I remember how it was -- JR
What Harvard means by 'diversity'
by Jeff Jacoby
THE LEFT-WING takeover of American elite universities is a very old story. In 1951, a young William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with God and Man at Yale, his first book, which documented the largely socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the Ivy League institution from which he had just graduated.
In much of American academia today, that worldview no longer merely prevails. It overpowers. It is pervasive, aggressive, and deeply intolerant. Half a century after Buckley's debut, an even younger conservative graduating from another prominent university — Ben Shapiro of the University of California Los Angeles — published his first book, Brainwashed, which picked up where Buckley had left off. "I have seen firsthand the leftist brainwashing occurring on campus on a daily basis," wrote Shapiro. "Under higher education's facade of objectivity lies a grave and overpowering bias."
That was in 2004. The imbalance Shapiro described then is even more pronounced now. It seems almost superfluous to document the phenomenon, but documentation continues to be compiled. In surveys of college faculty members by the Higher Education Research Institute over several decades, liberals have always outnumbered moderates and conservatives. That is especially the case in New England, as Sarah Lawrence College political scientist Samuel Abrams noted in a 2016 New York Times column:
In 1989, the number of liberals compared with conservatives on college campuses was about 2 to 1 nationwide; that figure was almost 5 to 1 for New England schools. By 2014, the national figure was 6 to 1; for those teaching in New England, the figure was 28 to 1. . . . If you are looking for an ideologically balanced education, don't put New England at the top of your list.
And definitely don't put Harvard on your list.
The Harvard Crimson reported last week that 82 percent of Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences characterize their political leanings as "liberal" or "very liberal." By contrast, "only 1 percent of respondents stated they are 'conservative,' and no respondents identified as 'very conservative.'" Compared to the rest of the country, New England's 28-to-1 lopsided liberal faculty dominance may appear wildly out of whack. But it is a model of evenhandedness compared to the 82-to-1 slant among the Harvard professoriate.
Moreover, reports the Crimson, that's the way most Harvard instructors like it. "When asked whether they would support increasing ideological diversity among faculty by hiring more conservative-leaning professors, only a quarter of respondents were in support," the paper reported.
From time to time in the world of higher education, proposals are floated to actively increase the share of faculty members whose outlook is more conservative. A few years ago, an Iowa lawmaker drafted legislation to require public colleges in his state to ensure that liberal and conservative faculty members be hired in equal numbers. The University of Colorado at Boulder has an endowed visiting professorship in Conservative Thought and Policy. The conservative activist David Horowitz for several years promoted an "Academic Bill of Rights," lobbying state legislatures to pass measures barring universities from (among other things) hiring, promoting, or terminating professors based on their political beliefs.
I am skeptical of such efforts. The steady leftward march of academia's most prestigious institutions is a genuine problem, but it isn't one that can be solved by tokenism or litmus tests, or by involving the government in hiring decisions. Frankly, I doubt that it can be solved at all other than perhaps by building up new institutions of higher education — a worthy process, but one that, even in the best of circumstances, will take many years to succeed.
Harvard's 82-to-1 faculty ratio of liberals to conservatives makes a mockery of the university's avowed commitment to diversity. A handsome page on its website declares that "Harvard's commitment to diversity in all forms" — my italics — "is rooted in our fundamental belief that engaging with unfamiliar ideas, perspectives, cultures, and people creates the conditions for dramatic and meaningful growth."
Those fine words aren't true, of course. Everyone knows that Harvard has no desire to uphold "diversity in all forms." Like other institutions that go out of their way to trumpet their embrace of diversity — the media, Hollywood, major-league sports — Harvard wants its people to be "diverse" only when measured by the yardsticks that matter least: race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation. But the clash of ideas? A robust competition among worldviews? The exposure of students to compelling arguments that challenge liberal and progressive shibboleths? That's not what Harvard is interested in. It hasn't been for decades.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26329/what-harvard-means-by-diversity
**************************************************Broke Colleges Resort to Mergers for Survival
When Covid-19 first tore through the nation, hundreds of college presidents sent students home, looked across their empty campuses and wondered how they were going to pay their bills.
Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun saw an opportunity. On May 15, 2020, he called six senior managers to his office. “Colleges and universities will be challenged,” he told his cabinet, he recalls. “This may be the time to start looking at mergers and partnerships.”
Over the next few weeks, Northeastern created a specialized M&A team to assess the value and vet the balance sheets of dozens of flailing colleges in the U.S. and abroad. His directive came to fruition on June 30 when Boston-based Northeastern absorbed Mills College, a 170-year-old women’s school on a 135-acre campus not far from Silicon Valley.
In exchange for the land, worth perhaps $1 billion, the school’s roughly $191 million endowment and an art collection that includes works by Diego Rivera and Winslow Homer, Northeastern is absorbing $21 million in Mills’s liabilities, putting $30 million toward an institute designed to continue the school’s feminist scholarship—and keeping open a college that planned to close.
Dr. Aoun called the deal a once-in-a-generation opportunity to expand Northeastern’s footprint, prepare students for careers in Silicon Valley and amplify Mills’s tradition of women’s leadership and social justice. Some Mills alumni are calling their school leaders dupes, given the deal’s lopsided nature. Higher-education experts see the event as emblematic of a sectorwide shakeout.
Students continue to pack into flagship universities and brand-name colleges. Less-prestigious schools are struggling. The number of colleges closing down in the past 10 years, around 200, has quadrupled compared with the previous decade.
And in the past four years, there have been 95 college mergers, compared with 78 over the prior 18 years, according to data compiled by the consulting group EY Parthenon. In the past two months, St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia absorbed the crosstown University of the Sciences, and Boston College announced it will absorb Pine Manor College, also in the Boston area.
Schools merge to broaden their enrollment base, diversify programs, expand facilities and create efficiencies of scale. About 40% of mergers involve private, nonprofit schools, and the majority involve schools within the same state and with fewer than 5,000 students. Public university systems with excess capacity have made or are considering mergers in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin.
The stress they face is driven by rising costs for college and uneven return on investment, which has diminished public confidence in higher education, opened the door to competitors and led to falling enrollment.
In 2019, 51% of American adults considered a college degree to be “very important,” down from 70% in 2013, according to a Gallup poll. Positive perceptions of college among adults 18 to 29 fell the fastest of any group, to 41% from 74%.
Meanwhile, companies including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Coursera Inc., as well as coding bootcamps, have eroded colleges’ and universities’ near monopoly on post-secondary education, offering inexpensive online courses a la carte that are closely aligned with the labor market.
Enrollment declines accompanied these shifts. From 19.6 million students enrolled in spring 2011, the number fell to 17.5 million in spring 2019. The pandemic sped the decline, and the number was down to 16.2 million by this spring, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.
The steepest declines are at for-profit schools, community colleges and less-prestigious private colleges. Lower demand has pushed some to hand out more scholarships and grants. In the 2021-22 academic year, students paid just 45.5% of the sticker price on average, the lowest ever, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
Some schools have dealt with falling revenue by offering fewer classes and services—leading to still more enrollment challenges. The term applied to schools engaged in such a death spiral? Zombie colleges.
“These are schools that are under-preparing and under-serving their students,” said Ricardo Azziz, who coined the term. They “have excess capacity and are resistant to considering consolidation.” Dr. Azziz was president of Georgia Health Sciences University in 2012 when he oversaw a merger with Augusta State University.
The U.S. government gave $76 billion in aid to colleges and universities to shore up their balance sheets as Covid-19 swept the country. That money delayed some hard decisions, says Robert Zemsky, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania. He predicts that 500 four-year colleges and universities will close in the near term.
“This is an industry that is almost totally unprepared for this,” Dr. Zemsky said. “There’s a lot of pain ahead for a lot of small colleges.”
Northeastern University was built a century ago on a work-study model. Today, its students intern at one of 3,100 companies during their education. That forces professors to adjust their curricula repeatedly to meet the needs of industry.
This exposure solves a problem that has long plagued higher education, says Northeastern’s provost, David Madigan. Schools are organized around academic disciplines, a system he calls “inward looking and tantamount to medieval guilds,” and they struggle to stay relevant at times of rapid change in the economy.
