RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today’s universities, with notable exceptions, are bastions of extreme political correctness. The problem is so bad, you wonder how anyone can learn anything useful.

In fact, they don’t. Students are so indoctrinated into an alternate reality of white supremacists hiding under the bed and fascists sitting next to them in class that fear becomes the norm. Anything and everything — even unrelated and unremarkable occurrences — can set off a wave of hysteria.

In the case of Michigan State University, the hysteria becomes a parody.

A student living in a dorm room reported a “noose” hung outside her door. The armies of righteous indignation were activated and the “incident” became a cause on social media.

The president issued a condemnation, students decried racism on campus, and black people reported being in fear for their lives.

In the immortal words of Emily Litella: “Never mind.”

Fox News:

A lost shoelace at Michigan State University caused a racial uproar Wednesday after someone mistook it for a noose.

MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon released a statement Wednesday morning saying she was “distressed” after finding out “a student reported a noose was hung outside of her room.” Simon commended the student’s “courage” for reporting the “racial incident” and put out a clear message.

“This type of behavior is not tolerated on our campus,” Simon said. “No Spartan should ever feel targeted based on their race, or other ways in which they identify.”

But by Wednesday afternoon, the investigation by MSU Police revealed there was no noose.

Instead, they found “the object was a packaged leather shoelace and not a noose,” MSU spokesman Jason Cody said in a news release, adding that the shoelaces “are packaged in a way that someone could perceive them to look similar to a noose.”

Officers tracked down and interviewed the student who lost both of the shoelaces. That student happens to live on the same floor as the one who made the report.

“Also, the original shoelace found inside the residence hall was not directed at any individual,” Cody said, adding that police believe someone found the shoelace and put it on a stairwell door handle after picking it up off the floor. CONTINUE AT SITE

While colleges talk a lot about diversity, conservatives hammer these same schools for focusing only on skin-deep matters like…well…skin. Rarely is there any concerted effort to make sure there is any kind of ideological diversity on their campuses. At least, that’s what folks on the right keep saying. But colleges keep acting like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, waving their hands and saying, “All is well!”

Only, it isn’t.

From The College Fix:

A new survey conducted by a student newspaper has revealed a staggering political divide among the faculty members of one of the nation’s most elite universities.

The Yale Daily Newsput a startling number on liberal predominance in a survey of the prestigious university’s faculty. Of the 314 respondents, a mere 7 percent identified as conservative, with only 2 percent saying they were “very conservative.” In contrast, nearly three-quarters identified as liberal or very liberal.

Speaking with with The News, Yale President Peter Salovey said the results were “neither positive nor negative.”

“It’s in the educational interest of students to be exposed to a diversity of political viewpoints… Having said that, in most fields, the political point of view of a faculty member is not relevant to the substance of their teaching, and so we would need to be very careful about making it a part of the hiring process for faculty,” Salovey told The News.

Salovey has, however, declared that Yale’s largely white faculty represents the “single biggest problem” the university faces; and in 2015 the school pledged to spend more than $50 million to increase the racial makeup of the faculty, according to The News.

Really? Their ideological viewpoint is completely irrelevant, but their skin color is?

If the issue was latent racism in the hiring process, I could see why Salovey would express concern. That can ultimately hurt the school, so it makes sense.

Yet that doesn’t seem to be the worry here. No, only the skin tone of the faculty is important.

All this while dismissing any concerns over ideological diversity at all. Nice. CONTINUE AT SITE

Ryan Walters has loaded up on advanced classes, studied until the wee hours and composed possible graduation speeches in his head as the high-school junior worked to be valedictorian at Heritage High School in Wake Forest, N.C.

But neither he nor any of his classmates will hold the title.

The Wake County Public School System, the 15th-largest in the nation, won’t have valedictorians after this school year, joining other districts that have moved away from lauding a single-highest performer.

“I think it’s pretty stupid, and I don’t think it’s fair,” says Mr. Walters, 16 years old. “Wake County is instilling in us that we shouldn’t try to be the best.”

