Wednesday, February 05, 2020


Study Reveals the Absurd Conformity of Higher Education

A recently released study confirms the suspicion that American higher education has become absurdly and ruthlessly monolithic in terms of political ideology.

The study found that the ratio of college professor donations to Democrats as opposed to Republicans was 95:1.

Besides federal agency employees, few other industries outside working for the Democratic National Committee or the media are so strongly skewed toward Democrats and the left.

The authors of the study, Heterodox Academy Research Director Sean Stevens and Brooklyn College Professor Mitchell Langbert, admit to some uncertainty on the numbers.

But even if the disparity in donations isn’t quite so high, it’s still clearly extreme and highly problematic, as the researchers explain.

“Researchers have raised concerns that ideological homogeneity may lead to questionable research practices,” Stevens and Langbert wrote. “This concern is grounded in research on confirmation bias, group polarization, motivated reasoning, and the tendency for these phenomena to be even more pronounced among the highly educated. As well, partisan polarization has been leading to Republicans’ increasing skepticism about higher education.”

Beyond problematic research is the larger problem that, at all but a handful of Americans colleges, young Americans are being dropped straight into left-wing indoctrination centers.

Anyone who has recently attended a college or university knows that even if one avoids politics and the humanities in their coursework, most campuses are pervasively left-wing. From professors, to administrators, to the most vocal students, rarely does one find a campus with even a tiny bit of ideological balance.

Unfortunately, this trend has been clear for a long time.

After all, William F. Buckley wrote “God and Man at Yale,” which highlighted the left-wing excesses at the prestigious university, more than a half-century ago. Yale was hardly alone.

Despite that warning, college environments aren’t improving.

Many campuses are now hostile to free speech, not only catering to a rigidly left-wing environment, but actively stifling any kind of dissent.

It’s not hard to see why so-called “cancel culture” is becoming deeply ingrained in our society. This just mirrors what’s already happening in our schools.

Convincing these institutions that intellectual diversity should be prioritized is clearly not working. If anything, it seems campuses are becoming more uniform, not less.

Then, on top of the ideological issue is the increasing problem of student debt and the question of whether the cost of going to school matches the value the degree ultimately brings.

Taxpayers, most of whom never had the privilege of attending college, are now being asked to bail out those who did attend largely on their dimes.

The bailouts are billed as a boon to students, but the biggest beneficiaries are the colleges.

The losers are pretty much everyone else.

Why should we let colleges off the hook en masse when it’s the perpetual promise of more federal dollars that caused costs to skyrocket in the first place?

Again, the burden of this bailout will fall on the middle class, not universities.

We should reconsider the reasons why Washington funds postsecondary institutions and whether the current system is an appropriate federal role.

Instead of handing what amounts to a blank check to these schools—and allowing them to pile up debt on the backs of graduates and eventually the taxpayers—we should start cutting the cord.

Washington has overstepped its bounds in many different ways with higher education policy, and we are now experiencing the effects of a government run amok.

As my colleague, Arthur Milikh, who is the associate director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at The Heritage Foundation, wrote in a provocative essay for National Affairs, perhaps left-wing dominance of higher education should make us question why we continue to pour so much money into it as we have done for generations.

The reality is that higher education has become increasingly financially bloated, ideologically rigid, and often fails to even protect the basic constitutional rights of students.

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Free to Succeed: A Brief History of School Choice

Perhaps it’s the title, but at first glance, Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” seems unassuming. To many Americans, the role of government in education is self-evident and impregnable. So, given public schools are run by the government, an essay on the government’s role in education seems like it would be both obvious (and boring). 

In reality, Friedman’s argument was neither obvious nor boring. In “The Role of Government in Education,” Friedman argued that basic free-market principles—such as competition and consumer freedom—should be reintroduced into the education marketplace.

Friedman’s argument was not necessarily new or radical. For the first eight decades after the American Revolution, parents were the primary drivers of what and how their children learned. According to Market Education, written by the late Andrew Coulson, this “unofficial school choice” later dissolved amidst burgeoning anti-Catholic immigrant sentiment and a massive push for mandatory, state-funded, public education.

By the time Friedman wrote “The Role of Government in Education,” state governments essentially had developed monopolies on education, with children assigned to public schools within the district boundaries where they lived. This iron triangle of public schooling—government administration, compulsion and financing of education—had weakened important market forces and limited parents’ power to control their children’s education. Private schools offered an alternative to public school system, but many low- and middle-income families could not afford to pay both the taxes that support public schools and the tuition required of private schools. 

So although the history of American education reflects aspects of school choice, education freedom had nearly disappeared by 1955. Children attended their neighborhood public schools even if those schools were a poor fit.

Friedman’s essay argued that parents, not the state, should makes the decisions when it came to their children’s education. Instead of government officials mandating students attend given schools, competition between schools would encourage greater innovation, efficiency, and effectiveness. Parents, untethered from arbitrary school district boundaries, then could vote with their feet. As Friedman put it: “Parents could express their views about schools directly, by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another, to a much greater extent than is now possible.”

Friedman’s essay also proposed a voucher program, where the state would take the money that wouldhave been spent to educate students at public schools and give it to parents to cover tuition at a private school of their choice. Fundamentally, he argued to separate the financing of education from the delivery of services.

