Betsy DeVos Just Dropped Another Bomb On Princeton’s ‘Systemic Racism’

By now, you know that the Department of Education is investigating Princeton University over its president’s declaration that racism is systemically “embedded” in the university’s administrative and campus culture.

In fact, Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber went so far as to declare that “racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as in our society, sometimes by conscious intention but more often through unexamined assumptions and stereotypes, ignorance or insensitivity, and the systemic legacy of past decisions and policies.”

Did you catch that? Racism exists at Princeton “sometimes by conscious intention,” according to the university’s president.

This declaration may seem like a public confession demanded by the racial inquisition within the high church of wokeness, and it could be just that and nothing more. But declaring that conscious acts of racism exist within the administration of a university receiving federal funding is kind of a big deal, and that’s why the feds declared last week that they are demanding answers and explanations from Princeton, immediately.

For anyone who might think the Trump Administration was merely engaging in an election year press release publicity stunt, think again.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is not only taking this very seriously, but she just articulated the specific trap that Mr. Eisgruber has willfully walked into.

Appearing on the Chris Stigall Show DeVos referred to this as a “very serious matter” not once, not twice, but three times. “It is a very serious matter,” she told Stigall this morning on AM 990 The Answer in Philly.

She then went to the very crux of the issue pertaining to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which mandates that “no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

In exchange for receiving overstuffed bags of your tax dollars on a regular basis, Princeton merely has to cross a couple of “Ts” and dot a few “Is” on the federal forms. One of the minor details the university needs to declare is that it doesn’t discriminate and that it follows federal laws with regard to civil rights.

And that’s the trap Princeton just willingly walked into. DeVos laid it out to Stigall in no uncertain terms.

“You have the requirement every year, that every higher ed institution – that has any kind of federal funding going to it – must certify and declare annually that they do not discriminate and that they follow all civil rights laws. And then, on the other hand, you have an institution whose leader says ‘we are inherently, systemically racist.’ Those two cannot exist together,” DeVos explained.

And there it is. If Princeton is guilty of “systemic racism” by “conscious intention,” that means that it has not only willfully and knowingly violated the civil rights of its students, but it also means it has falsely claimed otherwise to the federal government, thus violating the Civil Rights Act and knowingly taking your tax dollars under false and deceptive pretenses.

As DeVos said, “This is a very serious matter.”

Of course, there is a way out for Princeton and Eisgruber. DeVos graciously laid that out to Stigall.

“And so, it is a very serious matter that I trust that we are going to be able to navigate… that Princeton will respond appropriately and we will work through this,” she said. “It is a serious issue and the notion that any institution would knowingly and regularly continue to operate and declare that they are not discriminatory or racist and then at the same time acknowledge they are, the two are totally incompatible.”

First of all, DeVos’s use of “knowingly and regularly” is incredibly significant because it amplifies the pattern of discriminatory practices and the routine of annually certifying that the university has, in fact, not engaged in any discriminatory practices. As DeVos says, “the two are totally incompatible.”

The only remedy for Princeton is to admit it’s not guilty of systemic racism. Anything else could mean an existential threat to the university as well as shame and humiliation for Michelle Obama’s alma mater.

That’s what DeVos signaled when she said, “I trust that we are going to be able to navigate… that Princeton will respond appropriately and we will work through this.”

The ball is now in Princeton’s court. Will it stand by its declaration that it’s guilty of systemic racism and thus admit that it has been lying to the Department of Education in exchange for federal funding? Or will it admit that this was nothing but performative grandstanding to satisfy the unsatisfiable mobs demanding that all of us declare our racism and beg for forgiveness after a penance is exacted from our flesh?

We shall see. One thing is for certain: If Joe Biden wins in six weeks and Elizabeth Warren is the new Education Secretary, this entire matter will just go away.

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Competition among schools is healthy, especially in a pandemic

With so many public school districts starting the year with 100 percent remote learning, parents are scrambling. Driven by economic necessity or desperation for quality educational options, untold numbers of parents are looking for in-person learning options wherever they can find a spot: from private and charter schools to the learning pods that have sprung up this fall. But in some school districts, the resulting competition to keep these families enrolled is not sitting well.

a person sitting at a desk in front of a window: Remote learning in Chicago public schools© Scott Olson/Getty Images Remote learning in Chicago public schools
Last month, Denver’s board of education released a statement pleading with its parents: “Stay enrolled in your school!” Their message insisted that their schools are best for children, and that keeping kids enrolled “helps ensure [their] schools have the desperately needed resources to meet the needs of [their] students and community.” Also, “For every student who un-enrolls, the district loses approximately $10,600.”

