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EDUCATION

The Angst of the Well-Endowed One enormous facet of the education controversy remains ignored Matt Taibbi

https://www.racket.news/p/the-angst-of-the-well-endowed
I’m sure a lot of good people are being hammered by the recent cuts, and yes, there are real speech issues in play. The reaction from academia however leads me to believe these institutions are so myopic and intrinsically exploitative that they can’t be fixed without first being taken apart. They have to be moved back to reality, but if they won’t go on their own, what is there to do?

From Thomas Edsall in the New York Times this morning:

Marc Andreessen, a billionaire venture capitalist, cryptocurrency investor and pivotal but unofficial adviser to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, made the case in a recent interview that the entire system of American higher education should be shuttered and abandoned… The American university system commands worldwide respect. What would prompt a call for its abolition?

At Johns Hopkins, the loss of $800 million in U.S.A.I.D. grants has forced the school to lay off 2,200 foreign and domestic workers… The Trump administration announced that it was cutting $400 million in grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

Twenty years ago, maybe even ten, I’d have found these stories about Elon Von Hitler-Musk detonating thousands of campus-related jobs horrifying. But the education sob stories now flying off the presses are a Burj Khalifa of “needs context.” A gigantic lie of omission is a constant feature of these stories:

Take Johns Hopkins. NBC News was one of many to highlight the “grave consequences” the new administration’s policies have had on the famed institution, noting “the changes will also have an economic impact in Baltimore because the university is the largest private employer in Maryland.” NBC pointed out that “about half of Johns Hopkins’ funding last year came from federal research dollars, according to a letter from Ron Daniels, the university’s president.”

It seemed odd that the “largest private employer in Maryland” is half-funded by the federal “research dollars,” but I shrugged and went to the Johns Hopkins website to read the Daniels letter. When there’s money on the line and university presidents have time to compose their thoughts, expect the ultimate in soaring magniloquent resplenditude. Daniels didn’t disappoint.

Trump’s War on Woke: Columbia and Big Law Fall in Line Columbia and corporate elites cave to Trump’s crackdown on woke institutions, as his administration enforces fiscal discipline and accountability—with years left to escalate. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/23/trumps-war-on-woke-columbia-and-big-law-fall-in-line/

The parade of capitulations to Donald Trump’s instauration of America has been breathtaking. on to the phase of grumbling, then abject acquiescence. Here are a couple of notable examples from the last several days.

Columbia University, one conspicuous home of Intifada wannabes, was dinged some $400 million in government contracts because it had conspicuously failed to follow laws prohibiting discrimination. As Secretary of Education Linda McMahon explained, since the October 7, 2023, slaughter by Hamas of some 1,200 Israelis in Gaza, “Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses—only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them.”

At first, Columbia officials attempted to mount some moderately high, if decrepit, horses to insist on their defiance. But just a few days ago, the administration completely caved, basically acceding in substance to all nine of Trump’s demands. The university agreed to ban masks and allow campus police officers to arrest unruly students. It also agreed to appoint a senior university official to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies as well as the Center for Palestine Studies. The university objected to the term “receivership” to describe this outcome. But as The Wall Street Journal noted, “the changes align with what usually happens in a receivership.”

Although The Wall Street Journal is not usually thought of as a comic publication, that column did contain one inadvertently hilarious sentence. The column noted that educational institutions across the country are watching what is happening at Columbia “with alarm.” They should be alarmed, for the same reason that John Donne advised readers not to ask for whom the bell tolls. Then came the funny bit. “Their primary concern,” the Journal intoned, was that “without freedom to follow their intellectual curiosity, the discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy will decline or even grind to a halt.”

Set the phenomenon of “intellectual curiosity” on one side of a chart. Then write down “Columbia’s Departments of Middle East and Palestine Studies.” What connects the two? It’s a baffling problem that no one has yet been able to answer.

But it is probably not as baffling as the suggestion that what goes on in those politicized, anti-Semitic redoubts has ever issued in “discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy” or that, absent such putative “discoveries and innovations,” said the economy would “decline or even grind to a halt.”

That would be like saying that Columbia’s “Women’s and Gender Studies” Department featured “intellectual curiosity,” as distinct from politicized grievance-mongering, or that any verbiage emitted from those hothouse quarters ever issued in “discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy.”

