The Other College Admissions Scandals

Four University of California campuses–UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara–“unfairly admitted 64 applicants based on their personal or family connections to donors and university staff,” according to a September report by state auditor Elaine Howle. UC staffers “falsely designated 22 of these applicants as student‐athlete recruits because of donations from or as favors to well‐connected families.” The family of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein was involved in the scandal.

“Richard Blum, a wealthy investment banker and Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband,” the Mercury-News reported, “was revealed Thursday as the mystery University of California regent in a state audit earlier this week who inappropriately penned a letter that likely helped a borderline student gain admission to UC Berkeley.” Blum said it was “a bunch of nonsense” and “much ado about nothing.” That would surprise the state auditor, who noted that undermining the integrity of the admissions process “deprived more qualified students of the opportunity for admission.”

In similar style, show-business types offered bribes to get their academically unqualified children into prestigious universities. That too worked against the qualified students, and the special treatment continues. U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, allowed actress Lori Loughlin to choose the prison where she will serve her two-month sentence for wire and mail fraud. As this plays out, an even bigger admissions scandal is in the works.

Proposition 16 on California’s November ballot seeks to allow “diversity” as a factor in public employment, education, and contracting decisions. In reality, the measure turns back the clock to the days of state-sponsored discrimination. Proposition 16 will repeal the 1996 Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, which bars racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment and contracting. As with the recent admissions scandals, those preferences deprived more qualified students of the opportunity for admission. If Proposition 16 passes, qualified students will again be deprived, on a scale much wider that the two other scandals. Voters should know that this has nothing to do with affirmative action.

Before and after Proposition 209, no group was prohibited from admission to California’s public colleges and universities. They can cast the widest possible net and help needy students on an economic basis. What they can’t do is give preference to students on the basis of race or ethnicity. On November 3, voters will decide whether California returns to a regime of government-sponsored discrimination.

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Necessity Is the Mother of Invention: Collegiate Entrepreneurs

To the seven digit number of viewers of my screeds in this space over the past two years, I often seem highly critical of American universities: they are costly, often teach minimal amounts, lack sufficient viewpoint diversity, are over-administered, and, especially, slow to change. Yet, with thousands of schools, there have always been exceptions, and one of the few blessings of Covid-19 is it is compelling colleges to do things differently—”forced innovation” dominates. Let me briefly highlight three academic entrepreneurs doing positive things.

Vance Fried

A recently retired professor of entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University, Fried has had a varied career as a lawyer, CPA, and businessman, and has long argued that quality higher education can be provided at a dramatically lower cost. In 2008 he did a study for my Center for College Affordability and Productivity called “The $7,376 ‘Ivies’” that argued a high quality (albeit no nonsense) education could be offered at a low cost—if we abandoned numerous campus conventions like massive elective course offerings for students, huge bureaucracies, etc. Costs per student at undergraduate schools are currently typically at least double what they need to be (about $9,000 in today’s dollars).

Professor Fried now is going further, branching into promoting low cost on-line education, applying the premise that we do not necessarily have to teach today the same way Socrates did 2,400 years ago. In his latest venture, he is offering what sounds like reasonably high quality instruction that would enable a person to earn the first two years of college for $4,000 (about $200 a course). For students in Oklahoma, he has even got the cost lower—almost free college (with some private foundation support). Through his Micro-Collegiate Academy, he has focused attention on motivated high school students wanting to dramatically lower college costs. Fried is merely one example of a whole new breed of academic entrepreneurs.

Mitch Daniels

Daniels, President of Purdue University is a jack of all trades (businessman, politician, budget director, etc.) who I write about often. He was early in proclaiming Purdue would have students residing on campus this fall. Younger Americans very rarely die of the coronavirus, and if we don’t stop school when seasonal flu numbers spike, we need not do so for covid-19, albeit we need some special precautions. He gambled (which is what entrepreneurs do) that by buying the Kaplan on-line higher education service business, Purdue could rapidly expand into on-line education, something for which it had little prior expertise. Renamed Purdue Global, the operation has grown rapidly, although apparently losing tens of millions annually in promoting a large expansion. President Daniels other innovations are too many to detail, although his pioneering of Income Share Agreements as a mode of financing school deserves special recognition.

Panayiotis Kanelos

You cannot get more traditional in higher education that Saint John’s at Annapolis and also Santa Fe. It is the ultimate classical liberal arts school, with learning centered around learning great books, works of literature, philosophy, government, etc. that led to the flowering of Western civilization. It emphatically does not subscribe to the current fashionable but incredibly ignorant view that most of the great knowledge and insight that we possess today came recently from the fertile minds of contemporary woke intellectuals.

When President Kanelos was hired president of the original Annapolis campus three years ago, he told the governing board he would like to cut tuition in half. The board allowed him to cut it by about one-third, but tied that to a gigantic fund raising program to provide extremely low cost education for lower income students. Both moves seem quite successful. Applications have grown, and the average net tuition revenue per student has actually grown: a sharply lower “sticker price,” but higher discounted net revenue per student.

Kanelos understood that the old model of increasing published tuition fees and then discounting them ever more aggressively was not working. His board supported him, and outside fund raising grew as well.

This little tale of three university presidents is far from exhaustive, but all that I can discuss in more than twice the number of words it took a country bumpkin from Flyover Country, Abraham Lincoln, to deliver the Gettysburg Address 157 years ago.

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Virginia Public School District Wants Teachers to Enforce ‘Woke’ Revolution, or Else

What has gotten into the water in Virginia?

The commonwealth has quickly gone from a purple-state battleground to embracing a kind of left-wing extremism that makes California seem almost normal by comparison.

The latest insanity comes from Loudoun County, where the school board is set to vote on a radical new code of conduct policy that is akin to something you may see in the defunct Soviet Union or in Communist China.

