I remember how it was -- JR
British university professor was 'cancelled' for teaching basic facts about Islam
Human rights scholar Steven Greer, 66, effectively went into hiding after Bristol University Law School undergraduates complained that elements of his course were racist and discriminatory.
The Belfast-born academic, who grew a long, bushy beard, wore fake glasses to disguise himself and carried a screwdriver and a 'sturdy' umbrella in case he was attacked, admitted he was more afraid for his life than during the Troubles after he was hounded by 'woke' students.
Professor Greer, who was exonerated of all wrongdoing by an inquiry last year, has now accused Left-wing activists of putting the lives of academics such as himself at risk, and warned a 'Woke Inquisition' could 'dumb down degree courses at many of the UK's finest institutions'.
The grandfather-of-three said: 'Cancel culture is fast becoming the scourge of academia. A climate of fear is already replacing an environment of free, critical inquiry.
'There is a growing risk that many students will leave university with little critical insight, knowledge, or appreciation of the vital importance of intellectual freedom and evidence-based thinking in a healthy democracy.
'Some, wearing self-tied gags and blinkers, will go on to join the next generation of leaders. This does not bode well for the future of our society.'
He said academics were at risk of attacks because of how easy it was for students to make racism allegations 'based on nothing but lies and distortion'.
The professor added: 'Prejudice is deplorable and should rightly be condemned but this is far removed from legitimate academic enquiry. 'Unfortunately, cancel culture fails to see the distinction.
'The issue is compounded by universities. While some remain beacons of intellectual freedom, others are increasingly cowed by members of the cancel culture woke far-Left.
'Not only are students losing out but the reputation of British higher education is also being damaged around the world.
Prof Greer said university bosses need to do more to protect academics from 'intolerant' students.
He said: 'I had until last year enjoyed a wonderful career and I believe I had earned the respect of students, colleagues and peers all over the world.
'Almost overnight my name became synonymous with bigotry, racism and Islamophobia – especially on social media – because of a handful of malicious students who set out to ruin my life. 'I was vilified and my name and reputation were dragged through the mud.
'For my own safety, I was forced to act like a fugitive for including academically authoritative, fact-based information in my course that a few militant students took objection to.
Allegations of Islamophobia were first made against Prof Greer after he used a teaching slide that mentioned the 2015 terror attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a magazine that had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
The slide was described as having 'Islamophobic rhetoric'.
Additionally, a lecture that included 'well-attested observations' about the inferior treatment of women and non-Muslims in Islamic states and the tough penalties handed out under Sharia law was slated as 'bigoted and divisive'.
A five-month inquiry led by a senior academic at Bristol University found each of the accusations to be baseless. An independent KC appointed during the inquiry also found Prof Greer was not guilty of harassment.
But the 'scurrilous falsehoods by a handful of illiberal students' led to the removal of the material from the course and left him fearing for his reputation and his life.
He was not allocated any further teaching duties upon his return and says he was kept on what he regards as unofficial 'research leave' until his retirement in September 2022.
University bosses also dropped his module on Islam, China and the Far East so Muslim students would 'not feel that their religion is being singled out or in any way "othered" by the class material'.
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Subsidizing Higher Education Is Not Creating Widespread External Benefits
President Biden’s student debt relief proposal created a storm of controversy. That is not surprising, since it was a transparent (and apparently successful) attempt to buy the votes of an important Democratic constituency, even though it created a target-rich environment for critics.
It is sharply pro-rich at the expense of those far poorer, from a party pretending to stand for the opposite. It is very costly to everyone else (the National Taxpayers Union put the average burden at just over $2500 per taxpayer). The income cutoffs, designed to make it appear it is less pro-rich than it is, are misleading because most affected are in the early parts of their careers, when their incomes are lower, even though their average lifetime incomes (wealth, in present value terms) are likely to be far higher. It will encourage more people for whom the costs of going to college exceed the benefits to go anyway. It will raise the cost of college further, transferring many of the benefits claimed for students to the providers of education.
Oral arguments to Constitutional challenges to Biden’s plan will be heard at the Supreme Court in February, with much at stake.
What I have found surprising, however, is that the arguments and evidence for how ineffective, poorly targeted, inequitable and probably unconstitutional the student debt forgiveness plan is have not gone one seemingly obvious step further—to ask why we subsidize higher education so heavily in America, even without the currently proposed additional debt relief. After all, student loan forgiveness would only be the ex post icing on the cake of very large subsidies of other people’s money that already go to higher education.
