RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the final bells of the academic year sounded in New York City’s public schools two weeks ago, thousands of students and parents were dreaming of a better education down the block. Through a citywide program called Public School Choice, parents can apply to move their children from a poorly performing school to a better one. But the city Education Department’s stringent policy means that many of these requests are rejected. Last year about 5,500 families applied, but the city approved transfers for only 3,500 students.

Soula Adam, a single mother in Astoria, Queens, knows the disappointment of the rest. For years she tried to help her son Harry escape what she felt were lackluster teachers at P.S. 70, the same neighborhood school that she had attended as a girl. “I liked P.S. 122 on Ditmars Boulevard,” she recalls, explaining that the school was more rigorous and only two miles away. But she knew the city’s transfer guidelines would never allow her son into P.S. 122. “If you’re not zoned,” she says, “you couldn’t get in.”

Harry tried to win a spot at a charter school through an open lottery, but his number wasn’t called. Eventually he earned a scholarship to Saint Demetrios Astoria, a Greek Orthodox school close to home. That private generosity opened the door for the Adams, but thousands of other public-school pupils remain stuck.

Transfers between New York City schools first became available in 2003, after the No Child Left Behind Act required districts nationwide to create options for students whose schools lagged behind federal standards for progress. For more than a decade, however, the Education Department permitted moves only for students with specific hardships, such as health issues or one-way commutes over 75 minutes. Former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein defended this restriction on transfers for the sake of choice. “The system doesn’t work that way,” he told the Observer in 2014. “By definition, some kids get better choices.”

But last year the city began allowing “guidance” transfers, available to students who are not “progressing or achieving academically or socially.” The update received favorable notice from school-choice advocates, but the kicker is in the fine print: Transfers are still open only to students in 5% of New York City’s schools—the 88 designated as “priority” because of perennially poor performance. But nonpriority schools can still be bad, with as few as a quarter of test-takers proficient in English and math. Students at these schools have no recourse to move out and up.

Consider a tale of two elementary schools: P.S. 173 (Fresh Meadows) and P.S. 187 ( Hudson Cliffs ), less than a mile apart in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Both are zoned schools with no admission criteria beyond place of residence, and yet the share of students passing state exams in 2016 was 30 percentage points higher at Hudson Cliffs. The only thing that stops a bright student at Fresh Meadows from attaining success up the street is the city’s red tape.

In the long term, the free flow of students enabled by a reformed transfer program would put pressure on underperforming schools, as students left and budgets tightened. Successful schools wouldn’t be burdened by the influx of newcomers, since New York’s funding algorithm allocates enough money each year to cover the marginal cost of each additional student.

Critics may say the way to fix a bad school isn’t to cut its funding. But why should fear of tight budgets hold back students who are ready to succeed? Moreover, many of the city’s specialized private schools that serve low-income students have delivered impressive results with as little as half the funding per student as traditional public schools. CONTINUE AT SITE

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a lengthy report on the curious case of Keith Fink, a part-time lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. UCLA refused to renew his contract, writing in a letter that his teaching did not “meet the standard of excellence.” Fink cried foul, arguing that his free-speech classes were popular with students and that he was really fired for his pointed criticisms of the university and his stalwart defense of free speech on campus.

And, in fact, he was popular. As the Chronicle notes, “Student evaluations of the free-speech course Mr. Fink taught this year . . . mostly paint a picture of Mr. Fink as an engaging teacher and his course as stimulating and interesting.” His faculty evaluators, however, believed that there was “more to it than what the students think.” They took issue with his Socratic method of teaching (common in law schools), believed that he pushed his own point of view too much, and raised concerns about the “climate” in the classroom.

As I read the story, I had an immediate sense of déjà vu. I’ve litigated cases like this before, I’ve evaluated cases like this before, and I’m familiar with the extraordinary double standards that define how academic freedom works in modern higher education. Perhaps UCLA is right. Perhaps it has even-handedly applied its alleged “incredibly high” standards and has fired popular left-wing lecturers in part because they’ve pushed their views too much on their students. Perhaps it routinely fires even popular teachers for poor teaching performance. In other words, perhaps it’s different from the vast majority of colleges and universities — schools that have consciously and unconsciously created entire systems of anti-conservative discrimination.

First, let’s discuss the challenge of even finding a job in higher education. It’s difficult enough for even well-qualified leftists, but often academic departments define academic positions in such a way that effectively excludes the conservative point of view. Look at this current job posting at Harvard’s divinity school. It’s for a tenure-track professor of “religion, violence, and peace-building.” There’s nothing inherently conservative or liberal about the topic. Indeed, it fascinates me, but hidden within the job description is this gem of a sentence:

It is understood that applicants will employ forms of analysis that address race, gender, sexuality, and/or other intersecting forms of social power, such as womanist, feminist, and/or queer approaches. [Emphasis added.]

