Only one thing can save US universities, that is full introduction of merit based admissions and abolishing of legacy and any other non performance based admissions. This way universities would become place where people go to further their knowledge and not brainwashing factories they are now.
Also add to this, we need to put focus on STEM regarding finding and education. Any of "studies" such as gender and similar brainwashing programs need to be phased out from higer education, since they are clearly modern versions party education in Soviet Union
Focus on STEM can be achieved overnight simply by eliminating all federal grants and loan subsidies because STEM is basically the only thing worth providing loans for if you are using real money.
Almost all of our problems originate with the federal government being huge. Stop voting for the federal government to be huge, you idiots.
It's more than federal money. It's a mentality that is pervasive at the universities now. I have more students telling me that they are socialists or communists. At first I was amused but now I'm thinking 1. where is this generating from? and 2. how naive are these students! I've been told by non-woke students that they have to "keep their heads down" and not say anything in class that goes against the trend. This is so frightening to me.
No it’s the federal money. You will always have socialists. But socialists are worthless people. They are parasites. A flood of free money is what allows them to thrive.
We should also eliminate tax exempt status to wipe out the NGOs. I’m aware this will harm good charities but it is worth the price as NGOs are a truly dangerous pestilence.
Well if you wipe out the federal money then you have only rich students going to colleges. I can't afford to send my son to college without federal aid; I'm a teacher. Perhaps the problem is that very rich people are eligible for federal money through FAFSA. Maybe there should be a cap on who qualifies.
Deirdre - No, you would only have real students going to college. Students that want to learn something and get a degree they need to get a job and earn money and pay back loans AND ALSO you then have colleges that need to offer value for money. They would need to focus on education and not have, for instance, a DEI staff of 163 people (actual example, Univ of Michigan in 2021). College would cost less.
My son is a "real student" but I cannot afford college without some government help. He is in community college now but is hoping to transfer into a 4 year college. He also works full time. Rich people's kids will always have options, whether they are academically inclined or not. If you eliminate FAFSA you will get only rich, privileged kids at elite universities (or students from overseas, like from Saudi Arabia). I do agree that money should be eliminated from the DEI staff-- also a waste of time and energy.
Agreed, look at the administration positions at the universities and ratio to students, 20 years ago it was a semi-defensible number, now its about 2 students for every admin position at some schools. The universities saw the government open the checkbook to guarantee loans, and they responded by increasing costs as much as possible.
That instilled fear in the normies is intentional. Leftists above all crave power, and what better way to achieve and maintain it than to put the fear of God in anyone who would dare question your positions and orthodoxies.
We are paying the price for allowing our schools to be taken over by people who are resentful of the idea that they should be required to contribute meaningfully to the general public welfare in order to earn a living. They instead want to accrue power politically and through control of academic and media institutions so that they can influence policy to confiscate and redistribute wealth. In the face of every shed of evidence, they believe in communism — however else they choose to label it — as an effective national economic and political system.
These are the people teaching/indoctrinating our children.
"simply by eliminating all federal grants and loan subsidies"
Hafta agree. There is an entirely different perspective on who the Ivories can and can't admit for whatever reason -- remove all public funding and then let them do whatever the hell they want. Then, if a gazzilionaire, I myself would found The University of Whiteness -- dedicated to the protection, preservation, promotion and praise of Western Civilization ...and the white people who built it.
This got likes? Who are you people? Being critical of woke policing doesn’t require welcoming anyone’s white supremacist fantasies. You’re the people who make the leftist mob look like they have a point. Gross.
I'm ... not quite sure how to put it ... say satirical. The U of W needs to exist in a nation/culture that has become so self-destructive and mentally ill that it becomes necessary to defend, explicitly and even sarcastically, it's own existence and where it came from. In a sane culture there would be no need for the U of W, and suggesting such a thing would be seen as a joke. It should be a joke, unfortunately it isn't.
I can’t find which of my comments incited this reaction. Was it just my username? I should change it. It’s just an old nickname that meant nothing to me, but has meant a lot to people here. Whatever it was, thanks for the “shut up” on a thread largely about free speech in a publication dedicated to free speech. Woot!
Well, one can zoom in like that, but as one gains resolution, one also loses that which is peripheral but still positive. Me I sorta define Whiteness as a deep cultural state of mind that has historically burned brightest in the Anglosphere -- even in America!! -- but that anyone is free to partake of. I think of Thomas Sowell as whiter that I am and I'd be deeply honored if he'd run a faculty at the U of W. Whiteness is color blind!
It s very simple, tenure at American universities currently requires that a young investigator get the support of administrators ( deans of colleges and grant management officers), who will then “ promote” their output, steer the better students towards their labs, see that they get prizes and awards from various philanthropic foundations and other empty and meaningless virtue signaling front organizations, …, and so forth. Just the sort of stuff a Hollywood talent agency would do for a thespian talent. The administrator in turn, markets the young scholar to various companies who will pay for help to market products based on “ science” .The research “ talent” will then “ produce” appropriate results and policy recommendations, on key topics such as climate change or immigration or judicial reform . Then the Chinese and Russians being to understand and exploit the possibilities for subversion of our society based this corrupt nonsense.
It would also help if people knew the origins of higher education. If people knew that these were institutions of public indoctrination, it would show how and why changing them is so hard.
Yup. In my little industry, we have an actual free market (one of the very few in agriculture with no government involvement). I hate it when prices go against me, but that’s life in markets. The government ruins everything it touches.
> Also add to this, we need to put focus on STEM regarding finding and education.
I think there's a place for "softer" sciences. Classics, philosophy, history, folklore, music theory, even performing arts and comparative literature... all these ideas deserve to be preserved and passed on, albeit probably not to the extent it is now.
I agree. There’s plenty place for those disciplines. But I don’t think that I should have to subsidize someone pursuing them. For example, what does a practitioner of, say, folklore actually do? What if 10% of students at Folklore U majored in folklore every year? How would that many folklorologists contribute to the common good? Would they all have jobs folkloring? What would such a job consist of doing? It’s hard to answer.
There is a simple reason that forgiving student debt is a terrible idea: it insulates students from the reality that choices have consequences. It is ~never~ a good idea to deny reality.
I think there is a differentiation that needs to be drawn between the so-called “softer disciplines” of philosophy, literature, and classics vs the “ideological indoctrination disciplines” like women’s studies, gender studies, etc. The former educate you about *how* to think critically; the latter train you about *what* to think, blindly - and therein lies the problem. I write this as an English & Comparative Literature major who has enjoyed a long and successful career in finance. Much credit is owed to my liberal arts and humanities education which provided me with the tools to think about issues and questions from multiple perspectives so that I can arrive at a well-reasoned viewpoint for my clients. I haven’t parsed a John Donne sonnet in a long time, but the critical analysis tools I developed in learning how to do so are something I use every day. STEM aren’t the only disciplines that have value.
My concern is that people actually use their educations to make money and repay whatever debts they accrue. Otherwise I'm the one on the hook for them, and I don't like that. It matters not to me if people want to major in black studies or intersectionality or heaven knows what else. I'm fine with those choices. But if they want money to pay for that educations, such as they are, it can't continue to be a handout since that is a net negative to society.
I graduated in chemistry at MIT before going to medical school. Almost 50 years after becoming a chemist, the then-chairwomen of chem at MIT asked me what the relevance of my chemistry degree had to my practice. My answer was, "nothing; and everything." At least 99% of all physicians and surgeons would be unable to tell you anything about chemistry beyond the most trivial--like what an atom and a molecule is. Really. So it's genuinely irrelevant in that wise.
But before I (semi-) retired I was a professor of radiology and neurosurgery and did neurointerventional surgery, a specialty that didn't exist when I was in school. A small cadre of us made it from whole cloth. Critical thinking--which we all developed in our then-prior lives--and creativity were necessary. And undergrad was good place to refine and enhance those aspects.
I don't agree. In my generation of pre-med students we majored in biology & chemistry. This included inorganic, organic, biochemistry, quantitative & qualitative analysis. We were a bit more knowlegable. Was it useful as a pharmacologist & internist? Absolutely!
Your experience and mine are clearly different. Most physicians and surgeons I’ve known—and this is academic medicine—look at chemistry like Dracula looking at a cross. They might know the names of drugs, even generics, but ask them what enantiomer means and they’re like a dog watching television.
Try the experiment yourself. Work enantiomer or 7-receptor into a conversation and see where it goes. For that matter, make it simpler: chuckle at the cleverness of the person who decided on the generic name, esomeprazole. It’s pretty astute. Are your colleagues?
Very well said. What's worse is subjects like English lit are being watered down and hijacked by a social justice agenda and at the same time being made the scapegoat for this by those privileging STEM.
Are all those asking for student loan debt forgiveness non-STEM majors? I would guess not. I do not nor have ever had student debt to pay and my degree was in Theater and History. My husband graduated with a degree in History and went to seminary. We would both say our non-STEM degrees have helped us tremendously. Also teachers are not STEM degrees. I understand there are some stupid degrees so don't get me wrong but I think statements like yours are not helpful. I think if a University truly teaches a student to think (not what to think) you have created an asset to society. I also write this as a parent of a college student pursuing history and a high schooler who will study medicine.
Liberal Arts, classical education must always have a place or we are sunk.STEM is fine but not at all the final solution! I totally agree that our colleges and universities need to push a re-set button and get back to teaching kids how to think (not what to think) while also encouraging an increase in STEM majors. Balance! It is so often about balance!
You're right, STEM is fine, but when we discuss whether we can do something, STEM will find a way. When we discuss whether we should do something, STEM has no answers, it's the classically educated who can say, "Something like this has been done before and it didn't end well," or "This has worked in the past."
Amen! I kind of would argue that the issue of can we had put us in many of the conundrums of today. Also we need to realize that some degrees are actually more akin to vocational training to do job x and not classical education which teaches philosophy and such which can be applied to various jobs not just one or two.
This ^^ I was about to formulate a similar response above but you said it so succinctly :) Colleges and universities are not, and should never be, considered as simple career training factories. The whole purpose is to train "thinkers" not simply to create "ready to hire" job applicants.
I think part of this problem is that employers, however, have relegated college degrees as "job training" requirements. There are many fields, STEM included, that could be filled with simple career training courses and certifications, that don't require a four year degree. Save that for those seeking more leadership and decision making roles in those fields, and roll back the job requirements for entry to intermediate level roles to accept non-4 year degreed applicants who otherwise have work history/training/certs to fill the role (probably more than adequately too).
Federal student aid should be for disciplines that benefit the citizenry. A strong military does that, and that relies on STEM for modern weaponry. Medicine, nursing, teaching are a few more. One might argue for law, but there are a lot of lawyers already. What does a comparative literature degree do for the citizens? How about a degree in gender studies, or black history? No, not with taxpayer funds.
Why is the federal government in the student loan space? Return this money to the states and let them direct it. The GI bill is the only kind of federal government "thumb on the scale" program that seems reasonable because the military gave up the opportunity to go to college to serve their country. And that should be rewarded.
By federal student aid do you mean federal loans or just grants? Drawing the line somewhere in the sand with respect to majors requires the government to do it correctly, something it doesn’t have a great track record with. Free market economics on the other hand is pretty good at financially supporting the jobs in demand - the jobs with a shortage of workers tend to command a higher wage. This is on display with nursing right now. Thanks to a mass shortage of nurses now, hospitals are paying current entry level employees to go get degrees and covering tuition. The hospital system I work for just created a 1 year (fully paid) BSN program in partnership with ISU for anyone with a non-nursing bachelors to go back and get a second degree.
Let’s go with that. If a university wants to have a gender or ethnic studies degree track, let’s see how the free market responds with paying jobs and alumni donations.
Otherwise, I see these curricula as nothing more than self-affirming.
The hospitals and medicine in general has a reputation that is in the shitter after the shear malevolence of the response to Covid. I'm not surprised there is a nursing shortage. When did "First Do No Harm" become "First Make Bank and Kill Millions"?
I respectfully disagree as a person who has lived in a city with 5 military installations, I have known many who have worked for the military who are musicians, historians, political science experts and linguists. I get your point but too much government control has never been a good way to solve anything.
What government control are you referring to? No one would be denied access to these humanities programs. They would just have to pay tuition for themselves. Loans are still on the table, if the colleges fund them. So are grants from alumni contributions or endowment funds. I do not see how the rest of the country benefits from aid like that anywhere nearly as much as from contributions made by science, engineering, medicine, etc.
Rob-- Wow-- wiping out philosophy, history, art, literature, languages?! Then it's not a university. It's a vocational school. You don't think a Stem student might benefit from Aristotle's wisdom so he/she wouldn't end up like Elizabeth Holmes. Or wouldn't a business student value a history course? This almost sounds like a Marxist doctrine you are proposing. And FYI -- private universities are not receiving taxpayer funds.
I didn't say the humanities are worthless. Not at all a wipeout. Just not as worthy of taxpayer funding as the professions that produce practical good for society. We need more doctors and scientists, more engineers and mathematicians to solve the growing problems our expanding population needs to be solved. And private institutions get loads of federal funds. The universities have been foxes spending federal money on themselves by giving loans to marginal students unlikely to graduate who will be saddled with debt without a degree. We are the chickens paying those bills. Furthermore, humanities students can still pursue their passions if the universities simply fund them with their own money. I guarantee the foxes will retreat to the woods and the caliber of students receiving university funding will improve. In my view, the student loan problem was and is still being generated by the universities, and they should be on the hook to pay back loans that the students default on.
The humanities today don't teach Aristotle, they teach Marx. They should receive no government funding, donors can support such classes as they choose. Many degree fields should be eliminated as they are less valuable than four year apprenticeships in those fields, (e.g. jourmalism, performing arts, business).
A large portion have got to be. Most of the debt is grad school debt. I went to grad school for engineering and they paid me (and also worked me like the indentured servant that I basically was), and while med school generally doesn't go that way it also pays off famously afterward.
I agree . But it has to be acknowledged that allowing 17 years olds to make these decisions is part of the problem. Most sign on to these loans without understanding the economic reality
Doesn’t that mean the parents and the primary schools and high schools those 17 year olds attended did a terrible job, too? I understood when I was 17. My daughter understood when she was 17. It seems we are teaching them otherwise. Maybe not an accident?
Our world has been falling apart for about three generations now. Cradle-to-grave nanny-states are all about usurping parenthood de facto if not de jure.
I disagree. When I was 17, I knew the definition of the word loan and those who are going to college are supposed to be the best and the brightest and they know the definition of the word loan they just, selfishly don't care.
No, when I went to college, I understood that I would have to pay my grandmother back and I did. I also understood I would have to pay back my federal loan and I did. Unfortunately we as a society haven't adequately explained that when you are in debt, you are a slave until it is paid off.
In the high schools many are teaching financial literacy (which I have been proposing) because many students-- especially where I teach in Compton-- have NO idea how loans work. They don't understand credit cards. They don't understand why buying a brand new car is not a good idea. They spend hundreds of dollars on sneakers rather than saving money. I think ALL high schools should teach financial literacy.
well, part of that is a further problem with public education. The fact that most students have no idea how debt works or finance in general, yet they are often forced to take geometry and algebra seems odd to me.
