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EDUCATION

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Scott Walker’s Tuition Markdown A tuition freeze stirs a campus revolt but not by students.

By on February 11th, 2017

Scott Walker’s 2011 budget reforms are now paying out what he called a “reform dividend” in his budget proposal this week. The Wisconsin Governor wants to share some of the windfall with college students. Strangely enough, but then maybe not, his inspiration is riling up the bureaucracy that allegedly exists to serve college students.

Mr. Walker froze in-state tuition at the University of Wisconsin in 2013, and now he’s promoting a 5% cut for the 2018-19 school year—the first year-over-year cost decrease in the history of the public university system. The Governor suggests a state budget surplus can be used in part to increase UW’s $6.3 billion budget by $105.2 million, plus a separate $35 million to backfill the lost tuition.

Including the tuition freeze and next year’s cut, the class of 2019 will save about $9,000 each relative to the trend in the decade before the freeze, when UW tuition climbed 118%.

Nearly everybody agrees college affordability is receding and claims to be worried about student debt, though woe unto the Governors who do more than talk. Mr. Walker’s tuition discount is getting a cool reception in the Republican-controlled state legislature because it is a spending increase. But compare that to the reception in Madison and other college towns.

UW–Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank of the flagship campus said in a statement she was “very appreciative” of the funding increases, but she told the faculty in January: “It will not surprise you to know that I think this isn’t the best way to use state dollars. Saving everybody a hundred dollars or so is peanuts compared to what’s needed, which is affordability for low- and middle-income students. We have large numbers of families for whom that hundred dollars is meaningless.”

The UW Board of Regents has been in open revolt against the tuition freeze for years, viewing Mr. Walker’s concession prices as beneath the school’s reputation and dignity. “I don’t want to diminish the importance of tuition, but let’s not get tuition tunnel vision,” UW-System President Ray Cross warned last October. By the way, the new Walker budget brings need-based financial aid to an all-time state high.

Mr. Walker’s tuition cut is a useful exercise in truth-in-advertising for academic priorities. Public universities want both higher costs for students and more taxpayer money, and anybody who tries to challenge this status quo is merely offering “peanuts.”

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College to Host Workshop on Anti-Bias Training for Toddlers Apparently there are a bunch of racists and sexist tots out there who need to be educated. By Katherine Timpf

By on February 11th, 2017

Evergreen State College is planning to host a workshop “to help family members interested in anti-bias education for children ages 3-6.”

The program, called “A is for Anti-Bias,” is scheduled for Feb. 17, according to a description of the event on the school’s official website.

Now, my first thought when I heard this was to wonder whether or not there are actually a bunch of racist, sexist toddlers running around out there that I’ve been unaware of who are inspiring this sort of thing. I mean, I’ve always thought that toddlers were more into things like The Wiggles, temper tantrums, and cookies than white supremacy.

An article in Campus Reform seemed to consider the purpose of the workshop to be to help prevent toddlers from learning racism before it was too late rather than to rehabilitate toddlers who are currently active Nazis, and it’s not clear from the event description itself what exactly the reasoning is.

In any case, I’m not exactly convinced that this is going to do anyone any good, no matter what the aim is. After all, a recent study conducted by researchers from several major universities found that the lessons taught during implicit-bias trainings have very little to do with how people actually act. If these kinds of trainings aren’t doing adults any good, are they really going to have any kind of impact on a human who is still trying to learn how to stick a straw in a Capri Sun juice by himself?

The workshop is sponsored by Children’s Center.

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The Federalist Paper: The Publication Neil Gorsuch Helped Found at Columbia Gorsuch has been a sensible voice for conservatism in liberal circles since his college years.By D. Keith Mano

By on February 11th, 2017

Editor’s Note: We honor our late former colleague, D. Keith Mano, by sharing over the next weeks several of his acclaimed columns, which were published in National Review every fortnight from 1972 to 1989. The following piece was first published in the February 13, 1987, issue, under the headline, “The Federalist Paper​.”

