The 2020 Campaign Comes for College Students

At Politico, "The Rise of the Battleground Campus":

TEMPE, Ariz.—The vibe at Arizona State University’s sprawling main campus of palm trees and succulents was part carnival, part political convention. Hip hop and dance pop blasted from speakers as students handed out free popcorn and cotton candy on the lawn near the student union. Young men and women played bean bag and ball-toss games typically reserved for child birthday parties or the state fair, while cheerful, clipboard-toting activists in T-shirts and flip-flops urged them to register to vote.

This mixing of junk food and civic zeal was a poll-tested and focus-grouped enterprise, as carefully constructed as a 30-second television advertisement. It was all part of September’s National Voter Registration Day, a 7-year-old aspiring holiday. It’s little known among people who aren’t election officials, political activists—or the college students in their sights. At ASU, the civic zeal regularly spills over into the rest of the week and well into the next, as young liberals seek to register as many students as possible, and while young conservatives seek to remind them that not every 20-something has to be a liberal. This year, there were so many volunteers registering their classmates in preparation for the state’s Democratic primary in March and the general election in November 2020 that canvassers had trouble finding a single student who hadn’t already been approached...

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Anthony Kronman, The Assault on American Excellence

At Amazon, Anthony Kronman, The Assault on American Excellence.

Age of Amnesia

From Joel Kotkin, at Quillette:

"In feudal times, classical heritage was replaced by rigid religious dogma. Today’s clerisy uses the education system, media, & the means of cultural production to impose its standards of “privilege” & value, & to decide who deserves special dispensations" https://t.co/0tvtMZDn6E

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) July 16, 2019

RTWT.

Getting Into Harvard

At NYT, "Getting Into Harvard Is Hard. Here Are 4 Ways Applicants Get an Edge":

A federal case against Harvard has brought to light many of its closely guarded admissions secrets https://t.co/CGdXLwd8x9

— NYT National News (@NYTNational) November 8, 2018

For three weeks in October, Harvard’s admissions system was on trial before an often standing-room-only crowd in a federal courtroom in Boston. Harvard was accused of discriminating against Asian-American applicants, but the university firmly denied this throughout the trial, which ended last week.

Through testimony and internal documents, the case provided an eye-opening look into the often guarded and opaque admissions process at Harvard. With some 40,000 applicants and about 1,600 available seats, Harvard argued, some students would inevitably be left out.

How admissions officers went about that sifting process seemed to some in the gallery like an exercise in cynicism, which perpetuated the established ruling class, and to others like a noble pursuit, which lifted “diamonds in the rough,” of all backgrounds, into the future elite. Here’s what we learned about who gets an admissions edge:

‘A.L.D.C.’s

Harvard gives advantages to recruited athletes (A’s); legacies (L’s), or the children of Harvard graduates; applicants on the dean’s or director’s interest list (D’s), which often include the children of very wealthy donors and prominent people, mostly white; and the children (C’s) of faculty and staff. ALDCs make up only about 5 percent of applicants but 30 percent of admitted students.

While being an A.L.D.C. helps — their acceptance rate is about 45 percent, compared with 4.5 to 5 percent for the rest of the pool — it is no guarantee. (One of those rejected despite being a legacy was the judge in the federal case, Allison D. Burroughs. She went to Middlebury College instead.)

Harvard’s witnesses said it was important to preserve the legacy advantage because it encourages alumni to give their time, expertise and money to the university.

Students from ‘sparse country’

Every year, Harvard sends out thousands of recruitment letters inviting high school juniors to apply, based in part on their P.S.A.T. scores. Students who take Harvard up on the invitation are about twice as likely as other applicants to be admitted.

In “sparse country” — 20 largely rural states where relatively few apply to Harvard — the university drops the P.S.A.T. score cutoff for white students to qualify for an invitation. In 2013, white applicants with P.S.A.T. scores of 1310 were invited to apply from sparse country, compared with 1350 for white and Asian-American women and 1380 for white and Asian-American men outside of sparse country. Black, Hispanic, Native American or other minority students needed an 1100 or better to be invited to apply, regardless of location.

Effervescent (or reflective) applicants

Admissions officers are urged to look for applicants with “unusually appealing personal qualities,” which could include “effervescence, charity, maturity and strength of character.”

Outgoing students seemed to benefit most, according to court documents and testimony.

But new guidelines issued days before the trial began last month caution officers that character traits “not always synonymous with extroversion” should be valued, and that applicants who seem to be “particularly reflective, insightful and/or dedicated” should receive high personal ratings as well.

At trial, Harvard did not dispute that Asian-American applicants received, on average, lower personal ratings than applicants of any other race or ethnicity. The plaintiffs said this was evidence of Harvard’s stereotyping of Asian-Americans as industrious but dull. Harvard said it was not the result of discrimination; rather, it was partly because of weaker support from high school teachers and guidance counselors.

“We do not endorse, we abhor stereotypical comments,” the dean of the Harvard admissions office, William Fitzsimmons, testified.

Those with a compelling life story, who have overcome obstacles

Court documents, including guidelines issued to admissions officers, repeatedly showed clear advantages given to poor students and those from disadvantaged circumstances. But stories of besting challenges of other kinds also gave applicants an edge.

In his application, Thang Diep, a Harvard senior who came from Vietnam as a child, talked about being bullied for his accented English, and how affirming it was when a Harvard professor was the first teacher to pronounce his name correctly.

Sarah Cole appeared in court to testify that as a black student from Kansas City, Mo., she had worked hard to get a scholarship to a prestigious private college-prep school, but suffered socially for it. She said white teachers told her she was not smart enough to excel, and customers at her job laughed at her for wearing a Stanford T-shirt...

Still more.

Harvard's going to lose this case, especially on the effervescent" criteria, which systematically limits Asian acceptance rates. 

Scott Greer, No Campus for White Men

Robert Stacy McCain posts on Professor Christine Fair, of Georgetown University.

See, "Anti-Male Georgetown Professor Uses Tumblr Blog to ‘Dox’ Her Critics."

And linked at the post is Scott Greer's appropriate book, No Campus for White Men.

Happy Columbus Day

Here's the hilarious Steven Crowder, for Prager University:

The 'Diversity' Racket at UCLA

At great piece, from Heather Mac Donald, at the Los Angeles Times (surprisingly), "UCLA's infatuation with diversity is a costly diversion from its true mission":

UCLA's infatuation with diversity is a costly diversion from its true mission. https://t.co/18cp5KhBJ8 pic.twitter.com/Fl6E67j1mu

— L.A. Times Opinion (@latimesopinion) September 2, 2018

If Albert Einstein applied for a professorship at UCLA today, would he be hired? The answer is not clear. Starting this fall, all faculty applicants to UCLA must document their contributions to “equity, diversity and inclusion.” (Next year, existing UCLA faculty will also have to submit an “equity, diversity and inclusion statement” in order to be considered for promotion, following the lead of five other UC campuses.) The mandatory statements will be credited in the same manner as the rest of an applicant’s portfolio, according to UCLA’s equity, diversity and inclusion office.

A contemporary Einstein may not meet the suggested evaluation criteria. Would his “job talk” — a presentation of one’s scholarly accomplishments — reflect his contributions to equity, diversity and inclusion? Unlikely. Would his research show, in the words of the evaluation template, the “potential to understand the barriers facing women and racial/ethnic minorities?” Also unlikely. Would he have participated in “service that applies up-to-date knowledge to problems, issues and concerns of groups historically underrepresented in higher education?” Sadly, he may have been focusing on the theory of general relativity instead. What about “utilizing pedagogies addressing different learning styles” or demonstrating the ability to “effectively teach and attract students from underrepresented communities”? Again, not at all guaranteed.

As the new mandate suggests, UCLA and the rest of the University of California have been engulfed by the diversity obsession. The campuses are infatuated with group identity and difference. Science and the empirical method, however, transcend just those trivialities of identity that UC now deems so crucial: “race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, gender identity and socioeconomic status,” to quote from the university’s Diversity Statement. The results of that transcendence speak for themselves: an astounding conquest of disease and an ever-increasing understanding of the physical environment. Unlocking the secrets of nature is challenge enough; scientists (and other faculty) should not also be tasked with a “social justice” mission.

But such a confusion of realms currently pervades American universities, and UC in particular. UCLA’s Intergroup Relations Office offers credit courses and “co-curricular dialogues” that encourage students to, you guessed it, “explore their own social identities (i.e. gender, race, nationality, religion/spirituality, sexual orientation, social class, etc.) and associated positions within the campus community.” Even if exploring your social identity were the purpose of a college education (which it is not), it would be more fruitful to define that identity around accomplishments and intellectual passions — “budding mathematician,” say, or “history fanatic” — rather than gender and race.

Intergroup Relations is just the tip of the bureaucratic diversity iceberg. In 2015, UCLA created a vice chancellorship for equity, diversity and inclusion, funded at $4.3 million, according to figures published by the Millennial Review in 2017. (The EDI vice chancellor’s office did not have its current budget “at the ready,” a UCLA spokesman said, nor did Intergroup Relations.) Over the last two years, according to the Sacramento Bee’s state salary database, the diversity vice chancellor’s total pay, including benefits, has averaged $414,000, more than four times many faculty salaries. Besides his own staff, the vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion presides over the Discrimination Prevention Office; BruinX, the “research and development arm of EDI”; faculty “equity advisors”; UCLA’s Title IX office; and a student advisory board. Various schools at UCLA, including medicine and dentistry, have their own diversity deans, whose job includes making sure that the faculty avoid “implicit bias in the hiring process,” in the words of the engineering school’s diversity dean.

These bureaucratic sinecures are premised on the idea that UCLA is rife with discrimination, from which an ever-growing number of victim groups need protection...

 Keep reading.

What Happened to the Liberal Arts?

Heather Mac Donald's new book is out on September 4th, at Amazon, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.

And see the roundup on Ms. Mac Donald at AoSHQ, "Late Summer Saturday Open Thread August 25."

And at Prager University:

The Realist World of International Politics

From Professor Stephen Kotkin, at Foreign Affairs, "Realist World: The Players Change, but the Game Remains":

Just caught up wth this excellent essay in @ForeignAffairs by Stephen Kotkin: https://t.co/XxAqadRwvh

— Niall Ferguson (@nfergus) August 12, 2018

Geopolitics didn’t return; it never went away. The arc of history bends toward delusion. Every hegemon thinks it is the last; all ages believe they will endure forever. In reality, of course, states rise, fall, and compete with one another along the way. And how they do so determines the world’s fate.

Now as ever, great-power politics will drive events, and international rivalries will be decided by the relative capacities of the competitors—their material and human capital and their ability to govern themselves and their foreign affairs effectively. That means the course of the coming century will largely be determined by how China and the United States manage their power resources and their relationship.

Just as the free-trading United Kingdom allowed its rival, imperial Germany, to grow strong, so the free-trading United States has done the same with China. It was not dangerous for the liberal hegemon to let authoritarian competitors gain ground, the logic ran, because challengers would necessarily face a stark choice: remain authoritarian and stagnate or liberalize to continue to grow. Either way, the hegemon would be fine. It didn’t end well the first time and is looking questionable this time, too.

China will soon have an economy substantially larger than that of the United States. It has not democratized yet, nor will it anytime soon, because communism’s institutional setup does not allow for successful democratization. But authoritarianism has not meant stagnation, because Chinese institutions have managed to mix meritocracy and corruption, competence and incompetence, and they have somehow kept the country moving onward and upward. It might slow down soon, and even implode from its myriad contradictions. But analysts have been predicting exactly that for decades, and they’ve been consistently wrong so far.

Meanwhile, as China has been powering forward largely against expectations, the United States and other advanced democracies have fallen into domestic dysfunction, calling their future power into question. Their elites steered generations of globalization successfully enough to enable vast social mobility and human progress around the world, and they did quite well along the way. But as they gorged themselves at the trough, they overlooked the negative economic and social effects of all of this on citizens in their internal peripheries. That created an opening for demagogues to exploit, which they have done with a vengeance.

The Great Depression ended an earlier age of globalization, one that began in the late nineteenth century. Some thought the global financial crisis of 2008 might do the same for the current wave. The system survived, but the emergency measures implemented to save it—including bailouts for banks, but not for ordinary people—revealed and heightened its internal contradictions. And in the decade following, antiestablishment movements have grown like Topsy.

Today’s competition between China and the United States is a new twist on an old story. Until the onset of the nineteenth century, China was by far the world’s largest economy and most powerful country, with an estimated 40 percent share of global GDP. Then it entered a long decline, ravaged from without and within—around the same time the United States was born and began its long ascent to global dominance. The United States’ rise could not have occurred without China’s weakness, given how important U.S. dominance of Asia has been to American primacy. But nor could China’s revival have occurred without the United States’ provision of security and open markets.

So both countries have dominated the world, each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and for the first time, each confronts the other as a peer. It is too soon to tell how the innings ahead will play out. But we can be confident that the game will continue.

BEWARE OF WHAT YOU WISH FOR

To understand the world of tomorrow, look back to yesterday. In the 1970s, the United States and its allies were rich but disordered and stagnant; the Soviet Union had achieved military parity and was continuing to arm; China was convulsed by internal turmoil and poverty; India was poorer than China; Brazil, ruled by a military junta, had an economy barely larger than India’s; and South Africa was divided into homelands under a regime of institutionalized racism.

Four decades later, the Soviet Union has dissolved, and its successor states have embraced capitalism and private property. China, still politically communist, chose markets over planning and has grown to have the world’s second-largest economy. Once-destitute India now has the sixth-largest economy. Brazil became a democracy, experienced an economic takeoff, and now has the eighth-largest economy. South Africa overturned apartheid and became a multiracial democracy.

The direction of these changes was no accident. After World War II, the United States and its allies worked hard to create an open world with ever-freer trade and ever-greater global integration. Policymakers bet that if they built it, people would come. And they were right. Taken together, the results have been extraordinary. But those same policymakers and their descendants weren’t prepared for success when it happened.

Globalization creates wealth by enticing dynamic urban centers in richer countries to invest abroad rather than in hinterlands at home. This increases economic efficiency and absolute returns, more or less as conventional economic theory suggests. And it has reduced inequality at the global level, by enabling hundreds of millions of people to rise out of grinding poverty.

But at the same time, such redirected economic activity increases domestic inequality of opportunity and feelings of political betrayal inside rich countries. And for some of the losers, the injury is compounded by what feels like cultural insult, as their societies become less familiar...

Keep reading.

Looking at the Left at Concordia University

This is an enlightening piece, at Quillette, "Through the Looking Glass at Concordia University."

And interesting is the little Twitter exchange:

Well, it finally happened: a class of mine got singled out in a "horrors of the left" thinkpiece! My friend even got quoted! WE DID IT!https://t.co/nMF9W5wqAQ

— HANSA, the incredible melting man (@hansainallcaps) July 4, 2018

The teacher of said class emailed this article to his former students being like "do you guys even remember this happening???" and I feel like there were maybe better ways to handle that.

— HANSA, the incredible melting man (@hansainallcaps) July 4, 2018

If a student writes an article for a public audience is it kosher for professors to send it out in a mass email to other students for scrutiny? https://t.co/fvJxS6OHMl

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) July 5, 2018

Thanks for the RT, but I'm just gonna take the liberty of blocking you now - I'm not down to inadvertently promote your shitty website, and I'm definitely not interested in debating the flood of randos you've unleashed upon my mentions.

— HANSA, the incredible melting man (@hansainallcaps) July 5, 2018

Literary Theory's Stifling Uniformity

From Neema Parvini, at Quillette, "The Stifling Uniformity of Literary Theory":

In 1976, the Nobel-prize winning economist, F.A. Hayek, published The Mirage of Social Justice, the second volume of his magnum opus Law, Legislation and Liberty.1 Despite being widely regarded as the definitive critique of social justice, today one would be lucky to find advocates of social justice in the academy who are familiar with the name ‘Hayek’, let alone those who have read him. Among classical liberals, libertarians, and conservatives alike, Hayek is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century whose The Road to Serfdom represents one of the most powerful arguments against socialism ever written.2 But those in the academy who have perpetuated socialist ideas since the 1980s have practically ignored it. In this article, I will argue that this unwillingness to engage with the ‘other side’ is not only endemic in the radical intellectual schools that have overtaken literary studies, but also that it is symptomatic of their entire way of thinking which, being hermetically sealed and basically circular in its argumentation, has no language to deal with critics beyond reactive moral condemnation.

Many universities and colleges currently advertise literary theory courses which purport to introduce students to a range of different approaches to literary texts. On paper, it looks like as many as ten or fifteen different approaches. The labels proliferate: new historicism, cultural materialism, materialist feminism, ecofeminism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, structuralism, poststructuralism, race theory, gender theory, queer theory, postmodernism … the list might go on. This extensive list of labels seems to signal genuine range and diversity; however, in terms of their ideas, these approaches are somewhat narrower in scope and focus than one might expect. Virtually every approach listed here lays claim to be ‘radical’, which is to say politically of the left or even hard left – with roots in Marxist theory – hostile to capitalism, the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, liberal humanism, and even to the West itself. Virtually all are also committed to ‘social justice’. It must be noted that, since about 1980, these labels accurately register the genesis of literary studies as a discipline, but what they do not register is that, as they were rising, dissenting voices were systemically hounded out of the academy.

For example, in 1985, Sir Roger Scruton – now famous as a philosopher and public intellectual – wrote a book called Thinkers of the New Left in which he was strongly critical of continental theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and others.3 In stark contrast to the sometimes-wilful obscurantism of those he critiqued, Scruton wrote in plain prose and expressed ideas with clarity. Perhaps precisely because it laid the ideas bare, the book was greeted with howls of derision, and viciously attacked by scholars who had become disciples of Foucault et al. The publisher, Longman, was threatened with boycotts and risked being sent to the academic equivalent of the gulag if they did not stop selling the book, going as far as withdrawing copies from bookshops. As far as I can see, one thing that the episode did not produce is an intelligent response to any of the criticisms Scruton raised or, indeed, a single moment of critical self-reflection from any of those who had reacted so angrily. In effect, he was shut down and chased from academia.

In another infamous case, in 1988, Richard Levin, who was a Professor of English at the State University of New York, published an article in the PMLA – one of the premier journals in literary studies – outlining some of his problems with recent feminist studies of Shakespeare. The gist of Levin’s critique was that feminist readings of Shakespeare all seemed to reach similar conclusions. In his own words, ‘the themes employed in [feminist] interpretations are basically the same. Although the terminology may vary, these criticisms all find that [Shakespeare’s] plays are about the role of gender in the individual and society’.4 Now, one might expect a firm rebuttal to this charge from the scholars he was critiquing, and rightly so, but this is not what Levin received. Instead, the following year, a letter was published in the PMLA signed by twenty-four literary critics lambasting the journal for having the temerity to publish such an essay.5 It was not so much an academic response, but the public denunciation of a heretic – made more chilling because so many of the signatories worked on the Reformation, an era in which such burnings at the stake were de rigueur. Professor Levin, they argued, should not even be teaching literature. I remember when I first read of this episode while conducting research for my doctorate;6 I was not only appalled at Levin’s treatment, but also confounded by the utter refusal of these twenty-four scholars to engage in substantive argument. I remember it as a moment of profound disillusionment with the profession I was about to pursue, and it marked a turning point in how I would view the work of some of those who had signed it. Years later, during a podcast interview, I asked one prominent Shakespearean, who is strongly associated with the radical new approaches of the 1980s (but not a signatory of the letter), if he remembered Levin.7 The answer I got back was, ‘no one paid any attention to him; Levin was nowhere’. Again, I was struck by reasoning that seemed based entirely on what Aristotle would have called ‘ethos’, that is, the judgement of the person’s character as opposed to their arguments.8

If one understands the underlying theories, then it is not difficult to see why this happens. Despite significant differences, all the approaches I listed above assume that:

1. There is no universal human nature.
2. Human beings are primarily a product of their time and place.
3. Therefore, power, culture, ideologies, and the social institutions that promulgate them have an extraordinary capacity to shape and condition individuals.
4. In Western societies, since these institutions have been dominated by people who were predominantly rich, straight, white, and male it has tended towards pushing the particular interests of rich straight white men to the detriment of all other groups.
5. Furthermore, these rich straight white men have done this by acting as if their sectional interests were universal and natural – a flagrant lie.
6. Importantly, however, few if any of these rich white straight men were consciously aware of doing this, because they were themselves caught in the matrices of power, culture, ideologies and so on.
7. Where subordinated groups have gone along with these power structures, they have been exploited and the victims of ‘false consciousness’.
8 Now is the time to redress this balance by exposing the ways in which old texts have promoted the sectional interests of the rich straight white men and by promoting the voices of the historically marginalised groups.

Once this basic structure is understood, one can quickly see that the extensive list which seems like it represents a diverse range of approaches, in fact only promotes different flavours of a single approach. All that changes from one to the next are the specific groups of oppressors and oppressed as well as the structuring principle to which all individuals are invisibly in thrall. One might begin to represent it as follows...

"Either you are with the oppressed & therefore on the side of the angels, or you are implicitly supporting the side of the oppressors, & a damnable & unrepentant sinner. It is a straightforward binary moral choice & its missionaries will take no prisoners" https://t.co/RguleLqPbd pic.twitter.com/oLD9WIFdGD

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) April 16, 2018

Keep reading.

'Decolonizing' Everything

I tell you, I'm dealing with more and more of this kind of radical ideology even at my school, at the community college level.

It's unreal, frankly.

At the American Conservative, "The Censorious Left’s Latest Mania: ‘Decolonizing’ Everything":

Their obsession with destroying white, euro-centric ‘domination,’ wherever it may be, has become patronizing and authoritarian. https://t.co/RSesKUbLBk

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) February 24, 2018

At Northern Michigan University, students can discover how to “decolonize” their diet. That means learning “about where the common foods and ingredients come from, what a ‘decolonizing diet’ is, and how they can incorporate the diet into their daily lives.”

Meanwhile, the editors of the American Historical Review have announced plans to decolonize the journal and confront its “past lack of openness to scholars and scholarship due to race, color, creed, gender, sexuality, nationality and a host of other assigned characteristics.”

In the UK, London’s School of Oriental and African Studies has announced plans to “decolonize” its degree courses following high-profile student campaigns such as “Why is My Curriculum White?” that are critical of “the domination of white ‘Eurocentric’ writers and thinkers.” Last year, students at Reed College protested the Eurocentrism of their Introduction to Humanities course. At Yale University students petitioned for the removal of a course in Major English Poets that featured, surprisingly enough, mostly white men. Thanks to their efforts, that course has now been downgraded to optional.

The fight to decolonize Harvard led to the removal of the Royal family seal, for fear that it might “evoke associations with slavery.” At the University of Oxford a plaque honoring Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist who established the Rhodes Scholarships, has been taken down. At Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, professors can take a course in decolonizing education in order to “understand indigenous perspectives in the history of colonization to contemporary realities in Canada.” All around the world, universities are decolonizing courses, buildings, libraries, and reading lists.

The drive to decolonize is not confined to academia. In the UK we have discussions about decolonizing health care, translation, and feminist art. There are campaigns to decolonize architecture in the United Arab Emirates, the media in New Zealand, design in Mexico, bookshelves in South Africa, and seemingly the whole of Alaska. Throughout the U.S. we’ve seen the removal of Confederate monuments. Clearly, we have many unresolved issues with the past. But too often the rush to decolonize evades a discussion of history and instead paints everything that happened before today as irredeemably racist and wicked—in need of obliteration rather than discussion.

Last year, the journal Third World Quarterly published an article in which Bruce Gilley set out “The Case for Colonialism.” Those who read the piece criticized it for shoddy scholarship and historical inaccuracies. But most of us will never know how it measured up, as the publication was soon withdrawn following threats to the journal’s editor. In the UK, Oxford University’s Professor Nigel Biggar wrote a newspaper article arguing that people should not “feel guilty about our colonial history,” and as a consequence received a critical letter from over 200 colleagues and scholars condemning him as “an apologist for colonialism.” Biggar said: “There is a view that people with views like mine are not to be reasoned with, but only to be silenced.”

Preventing all discussion of colonialism erases, rather than confronts, the past. Indeed, the logic of the decolonize movement is that colonialism is not a legacy of history but a malignant impact upon the present. This sleight of hand allows campaigners to equate past invasion, murder, oppression, and exploitation with being made to sit through a lecture on Kant or Shakespeare in an expensive and elite institution...

Sill more.

David Horowitz, The Left in the Universities

At Amazon, David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left, Volume 8: The Left in the Universities Hardcover.

Collapse of the Global Elite

From Professor Eliot A. Cohen, at the Atlantic, "Witnessing the Collapse of the Global Elite."

Everyone at #MSC2018 is a has-been. Same with Davos. No new ideas coming out of any of these ego-stroking circle jerks. https://t.co/XudyBjcudW

— Milena Rodban (@MilenaRodban) February 20, 2018

Indian Slavery

This is pretty fascinating -- and tells you something about how far down identity politics has infested historiography and cultural assimilation.

At NYT, "Indian Slavery Once Thrived in New Mexico. Latinos Are Finding Family Ties to It."

Latinos with roots in New Mexico are discovering ancestors who were Native American slaves, prompting new debates over identity https://t.co/B6VpNjXmq1

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 28, 2018

What If Diversity Isn't America's Strength?

From Jonah Goldberg, at LAT, "This should elicit some fun email":

Sen. Lindsey Graham says he scolded the president for saying something scatological about certain countries and their immigrants. "Diversity has always been our strength," he allegedly said. By my count, this makes Graham the bazillionth person to proclaim some variant of "diversity is strength."

Is it true? I think the only close to right answer is, "it depends." Specifically, it depends on what — often clichéd — analogy you have in mind. Diverse stock portfolios are more resilient. Diverse diets are healthier. But that doesn't mean picking bad stocks will make you richer or that eating spoiled foods is good for you.

I once heard Jesse Jackson explain that racial integration of the NBA made it stronger and better. He was right. But would gender integration of the NBA have the same effect? Would diversifying professional basketball by height? Probably not.

All of these analogies can take you only so far. Thomas Sowell once said, "The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department."

There's a growing body of evidence that even if diversity— the kind that results from immigration — once made America stronger, it may not be doing so anymore. Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, found that increased diversity corrodes civil society by eroding shared values, customs and institutions. People tend to "hunker down" and retreat from civil society, at least in the short and medium term.

I think the real culprit here isn't immigration or diversity in general, but the rising stigma against assimilation. Particularly on college campuses, but also in large swaths of mainstream journalism and in the louder corners of the fever swamp right, the idea that people of all backgrounds should embrace a single conception of "Americanism" is increasingly taboo.

Anyone of any race or national origin can be an American, but it requires effort and desire from both the individual and the larger society. There's a shortage of both these days...

More.

Professor Jordan Peterson on the Lindsay Shepherd Affair

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Pronouns professor Jordan Peterson on the Lindsay Shepherd affair."

And more, at the Rebel:

Lindsay Shepherd

This is really troubling.

Best thing is, she recorded her inquisition, ha!

At Inside Higher Ed, "The Interrogation of a TA: University president apologizes after recording reveals how a graduate student was questioned over use of a video, which offended at least one student, of debate on nontraditional pronouns."

And the National Post, "Wilfrid Laurier University's president apologizes to Lindsay Shepherd for dressing-down over Jordan Peterson clip."

And watch Ezra Levant, at the Rebel, with excerpts from her recording. It's good:



And at tweet from Jordan Peterson on the abuse he's enduring. It's bad. Really bad:

Those who consider themselves my enemies have been posting these all around my home neighbourhood. pic.twitter.com/zF3Mc7Imsy

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) October 26, 2017

Unsettling Truth About Affirmative Action

From Professor Jeannie Suk, at the New Yorker, "The Uncomfortable Truth About Affirmative Action and Asian-Americans":

The application process for schools, fellowships, and jobs always came with a ritual: a person who had a role in choosing me—an admissions officer, an interviewer—would mention in his congratulations that I was “different” from the other Asians. When I won a scholarship that paid for part of my education, a selection panelist told me that I got it because I had moving qualities of heart and originality that Asian applicants generally lacked. Asian applicants were all so alike, and I stood out. In truth, I wasn’t much different from other Asians I knew. I was shy and reticent, played a musical instrument, spent summers drilling math, and had strict parents to whom I was dutiful. But I got the message: to be allowed through a narrow door, an Asian should cultivate not just a sense of individuality but also ways to project “Not like other Asians!”

In a federal lawsuit filed in Massachusetts in 2014, a group representing Asian-Americans is claiming that Harvard University’s undergraduate-admissions practices unlawfully discriminate against Asians. (Disclosure: Harvard is my employer, and I attended and teach at the university’s law school.) The suit poses questions about what a truly diverse college class might look like, spotlighting a group that is often perceived as lacking internal diversity. The court complaint quotes a college counsellor at the highly selective Hunter College High School (which I happened to attend), who was reporting a Harvard admissions officer’s feedback to the school: certain of its Asian students weren’t admitted, the officer said, because “so many” of them “looked just like” each other on paper.

The lawsuit alleges that Harvard effectively employs quotas on the number of Asians admitted and holds them to a higher standard than whites. At selective colleges, Asians are demographically overrepresented minorities, but they are underrepresented relative to the applicant pool. Since the nineteen-nineties, the share of Asians in Harvard’s freshman class has remained stable, at between sixteen and nineteen per cent, while the percentage of Asians in the U.S. population more than doubled. A 2009 Princeton study showed that Asians had to score a hundred and forty points higher on the S.A.T. than whites to have the same chance of admission to top universities. The discrimination suit survived Harvard’s motion to dismiss last month and is currently pending.

When the New York Times reported, last week, that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was internally seeking lawyers to investigate or litigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” many people immediately assumed that the Trump Administration was hoping to benefit whites by assailing affirmative action. The Department soon insisted that it specifically intends to revive a 2015 complaint against Harvard filed with the Education and Justice Departments by sixty-four Asian-American groups, making the same claim as the current court case: that Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asians in admissions, giving whites an advantage. (The complaint had previously been dismissed in light of the already-pending lawsuit.) The combination of the lawsuit and the potential federal civil-rights inquiry signals that the treatment of Asians will frame the next phase of the legal debate over race-conscious admissions programs...

More.

California State University to End Placement Exams and Remedial Classes for Freshmen

Remember my entry from a couple of weeks back, "Eloy Ortiz Oakley, California Community College Chancellor, Calls for End to Algebra Requirement for Non-STEM Majors."

The eradication of high standards for California's public education students continues apace. In a few years, students will be able to enter the university, and then likely graduate with a "four-year degree," without any foundation or completion of rigorous math, sciences, and languages.

Educational officials no doubt are dealing with a wave of unprepared students, thrust into the system by the massive open immigration we've had for the last few decades. It's really reaching critical mass. When I started teaching at Long Beach City College in fall of 2000, fully one-third of students enrolled came from a traditional white working-class background. I thought that was minuscule at the time, but now the number's down to about 13 percent white students.

There's nothing wrong with the diversity. In fact, Latinos at my college are more than half of the student population, and they're totally fine. Many, though not all, are indeed very outstanding. On the other hand, I'm having more and more students ---- including many Asians ---- who literally do not speak English. I don't know how they expect to succeed. But they're here and this is the reality in California.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Cal State will no longer require placement exams and remedial classes for freshmen":

Cal State plans to drop placement exams in math and English as well as the noncredit remedial courses that more than 25,000 freshmen have been required to take each fall — a radical move away from the way public universities traditionally support students who come to college less prepared than their peers.

In an executive order issued late Wednesday, Chancellor Timothy P. White directed the nation’s largest public university system to revamp its approach to remedial education and assess new freshmen for college readiness and course placement by using high school grades, ACT and SAT scores, previous classroom performance and other measures that administrators say provide a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of students’ knowledge.

Cal State will no longer make those students who may need extra help take the entry-level mathematics (ELM) test and the English placement test (EPT).

The new protocol, which will go into effect in fall 2018, “facilitates equitable opportunity for first-year students to succeed through existing and redesigned education models,” White wrote in a memorandum to the system’s 23 campus presidents, who will be responsible for working with faculty to implement the changes.

The executive order comes at a time when educators and policymakers across the nation are questioning the effectiveness of traditional remedial education and placement exams. At Cal State, about 40% of freshman each year are considered not ready for college-level work and required to take remedial classes that do not count toward their degrees.

Currently, students who enter Cal State without demonstrating college readiness in math and/or English are required to take up to three traditional remedial classes before they are allowed to enroll in courses that count toward their degrees. (If students do not pass these remedial courses during the first year, they are removed from university rolls.)

The problem is that these noncredit remedial courses cost the students more money and time, keep many in limbo and often frustrate them to the point that some eventually drop out, administrators said. In a recent study of similar college-prep work at community colleges, the Public Policy Institute of California found that remedial programs — also called developmental education — largely fail to help most students complete their academic or vocational programs.

Under the new system, all Cal State students will be allowed to take courses that count toward their degrees beginning on Day 1. Students who need additional support in math or English, for example, could be placed in “stretch” courses that simultaneously provide remedial help and allow them to complete the general math and English credits required for graduation.

Faculty are also encouraged to explore other innovative ways to embed additional academic support within a college-level course. A few other states have experimented with these approaches, and the results so far are encouraging, administrators said.

“This will have a tremendous effect on the number of units students accumulate in their first year of college,” said James T. Minor, Cal State’s senior strategist for academic success and inclusive excellence. “It will have an enormous effect on college affordability, on the number of semesters that a student is required to be enrolled in before they earn a degree, and it will have a significant impact on the number of students that ultimately cross a commencement stage with a degree in hand, ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school."

In addition to redesigning remedial requirements systemwide, the executive order instructs campuses to strengthen their summer Early Start programs...

More.

The end result will of course be to exacerbate social inequality, not reduce it. The economically privileged will continue to have access to very high-quality education, in all aspects of rigorous training, especially math and sciences. And these kind of people will float to the top. It's a system of social sorting that's been going on for a while, made more intense by the nature of the high-tech knowledge economy.