I remember how it was -- JR
The shame of Britain’s ‘cash for courses’ universities
‘If you can take the lift, why go through the hardest route?’ a recruitment officer representing four Russell Group universities asked an undercover reporter for the Sunday Times.
He boasted that ‘foundation’ course pathways onto undergraduate courses at Russell Group universities are much easier than the entry requirements for British applicants: overseas applicants ‘pay more money […] so they give leeway for international students […] It’s not something they want to tell you, but it’s the truth.’
And how. The paper reports that ‘overseas students wishing to study an economics degree using one of the pathways needed grades of CCC at Bristol; CCD at Durham; DDE at Exeter; DDE at Newcastle; and just a single D at Leeds. Yet the same universities’ A-level entry requirements for UK students is A*AA or AAA.’ Odd, isn’t it, when we’re making such a noise about immigration policy favouring only the cream of international talent that we seem to be applying the opposite metric when it comes to university admissions. I don’t think it makes you a little Englander to find it perverse that it’s much harder for British than foreign students to get a place in a British university.
Britain’s higher education sector has, historically, been something to be proud of
These universities have been quick to pooh-pooh the Sunday Times’s reporting – which, as Mandy Rice-Davies might have said, ‘they would, wouldn’t they?’ They say that it can’t possibly be the case that foreign students are ‘squeezing out’ domestic applicants because, look, domestic admissions to Russell Group universities are at a record high and foreign applications have slumped. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re right about this. I would be surprised, though, if that trend was privately regarded by the average vice-chancellor with anything but horror. There’s a reason they spend millions pimping themselves abroad.
If there’s a temporary shortage of foreign students, in other words, it’s not for want of trying. The slump in foreign students, particularly from the EU, is down to that awkwardness in 2016. That and the fact our general enthusiasm for making it harder for foreigners to live here may yet put a dent in the flow of Indian and Chinese money. This will cook the universities’ gooses yet further. The way university funding is now set up means that all but a very few universities positively rely on foreigners to pay the bills.
The universities further complain that the Sunday Times failed to differentiate between the traditional, front-door admission system via UCAS and the one-year ‘foundation’ courses offered to foreign students. It seems to me that the paper differentiated between them rather well: it made the point that getting into the latter, more or less, requires the offspring of your average Chinese billionaire to be able to make a smudge on a bit of paper with his thumb, whereas the former asks a native Briton to get a clutch of A*s at A-level. They grumble that this is not comparing like with like… but that’s sort of the point.
Sure, a foundation course doesn’t guarantee a straight-C student will go on to join the regular undergraduate course the following year alongside higher-achieving British peers. But the paper found all sorts of people prepared to testify that the end-of-year exams needed to get you through aren’t especially taxing. Pass rates of between 93 and 100 per cent were reported. So the back door does, to all intents and purposes, exist.
And why on earth wouldn’t it? Vice-chancellors are encouraged to run universities as businesses, and businesses tend to look for profit. If student fees for Britons are capped at a quarter of what you can charge a foreigner, you’re going to do everything you can to get some wealthy foreigners in through the door before you go bust.
There are two models of what a university education is for, and they have always jostled along together. One is the humanistic, perhaps slightly hippy-dippy notion that learning is in and of itself a good thing: that it benefits both the individual human and the common lot of humanity, on average, to have minds expanded and assumptions tested. This is the version that thinks that the Greats are great, that studying poems for three years partially or wholly on the taxpayer’s dime is just the sort of thing a civilised society should encourage, and that universities are the engines of our commonwealth of knowledge.
Then there’s the instrumental version, which is that learning is a good thing because it increases your human capital, creates the sort of people who will power a high-skill economy, boosts the graduate’s expected lifetime earnings by a measurable amount, and all in all keeps the wheels of industry whizzing merrily round. This is the version, increasingly favoured by government these last few decades, which wants to see a return on investment one way or another. It wants its students to cover their bills; and it wants, with a view to boosting the wider economy, to encourage the sorts of students who go on to become engineers or tech wizards rather than poets. (There is, of course, a third model of what a university education is for, favoured by many undergraduates back when it was free, which had to do with getting blootered and trying to shag people, but that need not detain us overmuch here.)
As I say, these models have always jostled along together. The balance has shifted dramatically to the latter lately, with times being tough and Wordsworth looking more optional. But there’s always been a sense that universities do both things at once. I’m not sure if the current funding situation continues, though, that they are likely to be able to do either for much longer.
The trend is towards a larger number of foreign students, and a larger number of students tout court. As Kingsley Amis said, ‘More will mean worse.’ If, as the Sunday Times suggests, they aren’t starting on an even academic footing with their British fellows, teaching wealthy but derr-brained foreign students will slow the progress of the brighter kids. One lecturer told the paper: ‘They might struggle to keep up on the courses, especially with the written work, and this can mean more work for me and a slower pace for the rest of the students in the class.’
Even if these foreign cash-cows aren’t actively displacing domestic students, they are unlikely to stick around – and will become ever more unlikely to as we make it harder for foreign graduates to live and work here. In effect, they’ll swoop in, enjoy the cachet of an elite education, and then repatriate their human capital smartly to their countries of origin or to the international job market. The national circulatory system of scholarship – where the smartest graduates either boost the UK economy by working here or refresh the lifeblood of British academia with postgraduate work – will have sprung a leak. Or, perhaps, invited a vampire across the threshold.
