RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s note: The following piece originally appeared at City Journal. It is reprinted here with permission.

Earlier in the month, my high-school alma mater in the prosperous Montgomery County suburbs of Philadelphia went viral. A video of a student brawl injuring four security officers and eight teachers appeared on YouTube, bolstering long-whispered rumors of the district’s decline. Four students were taken into custody; one of them, 18 and charged as an adult for four counts of aggravated assault, is still in jail as I write. All four of the students were black females.

I haven’t visited Cheltenham High since I graduated in the faraway American Graffiti era, but I ventured back for a packed emergency community meeting about the May 4 events. In addition to memories, I found a stark illustration of the nation’s evasions about racial gaps in education.

It became clear almost immediately that the brawl was no one-off. “Really we have experienced [this kind of fight] our entire high-school career,” said the student council president, the first speaker lined up at the audience mics. “We complained. We never got any response. We were told all disputes were personal and the school was safe. Why now?” she asked tearfully. “Because a video of it was leaked to the media?” Students described rape threats, stalking, kids sent back to classrooms after menacing teachers or classmates, teachers walking past fighting kids, security guards looking the other way. The problems, students insisted, weren’t limited to the high school; they remembered thuggery in middle and even elementary school, too.

There was no way to chalk up these complaints to adolescent theatrics. A February survey of CHS teachers had already revealed a school that resembled Lord of the Flies. Cursing, yelling students roamed the halls, pushing, shoving, ramming each other into walls, sometimes “accidentally” colliding with teachers. Thirty-six out of 79 teachers surveyed believed that they were unsafe in the hallways, and those who didn’t acknowledged either being big enough to stare down students or practiced at minding their own business. “What are you going to do about it? You can’t do anything,” “F*** off, crazy old motherf***er,” were some of the choice rejoinders they told of hearing. “If I feel uncomfortable by the language and noise level a student displays,” one teacher wrote, “I can 1) address it and open myself up to insubordination and/or a verbal retaliation for which no consequences will be delivered or I can 2) choose to ignore it which I struggle with ethically because then I feel complicit. It’s a complete ‘no-win,’ and I battle this every day.”

What could not be said out loud was that the problem kids were all black, though the district superintendent did delicately indicate that the school’s trouble is “racialized.” Like many inner suburbs, once predominantly white Cheltenham has become increasingly African American over the past decades. Back in the day, only about 10 percent of the high-school population was black; Reggie Jackson, who graduated two years before me, remains the school’s most famous alum. The large majority of my classmates were the sons and daughters of second-generation Jews who had followed the immigrant dream into Philly’s northern suburbs in the postwar years. (Yoni “Jonathan” Netanyahu, who would die in the 1976 Entebbe raid, graduated the same year as Reggie; his brother Bibi picked up his diploma three years later. Their unflattering view of their coddled American baby boomer classmates is the subject of this blunt 2015 Washington Post article.)

Today, the district is 53 percent black, though the demographics defy easy generalization. Most of those students are the children of a growing black middle class that had moved to Cheltenham for the same reason postwar Jewish families had: its relatively affordable, attractive homes, and its highly regarded schools, the holy grail of American house-hunting parents of all races. A number of black parents at the meeting spoke poignantly of the hopes that had brought them to the district. “I moved heaven and earth to make sure my child had a chance,” one voluble mother of a twelve-year-old pleaded. “I could have lived in a wonderful house in Philly. No way I’m sending my girl to those schools. I’d rather live in a box and let my kid get a good education.”

Yale University’s president recently provided a window into the modern university’s self-conception—an understanding embraced by both liberals and conservatives but flawed in essential ways. A primary purpose of a Yale education, President Peter Salovey told Yale’s freshman class last year, is to teach students to recognize “false narratives.” Such narratives, Salovey claimed, are ubiquitous in American culture: “My sense is that we are bombarded daily by false narratives of various kinds, and that they are doing a great deal of damage.” Advocates may “exaggerate or distort or neglect crucial facts,” Salovey said, “in ways that serve primarily to fuel your anger, fear, or disgust.” (Salovey repeated this trilogy of “anger, fear, and disgust” several times; it was impossible not to hear a reference to Donald Trump, though Salovey tried to stay nonpartisan.)

According to Salovey, the Yale faculty is a model for how to respond to false narratives: they are united by a “stubborn skepticism about narratives that oversimplify issues, inflame the emotions, or misdirect the mind,” he said.

Two things can be said about Salovey’s theme: first, it is hilariously wrong about the actual state of “stubborn skepticism” at Yale. Second, and more important, Salovey mistakes the true mission of a college education.

