RUTHFULLY YOURS

Support for, and reaction to, the tax-reform bill has divided almost entirely along partisan lines, with one notable exception: many on the right and the liberal left alike have denounced a new 1.4 percent tax on net investment income for the largest university endowments—those whose value exceeds $500,000 per student. Prominent conservatives such as George Will, Gregory Mankiw, and Michael Strain have characterized the tax—which will affect about 30 universities, including such major research institutions as Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton—as motivated by anti-intellectualism and partisanship, aimed at liberal academia. Will, who has served as a Princeton trustee, described the tax as an “astonishingly shortsighted” threat to the tradition of “great research universities (that) have enabled the liberal arts to flourish, the sciences to advance and innovation to propel economic betterment.”

Yet it’s worth keeping in mind that the federal government will continue to be the nation’s primary source of university research money. The government not only funds research through direct grants but also supports the facilities and staff of universities through “overhead” payments, which amount to many billions of dollars. The National Institutes of Health, for instance, distributed some $5.7 billion in overhead payments in 2013 alone, in addition to tens of billions of dollars in direct research grants. That same year, Stanford got 31 cents in overhead on top of every research grant dollar it received. Each university negotiates its own overhead rates, and complex formulas dictate what portion of the negotiated rate is actually disbursed along with direct research funding. According to federal data obtained by Nature, Johns Hopkins has negotiated a 62 percent overhead rate. By comparison, the European Union sets a flat overhead rate of 25 percent for all institutions receiving research grants.

The question that universities should ask themselves is how they have lost, at least in part, the longstanding bipartisan support that made the federal government the major financial backer of research, as well as a generous funder of university overhead costs. The original champion of federal research, development, and overhead grants for research institutions was the farsighted Vannevar Bush, the first presidential science advisor, who served Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. It was under Bush that the Office of Scientific Research and Development first negotiated a research overhead rate, with MIT. Today, the U.S. leads the world in government research and development spending; some $40 billion is distributed to nearly 900 colleges and universities, accounting for 60 percent of these institutions’ research funding. (Twenty percent of the total went to just ten universities, including Stanford, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins). The results—from the mapping of the human genome to the creation of the Internet—have transformed the world.

In Yiddish, the term dreck means excrement, dung, crap, or worthless junk. It is an apt term for the deliberate psychological damage being inflicted upon young Americans as they navigate the leftist swamp of higher education.

White privilege, or whiteness studies, is now an entrenched part of far too many -ology and humanities classes. This notion of white skin privilege has become an “article of faith among progressives,” who assert that “whites, by definition and DNA, would remain racists, even if unwittingly, until the end of time.”

Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, describes “white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets[.] White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” (McIntosh, 1989). She distributes the following, and students are asked to mark those that apply. A few of the items include:

I can arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
When I am told about our national heritage or about civilization, I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the food I grew up with, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.
Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial responsibility.
I can take a job or enroll in a college with an affirmative action policy without having my co-workers or peers assume I got it because of my race.
I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated.
I am never asked to speak for all of the people of my racial group.
I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk with the person in charge[,] I will be facing a person of my race.
If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
I can easily see posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
I can choose blemish cover or bandages in flesh color and have them more or less match my skin.
I can walk into a classroom and know I will not be the only member of my race.
I can enroll in a class at college and be sure that the majority of my professors will be of my race.

My recent columns have focused on the extremely poor educational outcomes for black students. There’s enough blame for all involved to have their fair share. That includes students who are hostile and alien to the educational process and have derelict, uninterested home environments. After all, if there is not someone in the home to ensure that a youngster does his homework, has wholesome meals, gets eight to 10 hours of sleep and behaves in school, educational dollars won’t produce much.

There’s another educational issue that’s neither flattering nor comfortable to confront. That’s the low academic quality of so many teachers. It’s an issue that must be confronted and dealt with if we’re to improve the quality of education. Most states require prospective teachers to pass a certification test. How about a sample of some of the test questions.

