RUTHFULLY YOURS

Just mention the name “Koch” and many leftist academics fly into a rage. Years of Two Minute Hates directed against Charles and David Koch for their thoughtcrime of using some of their wealth to push back against “progressivism” have rendered them incapable of clear thinking.

For evidence, consider the furor at Wake Forest University over the Eudaimonia Institute.

Professor James Otteson, a classical liberal who has written books about Adam Smith and The End of Socialism, came up with the idea for an institute at Wake Forest that would study the concept of human flourishing. It would bring together scholars from a number of disciplines to discuss the conditions that lead to human flourishing, or what Aristotle termed “eudaimonia.” Sounds harmless enough and there was no controversy over the proposal until Otteson was awarded a grant of some $4 million from the Koch Foundation. At that point, leftists on the faculty erupted.

One of Otteson’s faculty colleagues, Professor Robert Whaples (an economist) writes about the battle in today’s Martin Center article.

Whaples writes, “Libertarians and conservatives are a rare species on campuses and it appears that although some college professors have apparently never actually met any of them, just reading about their goals is enough to make their hair stand on end. It seems that Koch’s big idea is to push something called ‘freedom.’” Therefore, the innocuous idea of exploring human flourishing was turned into a provocation against leftism by the addition of some Koch money.

Professor Whaples, who is on the Institute’s board, went into a meeting with the opponents, intending to quell the opposition with calm and reason. No luck with that. He continues:

I explained that EI’s mission is genuine. It has begun to and will continue to study human flourishing from a wide range of viewpoints. Some of these viewpoints (those to the left of center) have increasingly claimed a monopoly on wisdom, knowledge, and understanding and have actively moved to push other viewpoints off campuses all over the nation and increasingly at Wake Forest. In a boat that is listing badly to one side, it is possible that EI will add balance and help right the ship by bringing in new viewpoints.

For saying that, I was told that my comments somehow confirmed the ideologically-biased mission of EI. Imagine that! You’re an ideologue only if you are open to opinions that aren’t firmly to the left of center.

What this episode shows, I believe, is that “progressives” no longer care about ideas but are all about power. They’ve got it and will use it against everything they dislike.

Whaples concludes on a mildly optimistic note: “Perhaps the faculty enemies of the Eudaimonia Institute would drop their opposition to it if they looked at what it does, rather than where its funds come from.” Perhaps, but my guess is that the self-righteous opponents will never get past the Koch connection.

In the 2017 edition of The State of the Bible, its annual survey, the American Bible Society reports that more than half of all Americans who regularly read the Bible now search for related material on the Internet. This shift in how the faithful learn about scripture has resulted in unprecedented public exposure to one particular kind of Bible study—namely, the academic kind. Major websites now offer the latest that scholars have to say about the Bible—its authorship, its historical accuracy, its proper interpretation—and those websites attract hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month. In an age when interest in the humanities is generally waning, the department of biblical studies is providing enrichment to what has become the most popular online branch of the liberal arts. https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2017/07/the-corruption-of-biblical-studies/

This is surely a blessed development. Men and women of good faith engage with these study materials in pursuit of that purest religious ideal: the truth. In doing so, moreover, they fully recognize that academic researchers ask important questions and often offer compelling answers by drawing on resources and insights unavailable through denominational venues. For many users, these answers and insights do not merely supplement but may also challenge the traditional Jewish and Christian teachings in which they have been brought up. So the interest in academic scholarship of the Bible increases—and with it the authority of the scholars purveying it. As a Jewish day-school teacher recently put it to me: “Often, I find that students might not be so well informed about the meaning of a scientific or archaeological claim­­; it’s enough that many academics holding respected titles have advanced a certain way of understanding something.” In today’s climate, the university biblicist, even before he or she speaks, enjoys a deep line of credit.

For Jews in particular, nothing in biblical studies draws so keen an interest as the issue of the origins of the Torah: the Five Books of Moses, or Pentateuch. The scholarly pursuit of the Torah’s putative sources and how they evolved into the text we have today is referred to in the academy as “source criticism”: the discipline’s oldest sub-field and still its largest. And source criticism of the Torah is also front-and-center in the Jewish public eye.

