I remember how it was -- JR
Don’t count on university alumni to protect free speech
Some donors are applying pressure — but others are fighting back
Can alumni save the American university from the illiberal progressive onslaught? A piece in the Wall Street Journal reports that the country’s alumni are increasingly organising to ‘defund’ their alma maters until they get their free speech houses in order. At Washington and Lee University, an alumni group sent over 10,000 emails to alumni calling on them to suspend donations until the university stopped disassociating itself from its namesakes George Washington and Robert E. Lee.
Twenty new organisations have been formed in the past few years and a new national donor organisation, the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, sprang up in October. This new activism is important: witness the way donor pressure prevented Cecil Rhodes’s statue from being removed from Oriel College, Oxford. But alumni pressure, while valuable, is unlikely to change the direction of travel on campus.
According to Pew, the share of Republicans who say universities have a positive effect on the country fell from 57% in 2015 to 34% in 2021. Donors who populate the new free speech alumni associations tend to be conservative or moderate. They resent giving to universities that prioritise cultural progressivism over free speech, rationality and American nationhood.
Growing attention to culture war issues such as Cancel Culture and Critical Race Theory may be helping to galvanise donor action. ‘This is a battle for our culture and, in many ways, for Western civilization,’ said John Craig, leader of a group from Davidson College, North Carolina. Davidson commissioned a survey which went out to over 1100 donors. Of the 314 that responded, just 20% agreed ‘it is very or extremely clear the school administration protects free speech,’ while 94% said ‘the next president should make protecting free speech and civil discourse a priority.’ This indicates an impressive pool of potential support for the new initiatives.
Yet despite this, there is no sign that the absolute value of alumni contributions to American universities has fallen — even though alumni contributions form a declining share of universities’ total income. Instead, national records show that donations remain static, fluctuating with the economic cycle, as figure 1 shows. Many donors are older and are thus less personally exposed to cancel culture. Status considerations and residual loyalties appear to be more durable than worries about academic freedom or national traditions.
Universities are growing more independent of alumni as overwhelmingly Left-leaning foundations such as Ford or Rockefeller have increased their contributions. Moreover, the political profile of elite donors has shifted substantially Leftwards over time. Big business used to give most of their money to the Republicans, but this is no longer the case.
As professions shift Left and the culturally Left-leaning tech sector has become more economically important, big donors are favouring the Democrats. In 2016, Donald Trump raised 70% of his campaign funds from donations of less than $200 compared to just 26% for Hillary Clinton. As if to illustrate this new elite progressivism, a young tech entrepreneur, Husayn Kassai, offered Oriel College to make up any shortfall in donor funding should it decide to remove Rhodes’ statue.
Alumni money is important, but has declined as a share of US universities’ takings, from close to 30% of voluntary contributions in 2006 to 22% in 2020. Meanwhile, foundations, who largely support the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) agenda, have been rising in clout.
Conservative and classical liberal donors will need to get more organised and convince a larger share of their associates to withhold their cash if they are to dent the rising force of woke culture in universities. More broadly, government-led reforms like Britain’s Higher Education Freedom Bill alongside new free speech universities like the University of Austin, Ralston College or Britain’s University of Buckingham will be more important in restoring academic freedom to our illiberal campuses.
https://unherd.com/thepost/dont-count-on-university-alumni-to-protect-free-speech/
*******************************************Parents Against Propaganda: Hungary showed the way
While the recent victory of governor-elect Glenn Youngkin in Virginia is a significant setback to those who advocate the introduction of critical race theory and other leftist curricula in schools, it’s by no means a definitive defeat of these forces. Youngkin only won by 65,000 votes, and the districts that had the most notable cases of radicalized school boards, such as my hometown in Loudoun County, still voted for the candidate who believed parents shouldn’t have a say in schools.
Millions of children in the United States remain enrolled in politicized education, with no realistic chance of a change in state or local administration. Even if parents choose to homeschool their children, the current career landscape often necessitates sending children to college, an institution that has long been dominated by left-leaning academia. Parents in solidly conservative states likewise face this quandary as most governors have yet to go after and dismantle the radical academia present in their own state universities. Thus, raising children in this country often means navigating a myriad of woke-dominated educational institutions.
While this might seem like a hopeless predicament for those raising children, parents must realize that despite the extensive levels of political pressure their children may face in school, college, and society, parents are the most powerful force in their children’s rearing.
We know this, because just 65 years ago, parents in Hungary fostered a generation that would rise against leftist totalitarianism, an event that shook the Soviet Union.
The 1956 Revolution, where Hungarians rose en masse against their Soviet-puppet government, began on Oct. 23, when large crowds, mainly led by college students, began demonstrating throughout Hungary demanding reform. Although the revolutionaries initially succeeded in achieving concessions from the Soviets, such as the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Budapest and a reinstatement of a reformist prime minister, the Soviets quickly reneged on their initial gestures and returned a few days later to squash the uprising in Budapest and other major Hungarian towns. On Nov. 4, the Soviet Army entered Budapest and engaged in intense street fighting with partisans and members of the Hungarian Army. Despite fierce resistance, the Soviets crushed the Revolution and killed more than 2,000 Hungarians. In the aftermath of this brutal crackdown, out of a country with fewer than 10 million people more than 200,000 Hungarians fled to the West and tens of thousands of them found a new home in America.
While this tale might seem like a tragic victory of communism over liberty, the Revolution revealed a colossal failure of communism: There are obvious limits to the widespread and extensive system of socialist indoctrination of the youth.
One can understand older Hungarians revolting against the communists. The regime in 1956 was only around 10 years old, and anyone older than 30 could remember what life in freedom was really like. However, a large percentage of those who revolted and who fought in the streets were young adults, some mere teenagers. Many of them were exclusively educated under the communist regime, so it’s no small feat that these young men and women had not been successfully indoctrinated by the Soviet-installed education system.
One of the first actions the communist regime carried out after seizing power in the late 1940s was to establish an expansive and indoctrinating education system. They first nationalized Hungary’s schools, ending the country’s longstanding system of church-run education, and established a curriculum heavily based on the Soviet Union’s education system. This system, dedicated to creating the perfect “Communist Man,” began as early as learning the ABCs.
“All of the textbooks used by first graders in grammar school had political connotations, even in learning the ABC’s, the letters were connected with politics,” stated a 1955 CIA report.
As students moved through the levels, this propaganda and indoctrination would only intensify. Students would be forced to attend lectures on Marxism and Leninism, chant songs devoid of religious content and praising communist leaders, observe new holidays instituted by the Marxist regime, and forget about Christian holidays.
This indoctrination was not limited to school either; the communists pressured students into joining their own version of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts called the Pioneers where “scout leaders” would preach further communist propaganda and build their own mini-version of socialist utopia. As one student under the system put it, “the authorities deprived the young people of their free time—that is, the time that they could live their own individual lives.” Students were thus subjected to propaganda material throughout their daily routine in virtually all aspect of their lives.
The university system only intensified the level of propaganda, with every teacher, no matter what subject, having the primary role of teaching Marxism. Students were subjected to hour-long classes on the philosophical underpinnings of communism and expected to actively participate. Silence would be taken as a sign of dissent and could lead to suspicion of their disloyalty. A ruthless quota system was enforced where previous “privileged” classes, such as the children of aristocrats and the bourgeois and the “clerical class,” were often denied, along with any children of politically unreliable characters. Children of the newly created working-class families constituted most students accepted into Hungary’s university system.
Why Did It Fail?
Despite this extensive and well-organized system of propaganda and indoctrination, the Revolution of 1956 showed how much the system had failed at gaining control of the hearts and minds of many students. But why did this fail? To answer this, we can look at two important factors.
After the Revolution was crushed, many of the student leaders of the Uprising came to the United States and explained why they had failed to be indoctrinated. Several of them attributed their disillusionment with the regime to the blatant lies the regime would tell them.
They recalled history books being changed and rewritten depending on the political mood of the day. Certain politicians or other public figures would be adored one day and hated the next, depending on how the political winds blew. The students were able to see that the “reality” they were being taught was, in fact, the opposite of reality. They were told that communism had brought them empowerment, equality, and prosperity, yet Hungary was impoverished, enslaved, and ruled unequally by the Party leaders.
These lies alone don’t explain the complete disillusionment of Hungary’s youth. While some of the Soviet propaganda was obviously false, in other places it was not as easy to discern. How were Hungarians able or know that the history taught to them was fabricated, or the political philosophies their teachers espoused were bankrupt?
The answer to this question, as well as the answer to our modern predicament with a politicized education system, lies with the parents of the students.
The Real Teachers
It was the parents who became the real teachers of Hungarians. As one student described, “There were two courses open to parents. Either they watched helplessly the effects of the state-controlled up-bringing of their children, or—and this was more frequent—they tried to counterbalance it.”
This “counterbalance” became widespread throughout Hungary, with many Hungarian families thwarting the propaganda schools would preach. As one Hungarian I met described, many of her conversations with her family in the 1950s would end with “not a word of this at school.” In these secret conversations at home, parents, after working gruelingly long shifts, would take the time to teach their children about religion, history, and culture. Since Hungarian culture, with its focus on its unique national history, religiosity, and attachment to the West, was entirely condemned by the state-run education system, it fell on the parents to pass on their traditions, knowledge, and history to their children.
It’s this instruction that allowed students to see through the lies they were exposed to at school. When they marched into the street demanding reform, and later fought heroically against the Red Army, they carried with them a generational teaching that inspired them to revolt against what they knew was wrong and evil. Although the 1956 Revolution would be crushed and the dream of liberty was deferred, Hungarian parents resumed their role as a shield and guide to their children in the face of continued communist rule. When the regime began to collapse in the late 1980s, college students and Hungarian youth would once again play a major role in the dismantling of the communist regime, the so-called roundtable talks in 1989 and Hungary’s first democratic elections in 1990.
As we study the example of 1956 and Hungary’s experiences with communism in general, we can take some hope from this episode; even a widespread and organized propaganda campaign is not inevitably successful. With this hope, however, must come the awareness that the communist education system in Hungary only failed because the familial education system succeeded.
Until (and even after) our entire education system, public, private, and collegiate, can be reclaimed from the clutches of leftist ideology, it’s incumbent on all parents to prepare and raise up a generation that will stay true to the values and principles of previous ones. Undoubtedly, the commitment of the parents is far more important than the quality of a governor and school board in the raising of a child.
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Hundreds of college professors - including Ivy League - sign open letter blasting 'woke' math movement to eliminate 'discriminative' advanced classes and say it will put American kids at HUGE disadvantage
Hundreds of university professors slammed a 'woke' math movement that eliminates calculus in favor of social justice principles, saying the curriculum leaves children unprepared for higher education and puts the US at a global disadvantage.
The missive, titled 'Open Letter on K-12 Mathematics,' was published December 6 and signed by 746 math teachers and professors, including many from Ivy League schools.
The letter takes specific aim at a proposed curriculum in California, called the California Mathematics Framework, which seeks to shift away from rigorous math courses to help close the achievement gap faced by underprivileged students, specifically those that are black, Hispanic or from low-income families.
'We are deeply concerned about the unintended consequences of recent well-intentioned approaches to reform mathematics education, particularly the California Mathematics Framework (CMF),' the professors' coalition letter continued.
'Such frameworks aim to reduce achievement gaps by limiting the availability of advanced mathematical courses to middle schoolers and beginning high schoolers. While such reforms superficially seem "successful" at reducing disparities at the high school level, they are merely "kicking the can" to college.'
The CMF would push Algebra 1 back to 9th grade and remove large parts of the calculus curriculum, while applying social justice concepts to math lessons.
The open letter said that taking away advanced math programs will be 'the height of irresponsibility' and will ultimately be to the students' detriment if they choose to pursue higher education.
For those that do enroll in college, the need for more introductory math courses at the university level to compensate for the lack of advanced high school math programs would likely cause students to need more time to graduate.
'We all share the urgent concern that the benefits of a robust mathematical education, and the career opportunities it opens up, should be shared more widely between students of all backgrounds, regardless of race, gender, and economic status.'
'We fully agree that mathematics education “should not be a gatekeeper but a launchpad,”' the open letter reads.
Rebecca Pariso, one of the team members of educators tasked in late 2019 with creating California's new mathematics framework, said she expected some controversy to come with the program, however she did not anticipate the national backlash.
Regardless, Parisio was one of the few vocal defenders the controversial math curriculum in replacing traditional STEM education.
'There's a huge problem with math instruction right now,' Pariso told CalMatters. 'The way things are set up, it's not giving everybody a chance to learn math at the highest levels.'
'We were transforming math education, and change is hard and scary,' the math teacher at Hueneme Elementary School District added. 'Especially if you don't understand why that change needs to occur. But I didn’t expect it to go this far.'
Meanwhile, the 746 educators and professors who signed the open letter insist that it is vital to adhere to the standards set by STEM - Science Technology Engineering Mathematics - which provides the critical thinking skills needed to excel in the future.
'While it is possible to succeed in STEM at college without taking advanced courses in high school, it is more challenging. College students who need to spend their early years taking introductory math courses may require more time to graduate,' the letter says.
In July, the California Board of Education announced they were going to push back against implementing the 'woke' overhaul of its mathematics curriculum, after opponents to the framework's movement argued the plan needlessly inserts politics and social justice measures into lessons, according to Fox News.
However, many schools have eliminated standardized testing in the wake of the COVID pandemic and have lowered math standards.
Parents across the country have echoed the professors' coalition in revolting against several Department of Education schools where accelerated math programs have been suspended.
'They're changing math to make it math appreciation,' said Michael Malione, a parent in the Piedmont City Unified School District who also works as a private math tutor.
'A part of math is learning things that are not authentic to life.'
Administrators at one of those schools, Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies in Manhattan, were pressured to reinstitute honors math classes in June after a number of complaints from parents.
The Robert Wagner Middle School on the Upper East Side has also looked to remove its honors math program despite a fierce backlash from parents.
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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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