Here’s a question from a recent test given to college students in Michigan planning to become teachers: “Which of the following is largest? a. 1/4, b. 3/5, c. 1/2, d. 9/20.” Another question: “A town planning committee must decide how to use a 115-acre piece of land. The committee sets aside 20 acres of the land for watershed protection and an additional 37.4 acres for recreation. How much of the land is set aside for watershed protection and recreation? a. 43.15 acres, b. 54.6 acres, c. 57.4 acres, d. 60.4 acres” (http://tinyurl.com/y7mtpfhk).

The Arizona teacher certification test asks: “Janet can type 250 words in 5 minutes, what is her typing rate per minute? a. 50wpm, b. 66wpm, c. 55wpm, d. 45wpm.” The California Basic Educational Skills Test asks the test taker to find the verb in the following sentence: “The interior temperatures of even the coolest stars are measured in millions of degrees. a. Coolest, b. Of even, c. Are measured, d. In millions” (http://tinyurl.com/yd85kv3n). A CBEST math question is: “You purchase a car making a down payment of $3,000 and 6 monthly payments of $225. How much have you paid so far for the car? a. $3225, b. $4350, c. $5375, d. $6550, e. $6398.”

If you’re a parent who is giving consideration to refinancing your home for the sake of sending your child off to a university, you may want to reconsider.

Most parents, doubtless, regard college as nothing more or less than a means to the end of a lucrative profession for their children. Still, even some of these may be of one mind with those parents who expect that, while pursuing their degrees, their children will and should receive a decent education.

Unfortunately, however, the view of Donna Riley, a professor of engineering education at Purdue University, is representative of a growing number of academics from around the country. In “Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit,” an article featured in the most recent edition of the journal Engineering Studies, Riley writes that rigor—“the aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality”—actually “accomplishes dirty deeds” in the fields of “engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research [.]”

To repeat: Academic rigor serves dirty deeds.

These “dirty deeds” are “disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege.”

Riley trades in the Newspeak that we’ve come to expect from contemporary leftist academics. This lends to her prose an aura of Gnosticism, the semblance of esotericism. Ultimately, though, Riley’s thesis is hardly original. In fact, it is but another expression of the dogmatic, Politically Correct status quo of her peers. It goes something like this:

Traditional academic standards, being the legacy of straight white men, are not unlike any other legacy of straight white men insofar as they “privilege” straight white men.

In other words, academic standards like that of rigor are “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “classist,” and so forth and so on.

Our research- and rankings-driven universities oblige arts academics to teach their research in order to justify their existence. This makes it very hard to establish coherent, overarching disciplinary perspectives, as opposed to an assemblage of research programs with teaching spinoffs.

“Western civilisation” shouldn’t be a contentious concept. If “civilisation” refers to the communal arrangements of relatively large or dense populations, broadly affiliated by enduring practices, rules and beliefs, and embellished and facilitated by characteristic arts, techniques and individuals, then that term seems uncontroversial. No one objects to the study of Chinese, Persian, Mesopotamian, Arab, Indian, Aztec, Inca or classical Greek civilisations.

As for “Western”, we are happy to speak of Western Australia, or the Western Isles of Scotland. Something being west of something else doesn’t seem intrinsically objectionable. We all have to be west of somewhere. Europe is west of Asia and the Middle East (although north of Africa). It has a civilisation with distinctive features and inheritances (although some of these derive from its closest neighbours). The Americas are west of Europe and in turn inherited many of these features, and “Euro-American civilisation” is a bit of a mouthful, as well as incomplete seen from New Zealand and points west.

Furthermore, many of these distinctive features are recognised worldwide as uncontroversially “Western”, as opposed to Chinese, Aztec and so on. Homer and Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, Jane Austen and Joan of Arc, Plato and NATO, Beethoven and Bartok, Leonardo and Picasso, the Parthenon and the Pantheon, Napoleon and Julius Caesar, Botticelli’s Venus and the Mona Lisa, the Roman empire and Christianity, the Enlightenment and its revolutionary American, French, industrial and scientific heirs, democracy and human rights. Most educated Chinese people, for example, would recognise much of this list as “Western”, are interested in its features, and where feasible would like to photograph themselves standing in front of one of them.