Regardless, we are talking about this like loans are the only solution. If colleges didn't have such a huge administrative staff the cost would go down and some students could work their way through school. The idea that school has to take 4 years is also a problem. It takes however long it takes. So a student could get a job and take a class or 2 a semester and not wrack up a ton of dept.
Student loan debt punishes people who want to spend their lives doing things that don't make money. It doesn't have much to do with their parents' wealth. I have no quarrel with artists who live for their art. We part company when they do poor art that doesn't pay, but they want to live in mansions.
Rich people's parents pay for their kids' education. Those who are not rich have to go into student loan debt. Things that are very important, like teaching school, do not pay much. Income adjusted federal student loans largely solve this problem so people can do work that is good for the world but doesn't pay as much as management consulting for big corporations that just make more money for those who are already rich.
My wife and I are no means rich (I work in mfg, she is a teacher in the local school district). Our first son graduated from university with zero debt, and our second son is on the way to same debt free graduation. The difference is my wife and I started planning from when they were infants to have monies available to put them thru school. We sacrificed, haven't had a real vacation in over twenty years, neither of us drives an expensive new car....but to us it was worth it.
I generally agree with the point(s) you are making. Are you in agreement that I should not be required to pay for your education? If you take out loans to get to what you want to do, I should not have to pay your loans off?
Completely agree! If you want to get a history or folklore degree go for it. But the public should not have to finically support your endeavor. Today there are plenty of ways to learn not all have to go to school and get a degree.
I agree. I'm a Humanities guy. All of this has tremendous value. It is arguably the loss of the Humanities to left wing lunatics that has enabled ALL OF THIS. The very people who should have been able and willing to oppose the lies and demonic destructiveness of the Left have on the contrary embraced, enabled, and furthered it.
But that says nothing about the fundamental value of Western culture, and for that matter, the cultures of other nations from whom we can also learn, which itself is a Western value. Or was.
I agree. As someone who originally wanted to be an English major, I think the real humanities are actually quite important to constructive and critical thinking. The bastardized things they put out there now, and call humanities, such as gender studies, is a bunch of bullsh$t.
Gender, racial, or other "minority" studies is actually a tremendous career move right now. There are tons of DEI and HR positions available (while a lot of science/engineering positions are being replaced by AI), and it's probably one of the strongest undergraduate degrees if you plan to apply for law school, MSW, education, etc.
That's where we are as a society where a degree in 2SLGBTQIA+ Studies gives you better job prospects than one in chemical engineering or economics.
This is why we should not use the ability to make money to judge whether a person should pick a major. These are not subjects of value but they are highly valued monetarily right now.
Yes, but monetary value is what a loan should be based on. If you wouldn't give a car loan to someone whose job can't make enough to pay it back, why give them an education loan?
Some kind of central planning picking which majors are 'valuable' will fail, as most all central planning does.
If, for instance, the supposed critical thinking skills of a philosophy major are useful, then jobs will want to hire people with those majors, which will make it valuable.
That said, I have met some philosophy majors. Aside from being able to quote some previous philosophers, I did not find them particularly more rational or better critical thinkers than people of other degrees.
I wanted to be a Professor, but even back then as a moderate Democrat--I've read good books since then and moved much farther to the Right, which I call the Middle--I was going to get in trouble. You spend all this money and do all this work, then you still won't be able to work if you don't kowtow to fundamentally illiberal, idiotic, and destructive ideologies.
That's what derailed my dream of being an English professor. Moderate was not good enough; you had to be full-on Far Left to have any hope of getting a tenure-track position.
I'm in the same boat. I turned down an extraordinary opportunity because I feared I'd become a target or worse based on my personal views, including being actively pro-israel.
I have so many friends who pandered to a leftist agenda and who are suddenly waking up and scratching their heads as to why their colleagues and institutions refuse to condemn baby killers.
Anyone not familiar with it should read up on the extraordinary story of tenured NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller and how he was treated by his woke colleagues and the cowed university.
I’m also an ex-humanities student (prior to a more *ahem* practical professional degree...house/food/money being necessary to live in our world), and agree that the classical humanities are of enormous value, and arguably were responsible for the Enlightenment (which is what Woke is trying to rescind).
The problem is that the humanities, beginning in the ’60s and ‘70s, and escalating quickly over the past few decades, have essentially been overtaken by “grievance studies”, which -- let’s face it -- are of no earthly use to anyone. This is the Marcusian post-structuralist monster that birthed Woke.
Let’s keep philosophy, political science, literature, etc. and stop funding degrees in grievances.
The irony is that virtually the entire output of most current Humanities Departments, outside of honest acholarship that I assume still sometimes happens, cannot be defended rationally on the basis of their OWN supposed criteria, like justice, tolerance, freedom and economic advancement.
They break everything they touch then lie about it. And once the habit of lying is engrained in groups its hard to eradicate.
Our world is being run by people who were too small and weak to be playground bullies, but who have done the work to where they can bully people from a distance. They are not just mean, but cowardly.
And this is their weakness. We need to stop giving in to their childish tirades and emotional terrorism. All it takes is balls and a firm attachment to basic principles. Satyagraha, in other words.
Philosophy, political science and literature today ARE degrees in grievances. Such subjects have no value as they are being taught. Find a university where those subjects are being studied as Classical Studies and you have something. That won't be at a "prestige" school, but the issuer of the degree is less important than the knowledge learned.
Thanks for standing up for us humanities guys and gals. My (supposedly liberal arts) college is about to phase out all of its art and music programs, and it breaks my heart. As someone who plans on using my English degree to advance my center-right values (and has seen how lost the science community has become about gender), I think it's wrong to assume an 100% STEM focus will end campus wokeness.
“I think all that would happen is our best and brightest would do science as trained bigots.”
The really scary part is that this has already happened. The most prestigious scientific journals are 100% captured by the anti-scientific drivel of gender theory. The Science™️ (aka ideology) trumped medicine, physical anthropology, economics, etc., with practitioners quickly falling into line with the prevailing political winds.
So many examples...just last month, the US and Canadian Anthropology’s national associations cancelled a planned panel discussion why biological sex is important to the discipline because of the “harms” such a discussion would cause (see Colin Wright’s Substack); a (ironically non-White) professor at a Canadian university was denied a scientific research grant because in the grant application’s DEI section, he said that he intended to hire “the most qualified researchers he could find without regard to race, gender, etc.”
I mean, in a world where “math is racist”, clearly STEM is not the “neutral” subject matter that we think it is! There’s an old Soviet era saying that when you cross science with politics, all you get is politics.
We have a long fight ahead, and we may not win, but fight we must.
Who benefits from an atmosphere of fear, misapprehension, shame, cancellation and lies? A child living in a home controlled by those dynamics might never overcome the damage to his psyche and emotions. How about a nation? Of all the reports TFP has posted the one I most remember was a swim meet at a major university where a "trans" man was competing against young women. The young women, many having spent years training for the competition, begged their parents not to say anything for fear of scholarship loss or career destruction. That isn't political anything. It is ball gag sadism and the people who perpetrated are monsters.
Education? One nightmare at a time. You bet!!. But the foul beast we call the D.E.I. has, at personal profit, "remora fished" itself onto every major American institution. More importantly, the American psyche. The Twitter pile on, the manufactured trial by press, the political witch-hunt of truth speakers, riot, physical assault, and the outright lie in the face of truth sanctioned and encouraged by a corrupt elite. Again, who benefits when a surveillance state psyop of of this proportion engulfs a planet?
A-Bomb 20th Century retro. It's the numbered account bag man blues wearing a shiny new jackboot and marching to a brand new tune.
Humanities is not wiped out by stopping federal funding. Just pay for your education. Federal funding provides an economic boost to the subjects most needed to benefit the citizenry. Loans get paid back; scholarships come from endowments. If humanities are valued then private university funding should fill in. Just don’t use taxpayer dollars to fund a gender studies or comparative languages degree. Those are not going to benefit society the way doctors, teachers or engineers do.
The problem is that all of those "softer" subjects have been overrun by the Far Left. If you look at the papers published in those fields, you will find an obsession with promoting Woke views on race, gender, and sexuality. Academics in those subject areas live and breathe political activism first and foremost. Their actual subject matter is merely a tool for achieving their political aims.
But lots of the STEM has clearly been overrun by the Far Left too, look at how they treat gender. All those STEM students aren't wasting time with humanities classes that aren't bare minimum gen-eds. So we shouldn't be acting like STEM professors are sacred guardians of Conservative values here.
They aren't, but there is a limit to which the ideology can affect the actual work. Wokeness can't engineer a bridge or an aircraft engine. For that reason, STEM is SOMEWHAT protected.
Yeah, well that's the problem isn't it? We are about to have a generation of woke engineers and doctors designing bridges and trying to set broken bones. I'm not expecting that to work out so well...
That is really alarming, isn't it? I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing catastrophic failures due to STEM students focusing more on politics than physics and DEI directors hiring those maleducated students.
You're right, of course. But it took longer for STEM to be overrun. I would guess that the few remaining professors in the U.S. who are conservatives are STEM professors.
Yeah or they’re international faculty who don’t align themselves politically like US born profs. Many STEM faculty are Asian and Indian and they might be conservative but are mostly apolitical. What’s missing from my academia are a bunch of hard-core conservatives who are in the humanities and social sciences and do research on economics and public policy.
When I was a graduate student in psychology in the early 90s, the leftists had not yet taken over. At that point one could still voice disagreements and if you argued your position well, you earned the respect of the professors. I spent many a night debating the older professors, who were indeed very left, but they loved it when you understood their arguments and disagreed with them employing facts and logic. No one tried to cancel me until the very end of my program, when a young ideologue joined my committee, and did her best to destroy my dissertation project. That was the beginning of the ugly intolerance and I barely made it out alive. It is so sad what has been lost.
I want to add that the loss has affected not just me, but many people who could potentially have added valuable intellectual diversity to academic life. You don't hear from us because we've given up the fight. We've gotten the message that divergent perspectives are not welcome, and we've gone into other fields.
And then the Left claims that conservatives "don't value education" or "are less intelligent" because so many conservatives have given up on academic careers, due to the way even moderates get treated in colleges.
I came to say this. A “classical” education should not provide only a far left perspective on the cannon & various methods of inquiry. University programs in the humanities and social sciences are failing to inculcate liberal values and impart the skillset to practice empiricism because they’re captured by a bunch of close-minded ivory tower progressives.
-signed, a tenured professor who has watched this evolution firsthand.
All of those things will be preserved and passed down. The government is not needed at all for this to happen. In fact the government-funded functionless psychopaths who have taken over are the primary threat to the preservation of the things you’re referring to because they view everything that is good and useful as ‘white supremacy’.
Go to a university. Look around. About 90% of the people you see should be driving a forklift.
> All of those things will be preserved and passed down
I watched an interview about how the far left have taken over Anglo-Saxon studies in England, and want to abolish the term "Anglo-Saxon", abolish the idea of the Angle and Saxon as distinct ethnic groups, and discourage the study of Old English and Celtic languages. They've already started rewriting history, eg declaring that Africans built Stonehenge. So, no, those things are disappearing or being co-opted at a rapid rate.
Too many commentators are failing to distinguish between the humanities properly understood and their current corrupted iterations. These disciplines are not “soft.” A software coder bereft of understanding of human history is pathetic.
Some of my most morally depraved students scored some of the very highest SAT scores. So we cannot presume intellectual merit is in any way equivalent to moral character. There are some very smart very warped kids in college.
In fact, this has been “proven”; in Nazi Germany, many early adopters of Nazism were university professors, doctors, and other professionals.
What may be more relevant to “character” are personality traits, especially cluster B personality traits (which are over represented among the higher IQs).
Just finished reading Isaacson’s book on Elon Musk. We have some very smart warped guys running the world - viz. the two richest men in the world, Musk and Gates. Throw in jackasses like SBF and Epstein (the list of their ilk is too long to continue here) and is it any wonder that the world is so fucked up?
I would add getting rid of tenure. Having people who can act as stupid as they want without fear of losing their jobs creates this environment. Everyone has run into a person like this. The subject is secondary to what they think, and the culture to get tenure is not based on merit and performance but rather the strict adherence to the religious orthodoxy.
This change needs to be part of a higher education bill in Congress that breaks the back of this movement. Let the reform begin.
But the top-down mess has created this. Ackerman et al. open their checkbook, but the student loan system gives them the real money. Tuition has skyrocketed in my lifetime because the government subsidizes it. What they are doing is fine, but they can only change what they can because of top-down policies. When those policies change, then the market can get to work.
The children of the useless-college-indebted can't afford houses so can't have children. There's a long tail balancing that occurs naturally in market environments.
What we really need, as a society, is to make political views protected in the same way that religious views are, and then require "diversity of thought" in hiring.
Jonathan Haidt pointed this out a decade ago: the completely lack of ideological diversity has warped many subject areas. There is no space for subject-advancing discussion or debate when everyone shares a narrow range of views.
Not a good idea. Tenure cuts both ways, like the filibuster in congress. Sure, getting rid of tenure now, when the overwhelming majority of professors are using it for evil, sounds good... but it could backfire in the unlikely event of a rightward shift in academia at some point in the future.
My thought has nothing to do with ideology but rather performance. When you don't have to worry about your job, some tend to stop paying attention to doing their job and start doing other things. Thanks for you post.
Many/most of these student protests are led by Muslims here on student visas (often taking precious spots of rejected American students). They should be expelled, have their visas revoked, and deported.
These students are the first to cry that their First Amendment rights are being violated but also the first to demand that anyone with an alternative view be silenced.
Case in point: Last year, Berkeley’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine asked other student groups to adopt a bylaw that banned supporters of Israel from speaking at events. It excluded any speaker who “expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” Nine student groups adopted the bylaw. Signers included the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, the Queer Caucus and the Women of Berkeley Law.
Isn’t it absolutely hilariously ironic that “women” and “queers” support an extremist Muslim organization like Hamas? As a recent meme points out, the concept of “Gays for Palestine” is akin to “Chickens for KFC”!
Many of them are immigrants and admitted on student visas but also Muslims born in the US. I am not optimistic that administration too cowardly or unwilling to condemn slaughter of Jews will have moral strength to expel these students. As much as we loath the government involvement in all aspects of our lives, there must be a law that requires it.
I will repeat here a proposal I made the other day: all campus political organizations, in order to be recognized, much less receive funding, have to respond to all calls for public debate twice a year. If some other group challenges them, they need to be willing to argue their case in a public forum.
The model would be Lincoln-Douglas debate, which I did in high school. You have a predetermined resolution that people can research and develop arguments for and against. In LD you have to be able to argue both sides--which is part of why it is in my view so useful--but in this scenario people would only need to argue their own side, the one to which they are partial, and the reason the group exists.
So you have a topic, such as "Resolved: that the Israeli treatment of Gazans warrants the rape and murder of young women, the torture and burning of families, and the abduction both of women and children to hold as hostages."
So the Pro-Hamas groups get to argue in favor of that resolution, which states clearly the latent subtext of things they have ALREADY said and supported, and a Jewish group of one form or another gets to do the negative.
