RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/josh-hawley-takes-aim-at-higher-ed/

Over on the home page I have some thoughts about the true nature of the student-debt “crisis” and some ideas for how to deal with it. Coincidentally, today Josh Hawley announced some very relevant reforms.

Per his press release:

SEN. HAWLEY: BREAK UP HIGHER EDUCATION MONOPOLY, PROVIDE MORE OPTIONS FOR CAREER TRAINING

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is introducing two pieces of legislation this week that will expand federal aid for people pursuing vocational education and will put higher education institutions on the hook for students unable to repay student loans.

It’s an odd definition of “monopoly” that encompasses a sector with thousands of competing options, but okay: Higher ed is pretty dysfunctional and these reforms target two big problems with it.

Hawley’s first bill will “make more job-training and certification programs, like employer-based apprenticeships and digital boot camps, eligible to receive Pell Grants through an alternative accreditation process.” This is a good idea. There’s no reason we should be subsidizing college to the exclusion of other ways to learn important skills.

His second bill requires “colleges and universities to pay off 50 percent of the balance of student loans accrued while attending their institution for students who default, and forbids them from increasing the cost of attendance to offset their liability.”

The idea of a “money-back guarantee” for college isn’t crazy; it forces schools to take responsibility for their students’ outcomes, rather than accepting students who don’t have the skills to graduate, collecting tuition for a few years, and then sending the kids along poorer, indebted, and lacking a credential.

But I’m not sold on the idea of forbidding colleges “from increasing the cost of attendance to offset their liability.” I’m not sure it’s possible to enforce such a rule — and while higher ed in general is inefficient, I’m not sure it’s possible for every college to shoulder a new liability without raising its prices at all. Further, if tuition hikes resulted from this legislation, they would basically “price in” half the school’s default risk, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2019/07/12/universities-in-race-to-the-bottom-as-grade-inflation-runs-rampant/#fbfe4ba67ed3

Universities appear locked in a race to the bottom as soaring numbers of students get top grades in their degree courses.

More than a quarter of students now get the highest classification, almost doubling in under a decade, according to new figures.

And an education watchdog has warned that much of the increase is unjustified, leading to fears that universities are lowering standards in an attempt to attract more students.

The proportion of students awarded first class honours – the highest possible – at English universities has risen from 16% in 2010/11 to 29% in 2017/18, according to new analysis by the independent Office for Students (OfS).

Much of the increase is unexplained by factors such as entrance qualifications or student characteristics, the OfS found, with 13.9% of the rise unaccounted for.

The pattern was also widespread across universities, with 94% of 148 higher education providers having a statistically significant unexplained increase in the proportion of students awarded first class degrees.

https://spectator.org/noura-erakat-recounts-

“Ideal with a lot of mental health stuff because of this. I have so much anxiety,” fretted Rutgers University Professor Noura Erakat while discussing her anti-Israel activism at Washington, D.C.’s Busboys and Poets restaurant on K Street. Given Erakat’s ludicrous views on the Arab-Israeli conflict, one might indeed question her mental health. But the like-minded audience of 100 at the June 20 event for her latest book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, found her unfounded, revisionist history to be on the level.

While introducing Erakat, Busboys and Poets founder Andy Shallal noted proudly that the packed event room bore the name of Communist Israel-hater Angela Davis. Moderating the discussion was Khury Petersen-Smith, an Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) fellow and an organizer of the “2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine,” the slogans for which include the trite “Zionism is racism.” Fittingly, Rasha Abdulhadi, a leftist poet and self-described “queer Palestinian Southerner,” read one of her poems.

The audience included a who’s who of anti-Israel leftists, such as Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin and Phyllis Bennis of IPS, an event co-sponsor. James Cobey and Zeina Azzam, well-known activists from Washington, D.C.’s local anti-Israel scene, attended. Erakat gushed that being “in the company of movement family” made this event her book-tour favorite.

https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/EsEmmi

Much has been written about the attacks on free speech, especially at universities and colleges. Speakers with conservative viewpoints are routinely banished from important venues, denied attendance, picketed, or subjected to the “hecklers’ veto.” At the University of California Berkeley and other campuses where conservative speech has been met with disorder, activists have justified it because, they claim, “speech is violence.” Gone is adherence to the maxim of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “If there be time to . . . avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Speakers must be held accountable for their words, to be sure. But sometimes “accountability” is ideological and unfair. Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers discovered this when, at an academic conference in 2006, he speculated about the preponderance of men working as professors of mathematics and physical sciences at elite universities. Although Summers acknowledged that women confronted barriers such as discrimination and disproportionate family responsibilities, he hypothesized that there might be other factors, like men’s superior performance in tests measuring mathematical ability. Summers was vilified and ridiculed, and eventually resigned.