Ahh yes, “intersectionality” rears its radical head. While this posting is extreme (though at an important institution), it perfectly illustrates a long-building phenomenon. Academics have redefined and refocused disciplines to such an extent that they essentially exclude conservative inquiry. Thus, they can honestly say they’ve never discussed politics in hiring decisions because the discipline itself has narrowed so much that it closes itself to conservatives.

Consider this statement, years ago, from the American Association of University Professors’ Roger Bowen. He was defending universities from the charge of ideological discrimination in hiring. First, he said this:

I’ve been a department chair, I’ve been a college president. I’ve conducted more searches than I can begin to describe, and I can tell you I have never asked a candidate what his or her party identification is, and I don’t know of a search committee in the country that would do that.

I’d agree with Bowen. In all my years representing conservative professors, I’ve never seen questions regarding party identification. But that’s a red herring. Search committees aren’t that blatant. They don’t have to be. Here’s the key quote:

Anthropologists — which apparently, according to the study, Democrats far outnumber Republicans [among anthropologists] — what do they do? Anthropologists, the discipline itself is focused on questioning religious and cultural myth, particularly myth that celebrates national, cultural or racial superiorities. That in many classrooms will be a shocker for a lot of students.

Sociologists tend to inquire on the origins of inequality as a source of alienation: new concepts to many college students that will seem, I imagine, given illustrations using the American example, rather shocking.

Political scientists, they focus on questions of legitimacy. . . .

Is there no limit to the level of disgusting behavior on college campuses that parents, taxpayers, donors and legislators will accept? Colleges have become islands of intolerance, and as with fish, the rot begins at the head.Let’s examine some recent episodes representative of a general trend and ask ourselves why we should tolerate it plus pay for it.

Students at Evergreen State College harassed biology professor Bret Weinstein because he refused to leave campus, challenging the school’s decision to ask white people to leave campus for a day of diversity programming. The profanity-laced threats against the faculty and president can be seen on a YouTube video titled “Student takeover of Evergreen State College” (http://tinyurl.com/yah2eo3p).

What about administrators permitting students to conduct racially segregated graduation ceremonies, which many colleges have done, including Ivy League ones such as Columbia and Harvard universities? Permitting racially segregated graduation ceremonies makes a mockery of the idols of diversity, multiculturalism and inclusion, which so many college administrators worship. Or is tribalism part and parcel of diversity?

Trinity College sociology professor Johnny Eric Williams recently called white people “inhuman assholes.” In the wake of the Alexandria, Virginia, shooting at a congressional baseball practice, Williams tweeted, “It is past time for the racially oppressed to do what people who believe themselves to be ‘white’ will not do, put (an) end to the vectors of their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system. #LetThemF—-ingDie”

June Chu, dean of Pierson College at Yale University, recently resigned after having been placed on leave because of offensive Yelp reviews she had posted. One of her reviews described customers at a local restaurant as “white trash” and “low class folk”; another review praised a movie theater for its lack of “sketchy crowds.” In another review of a movie theater, she complained about the “barely educated morons trying to manage snack orders for the obese.”

Harvey Mansfield, a distinguished Harvard University professor who has taught at the school for 55 years, is not hopeful about the future of American universities. In a College Fix interview, Mansfield said, “No, I’m not very optimistic about the future of higher education, at least in the form it is now with universities under the control of politically correct faculties and administrators” (http://tinyurl.com/y7qadxlz). Once America’s pride, universities, he says, are no longer a marketplace of ideas or bastions of free speech. Universities have become “bubbles of decadent liberalism” that teach students to look for offense when first examining an idea.

Who is to blame for the decline of American universities? Mansfield argues that it is a combination of administrators, students and faculties. He puts most of the blame on faculty members, some of whom are cowed by deans and presidents who don’t want their professors to make trouble. I agree with Mansfield’s assessment in part. Many university faculty members are hostile to free speech and open questioning of ideas. A large portion of today’s faculty and administrators were once the hippies of the 1960s, and many have contempt for the U.S. Constitution and the values of personal liberty. The primary blame for the incivility and downright stupidity we see on university campuses lies with the universities’ trustees. Every board of trustees has fiduciary responsibility for the governance of a university, shaping its broad policies. Unfortunately, most trustees are wealthy businessmen who are busy and aren’t interested in spending time on university matters. They become trustees for the prestige it brings, and as such, they are little more than yes men for the university president and provost. If trustees want better knowledge about university goings-on, they should hire a campus ombudsman who is independent of the administration and accountable only to the board of trustees.

