RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/common_sense_and_selfevident_truth_in_a_posttruth_world.html

Convincing Americans that there is no such thing as truth defeats the very foundation of the American idea.

Many Americans today go far beyond simply rejecting the ideas of the American founders, the claims of the Declaration, and the Constitution.  They reject the very idea of truth.  These Americans were taught in American universities that there is no such thing as truth, that truth is an outmoded concept, that we now live in a post-truth reality.  The belief that the concept of truth is outmoded is no longer confined to academia.  It has invaded the world outside academia and won a great victory there; the Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as the Word of the Year for 2016.

And a great victory it is.  Convincing Americans that there is no such thing as truth defeats the very foundation of the American idea.  The Founders, famously, founded America on certain truths, truths they declared to the world were not only true, but self-evidently true: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”  Self-evident truth occupies the first place and also the highest position among the declarations of the Declaration of Independence.  “Created equal” and “unalienable rights” and all the rest follow along after that bold opening claim.

The Founders certainly believed they built on the rock of self-evident truth.  But if there is no such thing as truth, then there can be no such thing as a self-evident truth, and everything the Founders declared and established can simply be dismissed.  There is no need to try to understand the thinking of the Founders — not even by professors of constitutional law.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/08/disappearing-liberals/

Anyone who writes about higher education and criticizes the pernicious effects of the Left is likely to receive an anguished letter. Usually, the writer proclaims himself to be a proud member of the Left who agrees with the criticisms of the academy, but he believes that one shouldn’t use words like Left or progressives to describe the enemies of intellectual freedom. Use those off-putting, polemical words and you’ll drive away useful allies from the fight to restore higher education.

I think it is appropriate to use the Left or progressives­ to criticize the enemies of higher education. But these letters require a thoughtful response. Why are those words appropriate?

My answer is a combination of No True Scotsman, Self-Definition, and Times Have Changed.

Let’s start with Times Have Changed.

The generation of academics on the Left that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s largely consisted of old-school liberals, who prized Western civilization and intellectual pluralism, and a small, illiberal minority—the illiberal Left—who hated both.

That generation witnessed the academy’s radicalizing transformation from the 1960s to the 1990s, to become ever more the creature of the illiberal Left. Yet when this generation retired, the illiberal Left was still in the process of achieving dominance within the academy. As late as the year 2000, the illiberal Left had not fully supplanted the old school liberals in higher education.

The changes within the academy were drastic enough from 1960 to 2000, but the changes in the 20 years since have been even more revolutionary.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/latinx__the_latest_leftist_educational_maneuver.html

Rutgers University founded in 1766 is one of only nine colonial colleges established before the American Revolution.  The alumni boast many who were predominant in the revolutionary founding. Inclusion and access began in 1867 when Kusakabe Taro was the first Japanese student to enroll in a U.S. college.  In 1892 James Dickson Carr was the first African-American to graduate from Rutgers and in 1918 the New Jersey College for Women was founded on the campus.

Currently, at the Rutgers Department of Education Graduate Studies a move is afoot to “advance narratives of achievement and success in higher education among Latinx/a/o students.  So according to Dr. Nichole Garcia, “a Mexican and Puerto Rican woman of color”

we need to understand the differences in the distinct groups that make up the Latinx/a/o community.  Once we do, we will be better positioned to meet the diverse needs of these different groups by creating programming to ensure the success of all students and allocating funds [emphasis mine].

Garcia wants to investigate “why Latinx/a/o are the largest ethnic population, but experience some of the lowest college completion rates.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/dumb_and_dumber_in_michigan_education.html

The state’s social justice warriors don’t allow coronavirus crisis to go to waste.

On April 1st Gretchen Whitmer wiped out the rest of the K-12 school year.  Teachers remained on the payroll, of course, and each of Michigan’s 587 school districts was tasked with implementing an on-line program.  In East Lansing the plan meant an end to letter grades; instead students will receive a “CR” (for credit) or an “I” for incomplete.

Ironically, the district’s social justice warrior school board president has sparked a near revolt by administrators and fellow board members for having the audacity to suggest that “credit” or “incomplete” isn’t fair.  Erin Graham presented evidence that East Lansing schools would be an outlier by nixing grades.

About two hours into the unusually tense meeting, (board member Terah) Chambers questioned the whole discussion, suggesting that we are all facing much more pressing issues with record levels of unemployment and food insecurity. She suggested the conversation was focusing on the privileged.

But Graham argued that a lack of a letter grade could affect more than college-bound students, affecting students who may want to join the military or take on entry-level positions in health care. In these cases, grades could determine eligibility, pay grade, and benefits, and disadvantages could compound over time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/american-universities-must-stop-covering-for-the-chinese-community-party/

Too often, links to the Communist ideology supporting the Chinese regime’s pernicious actions are omitted in higher education.

To the degree that the misdirection and inaction of China’s Communist government have been discussed in this pandemic, it is worth asking what the COVID-19 crisis has to do with Communism and its underlying ideology of Marxism-Leninism.

According to the dominant narrative in much of U.S. higher education today, absolutely nothing. A well-documented left-wing bias in colleges and universities, particularly in those considered elite, produces students who are poorly prepared to recognize such behavior. Compounding the problem, history plays a smaller role in secondary education than it once did, and civics has all but disappeared.

