Ground Zero of Woke

Universities are making themselves not just disliked and disreputable but ultimately irrelevant and replaceable

Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.

For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions.

Never in U.S. history have elite universities piled up such huge endowments, which soared during the lockdown. Harvard has $40 billion, Yale $30 billion, Stanford $28 billion, Princeton $25 billion and so on. The tax-free income from these huge sums ensures equally extravagant budgets that are somewhat insulated from market realities—at least in the sense that the larger endowments grew, the more likely university costs rose beyond the annual rate of inflation, and the greater aggregate student debt rose.

Just as importantly, spending per pupil is rarely calibrated to whether graduating students leave better educated than when they arrived—the ostensible purpose of universities.

There are certainly no “exit tests” for certification of the BA degree, in the manner of, say, a bar exam, that might set a minimum national standard for any acquisition of knowledge. Such standardized reassurance would rescue the BA degree from the growing general public perception that the campus has become politically warped, therapeutic, a poor measure of real knowledge, and is now largely a cattle brand of a sort that qualifies its holder for some sort of non-physical labor.

The result over the last few years of this relatively new higher-education marriage of big money and radical ideas is a strange disconnect. On the one hand, never have elite (though often indebted) college students been so demanding of apartment-style dorm living, latte bars, and rock-climbing walls, while virtue signaling their compensatory proletariat bona fides.

Never have universities been more able financially to subsidize and guarantee their own student loans. And yet they have outsourced that responsibility to federal guaranteed student loan programs. The result of that moral hazard of never being held accountable for rampant inflationary spikes in tuition, room, and board costs, is that universities over the last 30 years spent like drunken sailors on non-essentials: from diversity czars to in loco parentis therapeutic “centers” to Club Med accommodations—even as at the core test scores dived, grade inflation soared, and graduates increasingly did not impress employers.

So, universities themselves are largely responsible for the current $1.7 trillion in aggregate student college debt. Such a staggering encumbrance is not just the concern of higher education, but affects the entire country in manifest ways, well aside from emboldening our global rivals and enemies. Even communist China is spending far more of their higher education budgets on the sciences, math, and liberal arts than therapeutics, social justice crusades, and diversity, equity, and inclusion audits.

Students with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan obligations are likely to marry later, delay child rearing, cannot purchase a home in their 20s or even 30s, and more easily slide into prolonged adolescence. The country itself is experiencing a glut of the over- but not necessarily well-educated: history’s menu for radicalized and angry youth who feel they are properly credentialed with various letters after their names but suspect they lack the training and skills to enter the workforce, be productive, and earn commensurate good pay.

There is also something terribly wrong about well-compensated, tenured professors of the social sciences and humanities—whose own lives are conventionally materialist and bourgeoise—spooning out the usual radical race/class boilerplate to indebted students who in a sense have borrowed heavily to pay a large percentage of faculty salaries.

Few of today’s woke 20-somethings will graduate with rigorous instruction in language, logic, and the inductive methods with a shared knowledge of literature, history, science, and math. At far less cost, they would likely find better online classes in those now ossified subjects than in the courses that they went into hock in order to finance.

Never in U.S. history has the university been so at odds with not just the general pulse of America, but with its major traditions, institutions, and very Constitution. Most recently, Americans have been urged by university law schools and political science departments to eliminate the 233-year-old Electoral College, to pack the Supreme Court after 150 years of a nine-justice bench, to end the 180-year filibuster, to admit two new states to gain four progressive senators, and to question the constitutional cornerstone of two senators per state.

It is chiefly the university that scolds Americans that their customs, traditions, and laws have little moral weight, that they are merely constructs reflecting “white supremacy,” detached from either a natural law common to all humans or customs carefully cross-examined and honed after decades and even centuries of use in the public square.

Once abstract campus theorizing about open borders, hiring and admissions based on race, zero bail even for repeat felons, critical-legal-theory district attorneys, and Green New Deal energy policies have now all seeped out to warp the daily lives of Americans.

Yet unlike free speech movements of the 1960s, in 2021 it is the university that now wars on the First Amendment, castigating unwelcome expression as “hate speech” if found inconvenient for its agendas.

It is the university where the relevant amendments to the Constitution governing due process and confronting one’s accusers is jettisoned when the accused is of the wrong gender or race or both. It is the university that has renounced the legacy of the civil rights movement of the 1960s that once championed open housing, desegregation, and racially blind criteria.