Affirmative gets, say, a ten minute statement, followed by 5 minutes--timed by judges whose own views don't really matter--of questions by the Negative. Negative then gets 12 minutes, both to state their own case and respond to the Affirmative, after which Affirmative gets their own five minutes, and both sides then do an 8 minute closing statement.
Any group which refuses to do this loses recognition and funding. Any group on a COLLEGE CAMPUS unwilling or unable to argue the merits of their existence should not exist. I think that is simple enough.
I like your idea, but unfortunately today’s college students are incapable of putting together cogent arguments in a civil environment. They have been taught to throw tantrums when they run up against disagreements.
The Free Press published a piece earlier this year about the woke cancel culture that has taken over high school debate society.The woke masterminds know exactly what they are doing. They have poisoned the well to stifle any open serious debate on crucial topics of the day.
I was about to say this! It’s literally OVERWHELMING the extent to which Woke has overtaken virtually every aspect of our society. That “long march through the institutions” has been (possibly) the most successful soft revolution ever conceived by mankind. Being a pessimist (as a rabbit, this is not really surprising given our position at the very bottom of the food chain), it’s almost impossible to imagine the scope of action necessary to reverse course (if such a thing is even possible).
I see two potential outcomes: upon hearing an argument they don't like, the woke students will run and hide in their safe rooms or beat the Jews. We have seen both taking place on campuses lately.
The only thing I can think of with donors closing their check books is to say, "It's about time. What took so long?"
These universities have supported the PC/Woke tyrants for years and now that they are losing funds, they lie and say they are either supporting free speech (which is a lie) or they are neutral on outlandish speech from the left. Which is also a lie. They all have DIE departments and DIE officers. These brutal departments suck up and support any far left organizations and shut down or fire anyone who doesn't follow their far left agenda.
These universities support campus organizations that support violent Marxist student clubs and professors not only support these loony left clubs but preach support for these violent organizations in their classrooms.
These same universities fire or cancel professors who express centrist or right wing opinions. They don't discipline students who shout down speakers the left doesn't approve of while all the time falsely claiming they support free speech.
I find these far left universities disgusting. They need an entire revamping of their leadership.
I couldn’t agree more. Where were these donors outrage when BLM was rioting and burning cities/businesses and murdering innocent civilians, or when Riley Gaines was trapped in a college classroom by trans-activists were trying to violently harm her for speaking truth about biology, or when Yale law students were throwing molotov cocktails into NYPD cop cars. I could go on. Better late than never, but the rot in these institutions has been reeking long before Hamas decided to slaughter innocent Israelis. This whole century has been an absolute shit show with moral rot everyone you turn. Covid was the most insane - especially the reactions on college campuses and was used to egregiously violate so many human rights and take away our freedoms by our moral betters in these institutions and our government especially.
We have two teenage boys, a dog, and two cats so the house is full of love, warmth and dirt (LOL). I'm so sorry for the loss of your beloved cat and that your wife developed allergies. I know it's not for everyone, but I would probably suffer through the allergies than live with out my pets!
We did that for about 20 years but when we got to the States, her allergies got worse so after our beloved cat died, we never had another pet. We miss them.
Why do we need to fund elitist, private universities at all? Local colleges produce the most valuable graduates such as police officers, firefighters, nurses, teachers, IT practitioners, trade occupations, paramedics, etc. Often at reasonable tuition costs with little to no debt.
Good thoughts. We should also tie federal support (of aid or student loans) to meeting minimal thresholds of FIRE's Freedom of Speech ratings. Institutions that stifle free speech should be cut of from federal funding.
This would not be unprecedented as Medicare has a variety of metrics that hospitals must meet to be fully funded under the MCare program.
I was onboard until your example and then I kind of shuddered. The average hospital (161 bed community) has 59 FTEs dedicated to regulatory compliance at a cost of $7.6M annually. The administrative burden of regulatory compliance in the hospital industry totals almost $39B annually. Obviously not all regulation is bad and there will always be a price tag (healthcare is a logical place), but I don’t know that the government imposing more regulation is a good thing. What happens when a Biden-esque future president wants to tie it to ESG ratings instead?
.I was a hospital administrator for 30 years, and a CEO for 15. I hated the federal intervention in imposing these standards because they have zero expertise in developing relevant healthcare metrics. My point was, they've done it before, so they can do it now to address our runaway higher ed system.
So, ideally, the federal government would get out, totally, of subsidizing higher ed, but since that's unlikely, at least develop guardrails for compliance
There’s so many new people around these days I didn’t want to assume it was the same Jon. But yes, I agree fully with the broken system in healthcare and now education.
When my parents graduated from high school in the 1960s they had a track system. You either prepared for university or for a trade. I don’t think that was a terrible system (at least in Canada). My brother is an electrician. He went to a trade school. He’s a millennial homeowner who travels abroad several times a year and sends his daughter to a private school. He’s doing pretty alright.
Trades are essential to fixing the universities. We need to stop churning out bad university programs / students and start imagining better ways to BUILD.
Right now, we likely need people in the trades more than Uni grads. Finding a good plumber or welder is getting harder and harder. But we spent decades demonizing those jobs as lesser work or beneath people. And I can't help but think this is because it is a lot harder to indoctrinate someone while they are in carpentry school.
Yeah, I agree. My car's check engine light came on this past weekend and I won't be able to have a mechanic look at it for six weeks. So I get to drive my kids around worrying that a bad situation may get worse and there's nothing I can do about it. I know this is a "first world" problem, but this is absolutely a gap in our society that needs to be filled.
All the people who are pulling their funding from legacy universities should consider rerouting that money to trades programs. If our geopolitical situation keeps getting worse we're going to need highly skilled people who know how to build and fix things.
This is sorta cheese sarcasm, but your check engine light story reminds me of the problem with medicine or our sick care system today. A conventional doctor today would tell you to cut the wire on the check engine light. Nevermind trying to get to the root cause of that problem. Just turn off the signal that something is wrong. This is what pharmaceutical drug model is exactly. So way off topic sorry.
I agree with trade schools. I think the pendulum is swinging back the other way. In the Tampa, Florida area they recently created a large trades school program. I know it's happening all over the country. My son skipped college and took up low voltage cabling. He's very busy and no shortage of work.
I understand the sentiment, but there are more humanities out there besides gender studies. And the wonderful writing from Beri and others who have contributed here shows why we still need colleges to teach things like literature, writing, and history.
I disagree that emphasizing more STEM is the answer. The humanities are studies in which the goal is to make us more “ human.” We have neglected the importance of teaching to both sides of our brain and we now have students who are 1 dimensional thinkers at best, who only know how to argue with feelings not facts. Even science has become science fiction. And DEI.. these are classes that try to rearrange what is truth about what makes us all fully human without any regard to data or outcome evidence.
But the humanities; they are what civilize us and allow the development of our right side of the brain. This is the part that takes in the whole picture and enables us to see that there are nuances to humans that we are not all good or bad BUT the line of good and bad runs through every heart and we are at our best when have learned this. We have become imbalanced creatures without a conscious. Heaven help us.
But you won't get a solid humanities based education in college, unless you are fortunae enough to get into a school like Hillsdale or Florida's New College. You are better off to save the tuition money, buy books and read them at home.
“None of these institutions are solvent without the support of their alumni....”
Sadly, that's not true of the biggest. Math and finance are not my strengths, but does Harvard even need more donations to stay liquid, with their endowments.
So donors, don't just pause. Or stop. Demand your money back, publicly. (Even if it's not gonna happen.)
And the rest of you, take back your institutions. The long march BACK.
But the only thing that will save universities is competition. The alumni who are finally (at last) withholding funds to institutions can put their money where their mouths are now and throw their (many) millions into the founding of a few new universities that will proudly exhibit all the traits you espouse. Merit based admissions, first of all. Emphasis on STEM. High quality instruction in all the sciences and the humanities. But equally important, the complete and unfettered freedom to speak, to write, to debate, to teach, in the manner of the beliefs you are willing to defend. The freedom to be fearless. A university where all opinions matter, and where no institutional political or cultural bias exists. A university truly colour blind.
No legislation will get us there. No mandate to force the introduction of the improvements we all know universities need will do it. Only new institutions who will attract professors, management and prospective students from the legacy schools will do it, in my opinion. In order to compete, the Yales,Harvards, Princetons, Penn Sts et al of the future will have to adapt to a fairer, unbiased reality - or fall victim to it.
“It began with Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire, who had been doomscrolling since news of the attacks first broke. On Tuesday, he came across an open letter, signed by over thirty student groups from Harvard—his alma mater—which blamed Israelis for their own murders……….Ackman and his friends exchanged incredulous texts.”
—————————————————
I’d like to remind everyone that Ackman was also the guy who was watching the Rittenhouse trial with his wife and tweeted something like
“Oh shit turns out this guy is innocent and our media is fake.”
So I guess this is red pill number two for Mr. Ackman? Everyone just look up Gell-Mann Amnesia if you want to understand how this happens to someone as smart as Bill.
Just try to remember, the media is fake and Democrats lie about everything because they are possessed by Satan. Get some post-it notes or a tattoo if necessary.
A jury, presented with all the evidence, found Rittenhouse innocent. The "red pill" is more accurately characterized by the end of Ackman's sentence - media is [more or less deliberately] fake. Journalism which was once a trade and concentrated in condensing who, what, when, where into commuter-sized pieces has been displaced at legacy outlets by college kids on some sort of mission. Because the industry is now hopelessly fragmented and anyone can call him/her/they/zirself a journalist, competition for the largely fixed revenue pool has driven reporting neutrality out in favor of confirming the worldview of the target audience. It has also driven down salaries so that only the children of privilege can afford journalistic employment.
We score the business success of news reporting not on accuracy anymore but instead on how many news consumers can be induced to click through for a second layer of online ads to load. Sullivan v NYT provides litigation cover for writing that requires no reporting, just carefully vague word choices that lead the news consumer to confirmation of whatever larger "truth: the outlet subscribes to. This loops back to the most susceptible audience, desperate for acceptance, the young on college campuses. This is what you get. The mainstream of commerce one day wakes up, sees what is afoot and cuts off the kids' allowance.
The humanities are no longer interesting in thinking and pondering the human condition. They are 100% about political activism. Their subject area is used merely as a tool for achieving political aims.
I agree the bar should be lowered. To the extent news media and journalists take refuge in Sullivan - which essentially immunizes incompetent reporting despite reputational damage it does to targets - FOIA-type public discovery rules might be applied to journalists whose stories are proved false in court regardless of intent or malice. Then sources who use them for cover to plant false but damaging stories would be afraid of being outed. Once, reporters who were burned by sources with false tips would out those sources themselves. Now they are protected because they might tee up the next clickbait falsehood. A legal public discovery process would balance that nicely.
In the world of clickbait there probably aren't that many Judith Millers.
Not being American I'd no idea what Sullivan v NYT was till I looked it up. Whaddaya know Civil Rights and the Communist grifter and moral reprobate MLK. Unsurprisingly. Funny how all the pieces put together, whatever the puzzle, and Marx and his step-children emerge in the foreground. Four years later there would be lock-step reporting of the Tet Offensive as large scale US defeat when in fact it was a large scale US victory. Print the Legend!
In all fairness to Ackerman, when the Rittenhouse thing happened, a lot of people were still under the wrap how awful liberal MSM had gotten. Most adults, esp pre-Covid, are also not preoccupied with politics to the point of being very online to be keen on what's going on. Liberal MSM did a hell of a job casting Rittenhouse as a gun-toting alt-right nut job. And while conservative media reported differently, it's not as if conservative media don't lie and have their own agenda either. For a long time people side-eyed them, and not entirely unjustified. The fact that Ackerman actually got red pilled when the verdict came down is to his credit. The jury verdict was what convinced me too, and by the time the decision came down, I was long past believing anything MSM has to say. But even as we speak, there are still tons of liberals who think Rittenhouse is a Proud Boy alt-right ready to do the next mass shooting. They don't even seem to know he's been proven innocent, or any factual details of that incident for that matter. They just seemed to have heard someone or the MSM said he's a Proud Boy, and that's all they have to know to never change their minds.
I watched almost seemless coverage of Kenosha. It was provided by The New York Times video reporting team and blew apart practically in real time their parent organisations narrative and reporting. That is the second time I watched a news organisation destroy its own credibility itself via camera. The BBC News did a similar thing reporting unrest in Albania over the huge Ponzi scheme that nearly bankrupted the country in 1991. The video I was watching completely contradicted the Newsrooms voice-over. That the MSM is in fairyland most of the time on most topics is the only conclusion one can draw..
I lay it at the feet of the last Hollywood writers strike about 25 years ago, when the studios and networks turned to reality shows to save their revenue streams and came up with crap like Real Housewives of Sheboygan or whatever, and those insipid Dateline shows.
It was a small leap from there to networks realizing that the evening news could easily be produced as entertainment and the whole show could be an op-ed piece.
To be fair, The Real Housewives of Sheboygan and/or Cheboygan would have useful skill sets. They would most likely be able to make a tater tot casserole, clean and filet a fish, and in the case of Sheboygan, no doubt have cheese curds in the fridge. Their reality would hit closer to home than others. Your point with regard to Hollyweird and their move to produce junk programming is spot on.
Cheap TV production is a necessity given the share of networks now. The good news is that I'll bet the viewers of Real Housewives are low propensity voters.
The media isn't fake, not fake at all ... its merely stuffed with philanthropic journalism.
Philanthropic Journalism, for those who don't know, is where I donate my money to a charity, a very fine charity in fact, such a great and awesome charity, that I in-fact have founded this charity myself, and hence named this charity after myself ... and I fund this great charity with great benevolence. What does this great and awesome charity do in fact? Well, it funds journalists, very knowledgeable and skillful journalists, Journalists who earn such a small pittance working for nationally syndicated companies, that these Journalists often take on side gigs, such as writing gracious and loving stories about how Michael is such a loving soul, gracious and caring, a friend to mankind ... that's the sort of journalism my charity funds.
Agree - well said - except perhaps that many of the democrats are not technically lying ("an intentionally false statement") because they are brainwashed by years or decades of the blather and so they believe they speak truthfully...
More great news in a week when Australians emphatically told the woke elite to get stuffed and NZ voted an anti-woke government in with a landslide. My belief in the suicidal West is beginning to revive.
I’m sure the permanent unelected Australian government of left-wing college-educated busybody technocrat psychopaths will remain untouched and they will use the usual package of extortionate threats and sabotage tactics to bring the elected Romney-style conservatives into line.
The "woke elite" that was pushing The Voice to begin with are the same people having meltdowns whenever you suggest that Israel should not ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.
I don’t believe it. Progressivism is a religious cult. The egos of those who have gone all-in will not suddenly admit how devastating and disempowering their ideology has been to the very people they claim to help. These nihilistic narcissists took a hit, but they are regrouping and going through the mental gymnastics required to save face. They will re-write history and redefine words to justify their cause. They are already doing it by pretending to stand behind free speech, yet they will not denounce censorship. I will believe change is coming when these narcissists admit they were wrong about COVID, they were wrong about masks, they were wrong about BLM, they were wrong about anti-racism, they were wrong about micro-aggressions, they were wrong about men being women.... they are FACTUALLY wrong! Until then, this is cover so they can survive.