Northeastern’s model has helped make the onetime blue-collar commuter college one of the nation’s more selective universities. In 2021, 91,986 students applied for 2,620 spots.
About a decade ago, Northeastern began looking beyond Boston. It examined regional labor markets to identify gaps between the supply of workers for an area’s industries and the local academic programs to produce them. Over the past decade, Northeastern has opened campuses in Charlotte, N.C., London, Portland, Maine, San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Calif., Toronto and Vancouver. A campus in Miami is in the works.
Northeastern’s Dr. Aoun earned degrees in Lebanon and Paris before getting a Ph.D. in linguistics and philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said studying on three continents gave him an appreciation for the American university system, which encourages innovation more than others. “If you look around the world, you see everything is determined in a centralized way by the government and minister of education,” he said.
Despite the opportunity to innovate, he sees plenty of groupthink in higher education. Universities in the U.S. are “diverse but not differentiated,” he said. “Everyone follows the same approach.”
Northeastern’s work-study model tends to force innovation. Dr. Aoun, who is 69, switched his sneakers last year because students told him a new brand was better. “If the world is changing around you and you’re not changing, that is risky,” he said.
Instead of other universities, he looks to global companies for insights on expansion. A notion he has gleaned is that each campus should serve the needs of the area where it’s located.
As the technology sector grew, so did Northeastern’s interest in having a toehold in Silicon Valley. In 2015, it opened a small campus inside the offices of a tech company in San Jose. It offers programs in computer science, data science and information systems.
Mills College, in nearby Oakland, began in 1852 as a women’s seminary. It grew into a liberal arts college with a focus on women’s rights and gender equity, with graduates who include well-known artists and activists such as Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.) and singer-songwriter Laurie Anderson.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/broke-colleges-resort-to-mergers-for-survival-11658239445
***************************************Australia: Queensland teachers strike gold
Teachers have won a 3 per cent “cost-of-living’’ bonus in Queensland after union leaders accepted an inflation-busting pay offer that will put pressure on public sector payrolls and other industries.
Queensland teachers and principals will pocket the highest salaries in Australian schools through pay rises ranging from 11 per cent to 20 per cent over the next three years, pegged to the rate of inflation.
The Palaszczuk government has broken ranks with other states, with the inflation payment smashing the 2 per cent annual pay rise accepted by Victorian teachers in May, and the 3 per cent pay rise offered to striking teachers in NSW. The inflation bonus could potentially blow out Queensland’s public education sector wage bill – currently more than $8bn – by more than $1bn over the next three years.
The Queensland Teachers’ Union has recommended its members accept the pay deal of a 4 per cent pay rise this year, backdated to July 1, with rises of 4 per cent next year and 3 per cent in 2024. The pay package includes a “cost of living adjustment” worth up to 3 per cent each year, to be paid to teachers in a lump sum if the annual consumer price index in Brisbane outstrips the pay increase.
Should inflation hit 7 per cent this year, as forecast by some economists, starting salaries will soar by as much as $100 a week to $78,783 a year – more than the average wage for newly graduated doctors, lawyers or engineers.
Beginner teachers in Queensland would pocket a $2945 pay rise, plus a cost-of-living bonus worth an extra $2297.
Lead teachers would get a $5001 pay rise plus an inflation bonus of $3900, boosting their pay to $133,926 this year – the highest teacher salary in Australia.
Queensland Education Minister Grace Grace, who is also the Minister for Industrial Relations, on Thursday boasted about the generosity of the pay deal that also offers bonus payments to teachers who move to regional or remote schools.
“This is an offer that includes some of the highest pay increases and best working conditions for teachers in Australia,’’ she said.
“The Palaszczuk government is committed to making the Queensland Department of Education the employer of choice for teachers in Australia.’’
Teachers in Queensland have until July 29 to vote on the offer.
NSW Teachers Federation president Angelo Gavrielatos on Thursday dismissed the NSW government’s 3 per cent pay rise offer as a “pay cut” because it failed to keep pace with inflation.
He refused to rule out ongoing strikes to secure more money, nominating an increase of 10 per cent or 15 per cent over the next two years as a “starting point’’.
“Our claim is more than reasonable considering the inflationary pressure that exists today,’’ he said.
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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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