I remember how it was -- JR
A University Gets Free Speech Right … Mostly
Students are proving that they learned their social justice lessons well, as shout-downs of conservative campus speakers at universities like Stanford demonstrate. But when students demanded that state-funded George Mason University cancel Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as this year’s commencement speaker, the university refused. The university president defended the decision to host Youngkin because, in his view, universities should expose students to different ideas. His response got it right—mostly.
Youngkin’s policies to protect parental rights in public education triggered backlash from several student groups when they learned that he would give this year’s commencement address at George Mason. His selection as speaker, they say, is harmful and will promote hate.
This rhetoric is unsurprising. As early as elementary school, students are being taught to react rather than reason and cancel rather than converse. And as incidents at Stanford and other universities have shown, administrators and diversity, equity, and inclusion offices are empowering and encouraging students to apply these lessons to shut down and silence opposing views.
But George Mason has chosen a different path. In response to students’ demands, university President Gregory Washington issued a public statement defending the university’s decision to host the popular governor.
Washington emphasized that encountering opposing views will make students better advocates for themselves beyond the university. After all, he explained, the university is a place to discuss precisely those topics on which people disagree. If George Mason shielded its students from ideas they didn’t like, the university would fail to fulfill its purpose.
Washington got this much right: George Mason would be doing its students a disservice by denying them exposure to ideas with which they disagree. Universities exist to equip students to engage with a multiplicity of views and claims, to ask hard questions, and to think for themselves. The university is more than a marketplace of ideas; it is (or should be) a place to be fully alive in the pursuit of objective, knowable truth.
This is why intellectual diversity on campus is so important. As Washington rightly acknowledged, diversity is not about skin pigment. It is about something deeper: the unique experiences, views, ideas, talents, and personalities each of us bring to the table. It is about recognizing that each person has inherent dignity as a human being that makes each person’s views worth hearing and discussing, even if those views are wrong.
And far from being an assault on dignity, encouraging students to consider different perspectives on difficult topics respects everyone’s dignity by inviting them to pursue the truth for themselves. We thrive when we keep the public square open for multiple perspectives and dialog on the topics that trouble us the most.
But Washington missed an important point: Discourse about difficult topics is not just an opportunity to become a better advocate for yourself. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on your own beliefs and to consider whether they might be wrong.
Although Washington didn’t mention this in his letter, we suspect the protesting students know it. In fact, we suspect their opposition to Youngkin’s speech is motivated chiefly by the fear of having to wrestle with facts and arguments that challenge their own beliefs.
With administrator-backed student protests becoming a fad across the country, it is refreshing to see a university stand up to cancel culture. Other universities could learn a lot from George Mason’s example. But while we applaud the school’s commitment to free speech, including for commencement speakers, the president’s statement is only the beginning.
Now the real test begins: Will George Mason lead the way in cultivating real discourse, or will the governor receive a Stanford-style welcome?
We hope that students will heed Washington’s advice, put aside the disruption and hate, and embrace discourse. Even better, they should hold out the possibility that their beliefs and opinions might be wrong.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/03/a-university-gets-free-speech-right-mostly
********************************************Michigan Public Schools Admit Teaching Critical Race Theory
State governments in places like Florida, Virginia, and Arkansas are leading the fight against the use of race and sex to divide the country. These are welcome steps. But on the other side of the ledger, you have states like Michigan. There, the public schools are going in exactly the opposite direction.
Take Detroit, for example. Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti admitted that the schools are “deeply using critical race theory.”
Critical race theory is a body of work that teaches that racism is “systemic” in America. The teaching of this theory and its tenets in schools has been rejected by the likes of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Virginia counterpart, Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Vitti insists, however, that critical race theory will help Michigan students and that these students should understand systemic racism. Yet this type of curriculum encourages divisiveness rather than promoting family and American values.
Another example is in Livingston County. Mona Shand, a top aide to Democratic U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, sits on a “diversity council” that lobbies for teaching critical race theory within local schools.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, the council’s website bio for Shand was recently edited to remove references to Slotkin, changing from “Livingston County Representative for Rep. Elissa Slotkin” to “civic leader.” The council also removed a call to action for parents to advocate for critical race theory because of increasing pressure from parents who were upset with the potential for it to be included in the curriculum.
The current vice president of the Michigan State Board of Education, Pamela Pugh, is also pushing the divisive rhetoric. She is currently fighting Michigan Senate Bill 460, which would strip 5% of school funding for teaching the derivatives of critical race theory, while at the same time maintaining that critical race theory is not being taught in Michigan schools. She said that this legislation would confuse educators.
Pugh said to state legislators: “I go further to call on this body and your colleagues to embrace critical race theory as a framework for you to better understand educational inequality and structural racism so as to find solutions that lead to justice for all who live, work, learn, and play in Michigan.”