You can still get a good education at Columbia – yes, and Soviet fishing trawlers still do fish. Nonetheless, in that maison tolérée of academic leftism, where political truth is found torso-murdered daily, one student publication had a shocking headline – Divest now in the USSR. This at Columbia, where all right-brain functions are lobotomized during freshman week: first major university to divest from South Africa. They call that one student publication The Federalist Paper (after Columbia alumni Hamilton and Jay) and Vol. I, No. I came out last October. Came out written in elegant, witty, temperate diction, with a fine sense of place and moral errand. FP’s molto is Veritas Non Erubiscit (Truth Doesn’t Blush). And, to quote the first Statement of Purpose, “it will not be shouted down.”

These seven or eight young men who are reinventing conservatism at 116th Street and Broadway make up an extraordinary and diverse group. Brilliant, as you might suppose. But also mature and remarkably poised. They hold their audience in high and affectionate regard—that poor Columbia student intellectually lung-shot and left for dead by campus radicalism. Moreover, though their mean class level is sophomore-junior, they have considerable journalistic experience. Neil Gorsuch, Dean Pride, and A. Lawrence Levy were all associate editors of another conservative publication, The Morningside Review. “The Review.” Gorsuch said, “is more of a magazine. It addresses national and international issues, and it simply isn’t read on campus. What we’ve done here is try to establish something that has a broader base of interest. More people read The Federalist than ever read The Morningside Review.”

Readership matters, of course—so much so that no one on the FP staff will admit to being conservative. This is in part, an honest distancing from Reaganism, Republicanism, Falwell, whatever. In part, too, it is careful policy. “If our first issue had been far right, we might’ve been written off before we got started,” board member P. T. Waters thought. “We try to show that you can be liberal as hell, but still disagree with all those crazy knee-jerk liberals out there.” And Levy took that up: “We’re just trying to be an alternative. At Columbia that usually means you’re right-wing or moderate-to-right, because the mainstream is so far left.” And yet issues one and two belong in a liberal phobia clinic. The Promise of SDI, for instance. Or The ANC is not the only solution. Plus an incisive repudiation of mandatory gay seminars for freshmen. Plus damning information about the Reverend William Starr, leftist Episcopal double agent on campus. Plus a vivid Month in Review short-take section, which imitates NR up front pretty consciously. Like so:

CAPITALISM ON THE MOVE

During recent Warsaw Pact maneuvers in Czechoslovakia, authorities discovered that four Soviet soldiers traded their tank to a tavern owner for 24 bottles of vodka, seven pounds of herring, and some pickles. The owner dismantled the lank and sold the pieces to a metal-recycling center.

At Columbia they give you an equivalency diploma for that kind of reportage. Equivalent to ostracism.

Problems of self-definition attend. “We’ve basically been sitting back,” Gorsuch admitted, “and reflecting on what the Left has said and using our month to review it. They choose the issues—South Africa, military recruitment on campus, pornography, SDI. But now I think we have to come out with something.” Waters concurred: “We’d like to change the debate, not just reflect it.” That will be more difficult. These are sharp and idiosyncratic minds from all over America: D.C, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. The general atmosphere at FP might be characterized as center to right with a libertarian strain. From that composition, manifestos don’t quickly arise. “Reason why we can be so diverse.” said Gorsuch, “is that there is so much room to the right. It’s not a matter of having to be a conservative 10 be identified with the Right, it’s a matter of being a thinking man or woman.”

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Radicalizing for Vandalism with Campus Identity Politics Campus identity politics studies are a taxpayer funded violent campus cult. Daniel Greenfield

By on February 10th, 2017

“Bernie is asking for a political revolution and college students are some of the main demographic he is speaking to,” Elizabeth Prier, communications director for the Young Democrats of Watauga County, told students at Appalachian State University’s Plemmons Student Union.

That was a year ago.

This year, Prier became one of four ASU students arrested for spray painting “F— Trump,” “F— Cops” and “Black Lives Matter” on a police car and stores in downtown Boone, North Carolina.

Watauga County is divided between rural conservative voters and the students of Appalachian State University. Boone has a smaller population than the number of students at ASU. The tug of war between residents and students made it a swing county going by very narrow margins from Obama to Romney.

The Watauga County Board of Elections had been forced to add an early voting site on campus so that ASU students wouldn’t be expected to walk a few blocks over to vote even while rural voters were being disenfranchised and expected to travel for miles. ASU students won. And the natives lost.

Hillary Clinton won Watauga County, but it didn’t give her the state. And the ASU leftists lashed out.

At four in the morning, the four feminists went to work. The Appalachian Antique Mall, its cozy windows still filled with shining lights and gifts, was defaced with hateful scrawls of “Black Lives Matter” and “Ruled by White Supremacy”. Earth Fare, an organic food supermarket, was denounced for “Neoliberalism”. The term is largely associated with the anti-free enterprise radical left.

The Dan’l Boone Inn, a family restaurant in one of the oldest buildings in town serving Southern Fried Chicken and Black Cherry Preserves, was smeared. The vandals did their worst to a Boone police cruiser.

ASU facilities had also been vandalized making it all too easy to figure out who was responsible. A tip to High Country Crime Stoppers located the culprits who were predictably ASU students.

The four, Elizabeth Prier, 22,, Julia Grainger, 22, Taryn Bledsoe, 22, and Hannah Seay, 21 were part of Appalachian State University’s social justice crowd. The meaning of what happened to them goes beyond the vandalism in downtown Boone. It was the endpoint of the indoctrination into extremism on campuses across the country that transforms students into vandals and violent protesters.

How did Elizabeth Prier go from campaigning from Bernie Sanders to vandalism within a year?

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UC Berkeley Alumna: It ‘Is a Violent Act’ to Say Protests Should Be Peaceful The former student says anyone who calls for protests to be peaceful is displaying ‘idiocy.’ By Katherine Timpf

By on February 9th, 2017

An alumna of the University of California–Berkeley is defending the anarchists who used violence to protest a planned Milo Yiannopoulos speech on campus last week, calling it an “act of violence” to demand that these protests be peaceful.

Nisa Dang, whose Facebook page identifies her as a current Nevada State Democratic Party field organizer, wrote a piece for the Daily Californian explaining that she was disgusted to see how many liberals took to Facebook after Wednesday’s riots to say that “in order for a protest to be effective, it must also be nonviolent,” because that’s a “flawed, problematic and deeply cowardly line of reasoning.”

That’s right: These people smashed windows, threw rocks at police officers, hurled Molotov cocktails, and caused $100,000 worth of damage, and Dang says that if you’re going to say that was wrong, then you need to “check your privilege” because “asking people to maintain a peaceful dialogue” during these kinds of demonstrations “is a violent act.”

Yes, you read that right . . . hurling flames into the air is defensible, but asking people to please not throw flames into the air “is a violent act,” and if you disagree, Dang writes, then that is “idiocy.” Why? Well, according to Dang, there were rumors that Yiannopoulos “had plans to name undocumented students” during his speech, so no one has any right to say that it was wrong for people to get preemptively violent.

“If I know that you are planning to attack me, I’ll do all I can to throw the first punch,” she writes, adding that “police are violent agents of the state.”

One word for you, Dang: Nope.

Yes — some of the views expressed by some of the people on the alt-right absolutely are disgusting, and there absolutely is a serious need for criminal-justice reform in this country. I won’t deny that. I also won’t deny that I’m privileged, and that, as a white person, I’ll never know what it’s like to live as anything but a white person. But none of that means that I can’t tell people that they probably shouldn’t just start setting s*** on fire , because — and forgive me for being controversial — it absolutely is bad to just start setting s*** on fire.

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Who’s Afraid of Student Journalists? The American Association of University Professors likens reporting on campus to ‘witch hunts.’ By John J. Miller

By on February 9th, 2017

Mr. Miller is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, a writer for National Review, and the founder and executive director of the College Fix.

