RUTHFULLY YOURS

The University of Oxford has added extra time to maths and computer science exams because female students aren’t performing as well as their male counterparts.

Students sitting maths and computer science exams last summer were given an extra 15 minutes to complete their papers because “female candidates might be more likely to be adversely affected by time pressure,” according to a decision seen by The Daily Telegraph.

The number of male students achieving first-class degrees was double that of women before the change was made, the Telegraph reported. As a result, the department changed the goal posts in an attempt to help female students achieve better grades.

But while the change was implemented in order to help more women achieve first-class degrees, the added time simply helped more female students achieve 2:1 grades overall, with fewer women securing a lower class 2:2, according to the Telegraph.

Antonia Sir, an undergraduate representative of Oxford Women in Computer Science, told the Telegraph: “I am uneasy about schemes to favour one gender over another.

Are colleges colluding? The U.S. Justice Department wrote the National Association for College Admission Counseling Jan. 10 seeking information on its “ethics code.” The department’s aim is to determine whether colleges, through NACAC, may be violating antitrust law by seeking “to restrain trade among colleges and universities in the recruitment of students.”

It’s long been an open secret that American colleges engage in cartel-like behavior. Schools that are supposed to be wholly independent agree on when students can submit applications, when admissions officers must inform them of a decision (including a financial-aid offer), when students must accept or decline the offer, and when to let students off the waiting list. In response to an earlier Justice Department investigation, Ivy League schools in 1991 agreed to stop sharing information about offers of financial aid.

Colleges argue that this cooperation benefits applicants. Its purpose is “to provide access to college in a way that is transparent, is clear and easy to understand, in a way that parents and school counselors can understand how the process works,” Todd Rinehart, a University of Denver administrator who led the committee that rewrote the code last year, told InsideHigherEd.

Perhaps, but the code also serves to ensure that colleges cannot get an “unfair” advantage over one another. What if one school decided to allow applications before the NACAC-decreed Oct. 15 start date? What if it was so impressed by an application it sent an admission offer the following day? The student would save months of work filling out applications and hundreds of dollars on application fees. But the other colleges would be out of luck.

What about the way colleges agree on what it means to apply “early decision”? Students promise they’ll enroll in a school no matter what other offers come in and risk being blacklisted if they back out. Katharine Fretwell, dean of admission and financial aid at Amherst College, told U.S. News in 2016 her school and about 30 other colleges share lists of students admitted through early decision—and of those who subsequently decided not to attend. CONTINUE AT SITE

Over the last decade, programs to accommodate students with disabilities have been installed at most institutions of higher education, spurred largely by government mandate. Like George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind Act, with Title I provisions to aid the disadvantaged, the thinking is that no student should be left behind owing to disability. This measure is a subset of the “social justice” movement that seeks to equalize job and social outcomes irrespective of talent, competence, personal input, and professional responsibility.

Nobody wants to de-privilege the disadvantaged or the suffering. The disability fetish, however, has adversely affected the performance of the average student, created enormous difficulties for teachers, and complicated administrative procedures to the point of functionary chaos.

I have recently examined an accommodation document issued by a university, which I won’t name. The data are stunning. Student A requires extended time for assignments and exams. Student B requires a word-processor with spell- and grammar-checker. Student C must not write more than one exam per day. Student D requires one day between exams. Student E requires “mind maps” (i.e., cheat sheets). Student F needs N.C. (noise-canceling) headphones to prevent distraction. And so on all the way down the alphabet. Indeed, even as I write, a professor at the University of Guelph has been suspended for allegedly chastising an anxiety-disability student.

There are at least six obvious problems with the disability regime of the modern university, listed here in random fashion.

First, there is the problem of invisible disabilities, which far outnumber physical ones. When is test anxiety, for example, anything but a normal occurrence, and why should it be classed as a pathology requiring accommodation? We have all been through this and survived.