It’s hard to believe such pleas will work, in Denver or elsewhere, while families are desperate for in-person alternatives—as they are now. What’s more, it shouldn’t work, because it’s an effort to escape healthy competitive pressures to meet the needs of families—pressures that repeatedly surfaced in my discussions with numerous private, charter and public school superintendents this summer. In varied contexts, the threat of families “voting with their feet” pushed districts to keep the needs of their families in front of the loudest voices alarmed about the COVID-19 threat.

Competition, or its absence, can shape the reopening calculus. In districts where families have few choices, where charter schools are unavailable or full, private schools are unaffordable or pods are impractical, families are totally reliant on the plans of their traditional neighborhood schools. In such districts, competition hardly registers in school leaders’ decision-making. Without choices, parents clamoring for open schools cannot hold district leaders’ feet to the fire to reopen quickly, and their voices can be drowned out by more alarmist ones.

“My blood is on your hands!” and “Do you want me to die?” are real messages teachers I interviewed this summer sent to superintendents. Those outlandish messages reflect valid safety concerns of teachers—but with no counterbalance, they can amplify and exaggerate the health risks superintendents have to weigh. Public health officials can also push a one-sided view. When asked, “Who is really in charge of reopening schools?,” one superintendent responded, “I would say the health officer because he’s a ‘the sky is falling’ person. When I want to say, ‘Let’s close,’ I call him because he’ll say close until 2025.” Some parents report fearing reopening, but several superintendents said they tended to be two-income families better able to cope with closed schools and to make their voices heard. When faced with a chorus echoing “safety first,” superintendents find averting risk and asking parents looking for open schools to trust and wait to be the easy path.

In contrast, superintendents of tuition-dependent private schools feel competitive pressures acutely. As one put it, “if I don’t open face-to-face five days a week, people aren’t going to pay to come to a Catholic school.” Remote private schools face losing students when remote public school is available for free, and many have already had to close for good. Reopening in-person can be doubly good for private schools, stemming their losses and giving them a chance to grow their enrollments when public schools go remote.

If this raises lazy stereotypes of private school profiteers, don’t buy into them. Far from ritzy private schools for the wealthy, the private school superintendents I spoke to lead mission-driven organizations—and they all described their main struggle as figuring out how to reopen safely, keenly aware that such a safe reopening was the only viable path forward. A virus outbreak would disrupt the instruction they owe families in the short term, and harm their reputations in the long term. The first challenge these schools faced was retooling facilities and operations to ensure a safe return; the second was convincing teachers and parents that safety precautions would be effective, especially with neighboring public schools saying a safe reopening was impossible.

Of course, many public school district superintendents also face real competitive pressures, historically from private schools or charter schools, and now from pandemic learning pods. That competition pushes superintendents to pursue risk management, rather than risk aversion. And when parents have options, it animates their calls to reopen, forcing leaders to balance those views with the “sky is falling” contingent. In one superintendent’s words, “the safest environment is to go all remote. But if the district right next to you provides instruction, you’ve got a huge revenue loss to contend with.”

Ultimately, all superintendents, public and private, face the same challenge in this pandemic. Everyone I spoke with recognized the health and safety concerns that make remote learning a safer and easier option, but they also recognized the heavy educational losses and pressing family needs that require schools to reopen. Their challenge is to provide the best remote learning possible while schools have to be closed, and to reopen schools as soon as is prudently possible. But what passes for prudence is significantly shaped by whose voices get amplified.

Keeping competition at bay could give cover for school leaders seeking a path of risk aversion but, at least in Denver, competitive forces are part of a push toward managing risks that is bringing students back to school buildings ahead of schedule. Last week, Superintendent Susana Cordova informed teachers that the city’s youngest students would return weeks earlier than planned, “based on ongoing feedback we’ve received from our teachers, leaders, families and larger community.” When competitive pressures animate the voices of families that would be squelched without them and force more district leaders into the balanced risk management glimpsed in Denver, we should all be supportive.

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I’ve Taught High School Students Who Know the Constitution Better than Don Lemon Does

Chris Talgo

On September 21, CNN anchor Don Lemon displayed his contempt for America’s governing system, as well as his ignorance of basic civics, during a very revealing back-and-forth with his CNN colleague Chris Cuomo.

“We’re going to have to blow up the entire system,” Lemon said, referring to what he believes must happen should Joe Biden win the White House this fall.

Cuomo: “I don’t know about that. You’ve just got to vote.”

Lemon: “And you know what we’re going to have to do, honestly, from what your closing argument is, you’re going to have to get rid of the Electoral College.”

Cuomo: “I don’t see it.”

Exasperated, Lemon countered, “The minority in this country decides who the judges are and they decide who the president is. Is that fair?”

Cuomo: “We’ll need a constitutional amendment to do that.”

Lemon: “And if Joe Biden wins, Democrats can stack the courts and they can do that amendment and they can get it passed.”

