How wokeness could destroy higher education

“Get woke, go broke.” It’s a phrase people coined to describe the failure of Hollywood’s recent politics-drenched efforts at blockbuster films, from which viewers stayed away in droves. But now it applies to another field: higher education.

College and graduate degrees were comparatively rare before about 1970. People could be quite successful without them, and there was little stigma attached to their absence.

That changed as the baby boomers and the GI Bill hit colleges. By the 1970s, college became an essential ticket to entry in the managerial and professional classes (and even to military promotions). Where higher ed had once been a luxury, it became a necessity to membership in the middle, and especially the upper-middle, class.

Parents struggled to live in districts with “top” public schools so they could get their kids into good colleges. Once admitted, the students often borrowed huge sums (most of which went into the colleges’ pockets) to attend. The goal was a degree from a “prestige” school, which would guarantee a good job out of college or admission to a top law, medical or other professional school and thus a secure position among the haute bourgeoisie.

That system is falling apart. Higher education’s enormous costs, which have grown at a rate exceeding that of most other items in today’s budgets, have become such that even a good job as a doctor or lawyer often isn’t enough to justify them, and hardly any other professional jobs even come close.

As a result, college enrollments are plummeting — nationwide undergraduate enrollment fell by 650,000 in a single year, spring 2021 to 2022. It’s down 14% in the past decade, even as the US population grows.

But there’s a new wrinkle. It’s not just colleges that are “woke,” it’s also employers. And woke employers are pursuing a new strategy that may make colleges go broke faster, as notions of “equity” and “privilege” popular on campus spread to the corporate world.

As The Post reported recently, some employers are asking applicants to leave the colleges they attended off their applications. Instead of the school, they are simply to list the degree. Whether it came from Harvard or Slippery Rock won’t matter anymore because the employer doesn’t want to know. Prestige degrees confer “privilege,” you know, and that’s bad for equity.

Well, of course people know prestige degrees confer privilege. That’s why they pursue them. But now all that studying, all those contrived extracurricular activities, all those anguished nights spent writing a heartrending “personal essay” are for naught. You might as well have gone to a school whose admissions requirement was the ability to exhale warm air. The degree counts the same.

But wait, there’s more. The Gartner consulting firm recently recommended its 15,000 clients, in the name of equity, consider hiring people without degrees at all. The focus on degrees is bad for “underrepresented candidates” because they’re less likely to have attended, or finished, college. Gartner suggests employers instead focus on “assessing candidates solely on their ability to perform in the role,” rather than on their “formal education and experience.”

Far be it from me to criticize hiring people based on their ability to do the job instead of the polish of their résumés, but this is a huge departure from the past, and it spells bad news for the people who’ve been selling the polish. If employees are no longer hired based on credentials, the market for credentials is going to head south.

And there are problems on the other end, too. Why should parents struggle to get their kids into “top” public schools if they don’t need to get them into prestige colleges?

This goes double since some top public schools are embracing “equity,” too. At least seven high schools in tony Fairfax County, Va., turn out not to have told their students they’d won National Merit Scholarship awards. That sort of merit-based recognition is bad for “equity,” they felt, and the announcement might make the students who didn’t win feel bad.

So if working hard in a top high school won’t get you a scholarship to attend a prestige school that won’t get you a fancy job afterward, why bother? Why not start work sooner and develop skills and a track record employers will want?

Why not indeed? I don’t think there’s a happy ending for prestige colleges in this. Maybe pushing “equity” so hard was a mistake.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/16/how-the-wokeness-it-pushes-could-destroy-higher-ed/

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The Critical Race Theory debate is turning parents into unlikely activists

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is among the most divisive doctrines to ever threaten America’s schoolchildren, and it has sparked an unprecedented grassroots uprising of parents whose stories of ideological resistance have been detailed in our new book The Great Parent Revolt.

