Joe Biden’s Claim of Having Attended Historically Black College Refuted by School

He’s another Leftist psychopath

Vice President Joe Biden has a history of lying about his personal story.

He falsely claimed for years that his wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver, when in fact, police actually believed Biden’s late first wife was at fault. He also falsely claimed to have been the first in his family to go to college—a lie rooted in his plagiarizing a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock.

Last year, Biden claimed on the campaign trail to have attended Delaware State University, one of the country’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

“I got started out of an HBCU, Delaware State — now, I don’t want to hear anything negative about Delaware State,” Mr. Biden told the audience of a town hall event in South Carolina before the state’s Democratic primary. “They’re my folks.”

On Friday, the school confirmed that Biden’s claim isn’t true. Biden was never a student there.

“Vice President Biden did not attend DSU,” Carlos Holmes, director of news service for Delaware State, told the Washington Times. “However he was the Commencement keynote speaker in 2003 and [2016], and during the former he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree.”

The Biden campaign did not respond to requests for comment by the Washington Times.

What kind of excuse is there for Biden’s repeated, dare I say ‘pathological’, lying about his personal story?

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Students Are Clueless About History

Although students at many colleges are “technically” required to take a history course to fulfill their general education requirements, many institutions are extremely lenient about what counts as a foundational history class.

For example, instead of taking a survey course in American history, a student at UNC-Chapel Hill can easily fulfill their general education history requirement by taking a course entitled “Love and Politics in Early India” or “Samurai, Monks, and Pirates: History and Historiography of Japan’s Long 16th Century.”

Even history majors at UNC-Chapel Hill don’t need to study American history for their degree. They are, however, required to take a class in African, Asian, and Middle Eastern history, or Latin American history. History majors at other top schools such as the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University can also skip American history.

A 2016 report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) called the lack of knowledge of American history “a crisis in civic education.”

Every year for the past 11 years, ACTA grades colleges and universities based on whether they require key subjects such as history, math, and economics in their general education curricula. ACTA gives schools “credit” for the history/U.S. Government requirement if they require students to take “a survey course in either U.S. government or history with enough chronological and/or topical breadth to expose students to the sweep of American history and institutions.”

Many top schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UNC-Chapel Hill, UCLA, Berkeley, and Stanford don’t meet ACTA’s history standard.

All in all, ACTA has found that only 18 percent of four-year colleges require a foundational course in US history or government. Even worse, 70 percent of the nation’s top colleges do not require history majors to take a course in U.S. history.

But the bleak numbers don’t stop there. Countless surveys reveal just how ignorant Americans are of their own history. According to a 2018 survey conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, only 1 in 3 Americans would be able to pass the U.S. citizenship test. A 2011 Newsweek survey found that 70 percent of Americans didn’t know that the Constitution is the “supreme law of the land.” And according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 22 percent of Americans cannot name any of the three branches of government. In 2017, only 26 percent could name all three branches.

The First Amendment Center of the Freedom Forum Institute conducted a survey in 2019 and 16 percent of respondents said that the right to bear arms was guaranteed by the First Amendment. Twenty-nine percent of respondents agreed that the freedoms of the First Amendment “went too far.”

The National Association of Scholars found that 16 of the top 50 colleges “had mandatory or preferred survey courses in American history in 1964.” Nearly 30 years later in 1993, that number was zero.

A 2017 C-SPAN survey found that 90 percent of likely voters agreed with the following statement: “Decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court have an impact on my everyday life as a citizen.” But 57 percent couldn’t name a single Supreme Court justice.

Universities, however, don’t only fail to teach American history—they actively promote material that depicts America as racist, sexist, xenophobic, and fundamentally immoral. Pseudo-historians like Howard Zinn and error-ridden publications such as the 1619 Project have gained special prominence in both the K-12 and higher education systems.

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Of Academic Freedom and False Alarms

Three weeks ago I opened my email to find an unsolicited email from a lawyer, asking if I needed help. Odd, I thought, since I couldn’t remember getting any traffic citations recently. When I opened it, I discovered it was from lawyers at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), asking if they could help with the controversy at Appalachian State, where I teach.

