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EDUCATION

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Academia’s Case of Stockholm Syndrome written by Harry Crane and Ryan Martin

By on November 29th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/29/academias-case-of-stockholm

Earlier this year, we launched Researchers.One, a scholarly publication platform open to all researchers in all fields of study. Founded on the principles of academic freedom, researcher autonomy, and scholarly quality, Researchers.One features an innovative author-driven peer review model, which ensures the quality of published work through a self-organized process of public and non-anonymous pre- and post-publication peer review. Believing firmly that researchers can and do uphold the principles of good scholarship on their own, Researchers.One has no editorial boards, gatekeepers, or other barriers to interfere with scholarly discourse.

In its first few months, Researchers.One has garnered an overwhelmingly positive reception, both for its emphasis on core principles and its ability to attract high quality publications from a wide range of disciplines, including mathematics, physics, philosophy, probability, and statistics. Despite its promise, many academics worry that leaving peer review up to authors will grind the academic juggernaut to a halt. With nothing to stop authors from recruiting their friends as peer reviewers or from publishing a bunch of nonsense just to pad their CV, how should academic researchers be judged for hiring, tenure, or promotion? Without the signal of impact factor or journal prestige, how should readers assess the quality of published research? On their own, such questions are quite revealing of the predominant attitude toward academic publishing, which treats peer review as a means to an administrative end rather than an integral part of truth-seeking.

When done right, peer review is a rigorous process that fosters honest critique, lively discussion, and continual refinement of ideas for the mutual benefit of researchers and society. When done wrong, peer review plays to the worst instincts of human nature, devolving the pursuit of knowledge into a spectator sport in which the credibility of individual researchers, prestige of institutions, and legitimacy of scholarship as a whole are staked on the appearance of quality, objectivity, and novelty that the “peer review” label brings. As the above questions indicate, the prevailing mindset focuses on all that is wrong, and very little of what is right, with peer review.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Those Hoax Papers Tell Us A Lot about Declining Academic Standards By George Leef

By on November 28th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/those-hoax-papers-tell-us-a-lot-about-declining-academic-standards/

Back in 1996, Professor Alan Sokol pulled off a dazzling stunt in getting an academic journal to publish a paper he’d written that was pure baloney. (He argued that gravity was merely a “social construct” but by using trendy academic jargon, the editors fell for it.) His point was that some journals will publish anything so long as it sounds right to leftist ears.

This summer, a trio of academics bettered Sokol by getting a whole batch of nonsense papers accepted. In today’s Martin Center article, historian Phil Magness explains why he thinks this is important — it speaks volumes about the decline of academic standards.

Magness writes:

While identity politics have dominated the fallout discussions, the real lesson of the hoax is what it revealed about the crisis of rigor afflicting academic publishing. The fabricated articles only advanced to publication because decades of lax standards have made academically fashionable nonsense—including other forms of fraudulent work—the norm for celebrated scholarship in several of the humanities and social sciences.

Supposedly reputable academic journals published the silly hoax papers, but they have also published serious ones that are just as nonsensical, such as a paper that was nothing more than a juvenile, expletive-laden tirade against neoliberalism.

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EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Education and Anti-Semitism Too many young Europeans know little about their brutal past.

By on November 28th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/education-and-anti-semitism-1543450010?mod=article_inline

Americans rightly complain that their public schools teach too little history, and two new surveys in Europe show the results of such failures.

A poll by ComRes for CNN finds that awareness of the Holocaust is starting to fade among younger Europeans. While only about 4% of respondents overall reported they had never heard of the Holocaust, the figure is 20% of French aged 18-34. And 30% of all respondents said they know “only a little” about this defining event in recent European history.

Ugly stereotypes about Jews also persist. Some 20% of respondents believe Jews exercise too much influence over global media and politics, and nearly 30% believe Jews exercise too much influence over global finance.

Some 35% of respondents strongly or tend to agree that “Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its actions.” This false equivalence between Nazis and Israel is a trope on the left, where anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism elide. As Britain’s Labour Party has shown under Jeremy Corbyn, these attitudes encourage abuse of Jews and politicians who support Israel.

A separate survey of Jewish community leaders by the Joint Distribution Committee’s International Centre for Community Development shows where such attitudes lead. The proportion of leaders who expect anti-Semitism to increase has grown to 66% this year from 54% a decade ago. The percentage who feel “very safe” as Jews in their city fell to 20% from 36%, while the proportion who feel “rather unsafe” has risen to 13% from 6%.

This survey found that Jews now feel safer in countries of the former Soviet bloc than in Western Europe. One explanation may be immigration, since Western Europe has accepted and then failed to assimilate large numbers of Muslim migrants while Eastern Europe has not. Radical Islamists are responsible for most recent high-profile attacks against Jews in Europe, and CNN found that 15% of Muslims in Europe had never heard of the Holocaust.

Civilizations that fail to teach the lessons of their own brutal history to the young are, well, you know.

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EDUCATION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Problem with ‘The Journal of Controversial Ideas’ written by Bradley Campbell and Clay Routledge

By on November 28th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/27/the-problem

A group of academics recently announced plans to launch a new journal focused on research that its authors fear could lead to a backlash, putting their careers and perhaps even their physical safety in danger. With these concerns in mind, the journal will allow authors to publish their work anonymously, subject to peer review. Some are applauding the launch of what will be titled The Journal of Controversial Ideas.

They view it as a needed response to an academic and potentially broader culture that is increasingly afraid to grapple with sensitive topics and seeks to suppress ideas that may have merit but are socially unpopular. However, we think the creation of a journal like this, while serving as a prophetic warning about the new moral culture taking hold of academia and the future of our institutions of higher learning, may be a counterproductive way of dealing with the problems it addresses.

First, it is worth asking whether the concerns prompting the creation of this journal are warranted. Some writers and academics claim that stories of campus censorship, groupthink, and ideological bias are overblown, if not outright fantasy. We believe that these concerns are, in fact, justified. One need not look very hard to find cases of professors facing serious backlash, even threats, from students, faculty, and administrators because of ideas they have expressed in academic journals, opinion pieces, media interviews, and public lectures.

Just weeks ago Professor Samuel Abrams of Sarah Lawrence University published an op-ed in The New York Times documenting that among college administrators who are on the front lines interacting with students, liberals outnumber conservatives 12 to 1. He discussed how this imbalance can dramatically bias the campus social and educational agendas in favor of progressive viewpoints. In response to this article, campus activists vandalized his office and called for him to be fired. The student senate held an emergency meeting. The college president responded not with a forceful and unambiguous defense of free speech and academic freedom but by signaling support to campus activists and suggesting Professor Abrams had created a hostile work environment.

The lack of viewpoint diversity among college and university faculty gives further reason for scholars to be concerned about pursuing and attempting to publish “controversial” ideas.

University faculty, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, are overwhelmingly on the political left, and this may lead to social and professional consequences for academics whose ideas or research are perceived as at odds with a progressive worldview. For instance, in a survey of academics in the field of social psychology, researchers observed that conservative and moderate scholars reported experiencing a significantly more hostile work climate than liberals. The survey also found that the majority of respondents indicated some willingness to discriminate against colleagues who are conservative or whose research takes a conservative perspective. Surveys of faculty in other disciplines paint a similar picture of an academy populated by professors willing to block colleagues with divergent views from getting academic appointments, publishing their work, and receiving research funding.

Even while we recognize these and other threats to scholars who do work viewed as controversial, we believe the creation of The Journal of Controversial Ideas is ultimately a capitulation to the academic culture that motivated scholars to feel the need to establish such a journal.

One of us (Bradley) is a sociologist who has spent the last several years studying the rise of a new moral culture among progressive activists on college campuses. In The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, Bradley and his coauthor Jason Manning point out that campus activists increasingly reject many widely held moral concepts and ideals—the injunction to have thick skin and ignore insults, for example, or the distinction between speech and violence. Those who embrace the new morality use a framework of oppression and victimhood to interpret even mundane human interaction as hostile or malignant. In this way, victimhood confers a kind of moral status as the adherents of this new ideology create new kinds of protections for oppressed groups.

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Heather Mac Donald :Feminists’ Undue Process Ideologues react hysterically to the Trump administration’s suggested reforms to campus-rape tribunals.

By on November 27th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/devos-title-ix-regulations

The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings gave the public a crash course in campus-rape ideology. It is about to get another. Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released a proposed federal rule that corrects the worst procedural abuses of campus-rape tribunals. It hews closely to judicial precedent and is fair to all parties, yet the feminist establishment has reacted with hysteria, characterizing the draft regulation as an assault on sexual-assault “survivors.” Maintenance of the campus-rape myth, it turns out, is incompatible with due process. Whether feminism itself is compatible with Enlightenment values appears increasingly doubtful.

Opposition to the Kavanaugh nomination was based on the principle that self-professed “survivors” must be believed and that accused males must be condemned, regardless of the paucity of evidence against them. That principle, already ubiquitous on college campuses, got an assist from the federal government in 2011, when the Obama administration released a so-called guidance (an informal federal directive of murky legal status) on college rape proceedings. The guidance strongly discouraged cross-examination of the accuser and required schools to use the lowest possible standard of proof for finding a defendant guilty of sexual assault. It promulgated a broad definition of actionable sexual harassment—“unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”—that ignored relevant Supreme Court precedent and that would extend to an unwanted request for a date. Since 2011, due-process deficiencies in campus-rape proceedings have become ever more widespread. Colleges routinely deny defendants the opportunity to review all the evidence, fail to provide an impartial decision-maker, and ignore the presumption of innocence. The accused is regularly forbidden the assistance of counsel. In 2014, a Title IX officer at Washington and Lee University issued a lugubrious warning to a male student—“a lawyer can’t help you here”—before expelling him for sexual assault.

The proposed Education Department regulation tries to end these abuses. Ironically, in an administration regularly charged with ignoring the law, the DOE has carefully followed the legal framework for promulgating new federal rules. The 2011 Obama guidance was issued as a fait accompli; Donald Trump’s DOE, by contrast, is giving the public the opportunity to comment on the proposed rule before it becomes final.

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

A.J. Caschetta: Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies: Ramallah on the Hudson Welcome to the PLO’s American academic wing.

By on November 24th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272033/columbia-universitys-center-palestine-studies-aj-caschetta

http://www.thetower.org/6865-columbia-universitys-center-for-palestine-studies-ramallah-on-the-hudson/

The Trump administration may have closed the PLO’s Mission in Washington, D.C., but its Morningside Heights Mission is open for business. I refer to Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies (CPS), an Ivy League clearinghouse for PLO propaganda and the demonization of Israel. Call it the PLO’s American academic wing.

When the CPS opened more than eight years ago, founding co-director Rashid Khalidi promised that it would avoid doing “anything that’s directly related to any political activism.” This is laughable. What Khalidi meant is that the CSP would not participate in anti-Israel activism, but this is a lie. The faculty members who comprise the center’s experts are rivaled only by the faculty of Birzeit University for their anti-Israel advocacy.

It might, in fact, take a Center for Palestine Studies to examine thoroughly the history of Palestinian organizations devoted to political violence. But instead, Columbia has assembled the anti-Israel all-stars of academia, such as Joseph Massad, who has called for “the continuing resistance of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories to all the civil and military institutions that uphold Jewish supremacy.” Another member of CPS is Hamid Dabashi, who wrote that Israel is a “key actor” in “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.”

In addition to being a professor at Columbia’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the CPS, Khalidi also happens to be a former member of the PLO, as Martin Kramer has shown. Not since Columbia hired former Weather Underground member Kathy Boudinat its School of Social Work has it given a platform to “reformed” terrorists. At least Boudin expressed remorse, even if it was insincere. Not so Khalidi, a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS ) advocate whose views have remained consistent since his PLO days, though they are now masked in the academic patois of post-colonialism.

Brinkley Messick, the CPS’s other founding co-director, hyped it as the first academic center devoted to the study of Palestinian Arabs. “Very simply,” he gushed, “there’s never been a dedicated space … for this kind of research.” He was partly right. Columbia already had one called the Middle East Institute, which has an anti-Israel bent, but the CPS brought together faculty from beyond Middle East Studies, all dedicated to delegitimizing Israel and whitewashing Palestinian violence. Several of them have even been immortalized in The David Project’s documentary Columbia Unbecoming (2004) where their purported reluctance to be political is exposed as fraudulent.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Jews Revolutionized the Universities. Will Asians Do the Same? written by Barbara Kay

By on November 23rd, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/23/jews-revolutionized-the

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for student admission, a blind test that favored intelligent applicants even if they lacked poise or polish. By 1908, Jews—most the children of immigrants—constituted 7% of the school’s student population—double the percentage of Jews in the U.S. general population. By 1916, Jewish enrolment was 15%, and by 1922 it was more than 21%.

Harvard’s president, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, became alarmed by what he perceived as a serious problem. This was not because (or not only because ) Lowell harbored anti-Semitic views. As he wrote to a colleague in 1922, “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles.” (His observation was not incorrect—although he was wrong to assume that Jews in universities would have the same off-putting effect as in hotels.)

Today, we are watching what may well be a reprise of this scenario, with Asian-Americans as the targeted group: Harvard stands accused of “racial balancing” by keeping Asian-American admissions at or under a 20% threshold, and of using a bogus “personal rating” as a back-door method of keeping out Asian applicants who are stereotyped as bland workaholics.

For its part, Harvard does not deny that it weighs its entrance scales to favor groups it considers more disadvantaged than whites or Asian-Americans—namely blacks and Hispanics—but defends such measures on the grounds that “colleges and universities must have the freedom and flexibility to create the diverse communities that are vital to the learning experience of every student.”

The historical parallel between Jews and Asians is striking for a number of reasons—including the fact that both cases involve an explicit rejection of the idea that academic merit alone could be a tenable basis for admission. Like today’s affirmative-action supporters at Harvard, the gentiles of a century ago also started poking into applicants’ personal lives to discover what their “character” might be. And what a weasel word that turned out to be.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Reviving Due Process on Campus DeVos restores the right to cross-examination. Democrats are outraged.

By on November 21st, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/reviving-due-process-on-campus-1542758809

For those awaiting a restoration of rational discourse in American politics, well, you’ll have to keep waiting. No other conclusion is possible after seeing the reaction to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s long-awaited regulatory proposals last week on handling accusations of sexual abuse on campus.

From California Democrat Maxine Waters: “Betsy DeVos, you won’t get away with what you are doing. We are organizing to put an end to your destruction of civil rights protections for students.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden said on Facebook that the proposal “would return us to the days when schools swept rape and assault under the rug and survivors were shamed into silence.”

The centerpiece of the proposed regulations is—hold your fire—restoring the right of cross-examination, one of the oldest and most hallowed elements of due process.

The Obama Department of Education, responding to legitimate concerns about sexual abuse on campus, issued guidelines that went overboard, casting away many basic protections for the accused. The result has subjected victims and the accused to a system of campus justice often controlled by amateurs and political activists.

For more than four decades the Department of Education has set Title IX policy by issuing “guidance,” which circumvents the normal rule-making process. The Obama-era sexual abuse guidance was essentially an administrative diktat. The public had no chance to comment, and universities, which understood federal funding was at risk, opted to dilute standard legal protections for accused students.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Radicalization of Bedtime Stories More and more parents are buying picture books with politically progressive messages for their young children. Joe Pinsker

By on November 19th, 2018

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/childrens-book-storytime-political/575506/

More than 200 years ago, when books for children first became common, they delivered simple moral lessons about, for instance, cleanliness and the importance of prayer. Today, story time is still propelled by moral forces, but the issues have gotten a good deal more sophisticated.

In recent years, publishers have put out children’s books with political undertones and activist calls to action on topics ranging from Islamophobia to race to gender identity to feminism. “The trend has definitely exploded in recent years with the social-justice books and the activism books,” says Claire Kirch, a senior correspondent at Publishers Weekly who has been covering the book industry for 15 years.

For children of all ages, books about such charged topics are, in the words of one publishing executive, coming to be seen as more “retail-friendly.” This development applies all the way down to picture books—a category for which the intended audience and the buyers are two very different groups. In this sense, “woke” picture books can be thought of as products for parents, helping them distill some of the day’s most fraught cultural issues into little narrative lessons for their kids.

The wave of politicized children’s books has come more from the left than from the right. Kirch told me that “of the three publishers that are the most well known for publishing conservative books”—Center Street, Sentinel, and Regnery Publishing—“only one really has a kids’-book line.” That one is Regnery, which has put out titles such as Donald Drains the Swamp!, Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride (by Newt Gingrich’s wife, Callista), The Remarkable Ronald Reagan, and The Night Santa Got Lost: How NORAD Saved Christmas.

It seems there is more of an appetite for liberal-minded kids’ books: Kirch noted that another Regnery title—Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President, by Mike Pence’s daughter Charlotte and told from the perspective of the family’s pet rabbit—was far outsold by a parody of the book overseen by John Oliver’s HBO show that imagined the titular bunny to be gay.

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EDUCATION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Five Takeaways From Mike Rowe’s Speech About Work In America Nicole Russell

By on November 19th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/19/five-takeaways-from-mike-rowes-speech-about-work-in-america/

The former host of the Discovery channel’s “Dirty Jobs” received the Independent Women’s Forum “Distinguished Gentleman” award over the weekend. MikeRowe inspired the audience with tales demonstrating both the commonplace and the extraordinary in his acceptance speech, including on the role of moms, taking risks, perception, and work ethic.

Whether you’re a pediatrician or a plumber, an avid fan of the show or not, the speech is well worth your time.
1. Never underestimate the power of motivation and humble beginnings.

While most of America might recognize Rowe’s tanned face and rugged good looks from “Dirty Jobs,” which ran for eight seasons, few know of the show’s humble beginnings. During his speech, Rowe described how it all started.

He was “impersonating a host” for a local network’s show called “Evening Magazine” in 2001. It was an entertainment segment that ran after the news. Rowe went to wineries, restaurants and swanky events, profiling the glitz and glamour of San Francisco. Hardly satisfied with his work, but unsure of what to do about it, his mother — whom he referenced positively at least a dozen times in his speech — phoned him and reminded him of his grandfather, who was aging.

Rowe’s grandfather wasn’t anyone famous, wealthy, or reputable by any means, but the kind of man many of us who have any kind of blue collar roots can recognize. Even though he had the education of a 7th grader, he had learned valuables trades and could do the work, at any given time, of an electrical contractor, plumber, steamfitter, welder, and more. Rowe said he could build a house without a blueprint and could repair almost anything.

“He was heroic in his day,” he said. “Today, sadly, he would be overlooked.”

When his mother called, she simply said, “Wouldn’t it be terrific if your grandfather turned on the television and saw you doing something that looked like work?” That was all the motivation Rowe needed.
2. Risk taking and persistence will pay off.

In that phone call, Rowe said he had “what the Greeks called a peripeteia” — a reversal of fortune or a sudden change in circumstances. “I realized everything I thought I knew about my job was wrong.” Rowe went to his boss and said, “Why do we always have to film ‘Evening Magazine’ at wineries? Why not the sewer?”

The boss didn’t think enough people were even tuning in to care, so he gave Rowe the green light. While Rowe was in the sewer, threatening to get eaten by cockroaches and overcome by the stench, he determined this kind of gruesome and gross, yet vital, work would be the focus of his show.

“I put together a segment that I knew would get me fired. It’s okay, it got me here,” he said to applause. Without risk and focused insight, Rowe’s idea never would have seen a television channel.

After he got fired, Rowe pitched his idea to everyone in the news industry. “Everyone said no except Discovery,” he said. In 2003, they took him on, tweaked the title, and when the show wrapped in 2012, he had done 300 dirty jobs over the course of ten years, filming half a dozen times in every state.

“In my role as a quasi-host I really functioned as an apprentice doing the kind of jobs that make civilized life possible,” he said, quoting the show’s tagline. The show enjoyed tremendous success. So many Americans loved it that in 2008, it was the number one show on cable.

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