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.
Columbia’s Comedy of Errors
A comedy act by a former member of Saturday Night Live was shut down in mid-performance at Columbia University Friday night because students felt the humor was racist and anti-gay and made them feel unsafe. Nimesh Patel was performing for the campus Asian American Alliance’s charity event. One joke referred to being black and gay as a double vulnerability. So, a complaining student wrote in the Columbia Spectator, “If you’re black and gay, you don’t need a straight South Asian guy to point out that your life is hard because you’re black and gay.” You can read more at Reason.com.
I wonder if Professor Treadgold is talking about his own St. Louis University, where the tuition and fees are at least nominally not much short of those at Harvard, maybe 93%.
Anyhow, I wasn’t able to read John Leo’s piece behind the WSJ paywall (I let my subscription lapse some time ago). So I went to the Amazon site, found this:
“he proposes federal legislation to monitor the quality and honesty of professors and to limit spending on administration to no more than 20 percent of university budgets (Harvard now spends 40 percent).”
This strikes me as a horrid idea for too many reasons to list. And his further idea to start a new elite university that would be different from what we already have, that would welcome moderates and conservatives along with liberals and leftists, strikes me as rather naive. First of all, don’t places like the University of Chicago, Caltech sort of fit the bill already? Both those places could use the dough it would take to start a new university from scratch. Second, I am doubtful that the new university would be more successful than most of the old in resisting what seem like almost unstoppable forces. (I know, that sort of contradicts what I just said about a couple of distinguished schools that also are something of outliers. But that sort of supports my point that the money might be better placed at schools that already exist and seem to have a track record.)
The limiting of administrative positions, in universities and K-12 schools, is a good idea. Less administrators means less wacky programs and less internal agendas, more plain old teaching and research overseen only by professional peers.
Thank you for an interesting review of “The University We Need.” I completely agree with Warren Treadgold’s thesis–founding a “new university” may be the only solution. It is unalterably clear that America’s universities have been co-opted by the far left and a college “education” is no longer worth the expense. However, I was surprised Treadgold did not mention Hillsdale College as a template for the university he proposes. Hillsdale is the polar opposite of today’s typical university and (as of now) the sole beacon of hope.(I have no connection to Hillsdale College, having graduated from the University of Redlands, a small, private college that has also been corrupted by leftist ideology. But I admire Hillsdale’s unswerving belief in America’s ideals–since 1844!)
I’m wondering how the debate teams function in the postmodern university. Remember in the old days, a topic would be presented, such as, “Resolved: Capital punishment should be ended.” One team would take the affirmative and the competing team would take the negative. But now there is only one side permitted in controversial ideas–which are now no longer controversial at the university. The team that in former days would have argued the now politically incorrect side would today be charged as thought criminals and subjected to disciplinary proceedings and rehabilitation–even though they might protest that they didn’t really hold that viewpoint. One of the foundational ideas underpinning the old debate structure was that to have an informed and reasonable commitment to an idea, one must know and understand the arguments against it as well as for it.
I got a glimpse of how “debate” teams now function, and it came as quite a shock, since I once participated on a team myself. My faculty office is next to classrooms where a debate meet was being held one weekend several weeks ago. I was surprised to hear a guy screaming, his rant peppered with F-bombs, so I went and peered into the classroom to see what was going on. The room was filled with young people in very prim attire, and the young man “debating” was standing in front, the veins on his face bulging as he rendered his social justice “oratory.” And his presentation–of you could call it that–was typical of the entire morning. It seems that what we used to call “forensics teams” back in my day are now just theater; the participants do not reason, just emote. Perhaps they are judged on how impassioned their emoting is. Are these our future attorneys?
The real old-style debate is called “Parliamentary Debate”. There are other ones “XYZ Debate” that range from limp to ridiculous.
Nowadays I expect the teams take turns denouncing anyone opposing the correct political line, and the most fervent denunciation wins. Either that or they all start clapping once the topic is announced, and whoever stops clapping first gets sent to the gulag.