Higher Education Will Never Be the Same—And That’s Not All Bad

The coronavirus, combined with the public and private reactions to it, has affected every aspect of Americans’ lives, including the ways they learn. From pre-K to graduate seminars, many classes are moving online for the duration of the pandemic and perhaps beyond. That may spur pedagogical reforms that will lead to the creation of more Emersonian independent thinkers, people who can quickly find, analyze, and synthesize available data to come to reasoned conclusions on important matters—a resource that seemed in mighty short supply when the coronavirus hit the proverbial fan in mid-March.

Many colleges and universities will evidently have to tighten their belts for some time. Counterintuitively, it would be the lack of resources rather than a surfeit of them that could spur positive change among our very costly but not very effective schools.

Business, education, and policy leaders tend to think in terms of inputs. Achieving goal X will require inputs that cost at least a certain amount. That common approach, which often spends more than anticipated for something less than the stated goal, will be forestalled for the foreseeable future. Budgets will be tight at public and private schools (the former due to state government budget cuts and the latter due to endowment and donation losses because of the stock market crash). Planned educational “essentials” like rock climbing walls, expanded sports stadiums, and new buildings for administrators will have to be put on hold and possibly canceled altogether.

If, as seems likely, a recession or depression hits, student applications may well increase. They have in previous downturns because people who are out of work have a lower opportunity cost of time. But schools shouldn’t count on revenues increasing since many applicants will need more financial aid than they previously would have. In addition, universities that are reliant on foreign students (who often pay full tuition) will be stressed due to travel restrictions and cautious parents keeping their children closer to home.

On the plus side, biology and nursing departments and medical schools may find themselves flush with grants and donations—but likely at the expense of other programs. Universities may urge private donors left on the fence by the stock market crash to donate to promote public health education and research, money that pre-COVID-19 would have gone to general, or other specific, ends.

The nation will benefit to the extent that targeted donations actually improve future health care delivery, but too often more money does not lead to better outcomes. Already, professors from poetry to physics are scrambling to grab a piece of the expected windfall. Such rent-seeking, as economists call it, create deadweight losses, in this case, political and research efforts expended solely to seize COVID-19 funding for department X or program Y, some of which could not define or even spell epidemiology a month ago and that still cannot discern the difference between a positive economic demand and a negative supply shock.

As Richard Vedder has pointed out, the financial strain may bankrupt some schools outright, while sending others into a debt spiral as they borrow to cover lost revenue and to ramp up online teaching capacity. (One small college that recently announced its closure is MacMurray College in Illinois.) I would not be surprised to see the various university ranking services add more weight to pandemic preparedness, which will induce universities to try to outspend each other in those areas to improve their relative position in the rankings.

Tight budgets can be a good thing because they force leaders to make difficult decisions and to focus on what is most important.
Spending on preparedness is better than spending on sports or other frills or administrators of dubious necessity, but the race to outdo competitors in artificial rankings often leads to irrational overspending, a.k.a. a race to the top (or bottom depending on one’s perspective). One imagines administrators are already cooking up new fees to fund the acquisition of mask and toilet paper stockpiles.

Tight budgets can be a good thing because they force leaders to make difficult decisions and to focus on what is most important. A big federal bailout would forestall such a reckoning by allowing universities to continue spending recklessly on projects not closely connected to pedagogy and student learning.

Thankfully, other, less-costly, more student-centered responses remain open, including the one that I outlined in a Martin Center article a year ago. The core idea is for universities to invest in their students instead of the stock market by lending them their tuition. For starters, loans to productive people retain their value much better than stocks do. While SLABS (student-loan asset-backed securities) may or may not plummet in price in the coming weeks depending on federal legislation and COVID-19’s course, loans made directly from universities to students would likely hold up well during downturns, if only due to widespread unemployment insurance and federal subsidies to workers. Moreover, they would not be “marked to market” as stock portfolios are.

Obviously, the present moment is an inopportune one to convert an endowment mostly composed of beaten-down corporate shares into one mostly composed of loans to students. But an innovative approach like this, already successfully employed by Hillsdale College, could attract enough new money to fund a pilot program for students with marginal income and credit who otherwise might attend a less-expensive institution, or none at all. Also, most universities can borrow more cheaply than students can, creating a “spread” that could help all three parties—institutional lenders making safe loans at, say, 2 percent, students obtaining loans at a below-market rate of, say, 6 percent, and universities pocketing the difference, minus expenses.

Moreover, such a lending program could work wonders helping to recruit new students and retain old ones. Students and parents would not have to worry about finding financing in troubled times but, more importantly, is the signal such a program would send. The main insight behind the proposal, after all, is to more closely align the incentives of universities with those of their students who, obviously, will succeed or fail together.

As stock valuations improve, which they eventually will, universities with successful pilots can convert more and more of their endowment to loans to students. Soon, they will have strong incentives to find ways to improve student outcomes at the lowest cost possible, without accreditors or government bureaucrats adding costs or constraining innovation. Surely, we will not all live happily ever after, but we will all be happier when universities routinely produce graduates with the most marketable skill in history: The ability to think rationally and independently, which also happens to be the most important civic skill as well.

Lending to their own students is just one of many routes institutions of higher education could take in the post-COVID-19 world—provided that federal and state governments allow innovations to occur. But if Washington just showers cash on colleges, they will soon be back to business as usual, which means imposing a high cost on the country while failing to turn out high numbers of what the country needs most right now: Emersonian independent thinkers.

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American Professors Whitewash Islamic Terror

Muslims have at times allied with Europeans, sometimes even against fellow Muslims; as such, why see any Muslim attacks on Europe as ideologically driven—as jihads (“holy wars”) against the infidel? Why not see them all as generic wars? Such is the academic world’s main apologia against the notion that Islam’s military expansion throughout history was driven by a theological mandate.

Thus, weeks before my recent lecture on the topic of my book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, at the U.S. Army War College, another speaker was brought in to present an “alternative view.” That speaker was John Voll,* professor emeritus of Islamic history and past associate director of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. (This center was “gifted” 20 million dollars from Prince Alwaleed—a Wahhabi who suggested that the 9/11 attacks were based on America’s position “toward the Palestinian cause”—for the express purpose of improving Islam’s image in the West.)

According to the Army War College’s advertisement:

In contrast with the well-known story of Muslim-Christian military conflict, less well-known is the long history of Muslim-Christian alliances and cooperation, even in times of conflict. Voll will address risk of misunderstanding when the history of clashes between Islam and the West is viewed in broad generalizations. Voll will focus his discussion on alliances and conflicts in the modern era...
Weeks after he presented, Voll reasserted these themes in a less-than-honest Army Times report that depicted him as “a more mainstream speaker … who CAIR-Philadelphia did not object to” (as opposed to me):

Voll does not agree with Ibrahim’s view that Christians and Muslims are almost inevitably at odds. Extreme advocates of this “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis tend to deal with only half of the historical record of relations between the West and Islam, he said in an email.

“While the history includes many wars and conflicts, that history also includes many experiences of cooperation and alliances,” Voll explained. “To ignore the history of Muslim-Christian cooperations and only emphasize the conflicts is to present a misleading narrative that opens the way for dangerous misunderstandings of world history in general and current global affairs in particular.”

Is this true? Yes and no. Yes, Muslims have (infrequently) allied with non-Muslims, in this case, Europeans. No, this does not prove that the exponentially greater, perennial attacks on every corner of Europe were not ideologically driven by jihad. It merely proves that Muslims are pragmatic—which Islam endorses—and willing to ally with whomever best serves their interest.