Though many disabilities may be genuine, the opportunity for suddenly developing a qualifying infirmity is immense and has undoubtedly been taken advantage of by the thousands. A number of disabilities can easily be faked; in addition to test anxiety, there are agoraphobia, depression, bipolarity, panic attacks, “struggles with mental health” – and those that aren’t deliberately manufactured may still be more a matter of interpretation than a measurable impairment.

“In the fall of 2016,” New York University professor Michael Rectenwald recently told The Daily Caller, “I was noting an increase of this social justice ideology on campuses, and it started to really alarm me. I saw it coming home to roost here at NYU, with the creation of the bias reporting hotline, and with the cancellation of the Milo Yiannopoulos talk because someone might walk past it and hear something which might ‘trigger’ them.”

Rectenwald, himself a leftist, created an initially anonymous Twitter account, @antipcnyuprof, to speak out against that ideology and the “absolutely anti-education and anti-intellectual” classroom indoctrination he was witnessing, as well as the collectivist surveillance state that the campus was becoming, as students were urged to report each other for the sin of committing microaggressions.

In October of that year, he outed himself as the man behind the controversial Twitter account, and “all hell broke loose.” He swiftly found himself the target of shunning and harassment from his colleagues and the NYU administration. In true Cultural Revolution fashion, several colleagues in his department in the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group published an open letter declaring him guilty of incorrect thinking. “The thing that is interesting here is that they were saying that because I don’t think like them, I am sick and mentally ill,” Rectenwald said to the Daily Caller.

Instead of kowtowing to the campus totalitarians, Rectenwald declared himself done with the Left in a February 2017 tweet (“The Left has utterly and completely lost its way and I no longer want anything to do with it.”) and has gone on to become an even more fervent defender of free speech and academic freedom. He has appeared often in conservative media to discuss those issues and the harassment he has received from the Left.

Recently Rectenwald even filed a lawsuit against NYU and four of his colleagues for defamation. He consented to answering some questions for FrontPage Mag about his conflict with the NYU ideologues.

Mark Tapson: A year ago on Twitter you wrote, “Goodbye to the Left, goodbye.” Can you describe your intellectual journey from “left-liberal activist” to outspoken “deplorable” and what drove that seemingly sudden transition?

Michael Rectenwald: In hindsight, I think that the transition was less sudden than it might have appeared. I had gone from a left-liberal activist to a left communist before I became “deplorable.” I narrate the history of the transition in my book, discussed below. But I’ll tell something of the transition here.

It all started with a book called “P is For Palestine”

The left wing mob at Columbia is targeting a nearby business for believing Israel has the right to exist. How progressive.

Campus Reform reports:

Students, profs boycott bookstore for supporting Israel

More than 170 members of the Columbia University community have signed onto a petition calling for a boycott of a local bookstore for affirming Israel’s right to exist.

The petition takes aim at Book Culture, a locally-owned independent bookstore that also sells textbooks. In response to backlash from a local synagogue after the store began selling P is For Palestine, a book that praises “intifada,” the owners of Book Culture released a statement acknowledging the violence perpetrated against Israeli civilians during the Palestinian uprisings known as the first and second intifadas.

“We regret that we did not fully appreciate the political or communal ramifications of the children’s book, P is for Palestine, by Dr. Golbarg Bashi, nor did we anticipate the pain and distress it has caused in our community,” the statement began.

The owners of Book Culture also sought to dispel any misconceptions that they may support terrorism against Israelis, and further noted that they “support Israel’s right to exist” and “do not endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.”

This statement angered members of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, who subsequently launched a petition to boycott Book Culture, urging the owners to retract their statement of support for Israel and reaffirm support for “marginalized voices in literature.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Far-left provocateur Anita Hill spoke to a student group at the University of Connecticut. This despite Hill’s participation in the “high-tech lynching” of an African-American nominee for the Supreme Court.

In response to this partisan provocation, college administrators are offering counseling for folks who may be threatened or triggered.

The email reads, in part, “In the meantime, please utilize the many campus resources available to you should you want to talk through your feelings about this issue, including my office, the Cultural Centers, the Dean of Students Office, and CMHS, if necessary.”