Thirty-one years ago, a Congressional Budget Office study found that tuition subsidies alone averaged more than 80 percent of the cost of providing an education at 4-year public colleges and universities. And despite claims by Elizabeth Warren and others that there has been reduced investment of in higher education, the evidence does not support that.
And that is just one part of what Gordon Tullock called “a highly regressive scheme for transferring funds from the people who are less well-off to those who are well-off.” Economists Edgar and Jacqueline Browning put it similarly, in their classic Public Finance and the Price System: “Subsidies to higher education effectively benefit the brightest and most ambitious young people, and this group will on the average have the highest lifetime incomes even without assistance.” So, the question becomes whether the supposed benefits of college attendance to others in society are great enough to justify the huge subsidies. And careful thinking makes that highly doubtful.
As Peter Passell has written:
“The prospect of heavy debt after graduation would no doubt discourage some students from borrowing,” but “that may be the wisest form of restraint. Someone has to finally pay the bill, and it is hard to see why that should be the taxpayers rather than the direct beneficiary of the schooling.”
An important thing to recognize in this situation is that subsidies supposedly going to students increase the market demand for education, so that the incidence (who actually captures the gains from subsidies) is often quite different than claimed. As Adam Smith noted over two centuries ago, education subsidies increase college demand and go in large part to education providers in better wages and working conditions.
Market forces (in addition to serious barriers to entry into becoming an accredited and respected higher education provider) largely transform student aid into education provider aid. The case made for higher education subsidies to the rest of us has also long included a thicket of highly questionable arguments.
Many have argued that subsidizing higher education results in higher productivity, benefiting others. But competitive labor markets mean that higher productivity is captured by the workers in higher compensation, not by others in society. Consequently, it does not justify subsidies from others. It has also been argued that subsidies are justified because they increase the supply of skilled workers, lowering costs. However, the greatest part of that “gain” is actually a transfer from existing workers forced to accept lower wages for their skills than otherwise, not a net gain to society.
Still others have argued that added education provides cultural benefits to society. Again, however, such benefits primarily accrue to the students themselves (e.g., the ability to appreciate art), providing little or no justification for public subsidies from others.
There are other problems with the “external benefits” argument for government provision of education. “Skate” or “Easy A” classes do not provide substantial external benefits because they do not teach much of value. In contrast, law, medical, and dental training may teach a great deal, but as mentioned above, the benefit of such training goes to graduates in higher incomes, not society.
Furthermore, one must confront the fact that courses in some fields actually seem to make students less productive in the eyes of many potential employers. It is hard to see external benefits rather than external costs to others in such areas. Sizable external benefits to others would also require, at a minimum, that schools successfully teach valuable truths and skills and that students retain such wisdom past graduation, yet both conditions frequently go unmet.
There may be some social benefits, though difficult to articulate and measure, that one might argue justifies government higher education subsidies. But most plausible illustrations come at lower levels of education, not college (e.g., learning your ABCs and basic times tables in primary school), with few if any added benefits from higher education subsidies.
And even if there are some benefits to others from further education, those benefits to others would have to be greater than the costs imposed on others to fund the subsidies, a comparison few proponents consider seriously. With current subsidies already very large, before any consideration of loan forgiveness, costs are often far larger than benefits. And given our tax burdens and the vastly expanded future tax burdens implied by the recent explosion of government debt (that will also now need to be financed at much higher interest rates), the arguments for leaving the money in citizens’ hands, where they could always invest in added education if they believed it was the highest valued use of their funds, become even stronger.
Arguments against President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan are plentiful and powerful.
The substantial number of Swiss-cheese arguments long put forward in defense of higher education subsidies also lay bare what is only sensible as an effort to buy millions of votes from what has become a major Democrat interest group.
But those same arguments should also confront the massive higher education subsidies that would remain even in the absence of loan forgiveness. That would also bring us back to the Constitution. Not only does our supposed “highest law of the land” fail to grant the President unilateral executive power to cancel loan debts, nowhere does it enumerate education as a legitimate function of the federal government. We need less government involvement in both dimensions, not more in either.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14419&omhide=true&trk=title
******************************************************Australian parents flock to private schools amid public system exodus
Given the chaos at many State schools, any parent who could afford to opt out would want to
Parents are sending their children to the state’s independent schools in record numbers, while the share of students enrolled in public schools has plunged to its lowest level in 15 years.
