RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/16/identity-politics-rapidly-destroying-value-college-degrees/

I attended the College of William and Mary from fall 2014 until winter 2016, during the arguable height of social justice outrage. The infamous University of Missouri protests happened soon after I started school, where professor Melissa Click threatened a student journalist with physical violence.

At Yale, the Christakises were protested for arguing against over-coddling administrators telling students what they should not wear for Halloween. The Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus” that was later found fraudulent came out during my first year of school. It’s not for these reasons alone that college was futile, but the leftist insanity that perpetually surrounded me certainly played a part.

This spring was set to be my graduation from college. Had I not sped things up and graduated in two years, instead of four, I would have walked across the stage, taken pictures with my family, and graduated with $40,000 in debt. I wouldn’t have been able to earn editing and writing experience (like bylines at The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Reason, and The Houston Chronicle). I recommend the same path to other young conservatives — escape debt and leftist indoctrination, if you can. Choose work experience, trade school, or a fast-tracked route through college instead.
College Often Isn’t Worth Your Time and Money

Elite colleges aren’t designed for critical thinking or open inquiry anymore. According to Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post, “A fifth of undergrads now say it’s acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes ‘offensive and hurtful statements.’”

The same survey indicates that about four in every ten students believes the First Amendment does not allow “hate speech.” Meanwhile, even at elite colleges like the liberal arts school Pomona, nearly 90 percent of students say their campus climate chills speech because they fear saying things others might find offensive.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-state-charity-1534546826

Any day now the IRS will release new rules that address efforts by states including Connecticut, Oregon, New York and New Jersey to evade last year’s tax reform by masking tax payments as charitable contributions. The danger is that nonprofit scholarship organizations that are funded in part by tax credits could end up as collateral damage.

The issue arises because certain states—mostly left-leaning—have been looking for gimmicks to claw back the state and local deductions that were capped at $10,000 in the new tax reform. State politicians understand that because taxpayers can no longer fully deduct their high state taxes on federal forms, they are going to pay a higher price for their states’ big-spending ways.

Governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo have concocted a scheme to get around this. Essentially they’ve set up fake charities, which would collect in charitable contributions money that taxpayers formerly deducted from their federal taxes—which the states would then use to pay for state programs. Because the tax reform didn’t cap charitable deductions, taxpayers would effectively be taking a charitable deduction as a substitute for their formerly unlimited state and local tax deductions.

The IRS is rightly skeptical and in May issued Notice 2018-54 indicating it would adopt new regulations for such proposals. The danger now is that these new rules will not distinguish between “charities” that are really government fronts to collect taxes and Scholarship Granting Organizations that are not government entities, that do not funnel money back to the state, and that were set up by the states to expand opportunities for students.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/university-of-virginia-marc-short-miller-center/

Big universities are prone to bouts of craziness and one that’s particularly susceptible is the University of Virginia. The campus has been in an uproar one year after the alt-right vs. Antifa riot last summer. The turmoil was triggered by a horrible, provocative move by a center located at the university — it hired someone who worked in the Trump administration!

Charlottesville native and frequent Martin Center contributor John Rosenberg writes about the resulting affray in this essay.

Marc Short, who served as Trump’s legislative director, was recently hired by the Miller Center, which focuses on politics and the presidency. But hiring anyone who ever had anything to do with Trump is now verboten — at least in the minds of woke faculty members.

Said another prof at the Center, “Short’s hiring is an institutional and moral crisis” because “the Trump presidency does not represent American democracy and has upended the political order.”

Rosenberg’s comment on the ranting over Short’s hiring: “The unrecognized irony here, of course, is that there is a name for the intolerance of universities and other institutions refusing to hire anyone defending illiberalism: McCarthyism.”

Two Miller Center faculty members resigned rather than work under the same roof as Short. He’s being treated like a leper just for having been part of the Trump team.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“Education is the movement from darkness to light.”

Allan Bloom (1930-1992)

The Closing of the American Mind, 1987

With ten grandchildren, the two oldest of whom will be off to college in the fall of 2019 and the youngest only eight years behind, the state of higher education has been on my mind. Much has been written about the need for greater emphasis on STEM classes – that China and India outstrip us in graduates each year in those fields. We read of cryptocurrencies and cyber theft and recognize the need to understand the former and thwart the second. There are students talented in these fields, and they should be encouraged. Less, however, has been written and said about the decline in humanities and the concomitant attenuation of morals, values and character that are their progeny. When a student at Morehouse College in 1947, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote for the college newspaper: “The function of education is to think intensively and critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”

No country in the world has colleges and universities so well endowed, and so highly regarded as does the United States. Yet, too often, university administrators see their job as letting students design faddish majors that reflect a cultural-relevancy, advocating diversity in all ways, excepting ideas and preparing students for what is their view of a multi-cultural and globally-competitive world. There have been consequences.

