No Free Speech: Heckler Cancels Another Student Meeting
Last week, a group of at least 4 Portland State University police officers stood by and declined to intervene as a heckler with a cowbell single-handedly canceled a College Republicans meeting. This is the second time in 2019 that PSU allowed hecklers or would-be hecklers to shut down campus expression — and the second time the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has demanded the university adhere to its First Amendment obligations. FIRE first wrote to the university Feb. 18 after PSU’s law enforcement unilaterally canceled a meeting of a socialist student group after the founder of the group Patriot Prayer said he would show up.
Be Careful What You Wish For on Social Programs
Nathan Glazer, the last of a group of famous neocon social scientists, died at the age of 95 on January 19 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. (He resisted the label “neocon.”) Glazer consistently warned that vast government plans to improve the lives of the poor often come to grief or create new problems of their own. “The evaluations of the specifics of the first ten years after the launching of (the War on Poverty) confirm that nothing worked and in particular, nothing in education worked.” He concluded that the family was the key institution to positive social change and that rights are inherent in individuals, not groups. The article here by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute ran in 2011 when President Obama planned an extension of the War on Poverty.
You, Too, Can Turn in Your Classmate
The campus police of the University of Illinois have issued calls for students to report “acts of intolerance” to the schools Bias Assessment and Response Team. It said, “acts of intolerance create an unsafe and unwelcoming environment for campus community members. Please let us know if you feel unsafe.” According to BART, bias is defined as “actions or expressions that are motivated at least in part by prejudice against or hostility toward a person or group because of that person or group’s perceived age, disability, status, ethnicity, gender, identity-expression, national origin, race, religion/ spirituality, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, etc.” Those reported to BART may be required to participate in mediation or other educational conservations.
More Evidence of Professorial Political Bias
University of North Carolina business professor Michael Jacobs polled 40 Republican students at his school and found that all but two believed they would be penalized for not expressing the professor's politics in a test answer. The professor claimed that faculty should pledge to respect ideological diversity and that chancellors who are too afraid to promote tolerance for ideological diversity should be fired. “One of my top MBA students, who I would categorize as moderate, recently told me that she will no longer participate in class discussions that involve social or political issues for fear of being branded by the ‘progressive police,’” the professor said. Read the story at Campus Reform.
More Risible News From Yale
As you recall, the campus exploded in outrage in 2015 when Prof. Erika Christakis challenged a Yale diktat warning students not to wear offensive costumes for Halloween. (“If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away,” she wrote in a campus-wide email. Her husband Prof. Nicholas Christakis, threatened by a group of offended students, quit as master of Silliman House after getting zero backing from Yale. In a review of The Coddling of the American Mind in the American Interest, writer Aaron Sibarium says Christakis' successor at Silliman, psychology professor Laurie Santos, has a program for happiness that includes this advice:
- Avoid binding attachments and obligations; these will stress you out and make you sad.
- Focus on cultivating your own mind and mental habits so that you can be happy regardless of your external conditions, a self-reliant ray of sunshine.
- Prioritize instrumental knowledge that helps to achieve your goals; in particular, learn how to manipulate others to your advantage.
Yes, it is a money chase. That characterizes it the problem, but it does not identify the cause. It is an imbalance between the number of adequately prepared applicants and the number of four-year institutions. Nearly 40 percent of high school graduates require some post admission remediation. In aggregate, our secondary schools are certifying too many of their graduates as college ready. That is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. On the other side of the imbalance, there are too many institutions fighting to stay alive. A measured tightening of four-year admissions standards could prompt a positive rebalance.
Please differentiate between elementary-trained teachers, and their secondary counterparts (and the Liberal Arts teachers from the Math and Science teachers). Not ALL teachers rank low on the scale.
Ah, but this is only confusing if we somehow still believe that the purpose of College is education…the production of an informed citizenry….lux et veritas. If that were true, yes, we’d be absolutely baffled by the abysmal failure so evident in the reality we all wrestle.
But if the mission of College is NOT education, rather the production of degreed graduates….well, that’s another matter.
Obama made this abundantly (some might say absurdly) clear way back in ’09 declaring that “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” And of course to do that, we would have had to more than double college enrollments, to about 40 million students as of two years ago. Fortunately, that idiocy did not come to pass…. but the enthusiasm to produce just lots and lots of people holding sheepskins….that obsession (revenue driven) is with us still. And obviously, even to maintain the graduation rates for our current 20M we must continually reduce our standards (for entry & completion) and remove the hurdles (like writing and reading competency) which otherwise would stand in our way.
By God we will produce college graduates by the bushel! That is our job!
Unfortunately those who would employ our newly minted alumni continue to tell us they can neither read nor rite nor handle rithmetic. Hmmm. Perhaps we should hire another VP in Marketing? Or maybe offer remedial courses, on-site, for brand-new corporate hires??? Just think of the revenue possibilities!
Well said. “Higher” education has become just another industry.
In a word, money.
I’d agree with both EB and George Leef. The main reason colleges admit them is for the money. I remember years ago when I was working at a fairly selective public university and being appalled to hear the university president at the time talk about the need for “not just K-12 education, but K-16 education,” meaning, college for all. A few years later, Obama was elected and started pushing the “college for all” narrative, rationalized largely on the misinterpretation of basic statistics about the relative incomes of college graduates vs. those of high school graduates, as though the degree and not the ability to do college level work accounted for their subsequent career success. College administrators always seem to be in favor of growing enrollment because it means more funds flowing to their campuses, even if many of those students never graduate or accrue a fortune in debt while they are enrolled.
Beyond that, though, are factors such as grade inflation and calls for increased diversity on campus. Grade inflation frequently means that students who are incapable of doing college level work look like they are qualified or capable as a result of their grades in high school, but when they get to college, they are not able to keep up. And the topic of skills mismatches following from affirmative action in admissions has been well-established by researchers.
Yup. If thy say it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
Obama was talking about increasing the proportion of HS grads who go on to any type of post-secondary education, and he included (and emphsized) certificates that can be earned in 3 months to a year. That is where continued emphasis should reside (along with technical 2-year programs), but the 4-year and 2-year institutions and programs, especially liberal arts, are fearful for their futures if they don’t fill those seats.
Money. Colleges have to fill their seats, and they also have spent the last 50 years expanding in a never-ending competition. At the same time, they refuse to realize that the education they are offering is not appropriate for HS grads in the bottom half of their class. While it’s true that post-secondary education in the past failed to make room for well-prepared but low-income students, they have now over-compensated and are admitting poorly-prepared students from all economic levels.
I think that, given the dumbing down of the curriculum and pressure for grade inflation over the last several decades, the problem is less that the students admitted can’t do the work (such as it is), but that many of them just don’t want to. They’re used to schooling that’s easy and expect college to be more of the same.
Why does John Leo ask a question that he doesn’t answer in his opinion piece? Education doesn’t need more rhetoric; it needs answers to questions and solutions.
And you just perfectly summarized the entire problem, Professor Tommy. You can put it back to committee and see if they can help you out.