The University of Texas Belatedly Helps Poor Kids

Of all the major public universities in America, the one I have found consistently the most frustrating and behaviorally maladroit is the University of Texas at Austin (UT). UT has easily the largest endowment of any American public university—double any competitor. It is in the second most populous state, one that is booming, rapidly gaining human and physical capital resources. By now it should have easily become one of the top three state universities in the country. But UT, although a very good school, is generally considered not quite the equal to at least a couple of the University of California campuses (Berkeley and UCLA), not to mention flagship universities in states such as Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina and Illinois.

Besides buying prestige and hopefully academic excellence, a large endowment and a booming economy should allow Texas to provide essentially tuition free education to large numbers of students. Most of the endowment’s operating funds are constitutionally earmarked for the Austin campus, and I have previously argued that UT has the ability to make the Austin campus tuition free for all undergraduates (just as private Harvard, Yale and Princeton could). Given its endowment size of well over $20 billion, the school should have roughly one billion dollars annually in endowment income to spend, and total tuition payments of undergraduate Texans attending Austin surely do not exceed $300 million or so annually.

The UT Board of Regents has approved a plan reducing tuition to zero for all in-state undergraduate students from families making under $65,000 annually, with some tuition assistance for others making up to $125,000. A new endowment, initially funded with $160 million taken from the massive main Permanent University Fund, will finance the program (although I do not think that would be enough to permanently finance tuition remissions). About 8,600 in-state undergraduate students (about 25% of the total ) will be impacted. The University of Michigan, nicely but less opulently endowed, did something similar last year. Rice University has recently gone tuition free for many of its students, returning to its roots (it was originally a tuition free school). Several Ivy League schools did a similar thing more than a decade ago.

Thus the Sanders/Warren call for free tuition is nothing new for many high quality universities. Here is the dilemma: the best and brightest kids from lower income families can go to those schools tuition free, while less academically capable low income kids go to schools that are not only less good academically, but often more expensive because they are poorer institutions with less generous financial aid. Some might argue this exacerbates the already huge differences between the haves and have nots: institutional and student inequalities. While progressives find this offensive, there are defensible arguments for providing free tuition for the best of our lower income students but not for others. Such a scheme combines dimensions of both merit (high academic performance gets the best students into rich schools like Harvard or UT) and need— financial assistance is earmarked for lower income kids but not more affluent ones.

The new Texas tuition plan revealed that UT students are mostly from affluent families—surprise! Some of the 25% who will be receiving free tuition actually come from households with income above the Texas median—meaning more than 75% of Texas residing undergraduates come from families that range from moderately affluent to downright rich. In this, of course, UT is similar to many other flagship universities. The correlation between family income and student high school academic performance is highly positive.

The hard truth is higher education does not promote income equality in America, nor can it do so without significantly reducing the academic quality (learning) at our nation’s leading universities. Many kids who are poor are economically disadvantaged because of a unproductive family culture: an environment of less hard work, less discipline. The poverty rate is very low (2.1 % in 2017)) for full-time year-round workers, vs. 21.4% for those not working. Thus most poor kids are probably not surrounded by a strong work ethic. Not surprisingly, these kids struggle academically. So while UT is reaching out to those who are both very good students and poor, this is a small minority of low income Texans

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Trans Crusade: Teacher Fired for Not Using Male Pronouns to Refer to Female Student

On Monday, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a lawsuit on behalf of a high school French teacher who was fired after he refused to use male pronouns to refer to a female student who identifies as transgender. Peter Vlaming gladly referred to the student by her preferred traditionally masculine names, and he avoided using pronouns in class. Rather than accepting this compromise, the school board fired him for refusing to use male pronouns.

"Peter went out of his way to accommodate this student as he does all his students; his school fired him because he wouldn’t contradict his core beliefs," ADF Legal Counsel Caleb Dalton said in a statement. "The school board didn’t care how well Peter treated this student. It was on a crusade to compel conformity."

Vlaming "works hard to make his students feel welcomed. In his French class, he always calls his students by the name they choose. He even used the student’s preferred masculine name and was willing to avoid using pronouns in the student’s presence," Dalton added. "He just didn’t want to be forced to use a pronoun that offends his conscience. That’s entirely reasonable, and it’s his constitutionally protected right. Tolerance, after all, is a two-way street."

