-righteous fury and the message’s abusive conclusion belonged to the boy.
I also spoke to the mother of “Dana,” a sixth-grade girl at a Bay Area elementary school. In a social studies unit on ancient civilizations last year, the teacher encouraged students to share their “feelings” about “Israel and Palestine.” Students shouted: “Fuck Israel!” and “Israel sucks!” Dana was the only Jewish child in the class.
When Dana told her mother what had happened, her mother drove back to the school and asked the teacher, who admitted that the classroom exchange had occurred. Dana’s mother asked the teacher what “Israel and Palestine” had to do with the sixth-grade curriculum. The teacher claimed she couldn’t teach ancient civilizations without talking about the Palestinians. Dana’s mother knew the lesson offered neither historical nor archaeological evidence to tie the modern Palestinian national identity back to antiquity. But teachers today often consume and regurgitate anachronistic propaganda uncritically.
I spoke to a San Francisco middle schooler, “Zoe,” who told me her ethnic studies teacher so relentlessly preached anti-Israel sentiment, and the school was so engulfed in anti-Israel propaganda, that it changed how students treated her. Zoe told me one classmate came up to her and said: “A Zionist is someone who wants Palestinians dead.” Zoe replied, “That is actually not what it means at all.”
Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley is a midwife who has three Jewish children. Her son “Danny,” who was a student at Berkeley High School, told her that after October 7, a teacher used the school’s printing press to make “Free Palestine” T-shirts that were then distributed to students.
Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley has three Jewish children. Her son Danny, who is black, said to her, “If there was an image of a noose, we would not hear the end of it. There would be protests, people would be going crazy. But it’s always okay if it’s anything anti-Jewish.” (Jason Henry for The Free Press)
One of Danny’s teachers posted a running tally, in the front of the classroom, of the number of Palestinians allegedly killed by the IDF. She says, “So every day, when my son came into class, it would say how many people Israel has killed today.” (The Free Press has confirmed this with photographic evidence.)
Danny, who is black, said to her, “If there was an image of a noose, we would not hear the end of it. There would be protests, people would be going crazy. But it’s always okay if it’s anything anti-Jewish.”
One mother reported to grassroots organizers that her seven-year-old daughter came home from elementary school in Marin County last year and asked: “Mommy, if someone asks me if I’m Jewish, do I have to tell them?”
Learning to Hate Israel
Los Angeles Unified School District is failing its students. In the 2023–24 school year, fewer than half the students met reading proficiency standards, and less than 33 percent were proficient in math. But instead of a laser focus on how to educate kids, teachers are coming up with ever more ways to attack the existence of Israel.
It’s hard to imagine what U.S. arms sales to Israel has to do with the district’s core educational goals, but recently, the L.A. teachers union voted in opposition to it. They spend considerable union time and resources on organizing opposition to Israel. In the union’s recent Motions Report from October 10 of this year, half the measures put to a vote related to Israel. One motion, which passed unanimously, endorsed a discussion about “how to organize your workplace to support the Palestine Liberation Movement” and against “the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”
The First Amendment protects teachers’ political advocacy in union meetings. But public school teachers have no First Amendment right to express their political viewpoints in the classroom. “When it comes to K–12 education, the precedents are pretty clear that the school district or legislature or the principal or whoever the political process leaves in charge can set the curriculum and can require the teachers to go along with it,” Eugene Volokh, First Amendment scholar and distinguished professor of law at UCLA, told me.
But while the school board or legislature sets the agenda for what must be taught in schools, it can also choose not to police teachers who skirt those rules or even brazenly violate them.
Curriculum decisions, Volokh said, are “subject to the political process and not the legal process,” generally speaking. If the school district doesn’t object to teacher speech—or in fact encourages it—parents’ only recourse is through the political process: voting out state legislators or school board members.
Dillon Hosier, Chief Executive Officer of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, explained that for generations, the Jewish community has poured its resources into nonprofits, which are not legally permitted to lobby. “Our opponents,” he said, referring to organizations like Council on American-Islamic Relations, “are putting people in public office and getting bills passed.”
That strategy has paid off. School boards and state legislators are reluctant to confront the growing problem in their schools.
In Brooklyn, teachers led third graders at PS 705 in Prospect Heights in a chorus of “The Wheels on the Tank,” which encouraged them to despise Israel and the Israel Defense Forces, according to the New York Post: “The wheels on the tanks go round and round, all through the town. The people in the town they hold their ground, and never back down.” The rhyme continued: “Free Palestine till the wheels on the tanks fall off.” The book was illustrated with Palestinian kids hurling rocks at Israeli tanks.
In Portland, pre-K lesson plans included the story of Handala, a fictional Palestinian cartoon character who symbolizes the resistance. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people,” it continues, according to a piece in City Journal.
At a Fort Lee, New Jersey, high school, world history teachers confiscated students’ cell phones before giving a lesson that presented Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than an internationally designated terrorist organization. Teachers also showed a map of Israel that falsely presented Palestinians as the sole indigenous natives of Israel. (The Free Press has obtained a copy of the presentation. Click here to see it.)
The Black Lives Matter Week of Action is a standard program at thousands of schools across the country. It now routinely shifts from a focus on white racism against black Americans to the “other brown people” allegedly subjected to apartheid in the West Bank at the hands of the “white” settler colonialist Israelis, according to several grassroots organizers I spoke to who track radicalism in America’s public schools. (A majority of Israeli Jews are from non-white, non-European heritage.)
Nicole Neily is the founder of Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit that exposes radicalism in schools. (Jason Henry for The Free Press)
Three years ago, Nicole Neily founded Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit that exposes radicalism in schools, largely in response to the race and gender ideologies she saw coursing through public schools. This year, when her organization reached out to school districts to inquire whether they planned to include the war in Gaza in their BLM Week of Action instruction, the president of a school board in Rochester, New York, wrote back to confirm that they did. The school board president added, “I would ask that you study the history of the Jewish nation and their involvement in slavery–financing the slave ships to bring Africans into the Americas and the Carribbeans,” referring to a spurious canard associated with Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan.
Last spring, millions of Americans watched in disbelief as university students, particularly at our most elite schools, vandalized buildings, set up illegal encampments, and cheered for Hamas. But there was far less attention paid to the parallel dramas unfolding at K–12 schools across the country.
Aware of their ability to shape young minds, teachers encouraged schoolchildren to join “Walkouts” for Palestine, don keffiyehs, chant the eliminationist slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and tell their Jewish classmates, “It is excellent what Hamas did to Israel,” according to a complaint filed to the U.S. Department of Education by the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League on behalf of Jewish students.
“We had been tracking a lot of antisemitic incidents in school even prior to October 7. Obviously, in the wake of October 7, we saw things explode,” Neily told me. “This had sort of been simmering below the surface for a long time. You look at everything that happened on college campuses, and it’s not that kids turn 18, go to college campus, and think, ‘I’m going to underage drink and hate the Jews.’ So much of this was baked into the curriculum before.”
Neily, who is Catholic, has now become a national leader in the grassroots effort to expose antisemitism in schools. Her team regularly submits hundreds of FOIA requests, wrangling with schools that hide behind copyright law to avoid disclosing materials taught to American school children. And what she has found is that radical anti-Israel NGOs are training teachers and supplying materials used in thousands of American classrooms.“This stuff is really going viral, coast to coast,” Neily said.
Federal law gives parents the right to inspect their children’s educational materials. But schools routinely decline to turn over lessons on the grounds of copyright law.
“So long as a parent isn’t asking for the material to duplicate it and sell it, there is no copyright violation in providing that material to parents,” Lori Lowenthal Marcus told me. Marcus is the legal director at The Deborah Project, which protects the civil rights of Jews in education. She added, “It is a bullshit excuse that takes advantage of parents who aren’t lawyers.”
Lori Lowenthal Marcus. (Caroline Gutman for The Free Press)
Online textbooks are easily supplemented with material from Al Jazeera or other radical sources. Smartboards allow teachers to display fraudulent histories of Israel and outright propaganda.
This video, shown to tenth to twelfth graders in the Sequoia Union school district in Northern California as part of the mandatory ethnic studies curriculum, was produced by the virulently anti-Israel Turkish News site, TRT World. It ignores 3,000 years of Jewish history in Israel and instead frames Jewish connection to Israel as illegitimate or what is often called “settler colonialism.”
The video omits mention of Jews’ historic connection to the West Bank—called Judea and Samaria in the Hebrew Bible—and ignores the fact that the State of Israel accepted several peace proposals throughout its 76-year history that would have created a Palestinian state. It also omits that the Second Intifada and its 138 Palestinian suicide bombings of primarily civilian Israeli targets was the impetus for Israel erecting a security barrier.
An Undercover, Front-Row Seat
Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky. (Caroline Gutman for The Free Press)
Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, director of education and community engagement at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, first noticed an uptick in antisemitic K–12 materials in 2018, when she was getting her PhD in education. “What I saw was what seemed to be a very well-coordinated effort between activist teachers, activist organizations, and administrators that were trying to do a lot of kowtowing to progressive social ideology through programming and bringing that programming into their schools,” she said.
“There is just this insidious idea that it is okay to hate Jews or attack Jews if they feel any connection to the Jewish homeland—to Israel; if there’s any expression of Jewish pride, especially when that pride is Zionism,” she said.
“I think that antisemitism, like the Jew hatred, isn’t the end goal. I think it’s the symptom of a bigger anti-Western illiberalism that has taken over a lot of our institutions,” Shufutinsky told me.
Curious to learn more about the goals of these anti-Israel educators, Shufutinsky began hanging out in their virtual meetings. As a grad student at the University of San Francisco, she spent almost two years, she says, “undercover” in chat rooms where educators were developing a new curriculum: “Liberated Ethnic Studies.” This would eventually become the mandatory California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. In discussions about the need for ethnic studies, educators were uniquely fixated on promoting an anti-Israel agenda. “The whole goal for pushing ethnic studies, making it a requirement, was so that they could teach Palestine,” she said.