Two steps forward, one step back. That's the path to leftist hell.
Tacit support for genocide against Jews was two forward, now half-assed apologies will be the one step back - for exactly as long as it's not safe to publicly support the destruction of Israel.
This is a dangerous moment because if we wound but do not kill this beast, they will come back with double force next time they can use a crisis as an excuse.
Don't just cut donations, shame and oust every sociopath who pretended to be against racism, except when it's Jews.
Clarification... I don’t believe the donor class will save American universities because they are part of the progressive cult that they helped build. They will not suddenly admit they were wrong.
They don’t have to admit it. But I bet the donor club is small and they know each other. Peer pressure is as real for billionaires as it is for 7th graders.
“Maybe, just maybe, a new equilibrium can be reached. Maybe we can agree that political litmus tests for employment are bad, that requiring DEI statements is bad”
———————————————————
I think a DEI statement would be fine if DEI just stood for ‘Don’t Exterminate Israel’ and people used it to make sure they aren’t hiring pro-Palestine terrorists.
The current president of RISD was a career DIE commissar who worked with Kendi at BU and has no art or design experience. She is influencing young artists infuse the mind virus into their work. RISD has become RISDIE: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-appoint-a-commissar
I don’t think it’s critical to have people take loyalty oaths in order to get a job. I do, however, think that, in order to get a job, people sign agreements to abide by the rules of the organization hiring them. One such rule would be a zero tolerance for publicly espousing sentiments at odds with those of the organization’s. And an agreement that so doing would constitute grounds for immediate termination of employment.
The most famous practitioner of that philosophy was Huey P. Long, governor of Louisiana back in the early-mid 20th century. Huey required just two things of every person hired by the state: an off the top deduction of 10% of his or her wages to go into Huey’s political war chest*; and a signed, undated letter of resignation. Huey was clearly a dictator, and an adamant socialist.** But he knew a thing or two about how to get things done.
As a totally unrelated aside, although Huey P. was a seriously colorful character, he paled in comparison with his younger brother Earl K. Long. Anyone interested can grab a copy of The Earl Of Louisiana by A. J. Liebling. Or watch the movie, Blaze, which is mostly accurate but largely lacking in detail, which is what makes the book so much fun.
* That virtual war chest was called the deduct [pronounced dē’ duct or dē’ duck] box.
** Full, if unsurprising, disclosure: I’m as far from being a socialist as you can get. I love capitalism, always have, and will until I can no longer fog a mirror.
The political correctness, and “wokeness“ didn’t begin with George Floyd’s death, but that single event served to propel it. The glorification of a man who had been a career criminal, who was not representative of the vast majority of hard-working, conscientious, Black people, is a travesty and an allegory for our times. Unfortunately, it’s served as fuel for the fire. that is now consuming college campuses. it is quite simple either you deplore the killing of other human beings, or you don’t. And if you don’t, what exactly are you?
They are people without G-d who have too much time on their hands. They are the DoorDash generation. Can’t even be bothered to drive to get food and will pay twice the price for the privilege, yet complain they don’t get paid enough.
Woke madness started with Floyd and ended with the slaughter of 1300+ civilians in Israel.
BTW it’s worth spelling out: the woke response to these terrorist attacks was a cut and dry application of their simplistic intersectionality theory. Here we see it’s absurdity in an extreme limit. See Norm’s similar hypothetical below. We should all oppose this simplistic theory!
“it is quite simple either you deplore the killing of other human beings, or you don’t.”
But they DON’T deplore it. They want NO limits on abortion (yet they deplore the death penalty); they want “decarceration” (releasing the MOST violent criminals to predate freely among us), they refuse to address the problem of “black on black” murders (if ever there was a need for BLM, it is surely in this context).
Logic is anathema to Woke. It’s all about feelings and the perception of cherry picked groups that you deem to be “oppressed”.
The seed of wokeness and the present-day lunacy was planted during the school years of the current Millennial generation. I am firmly in that age band and attended a highly-rated public school that in hindsight steeped a lot of the curriculum in core tenets of post-modernism and moral relativism. I’m sure that means it started with the generation before that that taught but my generation was definitely indoctrinated in it.
Agree. Little older than you but we did not get it until college—highly selective USNWR university. I believe it is now being infused at younger ages depending on how posh the school and how liberal the area. Thank goodness we were more mature when they introduced these concepts. I knew one extremely gifted student who entered a depressive episode after exposure to these ideas. Luckily they had 18 years of reality under their belt and come through fine.
I would argue that the current state of indoctrination did not start with George Floyd. Our universities did not turn into Marxist indoctrination centers in the last few years. My sense is that the Vietnam War was the starting point and this has been building for decades. It got to its current state because no one was paying attention.
“None of these institutions are solvent without the support of their alumni,” Ackman said of the brewing donor revolt. “Perhaps this is the beginning of a catalyst for change.”
————————————————————
Yeah they also really really really aren’t solvent if the federal government would stop stealing my money and using it to back loans for useless people to study Pansexual Literature.
But of course DeSantis will cut loans for bullshit studies and David French will write a piece about
“This is vindictive punitive targeting of political opponents which is illegal because conservatives are not allowed to use the government for anything!!!”
David French: A stain on conservative values! He uses his religious convictions as a tool to stain everyone but himself. I used to listen to his podcast with Alexandra Desanctis, but when he started to talk over her, and marginalize her views, I deleted his feed. He would be better off on the staff of Christianity Today, which has fallen into woke-ism in recent years.
I agree 100% with Douglas Murray, who said that "any supporter of Hamas and their atrocities should be given the same treatment as that given to ISIS and their supporters"
We need to know who signed that list supporting Hamas
Remember after Jan 6, the pictures of the "mob" going around social media with the caption "we never knew how many truly horrible people lived amongst us"
Well now with the Left's support of terrorism and Hamas, the truth has come out - it is amongst the LEFT where the truly horrible people are living amongst us.
They should’ve figured that out after Nazi Germany. European Jewry were assimilated and integrated to the extent local laws allowed. Their men fought in WWI, many were successful businessman. None of this saved them.
Yes. And, it is about time. Your choice of words "Frankenstein's monster" caught my attention.
I thought this was a terrific essay. I also strongly agree with the part I paste below. Something is missing though... I am glad people are catching on regarding unfairness in sports and the insulting female caricature used for Bud Light... but - we also have a problem with people run out or shouted down on campuses when they speak against the Gender Ideology Frankenstein money making project which is allowed to happen under a cult ideology surrounding a made up thing called "gender identity". Before, a handful of fully grown adult men and fathers who gave in to their paraphelias had "sex changes" but today we confuse the young at school and Frankenstein them as children or at the magic age of 18 . They do not understand what they are doing. Please see today's PITT: "I’ll Visit You in Prison" https://pitt.substack.com/p/ill-visit-you-in-prison
"Liberals and centrists seem to have paid attention to conservative boycotts of Bud Light and Target. Then came the scandal surrounding Ibram Kendi’s antiracism center at Boston University. Having burned through over $20 million, he now faces an inquiry from the university. Kendi’s disgrace cracked the window—and the horrific responses to the Hamas attacks opened the door.
And yet it is only now—after all the histrionic and outraged statements about #MeToo and BLM and Ukraine and Roe v. Wade—that universities are discovering the virtue of institutional neutrality."
"LJC represents the Chino Valley Unified School District to defend it against California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s lawsuit, which attempts to block the district’s recently implemented parental notification policy."
Excellent piece here. Thanks to Bari and TFP. It might interest others here to know that the pro-Palestinian demo at Harvard three days ago led the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, to restrict (and it seems pretty much shut down entirely) all comments. I participate regularly in discussions there. I and most others keep it focused on substance, though it does result at times in the venting of strong feelings. The Crimson's current shutdown of debate is one instance of what has been a long, ongoing process of thought control and utter insecurity in the face of dissent.
Today, the Crimson has an editorial ("Don’t Bully Students With Dissenting Views. Protect Them") claiming the PSC demonstration was, while ill-advised, not antisemitic. I posted a response that disappeared awaiting "moderation," which so far has meant almost entirely complete elimination. So, if I may indulge, here is what I wrote today in response to that editorial:
MY COMMENT:
This is a big diversion. The issue of doxing is a big diversion. Doxing is wrong, and it is nice this particular outbreak of it has aroused such concern, since it has become a regular tool of the left, to no great concern expressed by Harvard before this event.
It is false to claim the PSC statement merely displayed "a troubling lack of empathy and compassion." It was in fact also antisemitic. In that, it not merely failed to condemn the violence Hamas inflicted, but in blaming Israel as primarily responsible, it failed to identify the very nature of the ideas motivating the barbaric pogrom. Those ideas are purely and simply a hatred and disgust at Jews. All Jews, not merely those living in Israel.
Hence, the PSC statement was NOT "seeking a deeper discussion of the roots of Israeli-Palestinian violence." Those roots lie within the ideology Hamas embraces. Hamas is not motivated by any nonsense about Palestinian rights or a two-state solution. Those have never been its concern. No one violates Palestinian rights more than it does. As for a separate Palestinian state, Hamas is a purely genocidal group. Its charter makes clear, slaughtering Jews (ultimately ALL Jews) is its aim, not a means to any other aim. It was shaped by the Nazi-Islamist fusion fashioned by the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas' progenitor) and the Mufti of Jerusalem and his accolades in the fires of World War II. Its purpose was and is Hitler's, plain and simple. This historical background needs to be far better understood than it is now - due in part to the duplicity of our media and our own leaders always seeking to accommodate these fanatics, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran.
I am sure many of the PSC demonstrators harbor no ill feelings toward Jews they know. That is not the form of modern antisemitism. An inordinate and totally double standard hostility to Israel is the form it takes now. The demonstrators participated in that fully.
I wonder if their statement "Don’t Bully Students With Dissenting Views. Protect Them" applies to students with dissenting views on gender ideology or DEI
Excellent strategy. But I cannot agree with "We need neutral institutions". Should Harvard have been neutral at the height of the Holocaust or any of the regimes responsible for 100 million genocidal murders over the past century? Universities need to teach the moral compass that has made Western capitalist democracies the most successful and tolerant societies this planet has ever seen, albeit far from perfect. Moral equivalency that equates the values of Islam to the values of the West are a formula for turning successful Western democracies into impoverished, violent, sadistic, primitive hell-holes, like most nations where Islamic values are dominant.
Moral compasses are installed by parents before a child is in kindergarten. Education only helps further define where the true north of morality is located.
Bill Maher cracked that some Harvard students supported the massacre of children but strongly objected to the term and connotations of “blacklisted”. He is correct to note how lost and how far from morality these students have been allowed to wander without a moral compass for years.
Universities need to teach critical thinking not indoctrination to ANY ideal. Students of a good teacher/professor won’t ever know which belief the teacher/professor actually holds as they will teach from all “sides” so that the students have to grow and think!
This is a great observation. The problem that bedeviled me lately is that we no longer have a shared baseline of what is "moral" When/how did we lose it? or did we?
“So when Hamas brutally murdered babies, raped women, and took the disabled as hostages, it was business as usual, at least on America’s college campuses”
———————————————————
Donald Trump being sued and forced to pay millions of dollars because Trump University wasn’t really all that he said it was, continues to be the most preposterously unjust banana republic shit we have ever done as a country.
It’s like arresting the one guy who steps outside of the crosswalk for jaywalking, while everyone else is shitting and masturbating all over the crosswalk.
If you look at what is happening at all of our other universities, you could argue that, in terms of net cost/benefit to society, Trump University was the best university in the United States; and it was a total scam.
Whatever you want to call the movement that believes mothers should be called “birthing persons”, or shaming of white people at corporate retreats in to acknowledging white supremacy as a loyalty oath. A push to become aware of the inequities of life. The fact that there have always been inequities between humans seems lost on the people who push for their illiberal behaviors.
The idea what words hurts and therefore should be banned ,is only the least of all the stupidity we have witnessed on college campuses. Looking for safe spaces only to have a college professor scream “get me some muscle over here” at a rally for social justice. Kinda displays their authoritarian methods.
There has been a revolution and it has largely succeeded. The take over of college and universities, media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley....all in lock step with the the political arm of Progressives and the Democrat Party. You often could listen to MSNBC, CNN and read the pages of the NYT and WAPO and see the same language someone at the DNC wrote.
The reason/ It's something that Obama uttered, Joe Biden along with Bernie said. A desire to "fundamentally change America". They don’t like the wage or income gap, they want to guarantee safe spaces for people they consider marginalized. Safe from inequities of life. Bad luck, white supremacy, merit. If they thought the American people would be for it they vote in a basic guaranteed income. The don’t equality, they want equity.... They want equity so much they are willing to discriminate against Asians. In America for centuries now when you were born you got a ticket that said “Admit One”. They now want the ticket to say , Success Guaranteed. As an employer, I wouldn’t want someone that thought the killing, behaving or burning alive of Jews was a good thing. I don’t think they make a good employee. their lack of a moral compass would be a problem.
Nah, they’ll just find a hospital or some other charity. They need to do it for several reasons. Taxes and to wash the guilt off themselves due to their success. We managed to convince ourselves that fabulous wealth is someone ethically and morally wrong. However NYC would have a Public Library system with out Andrew Carnegie. We’re close to having a vaccine for Malaria due to Bill Gates.... I tell my wife that men do come in handy at times. When the smoke alarm batteries die, light bulbs...jars that don’t open. Same with billionaires, their money comes in handy at times.
The fact is we are all complicit. The current nauseating display of support for the wanton slaughter of innocents is just the logical extension of trends that began in America in the 1960’s. This idea that since America is not a perfect place, it has no right to question or challenge anyone who declares America as irredeemable and deserving of destruction. Some white Americans are racists, ergo all white people are racist (in other words, to defeat racism, we must be racists). So to make amends, we donate $millions to a few charlatans who help no one but themselves, buying multi-$million estates and re-writing our history. A tiny minority of police are unfit to wear a badge. “Defund the police” becomes a new goal, turning once-great cities into cesspools. In short, everything that America believes in and does is evil and must be “cancelled”, an aphorism for destroyed. And replaced with what exactly? The totalitarians of the world are ready to show us if, through our indifference and moral sloth, we allow them to do so.
The Jewish people are used to this. It is their history across millennia. This is just the latest iteration. Well, as Americans, we are all Jews now. And, more to the point, if we don’t stand up and say STOP, and do what’s necessary to defend ourselves and our country, we deserve what comes next.
We should all applaud and support those in positions of power who are actually doing something tangible to address this cancer. Penalizing those who are working to destroy Israel is a good starting point. It is actually not that hard to identify them. The extraordinarily brave members of the site “Canary Mission” have for years been identifying and cataloguing the so-called educators and student leaders who have been calling for Jihad in America and spewing anti-Semitism. The second step would be to begin to review all the visas that have been granted to so-called “students” that are leading these demonstrations.
This is a point of inflection in America and we can only hope that we rise to the challenge.