Riots last week at the University of California, Berkeley stopped Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing provocateur who contributes to Breitbart News, from speaking on campus. The violence forced the cancellation of his event and inflicted $100,000 in damage to school property, according to administrators. Then it spread to New York University, where police arrested 11 protesters who tried to halt the libertarian comedian Gavin McInnes from talking to students.

The American Association of University Professors has said nothing about this coastal turmoil. Yet it has condemned what it apparently regards as a greater threat: students who provide accurate reports on the shouted-down speakers in their auditoriums and the left-wing biases in their classrooms.

In a 1,000-word statement released last month, the AAUP bemoaned “new efforts by private groups to monitor the conduct of faculty members,” which it likened to “witch hunts.” Then it named names: Professor Watchlist, Campus Reform and the College Fix.

I know a little about the first two groups and a lot about the third: I founded the College Fix seven years ago. Every day the website publishes articles by student journalists, who work with our professional editors to tell true stories about campus politics and culture. Our goal is to create compelling and original content, while identifying a new generation of promising writers and editors before they make the mistake of going to law school.

In recent days, the Fix has carried accounts of the disturbances at Berkeley and NYU. Our writers also have covered Barnard College’s proposal to require attendance at workshops on “inclusion and equity,” plus Pepperdine University’s decision to remove a statue of Columbus, whose presence has became too “painful,” according to the school’s president, Andrew K. Benton.

The Fix also brings readers into classrooms, as it did last fall when professors turned their lecterns into bully pulpits. One article described how Bruce Conforth, a music lecturer at the University of Michigan, began an election-eve class by urging students to vote for Hillary Clinton because she favors abortion rights, a higher minimum wage, and tuition-free college. Readers who questioned the article’s accuracy could watch an accompanying video of Mr. Conforth’s stump speech.

Professors who proclaim their own partisanship are bad enough, but some even turn their classrooms into semester-long re-education camps. Last fall at the Colorado Springs campus of the University of Colorado, history lecturer Jared Benson and sociology instructor Nicholas Lee taught a course titled “Resistance and Revolution.” In expletive-laden lectures, these self-styled Marxists called America’s founders “terrorists,” compared the Sons of Liberty to the Westboro Baptist Church, and ridiculed “the taxation-without-representation argument” as “asinine” on the grounds that American revolutionaries were rich men who didn’t want to pay their fair share. They also insisted that Ronald Reagan had little to do with the demise of the Soviet Union and that Martin Luther King Jr. was a secret communist (which they meant as a compliment). CONTINUE AT SITE

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Milo at Berkeley Identity politics and the progressive assault on campus free speech. Richard L. Cravatts

By on February 8th, 2017

Of the many intellectual perversions currently taking root on college campuses, perhaps none is more contradictory to what should be one of higher education’s core values than the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barraged with vitriol, all at the hands of progressive groups who give lip service to the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their own speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.

This is the tragic and inevitable result of a decades of grievance-based victimism by self-designated groups who frame their rights and demands on identity politics. Those who see themselves as perennial victims also feel very comfortable, when they express their feelings of being oppressed, in projecting that same victimization outward on their oppressors, as witnessed recently, for example, at Berkeley University where some 1500 violent rioters, including members of the radical, far-Left Antifa group, feminists, gay activists, pro-immigration groups, and other faculty and students, lit fires, smashed windows, tossed smoke bombs, destroyed property, and pepper sprayed and beat pro-Trump bystanders and conservatives, all because of the purported extreme ideology of Milo Yiannopoulos, a speaker invited to campus by the Berkeley College Republicans that evening as part of his “The Dangerous Faggot Tour.”

Lost in the reporting about the Berkeley rioting, of course, is the topic that was to be the theme of Yiannopoulos’ February 1st speech. It was specifically to address Berkeley’s recent decision, along with approximately 30 other campuses across the country, to become “sanctuary campuses,” giving them the dubious distinction of flaunting the intent and spirit of federal law that could lead to the arrest of students who are attending schools in this country but are actually not legally permitted to do so. Yiannopoulos was also going to raise the related, and clearly relevant, question of whether, once they had, in contravention of current law, declared themselves either sanctuary cities of sanctuary campuses, these entities should lose Federal funding.

Interestingly, in sending a letter to the university community prior to the Yiannopoulos’ planned speech, Berkeley’s Chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, confirmed, on one hand, a “right to free expression, enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and reflected in some of the most important moments of Berkeley’s history,” but then portrayed Yiannopoulos in that letter as “a troll and provocateur who uses odious behavior in part to ‘entertain,’ but also to deflect any serious engagement with ideas,” clearly signaling to readers that, as far as the Berkeley administration was concerned, this speech would be in violation of the prevailing norms and beliefs of the University at large and would, consequently, have no intrinsic intellectual value.

So while Dirks was purportedly supporting the idea of academic free speech, together with its oft-lauded vigorous open debate, he actually was violating the content neutrality that is required of free speech on campuses by leaving no one reading his letter with any doubt as to where he and the University stood on this issue, especially since the decision had already been made to ignore existing statutes that would call for the arrest and possible deportation of individuals who attend schools in this country but are not legally permitted to do so.

The debate over whether immigration to this country should continue without proper vetting and oversight, of course, was one of the central issues of the recent presidential election, so there is considerable emotion and debate over this topic, especially among college students and faculty (not to mention Democrat governors and mayors across the country), who have taken it upon themselves to decide that they have greater moral authority to settle this issue than the government does in enforcing existing laws of this nation.

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5 Great Reforms Betsy DeVos Will Bring to the Department of Education By Tyler O’Neil

By on February 8th, 2017

On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence broke a tie in the U.S. Senate to confirm President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos. Liberals have launched numerous attacks on DeVos, even protesting her nomination with a 24-hour “speechibuster” reminiscent of Ted Cruz’s anti-Obamacare message in 2013.

Liberal attacks have branded her an elitist, a religious extremist, and a foe of public education. But what will DeVos actually do as secretary of Education? Here are 5 things to expect from the newly confirmed secretary.
1. Decentralize education, abolish Common Core.

When asked what DeVos will actually do at the Department of Education, Friends of Betsy DeVos spokesman Ed Patru told PJ Media, “I think you’ll see a concerted effort to return decision-making back to states.”

Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips praised DeVos as “someone who understands that better outcomes can’t be dictated from Washington.”

Along those lines, DeVos released a statement last year announcing her full opposition to the Common Core Education Standards. DeVos supports “high standards, strong accountability, and local control,” her statement explained. She noted that many of the organizations she supported also backed Common Core, but added that “along the way, it got turned into a federalized boondoggle.”
2. Put kids before unions.

“I also think you’ll see a Department of Education that, before every decision, asks itself: ‘Is this policy in the interest of kids, or is it in the interests of teachers, administrators and organized labor leaders?'” Patru added. He argued that under DeVos’ leadership, “the interests of kids will always take priority.”

Black leaders have also praised DeVos for her concern about all kids, regardless of race. “She’s not African American, but she’s concerned about our children,” Dr. Dwight Montgomery, president of the Memphis Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), declared in December. Montgomery said DeVos will be committed to “make sure that every child is in an environment to receive the education that is in the best interest of the child.”

The new secretary of Education will “have a commitment to education, not just public education,” Montgomery declared. This may involve shaking up the status quo, to put the needs of children ahead of the education establishment.
7 Desperate Liberal Lies About Trump’s Education Pick Betsy DeVos
3. School choice.

DeVos has promised to revolutionize education in concrete ways, through school vouchers and charter schools. She has supported these programs in order to deliver “top-notch education for all students, regardless of their location or socioeconomic level.”

In 2000, DeVos and her husband backed a ballot proposal to amend the Michigan Constitution to create a school voucher program that allows taxpayer funds to follow students to private schools. While that proposal failed, the couple formed a political action committee to support voucher-friendly candidates on the national level. DeVos has also fought to expand the number of school choice programs across the country.

