NYU attempts to solve doctor problem Obamacare helped create

More big government policies should not be the answer to problems created by big government. Yet that is exactly what New York University is trying to do. The New York University (NYU) School of Medicine announced last week that it would offer a full tuition scholarship to all students in the medical school regardless of merit or need. While the goal of the program is to produce more doctors; instead, this program will only raise costs for everyone while failing to address the underlying problems within our health care system.

The United States desperately needs more doctors.

An April 2018 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) predicts a shortage of between 14,800 and 49,300 primary care physicians by 2030. At the same time, the AAMC predicts a shortage of between 33,800 and 72,700 specialty doctors.

This shortage is caused in large part by the Affordable Care Act, which increased demand for physicians while burying them in paperwork and regulations.

A series of studies reported on through Investor Business Daily found, 54 percent of doctors claim they are “suffering burnout,” 83 percent of doctors were thinking about quitting, and 40 percent said they would retire or seek other work because of Obamacare.

Clearly, the U.S. needs more doctors, but free tuition is not a good plan to make that happen.

NYU Med students pay an average $55,018 in tuition each year. The free tuition plan is expected to cost the school $600 million to fund. While the school hopes the generosity of donors will cover the cost, more than likely, other NYU students will be hit with the bill.

A January 2017 George Mason University Mercatus Center study found that increases in loan and grant programs within universities create artificial demand, largely resulting in greater tuition increases and produce little benefit to enrollment numbers. Similarly, in February of 2018, the Heartland Institute merged 25 studies on tuition costs and student aid to find that subsidizing college tuition raises prices for all students as universities raise tuition across the board. Flooding labor markets with these degrees in turn makes them less useful.

The NYU program will be costly and ineffective in producing more doctors.

Even worse, the free tuition for future students and student loan repayment for current students comes with no strings attached. So, a student does not even have to practice medicine in order to receive the benefits.

This is important considering a Mayo Clinic study cited in the aforementioned Investors Business Daily notes, “nearly one in five doctors plan to switch to part-time clinical hours, 27 percent plan to leave their current practice, and 9 percent plan to get an administrative job or switch careers entirely.” This has significantly exacerbated the doctor shortage.

It was the big government policies of the Obama administration that caused the doctor shortage we are dealing with today. If schools like NYU want to do their part, they should help encourage the rollback of Obamacare rather than attempting to put a band-aid on the problem. The free tuition myth will increase costs for other students while failing to help Americans still struggling with the impact of Obamacare.

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Amid secrecy, Acadia University professor at centre of free speech debate fired for controversial comments

The secrecy tells its own story

Rick Mehta came under fire for saying multiculturalism is a scam, denying the gender wage gap, and dismissing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

A Nova Scotia professor who stoked a national debate about free speech on campus after making controversial comments on social media and in the classroom has been fired.

Acadia University confirmed Friday that Rick Mehta has been dismissed, several months after the Wolfville, N.S., school launched a formal investigation into complaints against the psychology professor.

University spokesman Scott Roberts said he is unable to comment or “provide any elaboration” on the dismissal as it is a confidential personnel matter.

He also was unable to provide details of the findings of the investigation overseen by Dalhousie University professor emeritus Wayne MacKay, noting that it’s a “privileged document.”

The Acadia University Faculty Association said in a statement Friday it was informed of the firing on Aug. 31, and has since filed for arbitration.

“The termination of a tenured professor is very serious, and (the faculty association) has filed for arbitration while its senior grievance officer and legal counsel examine the administration’s disciplinary procedures and evidence,” the statement said.

Mehta could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday. However, he retweeted a blog article that discussed his firing.

Last month, he said in an email that the only way he could have a copy of the investigation report by MacKay was by signing an agreement, which he called a “gag order.”

Mehta was outspoken both on campus and online about a range of contentious issues including decolonization, immigration and gender politics, garnering both supporters and opposition.

He came under fire for saying multiculturalism is a scam, denying the wage gap between men and women, and dismissing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a vehicle for “endless apologies and compensation.”

On Twitter, he retweeted a post that said it is “statistically impossible for all Native children to have had a negative experience with residential schools.”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that more than 150,000 First Nations, Metis, and Inuit children were taken from their families – often by force – to attend government schools. The commission heard testimony from roughly 7,000 survivors, including graphic details of rampant sexual and physical abuse at the schools, and found at least 6,000 Indigenous children died from malnutrition, disease and widespread abuse.