Thank you for this post full of insight and practical information. I was unaware of “ Canary Mission”. I just googled it and I urge all readers of TFP to do so as well.
Great comment and terrific recommendation. I just checked out Canary Mission for the first time. Wow. They are doing the work the ADL was created to do.
And a quick review of the lists shows that women dominate these left-wing hate groups.
From the NY Post's article: "“We would like to clarify that we stand in solidarity with both Israeli and Palestinian victims and families,” the group wrote."
Sorry, but "both sides-ism" doesn't cut it! That is just a weaselly way of backing down a despicable statement.
Next up: Calls for a cease fire, and charges of disproportionality in Israel's response. In fact, it is already happening! In most news services we are seeing reports of "poor Palestinians" who are suffering at the hands of powerful racist Israelis. Sorry, but this strikes no chord in MY heart! The fact that Gazans are being used as shields for the Hamas terrorists (please do not say "militants") should not deter Israel from prosecuting the war until either the "poor Palestinians" renounce Hamas, or Hamas itself cry "Uncle".
Any entity that calls for the complete destruction of a free nation is itself racist and should be destroyed by their own words.
The FP had a piece by Noah Pollak on October 7th specifically predicting that the “usual course of propaganda” by the Palestinians would soon rear its head in MSM...and it has. (I read that, in the days after the massacre, The Guardian had NO photos of the Jewish victims, but included photos of wounded Palestinians). It ALWAYS works like a charm, so why wouldn’t they? The slaughtered Jews quickly recede in memory in favor of wounded Palestinians, and they can all feel good about their pro-Palestinian rallies and letters. Woke wins again. Because...”oppressed”
And just as you can count on the sun coming up in the morning, today Biden warned Israel about innocent Palestinian casualties! I predict that in less than a week Israel will be condemned by the U.S. media directly, while the Biden crew will issue veiled threats of canceled aid. Count on it!
Only one thing can save US universities, that is full introduction of merit based admissions and abolishing of legacy and any other non performance based admissions. This way universities would become place where people go to further their knowledge and not brainwashing factories they are now.
Also add to this, we need to put focus on STEM regarding finding and education. Any of "studies" such as gender and similar brainwashing programs need to be phased out from higer education, since they are clearly modern versions party education in Soviet Union
Focus on STEM can be achieved overnight simply by eliminating all federal grants and loan subsidies because STEM is basically the only thing worth providing loans for if you are using real money.
Almost all of our problems originate with the federal government being huge. Stop voting for the federal government to be huge, you idiots.
It's more than federal money. It's a mentality that is pervasive at the universities now. I have more students telling me that they are socialists or communists. At first I was amused but now I'm thinking 1. where is this generating from? and 2. how naive are these students! I've been told by non-woke students that they have to "keep their heads down" and not say anything in class that goes against the trend. This is so frightening to me.
No it’s the federal money. You will always have socialists. But socialists are worthless people. They are parasites. A flood of free money is what allows them to thrive.
We should also eliminate tax exempt status to wipe out the NGOs. I’m aware this will harm good charities but it is worth the price as NGOs are a truly dangerous pestilence.
Well if you wipe out the federal money then you have only rich students going to colleges. I can't afford to send my son to college without federal aid; I'm a teacher. Perhaps the problem is that very rich people are eligible for federal money through FAFSA. Maybe there should be a cap on who qualifies.
Deirdre - No, you would only have real students going to college. Students that want to learn something and get a degree they need to get a job and earn money and pay back loans AND ALSO you then have colleges that need to offer value for money. They would need to focus on education and not have, for instance, a DEI staff of 163 people (actual example, Univ of Michigan in 2021). College would cost less.
My son is a "real student" but I cannot afford college without some government help. He is in community college now but is hoping to transfer into a 4 year college. He also works full time. Rich people's kids will always have options, whether they are academically inclined or not. If you eliminate FAFSA you will get only rich, privileged kids at elite universities (or students from overseas, like from Saudi Arabia). I do agree that money should be eliminated from the DEI staff-- also a waste of time and energy.
Agreed, look at the administration positions at the universities and ratio to students, 20 years ago it was a semi-defensible number, now its about 2 students for every admin position at some schools. The universities saw the government open the checkbook to guarantee loans, and they responded by increasing costs as much as possible.
She is a teacher. A large part of the problem. Pay them no mind.
Very wealthy people either don’t need FSAFA or have cheaper avenues to borrow the money.
I agree. That's why I don't understand why they can't change that, at least. Since many well-off people apply for FAFSA and get money.
This i do not understand. I am familiar with FAFSA. It doesn't work this way:
"Perhaps the problem is that very rich people are eligible for federal money through FAFSA. "
Federal money ruins many things. Healthcare is another example. It was bad before Obamacare, but try and pay cash for care now. It’s insane.
That instilled fear in the normies is intentional. Leftists above all crave power, and what better way to achieve and maintain it than to put the fear of God in anyone who would dare question your positions and orthodoxies.
Fear is good. Fear works.
We are paying the price for allowing our schools to be taken over by people who are resentful of the idea that they should be required to contribute meaningfully to the general public welfare in order to earn a living. They instead want to accrue power politically and through control of academic and media institutions so that they can influence policy to confiscate and redistribute wealth. In the face of every shed of evidence, they believe in communism — however else they choose to label it — as an effective national economic and political system.
These are the people teaching/indoctrinating our children.
"simply by eliminating all federal grants and loan subsidies"
Hafta agree. There is an entirely different perspective on who the Ivories can and can't admit for whatever reason -- remove all public funding and then let them do whatever the hell they want. Then, if a gazzilionaire, I myself would found The University of Whiteness -- dedicated to the protection, preservation, promotion and praise of Western Civilization ...and the white people who built it.
This got likes? Who are you people? Being critical of woke policing doesn’t require welcoming anyone’s white supremacist fantasies. You’re the people who make the leftist mob look like they have a point. Gross.
Slow your roll Z - I think Ray is at least trying to be ironic.
Ah! Okay. Hmm. You sure?
I'm ... not quite sure how to put it ... say satirical. The U of W needs to exist in a nation/culture that has become so self-destructive and mentally ill that it becomes necessary to defend, explicitly and even sarcastically, it's own existence and where it came from. In a sane culture there would be no need for the U of W, and suggesting such a thing would be seen as a joke. It should be a joke, unfortunately it isn't.
Also Sprach Zarathustra. Where did that get us? Dualism and the Ubermensch. I'd shut up if I were you; there are adults in the room.
I can’t find which of my comments incited this reaction. Was it just my username? I should change it. It’s just an old nickname that meant nothing to me, but has meant a lot to people here. Whatever it was, thanks for the “shut up” on a thread largely about free speech in a publication dedicated to free speech. Woot!
The White ANGLOSPHERE that built it. There has been no end of stupid out of Russia; Germany; and France. ;-)
Well, one can zoom in like that, but as one gains resolution, one also loses that which is peripheral but still positive. Me I sorta define Whiteness as a deep cultural state of mind that has historically burned brightest in the Anglosphere -- even in America!! -- but that anyone is free to partake of. I think of Thomas Sowell as whiter that I am and I'd be deeply honored if he'd run a faculty at the U of W. Whiteness is color blind!
It s very simple, tenure at American universities currently requires that a young investigator get the support of administrators ( deans of colleges and grant management officers), who will then “ promote” their output, steer the better students towards their labs, see that they get prizes and awards from various philanthropic foundations and other empty and meaningless virtue signaling front organizations, …, and so forth. Just the sort of stuff a Hollywood talent agency would do for a thespian talent. The administrator in turn, markets the young scholar to various companies who will pay for help to market products based on “ science” .The research “ talent” will then “ produce” appropriate results and policy recommendations, on key topics such as climate change or immigration or judicial reform . Then the Chinese and Russians being to understand and exploit the possibilities for subversion of our society based this corrupt nonsense.
It would also help if people knew the origins of higher education. If people knew that these were institutions of public indoctrination, it would show how and why changing them is so hard.
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/donating-to-a-good-cause-how-billionaires
And then if people looked far enough, they’d see the correlation to the federal government.
Unfortunately, I don’t think people look deep enough.
Yup. In my little industry, we have an actual free market (one of the very few in agriculture with no government involvement). I hate it when prices go against me, but that’s life in markets. The government ruins everything it touches.
Amen.
> Also add to this, we need to put focus on STEM regarding finding and education.
I think there's a place for "softer" sciences. Classics, philosophy, history, folklore, music theory, even performing arts and comparative literature... all these ideas deserve to be preserved and passed on, albeit probably not to the extent it is now.
I agree. There’s plenty place for those disciplines. But I don’t think that I should have to subsidize someone pursuing them. For example, what does a practitioner of, say, folklore actually do? What if 10% of students at Folklore U majored in folklore every year? How would that many folklorologists contribute to the common good? Would they all have jobs folkloring? What would such a job consist of doing? It’s hard to answer.
There is a simple reason that forgiving student debt is a terrible idea: it insulates students from the reality that choices have consequences. It is ~never~ a good idea to deny reality.
I think there is a differentiation that needs to be drawn between the so-called “softer disciplines” of philosophy, literature, and classics vs the “ideological indoctrination disciplines” like women’s studies, gender studies, etc. The former educate you about *how* to think critically; the latter train you about *what* to think, blindly - and therein lies the problem. I write this as an English & Comparative Literature major who has enjoyed a long and successful career in finance. Much credit is owed to my liberal arts and humanities education which provided me with the tools to think about issues and questions from multiple perspectives so that I can arrive at a well-reasoned viewpoint for my clients. I haven’t parsed a John Donne sonnet in a long time, but the critical analysis tools I developed in learning how to do so are something I use every day. STEM aren’t the only disciplines that have value.
My concern is that people actually use their educations to make money and repay whatever debts they accrue. Otherwise I'm the one on the hook for them, and I don't like that. It matters not to me if people want to major in black studies or intersectionality or heaven knows what else. I'm fine with those choices. But if they want money to pay for that educations, such as they are, it can't continue to be a handout since that is a net negative to society.
I graduated in chemistry at MIT before going to medical school. Almost 50 years after becoming a chemist, the then-chairwomen of chem at MIT asked me what the relevance of my chemistry degree had to my practice. My answer was, "nothing; and everything." At least 99% of all physicians and surgeons would be unable to tell you anything about chemistry beyond the most trivial--like what an atom and a molecule is. Really. So it's genuinely irrelevant in that wise.
But before I (semi-) retired I was a professor of radiology and neurosurgery and did neurointerventional surgery, a specialty that didn't exist when I was in school. A small cadre of us made it from whole cloth. Critical thinking--which we all developed in our then-prior lives--and creativity were necessary. And undergrad was good place to refine and enhance those aspects.
I don't agree. In my generation of pre-med students we majored in biology & chemistry. This included inorganic, organic, biochemistry, quantitative & qualitative analysis. We were a bit more knowlegable. Was it useful as a pharmacologist & internist? Absolutely!
Your experience and mine are clearly different. Most physicians and surgeons I’ve known—and this is academic medicine—look at chemistry like Dracula looking at a cross. They might know the names of drugs, even generics, but ask them what enantiomer means and they’re like a dog watching television.
Try the experiment yourself. Work enantiomer or 7-receptor into a conversation and see where it goes. For that matter, make it simpler: chuckle at the cleverness of the person who decided on the generic name, esomeprazole. It’s pretty astute. Are your colleagues?
Very well said. What's worse is subjects like English lit are being watered down and hijacked by a social justice agenda and at the same time being made the scapegoat for this by those privileging STEM.
Exactly! Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Excellent response!
Are all those asking for student loan debt forgiveness non-STEM majors? I would guess not. I do not nor have ever had student debt to pay and my degree was in Theater and History. My husband graduated with a degree in History and went to seminary. We would both say our non-STEM degrees have helped us tremendously. Also teachers are not STEM degrees. I understand there are some stupid degrees so don't get me wrong but I think statements like yours are not helpful. I think if a University truly teaches a student to think (not what to think) you have created an asset to society. I also write this as a parent of a college student pursuing history and a high schooler who will study medicine.
Liberal Arts, classical education must always have a place or we are sunk.STEM is fine but not at all the final solution! I totally agree that our colleges and universities need to push a re-set button and get back to teaching kids how to think (not what to think) while also encouraging an increase in STEM majors. Balance! It is so often about balance!
You're right, STEM is fine, but when we discuss whether we can do something, STEM will find a way. When we discuss whether we should do something, STEM has no answers, it's the classically educated who can say, "Something like this has been done before and it didn't end well," or "This has worked in the past."
Amen! I kind of would argue that the issue of can we had put us in many of the conundrums of today. Also we need to realize that some degrees are actually more akin to vocational training to do job x and not classical education which teaches philosophy and such which can be applied to various jobs not just one or two.
This ^^ I was about to formulate a similar response above but you said it so succinctly :) Colleges and universities are not, and should never be, considered as simple career training factories. The whole purpose is to train "thinkers" not simply to create "ready to hire" job applicants.
I think part of this problem is that employers, however, have relegated college degrees as "job training" requirements. There are many fields, STEM included, that could be filled with simple career training courses and certifications, that don't require a four year degree. Save that for those seeking more leadership and decision making roles in those fields, and roll back the job requirements for entry to intermediate level roles to accept non-4 year degreed applicants who otherwise have work history/training/certs to fill the role (probably more than adequately too).
Federal student aid should be for disciplines that benefit the citizenry. A strong military does that, and that relies on STEM for modern weaponry. Medicine, nursing, teaching are a few more. One might argue for law, but there are a lot of lawyers already. What does a comparative literature degree do for the citizens? How about a degree in gender studies, or black history? No, not with taxpayer funds.
Why is the federal government in the student loan space? Return this money to the states and let them direct it. The GI bill is the only kind of federal government "thumb on the scale" program that seems reasonable because the military gave up the opportunity to go to college to serve their country. And that should be rewarded.
By federal student aid do you mean federal loans or just grants? Drawing the line somewhere in the sand with respect to majors requires the government to do it correctly, something it doesn’t have a great track record with. Free market economics on the other hand is pretty good at financially supporting the jobs in demand - the jobs with a shortage of workers tend to command a higher wage. This is on display with nursing right now. Thanks to a mass shortage of nurses now, hospitals are paying current entry level employees to go get degrees and covering tuition. The hospital system I work for just created a 1 year (fully paid) BSN program in partnership with ISU for anyone with a non-nursing bachelors to go back and get a second degree.
Let’s go with that. If a university wants to have a gender or ethnic studies degree track, let’s see how the free market responds with paying jobs and alumni donations.
Otherwise, I see these curricula as nothing more than self-affirming.
The hospitals and medicine in general has a reputation that is in the shitter after the shear malevolence of the response to Covid. I'm not surprised there is a nursing shortage. When did "First Do No Harm" become "First Make Bank and Kill Millions"?
I respectfully disagree as a person who has lived in a city with 5 military installations, I have known many who have worked for the military who are musicians, historians, political science experts and linguists. I get your point but too much government control has never been a good way to solve anything.
