Author Topic: The Politics of Education  (Read 6881 times)


ccp

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Re: The Politics of Education
« Reply #1 on: March 06, 2017, 06:03:35 AM »
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.

Crafty_Dog

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ccp

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trade student loan relief for delaying SS
« Reply #7 on: March 12, 2018, 07:42:42 AM »
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/

Body-by-Guinness

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Harvard's 3 Tiers of A Grades & Related Silliness
« Reply #8 on: October 13, 2023, 04:41:14 AM »
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


Body-by-Guinness

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Re: The Politics of Education
« Reply #10 on: October 13, 2023, 06:25:33 PM »
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


Crafty_Dog

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Re: The Politics of Education
« Reply #11 on: October 14, 2023, 02:30:44 AM »
BTW BBG, props for resurrecting this thread, which I see lay fallow since 2018 until you resurrected it.


DougMacG

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Re: WALLS DON’T WORK!
« Reply #13 on: October 15, 2023, 06:44:45 AM »
… 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."
« Last Edit: October 15, 2023, 06:58:48 AM by DougMacG »

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: WALLS DON’T WORK!
« Reply #14 on: October 15, 2023, 10:18:03 AM »
… 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.


Body-by-Guinness

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Body-by-Guinness

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Ivy League into Arabs for Billions
« Reply #18 on: October 19, 2023, 12:46:09 PM »
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

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Riley: What American U. stand for
« Reply #19 on: October 19, 2023, 01:49:18 PM »
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
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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.


Crafty_Dog

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Body-by-Guinness

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Useful and Clueless Fools
« Reply #22 on: October 24, 2023, 08:40:47 PM »
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.



Body-by-Guinness

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Teachers Seeing Performance Plunge
« Reply #25 on: October 30, 2023, 05:15:50 PM »
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

Crafty_Dog

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Racist Math
« Reply #26 on: November 04, 2023, 07:41:23 AM »

Crafty_Dog

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WI School choice to State Supreme Court
« Reply #27 on: November 06, 2023, 02:36:11 PM »
Will Judges Kill School Choice in Wisconsin?
Progressives tee up a case for the state Supreme Court’s new majority.
By
The Editorial Board
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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?

Body-by-Guinness

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Specific Qualities Over Quality in the Ed Biz
« Reply #28 on: November 18, 2023, 08:56:45 AM »
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

ccp

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Jewish prof barred no campus for calling out Hamas
« Reply #29 on: November 26, 2023, 03:27:48 PM »
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.

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Higher Ed a Threat to America
« Reply #30 on: December 05, 2023, 12:35:47 AM »
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.”


Body-by-Guinness

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Thanks but No Thanks
« Reply #32 on: December 06, 2023, 04:46:36 PM »
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.

Body-by-Guinness

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One Factotum for Every Four Undergrads @ UW Madtown
« Reply #33 on: December 06, 2023, 05:11:45 PM »
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

Body-by-Guinness

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Reforming Higher Ed: the Path Forward
« Reply #34 on: December 06, 2023, 08:20:17 PM »
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/

ccp

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And of course
« Reply #35 on: December 06, 2023, 08:27:59 PM »

Body-by-Guinness

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”I’d Like a Cat so Long as it Barked”
« Reply #36 on: December 07, 2023, 01:44:29 PM »

Body-by-Guinness

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Qatar Major Fund Source for Higher Ed … and Hamas
« Reply #37 on: December 08, 2023, 05:39:31 PM »
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


DougMacG

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New strains of Poison Ivy discovered
« Reply #39 on: December 10, 2023, 07:01:58 AM »
New strains of Poison Ivy discovered:

Harvard, Yale, Penn, Princeton.

  - Powerline, the week in pictures


Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: The Ivy League Mask falls
« Reply #40 on: December 11, 2023, 06:03:01 AM »
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

Body-by-Guinness

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Body-by-Guinness

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War of Position
« Reply #42 on: December 13, 2023, 06:47:41 AM »
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.

Body-by-Guinness

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They Have Standards, but Only of the Double Variety
« Reply #43 on: December 13, 2023, 09:09:41 PM »
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

ccp

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Re: The Politics of Education
« Reply #44 on: December 14, 2023, 06:23:19 AM »
" 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.

Crafty_Dog

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Sen. Sullivan of Alaska returns to Harvard
« Reply #45 on: December 17, 2023, 03:08:12 AM »
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.

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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

DougMacG

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Re: Sen. Sullivan of Alaska returns to Harvard
« Reply #46 on: December 17, 2023, 06:29:21 AM »
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/

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The Politics of Education
« Reply #47 on: December 17, 2023, 08:41:21 AM »
Poison Ivy League?   Ouch!!!


ccp

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Re: The Politics of Education
« Reply #49 on: December 26, 2023, 07:39:36 AM »
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: