Wednesday, September 23, 2020


Trump Promotes Pro-American Education in Schools

To make America great again, Americans must know what it was that made our nation great in the first place. On Thursday, President Donald Trump set about addressing this by issuing an executive order creating the 1776 Commission.

The president explained the motivation behind his order, stating, “The narrative about America being pushed by the far left and being chanted in the streets bear a striking resemblance to the anti-American propaganda of our adversaries.” Noting Critical Race Theory, the training that he banned for federal employees just two weeks ago, Trump asserted, “This is a marxist doctrine, holding that America is a wicked and racist nation — that even young children are complicit in oppression — and that our entire society must be radically transformed.”

He cited a controversial pamphlet on “Whiteness and White Culture” that had been produced by the Smithsonian Institution for the National Museum of African American History and Culture but was later changed due to public backlash. “[It] alleged that concepts such as hard work, rational thinking, and the nuclear family and belief in God were not values that unite all Americans, but were instead aspects of whiteness,” Trump noted. “This is offensive and outrageous to Americans of every ethnicity. It is especially harmful to children of minority back grounds who should be uplifted, not disparaged. Teaching this horrible doctrine is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.”

The president also blasted that infamous piece of leftist histrionics known as the 1619 Project, saying, “This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principles of oppression, not freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth. America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.”

“Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character,” Trump declared, “We must clear away the web of twisted lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

Therefore, Trump stated the 1776 Commission “will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding.” By teaching the nation’s young “to love America with all of their heart and soul,” Trump argued, “we will save this cherished inheritance for our children, for their children, and for every generation to come.”

With this latest EO, Trump has not only sought to stop the promulgation of poisonous anti-American Marxist propaganda, but he’s gone on the offensive in recognizing that America’s youth must not be robbed of the true knowledge of their glorious birthright. There is no nation more deserving of its citizens’ love, appreciation, and commitment than the United States.

SOURCE

When Student Debt Is A Good Thing (And When It’s Not)

Student debt has a bad reputation. It’s under attack from the left, which sees debt as a ball and chain that ruins the lives of young people who had the audacity to seek a decent education. Many on the right share this dim view of student debt but lay the blame at the feet of a higher-education bubble that cannot get its costs under control.

There’s merit to both of these views. Student debt can sometimes ruin lives, and the federal student loan program has indeed driven bloat and a proliferation of useless degrees. But the truth is more complicated.

While it can cause problems when employed in the wrong way, student debt can also be beneficial when used responsibly. The question is not whether we should eliminate student debt, but how we can ensure it is used only for beneficial purposes.

If the education is worth it—a big if, as we shall see—it will yield an earnings payoff in the future. Debt can help students with a liquidity issue, but it can also harm their career prospects if they take on bad debt.

When is student debt a good thing? “Good” student debt finances credentials that provide adequate value relative to their cost, increase lifetime earnings, and supply students with skills that are useful in the labor market and in life. “Bad” student debt deviates from this ideal in one or more respects. In discussing the “bad” sort of debt, many critics of higher education’s loan dependency have a point. But too often, the condemnation of “bad” debt fails to come with an acknowledgment of “good” debt.

A new NBER working paper quantifies the beneficial effects of student debt.

The study found that when students borrow slightly more, they are more likely to graduate college and enjoy higher earnings down the road. There was little quantifiable impact on student loan defaults or homeownership rates: the additional debt was an unambiguous net positive for the students observed. If a student starts college, takes on debt, and makes satisfactory academic progress, it is better to take on more debt rather than drop out.

Student loans provide the extra liquidity students may need to get across the finish line in college. Financial aid grants can help cover tuition, but there are other costs to consider. An unpaid fee or a car repair bill can mean the difference between graduation and dropout. That’s why students in countries with free college tuition, such as Sweden, still typically borrow five figures while in school. Debt can be a useful tool to cover living costs and surprise expenses, not only tuition.

All this presumes that the loans are financing a worthwhile education. In many cases, the value of a college degree is clear. For instance, students who earn bachelor’s degrees in engineering and nursing typically enjoy upper-middle-class salaries right out of college. At the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the typical nursing student earns a starting salary of $58,200, which is more than enough to manage a median debt load of $22,461. These credentials supply students with skills that are directly applicable to important jobs. Society as a whole is better off when students have loans as a tool to finance college education in these fields.

Unfortunately, much student debt often falls short of this ideal.

There are three principal categories of “bad” student debt:

For people who borrow but never complete the degree, student debt can truly ruin lives. About two in five students fail to finish college within six years, with dropouts concentrated at for-profit schools and community colleges. In North Carolina, 38 percent of students do not complete college within six years.

Non-completers are far more likely to default on their student loans, and the frequency at which students drop out means that over 20 percent of undergraduates default within five years. When borrowers default, the federal government is empowered to garnish their wages, seize their tax refunds, lower their credit scores, and add fees and penalties to their balances that can run into the thousands of dollars.

Most borrowers who drop out and default on their loans would have been better off not going to college at all. While policy changes can improve completion rates at the margin, many dropouts were never prepared for college to begin with and would have been better off pursuing other opportunities.

Yet these students were both encouraged and enabled to go to college by the heavily subsidized federal student loan system.

Other students graduate college but find that their degrees were not worth the cost. For instance, studies have shown that the average MBA graduate is no better off financially than he would have been in the absence of the degree.

An analysis by the Texas Public Policy Foundation shows that 30 percent to 40 percent of educational programs leave students with too much debt to justify the wages they earn in the labor market. Even at elite institutions, some degrees leave students with few well-paying job prospects after graduation. For instance, UNC-Chapel Hill students who earn a master’s degree in social work incur median student debt of $54,500 against a starting salary of $42,300; this equates to a debt-to-earnings ratio of 129 percent.

Students in this situation may be able to pay off their loans without defaulting, but they’re still paying too much and receiving too little.

The least visible problem with student debt, and consequently the trickiest to solve, is credential inflation. Subsidized student loans, along with other forms of financial support for higher education, enable more people to get degrees. Unfortunately, this leads employers to expect degrees from job candidates, even when those jobs have not required degrees in the past. Degree requirements lead people to take on student debt and earn college degrees when the needs of the labor market don’t justify it. Even if the borrowers themselves can use the debt to get access to better-paying jobs, the cost of their unnecessary education still acts as a drag on the economy overall.

How can we steer student debt toward its beneficial uses and away from funding noncompletion, low-value degrees, and credential inflation?

Different problems call for different solutions. Colleges should be financially accountable for a portion of student loans that are not paid back, which will encourage them to increase completion rates and de-emphasize low-value majors. There should be limits on the amount students can borrow from the federal government, particularly at the graduate level, to discourage degrees whose value doesn’t justify their cost. Governments and the private sector should invest in alternative credentials, such as apprenticeships and third-party certifications, to knock the expensive bachelor’s degree off its perch as gatekeeper to high-paying jobs.

And when things do go wrong, policymakers should find ways to make paying for education less burdensome, such as replacing debt with income-share agreements.

The federal government issues roughly $100 billion in new student loans every year, and much of that qualifies as “bad” debt. But the total eradication of student debt should not be the goal, since student loans can still be beneficial when used correctly. Instead, the right reforms can turn student debt from a drag on borrowers and the economy into a tool of individual empowerment.

SOURCE

Reclaiming the American University

Afew weeks ago, I learned I was blackballed by the major journal in my academic field, Rhetoric Society Quarterly. I have both published in, and served as a peer reviewer for, this journal in the past. I learned I was censored through a curt email exchange with the editor (Dr. Jacqueline Rhodes) after she refused to send my most recent essay out for peer review. Although she said the essay would be of interest to those in the field of rhetoric, she unilaterally decided it “wasn’t ready” for publication, despite its perfect alignment with the stated aims of the journal and the instructions for authors on the journal’s website. Because these judgments are typically left to peer reviewers, I asked for clarification—what was it about the essay that made it so “unready” that it couldn’t even be sent out for peer review?

Eventually, Dr. Rhodes replied that she was unwilling to publish anything that might be construed as “racist or transphobic, even in passing.” This made no sense. My essay’s topic was not even remotely related to race or gender politics. It was about people who take on assumed identities when trying to disappear from society. However, there was one sentence that Dr. Rhodes found “troubling.” In it, I made reference to my recent book, Metanoia, in which I offer a comparative analysis of the transformations of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal. Of course, my reference to my own work was made in the third person so that peers wouldn’t know that I also wrote the essay (a requirement for a blind review).

Further, I explicitly framed the current essay as a corrective to certain claims I made in my earlier work. Under these circumstances, it is clear that Dr. Rhodes did not have any problem with the essay I submitted. She had a problem with the fact that it was Adam Ellwanger who had written the piece, given her familiarity with my recent research (and her likely awareness of the regular conservative commentary that I publish online). If the work was truly not “ready” for publication, then the process of peer review would have confirmed that. The truth, though, is that Dr. Rhodes didn’t send the piece out for peer review precisely because she wanted to ensure against a positive reception from the reviewers, which would require its publication.

The Extent of the Damage

Honestly, I was not surprised that an editor would circumvent the peer review process to avoid publishing research that didn’t align with her personal political agenda. I suspect this has happened to me more than once. What surprised me was that Dr. Rhodes was the first editor to admit that political bias was the reason for the rejection. And while I commend her for her honesty, this censorship embodies only one of the many ways, covert and overt, that university policy and academic practice have been weaponized to advance the progressive ideological agenda, punish dissenting faculty, and propagandize new generations of students.

These trends have been worsening for at least a decade, but in 2020 we are past the point where college campuses are merely “inhospitable” to open inquiry and debate. They are now openly opposed to the American tradition of free speech, which is indispensable for learning and intellectual advancement. For many years, dissident professors were silent about these phenomena. But as we saw colleagues drawn into frivolous and fraudulent Title IX inquiries, watched searches for new faculty members turn steadily into ideological litmus tests, and saw even off-campus speech become increasingly policed by university representatives, many recognized that these trends wouldn’t simply blow over.

Over the last five years, many professors dedicated to the traditions of open inquiry and free speech have vocally expressed their opposition to the ideological drift of the climate in higher education. But sadly, public criticism and the voicing of dissent has done nothing to check these illiberal forces. On the contrary: they have only tightened their grip on the academy.

Just this week there have been reports of a Northwestern University Law School meeting at which participants were required to confess their own racism before participating, and an architectural design class in which Trump supporters were banished on the first day.

It is now evident that criticism of these trends is not enough: the bureaucratic culture of the university is resolutely committed to enforcing intellectual conformity, and the administration is all too willing to cave to pressure from the loudest, most belligerently political factions of the student body and faculty.

For university representatives concerned about the future prospects of our universities, there remains only one mode of resistance: personal non-compliance with the policies and procedures that have reinvented our institutions as communes for dogmatic groupthink.

SOURCE

False rape allegations at Australian universities

Bettina Arndt

Do survivors of unwanted staring really have trouble passing exams? Well, that’s the inherent assumption in a submission from End Rape on Campus to the Federal Government objecting to their Job-Ready Graduates legislation which proposes to remove government-funded loans from students who can’t pass half their subjects.

The submission claims to be advocating for survivors of sexual violence, suggesting they fail or drop out of most of their courses while dealing with the universities complaint processes, and can’t support themselves through regular employment due to the effects of the trauma. “EROC Australia believes that the measures relating to academic performance would have a devastating impact on the ability of students who have experienced sexual violence to gain an education.”

Note the careful use of the term “sexual violence.” End Rape on Campus deliberately uses this umbrella term to cover both sexual harassment and sexual assault, while implying they are only talking about rape victims. Sharna Bremner, founder of EROC Australia, actually tweeted this week that the government legislation would “punish student survivors for being raped” but her use of language in the submission is far more slippery.

It was the Australian Human Rights Commission which latched onto the term “sexual violence” to cover up the disappointing result of their million-dollar survey into what was widely called the “campus rape crisis.” They found 99.2 % of students surveyed reported no sexual assault. Most campus victims turned out to be survivors not of assault but low grade sexual harassment which the survey found to be mainly unwanted staring.

So unwanted staring is actually at the heart of the campus crisis but naturally EROC activists are reluctant to admit their case rests on proving a leering male gaze can derail a student’s education. So they fudge things by throwing in a few points about the special trials faced by actual sexual assault victims – which are no doubt very real – midst sweeping claims about the shattering impact of “sexual violence”.

These are very tricky operators. That’s why Bremner and her cronies have not only managed to hoodwink most of the mainstream media into taking seriously their claims about a campus rape crisis but also have become major players in tertiary education policy.

Dracula running the blood bank

Amazingly, Sharna Bremner is fourth in the list of 13 authors on the recent “Good Practice Note ” on sexual assault and harassment recently issued by our university regulator TEQSA.

This alarming document encourages universities to keep adjudicating rape on campus, showing a total disregard for last year’s Queensland Supreme Court decision which determined these kangaroo courts to be illegal and thumbing its nose at Education Minister Dan Tehan’s instruction that these matters should be handled by criminal courts.

So, our major regulatory body with oversight of our vast tertiary sector sees no problem in proudly acknowledging this activist is instrumental in steering our universities still further into the illegal quagmire of our kangaroo courts. And it was her lobby group that was largely responsible for persuading the tertiary sector to buy into the manufactured rape crisis in the first place. Talk about Dracula running the blood bank.

It speaks to the extraordinary arrogance of TEQSA which sees no need to show any semblance of objectivity as they continue to lean on universities to ensure they usurp criminal law to appease the feminists.

And Bremner still isn’t satisfied. This week, EROC was on twitter arguing more needs to be done to force the universities to get more active in this area.

Email from Bettina Arndt: newsletter@bettinaarndt.com.au

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