RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21525/government-funding-to-universities

Many left-wing university faculty members… are making the absolutist claim that it is always a denial of academic freedom for governments to pressure universities with a cut-off of funding.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to hypothesize the following variation on the current situation: it’s the 1950s and 1960s in the Deep South; a formerly segregated university is allowing masked KKK racists to harass Black students, blocking some from attending classes; buildings are occupied by Klansmen demanding a return to segregation; the university is doing nothing to protect the Black students, citing academic freedom and freedom of speech.

None of these purported factual distinctions justifies the allegedly principled opposition to the Trump administration’s employment of pressure to stop anti-Jewish discrimination at Columbia from those who would praise the employment of similar pressure to prevent discrimination against Blacks, gays or other groups favored by intersectionality. It is double standard bigotry against Jews, plain and simple.

The pressure on Columbia may produce positive results — if it keeps its promises — including more academic freedom and free speech for students who were victimized by Columbia’s inaction until it was pressured to act by the threat of defunding. That would be a good thing, just as federal pressure on some southern universities that reduced discrimination against Blacks in the 1950s and 1960s was a good thing.

Many left-wing university faculty members (a redundancy if there ever was one) are rebelling against the Trump administration’s threat to cut federal funding to universities that tolerate antisemitic actions against their Jewish students. They condemned the acting president of Columbia for accepting some of the administration’s conditions for restoring the $400 million that it threatened to cut, and she was forced to resign.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/state-percent-plans-college-admissions-race-affirmative-action

In her 2024 State of the State address, Governor Kathy Hochul announced the “Top 10% Promise.” The policy guarantees New York high school seniors ranked in the top 10 percent of their class direct admission to the State University of New York system.

The initiative, introduced in response to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on affirmative action in college admissions, is hardly novel. Since 1996, several states have adopted similar “percent plans”—policies that grant automatic admission to public universities based on class rank rather than test scores—in response to bans on racial preferences. But as I show in a new Manhattan Institute issue brief, these plans often fall short, both in advancing racial diversity and in boosting academic outcomes for the students they aim to help.

Consider Texas, which pioneered the “percent plan” model. In 1992, a white woman named Cheryl Hopwood was denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law. At the time, the school based admissions primarily on the “Texas Index,” a composite score combining undergraduate GPA and LSAT results. That year, black and Hispanic applicants needed a TI of at least 189 for admission, while white and “non-preferred minority” applicants needed a minimum score of 199. Hopwood, who earned a TI of 199, sued the law school for racial discrimination.

The United States District Court for the Western District of Texas heard the case and sided with the law school. But Hopwood appealed, and in 1996, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s decision. “The law school presented no compelling justification, under the Fourteenth Amendment or Supreme Court precedent, that allows it to continue to elevate some races over others,” it held. At the time, the Fifth Circuit’s ruling was binding, and it invalidated the use of affirmative action in Texas’s public universities.

Texas Democrats feared that, without racial preferences, the number of black and Hispanic students enrolled in the state university system would plummet. So, led by state representative Irma Rangel, they proposed a supposedly race-neutral alternative to affirmative action: the “Top 10% Plan.” Rangel’s plan guaranteed all Texas seniors ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class direct admission to the state university of their choice, regardless of race or ethnicity. For this reason, Democratic lawmakers understood the policy to be an alternative to affirmative action.

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As someone who has been writing about education issues for years, I have noticed that disinformation, misinformation, and all-around twaddle are now more ubiquitous than ever. I will cover three areas here.

Massive teacher layoffs

Various online articles report that “massive teacher layoffs” —notably in California— are “devastating, chaotic, and detrimental” to student learning conditions.” While some layoffs include other employees, including librarians and nurses, most cuts are to teachers.

Most of the hysterics don’t acknowledge that many districts are over-staffed due in part to the expiring $190 billion federal Covid relief funds. Also, a major contributor to the need for fewer teachers in California is that while there were 6.3 million students in 2006-2007, now just 5.8 million are enrolled, and the state projects that number to fall to 5.3 million by 2031.

Looking at the bigger picture, researcher Chad Aldeman reports that in the 2023-24 school year, public schools nationwide added 121,000 employees, hitting a record high, even though enrollment dropped by 110,000. He discloses that about one-third of these districts added teachers while serving fewer students. For instance, Philadelphia lost nearly 16,000 students but employed 200 more teachers, dropping its student-to-teacher ratio from about 17:1 to under 15:1.

Aldeman writes that about a quarter of all districts followed the path of California’s Capistrano Unified School District, which lowered its teaching force over time but not as fast as it lost students. Capistrano suffered a “22% decline in student enrollment but reduced its teaching staff by just 7%.”

It’s worth noting that in most of the country, where teacher union contracts are in play, layoffs are made based on seniority, not teacher quality. Hence, students suffer not because of fewer teachers but rather fewer good ones.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/reflections-on-the-dismantling-of-the-dept-of-education/

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to dismantle the Department of Education, there are a few issues to bear in mind – ones which, if properly attended to, will ensure that America remains a global educational force with which to contend.

