RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/04/harvard-law-school-suppressed-criticism-china-daniel-greenfield/

If only Harvard were as courageous in standing up to the People’s Republic of China as it is to homeschoolers.

Just over five years ago, Teng says, a “powerful person” at Harvard Law School told him to postpone an event that could harm the institution’s relationship with China.

Teng was a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School in 2015; he had accepted a position there as part of the Scholars at Risk program. Teng’s criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party made him a target for harassment from China’s government and he felt unsafe returning to mainland China.

The Crimson reports that in early 2015, Teng had been working to schedule an event at Harvard to discuss human rights in China with fellow dissident Chen Guangcheng, but the plans quickly went sideways because the timing coincided with then-Harvard president Drew Faust’s trip to Beijing.

[O]n Feb. 11, the powerful person at Harvard gave Teng the first call.

“He told me to cancel the talk,” Teng says. “He told me the time we were supposed to give our talk, that day was when the Harvard president would fly back from Beijing. And a few weeks before that, the Harvard president was meeting Xi Jinping.” The administrator told him hosting an event with two Chinese dissidents only days after a historic meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and then University President Drew G. Faust would “embarrass” Harvard, Teng recalls.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/04/22/harvard-caves-n2567444

After receiving a lashing from President Trump at Tuesday’s White House briefing, Harvard University announced Wednesday it will reject $9 million it received in Wuhan coronavirus relief. The taxpayer funding is part of the CARES Act, which was passed to get emergency funding to the most economically vulnerable. Harvard has a $40 billion endowment. 

“We have previously said that Harvard, like other institutions, will face significant financial challenges due to the pandemic and economic crisis it has caused. We are also concerned however, that the intense focus by politicians and others on Harvard in connection with this program may undermine participation in a relief effort that Congress created and the President signed into law for the purpose of helping students and institutions whose financial challenges in the coming months may be most severe,” Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton released in a statement. 

“As a result of this, and the evolving guidance being issued around use of the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, Harvard has decided not to seek or accept the funds allocated to it by statute,” he continued. 

Given where the virus originated, the funding was especially egregious. In January Harvard’s top chemist, Charles Lieber, was arrested and indicted by the Department of Justice for secretly working for a Chinese Communist Party program based in Wuhan. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/no_wonder_the_kids_are_historically_illiterate.html

Generally, when a buyer is defrauded of services, the demand for the goods diminishes. As more emerges of what colleges and universities across this country are not doing, the demand will dry up unless there are drastic changes.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has published a report titled “What Will They Learn?”  It is a survey of core requirements at our nation’s colleges and universities and one does not need a Ph.D. to comprehend the paucity of education now apparent in far too many places. In fact, “for over a decade, ACTA has expressed concern that rising employer dissatisfaction with college graduates, as well as the decline in civic competency and informed discourse in the public square, are attributable to an overall deterioration of core curricula in the liberal arts. That is why ACTA evaluates over 1,100 general education programs every year in light of standards and criteria established by the committees of scholars… convened.”

Repeatedly,

many colleges and universities are watering down their requirements, allowing students to bypass college-level writing, mathematics, and economics courses and to graduate with a mediocre knowledge base and skillset. The ‘joke’ or ‘easy-A’ courses, such as ‘Science in Film,’ ‘American History through Baseball,’ or ‘History of Rock n’ Roll in America,’ may be fun and easy, and there is certainly a place for the odd niche course as a free elective or advanced topics course in a major. But as students often discover after they leave campus, they graduated without developing the intellectual abilities that would position them to excel in a competitive job market — because their institution did not require them to take challenging courses that discipline and furnish the mind. It is hardly any wonder that two-thirds of college graduates express disappointment with some aspect of their college experience today.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/coronavirus-comes-to-academia-but-dont-give-them-a-dime-until-they-do-this/

America’s leading universities have begun to respond to the financial consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. Duke University will “pause” construction projects, new expenditures, and hiring, and freeze salaries (with the possibility of a bonus for employees earning less than $50,000). Princeton University will suspend faculty and staff salary increases, freezing new hiring save in exceptional circumstances, giving notice that the number of temporary, casual, and contracted positions is likely to plummet at the end of the semester, asking managers to reassign staff whose regular jobs are face-to-face to take on new tasks, and cutting all “non-essential spending.” Stanford University has frozen new hires and some of its top administrators have taken pay cuts—the provost and the president by 20% and other senior administrators by 5-10%.

These spending pauses and hiring freezes are partly a good idea. Colleges and universities need to be fiscally prudent as a depression suddenly looms. But they also freeze in place massively overgrown education bureaucracies. Ohio State University employs 88 diversity-related staff, which is 88 more than it needs. Harvard employs more than 50 Title IX coordinators, which is also surplus by 50. Sustainability, Student Success, Student Life, Residential Life, Community Engagement, First Year Experience, Multiculturalism, Equity, Inclusion—America’s universities, from the Ivies to the community colleges, possess vast bureaucracies that at best do nothing to promote education and for the most part, actively work to prevent it.

“Hiring freeze” is another way to say, “nobody gets fired.” And an awful lot of bureaucrats in higher education need firing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/fixing-college-corruption-walter-williams/

America’s colleges are rife with corruption. The financial squeeze resulting from COVID-19 offers opportunities for a bit of remediation. Let’s first let’s examine what might be the root of academic corruption, suggested by the title of a recent study, “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.” The study was done by Areo, an opinion and analysis digital magazine. By the way, Areo is short for Areopagitica, a speech delivered by John Milton in defense of free speech.

