RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/02/why-cant

Retired teacher Mary Hudson recently wrote a damning exposé based on her experiences in the New York City public school system. Hudson taught in three different public high schools and her observations from those years lead her to implicate the students and a “go along to get along” attitude among administrators for persistently poor educational performance.

Put simply, administrators are unwilling to set high educational and behavioral standards for fear of having to confront underperforming and disruptive students. They have few implements their toolbox to permit such confrontation. As a result, students feel diminished and take advantage of lax standards to dismiss the educational aspect of school. Peer pressure and even physical intimidation deter the few students who are interested in learning and effectively this turns schooltime into social time. Administrators respond by treating classes like day care, often to the chagrin of teachers.

This is “the soft bigotry of low expectations” epitomized.

The net result is a student body hostile to direction, discipline, and learning. This problem is exacerbated by the “social justice” and politically correct mindset that makes discipline, both behavioral and educational, subject to racial quotas. (Woe to the teacher or administrator who suspends or expels “too high” a proportion of students of a certain race.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273328/more-university-corruption-walter-williams

Last week’s column discussed the highly publicized university corruption scheme wherein wealthy parents bought admission at prestigious universities for their children. That is dishonest and gives an unfair advantage to those young people but won’t destroy the missions of the universities. There is little or no attention given by the mainstream media to the true cancer eating away at most of our institutions of higher learning. Philip Carl Salzman, emeritus professor of anthropology at McGill University, explains that cancer in a Minding the Campus article, titled “What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University.”

Professor Salzman argues that for most of the 20th century, universities were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. There was open exchange and competition in the marketplace of ideas. Different opinions were argued and respected. Most notably in the social sciences, social work, the humanities, education and law, this is no longer the case. Leftist political ideology has emerged. The most important thing to today’s university communities is diversity of race, ethnicity, sex and economic class, on which they have spent billions of dollars. Conspicuously absent is diversity of ideology.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/blend-texas-house-and-senate-bills-for-a-campus-free-speech-win/

The Texas State Legislature is considering several bills designed to protect freedom of speech on the state’s public-university campuses. The Texas State Senate has already passed a bill with many positive features, from the creation of a disciplinary code for shout-downs, to protection against the use of security fees as a tool of censorship, to protection for student groups facing discrimination for their beliefs. Although the Texas Senate bill is clearly a step forward, it is also weak in areas where bills being considered by the Texas State House are strong.

Two campus free-speech bills have been introduced in the Texas State House, one by Representative Bill Zedler and one by Representative Briscoe Cain. Readers may remember that Cain was himself subjected to an outrageous shout-down at Texas Southern University in 2017.

The Zedler bill includes two features in particular that would strengthen the senate bill. First, the Zedler bill would create an oversight system controlled by the university’s regents. This is critical, because the refusal of campus administrators to protect basic rights is at the center of the campus free-speech crisis. Administrators at the University of Texas, Austin, for example, have established a bias-reporting system that severely inhibits free speech. And Briscoe Cain himself was prevented from proceeding with his talk not only by student disruptors, but by the president of Texas Southern University. So we can’t rely on university administrators to report on their own performance, which is what the Senate bill does. Once administrators know that their bosses, the regents, are going to submit an annual oversight report to the legislature, which holds the university’s purse-strings, they will be far more likely to protect free speech on campus. So creating an oversight system is the single most powerful step the legislature can take to ensure that the new law will actually be enforced.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/01/free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee/

Many people who genuinely believe that they support freedom of speech exhibit a double standard: One person’s “hate speech” is another person’s belief, opinion or even (as they see it) fact. And opinions about whether there’s a “free speech crisis” on university campuses tend to vary according to these subjective determinations.

While I’m not a fan of such “crisis” language, there’s definitely a real decline in support for freedom of expression among young people. In a 2016 Knight Foundation survey, 91% of high school respondents said they supported the “freedom to express unpopular opinions.” But when pressed, only 45% said that people should have the right to publicly express ideas that others find “offensive.”

The Knight Foundation’s numbers on college students’ attitudes are similar. In 2016, 78% of college respondents agreed that colleges should expose students to all types of speech and viewpoints. Yet, more than two-thirds said that colleges should be able to enact policies against language that is “intentionally offensive to certain groups,” and more than a quarter said that colleges should even be able to restrict the expression of potentially offensive political views. (More than half reported that the climate on campus “prevents some people from saying what they believe because others might find it offensive.” A year later, that number rose to 61%.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-mole-hunt-for-diversity-bias-at-villanova-11553898400?

Like many colleges in the U.S., Villanova University has launched an effort to monitor its faculty for signs of “bias” in the classroom. As Villanova professors, we believe this mole hunt for bias undercuts our ability to provide students with a liberal education.

Last fall we were notified by the Villanova administration that new “diversity and inclusion” questions would be added to the course and teaching evaluations that students fill out each semester. In addition to the standard questions about the intellectual worth of the course and the quality of instruction, students are now being asked heavily politicized questions such as whether the instructor has demonstrated “cultural awareness” or created an “environment free of bias based on individual differences or social identities.”

In short, students are being asked to rate professors according to their perceived agreement with progressive political opinion on bias and identity. Students are also invited to “comment on the instructor’s sensitivity to the diversity of the students in the class.” Professors are rated on their “sensitivity” to a student’s “biological sex, disability, gender identity, national origin, political viewpoint, race/ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, etc.” The “etc.” in particular seems like an ominous catchall, as if the sole principle of sound teaching has become “that no student shall be offended.”

https://www.city-journal.org/college-admissions-scandal-meritocracy

If, like me, you’re an avid observer of human affairs at their most vain and status-crazed, you have been studying the College Cheating Scandal, or what investigators called Operation Varsity Blues, with all the intensity of a rabbinical scholar poring over Leviticus. Each reading yields delicious new details of greed, ambition, hypocrisy, and decadence. “Ah! Vanitas, Vanitatum!” as the author of the classic nineteenth-century novel Vanity Fair sighed. But eventually the mordant fun gives way to the recognition that what we have here is evidence of a serious sickness in the American meritocracy.

The story is well known by now, but before it disappears into the overflowing landfill of tawdry contemporary Americana, some of its more obscure gems deserve a farewell salute. Let’s begin with the master of ceremonies, William “Rick” Singer, owner of a Newport Beach, California college-consulting company. Singer bribed college coaches and staged mockups of his clients’ slacker children at athletic events, sometimes photoshopping their faces onto a picture of actual soccer players or rowers, or, weirdly, pole-vaulters. A 36-year-old Harvard grad, Mark Riddell, could take a standardized test and get an agreed-upon, specific score with the precision of an expert archer. Singer hired him to take or to correct tests for clients whose preliminary scores would put them on the reject pile: Riddell is now Cooperating Witness #2. My favorite bit of chicanery was Singer’s money-laundering operation. To hide the eye-catching sums that he was earning for his ploys—and to give his clients the extra perk of a (legal) tax deduction for their (illegal) contributions—Singer set up the Key Worldwide Foundation, which he advertised as “provid[ing] guidance, encouragement and opportunity to disadvantaged students around the world.” The IRS estimates that Singer earned $25 million for his good works.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/an-american-dilemma-stuyvesant-high-school/

This article in the New York Times is getting attention, understandably. It highlights an old, painful issue, involving “merit,” race, and ethnicity. The headline over the article is “Only 7 Black Students Got Into N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.”

That high school is Stuyvesant. As the Times reports, students get into such schools “by acing a single high-stakes exam that tests their mastery of math and English.” This leads to racial and ethnic outcomes that are deemed undesirable. At Stuyvesant, 74 percent of freshmen next year — call it three-quarters — will be Asian.

New York mayor Bill de Blasio, among others, has called for the scrapping of the entrance exam and the overhaul of the admissions process. I have a memory, from 2001. Indeed, via the power of Google, I will quote the Times:

Contending that standardized college tests have distorted the way young people learn and worsened educational inequities, the president of the University of California is proposing an end to the use of SAT’s as a requirement for admission to the state university system he oversees, one of the largest and most prestigious.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/elite-universities-ignore-merit-advance-progressive-agenda/

Higher-ed institutions have long ignored merit and squelched freedom, all while failing to educate.

A number of liberal bastions are daily being hammered — especially the elite university and Silicon Valley.

A Yale and a Stanford, or Facebook and Google, assume — for the most part rightly — that each is so loudly progressive that the public, federal and state regulators, and politicians would of course turn a blind eye to anything questionable that these social-justice institutions did.

And they have done a lot of quite questionable things — cynically (and in medieval fashion) using their progressive veneer to exempt themselves from the consequences of their actions, so that they may do what otherwise would earn scrutiny and worse for most other American institutions.

Our nation’s marquee universities, such as Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown — with dozens more no doubt to be named — recently got caught selling admittances. Or rather a few of their employees somehow freelanced under administration noses and sold entrances for cash. That is apparently our modern version of crooked 14th-century clerics putting out to bid penances to thieves and fornicators who wished to buy their way into heaven.

At some of our “best” universities, renegade coaches in minor sports took bribes in exchange for lies claiming that otherwise likely unqualified students were actually “athletes” and thereby could be greased into their colleges by middlemen who helped doctor résumés and test scores.

The irony is rich. The offenders were not the children in Dayton or Great Falls of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” or of the late John McCain’s “crazies,” or of Barack Obama’s “clingers” — it was not they who were using their “white privilege” to break the law as they virtue-signaled their racialist disdain of the working classes (who were without white privilege). What a strange psychological mechanism: Wealthy white liberals apparently squared the circle of their own private and insider privilege by fobbing “white privilege” off on those who don’t have it — as they used their privilege cynically for their own children.