It’s getting lonely at the top of the class in high school—or very crowded—as more schools alter or do away with the traditional role of valedictorian. While some schools no longer hail a single student with the best grade-point average, others are granting the distinction to anyone who gets at least a 4.0 GPA. And that is increasingly common as certain honors, or advanced-level classes, tend to grant higher than a 4.0 for an A.

At least half of U.S. states have schools that have stopped naming valedictorians, or now name multiple, to head off what school officials say has become unhealthy competition among students.

In recent weeks, Brown County Schools in Nashville, Ind., and Mehlville School District in St. Louis, decided to phase out naming valedictorians. Other districts around the country are discussing similar moves.

Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Va., had 178 valedictorians last school year, or 1 in every 3 graduates. Valedictorians are those who achieved at least a 4.0 grade-point average. Every valedictorian is ranked No. 1 in the class.

Murfreesboro, Tenn.’s Central Magnet School had a record-breaking 48 valedictorians last school year, a quarter of its graduating class. Awardees achieve the highest grade point average, take a minimum of 12 higher-level courses and meet state requirements to graduate with honors and distinction.

James Evans, spokesman in Rutherford County Schools, where Central Magnet is located, said the school has a lot of high achievers. “We’re pretty proud,” he said.
Ryan Walters, a junior at Heritage High School in Wake Forest, N.C. Photo: Jessica Cannon

More schools also no longer calculate numerical rankings for students—information still used by some colleges—out of fear that students missing higher rankings by a few points could be hurt in the college-acceptance process, or passed over for scholarships.

“We found that it’s shutting our students out from some really positive opportunities,” said Scott Martzloff, superintendent of the Williamsville Central School District in western New York, where the school board in September approved the elimination of class ranking. “I think it causes a lot of stress and unhealthy competition.”

But backlash is growing in some areas of the country, with students at the top of their class as well as their parents saying that high performance is being cast aside or diluted in the name of fairness.

“If everybody is called valedictorian, it doesn’t mean anything,” said Deborah Morley, whose daughter attends Exeter Union High School in Exeter, Calif., where all students with at least a 4.0 GPA can be valedictorian starting this school year.

At least one school, Melrose High School, outside of Boston, recently bucked the trend by going back to naming valedictorians after hearing from students. The new rule, approved in April after a school year without a valedictorian, awards the title to the student with the highest GPA.

“That was really important to people, especially the kids,” said Principal Jason Merrill.

Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared at Acculturated and is reprinted here with permission.

In a recent editorial in the Hoya, the official student newspaper of Georgetown University, students called for more conservative professors on campus.

The editorial is a refreshingly reasonable voice in the ongoing culture and free speech wars that are roiling America’s college campuses. The editors of the Hoya do not demand that a circus act like Milo Yiannopolous be allowed to come and disrupt the campus, or that the left continue its dominance of the country’s universities.

Instead, they make a straightforward case that the dearth of conservative professors at Georgetown is leaving students unprepared for the genuine diversity – that is, the diversity of thought – that is part of the real world. Georgetown’s homogeneity, they argue, is leading to an atrophying of their skills for debate and reasoned argument. In other words, without conservatives, they have no one to test their ideas against.

“One of the hallmarks of higher education is the opportunity to understand and grapple with a wide range of ideas,” the editorial notes. It goes on:

Yet, Georgetown falls short on its commitment to this ideological diversity in the makeup of its instructional corps. The university must work to remedy its lack of politically conservative professors by considering a diversity of viewpoints when hiring instructors, from assistant professors to those with tenure, and by ensuring that no bias exists against conservative educators in the hiring process.

The editorial cites a 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal by John Hasnas, who wrote that Georgetown faculty search committees often blackball conservative candidates. The Hoya editors also cite the Higher Education Research Institute, whose research has shown what even the Washington Post called “a dramatic shift” in recent years toward hiring faculty that leans left. In 1990, 42 percent of college professors identified as liberal or far-left, according to the HERI survey data; by 2014, that figure had risen to nearly 60 percent, while only 12 percent of professors identified as conservative.

In the fevered imagination of the academic left, these are dark days at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Speakers at a two-day conference, “Rights and Wrongs: A Constitution and Citizenship Day Conference at San Francisco State University,” described a campus where a “corporatist” administration is at war with its faculty; Arab-American professors are afraid to walk alone on campus; ethnic student organizations are consigned to the dank student center basement; “Zionists” lie in wait to pounce on innocent, beleaguered proponents of “Palestine”; and “white supremacy” rules. All at one of the most radical universities in the nation.

Leading these lamentations was the director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED), Rabab Abdulhadi, whose anti-Israel activism is coming back to haunt her. In addition to being named in a Lawfare Project (L.P.) lawsuit against SFSU alleging “anti-Semitism and overt discrimination against Jewish students,” she is at the heart of a Middle East Forum and Campus Watch campaign to end the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) she brokered between SFSU and An-Najah University, a hotbed of anti-Semitism and radicalism in the West Bank.

The conference was held on the top floor of the bustling Cesar Chávez Student Center – adorned with murals of Malcolm X and Edward Said – in spacious, light-filled Jack Adams Hall. A bulletin board near the entrance displayed a flyer calling for the removal of San Francisco’s Pioneer Monument, which it dubbed a “monument to white supremacy!” Conference programs featured a graphic of President Donald Trump’s silhouette balanced with a white fist on a scale of justice.

The audience of mostly students and small clusters of faculty ranged from a sparse fifty to sixty for the panel “Academic Freedom for Whom? Islamophobia, Palestine, and Campus Politics” to around 250 – many sitting on the floor after the seats quickly filled up – for “Muslims, Mexicans, and the Politics of Exclusion.”

Abdulhadi chaired both panels, while Hatem Bazian, director of U.C. Berkeley’s Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project, participated in the second. Both, she noted, hail from Nablus in the West Bank. The co-panelists were graduate student instructors (one nicknamed “Che”), local leftist activists, and “veterans” of SFSU’s 1968 Third World Liberation Front strike.

Abdulhadi – who assured the audience she is a woman, lest anyone fear that a man heads AMED – was persistently on the defensive. Harried and angry, her rapid-fire speech rendered many words unintelligible. She complained about Campus Watch tweets “attacking her” and marveled at the “four articles” (two pieces, in fact) about the MOU-facilitated “Prisoner, Labor, and Academic Delegation,” which sent Americans who served prison time for Weather Underground-affiliated domestic terrorism to meet fellow self-described “political prisoners” at Najah.

She blamed these concerns – and the well documented history of terrorism and anti-Semitism at Najah – on her opponents’ “muddying the waters” with spurious claims of anti-Semitism and falsely conflating Arabs and Muslims with terrorism. In Abdulhadi’s world, evidently, Palestinian terrorism and the cultural indoctrination underpinning it simply do not exist.

The bulk of her ire was directed at SFSU’s administration and her onetime ally, President Leslie Wong, with whom she had collaborated to create the MOU. She noted repeatedly that she had left a superior position as director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn at SFSU’s invitation, only to find herself relegated to a “token,” subjected to “new McCarthyism,” with AMED starved of funds and slated for termination.

Abdulhadi blamed Wong’s supposed abandonment of her on “Zionist pressure,” while accusing the administration of “Islamophobia”; “anti-Palestinian racism”; and the bigotry du jour, “white supremacy.” She and her supporters fault Wong for not reacting quickly or stridently enough to the ongoing David Horowitz Freedom Center poster campaign at SFSU, U.C. Berkeley, and elsewhere, despite evidence to the contrary. As with the grievances she reportedly filed earlier this year against the university “for the hostile and unsafe work and study environment for Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs on campus,” there is little proof to back up her assertions.