When in 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a requirement that schools make completion of ethnic studies a condition of graduation, he effectively made antisemitism a formal feature of California schooling. The original curriculum, “Liberated Ethnic Studies,” was so outrageously antisemitic, it was officially abandoned. In The Free Press, Shufutinsky called it “a Trojan horse to institutionalize antisemitism in California schools.”
But even the successor course—implemented by many of the same educators who had proposed the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum in California—has provided a vehicle for anti-Israel indoctrination of American schoolchildren.
Shufutinsky told me that the reformed curriculum teaches that “Israel is something that it isn’t. That it’s the ultimate evil. That it is apartheid. That it is a settler colonial state that deserves to be dismantled. That Zionism is racism.”
Elina Kaplan, a former manager in Northern California’s tech sector and self-described “lifelong Democrat,” was quick to recognize the problems posed by ethnic studies in the classroom. A childhood spent as a Jew in the former Soviet Union taught her to recognize state-sponsored antisemitic propaganda.
Elina Kaplan of Foster City, Calif. (Jason Henry for The Free Press)
She formed a nonprofit to organize against the inclusion of ethnic studies in California schools and maintains an archive of the antisemitic materials promulgated in American classrooms. While her organization helped defeat the worst excesses of the original curriculum, the broader effort to keep antisemitism out of the schools failed. Since 2021, she has seen the antisemitism once confined to ethnic studies sprout in virtually every subject.
Kaplan says, “In math class, they can be studying charts and are told, ‘Look at this pie chart of the number of Palestinians murdered. This slice shows the number of Israelis that were killed.’ ”
That example was actually presented to elementary school students in New Haven Unified School District, California. The chart is labeled “People Killed Since September 29, 2000” divided into Palestinians and Israelis and asks: “What information is this pie graph showing us?” The obvious answer: Far more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis.
Image obtained by The Free Press.
Another mother sent me an example of an assignment used in a physics class at Cupertino High School, which asked students to consider the “Effect of Israel’s Bombing of Gaza” on climate change.
Image obtained by The Free Press.
At schools where anti-Israel propaganda is promulgated, schoolchildren are turning against their Jewish classmates. Dozens of interviews with parents, teachers, and people at nonprofits revealed that discussions of Israel quickly become personal, and American Jews—even children—are the inevitable targets.
“Tammy” is a Jewish substitute teacher in Oakland who asked not to be identified. She said in the past year, she’s been astonished by the sheer volume of anti-Israel messaging to school kids across Oakland. She says only the Jewish families object. Where there are no Jewish students, the material goes entirely unopposed.
“We’re raising a generation of antisemites,” she told me.
“I have a necklace that says my name in Hebrew. And I wear it every day and I don’t take it off. It’s pretty small,” Tammy told me. One day last year, when she was substitute teaching in middle school, a boy saw her necklace and said, “Oh, I’m Jewish too.”
The boy went and got his backpack and pulled from it a necklace with a Star of David pendant. She remembers thinking, “Why is it in your backpack? Why aren’t you wearing it?”
Abigail Shrier is a contributing editor to The Free Press, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the New York Times best-selling author of Bad Therapy.
https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-the-kinderfada-revolution
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if it does not go their way:
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2024/11/01/jerry-seinfeld-shreds-his-kids-former-school-for-allowing-distressed-students-to-take-day-after-election-off/
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Peter Schweizer
@peterschweizer
Harvard cancelled classes after Trump won. They did not cancel classes after the October 7th Hamas massacre. What does that tell you?
https://x.com/peterschweizer/status/1854559084373999925
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Sweet baby Jesus, let me live long enough to see this implemented and granting degrees:
Student loans need to be like mortgages: appraise the property to make sure it’s worth the loan and do a check on the buyer to make sure they can pay it back.
In student loans, the “property” is their degree: the institution and major. A computer science degree from Stanford is worth more than a gender studies degree from Stanford. A computer science degree from South Alabama State University is worth less than one from Stanford. And a gender studies or cultural anthropology degree from South Alabama State is worthless.
The borrower is the student. In addition to the student’s credit rating (which matters - are they responsible with money or racking up credit card debt to buy clothes and electronics or leasing fancy cars?), they should look at GPA. A 2.0 GPA student is far less likely to pay back a loan than a 4.0 student regardless of school.
Then there should be a formula that (based on real world data) assigns a maximum loan amount tied to these data points about the student and school/major. That gender studies major at S Alabama State would get $0 as a 2.0 and $50 a year as a 4.0. A 4.0 computer science student at the same school would qualify for $10000 a year but less with poor credit. And a 4.0 Stanford computer science major could qualify for $100,000 a year.
Let’s do this!!
BBG: In addition he posted:
Incredible news: President @realDonaldTrump planning to tax excessively large private university endowments (which have benefited greatly from taxpayer $) to establish American Academy, a free online university for all. Purely academic.
Now please make a med school. I’ll help!
https://x.com/houmanhemmati/status/1856742889197637776?s=61
ETA: a list of the largest university endowments: https://www.educationconnection.com/resources/largest-university-endowments/#largest-university-endowment-colleges
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2nd post: Wouldn’t provide a letter of recommendation for a friend’s daughter. It’s a decent read:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/11/bill-ackman-declines-to-write-yale-recommendation-letter-for-friends-daughter/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bill-ackman-declines-to-write-yale-recommendation-letter-for-friends-daughter
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A wee bit of long overdue reflection from an English professor. Think it’s tepid, pulls punches, and doesn’t dive deeply enough into the arrogant pathology he’s speaking to. Nonetheless I expect he’ll be utterly excoriated in ed biz circles:
We Asked for It
Michael Clune
Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.
In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.
The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus. Public opinion of higher education is at an all-time low. The incoming Trump administration plans to use the accreditation process to end the politicization of higher education — and to tax and fine institutions up to “100 percent” of their endowment. I believe these threats are serious because of a simple political calculation of my own: If Trump announced that he was taxing wealthy endowments down to zero, the majority of Americans would stand up and cheer.
This crisis comes at a time in which colleges are ill-equipped to mount a defense. How did this happen?
Let’s take a closer look at why the identification of academic politics with partisan politics is so wrongheaded. I am not interested here in questioning the validity of the political positions staked out by academics over the past decade — on race, immigration, biological sex, Covid, or Donald Trump. Even if one wholeheartedly agrees with every faculty-lounge political opinion, there are still very good reasons to be skeptical about making such opinions the basis of one’s academic work.
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The first is that, while academics have real expertise in their disciplines, we have no special expertise when it comes to political judgment. I am an English professor. I know about the history of literature, the practice of close reading, and the dynamics of literary judgment. No one should treat my opinion on any political matter as more authoritative than that of any other person. The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to deal with climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.
The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to address climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.
The second problem with thinking of a professor’s work in explicitly political terms is that professors are terrible at politics. This is especially true of professors at elite colleges. Professors who — like myself — work in institutions that pride themselves on rejecting 70 to 95 percent of their applicants, and whose students overwhelmingly come from the upper reaches of the income spectrum, are simply not in the best position to serve as spokespeople for left-wing egalitarian values.
As someone who was raised in a working-class, immigrant family, academe first appeared to me as a world in which everyone’s views seemed calculated to distinguish themselves from the working class. This is bad enough when those views concern art or esoteric anthropology theories. But when they concern everyday morality and partisan politics, the results are truly perverse. In return for their tuition, students are given the faculty’s high-class political opinions as a form of cultural capital. Thus the public perceives these opinions — on defunding the police, or viewing biological sex as a social construction, or Israel as absolute evil — as markers in a status game. Far from advancing their opinions, professors in fact function to invalidate these views for the majority of Americans who never had the opportunity to attend elite institutions but who are constantly stigmatized for their low-class opinions by the lucky graduates.
Far from representing a powerful avant-garde leading the way to political change, the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports. The hierarchical structure of academe, and the role it plays in class stratification, clings to every professor’s political pronouncement like a revolting odor. My guess is that the successful Democrats of the future will seek to distance themselves as far as possible from the bespoke jargon and pedantic tone that has constituted the professoriate’s signal contribution to Democratic politics. Nothing would so efficiently invalidate conservative views with working-class Americans than if every elite college professor was replaced by a double who conceived of their work in terms of activism for right-wing ideas. Professors are bad at politics, and politicized professors are bad for their own politics.
If we have a political role by virtue of our jobs, that role derives from dedicated practice in the disciplines in which we are experts. Teaching students how to weigh evidence, giving them the capacity to follow a mathematical proof, disciplining their tendency to project their own values onto the object of study — these practices may not have the direct and immediate political payoff that has been the professoriate’s reigning delusion over the past decade. But they have two overwhelming advantages.
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First, a chemist, or an art historian, really does possess authority in their subject of expertise. They can show us things we couldn’t learn on our own. This genuine authority is the basis for the university’s claim to public respect and support.
Second, the dissemination of academic values regarding evidence and reasoned debate can have powerful indirect effects. I have argued, for instance, that even so apparently apolitical a practice as teaching students to appreciate great literature can act as a bulwark against the reduction of all values to consumer preference. The scientific and humanistic education of an informed citizenry may not in itself solve climate change or end xenophobia, but it can contribute to these goals in ways both dramatic and subtle. In any case, such a political role is the only one that is both sustainable in a democracy and compatible with our professional status as researchers and educators.
It would be wrong to place the blame for the university’s current dire straits entirely on the shoulders of activist professors. While virtually all professors (I include myself) have surrendered, to at least some degree, to the pressure to justify our work in political terms — whether in grant applications, book proposals, or department statements about political topics — in many cases the core of our work has continued to be the pursuit of knowledge. The primary responsibility for the university’s abject vulnerability to looming political interference of the most heavy-handed kind falls on administrators. Their job is to support academic work and communicate its benefits. Yet they seem perversely committed to identifying academe as closely as possible with political projects.