There were thousands fewer students enrolled in NSW public schools last year as families increasingly opted for a private education.
Official data released on Wednesday showed that 63.7 per cent of NSW students attended public schools in 2022 – a fall from 65.5 per cent five years ago. The proportion of students in independent schools has surged to 15.1 per cent, up from 13.3 per cent in 2017.
Catholic schools have remained relatively steady, with their share of students rising slightly to 21 per cent in 2022.
Families flocking to new housing developments on the city’s fringe are partly behind the surging enrolments in new and low-fee independent schools, according to Helen Proctor, a professor of education at University of Sydney.
“The new private schools are marketing themselves well, and the price point is really attractive to parents. These schools are also heavily subsidised by public funding, unlike the older and wealthier schools,” she said.
The exodus of students from public schools is a longer-term trend that has occurred while the number of private schools with fees between $5000 to $10,000 has grown, said Glenn Fahey, an education research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.
“It comes as little surprise to see an increasing flight of parents to private schools. This is a trend that had been going for some time,” he said.
Minister for Education and Early Learning Sarah Mitchell said the government supported parents’ freedom to choose which school they enrol their children in. “We also support the growth of low-fee non-government schools in high-growth areas through capital funding,” she said.
Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show the state’s independent school enrolments grew by 6570 in a year to reach 187,913 – the highest on record.
Association of Independent Schools NSW chief executive Margery Evans said enrolment growth had occurred in low and mid-fee Anglican, Islamic and Christian schools in Sydney’s newer suburbs.
“Demand for places in many independent schools exceeds supply, and schools report having scores of names on their waiting lists and, in some cases, hundreds of students are turned away,” Evans said.
Sydney’s private schools, many of which have increased fees by 4 to 7 per cent this year, have been lobbying to increase student caps, with principals warning restrictive student caps are creating huge enrolment pressures.
The ABS figures reflect a national trend, with independent schools across Australia recording the highest growth rate at 3.3 per cent last year, followed by Catholic schools at 1 per cent. Enrolments in government schools fell for a second year running, down by 0.6 per cent across the country.
Ellouise Roberts, head of education statistics at the ABS, said the proportion of students enrolled in independent primary schools was growing, with about 12 per cent of NSW students in private primary schools.
“This increase in the primary school share for independent schools has been continuing over a few years,” she said, noting that these proportions are much higher for high school, with 18.5 per cent of secondary students in NSW independent schools.
Across all schools, private schools had a lower student-to-teacher ratio (11.7 students to one teacher) than government schools (13.4 students to one teacher) and Catholic schools (13.6 students to one teacher).
Principal Alan Dawson at Richard Johnson Anglican School in Oakhurst said demand was increasing for low-fee private schools in high-growth areas in the city’s north-west. “Our fees are about $6400 for year 12 – parents really see it as value for money,” Dawson said.
“Even just in the past year to this year, we’ve seen a 44 per cent increase in a year at our Marsden Park campus. This is mainly due to a lack of public schools in this growth corridor,” Dawson said.
Leppington Anglican College principal Michael Newton’s school in south-west Sydney opened its doors this year and already has 180 students.
“We’ve got kids who have come from other public schools in the area,” he said. “There are some big open-learning style classrooms – for some parents, their children have found that difficult.”
He said parents who enrolled their children at the $8000-a-year school valued how staff used explicit instruction to explain academic concepts to children and the attention they received from one classroom teacher.
“In our area, parents say they want a disciplined environment,” he said.
Nikki Kapsanis, who lives in Earlwood, chose Rosebank College for her children, Jonas and Alexis.
The Five Dock private school charges $11,400 for year 12. This is significantly below amounts charged at Kambala and SCEGGS Darlinghurst, the most expensive Sydney schools where fees have increased beyond $45,000 for the first time this year.
“For us, the school is up there with the elite schools but not with the cost,“ Kapsanis said. “The co-educational factor was a big plus, and it offers academics, performing and arts. We think the fees are worth it.”
“The kids went to our local public primary school but for high school we wanted a private education. As children get older and they become teenagers, they need discipline.”
ACU senior lecturer and former principal Paul Kidson said there can be a “misguided view” that there is major academic benefit to sending children to private schools. There are many reasons parents select independent schools including social status, religious affiliation and family connections.
“It will be interesting to see what happens with enrolments in low-fee schools as mortgage and cost of living pressures grow,” he said, adding that high-fee schools will be relatively insulated.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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