Another example of caving to mob rule at Harvard was the law school’s decision to strip law professor Ronald Sullivan, Jr., of his position as faculty dean of a college residence hall. The reason? Some students felt “unsafe” because Sullivan represented Harvey Weinstein against charges of sexual misconduct. As Sullivan put it, “Unchecked emotion has replaced thoughtful reasoning on campus. Feelings are no longer subjected to evidence, analysis or empirical defense. Angry demands, rather than rigorous arguments, now appear to guide university policy.”

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2019/07/12/us_universities_dangerous_lack_of_foreign_gift_transparency.html

Rachelle Peterson is the Policy Director for the National Association of Scholars.

Last month the Department of Education revealed it is investigating two universities, Georgetown and Texas A&M, for potential violations of foreign gift transparency laws. Federal law requires colleges and universities to disclose gifts totaling $250,000 from a single foreign source in a calendar year, but Georgetown and Texas A&M’s past filings “may not fully capture” their foreign receipts, the Department said in letters to the two institutions.

Both universities must now turn over documents regarding their gifts from Qatar and from two Chinese tech firms suspected of espionage, Huawei and ZTE. Since 2012, Georgetown has disclosed receiving $350 million from Qatar and Texas A&M $274 million. Neither has disclosed any gifts from Huawei or ZTE. Georgetown is also being asked to disclose gifts from Saudi Arabia and from Russia, including from cybersecurity company Kapersky Lab. In its original disclosure filings, it reported $6 million from Saudi Arabia and none from any source in Russia.

For years, colleges have been collecting foreign gifts—some with alarming strings attached—without bothering to follow federal law. My organization, the National Association of Scholars, helped blow the whistle on these violations in our 2017 report on Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes, which offer a unilaterally pro-China outlook and suppress academic freedom. Many Confucius Institutes brought in major donations to their host universities that never reported those gifts. In a separate report, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that 70% of colleges whose Confucius Institutes cleared the $250,000-per-year disclosure threshold failed to report those gifts in accordance with the law.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/what_would_colleges_be_like_if_sats_were_the_sole_admission_criterion.html

Many bar and dorm room conversations probably have centered on what colleges would look like if SAT scores were the sole criteria for admission. People have had their suspicions and cite anecdotal observations but now Georgetown University has quantitatively answered the question as least as far as elite universities go.

Anyone with a passing awareness of today’s college admission policies knows that the student makeup would change if academics were the sole criteria. How much they would change is the question. As to whether using just SAT scores — i.e. academic performance — is good or bad is another matter.

Back to the Georgetown report.

It claims the percentage of blacks and Hispanics would fall sharply from 19 percent to 11 percent. The whites student population would rise from 66 percent to 77 percent.  And surprisingly, Asian students would fall from 11 percent to 10 percent. The study goes on to say that many of the whites in these select college would lose their seats to other better qualified white students.  

 In other words, the student mix would change noticeably.

There are a number of reasons why higher academically performing students lose seats to others. There are legacy admissions and sport scholarships. Both these skew the college population downward on the academic scale especially when it comes to big money-making sports like football and basketball. However, the greatest factor is a commitment to racial diversity. College administrators will literally go to any length the prove they are ‘woke.’

Zero Hedge noted that black and Latino college enrolment is almost twice what it would be based on “merit” alone. And this is before the College Board introduces its so-called “adversity score,” which is specifically designed to increase the minority presence in universities, to accompany a student’s SAT result.

https://www.israpundit.org/why-is-there-so-much-saudi-money-in-american-universities/

One spring afternoon last year, protesters gathered on a sidewalk alongside a busy street in Cambridge, Mass. City buses rolled past. Car horns sounded. A few pedestrians paused briefly before continuing on their way. The location was 77 Massachusetts Avenue, in front of a limestone-and-concrete edifice that serves as the gateway into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The building’s lobby leads to a long hallway known as the Infinite Corridor and into the heart of one of America’s most vaunted academic institutions.