A multidisciplinary education philosophy that places race at the center of American history and culture, CRT is akin to racial Marxism — with whites viewed as oppressors and non-whites framed as the oppressed. The philosophy is at the center of high-profile intellectual efforts, such as The New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project, which claims that slavery and anti-black racism are at the core of the entire American experience. In The Great Parent Revolt, we profile more than a dozen parents, students, and grassroots leaders who have courageously stood up and fought CRT.

One unlikely hero is Gabs Clark, a widowed low-income African-American mother of five children who had been living in a motel in Las Vegas.

Her high school-aged son, William, was in a local charter school which required a course called Sociology of Change. According to Clark, the course included an assignment that asked students “to list your identities, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your religion.”

William, who is mixed race with blonde hair and blue eyes, refused to complete the assignment and was given a failing grade for the class, which kept him from graduating. According to Clark, because of his fair complexion, the class viewed her son as “a dirty filthy oppressor. “

Clark filed a federal lawsuit charging the school with violating William’s First Amendment free speech rights, Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rights, and federal anti-discrimination rights for compelling him to complete the race-based assignment. The case has since been settled out of court.

Parents, says Clark, must realize that it is up to them to challenge CRT’s impact on education as she did. “Just because you have these rights,” she said, “if you don’t fight for them, then it’s like you ain’t got them.”

William’s case is no anomaly. We interviewed a California student named Joshua, who asked that his real name not be divulged, who told us shocking stories of the CRT-type exercises he has endured in the classroom.

The Great Parent Revolt

As a seventh grader he had to participate in a so-called “privilege walk.” In this absurd exercise, the entire class formed a line as their teacher read out characteristics of privilege, such as “I am white” or “I am male;” students had to take a step forward if a characteristic applied to them.

Joshua said it felt like a criminal lineup with students “singled out for privileges that they really can’t help or control.”

Those personal details “shouldn’t be the concern of other students in my class and they aren’t entitled to that information,” said Joshua, who is white. He added that students and teachers are “scared about what they say for fear that they may mess up regarding one’s race or pronouns or identities.”

If that sounds like Communist China, then just ask immigrant mom Xi Van Fleet. Now living in Virginia, Van Fleet grew up in China during Mao Zedong’s dreaded Cultural Revolution, which resulted in millions of deaths. She recalls Mao’s Red Guards, who were mostly middle and high school-aged students, identifying supposed anti-revolutionaries and parading them into town and organizing public trials.

“In China, we were taught at a very young age to just shut up,” says Van Fleet, who sees similarities between today’s hyper-racialized climate and Mao-era China..

“Everything that’s going on here happened in China during the Cultural Revolution,” she told us, which is why CRT “should have no place in our schools.”

CRT, she says, will result in “the total control of the population by a few on top.”

This type of control is on display in Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School, the state’s top academic school, which is located in Fairfax County.

Asra Nomani, an immigrant mom from India whose father marched with Mahatma Gandhi, has been a key parent leader protesting against the school’s change in admissions policy that de-emphasizes grades and test scores in favor of subjective factors like student “lived” experiences and limiting the number of students admitted from Asian-heavy schools. The aim, she says, “is to keep out too many Asian-American students.”

Nomani blames CRT, “which praises or blames members of a particular race solely because they happen to be that race.” Supporters of the new admissions policy derisively labeled Asian parents as White-adjacent, but Nomani said, “we were unapologetic.”

Nomani helped start a coalition of Thomas Jefferson parents that is suing to overturn the school’s admissions policy. Their efforts also resulted in Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares investigating the school for possible violations of state law.

We also talked with Lia Rensin, a California mom who is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Rensin is fighting what she describes as a CRT-influenced version of ethnic studies, often dubbed “liberated ethnic studies,” which formed the basis of a draft ethnic studies model curriculum proposed by California education officials. That draft also included anti-semitic elements such as a song lyric demonizing Jewish control of the media.

A huge grassroots outcry from groups such as Rensin’s own Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies forced California officials to pull the extreme draft curriculum and approve a more moderate ethnic studies model curriculum.