Paranoia may better explain her worries, for she then declared, “I do not walk by myself on campus anymore. I am actually very afraid for my life.” Because, you see, “the very people who are intimidating and harassing us, including people who have served in the Israeli military – and I grew up under Israeli occupation – are walking around on campus.” Who knew that IDF soldiers are menacing SFSU’s faculty?!

The Muslim “Brotherhood [MB] is traditionally a reformist, gradualist movement [which] is working on social change,” stated the Egyptian MB member Amr Darrag at a Georgetown University panel last month. With that, Darrag and his fellow speaker, the British-Iraqi MB operative Anas Altikriti, added to Georgetown’s longstanding history of enabling the MB’s deceitful use of liberal language to mask totalitarian goals. Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) hosted the event, which was titled: “Post-Arab Spring Middle East: Political Islam and Democracy.” A pro-Islamist bent was inevitable given that the moderator was ACMCU director Jonathan Brown.

he Muslim “Brotherhood [MB] is traditionally a reformist, gradualist movement [which] is working on social change,” stated the Egyptian MB member Amr Darrag at a Georgetown University panellast month. With that, Darrag and his fellow speaker, the British-Iraqi MB operative Anas Altikriti, added to Georgetown’s longstanding history of enabling the MB’s deceitful use of liberal language to mask totalitarian goals.

Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) hosted the event, which was titled: “Post-Arab Spring Middle East: Political Islam and Democracy.” A pro-Islamist bent was inevitable given that the moderator was ACMCU director Jonathan Brown. This professor has his own professional links to MB groups and is the son-in-law of convicted terrorist Sami Al Arian. In February, Brown was widely criticized after he gave a speech at a MB think tank justifying the practice of slavery within Islam.

Before the event, MB expert Eric Trager warned against Darrag’s visit to America: “The Muslim Brotherhood is an international hate group that seeks” to establish a “global Islamic state or neo-caliphate.” Speaking at the event, Altikriti, whom the Hudson Institute describes as “one of the shrewdest UK-based Brotherhood activists and the son of the leader of Iraq’s Muslim Brotherhood,” dismissed Trager’s article as “hilarious.”

Despite Altikriti’s insistence elsewhere that he has no connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, he describesthe movement as “the most important democratic voice that espouses multiculturalism, human rights and basic freedoms.” He also maintains that, while indeed part of the “spectrum” of “political Islam”, groups such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State are “abnormal phenomena” and not ideologically related to the Brotherhood. By contrast, Lebanese-American Middle East expert Walid Phares has identified the MB as the “mothership for the jihadi ideologies.”

Notwithstanding Altikriti’s support and apologetics for Hamas, an MB affiliate and the totalitarian ruler of the Gaza Strip, he expressed a desire for “far more political players and actors throughout society than political Islam.” He added that if the “only alternative to authoritarian regimes is political Islam, that’s a choice that I would loathe.”

Altikriti’s suspect celebration of pluralism echoes his previous descriptions of his own organization, the UK-based Cordoba Foundation. Altikriti has told Al Jazeera that his foundation “rehashes positive memories” of an ostensible period of multicultural coexistence in medieval Islamic Spain. Prime Minister David Cameron, however, describes the Cordoba Foundation as a “political front for the Muslim Brotherhood,” while the United Arab Emirates has designated the foundation a terrorist organization.

Darrag, meanwhile, was a former minister in Egypt’s MB-led government under Mohamed Morsi, until its 2013 overthrow. Darrag argued that under Morsi the MB wanted “to go back quickly to stability, to establish institutions, elections, get a parliament, constitution, a president, all the institutions that would be perfectly fit for an established democratic system.” He denied Islamist involvement in the “Arab Spring,” arguing that protestors “didn’t go out to ask for the application of sharia.” Trager has noted in fact that Darrag played a central role in creating under Morsi a new, sharia-focused Egyptian constitution.

