RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.openthebooks.com

The 25 colleges and universities with the largest endowments in the nation hold a quarter-trillion in existing assets. So, why do these schools reap billions from the Department of Education each year?

Collectively, the eight schools of the Ivy League have a $119 billion endowment fund.

Let’s put this into perspective: With this amount, the Ivy League could provide full-ride scholarships to its entire undergraduate student body for the next 51 years without any new gifts.

With continued gifts at the present rate, this could go on forever.

The Ivy League schools can’t argue they need taxpayer assistance… And yet, the Ivies reaped $26 billion in federal funding over a six-year period.

We published a full editorial at the Washington Times, co-authored with economist Stephen Moore, on this fiscal phenomenon. Read the editorial here.

Remember, this is just one example of the wasteful spending we uncovered in our investigation into the U.S. Department of Education.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273374/texas-teacher-assigns-anti-trump-essay-class-sara-dogan

A middle school teacher in the public Goose Creek Consolidated Independent School District near Houston assigned 12 and 13 year old seventh grade students to read and answer questions on an essay blasting President Donald Trump as “racist,” “insensitive,” and counter to American values as part of a lesson on inferring information from written text.

Even for seventh grade students who are not overly familiar with politics, it is easy to parse the message of the piece which essentially translates as ‘Dump Trump.’ Titled, “Trump Against American Values,” the essay begins, “Throughout Donald Trump’s time in the American spotlight, we have come to see his true colors. From the beginning of his presidency, we have witnessed insensitive remarks toward other racial and cultural groups.”

The assignment goes on to say that “Some of Trump’s policies have gone against what Americans value most, like the freedom of opportunity” and labels the president as “insensitive” for his focus on building a wall on the border with Mexico.

The piece concludes with remarks that could well have been lifted from a campaign commercial for one of Trump’s 2020 Democratic challengers:

“With all of these racist remarks by our president, I think that we as a people need to take a stand and show that we will not accept this kind of leadership in our country.”

https://openthebooks.lpages.co/education-report/

Today we launched our newest oversight report on the U.S. Department of Education with a focus on higher education.

Our breaking oversight report reveals outdated policies, misaligned priorities, and weak accounting controls at the Department of Ed.The facts are so revolting, the Washington Times just broke the story in a big way. 

Yesterday, economist Stephen Moore, Trump’s nominee for the Federal Reserve Board, also broke our preliminary findings in an editorial at the Washington Times.

In our deep dive report, we spelled out exactly how much federal funding is being poured into the nation’s richest colleges, the worst performing junior colleges, nontraditional colleges you didn’t know existed, for-profit schools, and more.We’re shining a light on corruption at its worst, and your ongoing support makes that possible.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/02/why-cant

Retired teacher Mary Hudson recently wrote a damning exposé based on her experiences in the New York City public school system. Hudson taught in three different public high schools and her observations from those years lead her to implicate the students and a “go along to get along” attitude among administrators for persistently poor educational performance.

Put simply, administrators are unwilling to set high educational and behavioral standards for fear of having to confront underperforming and disruptive students. They have few implements their toolbox to permit such confrontation. As a result, students feel diminished and take advantage of lax standards to dismiss the educational aspect of school. Peer pressure and even physical intimidation deter the few students who are interested in learning and effectively this turns schooltime into social time. Administrators respond by treating classes like day care, often to the chagrin of teachers.

This is “the soft bigotry of low expectations” epitomized.

The net result is a student body hostile to direction, discipline, and learning. This problem is exacerbated by the “social justice” and politically correct mindset that makes discipline, both behavioral and educational, subject to racial quotas. (Woe to the teacher or administrator who suspends or expels “too high” a proportion of students of a certain race.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273328/more-university-corruption-walter-williams

Last week’s column discussed the highly publicized university corruption scheme wherein wealthy parents bought admission at prestigious universities for their children. That is dishonest and gives an unfair advantage to those young people but won’t destroy the missions of the universities. There is little or no attention given by the mainstream media to the true cancer eating away at most of our institutions of higher learning. Philip Carl Salzman, emeritus professor of anthropology at McGill University, explains that cancer in a Minding the Campus article, titled “What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University.”

Professor Salzman argues that for most of the 20th century, universities were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. There was open exchange and competition in the marketplace of ideas. Different opinions were argued and respected. Most notably in the social sciences, social work, the humanities, education and law, this is no longer the case. Leftist political ideology has emerged. The most important thing to today’s university communities is diversity of race, ethnicity, sex and economic class, on which they have spent billions of dollars. Conspicuously absent is diversity of ideology.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/blend-texas-house-and-senate-bills-for-a-campus-free-speech-win/

The Texas State Legislature is considering several bills designed to protect freedom of speech on the state’s public-university campuses. The Texas State Senate has already passed a bill with many positive features, from the creation of a disciplinary code for shout-downs, to protection against the use of security fees as a tool of censorship, to protection for student groups facing discrimination for their beliefs. Although the Texas Senate bill is clearly a step forward, it is also weak in areas where bills being considered by the Texas State House are strong.

Two campus free-speech bills have been introduced in the Texas State House, one by Representative Bill Zedler and one by Representative Briscoe Cain. Readers may remember that Cain was himself subjected to an outrageous shout-down at Texas Southern University in 2017.

The Zedler bill includes two features in particular that would strengthen the senate bill. First, the Zedler bill would create an oversight system controlled by the university’s regents. This is critical, because the refusal of campus administrators to protect basic rights is at the center of the campus free-speech crisis. Administrators at the University of Texas, Austin, for example, have established a bias-reporting system that severely inhibits free speech. And Briscoe Cain himself was prevented from proceeding with his talk not only by student disruptors, but by the president of Texas Southern University. So we can’t rely on university administrators to report on their own performance, which is what the Senate bill does. Once administrators know that their bosses, the regents, are going to submit an annual oversight report to the legislature, which holds the university’s purse-strings, they will be far more likely to protect free speech on campus. So creating an oversight system is the single most powerful step the legislature can take to ensure that the new law will actually be enforced.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/01/free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee/

Many people who genuinely believe that they support freedom of speech exhibit a double standard: One person’s “hate speech” is another person’s belief, opinion or even (as they see it) fact. And opinions about whether there’s a “free speech crisis” on university campuses tend to vary according to these subjective determinations.

While I’m not a fan of such “crisis” language, there’s definitely a real decline in support for freedom of expression among young people. In a 2016 Knight Foundation survey, 91% of high school respondents said they supported the “freedom to express unpopular opinions.” But when pressed, only 45% said that people should have the right to publicly express ideas that others find “offensive.”

The Knight Foundation’s numbers on college students’ attitudes are similar. In 2016, 78% of college respondents agreed that colleges should expose students to all types of speech and viewpoints. Yet, more than two-thirds said that colleges should be able to enact policies against language that is “intentionally offensive to certain groups,” and more than a quarter said that colleges should even be able to restrict the expression of potentially offensive political views. (More than half reported that the climate on campus “prevents some people from saying what they believe because others might find it offensive.” A year later, that number rose to 61%.)