“Civilisation” is an unremarkable concept, then, and so is “Western”. But there’s a nuclear reaction when the two are put together. The idea of “Western civilisation” is contentious. Criticism of it is constant, and is of two kinds. The first comes mainly from scholars and intellectuals, who offer some version of the argument that the concept is empty or meaningless. The second criticism (censure, really) is of the thing, “The West” and all its works. In its domestic or endogenous form this also comes mainly from intellectuals, less scholarly ones on the whole, including especially students. But there is also an exogenous form, from people all over the world with radical non-Western or anti-Western attitudes and agendas, either covert or overt. Taking the two broader types of criticism together: either Western civilisation is nothing, or it is wicked. Either it doesn’t exist, or it shouldn’t.

The denial of its existence is an example of a common intellectual propensity to scrutinise some familiar object more and more closely until the object itself disappears, as under a microscope. Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger led quantum physics into seeing the visible world as fundamentally made of invisible energy. The harder scholars look at “Western civilisation”, the more fine-grained their analysis becomes, the less aware they are of the larger entity. Instead, they see its important sources and analogues in the Middle East or Africa (if Egypt is Africa), or the Arab scholars of the so-called “early middle ages” (a golden age for them) who were such vital transmitters of Greek thought to Europe. They see “Europe” and “the West” as concepts with identifiable provenance, so that almost by definition they once “didn’t exist”. They see the concept as embracing so many dissimilar or conflicting elements that it has no real meaning any more. They have difficulties with calling its essential elements “Western”, properly speaking (Christianity arose in the Middle East and so many of its adherents are now African or Asian). Above all, they can’t see “Western civilisation” as having any single, essential defining feature.

Some years back, I decided I had to quit the teaching profession to which I had dedicated half my life. The modern academy, I felt, was so far gone that restoration was no longer possible. Indeed, I now believe that complete collapse is the only hope for the future, but as Woody Allen said about death, I’d rather not be there when it happens.

Three reasons determined my course of action. For one thing, administration had come to deal less with academic issues and more with rules of conduct and punitive codes of behavior, as if it were a policing body rather than an arm of the teaching profession. Woe betide the (male) student accused of sexual assault or misconduct; the administration will convene an extra-judicial tribunal to punish or expel the accused, often with a low burden of proof. It will find ways to shut down conservative speakers. It will browbeat faculty and students to attend sensitivity training sessions on matters of race and gender. It will strike task forces to deal with imaginary issues like campus rape culture and propose draconian measures to contain a raging fantasy. The administration is now beset by two basic compulsions: to expand its reach at the expense of the academic community and to ensure compliance with the puritanical norms of the day. I thought it prudent to take early retirement rather than wait for the guillotine to descend.

For another, colleagues were increasingly buying into the politically correct mantras circulating in the cultural climate. The dubious axioms of “social justice” and equality of outcome, the postmodern campaign against the Western tradition of learning, and the Marxist critique of capitalism now superseded the original purpose of the university to seek out truth, to pursue the impartial study of historical events and movements, and to remain faithful to the rigors of disciplined scholarship. Most of my colleagues were rote members of the left-liberal orthodoxy: pro-Islam, pro-unfettered immigration, pro-abortion, pro-feminist, anti-conservative, anti-Zionist, and anti-white. Departmental committees were now basing their hiring protocols not on demonstrated merit, but on minority and gender identities, leading to marked pedagogical decline. Professional hypocrisy could be glaring. Case in point: The most recent hire speaking at a department meeting was a white woman advocating for more brown and black faces on staff – though, as a recent hire, she had never thought of stepping aside in favor of minority candidates vying for her position. In any event, faculties were and are progressively defined by firebrands on the one hand and soyboys on the other – partisans rather than pedagogues, plaster saints all. I found I could no longer respect the majority of people I had to work with.