Over the past fifteen years alone, four major projects by Jewish scholars have showcased the methods and achievements of source criticism. I have in mind two books, How to Read the Bible by James Kugel and Richard Elliott Friedman’s The Bible with Sources Revealed; the section on the Pentateuch in the JPS Study Bible; and, most recently, the website www.TheTorah.com, which is explicitly devoted to “integrating the study of Torah with the disciplines and findings of academic biblical scholarship.”

How did source criticism arrive at this state? And why has the crisis engendered no change whatsoever in how its practitioners go about their work? In both cases, the answer has little to do with the individual personalities of the scholars involved. Rather, the fatal inability of the discipline to self-correct is rooted in the field’s origins, and is perpetuated by a species of denial.

To be sure, biblicists are not alone here. Similarly disorienting symptoms have afflicted other areas of scholarly inquiry, especially in fields with semi- or quasi-scientific pretensions. A recent example is the stunned reaction among economists in the wake of the 2008 financial implosion, a disaster that so many of them failed to see coming and got so wrong. One outspoken member of the guild, the Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, suggested afterward that his fellow economists had been led astray by their professional “desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.” Thereby, to use Krugman’s own puffed-up terms, the profession “mistook beauty for truth.” If, he concluded, the guild of economists was ever to “redeem itself, . . . it will have to reconcile itself to a less alluring vision” and, above all, “learn to live with messiness.”

Of course, to admit that the economic world is messy is essentially to admit defeat in the long-fought battle to win for economics the status of a science with the power not only to study the past but, crucially, to predict economic performance in the future. And that offers another point of analogy with the predicament of biblical source-critics in their elusive search for the sources of the Pentateuch. In positing the date of a text and the stages of its composition, source critics strive to create an elegant narrative of its history and therefore of the evolution of religious ideas in ancient Israel. For many, this elegance has become a badge of their intellectual identity.

But biblicists, too, are prone to mistaking beauty for truth. The real, harder truth is that the enterprise of dating biblical texts and their stages of growth is messy, much messier than they would like to admit. And the larger truth is that we actually have limited access to the minds and hearts of the scribes of ancient Israel and cannot know the full range of motivations that drove them to compose the texts they did. What may look to our eyes as, for instance, an unresolved inconsistency between two passages may not have bothered the ancients at all.
Few biblical source critics have reached the necessary conclusion from the crisis in their field: that the precursors of the received text—their holy grail—simply may not be recoverable.

Consider historical inscriptions left us by Ramesses the Great, who ruled Egypt in the 13th century BCE. To commemorate his greatest achievement, a victory over his arch-enemies the Hittite Empire at the battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE, Ramesses inscribed three mutually exclusive and contradictory reports, one right next to the other, each serving a distinct rhetorical purpose, on monumental sites all across Egypt. (The longest is full of internal contradictions as well.) This practice is wholly foreign to modern writers, and far from intuitive. Literary conventions are culture-specific.

The election of Trump did not create the liberal’s hate…it revealed it

Author’s Note: The following is taken from my lecture on the first day of classes. My remarks are reproduced here with the hope that they will be useful to other professors teaching at public universities all across America. Feel free to use this material if you already have tenure.

Welcome back to class, students! I am Mike Adams, your criminology professor here at UNC-Wilmington.

Before we get started with the course I need to address an issue that is causing problems here at UNCW and in higher education all across the country. I am talking about the growing minority of students who believe they have a right to be free from being offended.

If we don’t reverse this dangerous trend in our society there will soon be a majority of young people who will need to walk around in plastic bubble suits to protect them in the event that they come into contact with a dissenting viewpoint. That mentality is unworthy of an American. It’s hardly worthy of a Frenchman.

Let’s get something straight right now. You have no right to be unoffended. You do have a right to be offended with regularity. It is the price you pay for living in a free society. If you don’t understand that you are confused and dangerously so.

In part, I blame your high school teachers for failing to teach you basic civics before you got your diploma. Most of you went to the public high schools, which are a disaster. Don’t tell me that offended you. I went to a public high school.

Of course, your high school might not be the problem. It is entirely possible that the main reason why so many of you are confused about free speech is that piece of paper hanging on the wall right over there. Please turn your attention to that ridiculous document that is framed and hanging by the door. In fact, take a few minutes to read it before you leave class today.

It is our campus speech code. It specifically says that there is a requirement that everyone must only engage in discourse that is “respectful.” That assertion is as ludicrous as it is illegal. I plan to have that thing ripped down from every classroom on campus before I retire.

As the final bells of the academic year sounded in New York City’s public schools two weeks ago, thousands of students and parents were dreaming of a better education down the block. Through a citywide program called Public School Choice, parents can apply to move their children from a poorly performing school to a better one. But the city Education Department’s stringent policy means that many of these requests are rejected. Last year about 5,500 families applied, but the city approved transfers for only 3,500 students.

Soula Adam, a single mother in Astoria, Queens, knows the disappointment of the rest. For years she tried to help her son Harry escape what she felt were lackluster teachers at P.S. 70, the same neighborhood school that she had attended as a girl. “I liked P.S. 122 on Ditmars Boulevard,” she recalls, explaining that the school was more rigorous and only two miles away. But she knew the city’s transfer guidelines would never allow her son into P.S. 122. “If you’re not zoned,” she says, “you couldn’t get in.”

Harry tried to win a spot at a charter school through an open lottery, but his number wasn’t called. Eventually he earned a scholarship to Saint Demetrios Astoria, a Greek Orthodox school close to home. That private generosity opened the door for the Adams, but thousands of other public-school pupils remain stuck.

Transfers between New York City schools first became available in 2003, after the No Child Left Behind Act required districts nationwide to create options for students whose schools lagged behind federal standards for progress. For more than a decade, however, the Education Department permitted moves only for students with specific hardships, such as health issues or one-way commutes over 75 minutes. Former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein defended this restriction on transfers for the sake of choice. “The system doesn’t work that way,” he told the Observer in 2014. “By definition, some kids get better choices.”

But last year the city began allowing “guidance” transfers, available to students who are not “progressing or achieving academically or socially.” The update received favorable notice from school-choice advocates, but the kicker is in the fine print: Transfers are still open only to students in 5% of New York City’s schools—the 88 designated as “priority” because of perennially poor performance. But nonpriority schools can still be bad, with as few as a quarter of test-takers proficient in English and math. Students at these schools have no recourse to move out and up.

Consider a tale of two elementary schools: P.S. 173 (Fresh Meadows) and P.S. 187 ( Hudson Cliffs ), less than a mile apart in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Both are zoned schools with no admission criteria beyond place of residence, and yet the share of students passing state exams in 2016 was 30 percentage points higher at Hudson Cliffs. The only thing that stops a bright student at Fresh Meadows from attaining success up the street is the city’s red tape.

In the long term, the free flow of students enabled by a reformed transfer program would put pressure on underperforming schools, as students left and budgets tightened. Successful schools wouldn’t be burdened by the influx of newcomers, since New York’s funding algorithm allocates enough money each year to cover the marginal cost of each additional student.

Critics may say the way to fix a bad school isn’t to cut its funding. But why should fear of tight budgets hold back students who are ready to succeed? Moreover, many of the city’s specialized private schools that serve low-income students have delivered impressive results with as little as half the funding per student as traditional public schools. CONTINUE AT SITE

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a lengthy report on the curious case of Keith Fink, a part-time lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. UCLA refused to renew his contract, writing in a letter that his teaching did not “meet the standard of excellence.” Fink cried foul, arguing that his free-speech classes were popular with students and that he was really fired for his pointed criticisms of the university and his stalwart defense of free speech on campus.

And, in fact, he was popular. As the Chronicle notes, “Student evaluations of the free-speech course Mr. Fink taught this year . . . mostly paint a picture of Mr. Fink as an engaging teacher and his course as stimulating and interesting.” His faculty evaluators, however, believed that there was “more to it than what the students think.” They took issue with his Socratic method of teaching (common in law schools), believed that he pushed his own point of view too much, and raised concerns about the “climate” in the classroom.

