Thursday, September 26, 2019



Colleges Don’t Want ‘Free College’

Several internet sites, especially The College Fix, have noticed something: most colleges are conspicuously silent about either the Warren or Sanders proposals for free college. This may seem odd, as most institutions of higher education and their national spokespersons (e.g, Terry Hartle of the American Council of Education) are not known to be shrinking violets. Why the reticence about commenting on something so fundamentally important to higher education?

There are several potential reasons. First, these are simply proposals of candidates for president, persons who may not be nominated, much less elected. Colleges should stay out of public policy brouhahas, so silence is the appropriate response. Saying something good, or bad, about, say, Bernie Sanders’s proposal might imply institutional support or opposition to his nomination, and universities should be neutral marketplaces of ideas, not proponents of positions, particularly since institutions of higher learning in reality are a melange of students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends of wildly varying political persuasions. I find it offensive when some university president signs, for example, a document supporting efforts to combat climate change in which he proclaims an institutional position.

However, there is a more fundamental and crass reason colleges are silent: free college is potentially a nightmare for schools. Most universities earn a large portion of their revenue from tuition fees, and “free college” implies ending those fees. Implicit in the Sanders/Warren proposal is replacing tuition revenues with increased governmental subsidies. But the size and changes of those subsidies are highly uncertain and subject to political whims. Public opinion has turned less favorable to universities in recent years, manifested in tepid increases in state appropriations and, for some wealthy private schools, in the form of actually taxing them (the new federal tax on large endowments).

If tuition were free at public schools, how could the federal government justify large student loan programs benefiting only students attending historically expensive private schools? The free college proposals are potentially the death knell of federal student loans which, in turn, are the primary reason for the tuition explosion of the last generation and the large amount of student loan debt. Thus the Sanders/Warren proposals are a threat to maintaining the gravy train that has led to the highly inefficient and overstaffed modern university.

But the dilemma here is profound. Colleges are dominated by progressives—especially the faculty and the more vocal students. They by and large love politicians of the Sanders (whose wife is a former college president)/Warren (a former Harvard professor) variety. They contribute money to their campaigns and offer them policy advice. If either of those candidates is elected, they will be heavily represented in their administration. They certainly don’t want to appear to have negative feelings towards them, as that could help their political opponents (e.g., Donald Trump). Yet if free college ideas were adopted, especially Sanders’ free tuition for all proposal, they would face financial uncertainty and increased governmental dependence, meaning a loss of much of the institutional autonomy they still possess.

What to do? My guess is that individuals will support the Democratic Party nominee heavily in the 2020 campaign but largely remain silent on collegiate funding issues. After the election, if the Democrat wins, college presidents and lobbyists will endorse greater higher education funding of a traditional nature—large increases in Pell Grants, more liberalized student loan terms—but scuttle efforts for truly “free college.”

Economists like me have a so-so record of economic forecasting, much less election prognostication, but I put the probability of anything even closely resembling the Warren or Sanders proposal being adopted in 2021 at less than 10%. That further incentivizes colleges to keep quiet now about college funding proposals. I put the probability of divided government (no one political party controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency) in 2021 at 60% at the least. For all the rhetoric about college financing, the likelihood of big changes in funding higher education in the next three years is pretty low. A business downturn in those three years—a greater possibility—could further dampen the likelihood of free tuition (unless sold as a stimulus program, a highly dubious proposition).

SOURCE 







Teaching That America Is Hopelessly Racist

Many more college students have read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ anti-white screed Between the World and Me (2015) than have read, say, works by the Nobel economist Robert Fogel, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery (1974) or Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989). I can say that with some confidence. The Open Syllabus Project finds Coates’ book assigned in 783 courses. Fogel’s Time on the Cross is assigned in 22 courses and his Without Consent or Contract in 156 courses. Moreover, Coates’ book is now the second most-assigned book in the country in college summer reading programs.

Coates treats slavery as an institution that was never truly abolished. It continues as the pervasive racism of American society. This rhetorical flourish sells a lot of books today. Fogel, the economic historian, takes on slavery as an appallingly real institution and brings intellectual heft to the task of explaining it.

That contrast is all the more important in light of The New York Times’ plunge into re-educating all Americans about our history through the lens of African American slavery. The Times launched its 1619 Project on August 18 to a great deal of fanfare. 1619 is the year that the first black African slaves landed at Jamestown. It is a noteworthy date, but not quite what the beginning of slavery in the New World or in what would become the United States. The Spanish had brought African slaves long before. And we have at least one account by an early Spanish soldier, Cabeza de Vaca, who was captured and enslaved by Native Americans in the South in the 1520s. Slavery was an indigenous American institution long before Europeans got here.

Be that as it may, the Times wants to reimagine the European version of America as founded on slavery and stained in every possible way by the continuing effects of slavery. This is a political project more than a historical one. Its unacknowledged goal is to taint all opposition to progressive political goals as rooted in the perpetuation of oppression, and perhaps to delegitimize America itself.