According to Michigan’s school code, the state requires that every school district provide education without discrimination as to religion, creed, color, or national origin. For a school to provide materials and opportunities in favor of one race over another would be discriminatory and violate that code.
Teaching true history is not about indoctrinating our children to the canard that this country is “systemically racist.” True history is teaching from an accurate lens that does not seek to persuade the students to adopt a political fad.
Critical race theory is, of course, not the only leftist fad affecting schools across the country and in the Great Lakes State.
At Gull Lake Community Schools in Michigan, teachers are promoting LGBTQ issues on social media platforms to students. A first-grade teacher in the district shared an image on Twitter that warned that children must have access to LGBTQ books and that those who do not promote them are guilty of discrimination.
Taxpayer dollars should not be used to promote gender ideology material or material that persuades a child to think that America is racist. Embracing an ideology that perpetuates division is not healthy for a school system. Threatening school districts that they must teach children about gender theory to further a political narrative is wrong for the district and its students.
There are some remedies, though. For example, public school officials in Michigan should publicize the course materials (syllabi, titles of assigned books, homework lessons, and in-class assignments) online. This would provide transparency for parents.
Additionally, schools need to return to teaching the values that America was founded upon, such as the fundamental principle that all men are created equal, which is the opposite of critical race theory. How are we going to appeal to tomorrow’s generation when we fall short of promoting American values?
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/03/michigan-schools-admit-pushing-critical-race-theory/
********************************************************Push for more Australian government support of vocational education
Australian National University chief Brian Schmidt has called on the federal government to extend HECS loans to vocational courses, and to open the way for new hybrid institutions spanning higher education and vocational education, to give students the sophisticated skills needed for the next wave of jobs.
In an unusual move for a university leader, Professor Schmidt outlined his vision for tertiary education in his own personal submission to the government’s universities review, which will publish its first report in June.
At the end of this year he will stand down as ANU vice-chancellor after eight years in the job and he said his submission was a “distillation” of his experience. “I’ve thought a lot about higher education in the last seven and a bit years. We need to rethink the system from nose-to-tail,” he told The Australian.
Professor Schmidt said it was critical to bring together federally funded higher education system and the largely state-funded vocational education systems so that students could use HECS loans, which he would limit to non-profit education institutions, to do courses that spanned both.
He said university students also needed the sophisticated skills best taught in hands-on vocational education courses, and vocational graduates often wanted to upgrade their qualifications to degree level. “The current system doesn’t do hybrid well. If people can’t move between the two it’s problematic,” he said.
In his submission the Nobel prize winner also tells the universities review panel that Australia needs a clear and properly funded strategy for research that focuses on long-term national goals.
“We have in Australia no long-term vision for what research can do for the Australian people over time. We have a program here that lasts a year, a program there that lasts a year. We don’t have a national vision,” Professor Schmidt says.
He says the government should give universities clear research missions, such as “energy transformation” and then fund them to succeed both in basic research and in applied research that translates into technology.
He says it is vitally important for Australia to have a sovereign research capacity and it could not continue to use international student fees to pay for university research. “We outsource (the funding of) research to international students, including to strategic rivals. It’s not only not sustainable, it’s just not right,” Professor Schmidt says.
His thinking on faults of the tertiary education system is a far cry from his Nobel prize, awarded in 2011 for his joint discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating – evidence that space was imbued with a mysterious dark energy driving the galaxies apart. But in 2016 he made the surprise transition from astrophysicist to university administrator and wants to help create a tertiary education system that sets Australia up for the future.
He says an example of the new skills people need to learn – not just in post-school education but through their lives – is competency in working with artificial intelligence. “You’re either going to be replaced by ChatGPT-like things or you’re going to use them to be more productive,” he says.
In his submission Professor Schmidt warns that universities and vocational colleges need to be ready to compete with new low-cost, online-education companies that will offer courses at scale and threaten the future of public universities and TAFE colleges.
“These providers will deliver only a limited subset of activities, and use their cheaper costs structures to focus on those areas that are profitable, thereby reducing the financial viability of Australia’s TAFEs and universities, which have much broader societal expectations,” he says.
He says a hybrid education approach would “improve the agility of tertiary and higher education institutions to compete”.
Professor Schmidt’s submission also argues that HECS fees should be standardised for all courses, unlike the current system where annual fees range from about $4000 to more than $15,000 depending on the course.
He also tells the review panel that universities need to do more to give academic and research staff more career certainty. He blames the high level of casualisation of university staff partly on the “inappropriate (government) funding for teaching and research” but “some of it must be attributed to institutions putting other objectives ahead of the reasonable treatment of staff”.
He says the attraction of an academic career has diminished over the past two decades and that stipends for PhD students, who carry out much of the research work, must be improved.
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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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