What controversy? And why me? As much as I respect the work that FIRE does, in my experience, letters from lawyers are never a good thing.

A few frantic emails later, I managed to piece together what had happened.

Over the weekend, a student in my team-taught course had objected—actually, his friend’s mother had objected—to a survey he had taken for class that seemingly advocated killing Republicans, and she reported it to a Townhall.com writer.

He produced this story about a survey conducted at Appalachian State, which briefly went viral. Several days after it was posted, a friend even forwarded it to me with an angry call to defund the UNC system, totally unaware that it had happened in my class. The controversy reached the UNC Board of Governors and our chancellor.

The problem was, the story was wrong in just about every way imaginable.

So what did happen? The story starts with an opportunity provided by the current online teaching environment. Without physical classrooms, we can explore new ways of team-teaching and be in multiple places at the same time. A co-teacher and I designed a Current Political Issues course where we would each teach our own sections, but base them on shared content.

The idea was that she (a progressive Democrat) and I (a conservative Republican) would engage each other in conversations about political issues and present them online to both sections. This, we thought, would both model civil discourse for our students and let them hear sincere arguments from each side.

We began the semester by asking students to take a survey from Jon Haidt, whose book The Righteous Mind: Why We Argue about Politics and Religion argues that there are different moral “tastes” and different people are hardwired to care about values like authority, fairness, taboos, etc. differently. He argues that this occurs for evolutionary reasons—the “tribe” needs variety to adapt and survive.

In my past courses I found it helps students understand that to be useful, political debates shouldn’t about who is moral and who isn’t, but about trade-offs between different moral perspectives. That’s the context we wanted to establish for our class, and we also wanted them to become self-aware about where they themselves stand.

One student in my co-teacher’s section, however, took a different survey at the same website where Haidt’s is posted, one that she did not assign. It has since been taken down, but it sounded innocuous, a “Political and Social Values” survey. It begins harmlessly enough as well, saying that the authors just want to hear your opinion and there is no right answer.

But then it takes a dark turn, asking whether the survey takers agree with the statements like the following:

Conservatives are morally inferior to liberals,

I oppose allowing people who advocate nutty right-wing views (say on abortion, capital punishment, gun rights, and gay marriage) to speak in public, and

If a few of the worst Republican politicians were assassinated, it wouldn’t be the end of the world

Just to reiterate, we did not assign this survey, and it wasn’t a student who complained. He showed it to a friend, who showed it to his mother, who complained.

Nevertheless, even if we had assigned it, the outrage was still misplaced. In reality, the survey is designed to measure “Left-Wing Authoritarianism.” It asks extreme questions to elicit from respondents just how far they will go to suppress alternative thought.

Essentially, its authors are trying to get valid survey data to support anecdotes like those in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism or Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies. But…they didn’t reveal that until after the survey was finished due to worries that respondents would likely give false answers if they knew its actual purpose.

Intolerance is a real concern, especially for us conservatives who still persevere in higher education. Surveys like the one taken by the student are valuable because the more evidence we can gather, the stronger the case we can make for free speech protections on campus.

Besides that, though, what can we learn from this about reporting on higher education?

It is ironic, to say the least, that in a course where I may be criticized for the conservative things I intend to say, the first actual attack turned out to be a right-wing conspiracy theory. It was a useful lesson for readers not to believe everything they see, and for writers to take the time to learn the full story before they start hyperventilating.

Secondly, it strikes me as an example of how opaque academia can be to those outside its walls. In their defense, neither the author who produced the outrage clickbait nor the friend’s mother understood our pedagogical choices for the class nor the survey researchers’ intentions. Indeed, the survey—and their reaction—reminds us why research ethics committees frown on deceptive research.

While there are certainly many things those of us on the Right can and should critique about contemporary higher education, we need to keep our powder dry for those things which are really worth critiquing.

At a practical level, this opaqueness suggests that both sides—those demanding reform and those on the defensive—be more patient with each other.

Along with that, the misunderstanding exposes the dangers of an increasingly adjunctified faculty workforce.