What government control are you referring to? No one would be denied access to these humanities programs. They would just have to pay tuition for themselves. Loans are still on the table, if the colleges fund them. So are grants from alumni contributions or endowment funds. I do not see how the rest of the country benefits from aid like that anywhere nearly as much as from contributions made by science, engineering, medicine, etc.
Rob-- Wow-- wiping out philosophy, history, art, literature, languages?! Then it's not a university. It's a vocational school. You don't think a Stem student might benefit from Aristotle's wisdom so he/she wouldn't end up like Elizabeth Holmes. Or wouldn't a business student value a history course? This almost sounds like a Marxist doctrine you are proposing. And FYI -- private universities are not receiving taxpayer funds.
I didn't say the humanities are worthless. Not at all a wipeout. Just not as worthy of taxpayer funding as the professions that produce practical good for society. We need more doctors and scientists, more engineers and mathematicians to solve the growing problems our expanding population needs to be solved. And private institutions get loads of federal funds. The universities have been foxes spending federal money on themselves by giving loans to marginal students unlikely to graduate who will be saddled with debt without a degree. We are the chickens paying those bills. Furthermore, humanities students can still pursue their passions if the universities simply fund them with their own money. I guarantee the foxes will retreat to the woods and the caliber of students receiving university funding will improve. In my view, the student loan problem was and is still being generated by the universities, and they should be on the hook to pay back loans that the students default on.
Private universities are not receiving taxpayer funds??? What about federal student loan guarantees?
The humanities today don't teach Aristotle, they teach Marx. They should receive no government funding, donors can support such classes as they choose. Many degree fields should be eliminated as they are less valuable than four year apprenticeships in those fields, (e.g. jourmalism, performing arts, business).
A large portion have got to be. Most of the debt is grad school debt. I went to grad school for engineering and they paid me (and also worked me like the indentured servant that I basically was), and while med school generally doesn't go that way it also pays off famously afterward.
Liberal arts used to turn out thinkers.
Some went back to study science.
BTW Computer scientists are now having a hard time finding jobs after the layoffs from big companies.
Of course we still need them along with other scientists.
Sorry. Here at TFP, college in general, is quite pointless/damaging to society, etc.
Is college responsible for your inept punctuation?
Is it responsible for your consistent inability to adequately refute an argument? :)
Next!
I agree . But it has to be acknowledged that allowing 17 years olds to make these decisions is part of the problem. Most sign on to these loans without understanding the economic reality
Doesn’t that mean the parents and the primary schools and high schools those 17 year olds attended did a terrible job, too? I understood when I was 17. My daughter understood when she was 17. It seems we are teaching them otherwise. Maybe not an accident?
Our world has been falling apart for about three generations now. Cradle-to-grave nanny-states are all about usurping parenthood de facto if not de jure.
I disagree. When I was 17, I knew the definition of the word loan and those who are going to college are supposed to be the best and the brightest and they know the definition of the word loan they just, selfishly don't care.
No, when I went to college, I understood that I would have to pay my grandmother back and I did. I also understood I would have to pay back my federal loan and I did. Unfortunately we as a society haven't adequately explained that when you are in debt, you are a slave until it is paid off.
In the high schools many are teaching financial literacy (which I have been proposing) because many students-- especially where I teach in Compton-- have NO idea how loans work. They don't understand credit cards. They don't understand why buying a brand new car is not a good idea. They spend hundreds of dollars on sneakers rather than saving money. I think ALL high schools should teach financial literacy.
You and Dave Ramsey are so right!
well, part of that is a further problem with public education. The fact that most students have no idea how debt works or finance in general, yet they are often forced to take geometry and algebra seems odd to me.
Regardless, we are talking about this like loans are the only solution. If colleges didn't have such a huge administrative staff the cost would go down and some students could work their way through school. The idea that school has to take 4 years is also a problem. It takes however long it takes. So a student could get a job and take a class or 2 a semester and not wrack up a ton of dept.
Folking folklorinors
Good one, boss!
Joe, "It is never good to deny reality" would be a perfect bumper sticker. I'd sport one.
Let me know when you have them made. I'll buy 10.
My personal favorite bumper sticker was one I saw in Boston about a million years ago. It said
Talk Nerdy To Me.
I've always been amazed at how effective that is.
Student loan debt punishes people whose parents aren't rich.
Student loan debt punishes people who want to spend their lives doing things that don't make money. It doesn't have much to do with their parents' wealth. I have no quarrel with artists who live for their art. We part company when they do poor art that doesn't pay, but they want to live in mansions.
Rich people's parents pay for their kids' education. Those who are not rich have to go into student loan debt. Things that are very important, like teaching school, do not pay much. Income adjusted federal student loans largely solve this problem so people can do work that is good for the world but doesn't pay as much as management consulting for big corporations that just make more money for those who are already rich.
My wife and I are no means rich (I work in mfg, she is a teacher in the local school district). Our first son graduated from university with zero debt, and our second son is on the way to same debt free graduation. The difference is my wife and I started planning from when they were infants to have monies available to put them thru school. We sacrificed, haven't had a real vacation in over twenty years, neither of us drives an expensive new car....but to us it was worth it.
I generally agree with the point(s) you are making. Are you in agreement that I should not be required to pay for your education? If you take out loans to get to what you want to do, I should not have to pay your loans off?
Completely agree! If you want to get a history or folklore degree go for it. But the public should not have to finically support your endeavor. Today there are plenty of ways to learn not all have to go to school and get a degree.
I agree. I'm a Humanities guy. All of this has tremendous value. It is arguably the loss of the Humanities to left wing lunatics that has enabled ALL OF THIS. The very people who should have been able and willing to oppose the lies and demonic destructiveness of the Left have on the contrary embraced, enabled, and furthered it.
But that says nothing about the fundamental value of Western culture, and for that matter, the cultures of other nations from whom we can also learn, which itself is a Western value. Or was.
I agree. As someone who originally wanted to be an English major, I think the real humanities are actually quite important to constructive and critical thinking. The bastardized things they put out there now, and call humanities, such as gender studies, is a bunch of bullsh$t.
Gender, racial, or other "minority" studies is actually a tremendous career move right now. There are tons of DEI and HR positions available (while a lot of science/engineering positions are being replaced by AI), and it's probably one of the strongest undergraduate degrees if you plan to apply for law school, MSW, education, etc.
That's where we are as a society where a degree in 2SLGBTQIA+ Studies gives you better job prospects than one in chemical engineering or economics.
Maybe not for long.
This is why we should not use the ability to make money to judge whether a person should pick a major. These are not subjects of value but they are highly valued monetarily right now.
Yes, but monetary value is what a loan should be based on. If you wouldn't give a car loan to someone whose job can't make enough to pay it back, why give them an education loan?
Some kind of central planning picking which majors are 'valuable' will fail, as most all central planning does.
If, for instance, the supposed critical thinking skills of a philosophy major are useful, then jobs will want to hire people with those majors, which will make it valuable.
That said, I have met some philosophy majors. Aside from being able to quote some previous philosophers, I did not find them particularly more rational or better critical thinkers than people of other degrees.
Sounds like Kendi may have screwed this prospect up, though I was unaware of this story prior to this article.
Worse, they propagated it. Everyone of my son’s Humanities professors was a 60s radical teaching the world according to Fanon, Derrida and Foucault.
I wanted to be a Professor, but even back then as a moderate Democrat--I've read good books since then and moved much farther to the Right, which I call the Middle--I was going to get in trouble. You spend all this money and do all this work, then you still won't be able to work if you don't kowtow to fundamentally illiberal, idiotic, and destructive ideologies.
That's what derailed my dream of being an English professor. Moderate was not good enough; you had to be full-on Far Left to have any hope of getting a tenure-track position.
I'm in the same boat. I turned down an extraordinary opportunity because I feared I'd become a target or worse based on my personal views, including being actively pro-israel.
I have so many friends who pandered to a leftist agenda and who are suddenly waking up and scratching their heads as to why their colleagues and institutions refuse to condemn baby killers.
On it as usual.
Anyone not familiar with it should read up on the extraordinary story of tenured NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller and how he was treated by his woke colleagues and the cowed university.
I’m also an ex-humanities student (prior to a more *ahem* practical professional degree...house/food/money being necessary to live in our world), and agree that the classical humanities are of enormous value, and arguably were responsible for the Enlightenment (which is what Woke is trying to rescind).
The problem is that the humanities, beginning in the ’60s and ‘70s, and escalating quickly over the past few decades, have essentially been overtaken by “grievance studies”, which -- let’s face it -- are of no earthly use to anyone. This is the Marcusian post-structuralist monster that birthed Woke.
Let’s keep philosophy, political science, literature, etc. and stop funding degrees in grievances.
The irony is that virtually the entire output of most current Humanities Departments, outside of honest acholarship that I assume still sometimes happens, cannot be defended rationally on the basis of their OWN supposed criteria, like justice, tolerance, freedom and economic advancement.
They break everything they touch then lie about it. And once the habit of lying is engrained in groups its hard to eradicate.
Our world is being run by people who were too small and weak to be playground bullies, but who have done the work to where they can bully people from a distance. They are not just mean, but cowardly.
And this is their weakness. We need to stop giving in to their childish tirades and emotional terrorism. All it takes is balls and a firm attachment to basic principles. Satyagraha, in other words.
Philosophy, political science and literature today ARE degrees in grievances. Such subjects have no value as they are being taught. Find a university where those subjects are being studied as Classical Studies and you have something. That won't be at a "prestige" school, but the issuer of the degree is less important than the knowledge learned.
Thanks for standing up for us humanities guys and gals. My (supposedly liberal arts) college is about to phase out all of its art and music programs, and it breaks my heart. As someone who plans on using my English degree to advance my center-right values (and has seen how lost the science community has become about gender), I think it's wrong to assume an 100% STEM focus will end campus wokeness.
I think all that would happen is our best and brightest would do science as trained bigots.
We need to retake the Humanities for humanity.
“I think all that would happen is our best and brightest would do science as trained bigots.”
The really scary part is that this has already happened. The most prestigious scientific journals are 100% captured by the anti-scientific drivel of gender theory. The Science™️ (aka ideology) trumped medicine, physical anthropology, economics, etc., with practitioners quickly falling into line with the prevailing political winds.
So many examples...just last month, the US and Canadian Anthropology’s national associations cancelled a planned panel discussion why biological sex is important to the discipline because of the “harms” such a discussion would cause (see Colin Wright’s Substack); a (ironically non-White) professor at a Canadian university was denied a scientific research grant because in the grant application’s DEI section, he said that he intended to hire “the most qualified researchers he could find without regard to race, gender, etc.”
I mean, in a world where “math is racist”, clearly STEM is not the “neutral” subject matter that we think it is! There’s an old Soviet era saying that when you cross science with politics, all you get is politics.
We have a long fight ahead, and we may not win, but fight we must.
Who benefits from an atmosphere of fear, misapprehension, shame, cancellation and lies? A child living in a home controlled by those dynamics might never overcome the damage to his psyche and emotions. How about a nation? Of all the reports TFP has posted the one I most remember was a swim meet at a major university where a "trans" man was competing against young women. The young women, many having spent years training for the competition, begged their parents not to say anything for fear of scholarship loss or career destruction. That isn't political anything. It is ball gag sadism and the people who perpetrated are monsters.
Education? One nightmare at a time. You bet!!. But the foul beast we call the D.E.I. has, at personal profit, "remora fished" itself onto every major American institution. More importantly, the American psyche. The Twitter pile on, the manufactured trial by press, the political witch-hunt of truth speakers, riot, physical assault, and the outright lie in the face of truth sanctioned and encouraged by a corrupt elite. Again, who benefits when a surveillance state psyop of of this proportion engulfs a planet?
A-Bomb 20th Century retro. It's the numbered account bag man blues wearing a shiny new jackboot and marching to a brand new tune.
If you ain't scared you ain't right.
Got Constitution?
Die facing the enemy, whatever that means. Its the only human, and only genuinely Liberal response.
> a (ironically non-White) professor at a Canadian university was denied a scientific research grant because in the grant application’s DEI section
Can you share a link to that, please?
Really sad we're even in a place where you need a DEI statement on a research grant application *at all*.
Hear hear!!!
MIT has a serious wokeness problem. It doesn’t get any more STEM than that.
Humanities is not wiped out by stopping federal funding. Just pay for your education. Federal funding provides an economic boost to the subjects most needed to benefit the citizenry. Loans get paid back; scholarships come from endowments. If humanities are valued then private university funding should fill in. Just don’t use taxpayer dollars to fund a gender studies or comparative languages degree. Those are not going to benefit society the way doctors, teachers or engineers do.
The problem is that all of those "softer" subjects have been overrun by the Far Left. If you look at the papers published in those fields, you will find an obsession with promoting Woke views on race, gender, and sexuality. Academics in those subject areas live and breathe political activism first and foremost. Their actual subject matter is merely a tool for achieving their political aims.
But lots of the STEM has clearly been overrun by the Far Left too, look at how they treat gender. All those STEM students aren't wasting time with humanities classes that aren't bare minimum gen-eds. So we shouldn't be acting like STEM professors are sacred guardians of Conservative values here.
They aren't, but there is a limit to which the ideology can affect the actual work. Wokeness can't engineer a bridge or an aircraft engine. For that reason, STEM is SOMEWHAT protected.
Yeah, well that's the problem isn't it? We are about to have a generation of woke engineers and doctors designing bridges and trying to set broken bones. I'm not expecting that to work out so well...
That is really alarming, isn't it? I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing catastrophic failures due to STEM students focusing more on politics than physics and DEI directors hiring those maleducated students.
You're right, of course. But it took longer for STEM to be overrun. I would guess that the few remaining professors in the U.S. who are conservatives are STEM professors.
Yeah or they’re international faculty who don’t align themselves politically like US born profs. Many STEM faculty are Asian and Indian and they might be conservative but are mostly apolitical. What’s missing from my academia are a bunch of hard-core conservatives who are in the humanities and social sciences and do research on economics and public policy.
When I was a graduate student in psychology in the early 90s, the leftists had not yet taken over. At that point one could still voice disagreements and if you argued your position well, you earned the respect of the professors. I spent many a night debating the older professors, who were indeed very left, but they loved it when you understood their arguments and disagreed with them employing facts and logic. No one tried to cancel me until the very end of my program, when a young ideologue joined my committee, and did her best to destroy my dissertation project. That was the beginning of the ugly intolerance and I barely made it out alive. It is so sad what has been lost.
I want to add that the loss has affected not just me, but many people who could potentially have added valuable intellectual diversity to academic life. You don't hear from us because we've given up the fight. We've gotten the message that divergent perspectives are not welcome, and we've gone into other fields.
And then the Left claims that conservatives "don't value education" or "are less intelligent" because so many conservatives have given up on academic careers, due to the way even moderates get treated in colleges.
Simultaneous victim-blaming and gas-lighting.
I came to say this. A “classical” education should not provide only a far left perspective on the cannon & various methods of inquiry. University programs in the humanities and social sciences are failing to inculcate liberal values and impart the skillset to practice empiricism because they’re captured by a bunch of close-minded ivory tower progressives.
-signed, a tenured professor who has watched this evolution firsthand.