Northwestern is hiring a new “assistant director of Fraternity and Sorority Life.” Greek organizations are a key aspect of the college experience for millions of students, and the organizations are deeply involved in the college itself. Sounds normal.

But Northwestern University has decided that Greek Life, just like the rest of the campus, needs to be a training ground for Leftism. From Campus Reform:

The new “ Assistant Director, Fraternity and Sorority Life” will be responsible not only for advising fraternity and sororities, responding to emergency situations, and ensuring adherence to university policies, but also for assisting in the coordination of “social justice education” programming.

Minimum qualifications for the position include at least three years of experience working with fraternities and sororities, understanding of the educational environment at “highly selective institutions like Northwestern,” and “demonstrated experience” in the field of “social justice.”

While the new assistant director should also ideally hold a Master’s Degree from an accredited college or university, according to the listing, Northwestern will also consider applicants with an “appropriate combination” of work and educational experience.

[…]

Those skills will likely come into play when the new assistant director begins to “assist in the coordination of thematic programmatic/educational initiatives,” which can include leadership/community development, harm reduction/risk management, or social justice education.

Northwestern wants someone to lead the indoctrination of fraternity and sorority members into social justice zealotry. They can try to present this any way they want, but it’s nothing but a case of indoctrination of a politically charged ideology. Students simply shouldn’t find themselves being indoctrinated into a radical ideology that ultimately boils down to blaming straight white males for all the ills of the world.

At least Northwestern is a private university, which means they’re not blowing taxpayer dollars directly. Of course, they do receive plenty of taxpayer money in the form of federal student loans and grants.

I look forward to the day that parents and students recognize social justice nonsense for what it is, and understand how this movement is exploiting the campus environment to spread its noxious ideology.

At a dinner for Silicon Valley executives in early 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to America. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” the typically blunt Apple cofounder told the president. Examining Jobs’s claim, the New York Times looked at Apple’s vast Chinese operations and found that workers there not only worked for less than Americans did; more of them were skilled. To oversee production and guide some 200,000 assembly-line workers, Apple, for instance, needed 8,700 industrial engineers—positions that required more than a high school diploma but less than a full college degree. While abundant in China, these kinds of employees are harder to find in the United States. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” an unnamed Apple executive told the Times.

That’s a refrain that more and more American business executives are uttering these days. Even as politicians argue over how to create or keep “good jobs” in the U.S., a recent National Federation of Independent Businesses survey reported that the percentage of small businesses saying that they get no or few qualified applicants for available jobs has hit a 17-year high. Studies estimate that hundreds of thousands of positions in manufacturing firms went unfilled, even during the post-financial-crisis downturn and subsequent weak recovery, because of the lack of skilled workers. “Open manufacturing jobs are at an all-time high,” the former CEO of Siemens USA, the industrial giant, observed in December.

Much of the problem, say business leaders and employment experts, is an educational failure. Career and technical training in the U.S. hasn’t evolved to keep up with the transformation of the modern economy—with many schools even slashing funding for vocational education. Worse, parents, guidance counselors, and even politicians keep pushing students to enter four-year college programs that provide no clear paths to employment. Meantime, jobs in traditional blue-collar trades—from manufacturing to automobile repair—have grown more sophisticated and demanding. A huge gap between job seekers’ skills and employers’ needs has resulted.

The good news is that some visionary businesses, educators, and nonprofit funders are intensifying efforts to revamp and upgrade career education—twenty-first-century vocational education—in the United States. The obstacles to such efforts are many, including school officials’ reluctance to partner with industry and lingering prejudices against vocational schooling. But for the rising number of students participating in programs that tailor education to career goals—programs that emphasize work-related experience and teach to the high standards necessary for modern jobs—the payoff has been impressive. Now the challenge is to build on those successes to ignite a broader cultural change that makes high-quality career training central to American education.

Congress may have had good intentions in 1917 when it passed the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act to promote vocational training in agriculture, industry, and trades. But the law, which required any student receiving trade-skill instruction with federal funds to spend at least half of his time in vocational training, tended to cut off vocational training from public school education. Career education eventually developed into something that teachers and guidance counselors encouraged students of low academic achievement to pursue. Though the robust post–World War II American economy provided many of these students with a solid middle-income living, vocational school became stigmatized. That stigmatization only intensified as American industrial jobs, battered by global competition and automation, started to disappear during the early 1980s, making four-year college seem for many the surest route to better jobs and higher earnings. Policymakers reinforced the message with subsidized student loans and other initiatives that sought to make college readily available to all.