The most obvious example is the routine proclamations from university presidents and deans on every conceivable political issue. In response to events such as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020, administrators broadcast identifiably partisan views as representative of the university as a whole. This trend has mercifully diminished in the wake of the disastrous House of Representatives hearings on antisemitism that led to the dismissal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and others. But the conception of the university as a vehicle for carrying out specific political ends continues in less visible ways.
For instance, recent years have seen a proliferation of high-level administrators given the task of instituting what amounts to a “shadow curriculum” of student and faculty training, the content of which is the explicit transmission and enforcement of controversial political views about race, gender, sexuality, and power. Even more unsettling has been the cloud of unknowing that has descended over the political imperatives governing faculty and administrative hiring practices.
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I will give an example from my own work as chair of several faculty search committees over the past two years. At a mandatory training session, I was told by the university’s diversity officer that I was to use candidates’ diversity statements as a means of ascertaining candidates’ racial identity. Yet at another training session, I was told that I was not to base hiring decisions on knowledge of candidates’ racial identity.
Chairing a search-committee meeting in which faculty members were openly discussing candidates’ race, I wondered aloud if what we were doing was illegal. I then received a stern email from the diversity dean telling me that it was unacceptable to raise the question of the legality of the university’s practices. I then asked what those practices were. How, in fact, does the university want us to take account of race? I never received a reply.
When I did meet with the dean, my questions were repeatedly turned aside by references to our “shared values.” But what are these values? What links the work of a professor who conceives of her job as climate activism, to a student-orientation leader teaching that the term “illegal immigration” is a microaggression, to the search committee deciding that this person from a minority group is a good candidate while that one is not? The thread is a shared commitment to a particular brand of partisan politics. If this is truly what the university stands for, if these are our values, then when we are called before our elected representatives to answer for ourselves, what can we say? Colleges have no compelling justification for their existence to give when the opposing political party comes into power. We have nothing to say to the half of America who doesn’t share our politics.
I believe administrators and professors should articulate a different set of shared values, stemming from our demonstrated expertise and commitment to high standards of evidence and argument. This expertise and this commitment are the grounds of the academic freedom by which we claim to pursue knowledge without fear of political pressure.
The good news is that these values animate what most professors, in most disciplines, do every day. The bad news is that the time to share this news with the nation is rapidly running out.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/we-asked-for-it
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-approves-bible-based-curriculum-for-pre-schoolers/ar-AA1uAz5P?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=725ae2f915e14e91b0dd56d597fe5b3c&ei=90
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a bit hypocritical to say the truth
maybe voluntary Bible clubs after hrs seems more in line with the C's Separation of Church and State if applying this to public schools
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With a bit of intellectual discipline it could be done to good effect, but of course the passion of the believers tends to push up against such boundaries.
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If the reporting is accurate, it looks like quite an overreach.
The movement is school choice. The article makes it sound like religion coercion.
No, they shouldn't get more money, they should get the same money per pupil if they cover all the academic requirements. And if they have religion in it, that should be a choice for parents.
We already have religion in schools, the religion of woke far leftism.
Taxpayers should pay only for the academics. The rest is parent choice.
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Trump’s School-Choice Agenda Hits Pushback From Red-State Voters
Defeat of state ballot measures suggests a divide between Republican lawmakers and voters
By
Matt Barnum
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Nov. 29, 2024 5:30 am ET
President-elect Donald Trump has made school choice a core tenet of his plan to remake education—but it isn’t clear his voters are on board.
Trump has indicated that he supports public funding of private schools and other options outside traditional school districts. “We will give all parents the right to choose another school for their children if they want,” Trump said in a campaign video. “It’s called school choice.”
Yet school-choice ballot measures lost in three states in the November election, including in two that went strongly for Trump, Kentucky and Nebraska. The results suggest a divide between Republican lawmakers and voters, many of whom have said in opinion surveys that they are generally dissatisfied with what they view as a “woke” agenda in public education but still like their own children’s local schools.
To school-choice supporters—which include some parents, Republican politicians and conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation—subsidizing private or other options outside traditional school districts gives parents more say in their children’s education. Teachers unions, Democrats and some public-school parents say that giving families money to go elsewhere drains needed resources from public schools.
Before this year, school-choice ballot measures have lost 14 of 16 times, according to an analysis by Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy at Indiana University.
“These are popular with politicians,” said Lubienski, a critic of school vouchers. “But voters tend to push back pretty hard.”
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Donald Trump has vowed to dissolve the Department of Education and reverse Biden-era policies. Oklahoma schools superintendent Ryan Walters and former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan weigh in on Trump’s plan. Photo Illustration: Ryan Trefes
School-choice advocates say that ballot measures in a handful of states don’t represent national voter sentiment—especially in a year in which many Republicans, including Trump, campaigned on the issue and won.
“There is a lot of support across the country for school choice,” said Anthony J. de Nicola, chair of Invest in Education, a group backing a federal school-choice law. “It’s part of the mandate that Republicans were elected into office on.”
Trump hasn’t said how he would enact school choice, but advocates have coalesced around a bill known as the Educational Choice for Children Act. The measure would provide up to $10 billion annually in tax credits to support organizations that give scholarships for private schools or other educational expenses. A smaller version passed a House committee earlier this year. If enacted, it would be the federal government’s first large-scale effort to subsidize the costs of K-12 private schooling.
In picking World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder and former Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon to be education secretary, Trump said she would “fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America.” McMahon has a relatively thin education resume, but has long indicated support for school choice. A Trump spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In Trump’s first term, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos pushed for school-choice legislation, but made little headway in Congress amid skepticism from Democrats and some Republicans.
School-choice Republicans have been more successful at the state level. Several states, including Arizona, now provide money—typically thousands of dollars per child—to help families pay for private-school tuition or other education expenses outside of public schools.
In states with vouchers or similar programs, they have proven popular with families whose children already attended private school, but only a small share of students have left public school.
In Kentucky, Republican-backed school choice laws were struck down after courts ruled that the state constitution forbade redirecting public money to private or charter schools. So the Legislature put a measure on the ballot to change the state constitution. Known as Amendment 2, it was rejected by nearly two-thirds of voters on Nov. 5, even as a similar share voted for Trump.
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“Amendment 2 is the voucher amendment. And vouchers take money away from public schools,” said Kelsey Coots, the campaign manager for Protect Our Schools KY. The group raised $8.6 million, most of it from state and national teachers unions, to defeat the measure. Supporters of the proposal raised millions from wealthy donors, including Pennsylvania financier Jeff Yass.
Timmy Truett, a public school principal in Jackson County in rural Kentucky, said he was concerned that sending money to private schools would hurt local public schools such as his. Truett is also a Republican state representative who enthusiastically voted for Trump, even while writing newspaper articles and appearing on podcasts arguing against Amendment 2.
“This could mean less funding for our public schools,” he said. “I don’t think people in Eastern Kentucky liked that idea.” Truett said he wants Trump to let local communities make decisions about education, rather than creating a federal school-choice program.
Jim Waters, president of the free-market, Kentucky-based Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, was taken aback by the breadth of the amendment defeat. He said that rural voters’ have “emotional” connections to local public schools that are difficult to dislodge. He said he hopes a federal choice program is enacted. “That would be especially helpful for Kentucky, to bypass the establishment—they wouldn’t be able to stop this,” he said.
In Nebraska, voters approved a union-backed measure to repeal a private-school scholarship program funded with a tax credit. The state also supported Trump by a wide margin.
The third state where the issue was on the November ballot was Colorado, which backed Vice President Kamala Harris for the White House. There, a slim majority of voters declined to codify a constitutional right to school choice.
Michael McShane, director of national research at the nonprofit EdChoice, said school choice did well on Election Day because voters backed many politicians who support it.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott targeted fellow Republicans who have opposed vouchers. After the election, Abbott said he now has the votes in the Legislature to pass school choice next year.
Hillary Hickland—a conservative activist and parent of four who said she switched her children to private schools over frustration with local public schools—defeated an incumbent state representative in her Central Texas district who voted against Abbott’s choice plan.
“Parents need to be in the driver’s seat,” she said.
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Have not read this yet
https://victorygirlsblog.com/randi-weingarten-and-unions-only-care-about-the-money/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/house-overwhelmingly-passes-crucial-communism-teaching-act-5772162?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2024-12-06&src_cmp=gv-2024-12-06&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYvAqcwcVzc7PzLYPrHFRB710wA0AIj31kx5JTWZu9FddhEg4S8RP
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I hope she nails their tongue to a tree, both because Penn deserves it, and because it will fire a shot across the collective bows of arrogant institutions of higher ed that embrace patent double standards, pretending they are astride the high moral ground when doing so:
Penn Professor's Fight for Free Speech Heads to Federal Court
Amy Wax is suing the Ivy League school for race discrimination, arguing that the university cracks down on speech unevenly depending on which group it offends
Amy Wax (C-SPAN)
Aaron Sibarium
January 16, 2025
Amy Wax, the tenured law professor who was sanctioned for her controversial remarks about racial issues, sued the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday for breach of contract and race discrimination, putting a dispute over tenure and academic freedom that has dragged on for almost three years into the hands of a federal court. The complaint comes after Wax was suspended for a year at half-pay and stripped of her named chair, penalties the lawsuit says are "illegal multiple times over."
"The imposition of academic discipline violates the University's contractual promise to Professor Wax to abide by the principles of the First Amendment," the lawsuit reads. And "the University's Speech Policy, which is the basis of that discipline, unlawfully discriminates based on the race … of both speakers and targets of speech."
The complaint advances a novel legal theory that could have major implications for universities as they brace for the incoming Trump administration. Wax argues that Penn engaged in race discrimination by punishing speech that offended racial minorities but not speech that offended Jews, citing a litany of cases in which the school declined to discipline professors who deployed anti-Semitic tropes and called for the destruction of Israel.
"Penn tolerated speech targeting Jews while punishing Professor Wax for speech about affirmative action and other racial topics," the lawsuit reads. "Race therefore was a but-for cause"—that is, a key motivation—"of the decision to discipline Plaintiff Wax."
