RUTHFULLY YOURS

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outcome, the postmodern campaign against the Western tradition of learning, and the Marxist critique of capitalism now superseded the original purpose of the university to seek out truth, to pursue the impartial study of historical events and movements, and to remain faithful to the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.

Suppose you always wanted to date tall and good-looking people, and believe yourself to be tall and good-looking too. There’s a club in your city called Lucky’s where all the tall and good-looking people go, so you show up there. But you can’t get in. The bouncer stops you.

“Only tall and good-looking people are allowed in.”

“I’m tall and good-looking, though.”

“Only tall and good-looking people with the proper credentials.” At this point, as he’s letting in another batch of the long and luscious, you notice that most of them are presenting the bouncer with a fancy piece of paper that says, “100% certified tall and good-looking.”

Aha, you say. I need that fancy paper. You go to the marketplace and find a confusing system of stalls and shops selling various kinds of fancy paper. Some of them won’t even look at you. Finally you notice a guy beckoning from an alley: “Psst. Tall-and-good-looking credentials right here.”

“How much?” you say.

“Only $60,000,” he says. “Plus four years of your life. Deal?”

You smell something fishy. And yet you go ahead with it. You take out loans. You spend four years of your life doing baffling chores. And you get your tall-and-good-looking credential. But when you take it back to the club, the bouncer just sneers at you. “We don’t accept credentials from this place.”

At this point you catch a glimpse of your reflection in someone’s car window. And you realize you’re 4′11″ and look like the Joker after he fell into a vat of acid. The guy you owe $60,000 is laughing.

That’s pretty much how college works. Want to join the lucky ones in Club Upper Middle Class? Be smart and/or hard-working. And if you’re neither smart nor hard-working, the fact that most of the people who make it to the upper middle class did indeed obtain a college degree identifying them as smart and/or hard-working should be irrelevant to you. All the credentials in the world aren’t going to fool the bouncers who guard the doorway of the club. These bouncers are employers. And they don’t care about your feelings. Just as bouncers want people who will pretty up the place, employers want people who will add value to their company. If you can’t provide it, they’ll tell you to take a hike.

A version of this article originally appeared at Minding the Campus on November 6, 2017.

The Abolition of Man is the best refutation of moral relativism that has ever seen print (aside from the Bible, of course). In this short and cogent book, C.S. Lewis ponders what happens when human beings abrogate transcendent moral law and objective truth, and begin to fashion their own guidelines for living. One argument that he refutes is that “Man” needs not to observe old, age-encrusted commandments handed down from the Year One, but can decide the course of his own future through reason and deliberation.

Lewis responds, simply, that “Man” will not make such decisions, but a certain number of men who have the power in any given generation will do so, depending on the technology available to them, and that these decisions will then bind the generations afterward. “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases,” Lewis explains, actually means “the power of some men to make other men what theyplease.”

Furthermore, Lewis argues, these powerful men will not necessarily act out of reason and deliberation, but, bypassing objective standards of truth, will be governed by their own “impulses.”

Lewis particularly faults the moral relativists for not considering, as physicists routinely must, the dimension of Time in their actions and calculations. Lewis is thinking in terms of generations. When we consider curricular changes propelled by students at a university, we are dealing with a much shorter timeline, four years really, the amount of time it takes most students to earn the degree, at least at the more selective schools–the ones who will earn the degree, that is, and not drop out altogether. So, at present, we are talking about changes demanded by, say, members of the Class of 2022, that will affect all future students in that particular college through the 2020s and into the 2030s and even the 2040s, some of them now obliviously playing video games, some toddling about their play groups, some not yet even born.

This prospective scenario may be playing out now at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. As Peter Wood writes at Minding the Campus, “a slow-motion protest” is being mounted at Reed by the “Reedies Against Racism,” who are

waging war on the college’s core humanities course, Humanities 110, “Greece and the Ancient Mediterranean.” The students seem to have gained the upper hand in their attack on Reed’s only required freshman course. Classes have been canceled; a day-long boycott was launched; a Black Lives Matter group presented the president of the college with a list of demands, and President John Kroger capitulated to many of them.

This article originally appeared in Minding the Campus on December 3, 2017.

In the sunken lobby of John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Tenth Avenue in New York City, a somber Memorial Hall is dedicated to the “Bravery and Sacrifice” of “NYPD Heroes 9-11 and Beyond.” Surrounded by photographs of the attack and the recovery, a twisted metal chunk of one of the Twin Towers rests on a circular black pedestal inscribed with the names of John Jay alumni killed in the attack.

Take the elevator to the sixth-floor offices of the college president, however, and the mood changes. There you will find in “The President’s Gallery” a celebratory exhibit of art created by the friends and allies of the 9-11 terrorists. The show, running to January 26, is titled “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay.” It is attracting quite a bit of attention. While I was there I ran into a film crew from CBS arranging a tour with one of the curators, Erin Thompson. A fellow exhibit attendee offered the CBS folks the perspective of—her words—“the mother of a victim of 9-11.” Her son (or perhaps daughter) was one of the 648 employees of the Wall Street trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, who were on the 101st to 105thfloors of the North Tower that day.

No Repentance for Monstrous Acts

“Ode to the Sea” presents 31 paintings, three model boats, and one assemblage titled “The Hall of Enlightenment,” which combines a stopped clock and an open book. The title of the exhibit is taken from the title of a poem by one of the inmates, Ibrahim al-Rubaish. It begins:

O Sea, give me news of my loved ones.

Were it not for the chains of the faithless,
I would have dived into you.
And reached my beloved family, or perished in your arms.

Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain, and injustice.
Your bitterness eats away at my patience.

Al-Rubaish was a senior leader of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Captured in Pakistan, he was released from Guantánamo in 2006 and sent into custody to Saudi Arabia. He escaped from the Saudis and went to Yemen where he resumed a leadership position in Al Qaida. He was killed in a drone strike in April 2015.

Hundreds of professors have signed onto a letter calling for New York City to remove monuments honoring Theodore Roosevelt and Christopher Columbus, saying the statues of the historical figures represent “white supremacy.”

The scholars made their request earlier this month in an open letter to New York’s Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers. The letter calls on the panel, established in September by Mayor Bill De Blasio, to recommend several monuments be scrubbed from city property and relocated to inside museums.

The statues of Roosevelt, the 26th president, and the Italian explorer Columbus are among five so-called “objects of popular resentment” the professors are petitioning to have removed.

“For too long, they have generated harm and offense as expressions of white supremacy. These monuments are an affront in a city whose elected officials preach tolerance and equity,” the letter says of the monuments, some of which have been targets of protest and vandalism in the past.

Earlier this month, Hyperallergic, an arts and culture website, reported the letter had more than 120 signatures. It has since amassed hundreds of additional signatures.

Those who have signed onto the letter include from professors from New York colleges including Columbia University, Brooklyn College and New York University as well as from far-flung institutions such as the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of New Mexico.

The College Fix reached out to more than a dozen signatories for comment, but did not receive any responses.

The academics’ request comes as New York city grapples with potentially removing controversial monuments located on city property. Following an August white nationalist rally in Virginia that left one person dead, De Blasio announced on Twitter the city would review its “symbols of hate.”

And while scores of professor have attached their name to the recent open letter, higher education already has a prominent role in the decision making process regarding the monuments. Six of the panel’s members are professors.

Describing Theodore Roosevelt as an “imperialist, and frank advocate of eugenics,” the open letter from the scholars asserts his statue’s removal would make a “bold statement” that racism won’t be celebrated in New York city.

The statue, located outside the city’s American Museum of Natural History, includes the former president on horseback with an American Indian, dressed in traditional garb, and an African man surrounding Roosevelt.

In recent decades, academics promoting pseudo intellectual studies have sought to advance the notion that antisemitism in the contemporary context, and specifically on college and university campuses, is a mere illusion, created by a group of alarmists,”[1] attempting to exaggerate the severity of threats against the Jewish community. Recently, this phenomenon received attention when the Research Group of the Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University published a September 2017 report, entitled “Safe and on the Sidelines: Jewish Students and the Israel-Palestine Conflict on Campus.”[2] The report, which has been presented in testimony before the US House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee,[3] attempts to discredit the argument that colleges and universities have become “breeding” grounds and “hotspots of antisemitism.”

While the report acknowledges that “[s]ince 2014, there have been at least seven separate studies[4] dedicated to tracking campus political discourse as it pertains to antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment,” it argues that “what [these studies] offer in numerical impressions, they obscure in the subtleties of student experience.” While the existing studies –conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (2015)[5], the AMCHA Initiative (2015, 2016, 2017)[6], Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar (2015)[7], Leonard Saxe et al. (2015, 2016),[8] and others — generated extensive data and statistics, using reported incidents, surveys, polls, and questionnaires, the study by the Research Group of the Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University is based solely on personal interviews with sixty-six undefined students across five California university campuses[9].

