I remember how it was -- JR
Leaving the Blight of Higher Education: Farewell, Students
In May of 2020, my wife and I took our retirement after more than 30 years of teaching college, the last 20 years of which we spent at what I will call Upstate Consolation University, a mid-tier state college somewhere in the Northeast. My wife taught French and I, a wide variety of courses, some 23 altogether over the years, in the English Department—concerning which, more to come.
Apart from wanting what remained of our active lives to be ours and not the institution’s, the main motive for our decision was the intolerable decline of Upstate. It had gone from a more or less serious academic organization, typically liberal but not yet politically correct or “woke,” into a copy of the ideological collective that, in the manner of Star Trek’s “Borg,” has digested and transformed virtually every center of post-secondary education in the nation.
“Resistance is futile—you will be assimilated.”
In the following paragraphs, I review my Upstate gig while highlighting the major symptoms of the aforesaid decline I observed. While my situation was specific to Upstate, Upstate is typical. My observations, therefore, have application well beyond the place where I gathered them.
Although all state colleges and universities shout “diversity” and preach “tolerance” at the top of their lungs, they in fact demonstrate monolithic bigotry and homogeneous narrow-mindedness.
A friend of mine from Upstate, “Fred,” served in the Army, where he rose to the rank of sergeant. After leaving the military, Fred found employment on campus as a manager of services. Fred and I frequently find ourselves in the same bar on weekends.
One afternoon, a gaggle of co-eds having entered the premises, Fred turned to me and asked, “Have you ever overheard them talking on campus?” I nodded, but let him continue.
“They use the f-word in every sentence,” he said, a phenomenon familiar to me. Fred, who came to Upstate from an environment where the f-word possesses a degree of functionality, nevertheless took offense in the profanity of female undergraduate banter.
Fred’s speech maintains a civilized quality and in this, he differentiates himself from students, female or male. It is not that co-eds implicate themselves exclusively in voluble profanity. Male undergraduates indulge equally in expletives. They even invoke the f-word and the s-word in class, but a stern glance can enjoin such infractions.
The problem is a continuing one, however, and its implication remains unsettling. In other classrooms—this is the only possible inference—these language-proletarians have escaped admonition. They, therefore, assume that no one could possibly object to their verbal infelicities.
When I divulged to a colleague that I would retire at the end of the semester, she divulged back that she wanted to reclaim her life, too, as soon as possible.
“I’m tired,” she said, “of writing the same comments and criticisms over and over on student assignments.” She meant not only that succeeding cohorts of freshmen bring with them ad seriatim the scribal incompetency that public secondary education appears to foster, but that the same students, either during the semester or in one course after another, reveal themselves as unable to internalize basic corrections.
Casually inserting the f-word in every spoken sentence betokens intellectual frustration that cannot articulate itself and has a relation to the a-grammaticality and impoverished vocabularies of North America’s high school graduates. It also relates to the fact that they never, if they can avoid it, read.
Instead, students stare at text messages on their cell phones. They constantly slap those cell phones up against their faces, even when descending a staircase or crossing the street. Many college teachers have given up asking students to write essays. In English courses, not to assign written work would seem a scandal, but the lack of writerly capacity, which mirrors the lack of readerly capacity, mostly subverts the possibility of engendering sensitivity to language.
Text messaging disqualifies itself as either reading or writing. It is practice in the restriction of consciousness. Most entering freshmen have no experience with books, from which they instinctively shy, or of which they are blithely unconscious.
Suspecting this, I long ago established an early-in-the-semester in-class exercise in all my courses. The classrooms at Upstate come equipped with the usual array of audio-visual devices, including a document camera whose image may be directed, via the digital projector, to the screen at the front of the room.
The exercise involves a stack of books—old scholarly ones from the first half of the last century. I set them beside the document camera. A volunteer comes to the document camera and selects a book from the pile. The instructions are, “Start turning the pages slowly and when you come to the first page that might tell you about the contents or the order of exposition—stop.” The student begins to turn the pages: Publisher’s information and copyright, title page, table of contents, and…he keeps leafing, as though there were no clue.
This happens every time. It indicates a problem that no one wants to acknowledge. Public education in the U.S.A. has not produced—not for a long time—an educated public.
College students, by and large, belong to the successive waves of post-literacy brought about by anti-intellectual curricula in K-12 and the corrosive effect of “media culture.” George Santayana, an American philosopher, wrote in his Sense of Beauty (1896) that “grammar…is akin to the deepest metaphysics, because in revealing the constitution of words, it reveals the constitution of thought, and the hierarchy of those categories by which we conceive the world.” A bookless, a-grammatical student body has no possible access to genuine higher education.