“The resistance,” Rensin says, “has to come from people who are aware of what’s going on, who push back and say…you’re not supposed to be indoctrinating my kids.”

The Pledge of Allegiance says that we are one nation indivisible. As I learned while researching our new book, parents such as these are true American heroes leading the fight to ensure we remain a land of liberty and justice for all.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/14/the-crt-debate-is-turning-parents-into-unlikely-activists/

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Catholic Schools Sue Michigan Over Civil Rights Reinterpretation

Catholic schools are suing Michigan after the Great Lake State’s highest court ruled last year that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected under the state’s civil rights law — even at religious institutions.

Two separate suits have been filed in the Western District of Michigan by Catholic institutions, with major players in religious liberties litigation at the helms of their cases.

Sacred Heart Academy, a classical Catholic school, filed suit in late December under the auspices of the Alliance Defending Freedom. Meanwhile, St. Joseph Catholic Church, a parish that operates a school 20 miles north of Lansing, will be represented by the Becket Fund in its concurrent suit.

The twin suits come after the state’s supreme court expanded the definition of sex in the state’s anti-discrimination ordinance, the Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act.

The 1977 statute prohibits discrimination in the state on the basis of “religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, familial status, or marital status” in a variety of services, including “educational facilities.” The legislation does not provide an exemption for religious institutions.

In July 2022, the Michigan supreme court ruled that “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation necessarily involves discrimination because of sex,” thereby violating the civil rights law.

Both schools raise concerns that the teaching and observance of Catholic doctrine could be curbed by the new ruling.

The suits include a litany of current practices at the school that accord with Catholic faith but could be deemed illegal under the expanded definition of sexually based discrimination — including curricular materials, gender-separated activities, and a commitment to traditional understandings of gender and marriage.

“Michigan’s new understanding of ‘sex’ discrimination deems it unlawful for St. Joseph’s to follow the 2,000-year-old teachings of the Catholic Church, including its teaching that marriage is a lifelong commitment between one man and one woman, that sexual relations are limited to marriage, and that human beings are created as either male or female,” the parish’s counsel at Becket wrote in its brief.

The Grand Rapids-based Sacred Heart Academy says the school “cannot embrace a vision of marriage and human sexuality that is inconsistent with Catholic doctrine because that undermines Sacred Heart’s vision of human flourishing.”

The suits additionally highlight how such an anti-discrimination regime would compel the institutions to change their hiring practices, potentially violating the legal principle of “ministerial exception.”

The legal doctrine, affirmed by the Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, grants religious institutions autonomy in employment practices “without government intrusion” — exempting them from federal anti-discrimination law.

Conflicts between civil rights protections and religious liberties have been growing since LGBT individuals emerged as a protected class, challenging the autonomy of both believers and their institutions.

Liberals and conservatives are in an ongoing struggle to define discrimination — or at least to prioritize which comes first. LGBT activists argue that religious institutions should be prohibited from discriminating against homosexuality and transgender ideology.

Conservatives, however, say that such arguments discriminate against religion, and religious institutions — and believers — should not be compelled to violate their core tenets by anti-discrimination laws.

Currently, the Supreme Court is deciding a case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, that hinges on a similar principle with regard to Colorado civil rights law. In the case, a Christian web designer, Lorie Smith, wants to advertise her work on wedding websites. Because of her religious convictions, however, Ms. Smith does not create wedding materials for same-sex marriages, which is a violation of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law as currently understood.

In Michigan, the court’s expansion of sexually based discrimination comes after decades of failed legislative attempts to include LGBT individuals in the Elliot-Larsen Act. Amendments to this effect have never passed the state legislature. The Republican co-sponsor of the original anti-discrimination bill in the Michigan state house, Melvin Larsen, is himself a former Catholic school principal.

https://www.nysun.com/article/catholic-schools-sue-michigan-over-civil-rights-reinterpretation

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