Maybe that is a good thing if we can start over from scratch.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/07/lew-rockwell/are-universities-finished/
Higher education in America today is in a crisis. The diversity thought police pounce on anyone who offers the slightest resistance to them. Here are a few examples “Students at pricey Marymount Manhattan College are demanding a veteran professor be fired for allegedly falling asleep during an anti-racism Zoom meeting. Students at the Upper East Side school claim Patricia Simon, a theater arts associate professor, took a snooze during the virtual town hall last month, and have collected 1,800 petition signatures. Petition organizer Caitlin Gagnon said ‘action has only capitalized on a pattern of negligence and disrespect that Patricia Simon has exhibited over and over again.’ Gagnon included a photo of the 30-year prof, and also accused her of enabling ‘sizeist’ staffers.” A ‘sizeist,’ by the way, is someone who discriminates against people because of their physical size, e.g., requiring an obese person to pay for two seats. Of course, it doesn’t matter if the heavy person occupies two seats. If you charge more, you are still a sizeist.
If you dare to challenge the Black Lives Matter terrorists, you are dead in the water. “A longtime UCLA professor has been placed on leave after facing backlash over his response to a student’s request to postpone the final exam for African American students, considering the impact of George Floyd’s death. Gordon Klein received the email on June 2, and rejected the request. UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where Klein has taught since 1981, said Klein’s classes have been assigned to other faculty, saying the following in a statement on Wednesday: ‘The lecturer is on leave from campus and his classes have been reassigned to other faculty.’”
Even if you like Martin Luther King, you can still get fired, if you say the wrong words. Look what happened to Ajax Peris: “In a virtual class lecture, Peris read a portion of King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ which contains a couple of uses of the ‘N-word.’ On June 2, one UCLA student tweeted a video of Peris reading a passage from King’s letter, declining to omit the epithet, and expressed outrage at his uncensored reading and called for his termination. In short order, UCLA’s College of Letters and Science referred the matter to the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for review, and Peris’ department chair sent a letter to departmental faculty condemning his reading of the passage and noting that he had referred Peris to UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office. The chair also faulted Peris for showing portions of a documentary that included graphic images and descriptions of lynching, as well as narration that, the chair wrote, ‘quoted the n-word in explaining the history of lynching.’”
At Princeton, the situation is even worse. Matt Taibbi notes that “on July 4th, hundreds of faculty members and staff at Princeton University signed a group letter calling for radical changes. . . Much of . . . the letter read like someone drunk-tweeting their way through a Critical Theory seminar. Signatories asked the University to establish differing compensation levels according to race, demanding ‘course relief,’ ‘summer salary,’ ‘one additional semester of sabbatical,’ and ‘additional human resources’ for ‘faculty of color,’ a term left undefined. That this would be grossly illegal didn’t seem to bother the 300-plus signatories of one of America’s most prestigious learning institutions.”
When Joshua Katz, a classics professor at Princeton, protested against the letter’s demands, “University President Christopher Eisengruber ‘personally’denounced Katz for using the word “terrorist.” Katz was also denounced by his Classics department, which in a statement on the department web page insisted his act had ‘heedlessly put our Black colleagues, students, and alums at serious risk’ while hastening to add ‘we gratefully acknowledge all the forms of anti-racist work that members of our community have done.’”
One last example: BLM thugs are trying to oust the outstanding Austrian economist Walter Block from Loyola University in New Orleans, based on a demonstrably false claim that he supports slavery: “Walter Block is a professor in the Business school at Loyola University New Orleans. He has publicly stated that he believes slavery to be wrong because it goes against Libertarianism, not because it is morally wrong. He has justified women being paid less than men (see his book Building Blocks of Liberty) He is allegedly an ableist, too. While it is important to have professors with different views and opinions and beliefs, racist and sexist beliefs should not be a part of this. It is harmful to any non-men and any Black people to be taught that slavery isn’t morally wrong, to be taught that women don’t deserve to be paid and treated equally.
Fight racism, end racism, fire the racists. Fire Walter Block.”
As if this weren’t bad enough, universities are taking advantage of the phony Covid-19 pandemic to offer worse service for about the same astronomical tutition: “After the sudden closure of college campuses across the country in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the fate of the fall semester was suddenly placed into question. All eight schools in the Ivy League have announced fall 2020 decisions as of early July. Penn, Brown, Cornell, Princeton, and Yale will all have hybrid modes of fall instruction, while Harvard will be completely online for the entire academic year. Each school has different decisions regarding which class years will come back to campus and where they will be housed during each school’s modified fall calendar.”
Professors have used the situation as an excuse to destroy already weakened academic standards. “As COVID-19 has forced classes online, colleges have eased up on graded assignments – even at the prestigious Ivy League schools. With professors and students advocating for automatic A’s or to be given passing grades at the minimum, many college administrations have surrendered highly generous grading policies to give students a break as coronavirus has taken its toll on the country”.
The crisis in higher education would not go away, even if we could get rid of Covid-19 and the PC thought police. Higher education has been in trouble for a long time. As the great economist Walter Williams has pointed out, “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016, only 37% of white high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 70% of them. Roughly 17% of black high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 58% of them. A 2018 Hechinger Report found, ‘More than four in 10 college students end up in developmental math and English classes at an annual cost of approximately $7 billion, and many of them have a worse chance of eventually graduating than if they went straight into college-level classes.’
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, ‘when considering all first-time undergraduates, studies have found anywhere from 28 percent to 40 percent of students enroll in at least one remedial course. When looking at only community college students, several studies have found remediation rates surpassing 50 percent.’ Only 25% of students who took the ACT in 2012 met the test’s readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math and science). Read the rest of this entry »
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