RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hedge fund big Bill Ackman, who’s lit a fire under Harvard over its antisemitism, seems to be still mulling the problems with universities.

He noted this, from the analysis of Washington Monthly:

According to Washington Monthly:

Student protestors at college campuses nationwide, united by their outrage at Israel’s actions in Gaza, can rightly be described as diverse. Despite the masks, it’s clear that they come from different racial backgrounds, and their views range from the belief that Israel should give up on its war effort to the conviction that Israel should be destroyed entirely.

But one thing is not especially diverse about the protests: the campuses on which they’ve been happening.

Many of the most high-profile protests have occurred at highly selective colleges, like Columbia University. But since the national media is famously obsessed with these schools and gives far less attention to the thousands of other colleges where most Americans get their postsecondary educations, it’s hard to know how widespread the campus unrest has really been.

We at the Washington Monthly tried to get to the bottom of this question: Have pro-Palestinian protests taken place disproportionately at elite colleges, where few students come from lower-income families?

The answer is a resounding yes.

 

I think the Washington Monthly analysis is sound, and intuitively. Ackman’s view about why this is so makes sense.

But my own experience is that students in both kinds of schools work pretty hard.

I’ve taken mostly tech courses at San Diego College of Continuing Education, and agree that yes, the vast majority of students are career-focused, often young and even older immigrants looking to upgrade their skills in order to work hard and achieve their American dream. They are fantastic people and while they aren’t discussing Romantic poetry, they are getting their work done which is demanding and considerable.

Meanwhile, at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, where I went in the 1990s, the work was exhaustively hard with no slack whatsoever tolerated. However, we did have what was openly called a trade-school model of education, which may have fostered the same attitudes.

That said, the School for International and Public Affairs students worked hard, I remember several who struggled; the law school students worked like grinds; the engineering students worked hard, filling their labs on Friday nights, so it may not be entirely the case that ivies are lazy schools, though there may be differences in different schools, particularly graduate schools and undergraduate ones. There are the majors, after all, where one wonders what they do over there, in some of the undergraduate areas, in the teachers college, in the social sciences. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of learning to speak ‘woke’ in the right way, having experienced some of those, too. Mastering the language is more important than adding value.

In any case, the Monthly does seem to think it’s a matter of entitlement, which seems to be the right vein to explore. That said, it’s also know that the outside organizers have targeted the fanciest schools in order to lay them low, and Middle Eastern money has flooded these places as well, more so than the trade schools, which may be more the root of the problem than how focused the students are.

Cut off that money and shut the outside agitators out, and see whether the nonsense continues.