The class design and the survey were both my idea, and as a professor with tenure, I’m confident taking controversial stances. I first publicly supported Trump in 2016 and haven’t been burned at the stake yet, at least. My co-teacher—the one who actually got into trouble—is an adjunct on contract that could easily be non-renewed. Can she be expected to pursue the university’s traditional goal of seeking truth on potentially controversial topics if some student’s friend’s mom’s media contact can potentially get her fired for something she didn’t even do?

Finally, I should say thank you to the good folks at FIRE for their offer—an offer to defend us against criticism from the Right, I would add for any readers skeptical of their intentions—but it doesn’t look like it will be necessary.

The various administrators at Appalachian State circled the wagons around us, perhaps a little too zealously, but that’s not a bad thing. The green light rating FIRE has given the university for protecting free speech was put to the test and found to be well deserved.

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Many Australians say private education is too expensive, experts warn the extra cost brings little benefit

This is transparent nonsense. It included ALL Queenslanders when it is only middle class parents who can afford it. What people think who cannot afford it is irrelevant. Around 40% of Queensland teenagers go to a private school so there are plenty who think it is worthwhile, almost the whole of the middle class, one surmises.

I sent my son to a private school and thought nothing of the fees. I got value for money in several ways — including orderly classrooms and some male teachers

I am also sponsoring a very bright lad in Scotland to the tune of $33,00 a year. With my help he is going to a top private school so that his opportunities in later life will be commensurate with his abilities. What school you went to is immensely important in Britain

Queenslanders have sounded the alarm over exorbitant school fees, with 60 per cent of Sunshine State residents saying the price of private education is too high, The Courier-Mail’s Your Say sentiment survey has found.

The survey, which garnered responses from 8000 Sunshine State residents, revealed 60 per cent of Queensland parents thought private schools were too expensive.

The Courier-Mail this year revealed that All Hallows’ School increased fees by 5.5 per cent to $11,450 for Year 7 in 2020.

Elite Brisbane Grammar School secondary fees are $27,540 per year, while sister school Brisbane Girls Grammar’s fees for Years 7-12 are $25,782 per year.

Southwest Queenslanders felt private education would cause the most hip pocket pain, with 64.72 per cent saying private education is too costly, followed by those who live in other southeast areas at 63.61 per cent.

Queenslanders in northern Greater Brisbane areas were the third most likely to think private school is too expensive with 60.85 per cent of residents in the area sounding the alarm over fees.

Sunshine Coast residents followed closely behind with 59.93 per cent objecting to private education costs, only slightly ahead of 59.08 per cent Central Queenslanders, and 59.03 per cent Far North Queenslanders.

Of those living in south Greater Brisbane, 58.8 per cent objected to private school costs, followed by 57.64 per cent of Gold Coast respondents.

The Sunshine State residents least likely to object to fees were North Queenslanders with just 54.14 per cent objecting to the costs of private education.

Southern Cross University associate professor David Zyngier said the average cost of educating a high school student was around $15,000 per annum.

“That’s the set costs for the average student so any private or non government school that charges more than $15,000, one has to ask the question what are they doing with that,” he said.

“If they’re charging $25,000 or $30,000, then parents should be asking themselves what they get for that additional money,” he said.

He explained that while parents pay more fees at independent schools, both public and private education outcomes balance out.

“Parents have been sold a story that private is better and unfortunately it is not,” Prof Zyngier said. “When you compare private schools (and public schools) with the same socio-economic status … the public school does better.”

UQ senior lecturer in education Dr Anna Hogan said there had been a trend of increasing public school enrolments.

“There seems to be an understanding in the public school sector, that middle-class parents who have the choice to pay for school fees are actually starting to more closely consider what they’re paying for education,” she said.

Parents were questioning why they would pay $30,000 in elite school costs when their children could have a good education at a select public school, she said.

He said private education meant smaller class sizes, more extra-curricular and sporting activities and more opportunities for their three children.

“There’s a strong sense of community and connections for later in life,” he said.

“I didn’t go to a private school but I personally feel the opportunities of private schools are better than what I had.”

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