To assess whether Yale is, in fact, a bastion of myth-busting, it is necessary to return to one of the darkest moments in Yale’s history: the university’s response to a shocking mass outbreak of student narcissism in October 2015. The wife of a college master had sent an e-mail to students, suggesting that they were capable of deciding for themselves which Halloween costume to wear and didn’t need oversight from Yale’s diversity commissars. (Halloween costumes have been the target of the PC police nationally for allegedly “appropriating” minority cultures.)

The e-mail sparked a furor among minority students across Yale and beyond, who claimed that it threatened their very being. In one of many charged gatherings that followed, students surrounded the college master, berating him for the pain that his wife had caused them. One female student was captured on video violently gesturing at the master and shrieking, “Be quiet!” as he gently tries to answer her tirade. She then screams: “Why the fuck did you accept this position [of college master]? Who the fuck hired you?”

Of all the Black Lives Matter–inspired protests that were sweeping campuses at that moment, Yale’s shrieking-girl episode was the most grotesque. In reaction, Yale groveled. President Salovey sent around a campus-wide letter declaring that he had never been as “simultaneously moved, challenged, and encouraged by our community—and all the promise it embodies—as in the past two weeks.” He proclaimed the need to work “toward a better, more diverse, and more inclusive Yale”—implying that Yale was not “inclusive” —and thanked students for offering him “the opportunity to listen to and learn from you.” That the shrieking girl had refused to listen to her college master—or to give him an opportunity to speak—was never mentioned; she suffered no known repercussions for her outrageous incivility. Salovey went on to pledge a reinforced “commitment to a campus where hatred and discrimination have no place,” implying that hatred and discrimination currently did have a place at Yale. Salovey announced that the entire administration, including faculty chairs and deans, would receive training on how to combat racism at Yale and reiterated a promise to dump another $50 million into Yale’s already all-consuming diversity efforts.

If ever there were a narrative worthy of being subjected to “stubborn skepticism,” in Salovey’s words, the claim that Yale was the home of “hatred and discrimination” is it. There is not a single faculty member or administrator at Yale (or any other American college) who does not want minority students to succeed. Yale has been obsessed with what the academy calls “diversity,” trying to admit and hire as many “underrepresented minorities” as it possibly can without totally eviscerating academic standards. There has never been a more tolerant social environment in human history than Yale (and every other American college)—at least if you don’t challenge the reigning political orthodoxies. Any Yale student who thinks himself victimized by the institution is in the throes of a terrible delusion, unable to understand his supreme good fortune in ending up at one of the most august and richly endowed universities in the world.

Despite the boos for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at Bethune-Cookman, leaders of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are noticing thatTrump is a step up from Obama:

Following his inauguration, Trump’s most overt outreach to African Americans has been his efforts to woo students and leaders of black colleges that were founded in the years after the Civil War and today consist of 101 public and private schools nationwide.

“For [President] Obama, people expected him to come in and fix everything — especially for black people. … But he never campaigned strongly for HBCUs,” said Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University in New Orleans, using the common abbreviation for the schools.

Now, he says, the reverse has happened — Trump came in with no expectations placed on him, and some black educators have been pleasantly surprised. “So people now want to see what’s going to happen because he’s coming in saying he’s going to be the president for HBCUs,” Kimbrough added. “It’s a very different perspective, but it’s still the first 150 days, so we’ll see what happens.”

Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, a nonprofit that helps provide financial assistance to students who attend black colleges, says the signs from the White House are encouraging.

“In the first four months of this presidency, the Trump administration has been far more responsive to our community than the past administration,” Taylor said. “I, for one, judge people by what they do — not what they say.”

A Republican president, the party that allegedly hates minorities, is the one actually keeping his promises about expanding minority educational opportunities.

Note that this deliberate outreach is rarely touted by the Trump administration, either — a good argument for Trump’s motivation not being “optics,” but, you know, expanding minority educational opportunities.

How much would it cost to fix American higher education? Think big. In 2015, colleges and universities spent about $532 billion to teach 20.5 million students enrolled in two-year and four-year colleges.

That $532 billion figure is the lowest estimate in circulation. The National Center for Education Statistics gives the figure as $605 billion for 2013-14. But let’s stick with the humble $532 billion.

So how much would it cost to fix our $532 billion worth of colleges and universities? The answer depends, of course, on what you think is wrong with them and which of the possible repairs you favor. But let’s not get overly complicated.

Here’s What’s Wrong with Higher Education

American higher education is subject to five broad categories of complaint.