While his defenders called his voice an antidote to political correctness run amok, his critics said his polarizing comments attacked marginalized people and perpetuated harmful stereotypes.

In a Feb. 26 letter, Mehta’s designated department head, Rob Raeside, detailed some of the complaints against him, indicating that the level of anxiety in the class was high and some students had stopped attending.

Raeside said students have accused Mehta of spending excessive class time on non-class related matters, using non-academic sources for lecture content, testing on content not dealt with in class or in assigned readings and making provocative comments in class.

The acrimonious debate has spurred a Halifax-based activist to launch a petition demanding his removal from the small-town Nova Scotia university, while a counter-petition called for him to stay in the classroom as a beacon of freedom of expression.

In March, the Canadian Association of University Teachers appointed a committee to review how Acadia handled grievances against Mehta to determine whether his academic freedom had been breached or threatened.

“Professor Mehta’s case raises important questions about the scope of academic freedom in teaching and the exercise of extramural speech by professors,” David Robinson, executive director of the association, said in a statement at the time.

“These issues are of broad significance to all academics in Canada.”

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Strange histories of conservatism

The growing tendency of late for liberals and conservatives to regard each other as not just opponents, but enemies, has been one of the most alarming in an alarming era. At the root of this fear and loathing is mutual incomprehension: Liberals simply don’t understand conservatives, and vice versa. In years past, the historical profession has done little to improve matters. Liberal historians typically treated conservatives and their ideas with disdain, when they deigned to notice them at all.

The end-of-century victories of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, however, forced historians to realize that conservatism could no longer be dismissed as a mere road bump on the inexorable progression toward a liberal future. The result, over the past two decades, has been a veritable tsunami of historical literature on conservatism. Virtually all of these works have been written by liberals. Nonetheless, historians of this new generation consider themselves to be unbiased and even sympathetic observers of conservatism. Many believe their collective efforts have produced a profound historical understanding of conservatism as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon, and thus contributed in some measure to bringing politically opposed citizens together.

Color me skeptical. I was a graduate student at the beginning of this new wave of conservative studies and I couldn’t help but notice that it coincided with the historical profession’s purge of any scholars who could be described as Republicans or conservatives. Some of the new works on conservatism have been excellent, others awful. But nearly all reveal the pitfalls for liberals writing about a movement with which they have no personal experience. If you’re a historian who has not a single conservative colleague—and perhaps not even one conservative friend—chances are you’ll approach conservatism as anthropologists once approached tribes they considered remote, exotic, and quite possibly dangerous.

The result is that two decades’ worth of scholarship hasn’t contributed as much as one might have hoped to our understanding of conservatism, especially in the age of Trump. This is particularly true of the works that have been most popular with the broader public. That’s a shame, because historians could provide deeper answers than they have so far to the questions many citizens now wrestle with: How did our political system become so divided and dysfunctional? To what extent is the conservative movement responsible for Trump’s rise? What have been the movement’s greatest successes as well as failures, and what relevance do they have to our understanding of ourselves as a nation and a people?

Those answers aren’t just relevant to our understanding of the past. A more robust, even-tempered account of conservatism is key to understanding what role the political and cultural phenomenon will play in our country’s future—whether liberals want to believe it or not.

***

A common flaw of the new political histories is to take the extreme right as representative of conservatism (or the Republican Party) as a whole. Lisa McGirr’s 2001 Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right was one of the earliest and best of these histories, but many of its readers came away convinced that the rabidly anti-communist John Birch Society dominated the Republican Party in the early 1960s, when it was a marginal element at best.

There’s little in McGirr’s scrupulously nonjudgmental account of the Birchers that alludes to their wild, conspiratorial fantasies, like the notion that the United Nations was training an army of barefoot African cannibals in Georgia to take over the United States, or that a “1313” committee of University of Chicago eggheads was plotting to deprive Americans of their rights to vote and hold property. Bircher-type thinking has had a resurgence on the present-day political right and points toward the enduring appeal of conspiratorial thinking in American life, so the organization merits study. But scholars should keep in mind that National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., as part of his larger “fusionist” project that eventually led to Reagan’s election, branded the Birchers as “kooks” and was able (for a while) to keep them out of the conservative mainstream.

