Two bills introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley aim to break up the education "monopoly."  

In what would amount to a societal shift of epic proportions were it to succeed, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has filed two bills in an effort to break up what he labels a “higher education monopoly” that has saddled thousands of students with massive levels of debt.

The first piece of legislation Hawley proposed aims to “amend the Federal Pell Grant Program to support career training opportunities for young Americans,” as the bill states. Toward that end, Hawley wants the Department of Education to develop “an alternative certification program” in order to allow the federal financial-aid program to be used for things like apprenticeships, digital boot camps, and other job-training programs.

“There’s no reason we should only be privileging those students who want to go to traditional four year institutions,” Hawley explained to Hill.TV in a phone interview. “We need to allow these opportunities in the form of these tax dollars to follow these students into other opportunities, other outlets that will help them get the skills they need to get the career path that’s right for them.”

Hawley insists the bills were motivated by input from his constituents. “The factor is talking to families all across our state over and over again,” he stated. “Students and workers who say they need more opportunities for jobs. They need job training. They need to get skills training. They need to get the kind of vocational training that they want and need for the workforce.”

More important, those he spoke with told him they wanted to get that training without having to take on the “burden” of financing four-year degrees whose costs have been skyrocketing. “You shouldn’t have to take on a mountain of debt and get a four-year degree that you don’t want in order to get a good job in our state or our country,” Hawley said.

Indeed. And while Hawley likens the current status quo to a “monopoly,” the term is not quite accurate — unless one is referring to a monopoly-like mentality American students and their families have inflicted on themselves for decades. While there are number of good jobs that don’t require four-year college degrees — or no degree at all — most Americans remain afflicted with the mindset best described by Mike Rowe: “There are millions of parents in the country right now, millions, who genuinely feel that if they don’t do everything they can to get their kid into a good school they will fail the kid.”

To be fair, a 1971 Supreme Court ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that maintained employers could only require educational credentials that were reasonably job-related, and that any company’s educational or testing qualifications engendering “disparate impact” violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, precipitated a change best described by a 2008 paper, “Griggs v. Duke Power: Implications for College Credentialing.” Authors Bryan O'Keefe and Richard Vedder explained that many employers, knowing that aptitude testing and high-school diplomas had become legally hazardous, began using college degrees to screen out applicants they didn’t want to hire. “Griggs turned the college degree into a ‘credential,’” the authors noted. “The content of the education did not change, but the degree — the sheepskin — became a necessary first step for a decent job.”

Hawley sees an alternative. “American students and workers need more pathways into the middle class, more opportunities to get good work and build bright futures,” he said in a statement. “And they shouldn’t have to further enrich colleges by taking on a mountain of debt or mortgage their lives in order to get a good-paying job.”

No doubt, but it will be fascinating to see if Democrats, who bemoan income inequality, while embracing the vote-buying scheme of “free” college that does nothing to mitigate higher education’s escalating costs, would opt for a very viable — and far cheaper — alternative.

Hawley’s second bill, aptly titled the “Skin in the Game Act,” directly addresses the odious dynamic whereby taxpayers are on the hook for all student-loan defaults, giving colleges no incentive whatsoever to control costs. This bill would make colleges themselves liable for 50% of student-loan defaults “used towards the cost of attendance at the institution.” Furthermore, it contains a “no offset” provision that would prohibit those same colleges from raising tuition, student fees, or any other costs associated with attendance to offset the costs of those defaults.

As Hawley explains, this bill is “meant to address the concentration of power that has accumulated in the higher education space.” He further explains that many colleges “have built massive endowments that [have] been enabled by federal tax dollars” while “they have gobbled those up and raised tuition so students have not benefited at all.”

A 2018 NPR article’s title succinctly explains why this is an idea whose time has come: “High-Paying Trade Jobs Sit Empty, While High School Grads Line Up For University.”

That’s only part of the problem. Nothing speaks to the growing level of tribalism in America better than the mentality — nurtured at countless universities around the nation — that Americans without college degrees are somehow less “worthy” than their more elitist counterparts. As Boston University professor emeritus Angelo Codevilla explains, “Our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in.”

College is an essential part of that commitment, and perhaps nothing says it plainer than the media’s shameless effort to convince Americans that only less educated or poorly educated voters carried Trump to victory in 2016.

Really? Could anything be more intellectually vapid than believing, as millions of highly credentialed Democrats and their “enlightened” followers apparently do, that there is a such a thing as “free” college or health care? Does anyone remember that our “best and brightest” brought the financial system to the brink of disaster in 2008, accumulated $22 trillion of national debt and counting, and precipitated polarization unseen since the Civil War? How many millions of Americans have been completely dismissed as “irredeemable/deplorable/bitter clingers” by those who view half the nation as “flyover country?”

And how many elitist Americans would abet millions of unskilled, uneducated illegals invading this nation in lieu of teaching their children the notion there are “jobs Americans refuse to do” is a morally bankrupt proposition driven by that same elitist arrogance?

Hawley’s bills would go a long way toward addressing a long-nurtured schism tearing this nation apart. And it behooves Congress to take on the vested interests who would oppose this attempt to level the playing field.

It’s what equality of opportunity is really all about.

SOURCE 







Ron Sullivan on defending Harvey Weinstein and the campus culture that cost him his job

“I certainly did not anticipate the reaction to the representation.”

Harvard College did not renew Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., and his wife’s contracts as faculty deans of Winthrop House, one of the school’s 12 residential communities—the culmination of a series of campus protests. The turmoil was unleashed after the New York Post reported in January that Sullivan—a clinical professor at Harvard Law School, the head of its Criminal Justice Institute and a nationally prominent criminal defense attorney—would be joining film producer Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team against a five-count indictment in New York State Supreme Court alleging rape and predatory sexual abuse.

Some students protested that his role on Weinstein’s team was inconsistent with Sullivan’s duties as faculty dean, and even that they felt unsafe with a dean who was aiding such a person.

In a Newsweek exclusive, Sullivan gave his first interview since his ouster to contributor Roger Parloff; he defended taking the case and accused Rakesh Khurana, Dean of Harvard College, of “cower[ing]” and “capitulating” to the “loudest voices in the room.”

Sullivan, 52, grew up in Gary, Indiana, where he attended public schools that were “100 percent” African American, he says. He graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1989 and Harvard Law School in 1994. Sullivan met his wife, Stephanie Robinson, when they were both students at Harvard Law School. She is also now an instructor there. She was formerly chief counsel to Senator Ted Kennedy; CEO of the Jamestown Project, a democracy-related think tank; and a national radio show host.

While serving as Winthrop House’s faculty dean, Ron Sullivan handled many high-profile cases, though most were the kind that were apt to be seen as popular causes on a college campus. He represented the family of Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. (The family won a $1.5 million wrongful death settlement in 2017.) In 2014, Sullivan designed and implemented the conviction review unit at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, which has since won release for more than 20 wrongfully convicted inmates, some of whom had served decades in prison.

In 2009, Sullivan and Robinson were named House Masters at Winthrop House. (Harvard changed the “House Master” title to “Faculty Dean” in 2016, after complaints about the term’s associations with slavery.)

On May 13, a few days after Sullivan was told that his faculty dean contract would not be renewed, Sullivan withdrew from the Weinstein representation. He cited a judge’s decision to postpone the start of the Weinstein trial from June until September, when it would conflict with Sullivan’s teaching schedule.

This has been edited for space; the full text is available on newsweek.com

NEWSWEEK: How did you come to join the criminal defense team representing Harvey Weinstein?

SULLIVAN: A colleague at the law school emailed me and asked whether I’d have any moral objection to representing Harvey Weinstein. When I got the email, I actually thought this was an ethics question—something she was posing to her class. I wrote back: Of course not. Every citizen has a right to a defense no matter how heinous the crime is or how unpopular the client. Then a few minutes later she wrote back and said, “He’d like to talk to you.”

So quickly I figured out this was not a law professor hypothetical. This was an on-the-ground reality. So I told my colleague that it was fine, and to give him my cellphone number, and we talked, and here we are.

What was your thought process as far as your position at Winthrop House and the potential reaction of the students?

I must say that I certainly did not anticipate the reaction to the representation. And I should say “the reaction at the college to the representation.” The law school was fine. [Fifty-two current and former members of the Harvard Law School faculty signed a petition supporting Sullivan.]

But I did not anticipate the reaction of the college, largely because of my history of these types of representations. Just the semester before, I was the lead prosecutor in the case against Eric Greitens, the then-governor of Missouri. And that case was all about an alleged sexual assault in the context of an invasion of privacy. So it’s not as though I hadn’t done a high-profile sexual assault case. But this one [the Weinstein case], appears to have been on the “wrong side” of the issue.

STANDING HIS GROUND “The job of an educator is to help students determine whether their feelings are rational.”STANDING HIS GROUND “The job of an educator is to help students determine whether their feelings are rational.”
You had also done some potentially unpopular cases while at Winthrop House?

Oh, absolutely. I represented [former New England Patriot] Aaron Hernandez in a double murder case. In which I won an acquittal. He was an extraordinarily unpopular figure in Boston at that time. He had already been convicted of one murder when I represented him in the double murder… There was no backlash or pushback for that representation at all. Indeed, students came to court to watch it. And, an interesting aside—later on, after I started representing Weinstein, a group of students asked if Winthrop House could rent a bus and take them to watch the Weinstein trial. Just making the point that there were still wide swaths of the student population that reacted the same way they had with the Hernandez case—or the terrorism case I tried. They wanted to see how the court system worked in action.

More HERE  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)






Federal Judge Bans Graduation Prayers, Religious Songs
    
Jesus just got banned from a South Carolina school district.

Federal Judge Bruce Hendricks issued an order against the Greenville County School District banning school-sponsored prayers, religious songs, and the use of religious venues at public-school graduations.

“The district shall not include a prayer — whether referred to as a prayer, blessing, invocation, benediction, inspirational reading, or otherwise — as part of the official program for a graduation ceremony,” Judge Hendricks wrote. “The district also shall not include an obviously religious piece of music as part of the official program for a graduation ceremony.”

The order is the culmination of a six-year legal battle between the American Humanist Association and the school district.

“The school district subjected countless students to school-sponsored prayers on what should otherwise be a celebratory and inclusive occasion for all students, religious or not,” American Humanist Association executive director Roy Speckhardt said in a prepared statement.

I spent the past year researching the stealth attacks to eradicate Christianity from the public marketplace. My findings are published in my new book, Culture Jihad: How to Stop the Left From Killing a Nation.

The court ruling in South Carolina is just the tip of the iceberg, folks.

Judge Hendricks also ordered school leaders to remove any references to prayer should they review a student’s prepared remarks.

If school officials do not review the student’s remarks, the judge said the student would be allowed to pray “provided that no other persons may be asked to participate or join in the prayer, for example, by being asked to stand or bow one’s head.”

“Moreover, in the event that a student’s remarks contain prayer, no school officials shall join in or otherwise participate in the prayer,” the judge ruled.

“We are thrilled that the court is finally putting an end to flagrant school-sponsored prayers and Christian hymns at public school graduation ceremonies,” said American Humanist Association attorney Monica Miller in a prepared statement. “This was a long fight for justice for students who do not wish to encounter government-sponsored religion at their own graduation ceremonies.”

The American Humanist Association and Judge Hendricks are culture jihadists — waging an unrelenting war to turn our cherished American traditions into a pile of rubble.

The idea that a school choir cannot perform “The Lord Bless You and Keep You” or that a child cannot invite people to pray is flat-out Christ-shaming.

SOURCE