All of those things will be preserved and passed down. The government is not needed at all for this to happen. In fact the government-funded functionless psychopaths who have taken over are the primary threat to the preservation of the things you’re referring to because they view everything that is good and useful as ‘white supremacy’.
Go to a university. Look around. About 90% of the people you see should be driving a forklift.
I wouldn’t trust most of them with a forklift.
> All of those things will be preserved and passed down
I watched an interview about how the far left have taken over Anglo-Saxon studies in England, and want to abolish the term "Anglo-Saxon", abolish the idea of the Angle and Saxon as distinct ethnic groups, and discourage the study of Old English and Celtic languages. They've already started rewriting history, eg declaring that Africans built Stonehenge. So, no, those things are disappearing or being co-opted at a rapid rate.
Those who control the past control the present and those who control the present control the future.
All of this is about power. But power to what end? This would properly be a Humanities—a human—question, but the Menschen are absent.
Churchils quip (quited approximately) that “zealots or fanatics are those who redouble their efforts, having forgotten the point”, is apt.
"The world needs ditch diggers too Danny"
- Ty Webb
Too many commentators are failing to distinguish between the humanities properly understood and their current corrupted iterations. These disciplines are not “soft.” A software coder bereft of understanding of human history is pathetic.
Some of my most morally depraved students scored some of the very highest SAT scores. So we cannot presume intellectual merit is in any way equivalent to moral character. There are some very smart very warped kids in college.
I would add in "very pampered" and protected from reality. Never a prescription for a life well led.
In fact, this has been “proven”; in Nazi Germany, many early adopters of Nazism were university professors, doctors, and other professionals.
What may be more relevant to “character” are personality traits, especially cluster B personality traits (which are over represented among the higher IQs).
Heidegger
Just finished reading Isaacson’s book on Elon Musk. We have some very smart warped guys running the world - viz. the two richest men in the world, Musk and Gates. Throw in jackasses like SBF and Epstein (the list of their ilk is too long to continue here) and is it any wonder that the world is so fucked up?
While odious, I don’t know how influential Epstein was politically
don't forget "Jennifer" Pritzker and "Martine" Rothblatt.
It's like Doctors in 1940's Germany and today.
You can presume cheating and adderall.
uh, like Mark Zuckerberg for instance?
I would add getting rid of tenure. Having people who can act as stupid as they want without fear of losing their jobs creates this environment. Everyone has run into a person like this. The subject is secondary to what they think, and the culture to get tenure is not based on merit and performance but rather the strict adherence to the religious orthodoxy.
This change needs to be part of a higher education bill in Congress that breaks the back of this movement. Let the reform begin.
More top down involvement will not have the effect you seek. Market forces work better as Ackman et al and Winston and Strawn show.
"OMG my performative tweets supporting the latest current thing on campus might kill my job prospects! How unfair!"
But the top-down mess has created this. Ackerman et al. open their checkbook, but the student loan system gives them the real money. Tuition has skyrocketed in my lifetime because the government subsidizes it. What they are doing is fine, but they can only change what they can because of top-down policies. When those policies change, then the market can get to work.
The children of the useless-college-indebted can't afford houses so can't have children. There's a long tail balancing that occurs naturally in market environments.
The second you abandon tenure, the few right wing and libertarian faculty still clinging on will be out on their ass.
Unfortunately true.
What we really need, as a society, is to make political views protected in the same way that religious views are, and then require "diversity of thought" in hiring.
Jonathan Haidt pointed this out a decade ago: the completely lack of ideological diversity has warped many subject areas. There is no space for subject-advancing discussion or debate when everyone shares a narrow range of views.
Not a good idea. Tenure cuts both ways, like the filibuster in congress. Sure, getting rid of tenure now, when the overwhelming majority of professors are using it for evil, sounds good... but it could backfire in the unlikely event of a rightward shift in academia at some point in the future.
My thought has nothing to do with ideology but rather performance. When you don't have to worry about your job, some tend to stop paying attention to doing their job and start doing other things. Thanks for you post.
Many/most of these student protests are led by Muslims here on student visas (often taking precious spots of rejected American students). They should be expelled, have their visas revoked, and deported.
These students are the first to cry that their First Amendment rights are being violated but also the first to demand that anyone with an alternative view be silenced.
Case in point: Last year, Berkeley’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine asked other student groups to adopt a bylaw that banned supporters of Israel from speaking at events. It excluded any speaker who “expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” Nine student groups adopted the bylaw. Signers included the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, the Queer Caucus and the Women of Berkeley Law.
Enough!!
Isn’t it absolutely hilariously ironic that “women” and “queers” support an extremist Muslim organization like Hamas? As a recent meme points out, the concept of “Gays for Palestine” is akin to “Chickens for KFC”!
I would add in the multitudes we admit through our demented immigration policies.
Queer Caucus for Palestine...how can you be that stupid?! As previously speculated, what next blacks for the KKK?
Many of them are immigrants and admitted on student visas but also Muslims born in the US. I am not optimistic that administration too cowardly or unwilling to condemn slaughter of Jews will have moral strength to expel these students. As much as we loath the government involvement in all aspects of our lives, there must be a law that requires it.
Brilliant post!
I will repeat here a proposal I made the other day: all campus political organizations, in order to be recognized, much less receive funding, have to respond to all calls for public debate twice a year. If some other group challenges them, they need to be willing to argue their case in a public forum.
The model would be Lincoln-Douglas debate, which I did in high school. You have a predetermined resolution that people can research and develop arguments for and against. In LD you have to be able to argue both sides--which is part of why it is in my view so useful--but in this scenario people would only need to argue their own side, the one to which they are partial, and the reason the group exists.
So you have a topic, such as "Resolved: that the Israeli treatment of Gazans warrants the rape and murder of young women, the torture and burning of families, and the abduction both of women and children to hold as hostages."
So the Pro-Hamas groups get to argue in favor of that resolution, which states clearly the latent subtext of things they have ALREADY said and supported, and a Jewish group of one form or another gets to do the negative.
Affirmative gets, say, a ten minute statement, followed by 5 minutes--timed by judges whose own views don't really matter--of questions by the Negative. Negative then gets 12 minutes, both to state their own case and respond to the Affirmative, after which Affirmative gets their own five minutes, and both sides then do an 8 minute closing statement.
Any group which refuses to do this loses recognition and funding. Any group on a COLLEGE CAMPUS unwilling or unable to argue the merits of their existence should not exist. I think that is simple enough.
I like your idea, but unfortunately today’s college students are incapable of putting together cogent arguments in a civil environment. They have been taught to throw tantrums when they run up against disagreements.
True, but none of us needs to accept the status quo. They push us, but if enough of us push back, honest progress is possible.
Make it a TV show. It would be better than reality shows as it is reality!
and they're voted off campus if they lose the debate
I like it
The Free Press published a piece earlier this year about the woke cancel culture that has taken over high school debate society.The woke masterminds know exactly what they are doing. They have poisoned the well to stifle any open serious debate on crucial topics of the day.
I was about to say this! It’s literally OVERWHELMING the extent to which Woke has overtaken virtually every aspect of our society. That “long march through the institutions” has been (possibly) the most successful soft revolution ever conceived by mankind. Being a pessimist (as a rabbit, this is not really surprising given our position at the very bottom of the food chain), it’s almost impossible to imagine the scope of action necessary to reverse course (if such a thing is even possible).
I see two potential outcomes: upon hearing an argument they don't like, the woke students will run and hide in their safe rooms or beat the Jews. We have seen both taking place on campuses lately.
I’d like to see Debate be a required course in middle and high school.
It certainly helped me. And the practice of arguing both sides of any issue is intrinsically useful.
The only thing I can think of with donors closing their check books is to say, "It's about time. What took so long?"
These universities have supported the PC/Woke tyrants for years and now that they are losing funds, they lie and say they are either supporting free speech (which is a lie) or they are neutral on outlandish speech from the left. Which is also a lie. They all have DIE departments and DIE officers. These brutal departments suck up and support any far left organizations and shut down or fire anyone who doesn't follow their far left agenda.
These universities support campus organizations that support violent Marxist student clubs and professors not only support these loony left clubs but preach support for these violent organizations in their classrooms.
These same universities fire or cancel professors who express centrist or right wing opinions. They don't discipline students who shout down speakers the left doesn't approve of while all the time falsely claiming they support free speech.
I find these far left universities disgusting. They need an entire revamping of their leadership.
I couldn’t agree more. Where were these donors outrage when BLM was rioting and burning cities/businesses and murdering innocent civilians, or when Riley Gaines was trapped in a college classroom by trans-activists were trying to violently harm her for speaking truth about biology, or when Yale law students were throwing molotov cocktails into NYPD cop cars. I could go on. Better late than never, but the rot in these institutions has been reeking long before Hamas decided to slaughter innocent Israelis. This whole century has been an absolute shit show with moral rot everyone you turn. Covid was the most insane - especially the reactions on college campuses and was used to egregiously violate so many human rights and take away our freedoms by our moral betters in these institutions and our government especially.
You nailed it!
Corey, I like your avatar. It made me yearn for a dog and a couple of cats but we can't have them. My wife is allergic.
When we moved back to the states we brought our 21 year old cat. She lived another year. It was like losing a child.
My wife developed allergies here in the States so no more pets. We miss them
We have two teenage boys, a dog, and two cats so the house is full of love, warmth and dirt (LOL). I'm so sorry for the loss of your beloved cat and that your wife developed allergies. I know it's not for everyone, but I would probably suffer through the allergies than live with out my pets!
We did that for about 20 years but when we got to the States, her allergies got worse so after our beloved cat died, we never had another pet. We miss them.
They give so much and ask so little.
OMG Corey brilliantly posted please post more!
Why do we need to fund elitist, private universities at all? Local colleges produce the most valuable graduates such as police officers, firefighters, nurses, teachers, IT practitioners, trade occupations, paramedics, etc. Often at reasonable tuition costs with little to no debt.
Yip why?
Good thoughts. We should also tie federal support (of aid or student loans) to meeting minimal thresholds of FIRE's Freedom of Speech ratings. Institutions that stifle free speech should be cut of from federal funding.
This would not be unprecedented as Medicare has a variety of metrics that hospitals must meet to be fully funded under the MCare program.
I was onboard until your example and then I kind of shuddered. The average hospital (161 bed community) has 59 FTEs dedicated to regulatory compliance at a cost of $7.6M annually. The administrative burden of regulatory compliance in the hospital industry totals almost $39B annually. Obviously not all regulation is bad and there will always be a price tag (healthcare is a logical place), but I don’t know that the government imposing more regulation is a good thing. What happens when a Biden-esque future president wants to tie it to ESG ratings instead?
.I was a hospital administrator for 30 years, and a CEO for 15. I hated the federal intervention in imposing these standards because they have zero expertise in developing relevant healthcare metrics. My point was, they've done it before, so they can do it now to address our runaway higher ed system.
So, ideally, the federal government would get out, totally, of subsidizing higher ed, but since that's unlikely, at least develop guardrails for compliance
There’s so many new people around these days I didn’t want to assume it was the same Jon. But yes, I agree fully with the broken system in healthcare and now education.
Same Jon, and I've been around for quite a while.
When my parents graduated from high school in the 1960s they had a track system. You either prepared for university or for a trade. I don’t think that was a terrible system (at least in Canada). My brother is an electrician. He went to a trade school. He’s a millennial homeowner who travels abroad several times a year and sends his daughter to a private school. He’s doing pretty alright.
Trades are essential to fixing the universities. We need to stop churning out bad university programs / students and start imagining better ways to BUILD.
Right now, we likely need people in the trades more than Uni grads. Finding a good plumber or welder is getting harder and harder. But we spent decades demonizing those jobs as lesser work or beneath people. And I can't help but think this is because it is a lot harder to indoctrinate someone while they are in carpentry school.
Yeah, I agree. My car's check engine light came on this past weekend and I won't be able to have a mechanic look at it for six weeks. So I get to drive my kids around worrying that a bad situation may get worse and there's nothing I can do about it. I know this is a "first world" problem, but this is absolutely a gap in our society that needs to be filled.
All the people who are pulling their funding from legacy universities should consider rerouting that money to trades programs. If our geopolitical situation keeps getting worse we're going to need highly skilled people who know how to build and fix things.
This is sorta cheese sarcasm, but your check engine light story reminds me of the problem with medicine or our sick care system today. A conventional doctor today would tell you to cut the wire on the check engine light. Nevermind trying to get to the root cause of that problem. Just turn off the signal that something is wrong. This is what pharmaceutical drug model is exactly. So way off topic sorry.
I agree with trade schools. I think the pendulum is swinging back the other way. In the Tampa, Florida area they recently created a large trades school program. I know it's happening all over the country. My son skipped college and took up low voltage cabling. He's very busy and no shortage of work.
The poisonous cancer of woke:
LBGTQ ✅
Trans ✅
DEI ✅
Police “brutality” ✅
Asian hate crimes ✅
Atrocities against Jews ❌
A caveat: they dropped and shut up about "Asian hate crimes" real quick when it turned out it wasn't the right race committing the hate crime.
All boxes ticked.
I understand the sentiment, but there are more humanities out there besides gender studies. And the wonderful writing from Beri and others who have contributed here shows why we still need colleges to teach things like literature, writing, and history.
I disagree that emphasizing more STEM is the answer. The humanities are studies in which the goal is to make us more “ human.” We have neglected the importance of teaching to both sides of our brain and we now have students who are 1 dimensional thinkers at best, who only know how to argue with feelings not facts. Even science has become science fiction. And DEI.. these are classes that try to rearrange what is truth about what makes us all fully human without any regard to data or outcome evidence.
But the humanities; they are what civilize us and allow the development of our right side of the brain. This is the part that takes in the whole picture and enables us to see that there are nuances to humans that we are not all good or bad BUT the line of good and bad runs through every heart and we are at our best when have learned this. We have become imbalanced creatures without a conscious. Heaven help us.
I think there is real value in a solid humanities based education. Education is a value in and of itself
Back in my day, 19 ought dickety seven, university was more about learning how to think, problem solve.
Now it seems to be more about what to think.
But you won't get a solid humanities based education in college, unless you are fortunae enough to get into a school like Hillsdale or Florida's New College. You are better off to save the tuition money, buy books and read them at home.
“None of these institutions are solvent without the support of their alumni....”
Sadly, that's not true of the biggest. Math and finance are not my strengths, but does Harvard even need more donations to stay liquid, with their endowments.
So donors, don't just pause. Or stop. Demand your money back, publicly. (Even if it's not gonna happen.)
And the rest of you, take back your institutions. The long march BACK.
(Or "house-to-house," if you like.)
Good ideas, Raziel.
But the only thing that will save universities is competition. The alumni who are finally (at last) withholding funds to institutions can put their money where their mouths are now and throw their (many) millions into the founding of a few new universities that will proudly exhibit all the traits you espouse. Merit based admissions, first of all. Emphasis on STEM. High quality instruction in all the sciences and the humanities. But equally important, the complete and unfettered freedom to speak, to write, to debate, to teach, in the manner of the beliefs you are willing to defend. The freedom to be fearless. A university where all opinions matter, and where no institutional political or cultural bias exists. A university truly colour blind.