In fact, the study acknowledges that it “intentionally sought out Jewish students who were either unengaged or minimally engaged in organized Jewish life,” thereby excluding students who are most likely to either be the targets of antisemitic attacks or be cognizant of antisemitism on campus. In light of these findings, this paper will illustrate that the study by the Research Group of the Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University contains fundamental methodological flaws, omissions, and distortions, thereby presenting a highly inaccurate and misleading account of antisemitism on campus.

Given the atmosphere on many university campuses, which often curtails and inhibits freedom of speech and dissenting views, as illustrated by Jonathan S. Tobin[10] and others, it is no surprise that the report was “approved and supervised by the Stanford University Institutional Review Board,”[11] when it, in fact, is devoid of scholarly merit. One must look no further than the cover page of the report to see that the authors include Abiya Ahmed, a former employee of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization with close political and ideological ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ari Y. Kelman, a member of the Academic Council of Open Hillel, which seeks to overturn Hillel International’s guidelines that proscribe partnering with anti-Israel groups or individuals. Open Hillel gives recognition to supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), two of the organizations most directly responsible for creating a hostile campus environment saturated with anti-Israel sentiment.

I’m cynical about students. The vast majority are philistines.

The conventional view—that education pays because students learn—assumes that the typical student acquires, and retains, a lot of knowledge. She doesn’t. Teachers often lament summer learning loss: Students know less at the end of summer than they did at the beginning. But summer learning loss is only a special case of the problem of fade-out: Human beings have trouble retaining knowledge they rarely use. Of course, some college graduates use what they’ve learned and thus hold on to it—engineers and other quantitative types, for example, retain a lot of math. But when we measure what the average college graduate recalls years later, the results are discouraging, to say the least.
In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. The ignorance it revealed is mind-numbing. Fewer than a third of college graduates received a composite score of “proficient”—and about a fifth were at the “basic” or “below basic” level. You could blame the difficulty of the questions—until you read them. Plenty of college graduates couldn’t make sense of a table explaining how an employee’s annual health-insurance costs varied with income and family size, or summarize the work-experience requirements in a job ad, or even use a newspaper schedule to find when a television program ended. Tests of college graduates’ knowledge of history, civics, and science have had similarly dismal results.

Of course, college students aren’t supposed to just download facts; they’re supposed to learn how to think in real life. How do they fare on this count? The most focused study of education’s effect on applied reasoning, conducted by Harvard’s David Perkins in the mid-1980s, assessed students’ oral responses to questions designed to measure informal reasoning, such as “Would a proposed law in Massachusetts requiring a five-cent deposit on bottles and cans significantly reduce litter?” The benefit of college seemed to be zero: Fourth-year students did no better than first-year students.

Other evidence is equally discouraging. One researcher tested Arizona State University students’ ability to “apply statistical and methodological concepts to reasoning about everyday-life events.” In the researcher’s words:

Of the several hundred students tested, many of whom had taken more than six years of laboratory science … and advanced mathematics through calculus, almost none demonstrated even a semblance of acceptable methodological reasoning.

I have been in school for more than 40 years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at George Mason University.

Thanks to tenure, I have a dream job for life. Personally, I have no reason to lash out at our system of higher education. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century of reading and reflection, has convinced me that it is a big waste of time and money. When politicians vow to send more Americans to college, I can’t help gasping, “Why? You want us to waste even more?”

How, you may ask, can anyone call higher education wasteful in an age when its financial payoff is greater than ever? The earnings premium for college graduates has rocketed to 73 percent—that is, those with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, 73 percent more than those who have only a high-school diploma, up from about 50 percent in the late 1970s. The key issue, however, isn’t whether college pays, but why. The simple, popular answer is that schools teach students useful job skills. But this dodges puzzling questions.

First and foremost: From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something.

The disconnect between college curricula and the job market has a banal explanation: Educators teach what they know—and most have as little firsthand knowledge of the modern workplace as I do. Yet this merely complicates the puzzle. If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? Because, despite the chasm between what students learn and what workers do, academic success is a strong signal of worker productivity.

Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job.