Darrag also claimed that the MB rejects violence in its pursuit of political reform. He described the work of his Istanbul-based Egyptian Institute for Political and Strategic Studies (EIPSS) as the promotion of liberal, democratic issues, such as “transitional justice” and “civil-military relations.” Once again, however, Trager has noted that EIPSS “presents itself as a scholarly think tank, but it often promotes violent interpretations of Islamic texts” in Arabic-language articles — yet another example of the MB feigning nonviolence.

The head of the University of Michigan disparaged President Donald Trump and his supporters, both before and after the 2016 election, in numerous emails sent to faculty and staff, court documents show.

The emails were released this week as a result of a lawsuit settlement with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which sued UM for failing to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request surrounding President Mark Schlissel’s Trump-related emails.

The FOIA request was filed a few days after the November election by Mackinac Center’s Derek Draplin, who was looking into the university’s decision to host events for students who were upset about the election. The center noted that the University of Michigan receives over $1 billion in taxpayer funds each year and Schlissel is a public employee.

The earliest of the emails released is from Aug. 12, 2016, and it includes a Washington Post article written by a college president explaining how he will “teach Trump” to his students, “calling out the candidate’s bigotry.”

In the next email, Schlissel explains to a UM colleague why he didn’t go for the “typical light feel good” summer convocation speech, noting that he had a room full of “first-time voters” before him.

“I realize that some may interpret this as anti-Trump although there is nothing explicit in the remarks,” Schlissel wrote. “That’s just the way it will have to be. I would feel awful if Trump won the election and I was too afraid of appearing political to make any effort to encourage our students to thoughtfully participate. I am willing to accept the criticism since I think it’s very important.”

Weeks later, on election night, Schlissel responded to an email from Andrea Fischer Newman, a Republican member of the university’s board of regents, about an article by The College Fix with video of a Michigan professor’s lengthy rant against voting for Trump.

The professor warned students they would lose civil liberties, Roe v Wade would be reversed and said they could kiss goodbye affirmative action and equal pay, among other things, if Trump was elected.

“It’s not inherently wrong for a faculty member to take a position on any issue, including an election,” Schlissel wrote to Newman. “The key is that they are solicitous and tolerant of the views of students that disagree and that those students don’t feel persecuted in any way.”

The University of Michigan president changed his tune after Hillary Clinton lost, speaking at an anti-Trump rally, then writing in an email two days after the election that it’s the public university’s job to aid in “pushing back against the idea that facts don’t matter, that science isn’t relevant to decision making and that people with white skin don’t belong here.”

Schlissel added that he was “torn on recommendations for appointees” since he couldn’t “imagine lending one’s name to a Trump administration.”

In another email following his anti-Trump remarks, Schlissel called it “ironic” that a “minority of Trump supporters” at UM “now feel marginalized and ostracized in our campus milieu and post-election activity.”

The Mackinac Center said the emails were being withheld in violation of the Freedom of Information Act by claiming the email were protected conversation under law when none of those emails met that standard.

As the left exhibits paroxysms of moral outrage since the presidential election, the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome are increasingly evident on university campuses.

One such instance of this irrationality was on full display in August at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln when Katie Mullen, president of the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, was verbally harassed by leftist professors after she had set up a promotional table for the organization.

A video recording of the events shows a graduate teaching assistant and PhD student, Courtney Lawton, giving the middle finger to Mullen while carrying a sign saying, “Just say No! to Neo-Fascism!” and shouting “Neo-fascist Becky right here. Wants to destroy public schools, public universities, hates DACA kids,” “fuck Charlie Kirk [founder and executive director of Turning Point USA],” and “TPUSA Nazis,” among other repellent slurs.

Another professor, Amanda Gailey (founder of Nebraskans Against Gun Violence and virulent critic of police and gun owners), taunted Mullen with a sign that stated, “Turning Point: please put me on your watchlist,” and others passing by aggressively accused the conservative student of being a white nationalist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and a fascist.

Even for campuses which normally tolerate any ideological excesses from its leftist faculty and students, this behavior was a bit too much for the Nebraska administration, which quickly removed Lawton from her position as a lecturer and assigned her to non-teaching duties, commenting that her behavior “did not meet the university’s expectations for civility.”