One is the politically-correct model they follow. Students are deprived of needed contrary and, at times, uncomfortable, speech and opinions. Thus, there is no open and free debate. Insularity in a world of seven billion people, awash with myriad philosophies and political system, does little to encourage curiosity, increase understanding, reduce arrogance and hone rhetoric. Another consequence is an emphasis on STEM that supersedes humanities. Certainly, we need students to use their creative talents to invent new products and services, but we also must consider the consequences, the “whats” and “whys” of their creations. Why is it needed and what might be its longer-term effects? Much of life is learning to balance and temper the proven versus the unproven, dreams from reality. Humanities help. History teaches perspective. Literature provides insights. Philosophy allows for nuances. Religion makes us think beyond ourselves. Students need to consider all sides of an argument, even to question the wisdom and motives of their instructors and professors. When 90% of the teaching and administrative staff is of one political mind-set, prejudice sets in. And, as Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote in National Review, “…bias is a force multiplier of ignorance.” Why, for example, should trigger warnings and safe rooms be necessary if the cloistered student is to become an unsheltered working woman or man? Do such actions prepare them for the world, or do they only offer cocoon-like protection for the duration of their time at university?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/texas-university-social-justice/

If you think that universities are immunized against the “social justice” plague because they’re located in conservative states, well, think again. They’re not. Once “progressive” thinking administrators get their hands on the school — and very few people who climb the academic ladder are not progressive — the contagion is sure to get in.

In today’s Martin Center article, attorney Mark Pulliam gives us Exhibit A, the University of Texas. He writes,

The latest racket in higher education, evident at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, is the disturbing proliferation of ‘social justice’ as a degree program, a course topic, an academic emphasis, and even as a prerequisite in campus job descriptions.

Consider, for example , UT’s Social Justice Institute. Pulliam gives us the flavor of this institute’s contributions:

The Institute hosts monthly programs (the Social Justice Conversation Series) on selected readings related to social justice and diversity. Topics have included “ableism, sexism, religious oppression, ageism, adultism, heterosexism, transgender oppression, racism and classism.” For each session, cohort leaders “help the conversation flow from a social justice perspective.”

That’s isn’t education; it’s propaganda for statism.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/a_teachers_lament_then_and_now.html

In his 1962 essay titled “A Dog in Brooklyn, a Girl in Detroit: A Life among the Humanities,” from The Age of Happy Problems, Herbert Gold recounts how “neither glory nor pleasure nor power, and certainly not wisdom, provided the goal of [the] students” he attempted to instruct.

Attempting to teach a college-level humanities course, Gold “could classify [his] students in three general groups, intelligent, mediocre, and stupid, allowing for the confusions of three general factors – background, capacity, and interest.”

Reminiscing about his attempt to motivate young people, Gold admits that he “often failed at inspiring [his] students to do the assigned reading. Many of them had part-time jobs in the automobile industry or its annexes.” Thus, the plaintive “I couldn’t read the book this week, I have to work” reverberated in the classroom with “its implied reproach for a scholar’s leisure.” Continuing to describe the paradoxes of teaching in a university, Gold finds little common ground between himself and his students.

When he attempted to explain Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte” and the “importance of … pointillism to students who only wanted to see life clear and true, see it comfortably,” he encountered students who asserted that “this kind of painting hurt [their] eyes.” In addition, students clamored that “there was too much reading for one course – ‘piling it on. This isn’t the only course we take.'”

Then, in the middle of his essay, Gold details how, in front of the school building, a skidding truck sideswiped a taxi, and the cab “was smashed like a cruller.” From the door of his cab, the driver emerged, stumbling holding his head. There was blood on his head and hands. He was in confusion and in shock – “[d]rivers turned their heads upon him … but did not get involved.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/academic-brand-deflated-elite-degrees-worth-less/When self-professed experts are wrong over and over, for decades, what’s the value of a university degree?

Trumpism is sometimes derided as an updated know-nothingism that rejects expertise and the input of credentialed expertise. Supposedly, professionals who could now save us tragically have their talent untapped as they sit idle at the Council of Foreign Relations, the economics Department at Harvard, or in the offices of the Brookings Institution — even as Trump’s wheelers and dealers crash and burn, too proud, too smelly, or too ignorant to call in their betters to come in and save Trump from himself.

But do the degreed classes, at least outside math, the sciences, engineering, and medicine, merit such esteem anymore?

Anthony Scaramucci’s Harvard Law degree seemed no guarantee of the Mooch’s circumspection, sobriety, or good judgement.

Bruce Ohr’s similar degree did not ensure either common sense or simple ethics. Or, on the contrary, perhaps at Harvard he learned that progressive ends justify any means necessary to obtain them. In any case, Ohr thought there was nothing wrong in keeping quiet about his spouse’s work on the discredited Steele dossier, or indeed in aiding and abetting the seeding of it, while he was the fourth-ranking official at Trump’s Department of Justice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/milwaukees-public-school-barricade-1534203534

Teachers’ unions and their liberal allies are desperately trying to preserve the failing public school status quo. Witness how the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system is defying a state mandate to sell vacant property to charter and private schools.

Milwaukee’s public schools are a mess. Merely 62% of students graduate from high school in four years, and proficiency rates are 15% in math and just over 20% in English. Families are escaping to charter and private schools, which has resulted in 11,000 vacant seats and a budget shortfall that’s expected to swell to $130 million within five years.

We wrote in 2015 about how MPS blocked charter and private school purchases of empty school buildings, which prevented high-performing schools like St. Marcus Lutheran from expanding. The state legislature then passed a law ordering the city and school district to sell vacant public school buildings.

Well, what do you know, the district still hasn’t sold a single vacant building to other schools despite 13 letters of interest from private and charter operators for 11 vacant buildings, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. Following protests from the teachers’ union, a local zoning board denied a bid by Right Step, a private school for children expelled from Milwaukee public schools. The city hasn’t even classified many unused buildings as “vacant.”