Students have adapted, in some cases eagerly, to the pernicious ethos of denunciation that prevails under “wokeness” on every college campus. Inculcated in the theories of universal racism and a malicious patriarchy, their adolescent narcissism inflated by constant baseless praise and the exuberant celebration of their non-existent moral perspicacity, students are ready to be “triggered.”
They’re eager to detect moral heresy and run to deans with accusations of faculty misdemeanors.
For years now, to meet with students in the office on a closed-door, face-to-face basis, especially with female students, has entailed a risk. Wise it is to meet with students only in public areas with other people present, so as to pre-empt damning lies and neurotic misrepresentations. In the last two or three years in particular, students have complained to my supervisors many times.
They have complained because, in my lectures and in my selection of reading material, I have challenged the premises of a vehement and humorless Left-radicalism that purports to address everything “critically” but cannot muster so much as an iota of self-inspection.
The current darlings of the university’s ideological overseers, trans students, exhibit the greatest potential for being “triggered,” and exercise alacrity in denunciation much more viciously than others. Their mission, in the pornographic phrase that they have adopted, is to “Spread Pride.” Squint at one of them and Dean Headburger or Ms. Buglove, Chief of Human Resources, will issue a summons. They will assume guilt in advance.
Female students figure prominently in the foregoing paragraphs. Women currently dominate higher education numerically at the undergraduate and graduate levels and, increasingly, as faculty members and administrators. The feminization of the academy has altered colleges and universities greatly, to the detriment of men. Colleges and universities have become minefields for men, not least because of that permeating ethos of denunciation. The “woke” mentality takes the notion of “the toxic male” as a premise. The anti-male bigotry that the notion inspires has led to the blatant persecution of parties on charges of “sexual harassment” even when the complaint is obviously vacuous and self-serving.
A few years ago, a popular Upstate professor graciously arranged for students to accompany him to a professional conference. At the event, a poster announced a special session devoted to Women in the Métier, so to put it. The professor made the casual remark, in a mood of light humor, about where he might find the complementary session devoted to Men in the Métier.
One of his students overheard him. When she returned to campus, she sprinted immediately to Headburger and Buglove with the claim that the professor had insulted and humiliated her. Headburger and Buglove dragged the man through an agony of humiliation. The young female delator, for her part, had done her honorable duty under the new Stalinist Code.
Charley Pride on Affirmative Action: Was He Right?
Charley Pride, the first Black musician to be put in the Country Music Hall of Fame, died recently, and he dispensed some refreshing wisdom besides his clear musical talent. During the height of his career, he noted: “This country is so race-conscious, so ate-up with colors and pigments...it’s a disease.”
No where in American life is the obsession with race more prevalent than on college campuses. In the Midwest, for the first time, the Ohio State-Michigan annual football game did not happen last week end because of COVID-19, but the two schools seem to have another rivalry going: which can have the most administrators whose prime responsibility is related to analyzing the race and gender of people working on campus or interacting with the campus community with a presumed goal of reaching some optimum. This presumes, of course, that changes in the racial designation of students and faculty, Pride’s “colors and pigments” is something to which campuses should devote considerable resources.
Two individuals come to mind when I think of chronicling campus administrative bloat: Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg (author of The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University) and University of Michigan and American Enterprise Institute economist Mark Perry. Perry a few years ago noted that his university had nearly 100 affirmative action administrators, many of them making six digit annual salaries. He has followed that up recently by turning his attention to the Wolverines archrival in football: Ohio State (OSU).
A Harvard undergraduate student, Hunter Gallo, very nicely recently picked up on Perry’s latest work on OSU for the College Fix. The over 100 OSU diversity bureaucrats are paid over $10 million annually in salary or fringe benefits, enough to cover the tuition fees for 882 in-state students. The Engineering College particularly seemed fanatical about the topic, because the Chief Diversity Officer in the College of Engineering is paid $279,276, vastly more than most professors, with a second “diversicrat” in that college scraping by on $190,000 annually; they are helped by a “program director” making a paltry $127,276. Within the broader university, there is both an “Associate Vice-President” for Talent Diversity and Leadership, and a “Vice Provost” in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion making about $250,000 annually.
To borrow a useful term from my profession (economics), there is a lot of successful “rent-seeking” in higher education. Economic rent occurs when someone is paid more than necessary to acquire his or her services. Any university professor at any decent sized school can point out a number of staff, including some faculty, who are paid far more than they are worth, more than they could earn working somewhere else. But the affirmative action area seems especially egregious in this regards.