Unfortunately, many students wound up enrolling in four-year colleges who weren’t suited for it, and the results haven’t been pretty. These days, only 55 percent of college students graduate within six years, leaving many with no degree and dismal job prospects. Meanwhile, student-loan debt has swelled to a monstrous $1.3 trillion.

Many of the students would have been better off receiving some kind of vocational training. Both as candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has tapped into widespread blue-collar discontent with his call to overhaul free-trade agreements to keep jobs from heading overseas. The reality, though, is that plenty of good-paying jobs are already available for properly trained workers. These positions typically fall into a category known as middle-skilled, meaning that they require some postsecondary education—for instance, a certified apprenticeship or a two-year associate’s degree from a community college—but not necessarily four years of university. These jobs are found in health care, information technology, manufacturing, and construction, among other fields. According to a 2013 Brookings Institution study, more than half of all jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) do not demand four-year degrees—and they pay an average annual salary above $50,000. Further, while high-paying STEM jobs requiring advanced degrees do cluster in a few major urban centers, plentiful middle-skilled jobs—ranging from cybersecurity specialist and web designer to robotics engineer and industrial-engineer technician—are dispersed throughout most American metropolitan areas, making them within geographical reach of most Americans.

Yet many of those jobs go unfilled. A 2011 survey by the consulting firm Deloitte and the Advanced Manufacturing Institute found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers—at a time when unemployment nationwide was above 8 percent. (By one estimate, some 1.5 million manufacturing jobs that America has added since the 2008 recession have been for workers with more than a high school education.) Even though the U.S. is graduating some 3 million high school students every year, nearly half of whom will enter the job market instead of continuing school, an estimated 1 million middle-skilled jobs in all fields remain unfilled.

A 2011 survey found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers.

A string of protests on college campuses that shut down events hosting conservative speakers has prompted universities around the country to pledge more tolerance for diverse opinions, but skeptics say they’ll believe it when they see it.

Johns Hopkins University announced Thursday a $150 million effort to “facilitate the restoration of open and inclusive discourse.”

The University of California, Berkeley, where protesters halted speeches by conservatives Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, is debating bringing in conservative faculty to broaden the spectrum of political discourse on campus.

About a dozen schools have signed on to a new doctrine from the University of Chicago that puts free speech above concerns about political correctness.

“I think there’s a lot of embarrassment on campuses, so some kind of statement from the top might have good-sounding words but actions speak louder than words,” said Jack Citrin, a professor of political science at Berkeley. “I’d like to see what happens the next time [conservative intellectuals] Charles Murray or Ayaan Hirsi Ali try to speak on a campus.”

Dr. Citrin is a member of the Heterodox Academy, a consortium of about 900 academics that aims to broaden the diversity of opinions on campus. This week the group released its second university rankings, which aim to measure just how well the most elite schools in the nation are faring in that regard.

The organization says its members come from across the political spectrum. The largest group (25%) consider themselves moderates, according to an internal poll of their members posted on their website.

Harvard University, which has repeatedly been in the crosshairs of free-speech advocates, was 103rd out of 106 schools in the Heterodox ranking.

Heterodox, which weighs schools’ regulations as well as the ratings of other first-amendment groups, cited Harvard’s history of censoring outside speakers, a blacklist on private clubs, fraternities and sororities, and a laminated “social justice” place mat handed out to students before winter break in 2015. The aim of the place mat was to help students prepare “for holiday discussions on race and justice with loved ones.”

Striking the balance between protecting both students and the First Amendment isn’t easy, said Ari Cohn, a director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He called it “advanced citizenship.”

But he also condemned university leaders for “wanting to have their cake and eat it too.” He pointed to the commencement address delivered by Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust in May.

“If some words are to be treated as equivalent to physical violence and silenced or even prosecuted, who is to decide which words?” she said.

A week later, Mr. Cohn said, the answer became clear: Harvard would decide. CONTINUE AT SITE

In an exclusive interview with The College Fix, venerable conservative Harvard University Professor Harvey Mansfield laments he is ‘not very optimistic about the future of higher education’ https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32311/

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Harvey Mansfield has been in higher education for a long time. In fact, he’s been a faculty member at Harvard since 1962. Yet, after all those years, the conservative professor of government isn’t hopeful about future of his trade.

“No, I’m not very optimistic about the future of higher education, at least in the form it is now with universities under the control of politically correct faculties and administrators,” he said.

His remark came during a 35-minute interview in April in his fourth floor office at Harvard, where the 85-year-old Mansfield lamented universities for losing their aspiration, describing them as bubbles of staunch liberalism ruled by faculties that have failed to make universities reach their potential.