A Reckoning for Higher Education? Are American colleges and universities finally getting their comeuppance? By Teresa R. Manning

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/21/a-reckoning-for-higher-education/

On Friday, March 14, Trump‘s Education Department announced an investigation into more than 50 colleges and universities for their continuation of racial preferences despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (“SFFA”) which found such practices both illegal and unconstitutional. The March announcement, which specifically mentioned race-based scholarships in a program called the “PhD Project,” was a follow-up to a February 14 “Dear Colleague Letter” by Acting Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights Craig Trainor, which told schools to get rid of diversity ideology (aka “DEI” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion)” or lose federal funds.

Things are getting real.

“Diversity” has been all the rage in business and academia for decades now. The word took hold in the 1990s when the prior terms “affirmative action,” “reverse discrimination,” “racial quotas,” and Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) were almost universally denounced as unjust and destructive. Though more pleasant sounding, “diversity” is actually just more of the same, the same wine in a different skin, as they say. A poisonous ideology that pits Americans against each other based on race or sex.

All these movements attack America, aiming to divide and conquer citizens by fomenting racial discord and creating a race industrial complex that enriches some—think the 6-figure salary of “White Fragility” author Robin DeAngelo or the million-dollar homes purchased by BLM founders—while leaving most others demoralized or puzzled. After all, obsession with race crowds out consideration of real aptitude and talent for jobs, scholarships, and school admissions.

With talent yielding to race politics, mediocrity becomes the norm. (Professional athletics, where champions like Tom Brady or LeBron James shine, would never put up with it!) Mediocrity then becomes ruin; the recent DC plane crash, for example, was immediately connected to “diversity hires.”  Ignoring or even penalizing real competence guarantees this result.

But Trump has other plans.

Micromanaging Microschools Government intrusion in education must be reined in. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/20/micromanaging-microschools/

In 2020, the concept of home-based “pandemic pods” went viral. At the time, Cato Institute scholar Jason Bedrick and EdChoice fellow Matthew Ladner released “Let’s Get Small: Microschools, Pandemic Pods, and the Future of Education in America,” a report on the phenomenon. They wrote that COVID-19 has “spurred the dramatic rise of microschools and ‘pandemic pods’ as school districts’ reopening plans (or lack thereof) drove desperate parents to explore alternative education options. For many microschooling or podding families, these options are merely temporary, intended to get them through the pandemic. However, given the considerable growth in microschooling in recent years, there are reasons to believe that the pandemic accelerated a growing trend that could significantly reshape K–12 education in the United States.”

A microschool is the reimagining of the one-room schoolhouse, where class sizes are usually fewer than 15 students of varying ages, and the schedule and curriculum are tailored to fit the needs of each class. Most microschools are independently parent-led, but some are affiliated with a formal network that offers paid, in-person instructors. Lessons are taught in various environments, such as homes, libraries, and other community centers.

The government, however, is very intrusive in this area. While parents can coach Little League teams, throw parties for their children, and take them and friends to a house of worship, when it comes to educating them, the government is in charge, even in homeschools and microschools.

In Iowa, for example, parents can go to jail if they talk about reading, writing, or arithmetic in a homeschool environment with more than four unrelated children. As the Institute for Justice’s Erica Smith and Darly James note, penalties for unauthorized teaching include “imprisonment not exceeding 10 days or a $100 fine. This is for a first offense. If parents continue dispensing knowledge without government permission, prosecutors can charge them with a serious misdemeanor.” Enacted in 2013, the law had a chilling effect on education innovation during the COVID-19 lockdown hysteria when parents sought alternatives.

How Trump Can Reform American Education By Jordan Adams

https://tomklingenstein.com/how-trump-can-reform-american-education/

President Trump has a crack team this time around. The president has come out swinging on parental rights, protecting girls in schools and sports, and stomping out CRT, DEI, and the rest of the insane woke agenda. 

With the White House’s statements on the disastrous new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, President Trump has even shocked  and received heavily caveated approval from many in the education punditry class, an almost exclusively left-of-center crowd. On top it all, Trump publicly directed Linda McMahon, his Secretary of Education, to prepare for the controlled demolition and hollowing-out of the Department of Education, whose workforce has now been reduced by roughly half.

Yes, we’re off to a great start. But there be dragons.

New to the Party

Republicans have long neglected education, partly because the teacher’s union arm of the Democratic Party controlled the space, but often because conservatives simply were not interested. Education was “boring” compared to fighting communism and bombing third-world peasants; curriculum reform didn’t get you invited to Wall Street soirees. After all, Jeb Bush — who admittedly did a tremendous amount to reform education in Florida — was the face of conservative education policy, and we know what Trump did to Jeb. School choice was about as daring as Republicans would get on the issue, and even that was tepid. Many still viewed local schools as a quaint bit of Americana, a trustworthy and decidedly small-c conservative system. The Left traded on that goodwill and trust for decades, quietly pushing their garbage down from on high, even as achievement eroded.

Then came the lockdowns, the remote schooling, the wokeness, and the National School Board Association collusion with the Biden administration to blacklist concerned parents as terrorists. 

Naomi Schaefer Riley, James Piereson Trump’s College Crackdown: It’s Their Own Fault Universities spent decades prioritizing activism over education.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-columbia-funding-anti-semitism-bias-universities

The federal government has some “legitimate concerns,” said Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong last week, after the Trump administration announced the withdrawal of $400 million in federal grants because, it claimed, Columbia had not addressed rampant anti-Semitism on its campus. Armstrong’s words suggest that Columbia received the message. But have other institutions of higher education?

A recent survey of university presidents suggests not. Unless they take steps to address not just anti-Semitism but also the profound ideological bias that has facilitated it and other forms of radicalism on campus, they may be in line for similar sanctions. If they fail to act, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

The poll, conducted by Inside Higher Ed, reveals the extent to which higher ed is in denial about its predicament. It asked university presidents about the causes of declining public confidence in higher ed. Only 11 percent identified “ideological bias” as the biggest cause of public mistrust (though twice as many acknowledged it as a “valid concern”).

The vast majority are clearly misreading the public mood. A decade ago, 56 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in higher education; by last year, that number had dropped to just 19 percent. A 2018 Pew poll found that 73 percent of Republicans believed higher education was headed in the wrong direction—and of that group, 79 percent cited politicization of the classroom and curriculum as a major reason. Among those voters, higher ed has been in free-fall for some time.

Columbia Now Faces an Expensive Day of Reckoning A cost to the Jew-haters and brownshirts. by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/columbia-now-faces-an-expensive-day-of-reckoning/

On many American campuses, antisemitic nitwits have ever since the beginning of the war in Gaza storm-trooped around, calling for the disappearance of Israel and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state (“From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free”), expressing a wish for homicidal violence against Jews (“Intifada Forever”), and accusing the Jewish state of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” (“Stop the Genocide”). The worst of these offenders have been the pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University, who have created that awful mess — physical and moral — on Morningside Heights, whom Columbia’s administrators have until now been treated with kid gloves, creating an environment where anti-Israel and antisemitic behavior goes largely unpunished.

Now the Trump administration wants Columbia’s tolerance for antisemitism to be investigated. Columbia, after all, receives $5 billion from federal contracts and grants, and that money which be at risk if Columbia is weighed and found wanting in its failure to protect Jewish students and faculty from the antisemitic bullyboys and brownshirts who threaten them, harass them, surround and hold some of them prisoner, while attacking others, and interrupt, in order to shut down, the classes taught by Israeli and Jewish professors. More on the Trump administration’s investigation — by three different federal agencies — of Columbia, and the possible action by the government to be taken against the university, can be found here: “Columbia’s Choice: Hamasnik Anarchy or Taxpayer Cash,” by Seth Mandel, Commentary, March 4, 2025:

The biggest myth regarding the campus anti-Semitism crisis is that it’s about speech. It is a self-serving myth: Institutions and activists that want to disregard their abuse of Jewish students will fall back on the claim that any attempt to hold them accountable for their actions is actually an attack on free speech.

Columbia University is learning what happens when that disingenuous trick starts to backfire: Students and professors take it as a license to do whatever they want, people end up in the hospital, and the government steps in to say this cannot continue to be done on their dime.

Qatar shaping anti-Israeli curricula for 8,000 American schools in all 50 states

https://worldisraelnews.com/qatar-influence-rewriting-us-school-curricula-to-promote-anti-israel-narrative/

Pro-Hamas, Iranian-aligned Gulf state using its petro dollars to shape the curriculum used by thousands of American K-12 schools in all 50 states, report warns.  

The Qatari government is using its funding of an American college where the curriculum for thousands of American K-12 schools is drafted to reshape the way school children in the U.S. are taught, injecting anti-Israel bias into primary and secondary school education, a recently published report warns.

Last week, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) published a report documenting the Qatari government’s extensive foreign influence and anti-Israel bias infiltrating U.S. K-12 classrooms through Brown University’s Choices Program.

This curriculum, used by over 8,000 schools across all 50 states and reaching more than one million students, operates with undisclosed foreign funding and has been found to systematically distort historical facts to delegitimize Israel.

The report also raises significant concerns about transparency, oversight, and compliance with federal disclosure laws.

According to the ISGAP report, Qatari funding has led to a systematic manipulation of educational materials used by the Choices Program within the same units over the last decade, gradually shifting its curriculum to present an increasingly anti-Israel perspective.

Heather Mac Donald Racist—But Underfunded? Universities have gone from arguing that science is biased to claiming that even the overhead on their massive federal research budgets must not be cut.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/nih-university-funding-research-budgets-indirect-costs

It seems like just yesterday that medical institutions were touting their antiracism efforts. In October 2020, the American Association of Medical Colleges published “Framework for Addressing and Eliminating Racism at the AAMC, in Academic Medicine, and Beyond.” The publication calls for “individual self-reflection on systemic racism,” “anti-racism efforts within the AAMC,” “anti-racism efforts within the academic medical community,” and “anti-racism efforts within the broader community.” In 2021, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA launched an initiative called “Anti-Racist Transformation in Medical Education.” The initiative aims to “mitigate racism in the learning and work environment of medical schools through a formal management change process.” In January 2023, an antiracism committee at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine offered a Facing Microaggressions in the Workplace training, part of the school’s Action for Cultural Transformation. ACT aims to eliminate “structural injustice across Penn Medicine”; it is overseen by the medical school’s vice chairs for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity.

Now the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, and the AAMC are telling a different tale about science and medicine. These fields are unqualified civilizational triumphs, they say, jeopardized not by racism but by MAGA ignorance. What changed?

On February 7, 2025, the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s biggest funder of biomedical research, declared that henceforth it was limiting the amount that it would pay universities for the indirect costs of NIH-funded science. Indirect costs (also known as overhead, or facilities & administration) might include the salaries of administrators across the university, campus-wide building and equipment maintenance and depreciation, utilities across the university, janitorial services, and general office equipment. Direct costs, by contrast, are grant-specific, covering particular researchers’ salaries, lab materials, animal specimens, cell lines, and the like.

Previously, the NIH was adding up to 69 percent of a research grant to cover the facilities & administration infrastructure that allegedly undergirded subsidized research. For every dollar that a university received to support a particular project, NIH would throw in as much as an additional 69 cents for indirect costs, say, bringing the total amount of the grant to $1.69. The NIH negotiated indirect cost rates individually for each university in a complex, resource-consumptive process; after a university’s rate was determined, that rate applied for the next three to four years to every NIH research grant that that particular university might receive, as well as to grants from other federal agencies.

How Trump’s Anti-Semitism Crackdown Has Already Changed Education by Seth Mandel

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/how-trumps-anti-semitism-crackdown-has-already-changed-education/

The Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student active in the anti-Zionist tentifada movement, is getting most of the attention regarding the president’s fight against campus anti-Semitism. That’s understandable—put a human face on something and it becomes a lone streetlight around which every media moth will flutter.

But that attention should not crowd out coverage of the fact that university administrative culture is already changing in significant ways thanks to the White House’s focus on combating campus anti-Semitism. Khalil’s case will develop more this week as court hearings begin, so at the moment nobody really knows where it’ll lead. Such uncertainty no longer applies to the colleges themselves.

Last week, the administration cancelled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia and announced it was undertaking a review of billions more in grants. Finally, we had the answer to a lingering question: Would there be any tangible consequences for the schools that allowed their campuses to descend into prolonged bouts of anti-Semitic hysteria?

Universities clearly took President Biden’s passivity as a reason to bet against being held to account for their flagrant violations of Jewish students’ civil rights. If they were right, that meant that the only students they had to placate were the anti-Zionists: There was no reason to protect Jewish rights or Jewish safety on campus because the Jews would never cause anywhere near the same amount of trouble for them. In contrast, there were a thousand scrawny segregationists in keffiyehs with nothing to do but wait for orders from their Hamasnik organizers.

But now the playing field has changed entirely. A source at Columbia told the journalist Steve McGuire that the Trump Education Department’s threats weren’t empty: “Grant cancellation notices flowing in now. Labs shutting down. Layoffs imminent. Faculty apoplectic at Katrina Armstrong for letting it get to this point. She has to fix this fast.”