Thus there are two starkly different interpretations of collegiate diversity efforts. The first is they are a noble and morally needed attempt by universities to correct for past and current wrongs by working to have college campuses approximate the racial, ethnic, and gender proportions existing in the broader society, seeking to overcome biological traits such as skin color or gender identity from being a deterrence to achieving academic goals and, ultimately, vocational success. They are a means of expanding access and opportunity for the disadvantaged.
The second is this is an attempt to implement a morally dubious and anti-meritorious system of making race, gender and other group characteristics the basis for determining such vital things as college admissions or appointment to well paid academic positions with high job security. In this interpretation, clever individuals use race or other attributes to obtain lots of economic rent engaging in a contemptuous denial of Martin Luther King’s magisterial injunction that “my...children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
These issues have concerned the nation for centuries, and probably will for long times to come. If the voters in liberal California in rejecting Proposition 16 (which would have gotten rid of legislation outlawing aggressive campus affirmative action efforts) recently are any guide of American public opinion, however, a majority of the American public seem to be wary of the frenzied efforts of places like the University of Michigan and OSU to devote enormous resources to enforcing a vigorous (and expensive) affirmative action regime.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13355&omhide=true
Why British Kids Went Back to School, and American Kids Did NotThe day I visited St. Thomas the Apostle School in Peckham, South London, a new shutdown was announced for Britain’s capital. But the comprehensive—a public high-school, in American parlance—was open. It was freezing: Doors were propped open for ventilation. Pupils chattered in the playground while wearing face coverings emblazoned with the school logo. For all that, the experience felt surprisingly normal. In-person attendance has been at more than 90 percent for most of the term. Out front, some boys were playing a very serious game of soccer. Others messed around with basketballs.
St. Thomas is the sort of school that, in the United States, has largely offered hybrid or remote teaching. A study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education estimated that only 8 percent of U.S. urban school districts had returned to full in-person instruction in November. Outside the inner cities, only 22 percent of U.S. suburban school districts were running in-person schooling, and only 64 percent of rural districts.
Across the U.K., by contrast, schools—having closed in March—started reopening in June. After the summer break, all children could go back. The U.K. has struggled with the pandemic: COVID-19 has killed 73,000 people so far, a greater loss relative to the country’s population than in the U.S. Ministers made repeated missteps, including subsidizing eat-in restaurant meals over the summer. But the average teenager in England has missed only about 6 days of in-person school during the fall. And in this regard, Britain is deeply European. Since September, according to the Blavatnik School of Government policy tracker, seven U.S. states have closed schools for a long spell while not forcing the closure of other workplaces. No European state has done so. School closures have remained the last resort.
Why, then, this transatlantic divide? The answer is a matter of centralization, consensus, and the role of teaching unions.
The decision to open St. Thomas and, indeed, all schools in England, was made by England’s education secretary, Gavin Williamson. Equivalent decisions were made by his counterparts in the Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish governments.
The teaching unions were unhappy about these calls. In May, Mary Bousted, one of the general secretaries of the National Education Union, the largest of the unions, said the first reopening plans were “nothing short of reckless.” The NEU’s preconditions for reopening—low caseloads and regular testing, in particular—were not met.
Bousted told me, “We have this education policy being run by hard-liners in [the prime minister’s office]. Schools are being kept open at all costs because of an economic imperative—because parents can’t work if the children aren’t in school.”
The unions were simply unable to leverage their large memberships for political effect. They are weak, and barely feature in England’s three-decade-long story of radical school reform. Opposition to reopening was also a particularly difficult stance to maintain. In August, Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, announced that “the chances of children dying from COVID-19 are incredibly small,” whereas school closure “damages children in the long run.” By the summer, this way of thinking had hardened into a consensus: The opposition Labour Party supported reopening.
No surprise, then, that teachers ultimately fell into line. In late August, TeacherTapp, a teacher pollster, found that 71 percent of teachers said they were looking forward to going back, a higher percentage than in previous summers.
Serge Cefai, the executive head teacher at St. Thomas, looked puzzled when I asked whether the unions had given him trouble. Not at all. “We told [staff] we’re going to follow guidelines and we do … We’ve spent a huge amount of money trying to make sure that staff feel safe when they come into school.”
Similar dynamics were apparent across Europe, and the strength of expert consensus dominated even in states with stronger unions and more decentralized government than the U.K. Ilka Hoffmann, a board member of the leading German education union, said: “The ministers in some states didn’t even talk with the school leaders.”
In the U.S., Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos pushed for schools to reopen. She said in July, “The rule should be that kids go back to school this fall.” But, unlike her peers in Europe, she could not make that rule. Washington contributes just 8 percent of U.S. schools’ budget. Such decisions fell to states, cities, and the country’s 13,600 school districts.
To outsiders, this fracturing has always been the American school system’s core oddity. It is why the U.S., unusually for a rich country, spends more on teaching its rich children than its poor. Success in the pandemic would have required federal leadership to set standards for safe reopening—standards that the various stakeholders found trustworthy. This did not arrive.
On the contrary, Laura Hallas, a researcher at the Blavatnik School, said that “the CDC, the White House, and governors’ offices sometimes presented divergent messaging around when and how schools should open for fall.” Some states stepped forward to take a lead. Many, however, left the districts to decide among themselves.
Against the backdrop of a fierce election, advice was politicized. Parents’ and teachers’ views on reopening became partisan. A paper published by Brown University found that school boards in areas that voted for Donald Trump were more likely to heed the education secretary’s call to keep schools open. Politics mattered more than local disease levels in determining local responses.
Another factor identified by the paper was the strength of teaching unions—a far more powerful force in the U.S. than across Europe. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the largest teaching unions in the U.S., spent a combined $24 million in the 2020 electoral cycle. They were able to threaten local strikes against individual school boards—local decision makers whom they know and negotiate with all the time—rather than try to run full-blown national campaigns to apply pressure to national leaders, which was what the European unions faced.
Katharine Strunk, an education-policy professor at Michigan State University, said unions were willing to “support their teachers in strike authorization if teachers felt that they were being forced back into unsafe conditions. That sometimes meant proper social distancing, but it sometimes meant a universally available vaccine.”
Unions were able to influence decision making in part because, as Strunk said, “when there is no good trusted advice, it’s hard for parents or school boards to argue against [the unions], because what [the unions were] saying was: ‘Isn’t one teacher or one student death too much of a cost when they can learn fine remotely?’”
Lacking a trusted federal lead created space for the unions’ caution. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me that “parents spoke with their feet in terms of … saying, ‘I'm not going back to schools like that.’ Educators said, ‘I can’t teach like that.’ And administrators were not able to put the resources together … Nobody trusted the CDC, unfortunately, because they kept on changing their mind … And nobody trusted DeVos or Trump when it came to kids.”
In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers used the threat of a strike to delay the return to in-person teaching. Schools partially reopened in late September under a hybrid model that emerged from a tense negotiation between government officials and the UFT. By November, schools were shut again when the citywide prevalence of the coronavirus breached an agreed-upon threshold—–more than 3 percent of COVID-19 tests were coming back positive.
Although elementary schools in the city were reopened quickly and Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed not to close them again, this reversal could not have happened without a new acceptance in the union movement that elementary schools are relatively safe to open.
Weingarten said teachers have learned since the summer that elementary schools are by and large low risk—-not least from the experience of New York City’s reopening. “We used to think that it was going to be harder for young kids” to comply with safety protocols, she said, “but young kids have taken to the safeguards and are willing to do them.”
Evidence is mounting that school closures have been bad for children. A McKinsey study of K–5 students from the U.S. found that even students who managed to get back into the classroom by mid-October had lost the equivalent of three months of math learning and one and a half months of reading.
The final figures are likely to be much higher when the hybrid- and remote-learning students are finally assessed: A similar study in the U.K. using test data from October found that a sample of 11-year-olds had lost 22 months’ worth of progress in writing ability during Britain’s relatively brief period of online learning.
This learning penalty will not be even. Higher learning loss will occur among poorer children, who are less likely to have the computers, space, quiet, and good internet connections required to make remote learning work. In the U.S., pupils of color will suffer particularly: They are more likely to be poor, and the schools they attend are less likely to offer the option of in-person instruction.
The U.S. education system would have struggled with this pandemic no matter what. Its kaleidoscopic fragmentation and the strength of its teachers’ unions would have presented a formidable challenge to smooth school reopenings in any circumstance. But the politicization of pandemic advice, for which the Trump administration must take a large share of the blame, made these structural realities into near-insurmountable impediments. Dragging pandemic policy into the culture war has been a disaster for the country, particularly its children.
The American death toll will rightly be cited as the main indictment of the U.S. government’s handling of the pandemic. But what has happened in schools is an astonishing public-policy failure of its own.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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