As I read the story, I had an immediate sense of déjà vu. I’ve litigated cases like this before, I’ve evaluated cases like this before, and I’m familiar with the extraordinary double standards that define how academic freedom works in modern higher education. Perhaps UCLA is right. Perhaps it has even-handedly applied its alleged “incredibly high” standards and has fired popular left-wing lecturers in part because they’ve pushed their views too much on their students. Perhaps it routinely fires even popular teachers for poor teaching performance. In other words, perhaps it’s different from the vast majority of colleges and universities — schools that have consciously and unconsciously created entire systems of anti-conservative discrimination.

First, let’s discuss the challenge of even finding a job in higher education. It’s difficult enough for even well-qualified leftists, but often academic departments define academic positions in such a way that effectively excludes the conservative point of view. Look at this current job posting at Harvard’s divinity school. It’s for a tenure-track professor of “religion, violence, and peace-building.” There’s nothing inherently conservative or liberal about the topic. Indeed, it fascinates me, but hidden within the job description is this gem of a sentence:

It is understood that applicants will employ forms of analysis that address race, gender, sexuality, and/or other intersecting forms of social power, such as womanist, feminist, and/or queer approaches. [Emphasis added.]

Ahh yes, “intersectionality” rears its radical head. While this posting is extreme (though at an important institution), it perfectly illustrates a long-building phenomenon. Academics have redefined and refocused disciplines to such an extent that they essentially exclude conservative inquiry. Thus, they can honestly say they’ve never discussed politics in hiring decisions because the discipline itself has narrowed so much that it closes itself to conservatives.

Consider this statement, years ago, from the American Association of University Professors’ Roger Bowen. He was defending universities from the charge of ideological discrimination in hiring. First, he said this:

I’ve been a department chair, I’ve been a college president. I’ve conducted more searches than I can begin to describe, and I can tell you I have never asked a candidate what his or her party identification is, and I don’t know of a search committee in the country that would do that.

I’d agree with Bowen. In all my years representing conservative professors, I’ve never seen questions regarding party identification. But that’s a red herring. Search committees aren’t that blatant. They don’t have to be. Here’s the key quote:

Anthropologists — which apparently, according to the study, Democrats far outnumber Republicans [among anthropologists] — what do they do? Anthropologists, the discipline itself is focused on questioning religious and cultural myth, particularly myth that celebrates national, cultural or racial superiorities. That in many classrooms will be a shocker for a lot of students.

Sociologists tend to inquire on the origins of inequality as a source of alienation: new concepts to many college students that will seem, I imagine, given illustrations using the American example, rather shocking.

Political scientists, they focus on questions of legitimacy. . . .

Is there no limit to the level of disgusting behavior on college campuses that parents, taxpayers, donors and legislators will accept? Colleges have become islands of intolerance, and as with fish, the rot begins at the head.Let’s examine some recent episodes representative of a general trend and ask ourselves why we should tolerate it plus pay for it.

Students at Evergreen State College harassed biology professor Bret Weinstein because he refused to leave campus, challenging the school’s decision to ask white people to leave campus for a day of diversity programming. The profanity-laced threats against the faculty and president can be seen on a YouTube video titled “Student takeover of Evergreen State College” (http://tinyurl.com/yah2eo3p).

What about administrators permitting students to conduct racially segregated graduation ceremonies, which many colleges have done, including Ivy League ones such as Columbia and Harvard universities? Permitting racially segregated graduation ceremonies makes a mockery of the idols of diversity, multiculturalism and inclusion, which so many college administrators worship. Or is tribalism part and parcel of diversity?

