RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-13/michael-r-bloomberg-students-dismal-test-scores-are-a-bipartisan-failure?srnd=opinion

For anyone concerned about America’s future, the latest findings from the Program for International Student Assessment are nothing short of alarming. US math scores fell by 13 points between 2018 and 2022, with students continuing to underperform their peers in most other developed countries. This failure underscores the need to improve America’s schools and hold them accountable for results. Sadly, it’s not clear our country’s elected leaders are paying attention.

The PISA test measured the aptitude of students from 81 countries in math, reading and science. And while US students mostly held steady in reading and science, overall, they are behind many competitors. Out of 37 participating members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the US ranked 26th in math — a slight improvement over 2018, but still unacceptably low. Yet it was enough for Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to declare that the $190 billion in federal relief spent on public schools since 2020 has “kept the United States in the game.”

If so, too many students are still losing. Student math performance was its worst in two decades. The gap between the US and the highest-performing countries grew. More than a third of American students failed to demonstrate basic proficiency in math. Just 7% of 15-year-olds scored in the highest two levels, compared to 41% in Singapore and 32% in Taiwan.

At the most basic level, US students need more classroom instruction to make up for pandemic learning loss. That should include high-dosage tutoring, longer school days and mandatory summer school for those furthest behind. Over the longer term, closing academic deficits with the rest of the world also requires policymakers to bolster teacher quality, adopt more rigorous instructional materials and promote greater competition through the expansion of high-quality public charter schools.

https://thespectator.com/topic/claudine-gay-way-words-dei-plagiarism/

Claudine Gay is a self-declared “transformational” president of Harvard University. She campaigned for the job by promising to retire the old Harvard of privilege and patrimony and to bring into being a new Harvard founded on principles of anti-racism and social justice. How is she doing?

At the moment, she is a bit distracted by allegations of plagiarism in her slim portfolio of publications. But she has a whole sea of troubles to take arms against. Let’s let her rest a moment on the shore and consider a small story from the not-always-illustrious past of America’s greatest university. 

In 2007 Harvard admitted as a transfer student a young man, Adam Wheeler, who had completed his first two years at Bowdoin College in Maine. Adam had achieved a spectacular academic record at Bowdoin and would go to achieve comparable results as junior and senior at Harvard. But before he could graduate, Adam was exposed as a fraud who through a combination of plagiarism, forgery and arrant lying had faked his way through his whole undergraduate career. Julie Zauzmer, a reporter for the Harvard Crimson, provided the audacious nuts and bolts in her 2012 book, Conning Harvard. 

How did Adam Wheeler get so far? He worked very hard at fooling people but, beyond that, he trusted that Harvard would never bother to double-check anything he submitted. His test scores were phony. His grades were doctored. His letters of recommendation were forged. And his essays were plagiarized. And he was right.

Wheeler’s luck ran out only when the chairman of the English Department, James Simpson, read his application for a Fulbright fellowship and discovered that Wheeler had stolen long passages from a book he knew well: Essays on General Education in Harvard College.

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“This year I gave only $1 to Brown.” Last week, three people said this to me.  Well, to be exact, one said, “only $10 to Princeton” and another “only $100 to Harvard.” But you get the idea.

All three have given millions to these institutions in the past. All three are infuriated by what is happening on campuses across the country. All three sought my approval for their pointedly small gifts.

They do not have my approval. The amount of money they should give is zero. Not $1, like Harvard alumna Tally Zingher, who plans to join “hundreds of other former students in a symbolic protest,” but $0. I made this argument last December, and reiterate it now at the end of a year in which public confidence in higher education understandably has hit a new low.

Colleges and universities, like other nonprofit organizations, care not only about how much they receive in donations but also about how many people donate. These institutions express great pride (or, sometimes, consternation) in the percentage of alumni who contribute money and, at the fanciest institutions, have an army of employees and volunteers working year-round to get as many people as possible onboard.

Take Princeton, which historically has had by far the country’s most loyal alumni. Today, many are unhappy with the university and are withholding donations. One reason explored in a long article in June’s Princeton Alumni Weekly is “politics,” on both the Left and the Right. Some alumni are so concerned about the state of free expression on campus—read the report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) on Princeton for an illustration of the problem—that they launched a 501(c)(3) to defend the speech rights of students and faculty.

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The pro-Hamas uprising that broke out across American universities after October 7 roused once-somnolent alumni and donors. That awakening has now produced a new university charter, called a “Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania,” drafted by Penn professors. Penn’s most recent president, Liz Magill, had to resign on December 9, following widely mocked testimony at a congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism. The charter’s authors, along with Penn’s rebel donors, hope to make agreement with the new constitution a requirement for Penn’s new president. If enough Penn constituents, especially faculty, endorse it, the board of trustees will be compelled to adopt such a prerequisite, their thinking goes. An ongoing donation boycott provides the financial pressure. Ultimately, alumni across the country may be inspired to seek a similar foundational shake-up in their own alma maters, the drafters hope.