The success of Buckley and his “movement” conservatives at transforming the GOP into an ideological vessel has led scholars to overlook the internal party warfare between moderates and conservatives that raged throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and continues in a diminished form today. Some scholars also downplay the real differences that separate traditionalists, libertarians, paleo-conservatives and neo-conservatives, among any other number of ideological splinter groups. Like many liberal voters, they assume that the Tuesday Group faction in the House of Representatives is just like the Freedom Caucus, or that Speaker Paul Ryan’s beliefs are more or less interchangeable with those of President Donald Trump or Ohio Governor John Kasich.

In fact, one of the more influential studies of conservatism, Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, insists that such seemingly disparate figures as Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Milton Friedman and Sarah Palin are all more or less the same, sharing the overarching goal of preserving the ruling order’s power and privilege against liberationist movements from below. In his view, the ideals conservatives tout (greater freedom, robust public morality, economic growth and deference to the Constitution) are nothing but fig-leaf cover for oppression, and anyone outside the elite who thinks otherwise is a victim of false consciousness. Robin—who, full disclosure, helped make my Ph.D. years miserable by leading a grad student unionization effort at my university—advances his argument with considerable force and erudition. But his reductionist thesis is the mirror image of the sloppy right-wing canard that liberalism is no different from socialism, or even communism.

Some scholars bring their present-day political concerns to bear on the past, particularly in relation to the Republican Party’s approach to racial matters, assuming that it’s inherently a party of racial oppression . In this view, African-American demands for racial equality have always entailed a program of economic redistribution—and because such programs are anathema to both moderate and conservative Republicans, then by definition Republicans cannot support civil rights. Of course, this presentist position is at odds with the historical reality, which is that civil rights activists of the 1960s viewed the considerable majority of congressional Republicans as allies, and acknowledged that the movement’s great advances could not have been achieved without their help.

Heather Cox Richardson’s To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party actually posits that the current GOP upholds the racist and elitist principles of the pre-Civil War slaveholding class. Richardson’s account is a mélange of liberal errors regarding conservative history. Like Robin, she dismisses Reagan’s populism as a screen for rapacious business interests. She contends that racism was the essence of Buckley’s New Right, and further that the Birch Society spread his ideas to ordinary voters. Buckley’s endorsement of Southern segregation was a moral blot on the conservative movement, and he later acknowledged it as his gravest error. But it’s anti-historical to assume that Buckley was little more than a Klansman with a large vocabulary, or to dismiss the monumental divisions on the right as minor quarrels within a united white supremacist alliance.

Some of the most highly praised scholars of conservatism in recent years have openly acknowledged their political opposition to the movement. Rick Perlstein, whom New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently pronounced “our leading historian of modern conservatism,” wrote a column a few years ago declaring “There Are No More Honest Conservatives, So Stop Looking for One.” Perlstein made a big splash in 2001 with Before the Storm, a well-researched account of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign that even conservatives praised for its empathy and insight. But Perlstein’s subsequent works, Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge, portray conservatives like Richard Nixon and Reagan as cartoon villains, all but ignoring the progressive parts of Nixon’s record and the pragmatic dimension of Reagan’s.

Perlstein’s treatment of conservatism is positively Solomonic, however, in comparison with Duke University professor Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, a 2017 National Book Award finalist that focuses on Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist James Buchanan. In MacLean’s telling, Buchanan’s “public-choice” school of economics provided the intellectual blueprint used by billionaire Charles Koch to advance a “diabolical” and “wicked” plan to suppress democracy by handcuffing government—a crime to which the entire Republican Party is now, apparently, a willing accessory. As numerous critics from across the political spectrum have pointed out, MacLean’s conspiracy theory owes more to her strained interpretations than actual evidence, and her account is replete with errors and distortions.

***

It’s true that the era when historians ignored conservatism or dismissed it as a curio is over; many universities now offer entire courses on its history. But a closer look at their syllabi typically reveals a paucity of writings by actual conservatives and a glut of hostile interpretations by writers such as Robin, Cox Richardson, Perlstein and MacLean. One teacher of such a course, Seth Cotlar of Willamette University, who was recently the subject of an admiring piece in Vox, apparently believes that the two major conservative intellectuals of the 1990s were Gingrich and Dinesh D’Souza—an error that no one who was personally involved with the conservative movement would ever make.

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