"I love French. It’s fascinating and beautiful," Vlaming said in a statement. "I fell in love with it while in high school. After that and spending 11 years in France after college, I saw more than ever how learning a foreign language opens doors to whole new worlds for people... I’m saddened that West Point Public Schools wouldn’t work with me to reach a happy situation for everyone on this matter so that we could all continue on with learning in mutual respect."

Vlaming is suing the West Point School Board, the superintendent, and the principal and vice-principal of West Point High School in West Point, Va. The fired French teacher sued them for violating his free speech, engaging in viewpoint discrimination, and retaliation against him, violating his free exercise of religion, violating his rights to due process and from government discrimination, breach of contract, and violating civil rights law by applying a non-discrimination standard that goes beyond Virginia law. He is asking for $500,000 in damages for lost wages and benefits and $500,000 for the loss of reputation and emotional distress, along with attorney's fees.

The dispute began in October 2018, when the female student asked to meet with Vlaming. She claimed others had told her that the teacher referred to her using female pronouns, and he promised not to use such pronouns. He spoke with the girl's parent over the phone and explained the situation, also taking time to express "his appreciation of the student's humor, wit, and intelligence." The parent shot back that "Mr. Vlaming should leave his principles and beliefs out of this and refer to the student as a male."

The French teacher spoke with the assistant-principal in person and called the principal over the phone to discuss the situation. They advised him to follow the parent's wishes. The assistant-principal gave him documents from the National Center for Transgender Equality that had been deceptively edited.

'The documents the assistant principal gave Mr. Vlaming were from a political advocacy organization and were based on a guidance letter from the Department of Justice and Department of Education that had since been repealed," the lawsuit explains. "The assistant principal stated that his non-use of pronouns was not enough: that he should use male pronouns or his job could be at risk."

"Mr. Vlaming believes both as a matter of human anatomy and religious conviction that sex is biologically fixed in each person and cannot be changed regardless of a person’s feelings or desires. Saying ‘he,’ ‘him,’ or ‘his’ objectively expresses the message that a person is, or the speaker believes them to be, male," the lawsuit explains. "Mr. Vlaming’s conscience and religious practice prohibits him from intentionally lying, and he sincerely believes that referring to a female as a male by using an objectively male pronoun is telling a lie."

Yet the principals refused his repeated requests for a compromise position. On October 31, they told Vlaming he "must use male pronouns to refer to this female student," and warned that he "would receive a letter of reprimand formally charging him with non-conformity with school board policy for not using male pronouns for this student."

Later that day in class, the girl took part in an exercise using virtual reality goggles. She had a partner to keep her from slamming into the wall, but her partner did not see that she was in danger. She was going to hit the wall, and Vlaming exclaimed, "Don't let her hit the wall!" He apologized to the student, but he was suspended later that day.

The superintendent gave Vlaming a directive, ordering him to refer to the girl using male pronouns. When he refused, the school board voted to terminate his employment on December 6. Students protested his firing with a walkout the day after.

"This isn’t just about a pronoun, it’s about what that pronoun means," ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer, director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom, said in a statement on the case. "This was never about anything Peter said or did; only about what the school was demanding he say. Nobody should be forced to contradict his core beliefs just to keep a job."

This French teacher was fired for refusing to speak in a certain way that violated his conscience. He had pledged to refer to this girl by her chosen name in order to avoid the pronoun fight, but the school's leaders deemed that insufficient. Instead, they pursued a transgender "crusade" against the heresy of biological reality and traditional beliefs about men and women.

Sadly, Vlaming is far from alone in facing steep penalties for opposing transgender ideology. The ACLU is suing a Catholic hospital for refusing to perform transgender surgery. Democrats have demanded Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson resign after the media twisted his words on transgender identity. A British tax expert was fired for disagreeing with transgender ideology. University of Louisville Professor Allan M. Josephson was effectively fired for the same reason.

Vlaming has a powerful case, and ADF has a long and impressive track record of success, including many Supreme Court wins like Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018).

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Spare us the diversity divas and teaching gurus

James Allan

I want now to list for you just some of the more specific problems with Australian universities. I have already hinted at the astounding level of managerialism and bureaucratic overreach in just about all of them.

What you see are top heavy and noticeably overpaid university administrations — more than 60 per cent of employees at all Australian universities are administrators and bureaucrats, not researchers and teachers.

And yet there are basically no secretaries around to enter marks or file papers or put exams into alphabetical order after marking or anything that remotely corresponds with a basic understanding of comparative advantage.

No, a proliferation of administrators in Australian universities have jobs that fall largely into the category of what has been described as “bullshit jobs’’.

If they went on strike no one would notice; indeed, the organisation would probably run more effectively. They are not really needed, these “diversity divas’’ and “how to teach gurus’’.

And yet, in Australian universities, administrators significantly outnumber those in the class and those actually producing peer-reviewed research.

Moreover, these university bureaucrats love uniformity; they impose one-size-fits-all regimes on all parts of the university (because they simply cannot leave law schools or philosophy departments to decide for themselves what is best for law or philosophy, down to the nitpicking minutiae of how many assessments you absolutely must give, or whether you can opt to have an optional assessment in your course; no, you need some recently hired deputy vice-chancellor brought in from a former teachers’ college to issue uniform diktats for all parts of the university).

Uniformity is king in Australian universities. Or, given that this deputy vice-chancellor may well be in charge of “diversity’’, let us say that “uniformity is queen’’ and let us say it while cordoning off some computer lab that will be out of bounds for anyone who is not indigenous.

As an aside, notice, too, that in the bizarre world of “university diversity’’ that “diversity’’ boils down to struggling to impose a 1:1 correlation between two or three features you find in the world at large and what these social engineers want you to find in the same ratio among university academics and, to a lesser extent, within the student body — most obviously (a) the statistically “right’’ ratio of the type of reproductive organs on campus, or (b) the “right’’ ratio of skin pigmentation specimens, or (c) the “right’’ ratio of whether, plausibly or implausibly, students and professors can claim to be a descendant of a person who arrived here tens of thousands of years ago. You never, ever, ever see “diversity divas’’ trying to get a statistical match within the university and the wider Australian public as regards political and economic outlooks. Never.

Even though in general terms over time 50 per cent of Australians vote for right-of-centre parties it is nevertheless the case that right-of-centre conservatives in our universities are exceptionally rare.

As I said, I have run through this in a different publication, but let me here give readers a taste of the lack of conservatives in universities. In US Ivy League law schools, because donations to political parties are public information there, law professors who give to the left-of-centre Democratic Party outnumber Republican ones by more than 6:1, and it is worse at non-Ivy League law schools. (And that was before President Donald Trump was elected and the ratio probably got even worse.)

After 14 years working here in a top Australian law school, and being the editor of a peer review law journal, and hence with a pretty good knowledge of this country’s legal academics, I would say that the ratio is worse here in Australia. The ratio of conservative to progressive or non-conservative law professors is smaller in Australia than in the US.

Or read Jonathan Haidt on how many academics in psychology in the US identify as right-of-centre conservatives. It is less than 1 per cent. Haidt is himself “of the left’’ but says this sort of imbalance is a disaster for students and for universities. Do any readers want to bet that here in Australia in women’s studies departments or indigenous studies departments or, heck, even in most universities’ sociology and politics departments, the percentage of righties is any better than it is with psychologists in the US?

But let me return for a moment to the astounding level of top-heavy, top-down and overcooked managerialism in Australian universities. Now, someone might well say in reply to this charge of insanely too much managerialism and bureaucratic overreach that, in fact, you actually need this bureaucratic managerialism in our universities to make things better.

Collegiality in running tertiary education institutions was not working, goes this line of response.

In other words, or so goes this claim, you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

But this is precisely the sort of argument put forward by all one-size-fits-all centralists. There is no better answer to it than the one George Orwell mordantly threw back at the defenders of the Soviet system who relied on that sort of apologist’s claim.

Asked in response to this “need to break a few eggs’’ assertion, Orwell replied “OK, but where’s the omelette?’’

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