RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/22/the-36-million-question-college-presidents-wont-answer/

“Where’s the racism?”

This is the question that college presidents nationwide—and most everyone in their administrations—refuse to answer.

If you want to see a college president tap-dance to avoid accountability, go ahead and ask: “Who are the racist people, and what are the racist policies, programs, and procedures on your campus you claim is ‘rampant’ with ‘racism?’”

Enjoy the public relations messaging, but don’t expect a real answer. They can’t answer, because finding actual racism on a college campus is as likely as sighting Bigfoot. And just about as credible.

Now, college leaders are even more likely to circle the wagons against accountability, largely due to fears of litigation. Thanks to the resolution of a legal case in Ohio last week, this has become a $36 million question. Oberlin College paid up on a $36.6 million judgment to a local family bakery for libeling their business as “racist.”

The sad and completely unnecessary case of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College is likely to reshape the conversation about so-called antiracism efforts on university campuses in coming months and years, even as colleges fund expensive bureaucracies, commission task forces, and hire well-heeled bureaucrats to solve a problem that is almost nonexistent at their institutions. 

To Catch a Thief

The incident that led to the judgment occurred in November 2016, when a black Oberlin student shoplifted a bottle of wine from the bakery, was chased and caught by one of the owners, all of which resulted in a scuffle. The thief and his two accomplices, who intervened for their friend to pummel the clerk protecting his business, were all arrested.

Within 24 hours, Oberlin moved swiftly into action. Not to upbraid the students, nor to apologize to the bakery and to the owner’s son, Allyn D. Gibson, whom the trio attacked.

Rather than assist in the prosecution of the student, Oberlin shifted into high umbrage mode and supported a coalition of students, faculty, and administrators to attack the bakery publicly for “racism.” The college stopped doing business with the bakery.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/college-carnage/

The well-documented woes that plague our government-run k-12 schools are now infecting our colleges. Students are arriving at universities woefully unprepared with the skills that are needed to tackle the rigors of upper-level education.

Of late, the downward k-12 spiral is a result of the lengthy and absolutely pointless Covid shutdowns, as well as many schools’ penchant for drifting away from the traditional 3 Rs and focusing instead on a heavily politicized curriculum. As a result, student learning has taken a big hit.

A recent survey informs us just how dire the situation is. While 87% of college students answered that at least one of their classes was too difficult and that the professor should have made it easier, 64% said this was the case with “a few” or “most” of their classes.

On a similar note, American Enterprise Institute scholar Rick Hess reports that 64% of college students claim that they put “a lot of effort” into school. But of the students who answered that they’re putting in a lot of effort, “a third said they devote fewer than five hours a week to studying and homework – and 70% said they spend no more than 10 hours a week on schoolwork.”

Some colleges are even dumbing down their curriculum to accommodate struggling students. The English department at Rutgers announced that it will de-emphasize “traditional grammar rules” in its graduate writing program so as not to put students with poor English backgrounds at a disadvantage. In Kansas, universities may scrap their algebra graduation requirement because too many students are failing it. It is reported that about one in three Kansas students fails college algebra the first time around, and some need to take it several times before they pass, while others get so frustrated that they drop out altogether.

Politically, colleges are an abomination. John Ellis, professor emeritus and chairman of the California Association of Scholars, explains that in the past “there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople.”

But these days, the situation is exactly the opposite. It’s now the “professors who do what the small-minded small-town worthies used to do, shutting down analysis whenever it offends them, which is often.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/__trashed-4/

I went to Harvard. Once. Which is to say, I walked around the campus one day a long, long time ago during a visit to Boston. It was pleasant enough. It was almost as pretty as Wesleyan, Princeton, the University of Virginia, Duke, Chapel Hill, Michigan, Michigan State, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, Claremont, McGill, Cambridge, Leiden, Heidelberg, Tübingen, and at least a dozen or so other campuses that I’ve sampled over the years.

Harvard is, of course, the oldest American college. It’s also considered the pinnacle, the zenith, the acme of higher education in the United States. But why? Back when I was studying English at Stony Brook, an accreditation committee gave our department a higher rating than Harvard’s. But that didn’t matter in the slightest after you graduated. On the job market, a Harvard diploma was gold. Stony Brook? Ha!

No, Harvard is Harvard because it’s…Harvard. U.S. News and World Report, which presumes to list the “best colleges” year after year, admits that its ratings are based largely on reputation. Which makes no sense. Everybody knows what Harvard’s reputation is. The point of a rating should be to indicate whether or not a reputation is justified.

And the plain fact is that, no, the reputation of Harvard, at least when it comes to the humanities and social sciences, isn’t justified. And the same goes for the rest of the Ivy League, as well as for Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and all those boutique establishments like Oberlin and Swarthmore. Because these are the places where “woke” ideology has made the deepest inroads – and done the most damage.

On December 15, Claudine Gay, a political scientist who specializes in Critical Race Theory and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and who currently serves as Harvard’s Dean of Arts and Sciences, was selected to be the university’s next president, starting on July 1, 2023. The usual suspects cheered her appointment wildly, most of them celebrating her deep warmth and compassion and noting with glee that she would be Harvard’s second woman president and first black president. What a step forward for the oppressed!