Britain’s higher education sector has, historically, been something to be proud of. The fact that all these foreigners still want to study here is testament to that. But if its short-to-medium-term survival strategy is to lower its standards and change its demographic, which over time will diminish its attraction to foreign students in the first place, there may not be a long term.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/the-shame-of-britains-cash-for-courses-universities/ ?
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Harvard Plagiarism: Et Tu?
Fresh off the Claudine Gay scandal, an even more obvious plagiarist seems to be embedded in the ranks of Harvard University. Sherri Ann Charleston is the storied university's chief diversity officer. She was hired by the school in 2020 and was partially responsible for Gay's ascension to the presidency. Charleston previously held a similar position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where her title was chief affirmative action officer.
So you're starting to get a picture already of what sort of academic Charleston is. She is ideologically focused on Racial Marxism initiatives, much like Claudine Gay. The next question is, how is her body of scholarly work? Is she actually an academic, or is she riding on the coattails of other people's work and her own intersectional status?
An anonymous complaint has been filed against her alleging 40 examples of plagiarism in her body of academic work. Her dissertation, like Gay's, was riddled with lack of attribution or proper use of quotation marks when referencing others.
Charleston's worst offense, though, involved a 2014 paper (her only peer-reviewed work) in which she apparently plagiarized her husband. LaVar Charleston, a fellow academic of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) infrastructure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote a 2012 study for the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. He then teamed up with his wife and another academic, Jerlando Jackson, and basically republished the 2012 study through the Journal of Negro Education in 2014.
The 2014 study quoted the same interviewees as the original, and it even included the same findings. All in all, about 20% of the 2014 paper was ripped straight from the original 2012 study conducted by LaVar. What makes it worse is they cited the 2012 paper in the writings to undergird that paper's main theory.
This type of academic fraud is called "duplicate publication" and is "typically a form of self-plagiarism in which authors republish old work in a bid to pad their résumés," according to The Washington Free Beacon. "Here, though, the duplicate paper added two new authors, Sherri Ann Charleston and Jerlando Jackson, who had no involvement in the original, letting them claim credit for the research and making them party to the con."
If these allegations are true, then not only Sherri Charleston but also her husband and Jerlando Jackson all enjoyed career boosts based on this fraudulent paper. However, holding academics to account is more than just calling out their academic malfeasance. One could perhaps start to conclude that intellectual dishonesty is rife throughout the DEI infrastructure within the higher education system.
The diversity, equity, and inclusion grift is a cancer on our academic institutions, though hardly the only one. There are several insidious aspects to DEI. First, it creates a culture within academia that lets DEI adherents get away with any and every intellectual malpractice and not be held to account.
This has largely proven true until this point because DEI aligns politically with the rest of higher ed's left-leaning agendas. Second, DEIers have a built-in get-out-of-jail-free card. If anyone calls them out, they can cry racism and accusers will usually back down. Third, and finally, DEI is a disservice to those academics of color who are in university positions because of their stellar academic work and incredible teaching.
DEI isn't about merit but about making sure the playing field is equal. If individuals have to cheat to make the playing field "equal," it's justified in their minds. However, to the public at large, as well as to the scholars who didn't take the racist DEI shortcut, this is a bad look.
Harvard is once again showing just how much it has fallen from its former academic glory by those it chooses to promote to leadership.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104052-harvard-plagiarism-et-tu-2024-02-01
**************************************************Anti-Israel protesters spew anti-cop chants, clash with officers at Columbia University: ‘NYPD, burn in hell!’
Anti-Israel protesters spewing anti-cop chants clashed with police at a rally outside Columbia University on Friday — leading to nine arrests over several hours.
The “All Out for Palestine” demonstration kicked off at 3 p.m. and less than two hours later protesters waving Palestinian flags could be seen in footage posted to social media scuffling with NYPD officers in the street.
“NYPD, KKK. IDF they’re all the same,” the group chanted as at least one protester was seen being detained by police.
A swarm of screaming protesters tried to intervene and rip cops off a woman as they tried to take her into custody in a scuffle, the clip shows.
The demonstration was organized in response to allegations that anti-Israel student demonstrators were sprayed with an unknown, foul-smelling chemical on Jan. 19 while marching through the campus of Columbia University.
The two alleged assailants were banned from campus following the incident and police kicked off an investigation into what “appears to have been serious crimes, possibly hate crimes,” Interim Provost Dennis A. Mitchell said last month.
When Friday’s main protest — attended by hundreds — died down, a smaller group marched south to West 107th Street and Broadway, where more arrests were made.
“You are violent thugs. You are criminals! You are the most violent. You are the most f–king violent,” one protester in custody yelled at cops from the back of a police van.
“It is right to rebel. NYPD, burn in hell! It is right to rebel. NYPD, burn in hell!” others chanted.
A woman holding up a poster of kidnapped Israelis was chanting “Am Yisrael Chai” — a Jewish solidarity anthem — when protesters surrounded her and ripped it out of her hands.
“Don’t you dare!” the pro-Israel woman yelled before cops separated her from the crowd.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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