If that argument is accepted by Pennsylvania's Eastern District court, it could become a roadmap for plaintiffs and government agencies seeking to challenge the double standards that emerged on campus after the October 7 attacks, when schools that had spent years policing microaggressions turned on a dime to defend the free speech rights of anti-Israel protesters, some of whom flew terrorist flags and used anti-Semitic rhetoric.
The hypocrisy was particularly glaring at Penn, whose former president Liz Magill resigned after she said at a congressional hearing that calls for the genocide of Jews do not necessarily constitute harassment. To illustrate the double standard, the complaint includes a table comparing Wax's speech with that of a fellow Penn faculty member, Dwayne Booth, who published a cartoon depicting Zionists drinking the blood of Gazans.
While the university took no action against Booth—claiming his speech was protected by Penn's "bedrock commitment to open expression"—it did sanction Wax over a series of remarks that the school said amounted to "inequitably targeted disrespect." Those remarks included criticisms of affirmative action, claims about the racial distribution of law school grades, and the statement that diversity officials "couldn't be scholars if their life depended on it," assertions the university said had "harmed" students.
"There is no rational way to conclude that Professor Wax's statements would cause more 'harm' than Mr. Booth's blood-libel cartoon," the lawsuit reads. "Yet the University has sought only to discipline Professor Wax, while hiding behind disingenuous paeans to free speech and a supposed commitment to academic free expression to justify its decision not to lift a finger against Mr. Booth."
Penn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The complaint, obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, comes days before the inauguration of a president-elect who has promised to "reclaim" universities from the "radical Left" and cut funding to schools engaged in race discrimination. The timing could put Penn in the crosshairs as the Trump administration hunts for early targets. And Wax's lawyers seem giddy at that prospect, telling the Free Beacon that the school's "racist double standards" justify a wholesale revocation of federal funding.
"Given Penn's multiple egregious violations of federal anti-discrimination law, including those detailed in our complaint, there is ample justification for cutting off Penn's federal funding across the board," said Wax's lead counsel, Jason Torchinsky, a former official in the Department of Justice's civil rights division. "Private universities like Penn have ample resources to fund their own discriminatory actions, which they continue to engage in unabated. They should not be relying on taxpayers to foot the bill."
The case might make it harder for universities to get away with a fair-weather approach to free expression, Torchinsky added, setting a precedent that they must either "abide by First Amendment principles" or, if they insist on censoring speech, "do so in a manner that is not racially discriminatory."
Penn initiated disciplinary proceedings against Wax in March 2022, after she said on a podcast that the United States should accept fewer immigrants from Asia given their tendency to vote for Democrats. But administrators were hinting that they planned to sanction her as early as 2019, when the dean of Penn Law School at the time, Theodore Ruger, told students at a town hall that "it sucks" that Wax "still works here."
The "only way to get rid of a tenured professor," he added, is a "process" that is "gonna take months."
The lawsuit cites those comments to argue that the school was acting in bad faith from the start, using a set of "kangaroo-court-like procedures" to reach a predetermined outcome. For example, the university charged Wax with a "major infraction" under Penn's faculty handbook, a category that covers criminal conduct like sexual assault and murder. The charge triggered a disciplinary process that was not designed for academic freedom issues, according to the lawsuit, and implied that "Wax's speech was equivalent in kind and degree to conduct like murder or sexual assault."
"Penn has never used the 'major infractions' procedures for any other speech," the complaint reads. "Indeed, it has not even invoked the minor infractions disciplinary procedures for any of the anti-Semitic speech or incitements to violence described in this Complaint."
It initially looked as though Penn's botched handling of anti-Semitism would resolve Wax's situation. Facing criticism for her decision to allow prominent anti-Semites to speak at a campus literary festival, Magill told trustees in September 2023 that the school voluntarily adheres to the First Amendment. She reiterated that policy a few months later when she was asked at a congressional hearing why Penn had not punished Ahmad Almallah, a university lecturer, for leading "Intifada" chants in the wake of the October 7 attacks.
Wax seized on Magill's statements to argue that she was the victim of selective prosecution and would have a strong legal case in the event that Penn sanctioned her. She used that threat to pressure Penn into settlement talks, nearly securing a deal that would have let her keep her base salary over the course of her suspension.
The negotiations broke down after Penn demanded that Wax waive her right to sue or criticize the university over the way it treated her. After all, she told the Free Beacon at the time, "this case is about free expression."
The lawsuit argues that Penn doesn't just discriminate based on the subject of speech, but on the identity of the speaker. "White speakers are far more likely to be disciplined for 'harmful' speech while minority speakers are rarely, if ever, subject to disciplinary procedures for the same," the complaint asserts. "The University's Speech Policy thus discriminates on the basis of race and other protected grounds—both in terms of the identity of speakers and the subject of speech."
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A case of significance! Let's keep an eye on it!
I added Prof Amy Wax's name to the subject line to facilitate future searches.
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How Trump Can Make Universities Great Again
The message he should send to college presidents: reform, or lose funding
Christopher F. Rufo
Feb 8
READ IN APP
US Supreme Court Grants Former Presidents 'Absolute Immunity'
Universities occupy a uniquely privileged position in American life. They enjoy tremendous prestige and billions in public subsidies, even as their costs have exploded, saddling the country with $1.7 trillion in outstanding student debt.
Do universities deserve their status? A growing number of Americans don’t think so. Far from delivering on their promises, most universities have devolved into left-wing propaganda factories. Nearly 60 percent of Republicans say that universities have a negative effect on the country, and only one in three independents has “quite a lot” of trust in higher education institutions. The trendlines suggest that the disillusionment has yet to hit bottom.
This is a crisis—and an opportunity. The Trump administration has a once-in-a-generation chance to reform higher education. The president and his prospective education secretary, Linda McMahon, should seize it.
The starting point of any serious higher-education agenda should be to recognize many universities for what they are: ideological centers that have abandoned the pursuit of knowledge for partisan activism. They have not earned their position as acclaimed credentialing institutions; rather, the schools have amassed their wealth and power from generous policy decisions bankrolled by American taxpayers, whom they have repaid mostly with contempt. These schools posture as though their position is untouchable, but their business model is nearly entirely reliant on federal largesse. Demanding that universities behave in a manner worthy of their unique financial and cultural position is long overdue.
But reform will not come easy. The Trump administration must renegotiate the deal between the citizens and the universities, conditioning federal funding on three popular demands: first, that the schools contribute to solving the student-debt crisis; second, that they adhere to the standard of colorblind equality, under both federal civil rights law and the Constitution; and third, that they pursue knowledge rather than ideological activism.
Here is how it can be done.
At the outset, we should acknowledge the dirty secret of higher education: it has become a creature, or, less charitably, a parasite, of the state. It is no stretch to say that the entire business model of higher education is fundamentally dependent on federal money.
First, consider direct grants. Universities collectively receive more than $50 billion in federal grants yearly. One-eighth of Havard’s annual budget—and two-thirds of its research funding—comes directly from the federal government. Likewise, Washington sends $900 million to Yale and $800 million to Columbia each year. Some of this money goes to noble causes, such as cancer research. But much of it is devoted to ideological drivel, such as the $600,000 sent to Yale to study the “impacts of mobile technology on work, gender gaps, and norms”; $700,000 to the University of Pennsylvania to study how to allocate Covid vaccines on the basis of race; and $4 million to Cornell University to increase “minoritized” faculty in the medical sciences. And at some schools, administrators get the biggest cut, skimming up to 60 percent of grant funding as “indirect” overhead costs, which Congress once capped at a mere 8 percent.
The real boon to universities comes not from direct federal subsidies, however, but from federally backed student loans and other financial-aid programs, which cumulatively add up to another $100 billion a year in subsidized debt. These loan programs, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson decades ago, were intended to ensure that tuition was not prohibitive for aspiring students. In practice, however, they have subsidized runaway tuition costs, while burdening many students, especially poor ones, with debt. Today, students from the lower half of the income scale make up a smaller percentage of today’s university campuses than they did in 1970.
What have universities done with all this cash? They have built glittering new campuses; stocked humanities departments with activists; padded their endowments; and gone on an administrative hiring spree, such that many schools now boast ratios of one non-faculty employee to just four students. (Among these administrative officials are those staffing the DEI bureaucracies, which have expanded their on-campus footprint after the 2020 summer of George Floyd.) The result of all this has been a crushing student debt load, much of it guaranteed by taxpayers and verging on delinquency. Before the Covid pandemic paused debt payments, the Brookings Institution estimated that 40 percent of student loans would be in default by 2023. Students’ financial prospects have hardly improved since.
The Trump administration should act before taxpayers are asked to bail out those who borrowed money for expensive degrees. Instead of this upward redistribution, Congress should send the bill directly to those who have benefited the most from the business model: the universities themselves. The entire loan system should be reformed to ensure that universities have skin in the game and taxpayers are no longer forced to underwrite substandard programs that often fail to graduate students or to provide a worthwhile education.
This will require privatization. Decades ago, William Bennett, secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, offered a hypothesis that multiple in-depth studies have since confirmed: federal financial aid allows colleges and universities to hike tuition. When the government floods the market with loans, colleges can easily spend more and offload the risk to students—and, ultimately, the taxpayer.
Private lenders, by contrast, would assess loans with a rigorous cost-and-return formula. A loan officer at a major bank would easily approve a qualified applicant for, say, an engineering degree from MIT but would likely reject an applicant seeking a gender studies degree from a third-tier university. A bank, unlike the government, would look not only at the value of the institution but also at the student’s proposed course of study—pressuring schools to deliver on both cost and quality.
Other policy options are available. The small tax on university endowments in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, currently 1.4 percent, could be raised to 35 percent, a solution proposed by then-senator J. D. Vance. At a minimum, Trump could use the threat of such a tax as leverage for broader reforms—an Art of the Deal–styletactic that could function similarly as threatened tariffs on various countries (some of which, such as those on Canada and Mexico, the administration has now put into effect).
