RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

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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?

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.