DeVos and her husband also helped to pass Michigan’s first charter school law, establishing publicly funded schools open to all students, but able to operate with more autonomy than traditional public schools. There are currently 275 charter schools in Michigan, and while these schools have been criticized for their lack of accountability and government oversight, they provide more educational options for children.

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The Real Democratic Party Why not a single Senate Democrat voted for Betsy DeVos.

By on February 8th, 2017

The Senate made history Tuesday when Mike Pence became the first Vice President to cast the deciding vote for a cabinet nominee.

The nominee is now Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The vote came after an all-night Senate debate in a futile effort by Democrats to turn the third Republican vote they needed to scuttle the nomination on claims that the long-time education reformer isn’t qualified. Republicans Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins had already caved, so Mr. Pence had to cast the 51st vote to confirm Mrs. DeVos.

She can now get on with her work, but this episode shouldn’t pass without noting what it says about the modern Democratic Party. Why would the entire party apparatus devote weeks of phone calls, emails and advocacy to defeating an education secretary? This isn’t Treasury or Defense. It’s not even a federal department that controls all that much education money, most of which is spent by states and local school districts. Why is Betsy DeVos the one nominee Democrats go all out to defeat?

The answer is the cold-blooded reality of union power and money. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are, along with environmentalists, the most powerful forces in today’s Democratic Party. They elect Democrats, who provide them more jobs and money, which they spend to elect more Democrats, and so on. To keep this political machine going, they need to maintain their monopoly control over public education.

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Berkeley Republican Describes Night of Terror, Says Agitators Were Trying to ‘Burn Us Alive’ By Debra Heine

By on February 7th, 2017

In an interview with The College Fix, a Berkeley College Republican said that he and his compatriots feared for their lives during the violent riot last week and some of them continue to face threats from the “anti-fascist” (Antifa) terrorists on campus.

Naweed Tahmas, who helped organize the Milo Yiannopoulos speaking event, said he was “pushed and shoved” by agitators as he headed to help prep for the speech. As the demonstration devolved into a riot, he and his peers sheltered in place as left-wing goons threw firebombs at the building.

And now Tahmas said he’s been told to watch his back because he may get jumped, and an Antifa affiliate has also threatened to publish the names and contact information of those sympathetic to Milo’s visit, called “doxing.”

Undaunted by the harassment and threats, he told The College Fix he is proud to stand for free speech.

Tahmas told The Fix that the crowd was violent and menacing from the start.

By the time he got to the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union to begin prepping for the event at 5:30 p.m., a throng of students and other demonstrators flanked the building. As he walked through the crowd, protesters surrounded him and closed in on him, pushing and shoving him from all sides.

“We know who you are, you can’t hide from us,” Tahmas recalls them saying as he pushed through the crowd.

“It was so violent at that point,” he said. “They were surrounding me. They were assaulting me.”

Rattled but essentially unharmed, he made it into the building. There he met up with Yiannopolous and other Berkeley Republicans. But it was not long before someone pulled the fire alarm. Then protesters began shooting M-80 firecrackers at the building, with several narrowly missing the group and the police officers attempting to guard them.

Tahmas said one of Milo’s security guards, a former Navy Seal, even commented: “I haven’t seen protests like this since Afghanistan.”

As the protesters began to light fires around the building, Tahmas recalls thinking that “they [were trying] to burn the building with us in it.”

“I don’t think they would have had any regrets burning us alive,” Tahmas told The Fix. “We were basically like cattle. The protesters shouted, ‘We’re going to burn and shut your shit down.’”

When the event was canceled, they tried exiting from the back of the building, but still had to pass through a gauntlet of rioters yelling, “F-ck the Berkeley College Republicans!” Milo, in the meantime, made his way out separately to an underground parking garage.

Tahmas told The Fix that he ended up sleeping at a friend’s house that night for his own safety because someone had posted his personal information on Facebook and Twitter. He said he continues to face threats for his role in organizing the event. “One individual mentioned they were ‘going to catch me in the shadows’ when I was on campus,” he said.

Tahmas disagreed with the notion propagated by some on the left that the troublemakers only came from outside groups.

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