‘Bubbles of decadent liberalism’

Once America’s pride, Mansfield argues universities are no longer the marketplace of ideas nor the bastions of free speech.

“Now [universities’] sole function seems to be to attack a free country and to try to narrow freedoms to privileges, for those who have been designated victims,” he says.

What universities have become are “bubbles of decadent liberalism,” that teach students to look for offense when first examining an idea.

“They don’t prepare you for the real world or for even an unreal world. They prepare you to be sort of lifelong college students,” he said.

Who’s to blame? Mansfield argues it’s a combination of administrations, students and faculties. However, he also puts most of the onus on his counterparts.

“I would put the blame primarily on the faculty because they could have their way and if their way was of a vibrant and remarkable university, they could have their way if they wanted it,” he said.

Too many professors, according Mansfield, give in and allow themselves to be cowed by deans and presidents that don’t want their faculty to make trouble. However, Mansfield himself hasn’t bought into the politically correct campus culture.

“You know, I try to use my tenure. If you are a professor and you have tenure, you ought to use it to say things which politicians who depend on getting votes can’t say,” he says.

Universities don’t know why they exist

Mansfield argues that higher education isn’t sure anymore why education is higher than anything else. For him, the current state of higher education stems from the current conception of culture.

Speaking in philosophical and theoretical language, Mansfield said culture used to mean refinement. Today, he says it “just means the way a society happens to think and there’s no value judgement in it any longer.”

“With this, universities have lost their sense of aspiration, of providing direction or questioning or thought,” he said. “So I think this is a general malaise of higher education. It doesn’t know why it exists.”

Though, that isn’t the biggest change the government professor has seen in his more than half century in higher education. That belongs to the 1960s, and the conception of liberalism that decade ushered in.

“What happened then was students who were mostly liberal and the faculty who were mostly liberal turned against themselves. The late [1960s] was an attack on liberalism, not on conservatism,” he said.

He adds the 1960s led liberals away from being concerned with liberty, with them losing a sense of speaking for Americans and humans as a whole and instead focusing on particular groups, like blacks and women.

“So, the universal ideas were turned into ideas for promoting the tribe, a kind of section within our democracy,” Mansfield explained.

What it led to, he says, was the labeling of certain social groups as “officially designated victims.”

“We have a society now of officially designated victims plus the rest. In the recent election, I’d say the rest took notice and rebelled,” he said.

Only engineering prof got funding to redesign a class around social justice https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/33779/

The Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve University is offering students and professors thousands of dollars each to promote, research and advocate for social justice.

While the university says “social activism” has been a focus since its founding by an abolitionist, the seven-year-old institute – which is directly funded by the administration – has more recently started paying people to make this “hallmark” of Case Western Reserve a reality.li

Undergraduates can apply for up to $2,500 to support any research project related to social justice, and graduate students can apply for grants up to $3,500.

Professors who wish to redesign their classes to better promote social justice can also receive grants, to the tune of up to $2,500.

Tenured or tenure-track professors who can “demonstrate a long-term commitment to social justice” can also apply for up to $10,000 in grants to support a research project, as long as they can justify how it relates to social justice.

Their university-funded research can “uniquely shape both the university’s efforts to combat inequality and other local, national and global issues,” says the fellowships page.

“Social justice is defined as eradicating systems of power and oppression with the purpose of advancing fairness and equality through the redistribution of resources and opportunities and exalting human dignity and respect,” the application reads.

The funding is consistent with the mission of the institute, according to Lisa Kollins, the institute’s head administrator.

Barely a week goes by without our political atmosphere becoming more noxious and the rhetoric growing more heated. A recent incident at my alma mater, the University of Georgia, highlights the toxicity of today’s discourse, especially on the Left.

On May 11, someone at the Twitter account for the Young Democratic Socialists at the University of Georgia retweeted an article about a professor who said that Republicans in Congress should be rounded up and shot with, “This is absolutely outrageous. House Republicans should NOT be shot! They should be guillotined.”

The group has since deleted the tweet — and the rest of their account — but, fortunately for us, screen shots are forever.

Campus newspaper The Red & Black notes that the organization’s former leader claims the tweet was a joke (because the only jokes anyone can make today must come at the expense of conservatives):

According to David Littman, founder of the Young Democratic Socialists, the inflammatory tweet was intended as a joke and should not be taken literally.

“I wouldn’t have made that joke myself, but it is clearly and obviously facetious,” Littmann said. “As a strict pacifist, I believe that all violence is immoral, period. But it’s absurd to take the joke literally.”

For what it’s worth, Littman graduated from UGA in 2016 and is no longer affiliated with the organization.