Outraged by the unceremonious firing of one of their colleagues, fellow faculty, students, and union members organized a September rally on the Nebraska-Lincoln City campus sponsored by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—purportedly to discuss issues of academic freedom but actually a protest of what they believed was Lawton’s unjustified termination. Ignoring the fact that Lawton had not engaged in debate or dialogue at all but had actually viciously bullied Mullen with ad hominem attacks and slurs, her supporters side-stepped that inconvenient detail entirely, choosing instead to make Lawton the victim.

It was not Lawton’s outrageously uncivil behavior that was the problem here, but retaliation for daring to question Turning Point USA, a conservative organization. “We find it suspicious and dangerous,” said English professor Fran Kaye, one of the demonstrators, “that [Lawton] is being told that she cannot speak . . . about an organization that she has, in fact, researched because one of the things it shuts down is research on gay rights, lesbian rights.”

There’s an important distinction to be made in this case, however. The lecture was reassigned and relieved of her teaching duties not because of the content of her speech or the views expressed therein, but for the manner in which she expressed them; specifically, her behavior, not her ideas, is what was inappropriate and violated the norms of both the school’s policies on academic free speech and conduct by students and faculty, but also the central idea of reasoned debate and dialogue. In fact, UNL’s own policies on graduate student conduct is very clear on this matter, stating that, “Of particular note in this regard,” the policy stresses, “are behaviors that make the workplace hostile for colleagues, supervisors or subordinates (e.g., undergraduate students) [emphasis added.].”

It is one thing to engage in a discussion from two opposing viewpoints and to marshal facts and opinions to prove one’s point in a debate, even if that discussion is very contentious and highly argumentative. It is another thing, however, to attack someone—and particularly when that someone is a student and the attacker is a lecturer—and not engage them in a reasoned debate, but instead use ad hominem attacks, spurious allegations about political affiliations, and accusations that their views as conservatives render their ideas useless because they are equivalent to fascist or Nazis beliefs. This is an entirely different interaction that the principles of academic freedom and campus free speech were never intended to protect or enable.

Peter W. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. He is an anthropologist and author of “A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now” (Encounter Books, 2007) and of “Diversity: The Invention of a Concept” (Encounter Books, 2003). His articles have appeared in Partisan Review, National Review Online, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/05/we-need-a-radio-free-america-on-campus/

Deep within the United States Code a dynamite charge lies buried. Once ignited, it could blow the current landscape of higher education to smithereens, replacing its monotonous ideological expanse with an alpine variety of competing views and perspectives.

Triggering the charge would require a willingness to overcome political reflexives that often serve conservatives well. But the hour is late, the need for action desperately real, and pragmatism sits proudly at the nation’s helm.

So let us strike the fuse.

The dynamite is a provision in federal law planted nine years ago. That’s when Congress created the American History for Freedom (AHF) program. It promised federal funding for university centers promoting the study of traditional American history, free institutions, and Western civilization.

But when Barack Obama was elected, the congressmen and senators who had pushed for the bill wisely decided not to seek a federal appropriation. Obama would have opposed it and the whole program would have come under withering attack. Those of us who had worked hard to get AHF passed in the first place decided to bide our time. It has been a long wait.

The First Ka-Boom

How good is this dynamite? It should be compared to the explosives that the radical Left brought to campus at the end of the 1960s: black studies, women’s studies, and environmental studies. These three were the leading edge of the Left’s attempt to politicize the university.

Each had its own agenda but those agendas overlapped in their disdain for America and in their rejection of the university as a place reserved for open-minded inquiry. The proponents of these programs pleaded for them as exceptions to the old academic standards, which they thought would continue to be upheld in English, history, the sciences, and so on.

