From Louis M. Profeta, MD.

We need to encourage our kids to slow it down, to take a longer path to college, perhaps. Expose our kids to real education—the kind of education that comes with a W-2, a boss, getting up early and working late and interacting with people who can’t afford a higher education. Make them appreciate the life experiences that come with nailing a 2 x 4, washing dishes, wheeling people to X-ray, picking up garbage, answering telephones. Make them earn their spending money BEFORE college and decide on their own if they’d rather use it on alcohol, weed, a four-block Uber ride, or laundry and food.

I recommend the whole essay.

Are there enough top students to populate the top colleges and universities? Here is a stab at answering that question. Continue reading →

Jonathan Turley reports,

American University has brought in an academic from the University of Washington-Tacoma with a curious mission for an academic institution: to teach academics not to grade on the writing ability of students as opposed to their “labor.” Professor Asao Inoue believes that writing ability should not be assessed to achieve “antiracist” objectives.

Inoue is the director of the UW-Tacoma Writing Center and has explained that “White language supremacy is perpetuated in college classrooms despite the better intentions of faculty, particularly through the practices of grading writing.” It appears that grading on writing ability is one of those acts of white supremacy. He has insisted that professors who use a single neutral standard for all students are perpetuating racism: “[using] single standard to grade your students’ languaging, you engage in racism. You actively promote white language supremacy, which is the handmaiden to white bias in the world.”

In the few years I taught as an adjunct at George Mason, I based part of my grades on writing quality. The white students did not demonstrate any advantage.

Pointer from Rod Dreher, who also located this gem, by Donna Riley, who is an academic administrator in the school of engineering at Purdue..

‘Rigorous engineering education research’ and the related ‘evidence-based’ research and practice movement in STEM education have resulted in a proliferation of boundary drawing exercises that mimic those in engineering disciplines, shaping the development of new knowledge and ‘improved’ practice in engineering education. Rigor accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege. Understanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.

So. . .we have university administrators arguing that good writing and rigor are aligned with white supremacy. These sorts of arguments might work to convince people. . .to become white supremacists.

And then there is this story about a special physics course at Stanford for minority students, because they have “less preparation.” I mean, why not offer a special physics course for students who have less preparation, rather than designate the race of the students?

It appears to me that these institutions are behaving as if they do not believe that their minority students can handle high-level work. Maybe some can’t. My guess is that a lot of white student’s can’t, either. But I think it’s clearly degrading to the students who can do high-level work, especially minority students who can do high-level work, to try to disparage such work with racialist boo-words.

Joe Pinsker writes,

Lately, Ciocca Eller said, schools are being held more accountable for their graduation rates, with some states tying educational funding to certain statistical benchmarks. “Potentially, there’s pressure on faculty to help students, especially underprepared students, to move them through the curriculum in order to keep churning up the graduation rate,” she said.

The optimistic take on this is that colleges are being more attentive to student needs and learning is improving. You would get the impression from reading The College Dropout Scandal by David Kirp that colleges do not have to reduce rigor at all in order to improve graduation rates. He makes it sound as if the Null Hypothesis has no bearing at all at the college level, and all colleges have to do to raise the graduation rate is pay more attention to their students’ sense of belonging and self-esteem. I think his “can-do” outlook is a baloney sandwich, but of course I could be wrong.

I think it is much more likely that the chief way to increase college graduation rates is to lower standards, both in terms of the courses required and the degree of rigor in grading. I think that conservative intellectuals should fight particularly hard against this.

Toby Young proposes an intellectual trade union to protect people from the progressive mob.

If a member is targeted for defenestration by an outrage mob, it will be the union that comes to their defense—the organization, not the other members. I don’t mean it will provide the person in the dock with legal representation. To offer legal insurance of that kind would make the membership dues prohibitively high and trade unions that do offer that service usually rely on internal officers to provide support to members involved in legal disputes—not the type of support that would be much help in a complicated case. Rather, the union will provide them with access to an approved list of defamation and employment lawyers, expert guidance on how to crowdfund their legal costs, access to lists of potential donors, PR advice on how to generate favorable media coverage—most importantly—access to a network of sympathetic colleagues, many of whom will have been through a similar ordeal.

I have a more aggressive idea. Set up a private organization to audit college courses for intellectual rigor. Call the organization the Collegiate Humanities and Social Sciences Rigor Audit Bureau, or the Audit Bureau for short. The scope would only include courses in the humanities and social sciences. Foreign languages, art, and music would be out of scope. “____ studies” courses would be in scope.

I am basing this idea on three assumptions and one comparable example.

The first assumption is that many of these courses are being taught to undergraduates, including those at “name-brand” colleges and universities, with extreme ideological bias and wooly-headed thinking.

The second assumption is that this is a serious enough problem for society that it is worth putting in some effort to try to fix it.

The third assumption is that conservative intellectuals are misguided if they frame this as largely a political problem. A better framing would be to focus on intellectual rigor.

The comparable example is the College Board audits of AP courses. You may not know this, but about five years ago the College Board required every high school AP teacher to submit a syllabus and some other materials to demonstrate that the course in fact deserved the “advanced placement” designation. I assume that the College Board did this because they noted that the AP “brand” on a course had become a powerful quality indicator, and they wanted to ensure that the brand’s reputation for quality was deserved and maintained.

The vision is that having a course labeled as rigorous by the Audit Bureau would come to be so desirable that students are better off with degrees from mid-range schools with those courses on their transcripts than with degrees from name-brand schools with courses on their transcripts that are not certified as rigorous. As a result, college professors at all institutions, including name-brand schools, feel pressured to offer courses that meet the standards of rigor.

Institutions could either establish their own standards for rigor or default to model standards created by the Audit Bureau. The standards need not be extremely detailed, but they should be clear enough that an auditor can test whether or not a course meets the standards. For example, Minerva’s standards are certainly clear enough to be audited against. But standards that are far less detailed would suffice.

I would want to see standards that include two elements.

1. Students clearly are exposed to differing points of view. For example, an economics course that is oriented in a very free-market direction also should include on the syllabus readings from Dani Rodrik or some equivalent critic.

2. In order to receive a grade of B or higher, the student has to provide written work (essay questions on exams and/or papers) that demonstrate substantive knowledge, the ability to communicate ideas, and the ability to both formulate arguments and state possible objections.

For comments, I would prefer for now that you spare me your opinion of this idea. Instead, imagine that someone were out to implement it. Which prominent intellectuals should they try to get on board, and why?

Phillip W. Magness writes,

Faculty growth on the political left comes at the direct expense of conservatives, who dropped from 22 percent of the academy as recently as 1995 to only 12 percent today. Furthermore, faculty who identify as “far left”—a category that usually includes Marxists, socialists, and derivative ideologies in Critical Theory—provided the main impetus of this shift. Far leftists more than doubled in number during this same period, going from a small minority of only 4 percent to 12 percent today

…Turning to administrative ranks, we quickly find several indicators of a leftward shift that has paralleled the faculty. Although polling data on administrator ideology only recently became available, a 2018 survey of student-facing administrators—typically the lower-level ranks of student affairs and university life personnel—found that 71 percent identified on the political left. Conservatives comprised only 6 percent, indicating that this segment of university administration sits even further to the left than the faculty at large.

Again, this stories is one of a series on the academic hard left.

Reminder: Now would be a good time to pre-order the latest edition of The Three Languages of Politics.

Williamson M. Evers writes,

Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.

The document to which he refers is an “ethnic studies model curriculum” proposed for California public schools. Read the whole piece.

Looking ahead, I see several posts scheduled where I link to stories of the academic hard left and the backlash that is forming against it.