The progressive left criticizes it for reinforcing oppression based on race, class, and sex. American higher education favors the rich and abets unjust capitalism.

Pro-market and libertarian observers criticize its dependence on public funding; guild-like stifling of innovation; and hostility to capitalism. American higher education privileges itself.

Liberals, moderates, and conservatives criticize it for putting identity politics at the center of curriculum and student life. It fosters inter-group hostility, a grievance culture, psychological fragility, incivility, and contempt for free expression. American higher education is illiberal.

Those who support the classical liberal arts criticize it for trivializing higher education, turning the curriculum into a shopping cart, neglecting the formation of mind and character in favor of political advocacy, and estranging students from their civilization by elevating the false ideal of multiculturalism. American higher education is culturally corrosive.

A wide variety of people criticize its high price, frivolous expenditures, and increasingly uncertain rewards for graduates. The gigantic growth in the number of campus administrative positions relative to the faculty comes under this heading too. American higher education is too expensive.

It would be easy to add more items or expand any of these into a whole book. Many have done just that. But my goal here is to cut a path through the forest, not to linger over the variety of trees.

When I speak of fixing higher education, I discard the first category, the criticisms of the university as a font of capitalist oppression. It simply has no basis in reality. Each of the other four categories is cogent, and any real repair would have to address all of them. Moreover, they are deeply connected.

I won’t linger over their interconnections either, but it is important to keep in mind that the guild-like or oligarchic aspects of higher education undergird its illiberalism, incoherence, and excessive expense; and its culturally corrosive quality licenses its voracious appetite for public funding, suppression of intellectual freedom, and frivolity.

Four Proposed Repairs to Higher Education

Corresponding to the four legitimate categories of complaint are four broad categories of possible repair:

Fix the financial model. Reduce and restructure federal and state support for colleges and universities. Eliminate the regulations that favor the guild and prop up oligarchy. Unleash the marketplace, including for-profit, online, and other entrepreneurial alternatives to the dominant model of two and four-year colleges. Steer Americans away from the idea that a college degree is necessary for a prosperous career. Find new and better ways to credential people as competent in specific endeavors. The general-purpose undergraduate degree should face competition from alternative credentialing.

Dismantle the infrastructure of campus illiberalism. Eliminate grievance deans and programs; rescind all government programs that subsidize identity politics; insist that colleges and universities punish those who disrupt events or otherwise undermine free expression. Some call for eliminating tenure because it has become a bulwark for the faculty members most intent on redirecting higher education into political activism.

Restore a meaningful core curriculum. This repair has three varieties: create an optional core curriculum at existing colleges, leaving everything else alone; create a mandatory core curriculum for all the students at a college; create new colleges that start out with their own core curricula. Reversing the cultural corrosion of American higher education will take more than reviving core curricula, but by common consent, that is the first step.

https://www.nas.org/ https://www.nas.org/articles/finding_academic_freedom

New York, NY (May 22, 2017) – The National Association of Scholars has released a chart that compares the ten most important statements on academic freedom in American history. “Charting Academic Freedom: 102 Years of Debate” starts with the World War I era “Statement of Principles” from the newly founded American Association of University Professors, and extends to recent declarations by Middlebury College professors and two Princeton professors.

The chart makes clear at a glance that “academic freedom” has changed its meaning many times in the last 102 years. During World War I, professors were worried that college trustees posed a risk to their right to speak out on controversial issues. They sought protection by claiming that their “scientific” pursuit of truth deserved a special status in society. By contrast, 107 Middlebury College professors issued a statement in March, decrying the “incivility and coarseness” of their own students, who had violently suppressed a speech by a visiting scholar.

“The NAS has published this chart to improve the quality of the national debate over academic freedom,” said Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. “The American public is rightly concerned that the freedom to learn in American colleges and universities has been damaged. Disinvitations to prominent speakers; riots at places such as Berkeley, Middlebury, and Claremont McKenna; and other efforts to intimidate both faculty members and fellow students have become all too common,” said Wood. “But efforts to repair the situation have been hampered by confusion over what ‘academic freedom’ really is. Our chart is meant to give all sides of the debate a roadmap of the major policy statements.”

https://www.nas.org/images/documents/NAS_freeSpeechChart_1.2.pdf

Parents, taxpayers and donors have little idea of the levels of lunacy, evil and lawlessness that have become features of many of today’s institutions of higher learning. Parents, taxpayers and donors who ignore or are too lazy to find out what goes on in the name of higher education are nearly as complicit as the professors and administrators who promote or sanction the lunacy, evil and lawlessness. As for the term “institutions of higher learning,” we might start asking: Higher than what? Let’s look at a tiny sample of academic lunacy.

