RUTHFULLY YOURS

Palestinian journalists are spearheading a campaign against Israeli reporters. They have been taught that any journalist daring to criticize the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Hamas is a “traitor.” They expect Israeli and Western journalists to report bad things only about Israel.

“It is very sad when you see that your colleagues on the other side are inciting against you and doing their best to prevent you from carrying out your work. This is harmful to the Palestinians themselves because they will no longer be able to relay their opinions to the Israeli public.” — Israeli reporter who has been covering Palestinian affairs for nearly a decade.

For Palestinian journalists, to be seen in public with an Israeli colleague is treasonous.

Many Western journalists turn a blind eye to assaults on freedom of the media under the PA and Hamas. They know they will be unwelcome in these places if they write any story that reflects negatively on Palestinians. Besides, the campaign against Israeli journalists is being waged by Palestinians, and not Israelis. To them, this fact alone makes it a story not worth reporting.

Nearly every Israeli media outlet has a journalist whose task is to report on what is happening on the Palestinian side. Until recently, these journalists would travel to Ramallah and other Palestinian cities in the West Bank to interview ordinary Palestinians, representatives of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and various Palestinian factions.

If you wonder what has become of us since the Greatest Generation began leaving the stage, consider this elegant 19th century warning from Victorian statesman and author, Sir William Francis Butler:

“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”

Despite that timeless advice, foolishness and political correctness recently joined hands at elite Northwestern University, neatly tucked away in Chicago’s toniest suburbs. As the Chicago Tribune reported last week, faculty opposition caused retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry to withdraw his name from a tentative appointment to head the university’s new institute on global studies.

Top officials at Northwestern had clearly viewed this prospective appointment as a huge win. In addition to his military rank, Gen. Eikenberry was deputy head of the NATO military committee, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and a distinguished public servant, intimately familiar with foreign cultures and decision-making at the highest levels of government. Then there was his gig at the newly minted Buffett Institute, underwritten by a $100 million grant from business magnate Warren Buffett’s sister, one of the largest research grants ever awarded to Northwestern. What could possibly go wrong?

Alas, the president and provost of Northwestern had obviously neglected a standard piece of academic wisdom, namely that faculty meetings are so vicious because the stakes are so small. Normally they are: But that whole ballgame changes when the faculty’s animal cunning is alerted that now, suddenly, something has arrived on campus that might be worth stealing.

Things at Northwestern began going south back in February. An “open letter on behalf of academic integrity” was signed by 46 faculty members but quickly became notorious for dismissing Gen. Eikenberry as a “non-academic career military officer” too closely aligned with American foreign policy to run a truly independent institute. Last week’s Tribune article quoted a professor of foreign languages who insisted, “It wasn’t because this guy was military. That wasn’t the case at all.” But as Max Boot sniffed in Commentary, “Apparently soldiers are good enough to fight and die for our freedom but are not good enough to teach our students. They are too biased, you see – in favor of America!”

Short, intense directed apprenticeships that teach students how to learn on their own to mastery are the future of higher education.

So it turns out sitting in a chair for four years doesn’t deliver mastery in anything but the acquisition of staggering student-loan debt. Practical (i.e. useful) mastery requires not just hours of practice but directed deep learning via doing of the sort you only get in an apprenticeship.

The failure of our model of largely passive learning and rote practice is explained by Daniel Coyle in his book The Talent Code (sent to me by Ron G.), which upends the notion that talent is a genetic gift. It isn’t–in his words, it’s grown by deep practice, the ignition of motivation and master coaching.

Using these techniques, student reach levels of accomplishment in months that surpass those of students who spent years in hyper-costly conventional education programs. The potential to radically improve our higher education system while reducing the cost of that education by 90% is the topic of my books Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy and The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.

Let’s start by admitting our system of higher education is unsustainable and broken: a complete failure by any reasonable, objective standard. Tuition has soared $1,100% while the output of the system (the economic/educational value of a college degree) has declined precipitously.

A recent major study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, concluded that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.”

‘Academically Adrift’: The News Gets Worse and Worse (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

These two charts are the acme of unsustainability: college tuition has skyrocketed, along with federally funded student loan debt.

Four years ago, I wrote an article for American Thinker that I believed was the final word on academic “studies” that were contorted to put conservatives in a bad light. The study, which purportedly found that conservatives “are losing faith in science,” said nothing of the kind. It found that conservatives are losing faith in the scientific community. The authors simply declared the scientific community and science are the same, thus arriving at the conclusion they so desperately wanted to reach.

It was a real twofer: a bogus study that showed exactly why conservatives are losing faith in the scientific community.

But now there appears before the court of public opinion an even better example. Sharp-eyed readers may recall that in 2013, three professors from Virginia Commonwealth University found that conservatives tend to exhibit forms of “psychoticism,” such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, but not much of one – and it’s exactly how it was stated in thousands of articles.

Liberals were said to exhibit “neuroticism” and “social desirability” and were therefore more likely to support public expenditures on public assistance.

“Social desirability” can be stated in plain English as a “conscious effort to get along,” says Steven Hayward at Powerline, who brought the important facts to light in recent days.

As he notes, the original article on the study was published in the American Journal of Political Science. The article includes this comment.

In line with our expectations, P [for “Psychoticism”] (positively related to tough-mindedness and authoritarianism) is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes. Intriguingly, the strength of the relationship between P and political ideology differs across sexes. P‘s link with social conservatism is stronger for females while its link with military attitudes is stronger for males. We also find individuals higher in Neuroticism are more likely to be economically liberal. Furthermore, Neuroticism is completely unrelated to social ideology, which has been the focus of many in the field. Finally, those higher in Social Desirability are also more likely to express socially liberal attitudes.