UCONN should be lauded for taking proactive steps to ensure that potentially offensive speech is met with responses of maturity and tolerance, especially given the speaker’s history of making uncorroborated and unproven accusations against an African-American man seeking appointment to the highest court in the land.

Except that’s not what happened at all. Anita Hill was feted at UCONN’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Convocation. According to the UCONN website,

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Living Legacy Convocation featuring Anita Hill
Thurs, Jan 18, 1:00 pm
MLK Living Legacy Convocation

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Living Legacy Convocation provides the opportunity for the UConn community to acknowledge that, in spite of the passage of time, through actions we are all accountable for making Dr. King’s dream a reality. Through this annual program, it is our goal to showcase a message of humanity, hope, understanding and the need for continuous learning as a community committed to inclusion.

We are proud to welcome Anita Hill as the speaker for this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Living Legacy Convocation to be held on January 18, 2018 at 1 pm in the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts.

Please join us for an inspiring afternoon.

Believe it or not, the trigger warning email wasn’t sent to inoculate students against the far-left provocateur.

Year-over-year wage growth for high-school graduates outpaced wage growth for college graduates in each quarter of 2017

Americans with only a high-school diploma are seeing faster earnings growth than their highly educated counterparts, as employers in low-wage industries hungrily search for workers to fill job openings.

In the fourth quarter of 2017, median weekly earnings for workers 25 years and older with only a high-school diploma rose 2.3% from the same period a year earlier, new Labor Department data show. Meanwhile, pay for Americans carrying a bachelor’s degree edged up just 0.8% from the fourth quarter of 2016.

The trend has been ongoing, with year-over-year wage growth for high-school graduates outpacing wage growth for college graduates in each quarter of 2017.

Jed Kolko, chief economist at job site Indeed, said the outsize pay growth for the least educated workers underscores the impact of a tight labor market on workers who largely hadn’t shared in the gains.

“As the labor market has tightened, more opportunities are opening for people with less education, less experience, and firms are competing more to hire people who they would not have fought as hard for a couple years ago,” Mr. Kolko said.

Those wage gains also at least partially reflect rising minimum wages, which increased in 21 states, plus the District of Columbia, in 2017.

Though quarterly earnings data are volatile, the longer-term trend for the least educated workers shows swift gains over the course of the economic expansion. Earnings growth for Americans without a high-school diploma was weak early in the recovery, which began in mid-2009. In the third quarter of 2017, earnings growth since the end of the recession for this less-educated group rose above growth for those with a bachelor’s degree and higher.
CONTINUE AT SITE

On Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos kicked off the New Year by calling for a rethink of the federal approach to education that has failed over both Republican and Democratic administrations. Sounds good. But to her list of questions that never even get asked, we’d add: Does collective bargaining by teachers help or hurt students?

Two Cornell academics— Michael Lovenheim, an associate professor of policy analysis and management, and Alexander Willén, a doctoral student—have recently completed a study that tries to answer it. In “A Bad Bargain: How teacher collective bargaining affects students’ employment and earnings later in life,” the professors conclude: “We find strong evidence that teacher collective bargaining has a negative effect on students’ earnings as adults.” Given that 34 states since 1959 have mandated collective bargaining with teachers and only seven prohibit it, the finding is also a call to reform.

The study compares outcomes for students in states that mandate collective bargaining before and after the collective-bargaining requirement was imposed to outcomes for students over the same period in states that did not require collective bargaining. It also adjusted for the share of the student’s state birth cohort that is black, Hispanic, white and male.

Students who spent all 12 years of their elementary and secondary education in schools with mandatory collective bargain earned $795 less per year as adults than their peers who weren’t in such schools. They also worked on average a half hour less per week, were 0.9% less likely to be employed, and were in occupations requiring lower skills. The authors found that these add up to a large overall loss of $196 billion per year for students educated in the 34 states with mandated collective bargaining.

Some recent examples from the world of Higher Education make the point that I’ve been at pains to impress upon readers, namely that for as sprawling as is the Academic-Industrial-Complex (AIC), it is essentially a function of an even more expansive Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC).

[1] There’s Brooklyn College’s Laurie Rubel, professor of math education. According to the student journalists who run the college watchdog publication Campus Reform, Rubel wrote an article for the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education in which she contends that the concepts of “meritocracy” and “color-blindness” are both “tool(s) of whiteness.”

The problem with meritocracy, Rubel asserts, is that it “ignores systemic barriers and institutional structures that prevent opportunity and success.”

As for color-blindness, Rubel remarks: “Teachers who claim color-blindness—that is, they claim not to notice the race of their students—are, in effect, refusing to acknowledge the impact of enduring racial stratification on students and their families.”

Rubel continues: “By claiming not to notice, the teacher is saying that she is dismissing one of the most salient features of the child’s identity and that she does not account for it in her curricular planning and instruction.”

So, by aspiring to know and evaluate their students independently of their racial backgrounds, teachers promote “whiteness.”

However, Rubel also contends that if teachers notice the racial backgrounds of their students, they’re guilty of promoting “whiteness.” For example, when teachers say of their students that they “can’t relate” to them, they note differences. But, Rubel laments, these “differences are typically cast in terms of deficit constructions about students, their places, and their families.”

In order to walk this tightrope, Rubel proposes that teachers include “social justice” issues into their math lessons.

On her first day of English class at Hostos Community College during the fall 2017 semester, Maria Diaz glared at the reading handout, a Plato excerpt on the trial of Socrates. “I used to be like, ‘Prof, why are we reading this? It’s so boring and confusing,” she recalls. But only months later, Ms. Diaz would gush about the merits of the Western canon, quoting Socrates’ claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

While much of academia continues its progressive and postmodern lurch, these courses at Hostos, first offered in 2016, represent a move in the opposite direction. One of the classes even was designed especially for students who score a “high fail” on their literacy tests. Profs. Andrea Fabrizio and Gregory Marks, along with their colleagues in the English Department, created the courses in collaboration with Columbia University. They borrowed heavily from the Ivy League school’s core curriculum for liberal-arts undergraduates.

So far about 1,300 students at Hostos, which is part of the City University of New York, have taken these Western Civ classes. “We’re trying to make them good writers, good thinkers and ultimately good citizens by talking about these deeply humane questions,” Mr. Marks says.

Studying the classics has become an anomaly on many campuses, as once-foundational texts have come under attack. The faculty at Oregon’s Reed College recently bumped up their decennial review of a required humanities course that student activists claimed was “Eurocentric,” “Caucasoid” and “oppressive.” Yale’s English Department voted in March to change its curriculum after more than 150 students signed a petition claiming “a year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color and queer folk are absent actively harms all students.” It’s now fathomable that a student could get a Yale English degree without studying Chaucer, Shakespeare or Milton.

And in 2016, Seattle University students held a weekslong sit-in to protest the classical emphasis in the humanities college, ultimately prompting the dean’s departure. One student, Zeena Rivera, complained to reporters that “the only thing they’re teaching us is dead white dudes.”

Based on demographics alone, Hostos Community College might seem like a probable place for similar protests. Hostos is in the South Bronx, in a congressional district that has repeatedly ranked the poorest in the nation. People of color account for more than 98% of the student body. Many are immigrants. In one Western Civ class, the 25 students spoke 10 foreign languages.

Like their counterparts at other colleges, Hostos students are focused on oppression and injustice. During a recent class I sat in on, slavery came up several times, and one student suggested that because of economic disparities and discrimination, “we’re still not really free.” Several students talked about how they suffered from racism and sexism.

“These students’ interest in rights and equality is just burning,” Mr. Marks says. He and Ms. Fabrizio draw on that interest with readings like the Declaration of Independence and excerpts from the Federalist Papers. Students also are given Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Fourth of July oration, which venerates America’s founding principles but notes that they are “flagrantly inconsistent” with slavery. CONTINUE AT SITE