RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-early-admissions-applications-drop-nearly-20-percent-year-over-year/

The number of early admission applicants to Harvard University fell by nearly 20 percent compared to the previous academic year.

Some have cited growing concerns over the administration’s handling of antisemitism on campus, highlighted by President Claudine Gay’s testimony before Congress earlier this month.

“That’s possibly one of several reasons, about the concern of safety on the campus,” Bob Sweeney, a veteran college counselor from a New York high school told Bloomberg. “There might be other factors as well as students are being more realistic about their expectations and chances for acceptance.”

By comparison, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania reported modest gains in annual early admissions. The latter’s president, Liz Magill, stepped down recently following her testimony in front of the House Committee on Education alongside Gay.

Bill Ackman, a Harvard alumnus and school donor, who has been a vocal critical of the administration’s handling of antisemitism, applauded the news. “Harvard College Early Applications Drop 17% From Last Year. It takes 400 years to build a reputation and only a few months to destroy it,” the hedge fund executive wrote.

Harvard has generated successive controversies since the October 7 atrocities committed by Hamas. Shortly after the Palestinian terror group invaded southern Israel, student groups on campus released a joint statement trying to contextualize and justify the massacres. “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the letter explained. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

The blowback — including a billboard truck circling campus highlighting signatories’ faces and names under the banner, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites” — led at least ten student groups to walk back their endorsement of the statement.

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.