RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nearly everyone outside academia knows that America’s colleges and universities are doing a poor job of preparing their charges for adult life. Undergraduate education, nonetheless, continues to enjoy tremendous prestige. Few upper middle class parents would prefer a gainfully employed child to one attending university; indeed, for most affluent parents, the former would be a source of embarrassment. Higher education’s social esteem makes it hard to fully assimilate its well-known failings but it also completely hides the worst. For, you see, the biggest problem isn’t the facts and skills students don’t learn, it’s the bad habits they do.

I was a philosophy professor for 13 years and, at the beginning, I noticed that my colleagues weren’t requiring much from students and the deleterious effect of this on the latter’s work habits. So, I tried making my students work to get good grades. But, regardless of the penalties I imposed, it was impossible to get all but a tiny minority to seriously apply themselves. The most active response I got from students was extreme resentment. Most students stared at me incredulously when I explained that they’d have to work hard to get a decent grade. A few times I heard a shocked student complain – without intending or even noticing any irony – “But this is harder than high school!”

I tried telling my classes that some work was required even though I wouldn’t be checking it and, literally, almost no one could comprehend what this meant. They immediately heard “won’t be checked” as “isn’t required” because almost all of them prioritized entertainment and socializing far above learning. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of students who major in the humanities do so precisely because they have no reason for being in college besides avoiding work and because humanities classes require far less of it than the sciences. But, even outside the humanities, the typical student views the person in front of the classroom, not as a teacher, but merely as an obstacle to getting a B or better.

Of course, students couldn’t stay in college with no desire to learn if their professors weren’t cooperating. And here we come to the second reason that college is such a crippling experience for so many: virtually no professors at an even minimally distinguished college or university regard their real job as teaching. Indeed, if you work at a prestigious college or university, you do so little teaching that it would be almost impossible to do so. I was an assistant professor in UCLA’s philosophy department from 1996-2004. Philosophy faculty taught four ten‑week courses a year, each meeting four hours a week. Salaries, however, by no means reflected our minimal teaching duties. Upon leaving, my annual salary – one of the lowest in the department – was $65,000 plus about $4,000 a year in (untaxed) “research” money for travel; the most senior department members had six figure salaries plus five figure travel budgets. Teaching loads and salaries at Princeton, where I earned my PhD, and Temple, where I worked next, and similar institutions are comparable. For a successful academic, teaching is just a cover story – it’s what you say you do to justify your generous pay. What you really do – what gives you self-respect, pride of accomplishment and takes up most of your time – is produce “research.”

Academic research calls to mind beneficial technological advancements. But, even most scientific research has no practical value. It’s mostly, at best, the accumulation of tiny facts that will never affect anyone outside a handful of aficionados. Even in the sciences academic research is mostly academic. But research in the humanities is entirely academic. That’s not to say that the great humanist texts have no value; the humanities’ canon does have very important things to say about how to live a good, productive, and happy life. But these practical lessons don’t generate the kind of papers required for success in academia. The writing of a successful professor must be couched in the most abstract terms – it must be completely inaccessible to all but a few like-minded colleagues. Accessibility and practical import are the hug and kiss of professional death; they mark your work as unsophisticated and you as not very clever.

Peace Studies, Black Studies, Womens’ Studies, Ethnic Studies, even Marijuana Studies. These “Sensitivity Degrees,” from 40K plus a year universities, are coming home to roost — as our youth begin taking their surly bite out of the “reality sandwich.” Having initially lusted after those glossy course catalogs, what a cold slap in the face it was to learn that an engineering degree actually required spending nights burning the midnight oil, rather than the bong. How comforting it was to switch majors after the freshman term and saunter into the lukewarm waters of sub-mediocrity. How natural it felt to re-enter the progressive womb and be “Born Again” as a smart-phone toting infant — where the ability to emote (and bullshit) was valued over the cruel, patriarchal, intolerant, and narrow world of science and its unforgiving mistress: mathematics.

And even if one still wished to cultivate the traditional loosey-goosey creative life, these days the disciplines of: Philosophy, English, and Political Science are more representative of Progressive indoctrination than that once blessed golden path of diving deep into the human condition. Now, the liberal arts or social sciences are indispensable to a cultured society, but only in the last few generations has our moribund culture succumbed to the delusion that such knowledge was sufficient, in and of itself, for obtaining gainful employment. Little did they know that “The Technical City” has little need of such pleasantries, and this cruel revelation hit working class parents perhaps the hardest. Indeed, how many scrimping couples mortgaged their golden years so that little Heather and charming Max could swig and cavort to the dulcet tones of Higher Education — that velvet-lined Hamster box of learning? Having handed over their treasures to the longhairs, Mom and Pop were handed back sniveling toddlers. And if we have learned anything from this vast transfer of wealth, it is that an expensive dumbed down liberal arts education only increases the difficulty of dynamiting the entitled little bastards out of the basement before we qualify for Medicare.

Listen. America has surpassed its solubility limit for the number of parasites it can absorb and coddle. A knowledge of Foucault or Betty Friedan may impress in the decadent salons of Manhattan, but not so much in cleaning storm drains or in inquiring whether a patron would prefer a refill of his beverage of choice at that petit’ bourgeois establishment — Le’ Burger King.

What have we learned, class? You’re taking too damn long to grow up here in America! And while the philosopher contemplates his indigence and the psych major has her head examined, the principle on that student loan ain’t budged a lick. How’s that for some fundamental transformation?

Poor American kids, like their Australian counterparts, continue to slide in assessments of educational achievement even as the sums poured into government schools soar. The president-elect’s endorsement of vouchers, choice and competition is the last, best hope to reverse that decline.
The current school-funding model is about to end and the federal, state and territory ministers of education are soon to meet and begin the process of deciding what will happen at the start of 2018. Crucial to the new funding model will be whether it continues the same old approach of governments controlling taxpayers’ money going to schools and thus forcing them to follow the ordained and endorsed policies in regard to curriculum, teacher employment and accountability.

That’s on this side of the pacific. In America president-elect Donald Trump offers an alternative called “school choice”. Trump has just appointed a school-choice advocate, Betsy DeVos, as Education Secretary and committed $20 billion towards “private school choice, magnet schools and charter laws”. That DeVos is already being denounced by all the usual suspects is an encouraging sign.

School choice involves local autonomy versus centralised, bureaucratic control, plus vouchers that see the money follow the child to whatever school his or her parents decide is best. In addition to being inherently good, the belief that parents should have greater control over where their children are educated signals to schools, both government and non-government, that if they are ineffective and fail to meet parental expectations enrolments will suffer. Instead of being run for the benefit of teacher unions, their executives and the thousands of bureaucrats employed at head office the focus is on giving schools the freedom to best reflect the needs of their communities.

Innovations such as charter schools and vouchers involve local control over curriculum and staffing and ensure that parents, especially those in disadvantaged communities, have the financial means to choose between privately managed schools and those controlled by the state. Florida, Washington and Milwaukee pioneered charter schools and the movement has gone international, with conservative and progressive governments in New Zealand, England and Sweden introducing a more market-driven model represented by school choice and increased local autonomy.

While not giving schools the same degree of autonomy and flexibility as charter schools in the US, the Australian government’s Independent Public Schools initiative is also based on the belief that local control leads to greater innovation and improved educational outcomes. As detailed in James Tooley’s book The Beautiful Tree, privately managed and funded schools are also increasingly popular in India where, because they achieve stronger results compared to government schools, poor parents are going without to pay the cost of enrolling their children.

Several student groups at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., sent a letter to administrators claiming that the police protecting them on campus is an “act of violence” because a police union endorsed Donald Trump.

The letter, which was obtained by the College Fix, is titled “Demands for Our Campus by Concerned Students.” (Yes . . . demands.)

The relevant section states:

“The university must re-channel its resources and money to its fundamental requirement: to protect its students. This safety must not depend on the University’s police. The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police union in the United States, has formally endorsed President-Elect Donald Trump. The FOP includes over 10,000 members in Washington D.C., many of which have jurisdiction over GW’s campus. Placing us in these officers’ care is an act of violence, especially for Black students.”

“The University must protect its students, instead, by dramatically increasing financial aid, emergency funds, health care resources, health insurance grants, and discretionary funds available to low-income students. It must create and/or dramatically increase funding for the community centers like the Multicultural Student Services Center for people of color and marginalized students. It must increase funding for Mental Health Services and expand hiring to candidates that are of color and specialize in race-related mental health concerns.”

Now, it’s important to note that it’s not clear from the language in the letter whether these kids want the cops to stop protecting them or not. It does state that campus police protection is an “act of violence,” that their “safety must not depend on the University’s police,” and that the university must increase funding to other areas “instead” — but we can’t be sure if they’re saying that they feel that the university is depending only on the police — and that it should pay more attention to other areas as well — or if they’re saying that it must not depend on the police at all. In either case, though, their argument is ridiculous.