Today in academia, one is far more likely to hear about the depredations of capitalism than the ravages of Communism. Calling oneself a Marxist has long been trendy. One recent poll concludes that four in ten Americans support some sort of socialism or socialist policies. Another poll concludes that one-third of Millennials support communism. A 2016 survey found that Karl Marx is more likely to be assigned as a class text in U.S. universities than Adam Smith.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2020/05/05/a-modest-proposal-for-opening-universities-some-faculties-should-remain-closed-n388408

“The main influence undermining academic work is discrimination based on ideological bigotry, given special preferences and benefits based on gender, race, sexuality, disability, and illegal alien status. Replacing academic disciplines are grievance studies programs, with the discrimination manifested also in segregated dining, housing, and ceremonies. This has all been engendered by a set of neo-Marxist models of society dividing everyone into evil oppressors and innocent victims, and jettisoning academic considerations for gender, racial, sexuality advocacy. Academic responsibility has been almost universally betrayed by colleges and universities in favor of so-called “social justice.” 

The Chinese coronavirus has closed North American colleges and universities or at least chased students and staff off of campuses. These institutions wait breathlessly to reopen, to bring students and their tuition payments back to campus. But how will campus crowds fare without social distancing, and how can social distancing be implemented in large classes, cafeterias, and administrative offices?

Perhaps the “old normal” or “all or nothing” model is not workable for the foreseeable future. Of course, there is much about the “old normal” that was not workable in any serious academic sense, but this was not the result of an exogenous influence, but the result of internal evolution. Here I am not speaking primarily of the gargantuan expansion of administrators in relation to professors and students or the gross inflation of tuition costs riding on government loans to students. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-oversight-reps-launch-probe-of-chinese-funding-of-american-universities/

Republican members of the House Oversight Committee on Monday announced a probe into Chinese funding of programs at American universities and colleges.

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Education, the representatives requested “information, documents, and communications” pertaining to “acceptance or reporting of foreign gifts” by university professors and departments.

“This joint inquiry is in furtherance of Congressional Republican’s efforts to investigate the Chinese government’s propaganda and cover-up campaign surrounding this pandemic,” the letter reads. Signatories include Representatives Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), and others.

“We  cannot allow a dangerous communist regime to buy access to our institutions of higher education, plain and simple,” Jordan said in a statement. “We owe it to the American people to hold China accountable and to prevent them from doing further harm to our country.”

4

The Chinese government has funded Confucius Institutes at numerous U.S. universities, ostensibly to promote knowledge of Chinese language and culture but which intelligence agencies have warned are essentially propaganda efforts.

The head of Harvard’s chemistry department in January was charged by the Justice Department with failing to disclose funding from the Chinese government. The Department of Education in February announced it had opened an investigation into foreign funding of American universities by China, Iran, Russia, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Like the Energizer Bunny, radical egalitarians just keep on going and going no matter how futile their utopian schemes and all the wasted money. This is particularly true in education where levelers are convinced that they can coerce government to ensure that everybody — regardless of race, sex, ethnicity or whatever — can be all (and equally) academically proficient.

This misguided passion has existed for decades, but for the last forty years it has entailed going to court to demand judges direct schools with large disadvantaged population to dramatically up spending to achieve the equality supposedly required by the state’s constitution. An organization called the Education Law Center (ELC), for example, has a national network of lawyers to sue states plus workshops to bring lawyers together to promote their egalitarian agenda. They have been active in every state, and while the ELC may have had notable legal victories, whether these legal wins have accomplished much beyond bloating educational budgets is debatable.

One would think that in today’s troubled time when governments struggle to provide basic services, these egalitarians would go on vacation and wait for a more plentiful era to launch their utopian schemes. In fact, it is estimated that as a result of the virus, states will cut some $57 billion in aid for local school budgets, a staggering amount considering how cities themselves are hurting financially.

The egalitarian passion was recently illustrated in Michigan, where plaintiffs (technically a group of students) revived an ongoing class-action lawsuit (Gary B. v. Whitmer) in which they claimed that Detroit’s dreadful schools (see here for grim details) had denied them a “minimum education” and this denial violated their constitutional right to literacy. In particular, their schools provided inadequate teaching in unsafe, vermin-infested buildings. Happily for these students, the Sixth Circuit of Appeals agreed that they had, indeed, been denied a “fundamental right.” But this one decision hardly ends it — the case now returns to the federal district court to be relitigated. Yes, Detroit may be unable to pay its bills, but rest assured, if these students eventually win, city employees may lose their jobs and the city will continue to deteriorate, but Detroit’s disadvantaged youngster’s students will, supposedly, be academically proficient.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/29/the-long-decline-of-american-higher-education-has-begun/

The paradox of American higher education is that going to college used to be aspirational, but now the sales pitch is that it’s scary not to get a degree. Long ago, universities were a place where students could explore new academic frontiers and challenge themselves with new ideas. And now, school is safe: four more years of deferring big decisions and optimizing for easy A’s.

In the last few weeks, everything has changed. Now, it’s the schools that are scared. And they should be.

The American higher education system faces four immense challenges: COVID-19, China, competition, and demographics. Think of them as two hammers and two anvils: COVID-19 is hitting enrollment and attendance, as students can’t gather on campus and are forced to reconsider whether school is the best option right now.

China has provided a steady flow of students, with strings attached; those strings are getting burdensome, and Chinese students now have better options. Competition is rising everywhere, from better trade schools to a better version of the Ivy League.

Demographics make things even more challenging: U.S. birthrates were steady throughout the 90s, but after a peak of 2.12 in 2007, birthrates steadily declined, and now average 1.77. Fewer births in 2008 translates to fewer 18-year-olds starting in 2026, with the decline slated to continue for a decade.

This means that each year, colleges around the country will face the same problem: how to pay for tenured professors, administrators, and fancy facilities while suffering from declining enrollment and an end to the rising-tuition gravy train?