The 1619 Project overstates things a bit. Slavery does have lingering consequences, and the economic, cultural, and political history of the country does reflect the awful institution. But the 1619 Project also reduces the lives of African Americans to perpetual victimhood, and it ignores the glorious ideal of freedom in American history. It reverses the traditional conception of America as an exceptional land of liberty to conceive of it as an exceptional land of slavery and oppression.

Four centuries ago, almost every Englishman believed a piece of anti-Spanish propaganda called the “Black Legend.” It presented all Spaniards and all Catholics as uniquely, demonically evil, whose cruelty was proved not least by their barbaric treatment of the Indians. The 1619 Project creates a new kind of Black Legend, which casts America as uniquely, demonically evil.

The Times is calculating that Americans are already primed to believe this new Black Legend. They have been softened up by the pseudo-history of Howard Zinn, whose elaborately distorted vision in A People’s History of the United States has been swallowed whole by millions. (A nod of appreciation is due to Mary Grabar whose new book Debunking Howard Zinn is a long-overdue corrective to the Marxist storyteller.) Others are hoping the 1619 Project will flatten what is left of resistance to anti-American mythmaking in K-12 and college history courses. The new Black Legend is already comfortably ensconced in many of our high schools and colleges. The first book college students read very likely treats it as fact.

One of the contributors to The 1619 Project, Bryan Stevenson, is the head of the Equal Justice Initiative, which is dedicated to releasing innocent people from jail. He’s also the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014), which has been the most popular single college reading for the last three years.

Stevenson wrote the same story for The New York Times and for Just Mercy: America’s justice system is racist to the core, and it aims at torturing blacks. Stevenson sees no distance between a racial lynching of an innocent man and the sober desire for justice by a judge and a jury following the law. He thinks “mass incarceration” is the result of racist animus—not a response to the unfortunate reality of too many millions of Americans choosing to commit crimes and even more unfortunate reality that a disproportionate number of those Americans who commit crimes are African American. He has no conception that it is a terrible injustice for the victims of criminals to see criminals fail to receive justice for their crimes. And he never even acknowledges that there might be an argument against him. He simply assumes that reading the book will get you ready to sign up for social justice activism, in service of the Equal Justice Initiative.

Stevenson’s Just Mercy has already been assigned to 94 colleges in the five years since it was published—it’s already the third-most frequently assigned book since 2007, and it’s on track to be the most widely assigned in a few years. In the very first year after it came out, it was the second-most popular assignment—assigned 16 times in 2015. It was the single most popular assignment in the last three years—assigned 31 times in 2016, 29 times in 2017, and 18 times in 2018. Every single one of those 94 colleges is already signed up for The 1619 Project.

So are the 54 colleges that have assigned as pre-freshman reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. So are the 13 colleges that assigned Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2009). So are the ten colleges that have already assigned Angie Thomas’ Black-Lives-Matter young adult novel The Hate U Give (2017).

The campaign to delegitimize America, to recast it as a uniquely evil force for slavery and oppression, has triumphed in a myriad of classrooms in American higher education. But it has triumphed even more with college administrators. The vast majority of the bureaucrats who choose common readings, plan events and invite speakers to campus are already true believers in The 1619 Project. The deans, provosts, and presidents acquiesce in their initiatives, where they do not support them. The institutional stamp of higher education tells incoming college students throughout the country: We believe in the Black Legend of American villainy. And you should too.

After all, the editors at The New York Times who commissioned The 1619 Project learned their defamatory history in college. The 1619 Project isn’t just a fire bell in the night that warns of distant dangers. The American Black Legend has already taken over much of our colleges, and The New York Times is just following their lead.

We must act now to reclaim our colleges and our history if we are not to lose our country.

SOURCE 






N.J. Schools Pushing Far-Left Indoctrination. What the Hell Is Betsy DeVos Doing?

Melissa Barnett, a supervisor of English Language Arts in the Washington Township School District in New Jersey, caused outrage on Twitter by tweeting out a photo of hundreds of books in dumpsters. "This week, dumpsters were filled with books that should have left decades ago @TWPSchools and replaced with engaging, relevant, culturally diverse literature."

This led to cries of "book burning" by critics and crowdsourcing to identify the books in the bins.

Amongst the "books that should have left decades ago" visible in these bins are "Hiroshima" by Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey, a 1946 journalistic account of the lives of 6 survivors of the atomic bomb, which started some of the 1st debates about the morality of atomic weapons

PJ Media reached out to the Washington Township School District to find out more. "I was not unaware they were cleaning out a book room," said Steve Gregor, director of secondary education. "Many of them were in poor condition and unreadable, dating back to the 1960s or earlier. We intended to replace [relevant] books with new copies."

Among the books that were reordered are Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, 1984, by George Orwell, Slaughter House Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, Dante's Inferno, and Night, by Elie Wiesel.

Most of the new books that were added to the classroom libraries are for independent reading time to be selected by the students. They include The Poet X, by Terreece Clarke which, according to Common Sense Media (CSM), contains sex, drinking, violence, drugs, and bad language.

It's a coming-of-age story about a first-generation Dominican American teen, Xiomara, growing up as a thoroughly American young woman with a developed body in a deeply religious (Catholic) immigrant home. There are instances of street harassment, parental abuse, religious discussions, sexual exploration (some kissing, and one scene of heavy petting), and the revelation of a character being gay. . .her mother makes her kneel on uncooked rice and hits Xiomara, causing injury.

Other offerings are Educated, by Tara Westover, a book recommended by Michelle Obama about being abused in a homeschooling survivalist family, and The House on Mango Street, which is full of child abuse, sex, and rape that CSM  calls "gritty material."

Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah, also made the list of new books and is about growing up under apartheid in South Africa. At least this one seems interesting, but it is also awash in abuse and violence.

I Am the Messenger, by Matt Berman, is "loaded with swearing and sexual references and fantasies. There are several bloody beatings, a husband rapes his wife, and characters smoke and drink to excess," according to CSM. Bodega Dreams, by Ernesto Quinonez, seems great. Here's an excerpt from Amazon,

"Blanca wasn't allowed to wear jeans but she made up for it by wearing tight, short skirts. She always carried a Bible with her and never talked bad about anybody and at school she only hung around with her Pentecostal friend, Lucy. Lucy was a hairy girl who never shaved her legs because it was against her religion. . .

Made you want to pick up a tambourine and join her one night in her church. Make a joyful noise to the Lord so she would begin to jump up and down to all that religious salsa. And maybe you'd be lucky enough to cop a cheap feel as the Holy Ghost took over her body."

And the last "engaging, relevant and culturally diverse" book on the list is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, that parents on Amazon describe as offensive and dark.

"What the author tries to do is obliterated by the overuse of offensive language," wrote one parent. "An 11-year old read this book and thought it had way too many bad words. If it was not a reading assignment from school, I would not have allowed her to read it. I don’t understand how this can be a pick of any writing award group. The plot is gruesome and it is too dark of a theme for middle schoolers."

"I did not like this book at all," wrote another.

The theme here seems to be that culturally diverse books must have violence, sexual degeneracy, rape, and foul language. I don't know about you, but that sure seems racist to me. Are the New Jersey "equity" educators saying that minority children only understand and relate to violence, abuse, and vulgarity? It's sad that there are so few uplifting choices in YA literature. Instead, the genre seeks to draw its readers into the gutter to wallow in filth and degeneracy.

The school district declined to name any of the books that were removed and not replaced, but Twitter users have identified at least two. One of them seems like it would be awfully relevant to today's youth called, The Ox-Bow Incident, by Walter Tilburg Clark, which is "a harrowing novel about ordinary people drawn into a murderous lynch-mob, exploring the nature of violence, mob mentality and the subversion of justice by supposedly good people." This seems far more relevant to the high school experience of 2019 than the "culturally diverse" offerings the district chose.

Amongst the "books that should have left decades ago" visible in these bins are "Hiroshima" by Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey, a 1946 journalistic account of the lives of 6 survivors of the atomic bomb, which started some of the 1st debates about the morality of atomic weapons

More troubling than the book selections of a single district is the reason the changes were made in the first place. "We get our marching orders from the [New Jersey] Department of Education," said Gregor, the Washington Township school official. And those orders included "equity training" that Gregor says he has participated in as a speaker. These trainings have led to assignments in schools like the one in North Carolina that left students in tears because they were asked to publicly declare their sexual identities in front of their peers.

The assignment, which was quickly pulled after media attention, came from one of these "equity trainings" that seem to be about pushing far-left social justice onto children at the expense of taxpayer dollars. PJM's investigation into these events uncovered that the equity office in North Carolina's school district had partnered with the highly partisan Southern Poverty Law Center in using its website, Tolerance.org, to push out sexual identity politics into the public school system there.

New Jersey schools are also getting their direction from these new equity projects that share the same goals of infiltrating every class in order to create "equity," but is little more than disguised political messaging.

Both in New Jersey and North Carolina, the equity conferences were the first of their kind. These are new directives that have clearly been well-organized and planned for some time. Students and parents are reporting that these equity initiatives are being carried out in every class through reading assignments, tolerance projects, and more, all focusing on sexual identity politics or racism and social justice. These lessons also include teaching the students how to be "activists," which is why we are seeing organized student protests pop up around the country -- protests that always seem to support Democrat talking points like gun control or climate change initiatives.

A review of the group activities for the New Jersey Equity for All conference found many politically charged sessions, including one on Black Lives Matter and teaching about white privilege in class.

Educators do not seem to understand that these talking points come directly from the Democratic Party and they are not accepted as fact by half of this country. Half of America rejects the idea that America is a racist nation or that whiteness comes with privilege. What the school systems are doing here is indoctrinating children into a political point of view. This is not education -- it's Marxist brainwashing.

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