The new constitution adopts the thinking behind the Kalven Report, drafted in 1967 at the University of Chicago. Penn must henceforth abstain from adopting an institutional position on political issues. Embracing an official line alienates dissenting members of the university who might want to challenge “common orthodoxies,” explains the charter. Individual members of the university, by contrast, shall be free to propose, test, and reject the “widest spectrum of perspectives.”

The university’s selection committees have one mission only: identifying excellence. Hiring non-excellent diversity candidates makes it harder to attract outstanding faculty and students. (This assertion will seem commonsensical to anyone who believes in merit. The diversity complex would respond that, to the contrary, faculty and students shun non-“diverse” institutions. Sadly, in some cases, especially in the case of woke students, the diversity complex is correct. That does not make Penn 2.0 wrong, however, to seek to break the stranglehold of diversity thinking.) The new constitution posits that an unambiguous, publicly understood commitment to excellence will give Penn a competitive edge in hiring and student admissions in the decades ahead. This, too, seems commonsensical. Testing such a hypothesis is long overdue.

Penn 2.0 overcomes in one stroke a weakness bedeviling a central strategy of campus reform. Those seeking to create new universities face the challenge that no new institution can offer the prize that a legacy university confers: status and bragging rights. It is prestige that drives the ever-more frenzied torrent of college applications, rather than any promise of knowledge. The beauty of the Penn 2.0 plan is that it re-founds Penn on a new footing, while maintaining Penn’s prestige-granting power.

Were Penn 2.0 to become part of the presidential hiring search, it would be clarifying to see how many university apparatchiks demurred from its principles. 

Penn’s temporary replacement for ousted president Magill shows how heavy a lift Penn 2.0 is going to be. Penn’s trustees chose J. Larry Jameson, now dean of Penn’s medical school, to serve as the university’s interim president. As soon as Jameson took over the medical school in 2011, he placed diversity hiring and indoctrination at the core of his administration. He created the school’s first vice dean for Inclusion and Diversity and first associate dean for Diversity and Inclusion. Naturally, an Office of Inclusion and Diversity followed, which rolled out endless diversity initiatives and mandates, including Health Equity Weeks, the Transgender Patient Advocate program, and the LGBT Student-Trainee-Faculty Mentorship program. In 2021, Jameson initiated what the Penn press office called a “new institution-wide program aimed at eliminating structural racism.” (Hint: There is no structural racism at the Penn medical school. The medical school, like the rest of the university, is desperate to admit and hire as many blacks and Hispanics as possible, often disregarding academic skills gaps to do so.) As with all such duplicative programs, the conceit of the 2021 “institution-wide” antiracism initiative was that the school was for the first time prioritizing “diversity” at “all levels of staffing.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-academy-at-the-crossroads

University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill would not have been forced to resign last weekend had Penn’s donors and alumni not been organizing against her for two months.

The Penn rebels have now upped the ante. They have drafted a new constitution for the school that makes merit the sole criterion for student admissions and faculty hiring. The new charter requires the university to embrace institutional neutrality with regard to politics and faculty research. The rebels want candidates for Penn’s presidency to embrace the new charter as a precondition for employment.

With this latest twist in the battle over university leadership, the academy stands at a crossroads. For decades, Wall Street titans funneled billions of dollars into their alma maters, even as those universities promoted ideas inimical to civilizational excellence and economic success. When students started celebrating the October 7 Hamas attacks, however, the mega-donors took note. They did not recognize their campuses, they said, though the pro-Hamas rhetoric came straight from the ethnic- and postcolonial-studies courses that had been a staple of university curricula since the 1980s. Some donors, at Penn and elsewhere, initiated funding boycotts and sought board shake-ups, hoping to pressure their alma maters to correct the anti-Semitism that they deemed responsible for the terror celebrations.

The pro-Hamas protests have exposed the anti-Western ideology that is the sole unifying belief system on college campuses. The question now is whether disgruntled donors and alumni can overcome decades of intellectual misdirection. To do so, they first must define the problem correctly—and avoid the temptation to adopt, for their own purposes, the intersectional Left’s rhetoric about “safety” and “protection” from speech. The proposed new Penn charter is a promising start.