Friedman’s ideas were first implemented in Wisconsin in 1989 when state Assemblywoman Polly Williams authored the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, —the first modern-day private school choice legislation. The bipartisan legislation enabled low-income minority families to use vouchers to pay for tuition at the city’s private schools.

Later, 18 states and the District of Columbia launched similar voucher programs. The same number of states now offer tax-credit scholarships, which enable individuals and businesses to receive tax credits for donating to nonprofits that fund private school scholarships.

In 2011—dubbed “the year of school choice” because 12 states passed legislation that either created new school choice programs or expanded programs that already existed—Arizona implemented the county’s first education savings account option.

Education savings accounts allow parents to use taxpayer funds to pay for tuition, tutors, textbooks, and other education expenses. Friedman had suggested this as well during a 2003 interviewin which he spoke of issuing “partial vouchers.”

Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, and North Carolina have since followed Arizona’s lead and implemented their own Education Savings Account options.

Around the same time Milwaukee passed the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, public charter schools—another key player in the fight for school choice—started to take off. Public charter schools operate with greater autonomy and at less cost than their traditional public school counterparts. Because they are independent from traditional public school curriculum requirements, charter schools can tailor their environments and curricula to their students’ needs. 

Despite these gains, pushback continues. Just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case that dealt with tax-credit scholarship programs. The case’s ruling, which is expected this summer, could shape the future of the school choice discussion in the United States.

But Friedman’s legacy endures, and this year’s National School Choice Week is a reminder that progress continues, but by no means is the fight for authentic education freedom over yet.

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2 Gay Students Are Suing a Seminary. Here’s Why It Matters

A man and a woman, both in same-sex marriages, have sued Fuller Theological Seminary for discrimination after it expelled them over their same-sex marriages.

Fuller, located in Pasadena, California, is the nation’s largest interdenominational seminary. The lawsuit represents a move that Christian organizations have anticipated in light of same-sex marriage. The lawsuit could become a landmark First Amendment case.

Nathan Brittsan, a pastor and expelled student who is in a same-sex marriage, added his name to a lawsuit against Fuller earlier this month. He joins Joanna Maxon, who filed a lawsuit in November after Fuller expelled her in 2018 for also being in a same-sex marriage.

The two claim that since Fuller receives federal funding, the seminary is violating Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which says that no person can be discriminated against under any education program receiving federal financial aid on account of sex.

The Obama administration had interpreted “sex” to include discrimination on the basis of assigned sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and transgender status. The Trump administration has rolled back those interpretations, however.

While the seminary is religious in nature, it offers a wide range of degree programs and does not require students to adhere to a statement of faith. Fuller has not applied for or received a religious exemption from the requirements of Title IX.

Brittsan and Maxon are making a full-fledged case that they have been discriminated against. “This is a civil rights case about two students who were expelled from their graduate program for one reason: They married someone of the same sex,” a portion of the amended complaint reads.

But Fuller insists this lawsuit violates the school’s First Amendment rights. Fuller hired the well-known religious liberty firm Becket to defend it in court.

Becket attorneys liken this case to one they previously tried, and won, at the Supreme Court in 2012: Equal Employment Opportunity v. Hosanna-Tabor, a case about ministerial exceptions to federal laws.

In that case, a commissioned minister and teacher sued Hosanna-Tabor, a Lutheran church and school in Michigan, for discrimination after she had been fired for “insubordination and disruptive conduct,” a violation of the church’s teachings.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Hosanna-Tabor, protecting the ministerial exception that ensures churches have the right to choose their own leaders and carry out their religious beliefs without government interference.

In the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “The church must be free to choose those who will guide it on its way.”

This case raises significant questions: Does expelling a student for entering a same-sex marriage count as discrimination for legal purposes? And if Fuller has discriminated, should it lose access to federal funding? If so, how would that bode for the hundreds of other similar Christian schools?

If sexual orientation, and for that matter gender identity, were protected classes under federal law, then this would qualify as discrimination. But federal civil rights law does not protect sexual orientation and gender identity. Fuller did not discriminate.

Even if it did, however, the plaintiffs’ argument may have to pass extra scrutiny because they are suing not just any school, but a seminary. Courts tend to defer a great deal to religious institutions when it comes to matters of conscience.

Traditional Christian teaching holds that sex should be between a man and a woman within the bonds of a covenant marriage relationship. As outdated, traditional, and bigoted as that may sound to some, this is a closely held religious belief, and most Christian organizations do not consider it discriminatory to hold or live by such beliefs.

If this lawsuit succeeds, it would set a new and worrisome precedent that organizations like Fuller can no longer expect to operate according to their consciences. It could strip Christian colleges and seminaries of the ability to be true to their convictions and foster a faithful Christian community.

It is certainly understandable that the plaintiffs do not want to be expelled from the seminary they chose to attend. But the seminary is a private institution, and those who voluntarily attend the seminary can be held to its ethical standards.

Fuller has a right to be Fuller, and these plaintiffs have the right to be themselves. It is imperative that our laws continue to protect the ability of schools like Fuller to carry out their missions in good conscience, even if that means removing noncompliant students from their rolls.

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