The point of these proposals isn’t to punish universities but to improve quality and reduce costs.
The second item for the Trump administration is to force universities to wind down discriminatory DEI bureaucracies and to uphold the standard of colorblind equality. These institutions get billions of dollars in government generosity and must comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Constitution. The president has already started this process by issuing an executive order directing a review of illegal DEI practices in institutions receiving federal funds, including universities with endowments of more than $1 billion. But much more could be done to force universities into compliance with civil rights law.
For decades, universities have flouted this obligation and structured their admissions, hiring, and promotion policies around discrimination, in the name of “diversity.” But an ostensibly noble cause does not justify lawbreaking. Rather than continue these practices, the administration should enforce the plain language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, forcing universities to ditch DEI in favor of colorblindness. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his Students for Fair Admissions concurrence, “racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism.” The Court has finally held, correctly, that the racially preferential “balancing” done by Harvard and other universities is unconstitutional. And as employers, universities are subject to the even more stringent Title VII standard, which doesn’t admit room for any racial preferences in hiring and firing, and unlike admissions, has never had a special carveout time to practice affirmative action.
The Trump administration has several levers at its disposal to ensure compliance. It can adapt some left-wing tools, such as civil rights investigations and Dear Colleague letters, to force significant changes to university DEI programs. As part of its investigations, the administration could demand internal admissions data, such as students’ SAT scores, GPAs, and class ranks, disaggregated by race, which would almost certainly show continued widespread discrimination against white and Asian applicants at many selective schools and would open the door to further lawsuits. As a senator, J. D. Vance proposed the creation of a “special inspector” to monitor racial discrimination in college admissions, but the tools to execute such monitoring already exist within the federal law-enforcement apparatus. The Republican Congress could provide extra support by bringing college presidents before relevant committees and forcing them to defend their DEI bureaucracies and discriminatory programs.
The administration should also remember that universities are not only in the business of admitting students but are also large employers, subject to non-discrimination laws. Those laws prohibit schools from making hiring and firing decisions based on race. Yet universities have been very open about their racialist hiring practices—using DEI programs, statements, and hiring criteria that favor some races over others.
This, too, can change with appropriate pressure. The Departments of Education and Justice can announce investigations into the discriminatory hiring practices at Ivy League universities, subpoena relevant documents, and make a public case that DEI is incompatible with the law and runs afoul of Trump’s recent executive orders.The administration can follow through by placing noncompliant universities under a federal consent decree, via the DOJ, or, in conjunction with the Secretary of Education, pause or terminate federal funding to schools that fail to adhere to the law.
Third, the Trump administration should use administrative means to curb violent and intimidating forms of campus activism.
In autumn 2023 and spring 2024, universities across the country hosted multiple rounds of illegal protests, encampments, and occupations. The cause du jour was Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in the Middle East, but the incidents are best understood in broader terms. Campus activists targeted Israel, which, for them, is a stand-in for whiteness, colonization, and the West; October 7 was merely the latest inciting incident for their longstanding hatreds. These activists deploy the same playbook—disruptive protests, tent encampments, deplatforming speakers, intimidating political enemies, destroying property—for whatever cause is in the headlines.
The administration can put an end to the illegal elements of this playbook. As interpreted by the courts, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act requires universities receiving federal funds to ensure that racial harassment does not disrupt anyone from attending school. A demonstrator screaming anti-Semitic epithets is protected by the First Amendment, but if that same protester prevents Jewish students from moving around campus safely or attending classes, he’s on the wrong side of the law. If a university administration is complicit in such activity, it, too, can be held accountable. The Trump White House should thoroughly investigate such demonstrations, and where merited, withdraw funds from schools that have failed to prevent racial harassment of groups that the progressive Left disfavors: white, Jewish, and Asian students, most commonly.
Likewise, the administration can use another overlooked provision of existing law—the Clery Act—to put a price on violent protests and other mob-like behavior on campus. The act requires universities, which often have private police departments, to record and disclose within 48 hours all criminal reports. Every time a university fails to do so, the federal government can assess a penalty of up to about $70,000; given the thousands of ignored incidents of criminal behavior on campuses in recent years, this could multiply into a hefty sum, and force schools to crack down on illegal protest.
Finally, last summer’s encampment protests included many foreign students, who are here by the grace of the American people and do not enjoy the same rights and protections as citizens and permanent residents. The Trump administration would be justified in permanently revoking the student visas of foreign nationals who participated in protests supporting terror organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. If universities refuse to provide the names of such students, their funding should be cut.
Again, these proposed actions merely require the administration to enforce existing laws with rigor. Universities that fail to comply should have their federal funding and student-loan-program eligibility withdrawn, which would devastate university budgets and ensure that all but the most ideologically captured institutions change course.
Taken together, this agenda would restore, rather than destroy, America’s once-great university system. While we support a reduction in the number of students attending four-year colleges in favor of trade school and apprenticeship programs, the United States certainly needs elite universities. The conservative reform program should not be misconstrued as a campaign against higher education. Conservatives believe in higher ed; we oppose its corruption.
America’s universities should be places where the country’s brightest students pursue truth, engage in debate, prepare for the professions, and learn the duties of citizenship. An increasingly unstable world demands that the United States retain its edge in groundbreaking research and technological development.
In the end, universities are like any other institution: they respond to incentives. We have already seen subtle shifts in policy, including a major accrediting body in California and Hawaii scrubbing DEI from their standards and replacing it with an emphasis on “educational excellence and success.” While these are likely cosmetic gestures, not substantive changes, the actions show how pressure can often be the strongest incentive for reform.
President Trump should present universities with a simple choice: reform, or lose billions in funding. He can back up the ultimatum with every administrative measure at his disposal. With some concerted action, it might yet be possible to shake universities out of their ideological torpor and remind them of their highest purpose: the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of democratic citizens.
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Higher ed seeks to avoid having its rocks turned over by DOGE:
DOGE can’t use student loan data to dismantle the Education Dept., lawsuit says
Students don't want loan data used in AI probe to slash DOE, according to lawsuit.
ASHLEY BELANGER – FEB 7, 2025 2:23 PM | 226
Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg
The Department of Education (DOE) was sued Friday by a California student association demanding an "immediate stop" to Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) "unlawfully" digging through student loan data to potentially dismantle DOE.
"The scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is enormous and unprecedented," the lawsuit said.
According to the University of California Student Association (UCSA)—which has over 230,000 undergraduate students as members—more than 42 million people in the US have federal student loans and face privacy risks, if DOGE's access to their information isn't blocked. Additionally, parents and spouses of loan borrowers share private financial information with the DOE that could also be at risk, the lawsuit alleged.
The lawsuit cites public reporting from anonymous sources familiar with DOGE's activity that suggests "roughly 20 people affiliated with DOGE" are working within DOE in efforts "shrouded in secrecy."
These DOGE employees, sources told The Washington Post, do not disclose their last names and use personal email addresses viewed as less secure than government email addresses. That seemingly violates security protocols, DOE officials have warned.
An expert on constitutional law, Blake Emerson, told the Post that DOGE seems to be acting as a "shadow executive branch" operating "outside of the channels the Constitution and the statutes that Congress authorized."
However, so far Congress has not intervened, despite the Constitution giving spending power to Congress, the Post noted, not temporary agencies created by the executive branch, like DOGE.
Some Democrats sent a letter Wednesday raising alarms about DOGE's work at DOE, describing "serious concerns" that DOGE's work is supporting a "broader plan to dismantle the federal government until it is unable to function and meet the needs of the American people." The Democrats demanded a response detailing who at DOGE has access to DOE databases and to what end, requesting answers by Friday. But it's unclear if DOGE has intentions to respond on that timeline, and Republicans ultimately have control of both chambers of Congress and seem hesitant to intervene, the Post reported.
The lawsuit could increase pressure on DOE to increase transparency of DOGE operations. Perhaps most urgently troubling to students, the lawsuit suggested, is reporting suggesting that DOGE's employees are feeding their loan data into artificial intelligence (AI) systems to identify ways to slash the DOE. That effort could expose Americans to cybersecurity risks and perhaps even help Donald Trump follow through on his promise to "kill" DOE, one source told The Washington Post.
Students never consented to that, the complaint said, while alleging that the DOE has "acknowledged" that handing "over access to financial aid records to DOGE" is "unlawful."
"People who take out federal student loans to afford higher education should not be forced to share their sensitive information with 'DOGE,'" the lawsuit said. "And federal law says they do not have to."
Because DOE's actions have allegedly "harmed UCSA’s members"—"by depriving them of the privacy protections guaranteed to them by federal law and, consequently, the ability to decide for themselves whether DOGE should be able to obtain and use their personal data for unknown reasons," including to potentially "shut down" DOE—they are entitled to a temporary, preliminary, or permanent injunction, the lawsuit said.
UCSA also asked the court to order DOGE to return any records that students did not authorize to be accessed by third parties outside the DOE. Students also want DOGE enjoined from any future access to their records without their consent.
The student association is represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group, the same legal group helping Americans sue the Treasury Department over DOGE access to federal payment systems. If the lawsuit follows a similar trajectory as the Treasury Department suit, a US district court judge assigned to the DOE case may insist that DOE finally identify all DOGE employees currently accessing education databases like StudentAid.gov.
DOGE's alleged AI probe of DOE records
Sources told The Washington Post that Musk's DOGE plans to use AI software to "probe" DOE's "programs and spending." DOGE apparently plans to feed personally identifiable information of people who both manage grants and other DOE financial data, as well as people receiving federal funding, into the AI software to "hunt" for spending cuts.
Microsoft declined to comment, but allegedly the DOGE employees are "using AI software accessed through Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure to pore over every dollar of money the department disburses, from contracts to grants to work trip expenses," one source told the Post.
The lawsuit noted that several DOE employees have tried to block DOGE's access by raising red flags up the command chain, but DOE leadership directly instructed lower-level employees to grant DOGE access, the same source alleged.
A big concern is that DOGE funneling education data into AI systems will cause sensitive data to be stored in a way that makes it more vulnerable to cyberattacks or data breaches. Another issue could be the AI system being error-prone or potentially hallucinating data that is driving decisions on major DOE cuts.
On Thursday, a DOE deputy assistant secretary for communications, Madi Biedermann, issued a statement insisting that DOGE employees are federal employees who have undergone background checks to be granted requisite security clearances.
"There is nothing inappropriate or nefarious going on," Biedermann said.
Trump has similarly waved away concerns over DOGE's work at DOE and other departments that officials worry are experiencing a "blitz" of seemingly unlawful power grabs, the Post reported. On Monday, Trump told reporters that "if there's a conflict" with DOGE accessing Americans' data, "then we won’t let him get near it." But seemingly until Trump agrees there's a conflict, Musk's work with DOGE must go on, Trump said.
"We’re trying to shrink government, and he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better," Trump suggested.
While thousands of Americans are suing, confused over whether they need to urgently protect their private financial data, one DOE staffer told the Post that DOGE "is working with almost unbelievable speed." The staffer ominously suggested that it may already be too late to protect Americans from invasive probes or defend departments against cuts.
"They have a playbook, which is to get access to the data,” the staffer told the Post. “And once they’re in, it’s already over."
Photo of Ashley Belanger
ASHLEY BELANGER SENIOR POLICY REPORTER
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/lawsuit-tries-to-block-doges-access-to-student-loan-data/
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https://twitchy.com/amy-curtis/2025/02/22/maryland-democrats-push-bill-to-put-condom-dispensers-in-elemetary-schools-n2408777?utm_source=twdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=a1714aba6c197395707aecde9ada65a65090b7be5f45291f6611e9cf3bd6bace&lctg=2677215
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How woke activists have the path smoothed for them as they advance n their academic careers:
John D. Sailer
How Universities Get Away With Hiring Radicals
Fellow-to-faculty programs have seeded academia with activists.
Feb 20 2025
In the days after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Jemma Decristo, a UC Davis professor, took to social media to express support for the violent energies that had erupted in the Middle East. “HELL YEAH,” Decristo wrote on X, responding to a report that protesters had set fire to the Israeli embassy in Jordan. Reposting news of protests at the United States embassy in Lebanon, Decristo added, “[fire icon] to the US embassy. US out of everywhere. US GO HOME. US GO HOME.”
One of her posts roused national attention: “One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation,” Decristo wrote. “they have houses w addresses, kids in school. they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.” She concluded with a series of icons: a knife, an axe, and three blood drops.
Shortly afterward, the university launched an investigation into Decristo’s comments, and in April of 2024, the StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice filed a lawsuit against the university for its inaction on anti-Semitism, putting the professor’s threats atop a list of examples in a press release. As of this writing, UC Davis has not disciplined Decristo.
Following Decristo’s comments, UC Davis chancellor Gary May said in a statement that calls for violence were inconsistent with the university’s commitment to “equity and justice.” Ironically, Decristo’s employment at UC Davis came about precisely because of the University of California’s purported commitment to social justice. Decristo, once described by UC Davis as a “scholar-artist-activist,” was recruited through the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP), which fast-tracks scholars showing a “commitment to diversity” into permanent faculty roles.
A growing number of like-minded activists are following Decristo’s path. For years, universities, federal agencies, and private foundations have worked to create well-funded career pathways for scholar-activists in higher education. The network includes undergraduate fellowships, graduate school funding, special hiring initiatives, and even administrator development programs. This constellation of “pipeline programs” is intended to hire more minorities; in practice, it heavily favors academics who view their scholarship as an extension of their political agenda.
The programs also raise legal questions. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in hiring. After President Trump’s executive order “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity,” many universities will likely reassess their pipeline programs to avoid federal scrutiny.
The universities with the most influential programs, though, have framed them as race-neutral, selecting scholars based on their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. So far, this has helped universities avoid legal scrutiny. But many scholars have argued that the commitment loophole has made university hiring more ideological—in a way that could still violate the First Amendment.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll be publishing stories on the pipeline model and what it means for the future of the American university. The series is based on thousands of pages of documents acquired through public records requests and interviews with more than a dozen scholars. It explores what is perhaps the most popular and effective kind of pipeline program, responsible for Decristo’s professorship at UC Davis: the fellow-to-faculty model.
Usually, a postdoctoral fellowship is just a small step in a scholar’s career. After a fellowship ends, former postdocs apply to competitive positions on the open market. The diversity-focused fellow-to-faculty model modifies this pathway. First, the programs’ administrators select fellows with special attention to how they contribute to diversity. Fellows are then heavily favored for—often guaranteed—tenure-track positions, bypassing a competitive search. It’s a side-door into the faculty lounge.
The UC system’s PPFP, which the university recently declared the “largest and most influential academic pipeline program of its kind in the nation,” serves as a blueprint. Launched in 1984, it’s the oldest such program. By now, some former fellows have held academic posts for decades, including Mark Lawson, the program’s director.
At its inception, PPFP awarded postdocs only to women and minorities. In 1996, when California voters banned affirmative action, identity-based criteria became unambiguously illegal, forcing the program to evolve.
Now, the UC system seeks demographic diversity by proxy. A grant proposal obtained by a public records request describes how PPFP assesses “a candidate’s demonstrated contributions to diversity and equal opportunity,” rather than using race or sex. This “innovative holistic selection process,” the proposal carefully points out, is “compliant with the current legal environment in California.”
PPFP also spearheaded the practice of “converting” its postdocs into tenure-track faculty positions. The system established a hiring incentive, promising UC campuses cash for hiring former fellows. It also offered a search waiver, so departments would not have to conduct a national search to make their hires.
Abigail Thompson, a professor of mathematics at UC Davis, was herself a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley in 1986. She is now critical of the program. In 2019, she published a short piece in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, arguing against the use of mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring. “In reality it’s a political test, and it’s a political test with teeth,” Thompson wrote. The piece provoked controversy among academics.
When I spoke with Thompson, she pointed out how the program gives administrators an especially convenient tool for advancing their hiring priorities. “This is such a clever idea, really,” Thompson said. “No one pays close attention to how these postdocs are hired.”
Perhaps because it’s so effective, the fellow-to-faculty model exploded throughout American higher education in the early 2010s, as universities around the country began ratcheting up their DEI efforts. The University of Arizona President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program seeks applicants whose research “addresses issues such as race, gender, diversity and inclusion.” The University of Virginia’s Race, Place, and Equity Postdoctoral Fellowship hires postdocs who “address issues of race, justice, and equity.” In the UC system, each individual campus created its own parallel program to fund the hiring of additional PPFP applicants.
A network of universities also coordinate on the model: the Partnership for Faculty Diversity, created by the UC system and the University of Michigan. Members include Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Tech, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Many universities outside the UC orbit have adopted the model as well. At the University of South Carolina, it’s called the Bridge-to-Faculty; at Ohio State, one such program is simply called Fellow-to-Faculty. A 2021 article in Frontiers in Psychology identified 38 diversity-focused postdoctoral “conversion” programs nationwide, though I found more in my investigation.
The upshot: a small but significant number of faculty across the country have been given side-door jobs based on ideological affinity. The University of Michigan’s Collegiate Fellowship Program, one of two fellowships at the university, has recruited 55 fellows since 2016. The University of Illinois Chicago has recruited 49 Bridge to Faculty Fellows since 2020. Over the last five years, one in 20 tenure-track hires in the UC System were former president’s or chancellor’s postdoctoral fellows.
The programs thus provide a steady stream of scholars committed to activist disciplines like “critical refugee studies” and “queer of color critique.” They raise serious questions about academic freedom, government funding and private philanthropy, and the feasibility of higher education reform. When the dust settles from the battle over DEI, reformers will still have to contend with the way that universities have reshaped their basic mission through the construction of a scholar-activist pipeline.
John D. Sailer is the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-fellow-to-faculty-programs-activists
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Many possible places for this:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hours-after-maine-gov-defies-trump-to-his-face-feds-hit-her-with-investigation/ar-AA1zAfxc?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=1ea4ec2f28a34c19eb3e31ef75ed499b&ei=12
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https://districtadministration.com/opinion/cases-for-and-against-dismantling-the-department-of-education/
When I did a google search on this everything that came up is from Left wing media with points made about protecting "vulnerable" children etc.
I did not read all the propaganda but what I did read made no mention of the failure of the Dept of Ed. to educate children with grades going lower not higher.
One source pointed out it will take and act of the legislative branches to actually close it down.
a majority in the House which we have and "likely" 60 votes in the Senate which we do not have.
Take into account many Repubs will be reluctant to close this down and the likely outcome it won't happen.
I also found the 1.6 TRILLION $ loan debt unbelievable. I am sure this has been reported often before but now I process in my brain in context.
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2025/03/10/top-union-boss-has-an-epic-meltdown-n2653570
I could make it through more than half the video.
I did not hear a single peep how Department of Ed has failed to teach children from Weingarten who tries to tell us we remove the Dept of Ed and children will be totally ignorant and lost.
So why do we need Dept of Ed? Still no answer from the likes of her.
I guess because LBJ taught Mexicans who went to school without shoes that makes any sense for dept of Ed today?
It must be hard having your power ripped out from under you like a rug.
:wink:
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I wonder if the Founders contemplated educating our children when they passed the 10th amendment, yes they did, Powers not granted to the federal government remain with the states and with the people.
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https://x.com/Hillsdale/status/1899644767866159525
“Education is one of the most bureaucratized things. To break this system is the first step toward real education reform.”
The Department of Education (
@usedgov
) has got to go,
@DrLarryArnn
told
@DLoesch
on
@DanaLoeschRadio
.
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Some straightforward ways to boot the Chinese, and other totalitarians, out of higher ed:
The DOGE Solution to Kicking the Chinese Communist Party Out of American Higher Education
Trump's DOGE proposes a 100% tax on foreign university funding and higher endowment taxes to curb foreign influence, cut the deficit, and hold elite schools accountable.
By Ian Oxnevad
March 16, 2025
Cost-cutting is now the rage of Trump 2.0 and the dread of bureaucrats inside the Beltway. While rooting out malign foreign influence in higher education is one of the quieter battles taking place within the broader effort to tackle the national debt, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) offers an elegant and principled solution: taxpayers should not have to compete with totalitarians in university funding.
Far too often, American universities see themselves as cosmopolitan city-states positioned beyond the reach of constitutional law or American cultural norms. Unlike in a typical American workplace, anti-Semitism is tolerated on college campuses. In higher education, discrimination against competent Asian and White students is not considered racist, but is rather seen as a virtuous pursuit of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Topping it off, universities offer pricey degrees to students with little guarantee of job prospects and a crushing debt burden. For all of its talk of resisting Trumpian authoritarianism, America’s universities and colleges have eagerly accepted funds from countries like China, Russia, and Qatar while agitating for “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” against Israel.
American higher education offers U.S. adversaries a low-cost means of shaping public perception, steering popular sentiment, and accessing sensitive emerging technologies under the guise of “fundamental research.” In a report published last September, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party discovered that American academics were partnering with Chinese counterparts in sensitive areas of research funded by both the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Intelligence Community. The level of collaboration is staggering, as Congress noted over 8,800 publications coauthored between American and Chinese researchers on sensitive topics, and over 2,000 papers that published research funded by the DOD that were coauthored by Chinese researchers tied to Beijing’s defense industry. Last year, Georgia Tech University canceled its ties with China’s Tianjin University and the Shenzhen Municipal Government after it was discovered the partnership violated U.S. sanctions and that Georgia Tech was collaborating with China on semiconductor development related to hypersonic missile technology. China’s efforts in swaying higher education extend well beyond the sciences, as Beijing has used innocuous-sounding programs like Confucius Institutes to shape perception and direct soft-power influence abroad.
China and other authoritarians co-opt American universities through foreign funding that is not only pervasive but often goes unreported. Currently, Section 117 of the Higher Education Act mandates that universities report foreign funds to the government if they amount to more than $250,000. Congressional investigations have discovered that nearly 70% of universities not only fail to comply with Section 117, but that even universities that do comply under-report the amount of foreign gifts they receive. According to a database of foreign funds compiled by the National Association of Scholars, the top 20 donations in dollar amounts all come from China. Kean University alone reported a five-year Chinese contract worth $353,708,530. UCLA reported one Chinese contract spanning from 2018 to 2038 valued at $60,000,000. In both cases, the donors were listed as “unknown.” UC Berkeley alone failed to disclose $240 million from China in the form of contractual partnerships, investments, and gifts.
In a piece of legislation called the “Deterrent Act,” Congress is looking to lower the reporting threshold for such gifts to $0 for countries like China and Russia; however, this lower threshold does nothing to protect sovereignty in education or ensure that universities will comply. After all, universities do not comply as it is. What is needed is a watchdog that not only barks, but bites. With an aggressive Congress, Trump’s DOGE can solve academia’s vulnerabilities once and for all by taxing foreign funds at a rate of 100%, and by taxing endowment proceeds derived from Chinese funds. Universities are unique in that they have incentives to pursue money and prestige just as any normal business enterprise. Money from Beijing and Chinese firms offers colleges plenty of cash, while trips and research collaboration allow even remote U.S. colleges aspects of international prestige and openness where it would otherwise be lacking.
Unlike normal businesses, universities are exempt from the normal pressures of the real world. For example, an automaker that produces cars with low mileage per gallon and technology that prices out a consumer will lose market share and profits to its competitors. In contrast, a university can matriculate waves of graduates with debt and poor job skills for a decade and produce little quality research while retaining enrollment rates by virtue of an elite letterhead. Elite universities pay a low 1.4% on profits from endowments. Harvard’s endowment is estimated at a value of $52 billion, and is larger than Latvia’s economy. To tackle the U.S. national debt, valued at over $36 trillion, a DOGE-inspired bill proposed by Texas congressman Troy Nehls looks to raise taxes on university endowments to 21% to reduce annual deficits.
Combined, aggressively taxing endowments and foreign funds would change university incentives. Under 100% tax on foreign gifts, taxpayers would no longer be funding future casualties in a war with China. A tax on endowments to a level reminiscent of a “fair share,” would reduce the deficit and place elite universities on a level playing field with other investors. Currently, elite universities undermine national security and offer little in return for American citizens. A regulatory watchdog like DOGE that bites is an idea whose time has come.
https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/16/the-doge-solution-to-kicking-the-chinese-communist-party-out-of-american-higher-education/
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https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/kean-university/student-life/international/
I grew up literally down the street from Kean University .
It used to be farm land. It has grown imensely when I drove by a few yrs. ago.
In the 60s there was a guy selling donuts on the corner out of a bus next to the big intersection at the end of the Kean parking lot. Across the street were 2 homes dating back to the 1700s. There were lifted and moves somewhere else. All that was famous for those in the area.
Elizabeth dates back to 1664. Kean sits on the border and is in Union.
I took a summer class there in the very early 80s.
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https://patriotpost.us/opinion/115382?mailing_id=9086&subscription_uuid=e046cf62-a6a8-4317-a631-0e7db6e8f626&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.9086&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=body
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https://lp.hillsdale.edu/wsj-2575897/
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https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/rethinking-daycare-for-dimwits
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https://www.newsmax.com/politics/columbia-trump/2025/03/25/id/1204324/
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WSJ
Harvard and the View From Hillsdale
The small college doesn’t take federal money. Its president, Larry Arnn, argues higher education would be far better if no one did.
By Tunku Varadarajan
April 18, 2025 2:01 pm ET
As Donald Trump trains his guns on Harvard, the president of a small nondenominational Christian college in southern Michigan is licking his lips in anticipation of a battle royale that could redefine American higher education. Larry Arnn, 72, has been president of Hillsdale College since May 2000. The way his own little college is run is now “hot news.”
Mr. Trump’s war on Harvard is largely about federal money, and Mr. Arnn’s Hillsdale “doesn’t take a single cent of it,” he says. “Nobody gives us any money unless they want to.” This means Hillsdale, founded by Free Will Baptists in 1844, isn’t bound by government mandates tied to funding, such as Title IX. Harvard, he says, was “exclusively funded by the private sector for—what is it?—it’s got to be 250 years.” (Harvard was founded in 1636.) “And now, in this progressive era, if my calculations are right, they get $90,000 per student a year from the federal government.” He recommends that Harvard, which receives about $9 billion a year from Washington, emulate Hillsdale and get off the government dole.
“They should give it all up,” Mr. Arnn says. “They should make an honest living.”
Mr. Trump has acted to withhold federal funds from a raft of elite universities: Harvard ($2.26 billion), Cornell ($1 billion), Northwestern ($790 million), Brown ($510 million), Columbia ($400 million), Princeton ($210 million) and the University of Pennsylvania ($175 million). The gravamen of Mr. Trump’s complaint is the abject failure of these institutions to deal with antisemitism on campus, but the president has also demanded a broader crackdown on DEI compulsions and an expansion of viewpoint diversity among predominantly progressive faculty.
As the targeted universities consider their response—Harvard said this week that it intends to fight—a rumbling has arisen in conservative circles for the “Hillsdale model.” Hillsdale itself hasn’t been shy in this regard. Harvard tweeted these words by its president, Alan Garber, on Monday: “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” Hillsdale responded with a taunt. “There is another way: Refuse taxpayer money.”
The college took a kick at Barack Obama after the former president lauded Harvard for “rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom.” Hillsdale’s response: “President Obama, we have thoughts on the next step Harvard could take in order to strengthen this position. (It has to do with federal funding.)”
Mr. Arnn laughs when I ask him about Hillsdale’s trolling of Harvard. “It’s long past time,” he says, for American universities to rethink their approach to money. “To have a liberal society, you have to have important things going on outside the government’s grip.” The federal government has “an outsized influence in the education system now, and they didn’t have that until about the 1960s.”
America would be a “better place if the sources of support for education were decentralized,” Mr. Arnn says. Schools like Harvard “get a lot of money from the taxpayer, and they don’t like what Trump is doing to them. Harvard is claiming to have a constitutional right both to the money and to do whatever they want.” But there are “rules that go along with taking that federal money.”
These rules are labyrinthine—and demanding. Some of them are set out in the Higher Education Act of 1965. Title IV, which governs student loans and other financial aid, “comprises several hundred pages of nearly unreadable rules.” Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bans racial discrimination by institutions that take federal funds. Hillsdale doesn’t discriminate and might lose its tax exemption if it did. But refusing federal money frees it from bureaucratic burdens such as counting its students by race and reporting the results to Washington.
Not taking money from government is “liberating,” Mr. Arnn says. “You know, Harvard is a very great thing. It’s the oldest American university and it’s very distinguished—even today. But it’s not its own thing anymore.” Harvard is “funded in a system that funds every college in America, except a few—and that’s not good, right?” (Mr. Arnn has a gently interrogatory way of speaking that comes from having daily lunchtime conversations with students in the college cafeteria.)
There are “3,000 or so colleges in America, but there’s only a few that are rich and famous,” Mr. Arnn says. “It’s amazing how similar they are to one another in their outlook and their opinions.” It’s fashionable to complain nowadays, he says, that the “gazillionaires have too much influence in politics. Well, at least the good news is that they disagree with each other, and then you can have an argument.”
Borrowing a line of reasoning from the financial crisis of 2008-09—when certain banks were said to be “too big to fail”—I ask if places like Harvard are too big to forgo federal money. Is it realistic to expect a sprawling university with more than 21,000 students to be like Hillsdale (enrollment 1,400)?
“I doubt that,” he says. “I don’t understand the Harvard finances. Sometimes I wonder if they do. But they have a lot of money”—an endowment of $53.2 billion—“and they have fame, and they can have support. One reads that their budget is tight, and they act like it’s tight. So they spend a lot of money too. So shouldn’t it be done economically, and as economically as possible?”