The donor revolt could have broken out at any number of campuses, all of which featured ignorant students cheering on the deliberate massacre of civilians, those students’ faculty enablers and bureaucratic fellow travelers, and feckless presidents. But it first erupted at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, perhaps because of the organization and self-confidence of their alumni.

https://victorhanson.com/the-three-blind-mice-of-the-university/

I wrote on X about the three blind mice college presidents (Gay of Harvard, Kornbluth of MIT, and Magill of University of Pennsylvania).

Recently, one blind mouse has tentatively resigned under pressure, Liz Magill, former dean of the Stanford Law School and lately president of the University of Pennsylvania.

An introductory note and warning: Long gone is the old university practice of appointing the most distinguished teachers and most accomplished scholars as deans, provosts, and presidents, on the theory that they would thus be uniquely qualified to evaluate faculty performance and the university’s intellectual tempo.

In the olden days, such esteemed faculty had to be coaxed from their departments for three to five years to “do administration” as a sort of campus public service. Not so Magill and Gay, (although Kornbluth has a record of medical and biological research).

In the long ago past, there was no ethos of young faculty jumping into junior administrative posts (e.g., “special assistant to the provost,” or “associate dean of Humanities for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) as the stepping stones in their administrative cursus honorum, which prove to be soon exclusive of teaching or research.

The end result is a Harvard President Claudine Gay, whose meager and undistinguished record of publication as an untenured Stanford political science professor should not have merited tenure at any UC or perhaps even a CSU campus (I served on retention, promotion, and tenure committees at CSU Fresno).

The result is that Gay was never in any position to evaluate the relative scholarly merits of her own faculty, or due to long tenure in administration and long absence from research and tenure, intellectually or temperamentally equipped to handle some brilliant House member interrogators (most of whom lacked extensive graduate degrees but knew far more from the real arena outside of the campus).

Watch videos of their lengthy House of Representatives testimonies. They did not really listen to the Representatives’ questions. Instead, they simply gave scripted, canned, and prepped boilerplate answers about “context”—even when asked about eliminationist speech calling for the erasure of Jews. Much less were they aware of how they sounded to those without experience in the gobbledygook gibberish of the campus.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-12-11-free-speech-at-harvard-penn-mit-and-other-elite-universities

“At Gay’s Harvard, if your speech supports the conservative position, the thinnest allegation against you can destroy your career. If you support the woke narrative, even the most explosive allegations against you can be buried.”

Six days ago, on December 5, the Presidents of three elite universities — Harvard, Penn and MIT — appeared at a Congressional hearing to testify about their responses to pro-Hamas and anti-semitic demonstrations and advocacy on their campuses. In the most widely-viewed exchange at the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik asked each of the Presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their codes of conduct. The three answered by emphasizing the importance of freedom of speech on their campuses, and by saying that they could not give a definitive answer as to whether calling for genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct, because the answer was “context-dependent.”

Over the intervening days, the responses of the three Presidents have generated widespread backlash, including harsh criticism from even some mainstream press sources, and even pushback from some major donors. The Presidents’ responses appeared to be, and were, tone deaf and highly legalistic. But were they wrong?

This may surprise you, but I’m going to stand up for the three Presidents on this particular point. If you have been a reader here for any substantial period, you know that I am close to what may be called a “free speech absolutist.” I think that people ought to be able to say even the most hateful and despicable things, short of immediate threats of violence. By saying such things they discredit themselves, and for the government (or a university or corporation) to claim the power to shut them up is an even worse problem than allowing the speech.

The problem with the statements of the three Presidents is not their position as to upholding freedom of speech for the pro-Hamas and anti-semitic speakers. The problem is that the Presidents don’t apply the same true free speech principles at all when it comes to political opinions with which they disagree, or that are out of line with current woke orthodoxy.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/right-deed-wrong-reason

Liz Magill was forced to resign Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania—by all indications because, at a congressional hearing, she could not bring herself to declare that calls for the genocide of Jews are punishable speech. She would more justly have lost her job for being a bald-faced hypocrite when it comes to campus free expression. The future of higher education depends on which of these motives governs such decisions in the future.

Magill was part of a triumvirate of college presidents who testified before a House committee last week. Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth had been called to discuss the anti-Israel hatred embroiling their universities since the October 7 terror attacks on Israel. To call their performance robotic would insult robots. When asked a repeated question after their first evasion did not satisfy the questioner, these intellectual role models repeated their first evasion verbatim, maybe adding a cryptic non sequitur.

Congressman Jim Banks (R., Indiana) grilled Magill, for example, about a conference on Palestinian culture that the University of Pennsylvania had hosted two weeks before the Hamas terror attacks. Critics had demanded that Penn cancel the conference, due to the presence of alleged anti-Semites among its speakers. Penn allowed the gathering to continue, however, citing academic freedom.