It should be noted that it was reported in late September that Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools paid Ibram X. Kendi, a leading purveyor of critical race theory, $23,000 to give a one-hour lecture to its staff.

Kendi is the author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” whose ideas, ironically, sound a lot like racism and encourage ruthless tyranny to boot.

Loudoun is keeping up with neighboring Fairfax County by not only wasting tens of thousands of dollars to have Kendi deliver brief lectures to staff, but is actually paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to have “diversity consultants” implement some of his ideas.

Loudoun’s proposed new policy, which will be put up to a vote in the school board on Oct. 12, will essentially enforce critical race theory in the public and private lives of teachers and school staff through a code of conduct.

According to a draft of a policy, “Any comments that are not in alignment with the school division’s commitment to action-oriented equity practices” will be subject to punishment.

“The proposed change would cover all communication by Loudoun County Schools’ employees, on campus or off, by telephone, in person, or on social media,” according to a report from West Nova News.

In addition, any kind of speech perceived as “undermining the views, positions, goals, policies or public statements” of Superintendent Eric Williams or the school board will not be tolerated.

Employees will be directed to report anyone who does not follow the guidelines.

Remarkably, the document says the new policy shouldn’t be “interpreted as abridging an employee’s First Amendment right to engage in protected speech.”

What a relief.

Oh wait, there’s more: “ … however, based upon an individualized inquiry, speech, including but not limited to via social media, on matters of public concern may be outweighed by the school division’s interest in the following.”

The following includes: “Achieving consistent application of the board’s and superintendent’s stated mission, goals, policies and directives, including protected class equity, racial equity, and the goal to root out systemic racism.”

Again, this does not just apply when staff are working in an official capacity at school, but whenever they say or do anything on campus or off.

Oh, but don’t worry, your right to free speech is perfectly safe as long as you follow the party line at all times.

This reminds me of that old joke about a Russian commissar saying there is freedom of speech in the USSR, just like in the United States. In America, you could go to the White House and yell “Down with Ronald Reagan!” without being arrested. And in Moscow, you too could walk down to the Red Square and yell “Down with Reagan!” and not be arrested.

As Rod Dreher, a columnist and author, wrote for The American Conservative, Loudoun’s proposed standards leave out the phrase “critical race theory.” However, they adopt it in practice.

If you read through the school district’s “equity plan,” Dreher noted, it “involves manipulating passing grades and school suspension rates to achieve ‘equity’—that is, to reward or punish people based not on their conduct and accomplishments, but on their race and ethnicity.”

“Equality means giving everyone an equal chance; equity means guaranteeing an equal outcome, or at least a demographically proportional outcome,” Dreher wrote.

Critical race theory is not, as some may believe, simply an element of “sensitivity training.” It is a theory, rooted in Marxism, that reduces all issues down to race, where there are only oppressors and the oppressed. Its promotion of “equity” is at odds with the concept of equality under the law as well as the basic tenets of a free society.

Critical race theory will not only be foisted on teachers and students of Loudoun County Public Schools, it will be accepted without question if the new code of conduct policy is adopted.

These tyrannical and intellectually bankrupt ideas are no longer consigned to radical corners of American college campuses, they are coming to a school near year.

This is why parents need options to pressure their schools to abandon this madness, or at the very least ensure that their children will not be subjected to nonstop and enforced indoctrination.

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Australian Universities welcome $1 billion research bailout package

Universities say their pleas have been answered after the federal budget contained a $1 billion research bailout package to help plug the hole caused by the collapse of the international student market.

The funding lifeline comes amid a horror year for the sector as many universities were forced to slash hundreds of jobs in response to a sudden decline in international student enrolments due to border closures.

The Group of Eight – which represents the eight institutions that account for 70 per cent of Australia’s university research – said the funding would “reverberate positively” through industry an security sectors which rely heavily on research advancements in technology and science.

“We have been quite desperate in past months as researchers were being stood down and research programs faltered or halted all because we were missing the International student fees which previously paid for Australia’s research” chief executive Vicki Thomson said.

“With no idea when or even if that market will ever recover, the silver lining is that Australia can once again claim it is funding its own research. That will be welcomed much further afield than our university campuses.”

The coronavirus pandemic has underlined the over-reliance of Australia’s universities on the high fees paid by international students which are used to cross-subsidies research programs.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education have estimated the shortfall in research funding could hit $7.6 billion over the next four years due to the loss of international student revenue.

The Rapid Research Information Forum, chaired by Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel, found universities job losses could hit 21,000 full time positions by the end of the year, of which up to 7,000 could be research-related academic staff.

In his budget speech on Tuesday evening, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the $1 billion injection for research over the next year was about “backing our best and brightest minds whose ideas will help drive our recovery.”

Peak body Universities Australia said the government had “heard the alarm bells” and the funding would stabilise research programs and jobs.

“This will ensure world-class research and discovery can continue on Australia’s universitycampuses,” Universities Australia chair Professor Deborah Terry said.

Higher education expert Andrew Norton, from the Australian National University, said lifeline was bigger than the sector had been expecting and would save some jobs in the firing line.

“This will give universities breathing space meaning they will have sack fewer people in the next few months,” Professor Norton said.

“It would’ve been much much better if they had announced it a few months ago because the universities have already set in motion some of these job cuts.”

National Tertiary Education Union president Alison Barnes criticised the announcement as insufficient, saying the funding represented only “a fraction” of the research shortfall universities were facing.

“The budget also fails to seriously address the funding and jobs crisis that universities are experiencing. Livelihoods and careers have been demolished in the past six months with 12,000 jobs lost and $3 billion in revenue disappearing,” Dr Barnes said.

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