During a campus debate, Purdue University professor David Sanders argued that a logical extension of pro-lifers’ belief that fetuses are human beings is that pictures of “a butt-naked body of a child” are child pornography. Clemson University’s chief diversity officer, Lee Gill, who’s paid $185,000 a year to promote inclusion, provided a lesson claiming that to expect certain people to be on time is racist.

To reduce angst among snowflakes in its student body, the University of California, Hastings College of the Law has added a “Chill Zone.” The Chill Zone, located in its library, has, just as most nursery schools have, mats for naps and beanbag chairs. Before or after a snooze, students can also use the space to do a bit of yoga or meditate. The University of Michigan Law School helped its students weather their Trump derangement syndrome — a condition resulting from Donald Trump’s election — by enlisting the services of an “embedded psychologist” in a room full of bubbles and play dough. To reduce pressure on law students, Joshua M. Silverstein, a law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, thinks that “every American law school ought to substantially eliminate C grades and set its good academic standing grade point average at the B- level.”

Today’s academic climate might be described as a mixture of infantilism, kindergarten and totalitarianism. The radicals, draft dodgers and hippies of the 1960s who are now college administrators and professors are responsible for today’s academic climate. The infantilism should not be tolerated, but more important for the future of our nation are the totalitarianism and the hate-America lessons being taught at many of the nation’s colleges. For example, led by its student government leader, the University of California, Irvine’s student body voted for a motion, which the faculty approved, directing that the American flag not be on display because it makes some students uncomfortable and creates an unsafe, hostile environment. The flag is a symbol of hate speech, according to the student government leader. He said that the U.S. flag is just as offensive as Nazi and Islamic State flags and that the U.S. is the world’s most evil nation (http://tinyurl.com/kjoax3j).

In a recent New York Times op-ed, New York University provost Ulrich Baer argued: “The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community.” That’s a vision that is increasingly being adopted on college campuses, and it’s leaking down to our primary and secondary levels of education. Baer apparently believes that the test for one’s commitment to free speech comes when he balances his views with those of others. His vision justifies the violent disruptions of speeches by Heather Mac Donald at Claremont McKenna College, Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley and Charles Murray at Middlebury College. Baer’s vision is totalitarian nonsense. The true test of one’s commitment to free speech comes when he permits people to be free to say and write those things he finds deeply offensive.

A demand for $40 million normally is the stuff of thriller movies, with British-accented villain threatening to blow up stuff or kill the governor’s daughter or some similar unspeakable horror. Supervillain territory. But the demand of the UCLA “Afrikan Student Union” for a building plus 40 mill carries no threat that I can find. Other than the implicit threat to cry racism and demonstrate, I suppose. Still, I have to credit them for chutzpah. The UCLA Daily Bruin reports:

The Afrikan Student Union called on UCLA to create a Black Resource Center and a $40 million endowment to address African-American underrepresentation on campus in a list of demands it released Thursday [May 11].

Fourth-year philosophy and African American Studies student and Afrikan Student Union Chair Alicia Frison said the group worked on the demands throughout the year and decided to release the list now in response to recent incidents affecting African-American students.

“This year will be the 51st year the Afrikan Student Union is on campus,” ASU wrote in a statement, “however, 50 years later we are struggling with many of the same issues as our ancestors and elders dealt with in 1966. This is unacceptable.”

Ms. Frison: is that a gang sign in your left hand? (Photo: Daily Bruin)

The grievances listed by the “Afrikan” students are pretty weak beer:

On April 30, a picture that showed USAC President Danny Siegel holding up a gang sign was leaked, and on the same day there was a shooting near University of California, San Diego targeting African-American individuals. ASU also cited racist stickers posted around the offices of the Academic Advancement Program as a reason for releasing its list of demands.

The poor snowflakes have no idea or concern for how many taxpayers had to skimp and go without in orer to pay their huge California tax bill. They must think that $40 million is chicken feed:

“$40 million is just a drop in the bucket for the university,” Frison said. “Berkeley already has a $30 to $40 million endowment even though they have less African American students.”

I think she means “fewer” students.

Here is thought for Ms. Frison: how about raising money for the endowment on your own? Maybe get a job and start saving.

The campaign against free speech on American campuses rolls on, steadily decreasing the domain of permissible ideas. But the case of Paul Griffiths, a professor at Duke Divinity School, is something new. The defense of liberty of thought and discussion itself has been transformed into a career-ending transgression.

The case was brought to light in late April when Rod Dreher of the American Conservative published a series of email exchanges. It started Feb. 6, when Anathea Portier-Young, another Divinity School professor, distributed a facultywide email. “On behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee,” she wrote, “I strongly urge you to participate in the Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training planned for March 4 and 5.” Ms. Portier-Young promised colleagues that the weekend program would be “transformative, powerful, and life-changing.”

Ms. Portier-Young, an Old Testament scholar with expertise in “constructions of identity, gender, and ethnicity, and traditions of violence and nonviolence,” approvingly quoted the Racial Equity Institute’s guiding ideas: “‘Racism is a fierce, ever-present, challenging force, one which has structured the thinking, behavior, and actions of individuals and institutions since the beginning of U.S. history.’ ” She also included the institute’s call to political action: “ ‘To understand racism and effectively begin dismantling it requires an equally fierce, consistent, and committed effort.’ ”

Late in the afternoon of the same day, Mr. Griffiths replied in a facultywide email. Noting that Ms. Portier-Young had “made her ideological commitments clear,” he stated that he would “do the same, in the interests of free exchange.”

Mr. Griffiths, a professor of Catholic theology, was good to his word. “I exhort you not to attend this training,” he wrote. “There’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty,” he continued, and it would reflect “illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies” and be “definitively anti-intellectual.” He noted that “(re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history.”

He then entreated the faculty to rededicate themselves to their scholarly and pedagogical mission: “Each of us should be tense with the effort of it, thrumming like a tautly triple-woven steel thread with the work of it, consumed by the fire of it, ever eager for more of it.”

That evening, Dean Elaine Heath entered the fray. Announcing in her own facultywide email that she was “looking forward to participating in the REI training” and that she was “proud that we are hosting it at Duke Divinity School,” Ms. Heath—also a professor of missional and pastoral theology—expressed confidence that the sessions would improve the school’s “intellectual strength, spiritual vitality, and moral authority.”

Having sided firmly with Ms. Portier-Young, the dean proceeded to outline rules of acceptable discourse in facultywide email exchanges. “It is inappropriate and unprofessional to use mass emails to make disparaging statements—including arguments ad hominem—in order to humiliate or undermine individual colleagues or groups of colleagues with whom we disagree. The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.”

Yet Mr. Griffiths’s three-paragraph, 228-word email made no disparaging statement about any individual, much less expressed bigotry of any sort. Unless—in accordance with the illiberal spirit that has taken root on our campuses—one equates unsparing criticism of ideas with attacks on a person and redefines “bigotry” to mean deviation from the progressive party line. CONTINUE AT SITE

The National Review ran a short piece, which, at first, I thought was a satirical piece by Katherine Timpf in the spirit of the Harvard Crimson, “U-Arizona is hiring-students-to tattle on others for ‘bias-incidents.’”

The University of Arizona is hiring students to be “social-justice activists,” [SJAs] and the job description demands that they “report any bias incidents or claims to appropriate Residence Life staff.”

In other words: These kids are being paid to tattle on other kids for anything they might consider to be a microaggression, and any students who gets these jobs should probably identify themselves so that other students will know to never invite them to their parties.

According to the university’s website, the official title of the position is “social-justice activist,” and it pays $10 per hour. They can expect to work about 15 hours per week, which, as the Daily Caller notes, means that they will be making roughly $600 per month to behave like self-righteous, meddling nightmares.

Before I blinked twice and realized Miss Timpf was reporting a fact, and wasn’t trying to be humorous, I wondered if the $600 a month stipend would go to reducing a student’s federal and/or state college loan, which will typically run in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars, depending on the campus.

But, no, Miss Timpf was dead serious.

The SJA would not act as an ombudsman to negotiate resolutions between triggered emotionally hurt students and steely-eyed truth tellers. Nor would he act as a blockwart, which was a Nazi rank below gauleiter. He would be, frankly, a paid, contemptible snitch. His job would be to turn in and stamp out individuals, not whole populations.

The University website, “Social Justice Advocates Recruitment Information,” informs us:

The Social Justice Advocates (SJA) Position is one that is grounded in the multicultural competency framework and allows student staff to gain the awareness, knowledge, and skills necessary to work effectively with students and residents across cultures and identities. The position calls for an understanding of social identity groups, experiences, histories, and practices as it relates to everyday life and life at the University of Arizona.

The position also aims to increase understanding of one’s own self through critical reflection of power and privilege, identity and intersectionality, systems of socialization, cultural competency and allyship as they pertain to the acknowledgement, understanding and acceptance of differences. Finally, this position intends to increase a student staff member’s ability to openly lead conversations, discuss differences and confront diversely insensitive behavior.