Authors Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian say that something has gone drastically wrong in academia, especially within certain fields within the humanities. They call these fields “grievance studies,” where scholarship is not so much based upon finding truth but upon attending to social grievances. Grievance scholars bully students, administrators and other departments into adhering to their worldview. The worldview they promote is neither scientific nor rigorous. Grievance studies consist of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, gender studies, queer, sexuality and critical race studies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/med-school-needs-an-overhaul-11586818394?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

As the number of Covid-19 infections rises and the death toll mounts, the media is doing a good job of focusing on the safety of the health-care workforce and the capacity of hospitals to deal with a surge of desperately ill patients. What has received less attention is that many doctors haven’t been adequately trained in medical school to deal with a situation like this.

Most medical schools don’t require students to do coursework on pandemic response or practical preparation for a widespread and sustained emergency. American medical training as a whole doesn’t include a strong grounding in public-health issues or disaster preparedness. Instead, two of the nine specific curricular requirements decreed by the body that accredits medical schools are focused on social issues in medicine, including “the diagnosis of common societal problems and the impacts of disparities in health care on medically underserved populations,” particularly “in a multidimensional and diverse society.” None mention public health or epidemics. 

Physicians are highly educated, but that doesn’t mean they know everything—even things broadly related to the practice of medicine. When doctors speak on topics they don’t understand, they can confuse the public and other physicians. While medical schools require students to study statistics, these courses are generally superficial. They wouldn’t equip most physicians to grapple with epidemic models like the ones on which Deborah Birx has been briefing the White House press.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/12/are-american-universities-becoming-multinational-institutions/

American universities should always serve American interests—not serve as a machine to employ compradors and promote acquiescent collaborators to foreign strip-mining of America.

Iconoclast historian Henry Kamen argued in Empire that there wasn’t really a Spanish empire. Spain was a convenient vessel for Italian bankers, Portuguese shipwrights, and German soldiers. Christopher Columbus was Genoese; Hernán Cortés served the interests of his Tlaxcalan allies as he conquered Aztec Mexico.

Higher education administrators are turning “American higher education” into a vessel for foreign study and foreign economic reward.

New York University now has a campus in Abu Dhabi and Texas A&M University a campus in Qatar. Saint Louis University has a campus in Madrid and SUNY a campus in South Korea. Lakeland College has a campus in Tokyo and Duke University a campus in Kunshan, in partnership with Wuhan University.

American universities are becoming multinationals. New York University wants to become a global franchise: it possesses two degree-granting institutions in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, and 10 more academic centers abroad, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, all of which are the seeds of future degree-granting campuses.

American graduate schools within the nation’s borders, especially in engineering and the sciences, are also becoming multinational enterprises. A majority of graduate students in a great many fields of study come from abroad; in disciplines such as petroleum engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science, the proportion is closer to 80 percent.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/11/covid-19s-next-victim-higher-education/

In higher education, April is when college and university administrations prepare for their freshman incoming classes in September. In a normal year, an institution could predict, with a high level of certainty, how many students would show up after Labor Day (based on the number of deposits from accepted would-be students).

But this isn’t a normal year. Health risks are a new factor in how students and parents view higher education. We should expect institutions to be impacted the most are those in the New York City area and small, private, but unexceptional liberal arts institutions.

The New York City factor: let’s say Jane Smith has been accepted to two Ivy League schools, Columbia (located in New York City) and Dartmouth (located in rural New Hampshire). For their peace of mind, Jane’s parents urge her to choose Dartmouth, and she does.

Does this mean Columbia University will be scrambling for freshmen? No, but Columbia may discover there are a larger number of foreign students or wait-listed students (with lower SAT scores) filling their freshman seats, compared with previous years.

Now let’s consider Jane’s choice between New York University (again, located in the city) and Cornell (located in rural upstate New York). All other things being equal (e.g., scholarships), which university seems safer to Jane’s parents?

https://www.city-journal.org/higher-ed-diversity-bureaucracy

As American unemployment mounted by the millions in March and April, the dance of the college diversity deans kept up its usual brisk pace. On April 1, Harvard University announced that its acting associate dean for inclusion and belonging was moving on to Denison University. But the Harvard associate deanship will not be vacant for long. On May 1, the current head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus will step into the Harvard position, to direct the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion team within the Dean of Students Office; the Office of BGLTQ Student Life; the Office of Diversity Education and Support; the College’s Title IX Office; the Women’s Center; and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.

Elsewhere, campus diversocrats enjoyed similarly enviable mobility while the rest of the country was shutting down. The vice president for inclusion and diversity at George Mason University will become chief diversity officer at the University of South Carolina at Columbia on June 15. The former occupant of the South Carolina position decamped to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 15 to serve as its community and equity officer. On March 1, a former associate vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Iowa became associate vice president for inclusive excellence at Georgia Southern University. The first diversity, equity, and inclusion librarian at the University of Florida assumed her position in February.

Many college presidents are terrified that the coronavirus pandemic will devastate their schools’ finances and enrollment. Anyone who cares about a revival of serious learning can only hope that they are right.