Cuomo: “Well you need two-thirds vote in the congress and three quarters of the state legislatures.”

Lemon: “Well they may be able to do that.”

It is sad (and funny) that Lemon, a CNN anchor with a primetime slot, is clueless about elementary civics.

However, it is frightening that Lemon is condemning the Electoral College, which is the last line of defense against mob rule.

Unbeknownst to Lemon obviously, the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College to prevent as James Madison put it, “tyranny of the majority.”

According to Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, “The Electoral College is a very carefully considered structure the Framers of the Constitution set up to balance the competing interests of large and small states. It prevents candidates from wining an election by focusing only on high-population urban centers (the big cities), ignoring smaller states and the more rural areas of the country — the places that progressives and media elites consider flyover country.”

As Spakovsky understands, unlike Don Lemon, the Founding Fathers were well aware of the dangers that direct democracies pose to the preservation of rights for all, especially those in the minority.

Such is why they insisted that the United States not follow the example of ancient Greece, the world’s first direct democracy. Instead, the Founding fathers, in their wisdom, created a federal constitutional republic.

And under the Constitution, they made sure to enact a system that protected the rights of all, including those who live in small states. That is why state legislatures originally elected U.S. senators, not the people directly. By doing so, the states had a say in the federal legislature.

That is, until the Progressive Era, when the 17th Amendment was passed, which resulted in less power for the states and more power for the federal government.

Perhaps, one of the last vestiges of state power, at least as the Founding Fathers originally intended, lies in the Electoral College. The genius of the Electoral College is far and wide.

Not only does it ensure that multiple constituencies in several states maintain their place at the table of power, it also forces presidential candidates to barnstorm the nation in an effort to win the votes of all sorts of groups, who have a plethora of issues that they care about.

If we were to do away with the Electoral College, which is not as easy as Lemon thought it was, presidential candidates would likely travel to major cities while ignoring the wants and needs of those in rural areas and less-populated states.

Yet, I suspect that someone like Don Lemon, who has repeatedly thumbed his nose at so-called flyover country, would have no problem with this scenario. In fact, I strongly believe out-of-touch coastal elites like Lemon would welcome this with open arms.

Well, sorry Don. As things stand, the Constitution is still the supreme law of the land. And as a former teacher of American Government and U.S. History, I can say that I taught hundreds of teenagers who grasped this concept (along with other basic civic lessons) much better than you apparently do.

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Saving a Struggling College Starts with the Board

Before the COVID-19 pandemic walloped our colleges and universities, higher education had been facing threats to existing business models for years. A great deal has been written the past few years predicting the demise of large numbers of U.S. colleges and universities.

Many higher education institutions are indeed threatened. But their demise may not be inevitable; the problem may not be endogenous factors but how they are managed, and that can be corrected.

Still, the scenario has looked bleak for many small private colleges. Former Harvard Business School professor and management guru Clayton Christensen predicted that half of American colleges would shut down by 2030. One new study, “The College Stress Test, Tracking Institutional Futures across a Crowded Market”, is less alarmist than Christensen, albeit still quite concerning. The authors summarize the public conversation of higher education. They depict it as suffering a gloomy future, particularly for small, private, tuition-dependent colleges, “whose fate has already been sealed…higher education is on the brink of a crisis, and schools need to sit up and take notice.”

The smaller and more tuition-dependent an institution is, the more vulnerable it is. At many of these places, any loss of revenue can be dire. Former president of the Appalachian College Association Alice Brown wrote that “having ten fewer students than expected is a serious financial problem. Having thirty fewer is a disaster.” Former chancellor of the Minnesota State University and University of Maine systems Terrence MacTaggart characterized the situation facing small, private, low-prestige institutions rather bluntly: “Small private colleges without a distinctive niche face a harsh reality: Change for the better or risk decline and possibly going out of business.”

The headwinds facing small, private, colleges were already severe prior to the pandemic: a looming demographic cliff, soaring costs, declining revenues, competition from significantly less-expensive alternatives (e.g. state institutions, online institutions like Western Governors University and Southern New Hampshire University), alternative stackable credentials, and according to William Bennett, former U.S. secretary of education, growing sentiment questioning whether a college degree is worth it.

A business facing environmental changes of this magnitude would be expected to pivot rapidly by entering new markets, developing new products and services, jettisoning legacy systems, and rapidly innovating. Higher education, however, does not operate at the speed of business.

Decision-making in higher education does not rest solely in the executive ranks; it is often paralyzed because governance is shared between the board of trustees, the president, and the faculty.

Augustana College’s president, Steven Bahls, wrote that shared governance is broadly understood to have certain guidelines about who has authority over different spheres of activity: the faculty taking charge of the curriculum, the president conducting day-to-day management of the college, and the board having responsibility for fiduciary oversight, stewardship of the institutional mission, and hiring/firing of the president. In practice, however, this ostensibly clear-cut delineation of authority is not actually clear and can be a significant impediment to making decisions and taking action. Rather, it becomes a political process dedicated to balancing competing interests; the resultant horse-trading inevitably defers action.

This political process of shared governance is just that—political. According to Jay Schalin, the director of policy at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, most private college and university boards are effectively the owners of the institution and legally have the final say, yet they commonly relinquish that authority to the president and the faculty. If an institution is in decline and on a path to closing, it is the board of trustees that is ultimately to blame. College presidents Brian Mitchell and Joseph King state: “The institutional buck generally stops with the trustees—and therein lies the problem.”

The problem is that the board has shunned its fiduciary duties by abdicating responsibility to the president and the faculty.

The problem is that the board has shunned its fiduciary duties by abdicating responsibility to the president and the faculty.
If that sounds like the point of view of a trustee, that’s because it is. I have been a member of the board of trustees of Westminster College in Utah for over 12 years. It has been one of the great honors of my life to serve on this board. Nevertheless, I have frequently been frustrated with the pace of, or in some instances, resistance to, change. I chose to channel that frustration into the pursuit of a deeper understanding of how boards of trustees resist or contribute to change. Ultimately that led me to enter a PhD program in Leadership and Change at Antioch University; my recently completed doctoral dissertation is entitled: “Turning Around Small, Private, Tuition Dependent Colleges: How Boards of Trustees Impact Decline and Turnaround.”

This comparative case study of three colleges that flirted with going out of business but managed to turn things around focuses on the actions and attitudes of the board of trustees, rather than focusing just on the president.

Each of the institutions I studied suffered from what small college turnaround consultant Ruth Cowan called “problem blindness.” One of them was egregiously so; that institution was effectively insolvent, unable to make payroll, and buried under a mountain of payables, yet the board thought everything was fine.

The other two boards were aware of their financial troubles, but they tolerated year-over-year deficits, choosing to believe that the deficits were episodic rather than structural. Regardless of the reasons for problem blindness, the result was that each of the three colleges squandered millions of dollars.

Compounding the problem blindness of the boards was the way that each board was overly deferential to the president, contributing to these presidents engaging in wasteful, misguided, and risky pursuits. Deference to the president is inherent in the governance of U.S. colleges and universities; this is due to an asymmetry of information problem. Board members are largely volunteers and predominantly have backgrounds in business and law. Their awareness of what is going on at their campus and in the broader landscape of higher education comes almost exclusively through reports and updates provided at quarterly board meetings. Administrators, on the other hand, are usually long-term academics who are intimately acquainted with almost everything that occurs on their campus and highly informed about higher education in general. It is therefore only natural for board members to defer to the president.

The interdependence of the board and the president can be a real strength of the presidency, however, it can also lead to what long time college trustee and US Appeals Court Judge Jose Cabranes described as “back him or sack him” whereby trustees believe they should unequivocally support the president until he or she becomes objectively and obviously unfit for the position.

Loss aversion is what an Antioch University professor of education, Jon Wergin, described as the tendency to act out of fear of loss rather than to seek out the potential for gain. It is a psychological trap that people fall into in which they remain in doomed relationships or continue to gamble rather than cut their losses and walk away. Two of the institutions I studied retained presidents long past the time that enough evidence was in that they were objectively unfit. Loss aversion, plus a strong tendency to stay the course because of a past commitment even though doing so is harmful, creates an environment that makes it extremely difficult for a board to fire a president.

Optimism bias can lead to a systematic fallacy in strategy and decision-making that Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman calls “the planning fallacy.” In this dynamic, decisionmakers tend to underestimate costs, completion times, and risks while overestimating the benefits. Kahneman suggested that the root cause of the planning fallacy is decisionmakers taking an “inside view,” focusing on the specifics of a plan or budget. The planning fallacy can be mitigated by “reference class forecasting” whereby decisionmakers find a reference class of similar projects that have already been completed. The actual results of those similar projects can be used to help form an “outside view” that is almost certain to be less optimistic than the inside view.

The very nature of private college governance is a breeding ground for optimism bias. One reason is the expectation that boards will defer to the president until he or she clearly proves to be unfit. Another is the omnipresent problem of information asymmetry between the administration and the board.

Without overt effort on the board’s part, the inside view is likely to be their only view. So, if a president presents a budget to his or her board of trustees, the inertia created from the confluence of these factors all but guarantees its approval, regardless of the accuracy of the numbers. One problem with this is that expense levels are going to be set based on the approved revenue projection. In higher education, it is extremely difficult to cut expenses if the revenue doesn’t materialize. This means that not only is money wasted on unnecessary expenses, but the school may have to borrow the money in the first place.

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