Instead, many colleges now allow students (at least those self-identified as “marginalized”) to pick their dormitory roommates on the basis of race, to declared certain areas of campus racially segregated “safe spaces,” and to discriminate in student admissions and faculty hiring. If Martin Luther King, Jr. were to return to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford and to repeat verbatim the speech I heard (at age 11) that he gave in 1965 at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, about equality, shared humanity, and the need to excel at whatever task one takes on, regardless of his station (“Be the best of whatever you are”), he would likely be jeered and derided as an integrationist and assimilationist.

One final irony? From the university we hear calls to either end or reform radically our major institutions and cultural referents: recalibrate the First and Second Amendments, scrap the border, tear down that statue, rename this plaza, do away with existing classes of gender pronouns, heckle speakers, and destroy the lives of unwoke faculty. And yet from such critical faculty scolds, there is oddly zero self-criticism or indeed any self-reflection of their own shortcomings.

Do academics ponder over why the reputations of their universities are eroding in the public mind? What exactly is the campus responsibility for graduating students with bleak job possibilities and unsustainable debt? Why is the clueless 21-year-old graduate now the stock joke of popular culture and comedy? How did the enlightened institutionalize a two-tier system of privileged tenured grandees resting on the backs of exploited contingent and part-time faculty? Why are critics of a supposedly non-transparent American society so secretive about their own admissions, hiring, and budgetary policies? And how did the locus of cheap anti-corporate boilerplate become so deeply reliant on siphoning corporate cash?

The racialized civil strife of 2020-21, and indeed the entire woke and cancel-culture revolutions originated ultimately from campus fixtures who never suffer the real-life consequences of their abstractions. And meanwhile, China, the greatest threat that the United States has faced in 30 years, smiles at our universities’ importation of most of the bankrupt and suicidal ideas abroad, from Frankfurt School nihilism and Foucauldian postmodern relativism to Soviet sclerosis and Maoist cultural revolutionary suicide.

Unless the university itself is rebooted, its rejection of meritocracy, its partisan venom, its tribalism, its war with free speech and due process, and its inability to provide indebted students with competitive educations will all ensure that it is not just disliked and disreputable but ultimately irrelevant and replaceable.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13829

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Diversity, Equity, Inclusion: New Criticisms and Challenges

Richard Vedder

No area of higher education has changed more fundamentally in my lifetime of teaching than what once was called affirmative action and now is called diversity, equity, and inclusion. Starting from virtually nothing in the early 1960s, colleges have formed massive and typically powerful bureaucracies to assure that schools have learning and discovery communities are “diverse.” It is the academic obsession du jour.

In the course of a week of traveling last week to academic events in three states (Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Texas) I became more conversant with two dissenting voices on current policy initiatives in this area. In North Carolina, I encountered John Chisholm, Silicon Valley entrepreneur with close ties to his alma mater M.I.T. I also started reading A Dubious Expediency, a new highly critical assessment of racial preferences co-edited by a friend of mine, Gail Heriot, law professor at the University of San Diego and also a longtime member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Gail and I serve together on the board of the National Association of Scholars.

Growing up gay in southern Florida several decades ago, John Chisholm understands first hand how some people feel excluded from university communities, therefore believing that the move towards greater diversity, equity and inclusion is a highly commendable one. But he also feels colleges have adopted an extremely narrow approach, concentrating on biological physical characteristics like skin color and gender identity, while ignoring many other characteristics important in instilling true “diversity” into the academy. Serving for years as a member of M.I.T.’s governing board and even once as president of its alumni association, Chisholm has recently authored a study (”Achieving Holistic Diversity and Inclusion at a Major Research University”) in which he provides empirical evidence that on several measures, M.I.T. seems to seriously avoid certain types of students.

Chisholm asks: do universities look at other forms of diversity that could make their communities more representative of the population? Do they look at, for example, political diversity, geographic differences (rural vs. urban living backgrounds), or even religious differences? Do they look for variations in thinking processes—those with long vs. short term time horizons, or those who are risk-adverse as opposed to risking-taking adventurers? Using population-adjusted enrollment data by state, Chisholm finds M.I.T. takes large numbers from wealthy politically progressive coastal states (Connecticut, New York, California), but dramatically fewer from states like Arkansas, Wyoming, or Ohio. Is it by accident or design that M.I.T. favors those from blue states as opposed to red states?

Is M.I.T. by accident or design bringing more uniformity instead of diversity into the campus community by its emphasis on biological factors? And if there is a problem at M.I.T., what about at schools that are much more consciously fashionably woke? Chisholm is raising important questions and revealing inconvenient truths.

So is Gail Heriot, co-editor Maimon Schwarzschild, and other scholars (e.g, John Ellis, Heather MacDonald). Here the emphasis is much more on the pernicious unintended consequences of diversity, equity and inclusion policies. For example, in a long essay Professor Heriot reinforces the findings of other scholars that affirmative action has often hurt African-Americans and promoted academic failure by contributing to an untenable mismatch regarding the qualifications of students to succeed. This often does lead to dropping out, to a watering down of standards, grade inflation and other pathologies of the modern era. In recognition of the problems race-based admissions poses, Professor Heriot led the Proposition 16 efforts last year in which California voters resoundingly made it clear it is opposed to race-based admissions, much to the chagrin of university administrators.

The eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington made a splash a generation ago by talking about a “clash of civilizations.” Today, there is a a wide and growing gap between the academic world and the real world—the broader society—in the United States. I have said ad nauseam that higher education is ultimately dependent on the broader society for financial sustenance, and as the culture of the academy clashes increasingly with that of the broader public, universities will ultimately face severe financial consequences—at a time when a birth dearth, growing international threats, and other financial responsibilities associated with financing a welfare state among an aging population already create challenges for higher learning

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13823

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Woke School District Accused of Mishandling Vicious Bullying, Beating of 15-Year-Old

Fifteen-year-old Sean Ade was lured into an ambush by six of his peers in a brutal beating outside a Massachusetts school that landed him in the emergency room.

The boy told police that on July 19 he was punched, kicked, elbowed, spit on, chased, and urinated on by five fellow students while a sixth student filmed the attack, according to a police report obtained by The Daily Signal.

On another occasion, the high school sophomore told police, the boys had “tackled him to the ground” and “shoved their bare asses in [his] face.”

Sean’s mother told The Daily Signal that her son’s attackers also cyberbullied him, urging him to kill himself over the internet.

All of the students involved in the attack attend Wellesley High School, but the beating occurred in the woods adjoining nearby Katharine Lee Bates Elementary School. Both schools are within the Wellesley Public Schools district, sued only last week over censorship of student speech and racially segregated groups.

Allyson Ade said she is unsure why the students decided to mistreat her son, a young man she described as a “kind, empathetic, awesome kid.”

Maybe two of the boys were angry because they each had dated a girl who was friends with Sean, she suggested to The Daily Signal. Perhaps, she speculated, the attack was just “misguided, unchecked anger and frustration.”

One boy told police that the group targeted Sean over unexplained rumors regarding Sean, girls, and alcohol. These rumors are false, his mother told The Daily Signal.

Whatever the reason for the attack, Dylan and Allyson Ade want justice for their son and a reformed bullying policy from Wellesley Public Schools, a school district they accuse of egregiously mishandling the vicious beating.

“The hope is that something good can come out of something horrible,” Allyson Ade told The Daily Signal.

“If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger,” she recalled telling her son. “And it’s up to us how strong it makes you and how you’re going to look forward.”

But both of Sean’s parents said that the school district, which spends significant time and efforts on its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, was not prepared to follow its own bullying guidelines and thus unprepared to help their child deal with the traumatic event.

Aftermath of Assault

Four of the other teenagers were charged with assault, Dylan Ade said during an Oct. 12 meeting of the Wellesley school committee. Two of those students will not return to Wellesley High School, he said, although two others involved will return.

Ade demanded that the school district “expand the suspension that these kids were given,” pointing out that one of the students who beat his son had been suspended for only 10.5 days.

The father specifically blamed Wellesley High School Principal Jamie Chisum and Wellesley Public Schools Superintendent David Lussier for mishandling the attack on his son, calling Chisum’s and Lussier’s actions “outrageous.”

The district did not issue a statement on the beating until Oct. 19—the same day that Parents Defending Education filed its lawsuit and the day before parents and students organized a protest against bullying.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/10/25/massachusetts-school-district-mishandled-beating-parents-say

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My other blogs: Main ones below

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://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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