Trinity College sociology professor Johnny Eric Williams recently called white people “inhuman assholes.” In the wake of the Alexandria, Virginia, shooting at a congressional baseball practice, Williams tweeted, “It is past time for the racially oppressed to do what people who believe themselves to be ‘white’ will not do, put (an) end to the vectors of their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system. #LetThemF—-ingDie”

June Chu, dean of Pierson College at Yale University, recently resigned after having been placed on leave because of offensive Yelp reviews she had posted. One of her reviews described customers at a local restaurant as “white trash” and “low class folk”; another review praised a movie theater for its lack of “sketchy crowds.” In another review of a movie theater, she complained about the “barely educated morons trying to manage snack orders for the obese.”

Harvey Mansfield, a distinguished Harvard University professor who has taught at the school for 55 years, is not hopeful about the future of American universities. In a College Fix interview, Mansfield said, “No, I’m not very optimistic about the future of higher education, at least in the form it is now with universities under the control of politically correct faculties and administrators” (http://tinyurl.com/y7qadxlz). Once America’s pride, universities, he says, are no longer a marketplace of ideas or bastions of free speech. Universities have become “bubbles of decadent liberalism” that teach students to look for offense when first examining an idea.

Who is to blame for the decline of American universities? Mansfield argues that it is a combination of administrators, students and faculties. He puts most of the blame on faculty members, some of whom are cowed by deans and presidents who don’t want their professors to make trouble. I agree with Mansfield’s assessment in part. Many university faculty members are hostile to free speech and open questioning of ideas. A large portion of today’s faculty and administrators were once the hippies of the 1960s, and many have contempt for the U.S. Constitution and the values of personal liberty. The primary blame for the incivility and downright stupidity we see on university campuses lies with the universities’ trustees. Every board of trustees has fiduciary responsibility for the governance of a university, shaping its broad policies. Unfortunately, most trustees are wealthy businessmen who are busy and aren’t interested in spending time on university matters. They become trustees for the prestige it brings, and as such, they are little more than yes men for the university president and provost. If trustees want better knowledge about university goings-on, they should hire a campus ombudsman who is independent of the administration and accountable only to the board of trustees.

Northwestern is hiring a new “assistant director of Fraternity and Sorority Life.” Greek organizations are a key aspect of the college experience for millions of students, and the organizations are deeply involved in the college itself. Sounds normal.

But Northwestern University has decided that Greek Life, just like the rest of the campus, needs to be a training ground for Leftism. From Campus Reform:

The new “ Assistant Director, Fraternity and Sorority Life” will be responsible not only for advising fraternity and sororities, responding to emergency situations, and ensuring adherence to university policies, but also for assisting in the coordination of “social justice education” programming.

Minimum qualifications for the position include at least three years of experience working with fraternities and sororities, understanding of the educational environment at “highly selective institutions like Northwestern,” and “demonstrated experience” in the field of “social justice.”

While the new assistant director should also ideally hold a Master’s Degree from an accredited college or university, according to the listing, Northwestern will also consider applicants with an “appropriate combination” of work and educational experience.

[…]

Those skills will likely come into play when the new assistant director begins to “assist in the coordination of thematic programmatic/educational initiatives,” which can include leadership/community development, harm reduction/risk management, or social justice education.

Northwestern wants someone to lead the indoctrination of fraternity and sorority members into social justice zealotry. They can try to present this any way they want, but it’s nothing but a case of indoctrination of a politically charged ideology. Students simply shouldn’t find themselves being indoctrinated into a radical ideology that ultimately boils down to blaming straight white males for all the ills of the world.

At least Northwestern is a private university, which means they’re not blowing taxpayer dollars directly. Of course, they do receive plenty of taxpayer money in the form of federal student loans and grants.

I look forward to the day that parents and students recognize social justice nonsense for what it is, and understand how this movement is exploiting the campus environment to spread its noxious ideology.

At a dinner for Silicon Valley executives in early 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to America. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” the typically blunt Apple cofounder told the president. Examining Jobs’s claim, the New York Times looked at Apple’s vast Chinese operations and found that workers there not only worked for less than Americans did; more of them were skilled. To oversee production and guide some 200,000 assembly-line workers, Apple, for instance, needed 8,700 industrial engineers—positions that required more than a high school diploma but less than a full college degree. While abundant in China, these kinds of employees are harder to find in the United States. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” an unnamed Apple executive told the Times.