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, would be visiting the next day. The protesters, a mix of students and local peace activists, wanted his invitation revoked. They were opposed to the prince being welcomed as an honored dignitary and were calling attention to the Saudi state’s financial ties to M.I.T. — and to at least 62 other American universities — at a time when the regime’s bombing of civilians in a war in neighboring Yemen and its crackdown on domestic dissidents were being condemned by human rights activists.

Prince Mohammed, who is 33, became Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader in 2017, when he was named crown prince by his ailing father, King Salman. He was in the midst of an American tour and had already been to the White House to meet President Trump, who said, as they sat together in the Oval Office, that they had become “very good friends over a fairly short period of time.” The president thanked the prince for what he said was the kingdom’s order of billions of dollars of American-made military hardware. “That’s peanuts to you,” he quipped.

From Cambridge, Prince Mohammed’s travels would take him to California, where he rented the entire 285-room Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills and was the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by Rupert Murdoch and attended by numerous entertainment-industry grandees. In Silicon Valley, he met with Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, and other tech executives; in Seattle, he met with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief executive. Saudi Arabia was already an investor in Uber through its sovereign wealth fund, which is controlled by the crown prince, and Prince Mohammed was negotiating to buy a stake in Endeavor, the Hollywood conglomerate that includes the WME talent agency and the Ultimate Fighting Championship business.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/08/using-u-s-qatari-funding-duke-university-teaches-k-12-teachers-biased-info-islam/

Documents shed light on the workings of Duke University’s unique influence operation targeting the U.S school system with funds from a global terrorism supporter.

By accepting more than $111,000 from Qatar Foundation International to provide U.S. teachers anti-Israel training, Duke University is abusing its status as one of only 14 Middle East National Resource Centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education to provide guidance on curriculum materials and teacher training for K-12 Middle East studies.

From June 30 to July 5 on the Duke campus this year, “Dimensions of the Middle East” was an immersion program for grades 6-12 U.S. educators. Presented by the Duke Islamic Studies Center, Duke University Middle East Studies Center, and Qatar Foundation International, the institute trains 40 teachers who are hand-selected by QFI, according to a Duke University spokesman.

Qatar Foundation International (QFI), based in Washington, DC, is a subsidiary of the Qatar Foundation (QF), with direct ties to the Sharia-law government of Qatar. While QFI cuts a moderate, even scholarly image in public, its parent QF has been tied to supporting terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood. QFI partners with other elite universities for student outreach, but will resort to lawsuits to keep the financial details of these programs secret once the public begins to ask questions.

Documents received by the Haym Salomon Center shed light on the workings of Duke University’s unique influence operation targeting the U.S school system.

https://www.city-journal.org/richard-carranza-racial-bias

Speaking at a recent middle school graduation, New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said, “We’re going to move the agenda to serve our students, and people that have been very comfortable for a very long time doing absolutely nothing for the children that they’re supposed to serve are going to feel uncomfortable.” Talk like this is cheap, and Carranza’s approach—mandatory anti-bias training and charges that the opposition is racist—is deflection. He’s covering up his lack of a programmatic approach to school improvement and the mayor’s abandonment of any meaningful school accountability. 

Quality is distributed inequitably within New York’s school system, but not because of deep-seated racial bias among employees. Rather, it is the outcome of specific policies and programs that could be changed if the political will existed to do so. For 40 years, each of Carranza’s predecessors pursued policies that they believed would improve educational outcomes for the city’s low-income minority children. Some were successful, others less so, but all were dedicated to educational equity. Carranza speaks constantly of his experience as a minority, as though he were the first to hold the chancellor’s job in New York—but two-thirds of his predecessors dating back to 1978 were minorities, too.

Carranza does differ from them in one significant way: he has yet to articulate an approach to identifying the policies and people that stand in the way of meaningful school improvement. A generation ago, then-mayor Ed Koch’s first chancellor, Frank Macchiarola, centered his efforts around affirmations that “all children can learn,” and that “it is the responsibility of the public-school system to promote learning and equality for all children.” These statements, made in 1978, stood in direct conflict with the consensus among policymakers and social scientists that schools have little effect on student outcomes, relative to a student’s family background.