That proved to be an illusion. The radical environmentalists adopted Barry Commoner’s “First Law of Ecology,” namely, “Everything is connected to everything else.” You can’t expect radical environmentalists to keep their eco-apocalyptic creed isolated in the Environmental Studies Department. It has to be integrated into all the other departments because, “Everything is connected to everything else.” The same principle applied to black studies and women’s studies. Identity politics moves like a blob of mercury. It doesn’t stand still.

The political doctrines first spread to other academic departments via missionaries who held “dual appointments”—for example, women’s studies and political science, or black studies and English. But soon the bridges grew more plentiful. We saw the rise of cross-listed courses, “History 305, the Antebellum South, also listed as Black Studies 309, Slavery in Pre-Civil War America.” And soon there were distribution requirements and major requirements that entrenched the “studies departments” as central to whole of undergraduate education. The faculty in these departments also found their way onto search committees and other university bodies and carried their political programs with them.

Instead of occupying a space set apart in the curriculum for political indoctrination, the politicized departments became the agent for politicizing whole institutions.

That was the dynamite planted by the academic left circa 1968.

It’s hardly a secret that many teachers take advantage of the allowable sick days that are part of a typical union collective bargaining agreement (CBA). All teachers use sick days legitimately at some point, but many (including yours truly, on occasion) have been known to call in sick when perfectly healthy. My middle school was typical, where teachers invariably got “sick” much more often on Mondays and Fridays. And some would come down with a bad case of the flu at strategic times—like the three days before the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, giving them a ten-day vacation with pay.

But now, using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, a Fordham Institute study released in September demonstrates the full extent of the absentee problem. On average, teachers miss about eight school days a year due to sick and personal leave, while the average U.S. worker takes only about three and a half sick days per annum. Worse, the study shows that 28.3 percent of teachers in traditional public schools are chronically absent—defined as missing more than 10 days of school per year because of illness or personal reasons. In charter schools—most of which are not unionized—the corresponding rate is just 10.3 percent. But even within the charter sector, the study reveals a glaring disparity: teachers in unionized charters are almost twice as likely to be chronically absent as their colleagues in non-unionized charters—17.9 percent to 9.1 percent.

More important, the study’s author, David Griffith, suggests a direct link between teacher attendance and student achievement. He writes, “There are roughly 100,000 public schools in the United States, with over 3 million public school teachers and at least 50 million students. So every year, at least 800,000 teachers in the U.S. are chronically absent, meaning they miss about 9 million days of school between them, resulting in roughly 1 billion instances in which a kid comes to class to find that his or her time is, more often than not, being wasted.”

Of course, when the regular teacher calls in sick, the schools arrange for a substitute. Some subs are excellent, but they’re in high demand, and the chances are slim that one of them will get assigned to your child’s classroom. All too often, a sub can’t be found or doesn’t show up. If they do make it to the classroom, they often can’t control the class, or they have their own agenda for the day.

This study is yet another in a growing list that shows CBAs are harmful to students. In 2015, researchers Michael Lovenheim and Alexander Willen found that laws requiring school districts to engage in the collective bargaining process with teachers’ unions lead students to be less successful in life. In 2009, Stanford researcher Caroline Hoxby detailed in practical terms how CBAs stifle flexibility in determining the best slot for a teacher at a given school and deny the opportunity to get rid of underperformers—rigidity being the hallmark of labor contracts. In 2007, Stanford researcher Terry Moe found that CBAs appear to have a strongly negative impact in larger school districts, but seem to have no effect in smaller ones, except possibly “for African-American students—which is important indeed if true.”

Some observers have disputed the impact that CBAs have on chronic teacher absences. National Council on Teacher Quality president Kate Walsh claims that school culture explains the disparity. She points to discrepancies in teacher-absence rates between cities. For example, more than 30 percent of traditional public school teachers miss more than 10 days in unionized Chicago, while in San Francisco, also unionized, only 10 percent hit that mark. Walsh claims, “The difference is there’s a cultural expectation you show up.” School culture may have the power to trump CBAs, but the much more common phenomenon is that CBAs set the culture of the schools.