For instance, in its announcement, the Army War College noted that “Voll will focus his discussion on alliances and conflicts in the modern era, to include the history of the Anglo-Egyptian relationship, and the enemy-ally transitions of the Sanusiyyah and the Angle-American powers of World War II and the Cold War.

Why the “modern era”? Could it be that, as opposed to the twelve centuries of Islamic raids on Europe (circa. 634-1830, when Barbary was subdued), Muslims have been remarkably weak vis-à-vis infidel Europe beginning in the late modern era and therefore had much to gain by allying with them?

Relying on the late modern era—the last two centuries which Voll bizarrely claims represent “half of the historical record of relations between the West and Islam”—to explain the totality of Islamic/European relations (nearly fourteen centuries) is, of course, one of the oldest tricks relied on by Islamophilic academics: presenting rare exceptions (alliances with non-Muslims) to the rule (jihad against infidels) as the rule itself.

This is well epitomized by the recent book, Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North, by William Polk, a retired professor of history at Harvard (my complete review here). Despite its ambitious subtitle, only some 30 of its 550 pages deal with the first millennium (when jihad was the norm—not that Polk mentions it even here); 95 percent is devoted to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the “modern era.” As with Voll, this lopsided approach allows Polk to present Muslims as, not just occasional allies of the West, but its eternal victims as well.

However, as much more balanced historians such as Bernard Lewis put it:

We tend nowadays to forget that for approximately a thousand years, from the advent of Islam in the seventh century until the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam, the double threat of conquest and conversion. Most of the new Muslim domains were wrested from Christendom. Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were all Christian countries, no less, indeed rather more, than Spain and Sicily. All this left a deep sense of loss and a deep fear.
“We tend nowadays to forget” these troubling facts precisely because those most charged with reminding us—the professional historians of Islam, the Volls and Polks of American academia—go out of their way to suppress them.

Moreover, Islam’s modus operandi has always relied on circumstances. When Muhammad was weak and outnumbered in his early Meccan period, he preached peace and made pacts with infidels; when he became strong in his Medinan period, he preached jihad and went on the offensive. This dichotomy—preach peace when weak, wage war when strong—has been instructive to Muslims throughout the centuries.

Indeed, when it comes to making life easy for Muslims, particularly vis-à-vis infidels, Islamic law (shari‘a) is remarkably lenient, via the doctrine of taysir (ease). It is why millions of Muslims—who under strict shari‘a are banned from willingly relocating to infidel nations—are flooding the prosperous West: it is beneficial to them, even if they hate and occasionally abuse their hosts (which, for some clerics, validates their presence as a form of jihad).

At any rate, ignoring the first millennium of Muslim/European history—when Islam was frequently stronger than Europe, and therefore regularly waging jihads on it—and focusing only on the last two centuries—when Islam has been much weaker than and therefore often “friendly” to the West—is truly what “present[s] a misleading narrative that opens the way for dangerous misunderstandings of world history in general and current global affairs in particular,” to quote Voll, though in reverse.

* As an amusing side note, I actually sat in on one of Voll’s courses on Islamic history at Georgetown University nearly two decades ago. An apparently too challenging or contentious question I asked concerning what he was saying ended, I distinctly recall, with a curt response and a very dirty look—and my deciding not to sign up for his class.

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Cambridge finalists will be given 'safety net' in exams as university insists it is not 'dumbing down' degrees

(A bachelors degree in England is normally awarded after THREE years)

Cambridge University finalists will be given a “safety net” in their exams as the institution insists it is not “dumbing down” degrees due to the coronavirus pandemic.

For the first time in the university’s 800 year history, exams will largely be completed online rather than by hand.

Professor Graham Virgo, senior pro-vice-Chancellor for education at Cambridge said he has done all he can to ensure that the new format of exams will be rigorous and fair, but added that “there are no precedents on which we can rely” for the current situation.

He explained that final year undergraduates will be given a “safety net” which means that as long as they pass their exams, they will not receive a degree class that is lower than the class they were awarded in their second year exams

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