In reverting the education of our youth to the individual states that make up our nation, and against the backdrop that some states are fiscally more advanced than others, the question remains: how does the United States remain true to its commitment to provide a first-class education to its youth without compromising any of its quality, where that quality is tied to economic status on a state level? The ethical issue at stake here is that the quality of each American student ought not be constrained by an accident of birth. Students born into poor families and living in poorer states have just as much potential and cognitive capabilities as those born into affluent families living in high-income districts.

Although there are some exceptions, high-income school districts tend to spend more money on education per pupil and have better outcomes, while low-income districts tend to spend less and have worse outcomes. Without entering into a debate about the ethicality of publicly funded education, it should be fairly obvious that in order for the United States to surpass those 40 countries President Trump has identified as being ahead of us educationally, our nation needs to ensure that talented and capable students trapped in poorer states should have as much of an equal chance to matriculate through K-12 as their more affluent compatriots.

The President has derided our education system and has stated that the country performs the worst globally while spending the most per pupil. President Trump declared: “We’re last, we’re number 40 but we’re number one in cost per pupil.”

One issue that needs to be investigated is exploring how and why such funds are allocated in ways that do not increase performance. It should go without saying that if we wish to remain competitive with other nations that are outperforming our students in several domains including reading, writing and mathematics, then the government ought to ensure that dollars are spent in a way that can directly correlate to excellent outcomes.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/columbias-president-resigns-but-the-dei-battle-is-just-beginning

With the resignation of Columbia University’s interim president, the academic-diversity complex seems to have sent out a warning shot: cooperation with the Trump administration will be punished. Outgoing president Katrina Armstrong claimed in her resignation letter, submitted Friday, March 28, that she had always “planned” to return to her various bureaucratic positions in Columbia’s medical schools. Quite possibly true. But the question is: For when was that return planned?

The timing suggests that the decision was forced by external pressure. Armstrong had been facing a faculty revolt for over a week, as well as a lawsuit from eight Columbia students. The faculty objected to Armstrong’s decision to comply—more or less—with a set of Trump administration demands issued as a precondition for avoiding a $400 million cut in federal funds.

The Columbia faculty, or at least its most left-wing, pro-Palestinian bloc, had also revolted against Armstrong’s predecessor, Minouche Shafik. According to her critics, Shafik had failed in Congress to sufficiently defend Columbia’s pro-Hamas campus protests,. Then she failed to protect those illegal protesters from arrest.

Now the faculty appear to have taken another scalp.

Th irony is that Armstrong had outmaneuvered the Trump administration in some of its demands. Contrary to press reports, that outmaneuvering was not a concealed stratagem; she merely used clever drafting. In so doing, she had served a reminder that the president’s team had better start reading the fine print if it wants to secure its counterrevolution. Other recent developments in academia confirm how wily the Trump administration’s diversity-industry opposition is.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-groves-of-academe-get-some-needed-weeding/

After fifty years of pedagogical malpractice and trillions of squandered taxpayer dollars, Donald Trump has begun to rid our public schools of their destructive politicization. He’s directed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to start dismantling the Department of Education, and has commenced “pausing” funds given to rich, prestigious universities that promote transgender voodoo, tolerate anti-Semitism, and enable supporters of terrorism.

Most important, he’s acting to reverse the failures of our public schools to teach foundational skills and knowledge necessary for citizens living in a free state with unalienable rights and political equality.

And he’s starting with the exorbitant public funding of private universities flush with huge, tax-free endowments, and taxpayer subsidies distributed through government-backed student loans managed by the Department of Education–– “a student-loan boondoggle,” the Wall Street Journal writes, “with a $1.6 trillion portfolio, while harassing schools, states and districts with progressive diktats on everything from transgender bathroom use to Covid-19 mask rules.”

Moreover, universities with bulging endowments have been raising tuition costs far beyond the rate of inflation, at the same time they create politicized programs, even as completion and graduation rates decline, administrator outnumber tenured faculty, GPA inflation skyrockets, and fundamental skills and knowledge are replaced with leftist ideological fads like illiberal identity politics programs.

Trump’s cutting back on federal funds is a good way to fight back against this degradation of curricula. Taking back $400 million from Columbia is a good start. Its indulgence of violent protests against Israel, replete with anti-Semitic, genocidal slogans, swastika graffiti targeting Israel, and violence against Jewish students, epitomize the ideological corruption of our once-most prestigious universities.

But Trump also is offering a smart way to get the funds back: by requiring universities to agree to meet his nine demands, including “banning masks, empowering campus police and putting the school’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies under ‘academic receivership,’” the Journal writes, which means such programs would no longer be controlled by the faculty. After some grousing, Columbia has acceded to Trump’s conditions.