RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/13/is-the-jig-up-for-elite-higher-education/

Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal—and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.

Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Graduation ceremonies became overtly racially and ethnically segregated. The same was true for dorms and “theme houses.”

So-called “safe spaces,” in the spirit of the Jim Crow South, reserved areas of campus solely for particular races.

Affluent foreign students often openly protested on behalf of designated terrorist groups like Hamas.

First-Amendment-protected free speech all but vanished on elite campuses. Any guest speaker who dared to critique abortion on demand, Middle East orthodoxy, biological males dominating women’s sports, or diversity/equity/inclusion dogmas was likely to be shouted down, or on occasion roughed up.

University administrators either ignored the violence done to the Bill of Rights or quietly approved when their rowdy students were turned loose on supposed conservatives.

But in their hubris, the universities began a series of blunders that may now end them as they once were.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/a_former_columbia_professor_applauds_the_defunding.html

I almost cheered out loud when I read that the Trump administration has cancelled $400 million in funding for Columbia University, despite the fact that when I taught there about three and a half decades ago, I no doubt directly benefitted from federal money flowing in, enjoyed my colleagues, and was treated very well. My animus and support for the cuts derives from the reluctant conclusion that as an institution, it has been corrupted, and nothing less than traumatic levels of change are required. The level of change required includes firing administrators, faculty, and admissions officers, expelling students, and revising hiring and admissions criteria. Only fear of financial catastrophe will suffice to strengthen sufficiently the spines of trustees and the administration.

Consider this abuse:

Some Columbia University professors canceled in-person classes on Monday in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the student activist and foreign national whom the Trump administration moved to deport over his pro-Hamas campus organizing. The cancellations — which came amid a pressure campaign from the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter — put the professors at odds with Columbia’s provost, who emailed “faculty colleagues” Monday morning to issue “a reminder that faculty must meet all scheduled classes.”

Faculty who cheat their students in order to make a political point should be immediately fired. They are defrauding the young minds whose families have coughed up the exorbitant tuition Columbia (and every other prestige college) charges: $71,170 per year. That works out to a quasi “ticket price” per hour of classroom instruction of $182 to $228, depending on whether a student takes 4 or 5 courses per semester. (See Columbia’s requirements, regulations and costs posted online for the underlying data.)

Imagine a theatre cancelling a performance that people spent over $200 to attend and refusing to refund the tickets.

It’s obvious that deeply politicized faculty, staff, and students are so numerous that they dominate the campus and poison the atmosphere, making the campus unsafe for Jews and any other minority that they may decide to target. They can’t be “reformed” because, as ideologues, they will resist.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-department-of-educations-time-has-come/

President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has terminated nearly $1 billion in contracts with the federal Department of Education (ED) and cut 29 DEI programs costing taxpayers $101 million. While further revelations await, the people should know that ED has no constitutional foundation – education is the purview of the states – and has existed only since 1979.

In 1976, the National Education Association, the nation’s most powerful teacher union, endorsed Jimmy Carter for president. The Georgia Democrat returned the favor by establishing the federal Department of Education, which did nothing to improve student achievement. That was confirmed in 1983 by A Nation at Risk, which contended that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”

ED was more about fattening the government payroll and boosting government power. Consider the actions of Biden education secretary Dr. Miguel Cardona, for example. Cardona’s “doctoral degree,” like Jill Biden’s, is in education, a non-discipline most useful as a bureaucratic credential. A classic zealot, Cardona used new Title IX regulations to impose gender junkthought.

“In a nutshell, the new rewrite means: – men can take academic AND athletic scholarships from women,” Riley Gaines explained. “Men will have FULL access to bathrooms, locker rooms, etc – men could be housed in dorm rooms with women – students and faculty MUST compel their speech by requiring the use of preferred pronouns If the guidelines above are ignored or even questioned, then YOU can be charged with harassment.” Cardona also deployed ED against schools congressional Democrats don’t like.

Grand Canyon University is an independent college that “reaches a broad variety of like-minded Christian congregations and organizations,” and many students want to attend. By contrast, Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro called GCU a “predatory for-profit school.” The dutiful Cardona told her ED was aiming “to shut them down” and hit GCU for $37.7 million, the “largest fine in history against a school that lied about costs,” and so on. Compare Cardona’s predations with Obama ED boss Arne Duncan.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-supreme-court-affirmative-action-racial-preferences

When the Supreme Court, in 2023, banned the use of racial preferences in university admissions, observers expected the number of black and Hispanic freshmen on elite campuses to fall and the number of Asian freshmen to rise. At many schools, however, that didn’t happen.

Admissions data reveal that Yale, Princeton, Duke, and several other highly selective schools enrolled fewer Asian students in their Classes of 2028—the first group admitted since the Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—than they did in their Classes of 2027. Black enrollment at these schools, by contrast, remained virtually unchanged.

In the run up to SFFA, these elite colleges repeatedly asserted that they could not maintain racial diversity on campuses without affirmative action. Sixteen prestigious colleges filed a joint amicus brief arguing that “no race-neutral alternative presently can fully replace race-conscious individualized and holistic review to obtain the diverse student body Amici have found essential to fulfilling their missions.” Several had advanced the same argument in amicus briefs filed in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger and 2016’s Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, earlier cases examining the use of racial preferences.

For more than two decades, universities claimed that socioeconomic preferences, geographic sorting, and other race-neutral alternatives could not achieve the same level of racial diversity on campus as could affirmative action. Yet the demographics of many schools’ Class of 2028 suggest otherwise. It raises an awkward question: Did America’s top universities mislead the Supreme Court then, or are they breaking the law now?

Consider data from an Inside Higher Ed database that tracks the demographics of the Classes of 2027 and 2028 at 31 highly selective universities. The database includes the first-year demographics for 13 of the 15 highly selective universities that alleged, in the SFFA amicus brief, that their campuses would lose racial diversity absent racial preferences. I’ve listed the demographics for 12 of those universities below. (The University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania were not included in the database. I chose to omit the California Institute of Technology because its data appeared unclear.)

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/07/retooling-schooling/

As I noted in January, the public school enrollment count for the 2023-24 school year showed that 9 of the top 10 and 38 of the 50 largest districts have lost students since 2019-20, while 31 of the 50 largest districts lost students between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school year, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report.

Now, there is more bad news. The results of a Gallup poll released Feb. 5 show that Americans’ opinions about the quality of public education in the U.S. continue to tank.

The percentage of adults who are dissatisfied with public education increased from 62% to 73% between 2019 and 2025, making the percentage of adults who feel satisfied with public education the lowest since 2001. (The report tracks Americans’ satisfaction across 31 aspects of U.S. society or policy, such as the military, health care, and crime, and it found that public education ranked 29th among those 31 areas.)

What can be done to change this sorry state of affairs?

First, we must change the way we pay teachers. Whereas private sector employees are paid via merit, K-12 educators rarely are, courtesy of the teachers’ unions. Instead, teachers are part of an industrial-style “step and column” salary regimen, getting salary increases for the number of years they work and for taking (frequently meaningless) professional development classes. Great teachers are worth more—a lot more—and should receive higher pay than their less capable colleagues. Of course, any suggestion to augment any form of merit pay, turning teachers into independent professionals, is a red flag for the teachers’ unions, which view educators as identical dues-paying automatons.

One significant loss for the teachers’ union occurred in Wisconsin when Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 became law in 2011. The measure all but eliminated collective bargaining for teachers and created a marketplace where school districts could compete for better educators by paying valued teachers more.