Taking its chances in the market, Mr. Arnn believes, would make an “honest institution” of Harvard. A third of Harvard’s operating budget comes from “this one donor, and it’s the plurality of your support. And the donor is your government. It has the power of law, and it controls you.” In Mr. Arnn’s ideal world, the government is “actually supposed to be controlled by the society.” He laments that the government, “Republican and Democrat, tends to look at students like they’re factors of production.” Officials and the colleges they control “think they’re managing the future by managing what young people learn.”
In Mr. Arnn’s view, colleges are where a student “learns to be a good human being.” He regards as “very much the villains” that generation of educators who shaped the Progressive Era of American society in the early 20th century—foremost among them John Dewey (1859-1952), Frank Goodnow (1859-1939) and Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)—“who began the transformation of American education into an exercise in power and a way to engineer the society.” That “undercut the idea of human freedom, and the old idea of what university was for, which was to understand the society and understand what would make a good society.”
Mr. Arnn lives as much in the real world as he does in the bosom of an old-fashioned Christian campus—which he traverses daily in his gleaming Tesla truck, purchased in December. “Admiration for the DOGE”—Department of Government Efficiency—“which I have in great measure, had something to do with my buying the truck. But I like the truck for its own sake.”
What is the president trying to accomplish in his attack on Harvard? “What’s happening right now is classic Trump,” Mr. Arnn says. “He’s negotiating, and I don’t know any better than anybody else what he intends, except he does appear to intend that Harvard is going to reform itself in some big ways.” It is his way “to ask for more than he is likely to get in the beginning. He seems to do that all the time.”
In his Monday response to the Trump administration, Harvard’s president objected to “direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.” Mr. Arnn agrees: “I don’t think Trump ought to run Harvard. I doubt if he thinks that. But I do think that we’re spending a lot of money at Harvard. It’s a very unbalanced institution. And goodness’ sakes, some of the kids are not safe there, because of their race, or religion, or both. And so, should the taxpayer be funding that?”
He offers an anecdote that sheds light on the failings of elite colleges. He recently had in his office a prospective transfer student and her father. “Darned if he didn’t cry in my office when I told them what a college is for,” Mr. Arnn says. The student had told him she was a conservative. “I said, ‘Define the term for me, would you?’ And of course, she couldn’t. She’s 18. And I said, ‘See, it’s actually not about your opinions, right? You should try to find out what that is before you become one of them.’
“And that’s what we do at college. You come here to figure it out. And her dad, who’s a college professor, I swear he cried. And I told her, ‘See, there we see something abidingly true. He loves you. He was nervous about coming in this office, not because he’s afraid of me, but because he wants to protect you.’ We go to college to look for that.”
By which Mr. Arnn means colleges should strip the young of their illusions of omniscience and protect them from their innocence and ignorance—while teaching them. “That, I think, is what they don’t do” at Ivy League schools.
“I noticed the anti-Israel demonstrations were virulent and ugly,” he says. “I watched several interviews with the students who were demonstrating, and they didn’t seem to know very much about the history of the Middle East. And shouldn’t they be there learning that instead of trying to change policy about that? That means they’re off the rails.” They were like the young woman in his office, except that there was nobody there saying, “Let me teach you.” They were merely expressing themselves. “We all have a right to our opinion when we enter a college,” Mr. Arnn says. “But that is the place where it’s getting ready to be questioned. Every opinion.”
Mr. Arnn believes the real problem—a moral crisis, even—was that “Harvard and Columbia couldn’t define a reason to stop these protests last spring.” There wasn’t enough “integrity of purpose, of community,” for someone in authority to step in and say, “ ‘Enough, stop, get back to class.’ And I think that’s because they don’t have an agreement about what they’re there to do. It was astonishing to me. They couldn’t reach an agreement to go back to their work.”
He sees the beginning of a counterrevolution in American higher education: “Harvard has asserted a constitutional right against the government. That’s a fundamental dispute. Their letter to Trump contains some procedural accusations that look like the basis of a court case.” Mr. Trump seems to be spoiling for the fight. “I do think that this is the best prospect for ending up somewhere better than I have seen.”
Hillsdale is “a happy place” (and the week I spent on campus teaching a one-credit journalism course confirms this). Every student who attends the college “knows that there’s an honor code and a purpose to the college. You may not agree with it, but at least the taxpayer isn’t paying for it.” It’s understood that “you can say anything you want to, if you can say it in a civil and academic manner. And that means you don’t shout ‘dirty Jew’ at anybody.” Hillsdale will soon introduce a minor, and eventually a major, in Jewish studies, partially in solidarity with beleaguered Jews on other campuses.
Students here are free to make the argument that Israel is illegitimate. “Make it if you can. But if you want to say, ‘Run those people into the sea, and everybody like them, and everybody like them is evil,’ you can’t do that, because it breaks up the happy community.”
Harvard needs to reform, “or to change fundamentally the way they work,” Mr. Arnn says. “I think that would be a good idea. Harvard should be happy. It’s a great place. It’s very elite. Why is there so much strife there? There shouldn’t be.”
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute
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from CNN (ugghh but probably accurate)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/18/us/harvard-university-endowment/index.html
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I'm in the belly of this beast & approve of this message:
Stop All Federal Funding of Universities
"Education and genuine scholarship are too important to entrust to the whims of politicians and government bureaucrats."
QUOTH THE RAVEN
APR 24, 2025
By Connor O’Keeffe, Mises Institute
The Trump administration has found itself in a dispute with Harvard University. It began when the President’s team sent several Ivy League universities a list of changes they expected the schools to make.
The move is part of a new right-wing strategy which recognizes that we currently live under a vague, necessarily politicized system of civil rights law and aims to begin interpreting civil rights laws in ways more in line with the values and social aims of the right.
By threatening to withhold federal funds, the administration was able to get schools like Columbia University to agree to enact changes like banning masks, granting campus police more powers, and appointing an administrator to oversee the Middle East Studies Department with the authority to crack down on rhetoric about Israel that the administration considers antisemitic.
Harvard, however, refused to abide by the administration’s demands. As a result, Trump froze a little over $2 billion in federal funds going to the school last week and announced plans to freeze an additional $1 billion earlier this week—all while threatening to withhold all $9 billion the Ivy League school receives from the federal government each year if they refuse to agree to the President’s demands.
The showdown is largely being framed as either a battle to protect academic freedom from an authoritarian president or an overdue effort to rescue one of the nation’s oldest universities from the radical far-left administrators leading it off course.
But as politicians, pundits, and university officials battle over which characterization is accurate and, therefore, what ought to happen next, few are paying any attention to one of the more outrageous details that this dispute has brought attention to: that taxpayers are being forced to send $9 billion a year to one of the wealthiest colleges in the world.
The $9 billion figure comes from several federal programs—including education initiatives, student aid, research grants, student loan guarantees, and funding for the university’s affiliated hospitals. Much of this funding is composed of multi-year grants and contracts, but the annual figure does, indeed, tend to land around $9 billion.
And that’s just Harvard. Zoom out, and you’ll find that those same federal programs are forcing the over-taxed, heavily-indebted, inflation-rattled American public to send well over $100 billion to colleges and universities every single year.
Conservatives and free-market advocates are right to point out whenever the topic of student debt forgiveness is brought up that such a program is, in effect, a wealth transfer from poorer, working-class Americans without college degrees to their better-off, frequently white-collar, college-educated counterparts. But the same is true for all programs that transfer tax dollars to colleges and universities.
Beyond being blatantly unjust, the federal money pouring into higher education is the main factor behind the exploding cost of college in recent decades. In the name of making college more affordable, the federal government effectively took over the student loan market in the US and—primarily by extending government loan guarantees—expanded the level of lending far beyond what private lenders were willing to provide.
That created significantly more demand for college, which jacked up the price. Then, the artificially high prices forced even more students to turn to loans to afford school, which required more government loan guarantees, which made prices even higher, meaning more loans were needed, and on and on. All the while, the government has started and expanded direct federal spending programs on education that have only fueled the affordability death spiral.
This has been terrible for every non-wealthy student or family straining to pay for a college degree, and all the people who could not afford to go to college at all who are still forced to fund all the government subsidies causing this mess. But, it’s important to understand, this setup has been great for the universities who have gotten to enjoy filling their campuses with cartoonishly lavish buildings and resort-level accommodations, while bloating their administrations with diversity officers, sustainability directors, and other ideological positions.
It has also been great for the politicians and government bureaucrats who have gained leverage over the schools educating the next generation and the scholars and intellectuals currently researching topics relevant to those running our federal government.
In other words, federal higher education policy is best understood as one big government-run scam that’s enriching and empowering a small group of ideological administrators and bureaucrats at our expense. It is, in that way, no different from the healthcare system—through which schools like Harvard are also receiving money through their hospitals.
That is the big unspoken truth at the core of this debate about what the Trump administration is doing with Harvard. A president like Trump can exert control over the internal policies of these universities because of how unnecessarily reliant they are on government money. And widespread pushing of highly unpopular progressive dogmas in classrooms and professional scholarship can only happen at this large a scale because of how—and how much—higher ed and academia are subsidized in modern America.
There is only one genuine and permanent solution to these problems. Halt all federal funding—direct and indirect—for these “private” colleges and universities.
As long as these schools rely on politicians to fund their operations, they will always be politicized. There is no escaping that. And, on the other side, even if Trump is totally victorious and gets Harvard to capitulate on everything, there is functionally nothing stopping the next Democrat to win the presidency from reversing everything Trump did.
Education and genuine scholarship are too important to entrust to the whims of politicians and government bureaucrats. Research and scholarship that is actually valuable does not require forcing people to fund it against their will. And the American people cannot afford to keep sending a significant portion of their money to the well-off and well-connected. These problems are extensive, but the solution is straightforward: stop forcing us to fund these universities.
https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/stop-all-federal-funding-of-universities?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true