That’s a refrain that more and more American business executives are uttering these days. Even as politicians argue over how to create or keep “good jobs” in the U.S., a recent National Federation of Independent Businesses survey reported that the percentage of small businesses saying that they get no or few qualified applicants for available jobs has hit a 17-year high. Studies estimate that hundreds of thousands of positions in manufacturing firms went unfilled, even during the post-financial-crisis downturn and subsequent weak recovery, because of the lack of skilled workers. “Open manufacturing jobs are at an all-time high,” the former CEO of Siemens USA, the industrial giant, observed in December.

Much of the problem, say business leaders and employment experts, is an educational failure. Career and technical training in the U.S. hasn’t evolved to keep up with the transformation of the modern economy—with many schools even slashing funding for vocational education. Worse, parents, guidance counselors, and even politicians keep pushing students to enter four-year college programs that provide no clear paths to employment. Meantime, jobs in traditional blue-collar trades—from manufacturing to automobile repair—have grown more sophisticated and demanding. A huge gap between job seekers’ skills and employers’ needs has resulted.

The good news is that some visionary businesses, educators, and nonprofit funders are intensifying efforts to revamp and upgrade career education—twenty-first-century vocational education—in the United States. The obstacles to such efforts are many, including school officials’ reluctance to partner with industry and lingering prejudices against vocational schooling. But for the rising number of students participating in programs that tailor education to career goals—programs that emphasize work-related experience and teach to the high standards necessary for modern jobs—the payoff has been impressive. Now the challenge is to build on those successes to ignite a broader cultural change that makes high-quality career training central to American education.

Congress may have had good intentions in 1917 when it passed the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act to promote vocational training in agriculture, industry, and trades. But the law, which required any student receiving trade-skill instruction with federal funds to spend at least half of his time in vocational training, tended to cut off vocational training from public school education. Career education eventually developed into something that teachers and guidance counselors encouraged students of low academic achievement to pursue. Though the robust post–World War II American economy provided many of these students with a solid middle-income living, vocational school became stigmatized. That stigmatization only intensified as American industrial jobs, battered by global competition and automation, started to disappear during the early 1980s, making four-year college seem for many the surest route to better jobs and higher earnings. Policymakers reinforced the message with subsidized student loans and other initiatives that sought to make college readily available to all.

Unfortunately, many students wound up enrolling in four-year colleges who weren’t suited for it, and the results haven’t been pretty. These days, only 55 percent of college students graduate within six years, leaving many with no degree and dismal job prospects. Meanwhile, student-loan debt has swelled to a monstrous $1.3 trillion.

Many of the students would have been better off receiving some kind of vocational training. Both as candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has tapped into widespread blue-collar discontent with his call to overhaul free-trade agreements to keep jobs from heading overseas. The reality, though, is that plenty of good-paying jobs are already available for properly trained workers. These positions typically fall into a category known as middle-skilled, meaning that they require some postsecondary education—for instance, a certified apprenticeship or a two-year associate’s degree from a community college—but not necessarily four years of university. These jobs are found in health care, information technology, manufacturing, and construction, among other fields. According to a 2013 Brookings Institution study, more than half of all jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) do not demand four-year degrees—and they pay an average annual salary above $50,000. Further, while high-paying STEM jobs requiring advanced degrees do cluster in a few major urban centers, plentiful middle-skilled jobs—ranging from cybersecurity specialist and web designer to robotics engineer and industrial-engineer technician—are dispersed throughout most American metropolitan areas, making them within geographical reach of most Americans.

Yet many of those jobs go unfilled. A 2011 survey by the consulting firm Deloitte and the Advanced Manufacturing Institute found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers—at a time when unemployment nationwide was above 8 percent. (By one estimate, some 1.5 million manufacturing jobs that America has added since the 2008 recession have been for workers with more than a high school education.) Even though the U.S. is graduating some 3 million high school students every year, nearly half of whom will enter the job market instead of continuing school, an estimated 1 million middle-skilled jobs in all fields remain unfilled.

A 2011 survey found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers.