Duke Graduation Speaker 'Surprised' That Some Passages From Her Speech Were Taken From a Recent Commencement Speech at Harvard (VIDEO)

So surprising. *Eye-roll.*

If you plagiarize you're going to get caught. I catch a number of students plaigarizing every semester, and this is on simple assigned essays, not research papers. Students probably spend more time scouring the web than actually writing a four-page think piece. Sadly, even scraping stuff straight from Wikipedia is a thing. Even more sadly: When I notify my dean she does nothing but to tell me, "let this be a lesson for the student." 

Right. 

In other words, cheat, violate written college rules and ethical standards --- for which in the past a students could be suspended or expelled --- and get off scot-free. Not so fast, I say. I'll give the student a "0" on the assignment, and they can complain all they want. A plagiarized paper is worth nothing. *Sigh.*

At WSJ, "Duke Commencement Speaker Takes ‘Full Responsibility’ After Similarities in Speech Spark University Probe":

Parts of her speech included passages similar to those in a 2014 Harvard graduation speech; Duke says it is investigating the matter.

A Duke University student said she is taking “full responsibility” for parts of her commencement speech that included passages similar to those in a Harvard University graduation speech years ago, prompting a university probe.

Undergraduate commencement speaker Priya Parkash spoke to her fellow classmates at Duke’s graduation ceremony on Sunday. The following day the Duke Chronicle—the university’s student newspaper—reported that several passages of Ms. Parkash’s speech were similar to that of a Harvard speech in 2014 given by then-student Sarah Abushaar. Duke is investigating the matter, a spokesman said.

A public-relations representative for Ms. Parkash said in an interview that she incorporated ideas for passages provided by friends without researching if they had been used previously. She didn’t find out until after the speech that those passages had come from a speech given at Harvard, her spokesman said.

“I was embarrassed and confused to find out too late that some of the suggested passages were taken from a recent commencement speech at another university,” Ms. Parkash said in an earlier statement provided through the PR firm. “I take full responsibility for this oversight and I regret if this incident has in any way distracted from the accomplishments of the Duke Class of 2022.”

Michael Schoenfeld, a spokesman for Duke, said the university is aware of the allegations and has “initiated a process to understand the facts of the situation.”

“Duke University expects all students to abide by their commitment to the Duke Community Standard in everything they do as students,” he said.

Parts of Ms. Parkash’s speech were similar to passages from Harvard undergraduate speaker Ms. Abushaar’s 2014 commencement address, with references to Harvard swapped for Duke.

Ms. Abushaar didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In her speech, Ms. Parkash spoke about her experience being Pakistani and going through airport security checkpoints, wearing Duke gear as a way to prove she wasn’t a threat. Ms. Abushaar made similar comments about going through airport security as a Middle Easterner in Harvard attire.

Both speakers joked about how their respective campuses could be their own independent countries.

“We had our own version of the Statue of Liberty, the John Harvard statue; our own embassies, the Harvard clubs of Boston and London; a tax collection agency, the Harvard Alumni Association; and endowment larger than more than half the world’s countries GDPs,” Ms. Abushaar said in her 2014 speech.

In Ms. Parkash’s speech on Sunday, she said, “We are home to several consulates…we also have our own version of Christ the Redeemer, the statue of James Buchanan Duke…we also have an IRS with its surprisingly bubbly fleet of tax collectors, the Duke Alumni Association; we also have the equivalent of the Federal Reserve, DUMAC, which manages an endowment larger than the GDP of one-third of the countries in the world”...

Yep. You can see that comparison at the video above.

 

Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up

At Amazon, Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.

College-Educated Workers Head to Amazon, Starbucks, Looking for Jobs

And REI as well.

Hey, "creative destruction," and all that!

The makings of a new American college-educated proletariat!

At the New York Times, "The Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class":

Over the past decade-and-a-half, many young, college-educated workers have faced a disturbing reality: that it was harder for them to reach the middle class than for previous generations. The change has had profound effects — driving shifts in the country’s politics and mobilizing employees to demand fairer treatment at work. It may also be giving the labor movement its biggest lift in decades.

Members of this college-educated working class typically earn less money than they envisioned when they went off to school. “It’s not like anyone is expecting to make six figures,” said Tyler Mulholland, who earns about $23 an hour as a sales lead at REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. “But when it’s snow storming at 11:30 at night, I don’t want to have to think, ‘Is the Uber home going to make a difference in my weekly budget?’”

In many cases, the workers have endured bouts of unemployment. After Clint Shiflett, who holds an associate degree in computer science, lost his job installing satellite dishes in early 2020, he found a cheaper place to live and survived on unemployment insurance for months. He was eventually hired at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, where he initially made about $17.50 an hour working the overnight shift.

And they complain of being trapped in jobs that don’t make good use of their skills. Liz Alanna, who holds a bachelor’s in music education and a master’s in opera performance, began working at Starbucks while auditioning for music productions in the early 2010s. She stayed with the company to preserve her health insurance after getting married and having children.

“I don’t think I should have to have a certain job just so I can have health care,” Ms. Alanna said. “I could be doing other types of jobs that might fall better in my wheelhouse.”

These experiences, which economic research shows became more common after the Great Recession, appear to have united many young college-educated workers around two core beliefs: They have a sense that the economic grand bargain available to their parents — go to college, work hard, enjoy a comfortable lifestyle — has broken down. And they see unionizing as a way to resurrect it.

Support for labor unions among college graduates has increased from 55 percent in the late 1990s to around 70 percent in the last few years, and is even higher among younger college graduates, according to data provided by Gallup. “I think a union was really kind of my only option to make this a viable choice for myself and other people,” said Mr. Mulholland, 32, who helped lead the campaign to unionize his Manhattan REI store in March. Mr. Shiflett and Ms. Alanna have also been active in the campaigns to unionize their workplaces.

And those efforts, in turn, may help explain an upsurge for organized labor, with filings for union elections up more than 50 percent over a similar period one year ago.

Though a minority at most nonprofessional workplaces, college-educated workers are playing a key role in propelling them toward unionization, experts say, because the college-educated often feel empowered in ways that others don’t. “There’s a class confidence, I would call it,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “A broader worldview that encompasses more than getting through the day.”

While other workers at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are also supportive of unions and sometimes take the initiative in forming them, the presence of the college-educated in these jobs means there is a “layer of people who particularly have their antennae up,” Ms. Milkman added. “There is an additional layer of leadership.”

That workers who attended college would be attracted to nonprofessional jobs at REI, Starbucks and Amazon is not entirely surprising. Over the past decade, the companies’ appetite for workers has grown substantially. Starbucks increased its global work force to nearly 385,000 last year from about 135,000 in 2010. Amazon’s work force swelled to 1.6 million from 35,000 during that period.

The companies appeal to affluent and well-educated consumers. And they offer solid wages and benefits for their industries — even, for that matter, compared with some other industries that employ the college-educated...

Still more.

 

U.S. Economy Shrank 1.4 Percent in Weakest Quarter Since 2020

Let's Go Brandon!

At the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. GDP Falls 1.4% as Economy Shrinks for First Time Since Early in Pandemic":

Supply disruptions weighed on the economy, but consumers and businesses continue to spend.

The U.S. economy shrank at a 1.4% annual rate in the first quarter as supply disruptions weighed on output, though solid consumer and business spending suggest growth will resume.

The decline in U.S. gross domestic product marked a sharp reversal from a 6.9% annual growth rate in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday. The first quarter was the weakest since spring 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and related shutdowns drove the U.S. economy into a deep—albeit short—recession.

The drop stemmed from a widening trade deficit, with the U.S. importing far more than it exports. A slower pace of inventory investment by businesses in the first quarter—compared with a rapid buildup of inventories at the end of last year—also pushed growth lower. In addition, fading government stimulus spending related to the pandemic weighed on GDP.

Consumer spending, the economy’s main driver, rose at a 2.7% annual rate in the first quarter, a slight acceleration from the end of last year. Businesses also poured more money into equipment and research and development, triggering a 9.2% rise in business spending.

“The most important aspects of the domestic economy held up better than they did at the end of 2021, when growth was soaring,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, in a note.

Two years after the pandemic struck, the U.S. economy faces challenges, including supply disruptions related to the pandemic and Ukraine war, labor shortages and high inflation. Central bank officials lifted their benchmark rate in March by a quarter percentage point from near zero to tame inflation, and they have signaled more increases are likely to follow.

Many economists think that the economy can withstand higher interest rates and return to modest growth in the second quarter and beyond, in part because consumers and businesses are continuing to spend.

Americans are spending more on services amid lower Covid-19 case totals and the lifting of remaining pandemic restrictions. Travel is one key example: Hotel occupancy rates are up from January, and more people are also boarding planes.

George Lewis, co-owner of Brass Lantern Inn in Stowe, Vt., is seeing a surge in demand. Visits to his bed-and-breakfast on Maple Street are running strong with rooms selling out some weekends this spring, a sharp shift from earlier in the pandemic when the inn relied on small-business aid to survive.

“People have called up: ‘Are you really sold out?’ ” Mr. Lewis said. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re really sold out.’ ”

Still, Mr. Lewis is more concerned about business next year. For one, it isn’t clear where inflation will be, he said. Prices have already risen briskly for heating oil to warm rooms, as well as for the cheddar cheese Mr. Lewis uses in egg strata, a breakfast casserole he serves up on Saturdays.

Consumer spending is another wild card, he added.

“We don’t know what people’s pocketbooks can accommodate after this year,” he said. “Some people are spending…independent of what the cost is.”

Looking ahead, economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal estimate GDP rising 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2022 from a year earlier, matching 2019 annual growth, but logging in well below 5.5% growth recorded last year.

The labor market is a key source of economic strength right now. Jobless claims—a proxy for layoffs—have been near historic lows and fell last week to 180,000 as employers clung to employees amid a shortage of available workers. Businesses are hiring and ramping up wages, supporting consumer spending.

High inflation, though, is cutting into households’ purchasing power. Consumer prices rose 8.5% in March from a year earlier, a four-decade high. Elevated inflation is wiping away pay gains for many workers: average hourly earnings were up 5.6% over the same period.

Fast-rising prices are also challenging many businesses...

 

Harvard's Slave Photos Raise Many Questions

Following-up, "Harvard University Pledges $100 Million to Redress Past Ties to Slavery (VIDEO)."

At the New York Times, "The First Photos of Enslaved People Raise Many Questions About the Ethics of Viewing."

This is Renty below, in a very famous photograph you may have seen before.

From the article:

For a century, they languished in a museum attic. Fifteen wooden cases, palm-size and lined with velvet. Cocooned within are some of history’s cruelest, most contentious images — the first photographs, it is believed, of enslaved human beings.

Alfred, Fassena and Jem. Renty and his daughter Delia. Jack and his daughter Drana. They face us directly in one image and stand in profile in the next, bodies held fixed by an iron brace. The Zealy daguerreotypes, as the pictures are known, were taken in 1850 at the behest of the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz. A proponent of polygenesis — the idea that the races descended from different origins, a notion challenged in its own time and refuted by Darwin — he had the pictures taken to furnish proof of this theory.

Agassiz wanted images of barbarity, and he got them — implicating only himself. He had hand-selected his subjects in South Carolina, seeking types — “specimens,” as he put it — but each daguerreotype reveals an individual, deeply dignified and expressive. Their hurt, contempt, fatigue, utter refusal are unequivocal. The photographer, Joseph T. Zealy, who specialized in society portraits, did not alter his method for the shoot; he carried on as usual, using the same light, the same angles, giving the images their unsettling, formal perfection.

Agassiz showed the pictures only once. They were then tucked away at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Rediscovered in 1976, they have been at the center of urgent debates about photography ever since...

 

Harvard University Pledges $100 Million to Redress Past Ties to Slavery (VIDEO)

Ooo!

Well one would think. They're sitting on a $53.2 billion endowment. I'm sure they can afford a chintzy $100 million to throw a sop for reparations. *Eye Roll.*

At the New York Times, "Harvard Details Its Entanglements With Slavery and Its Plans for Redress."

Plus, "The Major Findings of Harvard’s Report on Its Ties to Slavery":

Harvard University issued a 134-page report investigating its ties to slavery, and its legacy. Here are the key findings.

In 2019, Harvard’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, appointed a committee of faculty members to investigate the university’s ties to slavery, as well as its legacy. Discussions about race were intensifying across the country. Students were demanding that the names of people involved in the slave trade be removed from buildings. Other universities, notably Brown, had already conducted similar excavations of their past.

The resulting 134-page report plus two appendices was released Tuesday, along with a promise of $100 million, to create an endowed fund to “redress” past wrongs, one of the biggest funds of its kind.

Here are some of its key findings and excerpts.

Slavery Was Part of Daily Life at the University

The report found that enslaved people lived on the Cambridge, Mass., campus, in the president’s residence, and were part of the fabric, albeit almost invisible, of daily life.

“Over nearly 150 years, from the university’s founding in 1636 until the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found slavery unlawful in 1783, Harvard presidents and other leaders, as well as its faculty and staff, enslaved more than 70 individuals, some of whom labored on campus,” the report said. “Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students.”

Four Harvard Presidents Enslaved People

The committee found at least 41 prominent people associated with Harvard who enslaved people. They included four Harvard presidents, such as Increase Mather, president of the university from 1692 to 1701, and Benjamin Wadsworth, president from 1725 to 1737; three governors, John Winthrop, Joseph Dudley and John Leverett; William Brattle, minister of First Church, Cambridge; Edward Wigglesworth, professor of divinity; John Winthrop, professor of mathematics and natural philosophy; Edward Hopkins, founder of the Hopkins Foundation; and Isaac Royall Jr., who funded the first professorship of law at Harvard.

The University Benefited From Plantation Owners

While New England’s image has been linked in popular culture to abolitionism, the report said, wealthy plantation owners and Harvard were mutually dependent for their wealth.

“Throughout this period and well into the 19th century, the university and its donors benefited from extensive financial ties to slavery,” the report said. “These profitable financial relationships included, most notably, the beneficence of donors who accumulated their wealth through slave trading; from the labor of enslaved people on plantations in the Caribbean islands and in the American South; and from the Northern textile manufacturing industry, supplied with cotton grown by enslaved people held in bondage. The university also profited from its own financial investments, which included loans to Caribbean sugar planters, rum distillers, and plantation suppliers along with investments in cotton manufacturing.”

Integration Was Accepted Slowly

Early attempts at integration met with stiff resistance from Harvard leaders who prized being a school for a white upper crust, including wealthy white sons of the South.

“In the years before the Civil War, the color line held at Harvard despite a false start toward Black access,” the report said. “In 1850, Harvard’s medical school admitted three Black students but, after a group of white students and alumni objected, the school’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., expelled them.”

Faculty Members Spread Bogus Science Harvard faculty members played a role in disseminating bogus theories of racial differences that were used to justify racial segregation and to underpin Nazi Germany’s extermination of “undesirable” populations.

“In the 19th century, Harvard had begun to amass human anatomical specimens, including the bodies of enslaved people, that would, in the hands of the university’s prominent scientific authorities, become central to the promotion of so-called race science at Harvard and other American institutions,” the report said.

The bitter fruit of those race scientists remains part of Harvard’s living legacy today...

The Legacy of Slavery Lived On

Until as recently as the 1960s, the legacy of slavery lived on in the paucity of Black students admitted to Harvard...

 

Arizona State's Power Play for California's College Students

A very interesting piece, at the Los Angeles Times, "UC and CSU deliver thousands of rejection letters. Arizona State wants to fill the void":

Kiana Tovar was all set to attend Sacramento State. Kara Smith had firm plans: enroll at Santa Monica College, then apply to transfer to UCLA. Israel Cortave had been accepted to UC Merced and UC Riverside, which both offer the computer science and engineering majors he wants to explore.

All three students are now attending college in California, mixing state-of-the-art online classes with small in-person gatherings. They’ve been able to forge friendships, stay on track with “success coaches” and learn about career opportunities from industry professionals. But the name inscribed at the entrance of the university they decided to attend is not a California public institution.

It’s ASU — Arizona State University. And its newest campus is in Los Angeles.

After years of steadily targeting California, the No. 1 source of ASU’s out-of-state students, the university has planted its first flag in the heart of downtown with a high-profile, multimillion-dollar takeover of the landmark Herald Examiner Building. The upstart program is too tiny to measure now. But California public university leaders have taken note — and are watching whether ASU President Michael Crow’s alternative vision for higher education will be a trendsetting incubator launched in Los Angeles or a failed incursion into a neighboring state.

Crow sees California gold in the tens of thousands of students each year who are delivered rejection letters from the University of California’s and California State University’s most popular campuses — the annual heartbreak happening now. He gives both systems due respect, but says they’re stuck in old models of enrollment tied to availability of physical space and are failing to embrace technology to deliver education. And UC campuses have responded to surging demand mostly by becoming more selective, rather than more inclusive.

“They’ve bought into the logic of exclusion as a part of the measure of success,” Crow said of UC. “I don’t think a public university can do that. Our mission as a public university is to serve the public wherever they are and whatever they need.”

At UCLA — the most sought-after university in the nation — the average GPA of admitted first-year students last year rose to 4.5 and its admission rate dropped to 10%. In 1990, UCLA’s admission rate was 43%.

Crow lays out a different vision at ASU: broad access over selectivity, with an 88.2% admission rate for first-year students entering in fall 2021 and guaranteed acceptance to those with a minimum 3.0 GPA and completion of required college prep courses. ASU has vastly expanded its capacity to become one of the nation’s largest universities today — doubling its total enrollment in the last dozen years to 136,000 in fall 2021. The biggest growth has come in online enrollment, which now accounts for 43% of ASU students, with a growing share at several satellite sites outside the main Tempe campus in Phoenix, Mesa, Lake Havasu and elsewhere.

Californians made up 14% of ASU’s total enrollment of 129,000 in fall 2020 — two-thirds of them enrolled in online programs. They represented more than 10% of the 14,350 first-year, on-campus students in Arizona in fall 2021 — a record — and nearly one-third of those from out-of-state. Overall, that first-year class grew 12% over fall 2020, as ASU bucked national trends of declining enrollment at community colleges and some Cal State campuses.

UC officials say they don’t see ASU’s latest entry into the state as a competitive threat as much as an opportunity to learn. UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ says she regards Crow as “one of the most interesting thinkers in higher education today” and last year invited him to address her top advisors to spark ideas about how to expand capacity, which she views as one of the university’s most pressing needs.

In a recent interview, Christ lamented a 2013 study by two UC researchers that found that California enrolled a lower proportion of its college students at four-year campuses than any other state.

ASU has used online instruction, technology tools and satellite campuses to increase enrollment, all measures Christ is considering for Berkeley. The UC system is vowing to add at least 20,000 more students by 2030.

Christ describes Crow as “not being so much of a gatekeeper in selective admissions, but really trying to find ways of serving more students. The time has come for some very creative rethinking” at UC.

Cal State leaders, however, are acutely aware of Crow’s moves and wonder what they will mean for their own enrollment — which declined systemwide by 13,000 students last year — since the two universities draw applicants from similar academic profiles versus the more selective UC.

Cal State isn’t so concerned that ASU will siphon off students who want a full college experience — one leader called the ASU Los Angeles center a “stripped down version of a college education” without sports, clubs and other popular on-campus attractions. San Diego State, for instance, drew a record 77,000 first-year applicants for about 5,500 seats for fall 2022 — and those students want an on-campus, residential experience, said Stefan Hyman, associate vice president for enrollment management.

UC Regent Eloy Ortiz Oakley recently told fellow board members that UC needed to up its game in expanding online learning and access to nontraditional students because “we have our friends at Arizona State University chomping at the bit to take California students.” Oakley later told The Times that he doesn’t “begrudge” ASU for targeting Californians.

“But I also think it’s a lost opportunity for our own institutions because these are California students that are ready and willing to get into higher education and we’re just not providing them enough access,” said Oakley, chancellor of the 116-campus California Community Colleges system...

Still more.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Bring Back Scholastic Aptitude Test

I saw this first at NYT, "M.I.T. Will Again Require SAT and ACT Scores."

Now from Kathryn Paige Harden, at the Atlantic, "The SAT Isn’t What’s Unfair: MIT brings back a test that, despite its reputation, helps low-income students in an inequitable society."

Herbert Marcuse and the Left's Endless Campaign Against Western 'Repression'

This is from Benedict Beckeld, at Quillette (via Maggie's Farm):

The Frankfurt School of social theory began about a century ago, in the Weimar Republic. It consisted in the main of a group of rather anti-capitalist, Marxist-light gentlemen who embraced oikophobia (the hatred or dislike of one’s own cultural home), and who were understandably disillusioned by the carnage of World War I. Our interest today is mainly historical; of its earlier members, such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, really only Adorno is still read with a measure of seriousness outside of academia.

The Frankfurt School popularized historicism—the belief that reflection itself is a part of history, which is to say that earlier thoughts are historically conditioned by the circumstances in which the thinkers lived, and should be seen in that light; and that what passes for “knowledge” is marred by the historical time and place in which that knowledge appeared. (This idea was present already in the second part of The Communist Manifesto.) The insights that a more positivist outlook claims to be certain, based on sensory data, historicism will consider uncertain and necessarily bound by subjective value judgments. A part of this view is the concern—and the French postmodernists will pick up this point—to identify, isolate, and thereby exorcise every sort of domination that any group might have held over any other group.

They wanted to find the particular reasons why someone in the past had thought in a particular way, reasons that were to be found mainly in external factors. Essentially, the Frankfurt School endeavored to establish a “value-free” social science, that is, the erasure of any sort of prejudice among philosophers and sociologists. Since Western civilization was monomaniacally seen as the history of dominations by various groups over one another—which meant that individual actors had to be viewed as purely nefarious oppressors—it followed quite naturally that much of the West was ready for the garbage heap. Not only were the workers and the poor oppressed by the rich, but the rich in turn were, along with everyone else, oppressed psychologically by Christian sexual mores and by the overall familial hierarchy of Western civilization. This is why, to many of the school’s members, not only smaller fixes had to be implemented here and there, but the whole edifice had to be brought down (which was itself ultimately a morally positivistic effort). With the rise of Nazism in Germany, many Frankfurt scholars moved to New York, and thereby gained a broader audience of impressionable college students....

Keep reading.

And see Linda Kimball's now classic article, "Cultural Marxism."  

College Students Forgot How to Talk to Each Other

The Democrat Party pandemic lockdown policies have set back, if not destroyed, a generation of young people, and not just school children. 

I know this first hand from my oldest, 26, who moved to San Francisco to start at S.F. State in February 2020. He came back home after one semester in The City, depressed and disappointed at how isolated and inferior was his college experience compared his time at Santiago Canyon College in Orange Park Acres. 

I also know this from teaching college students online for two years. I'm on my fifth semester in a transition to "remote emergency instruction" that was expected to brief and temporary. Even this semester, where my college has gone back to full in-person on-campus classes, more than 50 percent of those enrolled are taking their courses online. Indeed, the enrollment was so low in some of the campus-based classes that over two dozen were cancelled in my department alone. 

You're not getting the full college experience --- and excellence in education --- with online classes. It's good for some very motivated students who thrive in the intense atmosphere of digital learning space, but in my experience, it's not for most. I'm expecting to hear soon about my class schedule for fall, where I've requested to teach all on campus. We'll see how that goes. It feels weird to even be possibly going back. I feel like I need to retrain myself, to get myself fit for teaching in person. Seriously. My lectures are quite stentorian, and I need to be in good cardio-vascular condition. I don't feel like that right now, as I haven't been physically training during the pandemic lockdown. 

This summer I'll be changing my daily routine if all works out and I'm set to resume going to work everyday,  like I used to for 20 years.

In any case, at the Wall Street Journal, "College Students Have to Learn How to Make Small Talk Again":

When students at San Jose State University returned to campus last fall after more than a year of remote learning, lecturer Damon Moon thought they would be chatty and excited to see one another. Instead, he noticed something concerning: They weren’t talking at all.

Before class, students were looking at their phones or laptops. Even in the campus cafeteria, Mr. Moon saw that most students were eating alone, sandwich in one hand, phone in the other.

“They lost the skill to have small talk,” said Mr. Moon, who teaches international business classes. To get a close-up look at this phenomenon, I spoke to Mr. Moon and his students at the university.

“When I was in elementary school or middle school, if I wanted to talk to someone new, I would go up to them and try to strike up a conversation,” said Kian Kashefi, a 19-year-old business accounting major. Now, he said, “it feels weird to talk to anybody new without first connecting on social media.”

In a prolonged pandemic that has shifted more interactions online, college students are finding it harder to strike up conversations and make friends. In the past, socializing wasn’t just a perk but also a big incentive for students choosing campus life.

College instructors worry that if they don’t do something to facilitate conversation in class, their students will be unprepared to enter the workforce. To overcome screen-reinforced social awkwardness, some even lean on smartphones and web browsers to encourage students to interact.

Researchers from three universities surveyed nearly 33,000 college students around the U.S. and found two-thirds were struggling with loneliness in the fall of 2020. More than a year later, many students, including those at San Jose State, had returned to remote instruction after winter break because of the Omicron Covid-19 surge.

Joel Figueroa, a 20-year-old business major, said that since the pandemic began he has become more nervous about talking to people. “I was much more confident in my abilities before,” he said.

While technology has enabled him to remain in touch with friends, it has undermined his in-person interactions, he said. “My connections with friends offline would definitely be deeper if we were not so attached to our devices,” he said.

Even older students I talked to, who didn’t grow up with as much technology or spend formative years in a pandemic, are finding it hard to make connections.

“I didn’t form relationships with any students when I went back to campus last fall,” said Megan Dela Rosa, a 43-year-old business major. “Everyone had their masks on and you didn’t know anyone’s comfort level.” She added, “I just went to class, got my work done and left.”

Anna Touneh transferred to San Jose State from a community college last fall. Since school began this year online, the 32-year-old said talking to students has only become more awkward.

In one class recently, small groups of students went to Zoom breakout rooms to work on an assignment. Ms. Touneh said in her group, no one had their cameras on and no one spoke. “It took me six minutes to say something,” she said. “I finally gathered the courage, but it was very meek. I said, ‘Hey, guys, so what are we supposed to be doing?’”

Runhua Yang, a 43-year-old business major, said she’s normally extroverted but the pandemic has made it more difficult to express herself. Masks have made it harder for teachers to hear her, she said, causing her to speak up less often. “If a professor doesn’t encourage participation, I stay quiet,” she said.

Parents and psychologists were already concerned that phone usage was negatively affecting social-skill development among young people, even before the pandemic, according to Danielle Ramo, chief clinical officer at BeMe Health, a mobile platform for teen mental health. In a previous job, she helped develop an app called Nod to help college students improve their social lives by challenging them to do things like smile at five new people or keep their dorm-room doors open in the evening...

 

Omicron Leaves U.S. Parents, Teachers, and Students on Edge

Maybe this variant is peaking. We'll see. 

At LAT, "Anxious. Helpless. Upset. Omicron surge leaves U.S. parents, teachers and students on edge":

Tierra Pearson suspected the winter months would mean a sharp surge in coronavirus cases. So the Chicago mother made sure she and her two sons — seventh- and 10th-graders — were fully vaccinated.

“We were going to be prepared,” she recalled.

But as she kept the TV news on around the clock over much of the last two weeks, watching in dismay as leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Lori Lightfoot battled over safety precautions and schools reopening, Pearson felt far from prepared. She felt helpless.

“We as parents were totally left out of the conversation,” she said. “We had no voice about our schools, and that was truly a shame.”

As the Omicron variant continues to propel a massive surge in infections that has hit many educators and school staff, parents across the nation are faced with painful deja vu: toggling between virtual and in-person schooling and trying to keep up with constantly evolving district policies.

This week the Biden administration announced that it is planning to make 10 million COVID-19 test kits available each month for schools as part of its push to keep classrooms open during this wave of infections — a critical step considering that vaccination rates are lower among children.

Registered nurse Rafael Sanchez, left, evaluates COVID-19 patient.

Overall, 63% of Americans are fully vaccinated, but among children ages 12 to 17 the rate sits at 54% and among those 5 to 11, the rate drops to 17%. (In Vermont, 48% of that age group are vaccinated; in California, nearly 19%; and in Mississippi, 5%.)

But disruptions have occurred and at regular intervals.

On average, about 4% of schools across the country — 4,179 of 98,000 schools — dealt with COVID-19 disruptions such as closures this week, according to Burbio, a K-12 school opening tracker. That’s down slightly from 5,376 schools last week and a fraction of the peak that occurred around Labor Day 2020 when more than 60% of schools were closed, said Dennis Roche, Burbio’s co-founder.

Most of the closures were in the Northeast and Midwest, but some schools were starting to close in the West and South, Roche said. In Minneapolis, schools will go virtual for two weeks starting Friday because of a surge in Omicron cases among teachers. In Louisville, Ky., Jefferson County Public Schools shifted to remote learning because of COVID staffing shortages, while in the Portland, Ore., metro area, school districts moved to remote learning due to surges in cases and teachers being out sick.

Across the U.S., students are threatening boycotts and walkouts. The Oakland Unified School District faces such a strike unless it addresses a list of pandemic health and safety concerns. Students want the district to return to remote learning unless it provides KN95 masks for all kids and are calling for increased testing, among other demands. On Jan. 7, 12 district schools were forced to close after teachers staged a “sickout,” citing COVID worries. About 500 teachers were reported absent. And in New York, hundreds of students in recent days boycotted classes and staged walkouts over concerns about testing and called for remote learning to be implemented.

“We’re really in a pressure cooker situation right now, because American families are holding up the economy, we’re holding up the healthcare system and then we’re also expected to hold up the public education system,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, a network of grass-roots parent groups. “A lot of families across this country are absolutely at their breaking point.”

For many parents who live paycheck to paycheck, taking a few days off when schools close can mean the difference between having groceries or not and making rent or not, Rodrigues said. Beyond the financial loss, many parents worried that their kids’ mental health and grades would deteriorate when schools switch to remote learning.

“When you close down schools over an abundance of caution, understand what you are asking of American families who are already at the brink,” she said.

This week the Clark County School District, which spans Las Vegas and is the nation’s fifth largest school system with more than 320,000 students, announced it was canceling classes for two days due to extreme staffing shortages.

Jessica Atlas, a 46-year-old single mother, was already frustrated with the school district for not planning activities for her son, Ashton, 9, while he quarantined this week after he caught the flu and she tested positive for the coronavirus.

“I feel like the bottom’s falling out,” Atlas said, noting that Ashton had not been sent home with any additional

schoolwork. “There should be a plan in place if you send kids home. But there’s no organization, no real leadership and no real plan to catch these babies failing all over the place.”

The district said there would be no remote learning on the canceled school days.

 

University of Washington Professor Stuart Reges' Land Acknowledgement Case

This is bizarre.

I've noticed indigenous "land acknowledgements" lately, something like, "We hereby acknowledge that this campus resides on stolen land," blah, blah...

Professor Reges ain't taking it.

At the F.I.R.E., "University of Washington: Professor created ‘toxic environment’ by deviating from university-approved language about Native American land."

College, University Lockdowns Can't be Justified by the Science

Dr. Marty Makary, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Universities' Covid Policies Defy Science and Reason":

Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel.

Some of America’s most prestigious universities are leading the charge.

At Georgetown University, fully vaccinated students are randomly tested for Covid every week. Using a PCR test, which can detect tiny amounts of dead virus, asymptomatic students who test positive are ordered to a room in a designated building where they spend 10 days in confinement. Food is dropped off once a day at the door.

I spoke to several students who were holed up. One of them told me she would sometimes call a friend to come and wave at her through the window, just to see a human face. Another told me that the experience in quarantine “totally changed” her feelings about the school. “Everyone’s just fed up at this point,” she said. “People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water. And it was during finals.” She told me she is thinking about “transferring to an SEC school just to have an in-person experience.”

Given the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently changed the official quarantine period from 10 days to five, I reached out to Georgetown’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Ranit Mishori. She told me that Georgetown is still using a 10-day quarantine.

Students are the lowest risk population on planet Earth. Over the last six months, the risk of a person in the broader age group (15-24) dying of Covid or dying with Covid (the CDC does not clearly distinguish), was 0.001%. All or nearly all of those deaths were in a very specific subgroup: unvaccinated people with a medical comorbidity. But despite Georgetown’s strict vaccination, masking, testing, and quarantine requirements, the university announced late last month that “all University events, including meetings with visitors, will need to be held virtually or outdoors,” among many other restrictions.

At Princeton University, fully vaccinated students are not allowed to leave the county unless they are on a sports team. They’re also testing all students twice a week, usurping the scarce testing supply from vulnerable communities so that low-risk, young people can use them.

At Cornell, masks are still the rule—and even recommended outdoors. “Masks must be worn indoors at all times, unless in a private, non-shared space (e.g., dorm room or office); we strongly recommend masking outdoors when physical distancing is not possible,” the school announced in mid-December.

At Amherst, students must double mask if they don’t use a KN95. In nearby Boston, at Emerson College, students are tested twice a week and have stay-in-room orders. The college instructs students to “only leave their residence halls or place of residence for testing, meals, medical appointments, necessary employment, or to get mail.” Seriously.

At these institutions of higher learning and thousands more, science is supposedly held in the highest esteem. So where is the scientific support for masking outdoors? Where is the scientific support for constantly testing fully vaccinated young people? Where is the support for the confinement of asymptomatic, young people who test positive for a virus to which they are already immune on a campus of other immune people? The data simply do not justify any of it...

 

Abigail Shrier

She's wonderful.

See, "What I told the students of Princeton."

What I told the students of @princeton tonight:

Show some self-respect and reclaim your freedom.https://t.co/he3Um6oSjQ pic.twitter.com/JFJce3ImWP

— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) December 9, 2021

Protesters at Arizona State Hold 'DEATH 2 AMERICA' Sign at Kyle Rittenhouse Protest

Arizona State's in Tempe, just outside of Phoenix. It's a really university, but I wouldn't want to go there.

See, "Arizona State University Defends ‘Death 2 America’ Sign at Anti-Rittenhouse Rally."

A Chaotic Rivalry Weekend Sets Up Final Sprint for College Football Playoff Spots (VIDEO)

I watched all three big games: Ohio State at Michigan, Oklahoma at Oklahoma State, and Alabama at Purdue.

All great, especially Oklahoma vs. Oklahoma State, with four overtimes.

At WSJ, "The semifinal field is still wide open after Michigan defeated Ohio State, Oklahoma State beat Oklahoma and Alabama won ugly in the Iron Bowl":

In Ann Arbor, there was catharsis for Michigan fans. At Auburn, Alabama’s uncharacteristic mistakes set up a quadruple-overtime survival test for the Crimson Tide. And by the time the clock ran out in Stillwater, Okla., the top end of the college football standings had been completely reshuffled.

College’s football’s rivalry weekend brought a huge dose of unanticipated chaos to the College Football Playoff picture. No. 1 Georgia and upstart Cincinnati both remained undefeated. But elsewhere, the top end of the rankings got a major reshuffle.

Michigan has its eye on a playoff spot for the first time after defeating Ohio State 42-27 in a snowy Big House. First it must beat No. 16 Iowa in the Big Ten championship next weekend, however.

Oklahoma State is also eyeing a semifinal debut, having rallied from a nine-point deficit to beat Oklahoma for the first time in seven years and clinch a spot in the Big 12 title game.

Saturday was rougher for No. 3 Alabama, which was held to three points through 59 minutes of the Iron Bowl and needed a last-minute touchdown drive and four additional overtimes to take down a 6-5 Auburn team playing with its second-string quarterback who was visibly injured.

It was an unusually sloppy performance for the Crimson Tide, who tallied 11 penalties for 129 yards. Quarterback Bryce Young, a Heisman Trophy favorite, threw a crucial red-zone interception and completed less than half of his 52 passes, top receiver Jameson Williams got ejected from the game for targeting during a first half kick return and Alabama converted on fourth down just once in four tries. Auburn nearly clinched the game in regulation with just 10 points and 137 total yards of offense.

“I just had a feeling that the way we were playing on defense, that we were going to have some opportunities and be able to come back in the game,” said Alabama coach Nick Saban following the game. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of the way our players kept competing in the game.”

Oklahoma State also pulled off a second-half comeback in its rivalry game against No. 10 Oklahoma. The Cowboys headed into halftime tied at 24 only to see the Sooners open up a nine-point lead after a special teams gaffe, a missed field goal and a turnover in the third quarter.

Just when everything was going wrong, Oklahoma State clawed its way to a 37-33 lead. Steady defense sealed the deal, breaking up several deep balls to the end zone from Oklahoma’s freshman sensation, quarterback Caleb Williams, then sacking him on the final play of the game...

 

Abe Greenwald: "Review of 'Woke Racism' by John McWhorter"

At Commentary, "Among the Elect":

If the United States manages to put down the woke revolution, it will be because a critical mass of liberals chooses to reject it. Conservatives, opposed to wokeness from the start, can make arguments and stand up for their principles individually. But they can’t stop the liberal-to-woke conversion process that turns mildly left-of-center Americans into cosplay Black Panthers overnight. The liberals themselves are the gatekeepers of their own movement and its institutions. Given that these institutions—news media, social media, entertainment, academia, and the current majority party in Washington—shape so many aspects of American life, it’s mostly up to liberals to halt and reverse the transformation of the country.

Among the dozen or so prominent liberals who have answered this call, John McWhorter has taken on an invaluable role. McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, is less consumed with particular woke-inspired outrages than with getting at the substance of wokeness itself and the threat it poses to his fellow black Americans. On those matters, his new book, Woke Racism, makes several major contributions.

First, it’s not pitched at the woke. McWhorter is done with them. “Our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy by missing the futility of ‘dialogue’ with them,” he writes. No one can be argued out of wokeness and, just as crucially, McWhorter wants to get to liberals—black and white—before they’re irretrievably lost to the impenetrable mob: “I want to reach those on the fence, guilted into attention by these ideologues’ passion and rhetoric but unable to disregard their true inner compass.”

McWhorter also argues that wokeness is insulting to and catastrophic for black Americans. By the lights of the woke, he says, “white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special.”

Despite the book’s title, McWhorter dispenses with the term woke altogether. Borrowing, with acknowledgment, from the conservative writer Joseph Bottum, he deems the woke “the Elect.” The term evokes the social-justice warrior’s smugness in his sense of having come to higher moral knowledge. The Elect also has a helpfully medieval resonance to it: “This is apt, in that the view they think of as, indeed, sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are.” The Elect are, to some degree, inquisitors.

From there, McWhorter makes his most convincing argument—that Electism is not a political persuasion at all but a religion. “I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion,” he writes. “I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.”

Understanding Electism as a real, not metaphorical, religion, requires some explication. McWhorter details the new faith’s tenets and motivations at length. Like any religion, Electism involves “certain suspensions of disbelief.” This means, for example, one is not to question the Elect’s boundless outrage over the police killing of George Floyd compared with its more muted response to thousands of black-on-black murders committed the same year. “Does that mean ‘It’s not as bad if we do it to ourselves?’” McWhorter asks. Moreover, “to suspend disbelief,” he writes, “is a kind of submission.” And the Elect evince this submission when they refuse to question a host of policies—from an extreme version of affirmative action to defunding police—that show no benefit for the black Americans the Elect want to help.

The Elect also have a very influential clergy. Figures such as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Ta-Nehisi Coates make up a priestly class, and their writings are scripture...

Continue reading.

And buy the book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

America Is Built on a Great Culture. Progressives Want to Abandon It

It's Joel Kotkin, at Newsweek.

In Return to Classroom, Universities and Professors Struggle with Covid

My division dean just sent out an announcement on this yesterday. How to handle? 

1. Notify sick student to stay the hell off campus. 

2. Reassure the lamebrains that you're not going to drop them from class.  

3. Make sure students are screened and cleared for classes at the check-in tables on-site.

4. Contact college administration to inform them of a cases. 

5. Maintain strict confidentiality. (Or else?) 

At the New York Times, "The Masked Professor vs. the Unmasked Student":

Matthew Boedy, an associate professor of rhetoric and composition, sent out a raw emotional appeal to his students at the University of North Georgia just before classes began: The Covid-19 Delta variant was rampaging through the state, filling up hospital beds. He would teach class in the equivalent of full body armor — vaccinated and masked.

So he was stunned in late August when more than two-thirds of the first-year students in his writing class did not take the hint and showed up unmasked.

It was impossible to tell who was vaccinated and who was not. “It isn’t a visual hellscape, like hospitals, it’s more of an emotional hellscape,” Dr. Boedy said.

North Georgia is not requiring its students to be vaccinated or masked this fall. And as in-person classes return at almost every university in the country, after almost a year and a half of emergency pivoting to online learning, many professors are finding teaching a nerve-racking experience.

The American College Health Association recommends vaccination requirements for all on-campus higher education students for the fall semester. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends face coverings, regardless of vaccine status, for indoor public spaces in areas where the rate of infection is high.

But this is not how it has worked out on more than a few campuses.

More than 1,000 colleges and universities have adopted vaccination requirements for at least some students and staff, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. In an indication of how political vaccination has become, the schools tend to be clustered in states that voted for President Biden in the last election.

But at some campuses, particularly in Republican-led states with high rates of contagion — like the state systems in Georgia, Texas and Florida — vaccination is optional and mask wearing, while recommended, cannot be enforced. Professors are told they can tell students that they are “strongly encouraged” or “expected” to put on masks, but cannot force students to do so. And teachers cannot ask students who have Covid-like symptoms to leave the classroom.

At least nine states — Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Tennessee — have banned or restricted school mask mandates. It is unclear, education officials say, whether all of these prohibitions apply to universities, but public universities depend on state funding.

Certainly, some professors are happy to go maskless. A smattering have resigned in protest over optional mask policies. Most, like Dr. Boedy, are soldiering on. But the level of fear is so high that even at universities that do require vaccination and masks, like Cornell and the University of Michigan, professors have signed petitions asking for the choice to return to online teaching.

“Morale is at an all-time low,” warns a petition at the University of Iowa.

Universities are caught between the demands of their faculty for greater safety precautions, and the fear of losing students, and the revenue they bring, if schools return to another year of online education.

“I think everybody agrees that the idea is to have people physically back in the classroom,” said Peter McDonough, general counsel for the American Council on Education, an organization of colleges and universities. “The turning on a dime to provide online education last year and the previous spring semester was only seen as temporary.”

For some faculty, the new year brings not a return to normal but a strong sense that things could go off the rails. In the first weeks of class, case counts have risen at schools including Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Arizona State, Liberty University, the University of Arkansas, the University of North Florida and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“It seems like a repeat,” said Michael Atzmon, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan. “On the one hand, we have the vaccine. On the other hand, we have Delta.”

Dr. Atzmon helped organize a petition asking the university to be more open to online teaching. It was signed by more than 700 faculty members and instructors.

In a response to the petition, Michigan’s president, Mark Schlissel, said on Thursday that, given the “stellar” rate of vaccination at the Ann Arbor campus (92 percent for students, 90 percent for faculty), the classroom was “perhaps the safest place to be” on campus.

Dr. Schlissel suggested that faculty would just have to get used to the idea that there would be Covid cases on campus. “A pandemic is unsettling, it’s unpredictable, and yes, it involves an unavoidable level of risk,” he said.

There are signs of defiance against state policies. The three big public universities in Arizona — University of Arizona, Arizona State and Northern Arizona University — are tiptoeing around the ban on masks and requiring them in class. If all students have to wear masks, university officials believe that they are obeying Gov. Doug Ducey’s order not to discriminate against students who choose not to be vaccinated.

“It’s kind of a cat-and-mouse game,” said Peter Lake, an education law professor at Stetson University...

For real, man.

Keep reading. 

 

A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’

This isn't new, though indeed folks don't talk about it on campus, at all (at least at my college, and I surmise others, most others, in fact). 

Props to WSJ for the excellent reporting here. 

ICYMI, Christina Hoff Sommers has written on this stuff, here: The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men.

And from the article:

The number of men enrolled in college this year trails women by record highs, part of a nationwide education gap. Nobody wants to talk about it. https://t.co/RzPzSDIDPd

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) September 8, 2021

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

No reversal is in sight. Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the 2021-22 school year—3,805,978 to 2,815,810—by nearly a percentage point compared with the previous academic year, according to Common Application, a nonprofit that transmits applications to more than 900 schools. Women make up 49% of the college-age population in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

“Men are falling behind remarkably fast,” said Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, which aims to improve educational opportunities for low-income, first-generation and disabled college students.

American colleges, which are embroiled in debates over racial and gender equality, and working on ways to reduce sexual assault and harassment of women on campus, have yet to reach a consensus on what might slow the retreat of men from higher education. Some schools are quietly trying programs to enroll more men, but there is scant campus support for spending resources to boost male attendance and retention.

The gender enrollment disparity among nonprofit colleges is widest at private four-year schools, where the proportion of women during the 2020-21 school year grew to an average of 61%, a record high, Clearinghouse data show. Some of the schools extend offers to a higher percentage of male applicants, trying to get a closer balance of men and women.

“Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant who previously led the admissions offices at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. “The question is, is that right or wrong?”

Ms. Delahunty said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has become “higher education’s dirty little secret,” practiced but not publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter.

“It’s unfortunate that we’re not giving this issue air and sun so that we can start to address it,” she said.

At Baylor University, where the undergraduate student body is 60% female, the admission rate for men last year was 7 percentage points higher than for women. Every student has to meet Baylor’s admission standards to earn admission, said Jessica King Gereghty, the school’s assistant vice president of enrollment strategy and innovation. Classes, however, are shaped to balance several variables, including gender, she said.

Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered. Baylor created a “males and moms communication campaign” a few years ago to keep high-school boys on track, she said.

Among the messages to mothers in the campaign, Ms. Gereghty said: “ ‘At the dinner table tonight, mom, we need you to talk about getting your high school transcripts in.’ ”

Race and gender can’t be considered in admission decisions at California’s public universities. The proportion of male undergraduates at UCLA fell to 41% in the fall semester of 2020 from 45% in fall 2013. Over the same period, undergraduate enrollment expanded by nearly 3,000 students. Of those spots, nine out of 10 went to women.

“We do not see male applicants being less competitive than female applicants,” UCLA Vice Provost Youlonda Copeland-Morgan said, but fewer men apply.

The college gender gap cuts across race, geography and economic background. For the most part, white men—once the predominant group on American campuses—no longer hold a statistical edge in enrollment rates, said Mr. Mortenson, of the Pell Institute. Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal.

No college wants to tackle the issue under the glare of gender politics, said Ms. Delahunty, the enrollment consultant. The conventional view on campuses, she said, is that “men make more money, men hold higher positions, why should we give them a little shove from high school to college?”

Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”

The pandemic accelerated the trend. Nearly 700,000 fewer students were enrolled in colleges in spring 2021 compared with spring 2019, a Journal analysis found, with 78% fewer men.

The decline in male enrollment during the 2020-21 academic year was highest at two-year community colleges. Family finances are believed to be one cause. Millions of women left jobs to stay home with children when schools closed in the pandemic. Many turned to their sons for help, and some young men quit school to work, said Colleen Coffey, executive director of the College Planning Collaborative at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, a program to keep students in school.

“The guys felt they needed to step in quickly,” Ms. Coffey said.

It isn’t clear how many will return to school after the pandemic...

I don't trust this Framingham study. 

I'm at community college. I've been teaching online since March 17th last year. I suspect just as many women have been working outside the home to support their families as have men.

Who know, though? I'd have to see the data.

Either way, boys and young men are indeed getting screwed. Gender identity theory, and whatever other brain dead ideological abominations, have left men high and dry. 

Still more.