No legislation will get us there. No mandate to force the introduction of the improvements we all know universities need will do it. Only new institutions who will attract professors, management and prospective students from the legacy schools will do it, in my opinion. In order to compete, the Yales,Harvards, Princetons, Penn Sts et al of the future will have to adapt to a fairer, unbiased reality - or fall victim to it.
Competition, it's the American way.
“It began with Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire, who had been doomscrolling since news of the attacks first broke. On Tuesday, he came across an open letter, signed by over thirty student groups from Harvard—his alma mater—which blamed Israelis for their own murders……….Ackman and his friends exchanged incredulous texts.”
—————————————————
I’d like to remind everyone that Ackman was also the guy who was watching the Rittenhouse trial with his wife and tweeted something like
“Oh shit turns out this guy is innocent and our media is fake.”
So I guess this is red pill number two for Mr. Ackman? Everyone just look up Gell-Mann Amnesia if you want to understand how this happens to someone as smart as Bill.
Just try to remember, the media is fake and Democrats lie about everything because they are possessed by Satan. Get some post-it notes or a tattoo if necessary.
A jury, presented with all the evidence, found Rittenhouse innocent. The "red pill" is more accurately characterized by the end of Ackman's sentence - media is [more or less deliberately] fake. Journalism which was once a trade and concentrated in condensing who, what, when, where into commuter-sized pieces has been displaced at legacy outlets by college kids on some sort of mission. Because the industry is now hopelessly fragmented and anyone can call him/her/they/zirself a journalist, competition for the largely fixed revenue pool has driven reporting neutrality out in favor of confirming the worldview of the target audience. It has also driven down salaries so that only the children of privilege can afford journalistic employment.
We score the business success of news reporting not on accuracy anymore but instead on how many news consumers can be induced to click through for a second layer of online ads to load. Sullivan v NYT provides litigation cover for writing that requires no reporting, just carefully vague word choices that lead the news consumer to confirmation of whatever larger "truth: the outlet subscribes to. This loops back to the most susceptible audience, desperate for acceptance, the young on college campuses. This is what you get. The mainstream of commerce one day wakes up, sees what is afoot and cuts off the kids' allowance.
The humanities are no longer interesting in thinking and pondering the human condition. They are 100% about political activism. Their subject area is used merely as a tool for achieving political aims.
Sullivan needs to be overturned.
I agree the bar should be lowered. To the extent news media and journalists take refuge in Sullivan - which essentially immunizes incompetent reporting despite reputational damage it does to targets - FOIA-type public discovery rules might be applied to journalists whose stories are proved false in court regardless of intent or malice. Then sources who use them for cover to plant false but damaging stories would be afraid of being outed. Once, reporters who were burned by sources with false tips would out those sources themselves. Now they are protected because they might tee up the next clickbait falsehood. A legal public discovery process would balance that nicely.
In the world of clickbait there probably aren't that many Judith Millers.
I think SCOTUS has actually given cert to a relevant case on this, so it’ll be interesting to see what the current composition of the court decides.
Not being American I'd no idea what Sullivan v NYT was till I looked it up. Whaddaya know Civil Rights and the Communist grifter and moral reprobate MLK. Unsurprisingly. Funny how all the pieces put together, whatever the puzzle, and Marx and his step-children emerge in the foreground. Four years later there would be lock-step reporting of the Tet Offensive as large scale US defeat when in fact it was a large scale US victory. Print the Legend!
In all fairness to Ackerman, when the Rittenhouse thing happened, a lot of people were still under the wrap how awful liberal MSM had gotten. Most adults, esp pre-Covid, are also not preoccupied with politics to the point of being very online to be keen on what's going on. Liberal MSM did a hell of a job casting Rittenhouse as a gun-toting alt-right nut job. And while conservative media reported differently, it's not as if conservative media don't lie and have their own agenda either. For a long time people side-eyed them, and not entirely unjustified. The fact that Ackerman actually got red pilled when the verdict came down is to his credit. The jury verdict was what convinced me too, and by the time the decision came down, I was long past believing anything MSM has to say. But even as we speak, there are still tons of liberals who think Rittenhouse is a Proud Boy alt-right ready to do the next mass shooting. They don't even seem to know he's been proven innocent, or any factual details of that incident for that matter. They just seemed to have heard someone or the MSM said he's a Proud Boy, and that's all they have to know to never change their minds.
I watched almost seemless coverage of Kenosha. It was provided by The New York Times video reporting team and blew apart practically in real time their parent organisations narrative and reporting. That is the second time I watched a news organisation destroy its own credibility itself via camera. The BBC News did a similar thing reporting unrest in Albania over the huge Ponzi scheme that nearly bankrupted the country in 1991. The video I was watching completely contradicted the Newsrooms voice-over. That the MSM is in fairyland most of the time on most topics is the only conclusion one can draw..
And everyone ignores the simple fact that the white supremacist group Proud Boys was headed by an Afro-Cuban named Enrique Torres.
Some people still think 2 + 2 = 5
1. It's Ackman.
2. Where is this "conservative media?"
I lay it at the feet of the last Hollywood writers strike about 25 years ago, when the studios and networks turned to reality shows to save their revenue streams and came up with crap like Real Housewives of Sheboygan or whatever, and those insipid Dateline shows.
It was a small leap from there to networks realizing that the evening news could easily be produced as entertainment and the whole show could be an op-ed piece.
To be fair, The Real Housewives of Sheboygan and/or Cheboygan would have useful skill sets. They would most likely be able to make a tater tot casserole, clean and filet a fish, and in the case of Sheboygan, no doubt have cheese curds in the fridge. Their reality would hit closer to home than others. Your point with regard to Hollyweird and their move to produce junk programming is spot on.
The woman I know from Cheboygan have great skill sets besides making tater tot casseroles. Even though they do make awesome tater tot casseroles.
Cheap TV production is a necessity given the share of networks now. The good news is that I'll bet the viewers of Real Housewives are low propensity voters.
They don't have to vote as long as they are registered so the Democrats have their name and address and a mail-in ballot.
Possessed by Satan? Are you kidding me? They are Satan! They are the definition of evil!
Kevin! ❤️🤣
The media isn't fake, not fake at all ... its merely stuffed with philanthropic journalism.
Philanthropic Journalism, for those who don't know, is where I donate my money to a charity, a very fine charity in fact, such a great and awesome charity, that I in-fact have founded this charity myself, and hence named this charity after myself ... and I fund this great charity with great benevolence. What does this great and awesome charity do in fact? Well, it funds journalists, very knowledgeable and skillful journalists, Journalists who earn such a small pittance working for nationally syndicated companies, that these Journalists often take on side gigs, such as writing gracious and loving stories about how Michael is such a loving soul, gracious and caring, a friend to mankind ... that's the sort of journalism my charity funds.
Agree - well said - except perhaps that many of the democrats are not technically lying ("an intentionally false statement") because they are brainwashed by years or decades of the blather and so they believe they speak truthfully...
Love the “Memento” reference, Kevin!
More great news in a week when Australians emphatically told the woke elite to get stuffed and NZ voted an anti-woke government in with a landslide. My belief in the suicidal West is beginning to revive.
I’m sure the permanent unelected Australian government of left-wing college-educated busybody technocrat psychopaths will remain untouched and they will use the usual package of extortionate threats and sabotage tactics to bring the elected Romney-style conservatives into line.
I found that to be uplifting, also. I sincerely hope this trend continues.
It won't, unfortunately. They are all "finger in the wind" believers, and will change sides when it is convenient to do so.
Not much "news" on that but good news, indeed. Maybe the Anglosphere is regaining its footing and moral compass?
The "woke elite" that was pushing The Voice to begin with are the same people having meltdowns whenever you suggest that Israel should not ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.
Yip the left in meltdown.
I don’t believe it. Progressivism is a religious cult. The egos of those who have gone all-in will not suddenly admit how devastating and disempowering their ideology has been to the very people they claim to help. These nihilistic narcissists took a hit, but they are regrouping and going through the mental gymnastics required to save face. They will re-write history and redefine words to justify their cause. They are already doing it by pretending to stand behind free speech, yet they will not denounce censorship. I will believe change is coming when these narcissists admit they were wrong about COVID, they were wrong about masks, they were wrong about BLM, they were wrong about anti-racism, they were wrong about micro-aggressions, they were wrong about men being women.... they are FACTUALLY wrong! Until then, this is cover so they can survive.
Two steps forward, one step back. That's the path to leftist hell.
Tacit support for genocide against Jews was two forward, now half-assed apologies will be the one step back - for exactly as long as it's not safe to publicly support the destruction of Israel.
This is a dangerous moment because if we wound but do not kill this beast, they will come back with double force next time they can use a crisis as an excuse.
Don't just cut donations, shame and oust every sociopath who pretended to be against racism, except when it's Jews.
Clarification... I don’t believe the donor class will save American universities because they are part of the progressive cult that they helped build. They will not suddenly admit they were wrong.
They don’t have to admit it. But I bet the donor club is small and they know each other. Peer pressure is as real for billionaires as it is for 7th graders.
And if one billionaire in TFP persuades others to follow, TFP becomes the place that billionaires look to for their social cues.
That's how to kill legacy institutions - become the new leader.
Yeah - go Bari!
Finger in the wind liberals, cum leftists! They shift to suit the newest narrative.
Reminds me of a certain 42nd president...
Excellent post at the moment they still batshit crazy especially on the Israeli front.
“Maybe, just maybe, a new equilibrium can be reached. Maybe we can agree that political litmus tests for employment are bad, that requiring DEI statements is bad”
———————————————————
I think a DEI statement would be fine if DEI just stood for ‘Don’t Exterminate Israel’ and people used it to make sure they aren’t hiring pro-Palestine terrorists.
The current president of RISD was a career DIE commissar who worked with Kendi at BU and has no art or design experience. She is influencing young artists infuse the mind virus into their work. RISD has become RISDIE: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-appoint-a-commissar
I don’t think it’s critical to have people take loyalty oaths in order to get a job. I do, however, think that, in order to get a job, people sign agreements to abide by the rules of the organization hiring them. One such rule would be a zero tolerance for publicly espousing sentiments at odds with those of the organization’s. And an agreement that so doing would constitute grounds for immediate termination of employment.
The most famous practitioner of that philosophy was Huey P. Long, governor of Louisiana back in the early-mid 20th century. Huey required just two things of every person hired by the state: an off the top deduction of 10% of his or her wages to go into Huey’s political war chest*; and a signed, undated letter of resignation. Huey was clearly a dictator, and an adamant socialist.** But he knew a thing or two about how to get things done.
As a totally unrelated aside, although Huey P. was a seriously colorful character, he paled in comparison with his younger brother Earl K. Long. Anyone interested can grab a copy of The Earl Of Louisiana by A. J. Liebling. Or watch the movie, Blaze, which is mostly accurate but largely lacking in detail, which is what makes the book so much fun.
* That virtual war chest was called the deduct [pronounced dē’ duct or dē’ duck] box.
** Full, if unsurprising, disclosure: I’m as far from being a socialist as you can get. I love capitalism, always have, and will until I can no longer fog a mirror.
I love that Kevin can make us laugh out loud.
The political correctness, and “wokeness“ didn’t begin with George Floyd’s death, but that single event served to propel it. The glorification of a man who had been a career criminal, who was not representative of the vast majority of hard-working, conscientious, Black people, is a travesty and an allegory for our times. Unfortunately, it’s served as fuel for the fire. that is now consuming college campuses. it is quite simple either you deplore the killing of other human beings, or you don’t. And if you don’t, what exactly are you?
They are people without G-d who have too much time on their hands. They are the DoorDash generation. Can’t even be bothered to drive to get food and will pay twice the price for the privilege, yet complain they don’t get paid enough.
Woke madness started with Floyd and ended with the slaughter of 1300+ civilians in Israel.
BTW it’s worth spelling out: the woke response to these terrorist attacks was a cut and dry application of their simplistic intersectionality theory. Here we see it’s absurdity in an extreme limit. See Norm’s similar hypothetical below. We should all oppose this simplistic theory!
https://twitter.com/normmacdonald/status/809637479674281984?lang=en
“it is quite simple either you deplore the killing of other human beings, or you don’t.”
But they DON’T deplore it. They want NO limits on abortion (yet they deplore the death penalty); they want “decarceration” (releasing the MOST violent criminals to predate freely among us), they refuse to address the problem of “black on black” murders (if ever there was a need for BLM, it is surely in this context).
Logic is anathema to Woke. It’s all about feelings and the perception of cherry picked groups that you deem to be “oppressed”.
The seed of wokeness and the present-day lunacy was planted during the school years of the current Millennial generation. I am firmly in that age band and attended a highly-rated public school that in hindsight steeped a lot of the curriculum in core tenets of post-modernism and moral relativism. I’m sure that means it started with the generation before that that taught but my generation was definitely indoctrinated in it.
Agree. Little older than you but we did not get it until college—highly selective USNWR university. I believe it is now being infused at younger ages depending on how posh the school and how liberal the area. Thank goodness we were more mature when they introduced these concepts. I knew one extremely gifted student who entered a depressive episode after exposure to these ideas. Luckily they had 18 years of reality under their belt and come through fine.
I would argue that the current state of indoctrination did not start with George Floyd. Our universities did not turn into Marxist indoctrination centers in the last few years. My sense is that the Vietnam War was the starting point and this has been building for decades. It got to its current state because no one was paying attention.
Spot on. The long march has taken 50 years. It won't be reversed overnight.
“None of these institutions are solvent without the support of their alumni,” Ackman said of the brewing donor revolt. “Perhaps this is the beginning of a catalyst for change.”
————————————————————
Yeah they also really really really aren’t solvent if the federal government would stop stealing my money and using it to back loans for useless people to study Pansexual Literature.
But of course DeSantis will cut loans for bullshit studies and David French will write a piece about
“This is vindictive punitive targeting of political opponents which is illegal because conservatives are not allowed to use the government for anything!!!”
David French: A stain on conservative values! He uses his religious convictions as a tool to stain everyone but himself. I used to listen to his podcast with Alexandra Desanctis, but when he started to talk over her, and marginalize her views, I deleted his feed. He would be better off on the staff of Christianity Today, which has fallen into woke-ism in recent years.
French is a "conservative" in the same way as David Brooks or the now laughable George Will are - lapdog sellouts to leftist house organs.
I agree 100% with Douglas Murray, who said that "any supporter of Hamas and their atrocities should be given the same treatment as that given to ISIS and their supporters"
We need to know who signed that list supporting Hamas
Remember after Jan 6, the pictures of the "mob" going around social media with the caption "we never knew how many truly horrible people lived amongst us"
Well now with the Left's support of terrorism and Hamas, the truth has come out - it is amongst the LEFT where the truly horrible people are living amongst us.
Many on the left are seemingly shocked that the Frankenstein's monster they built could be turned against them.
And many very left leaning American Jews can now see that having a worldview that is consistent with the far left will not protect them.
They should’ve figured that out after Nazi Germany. European Jewry were assimilated and integrated to the extent local laws allowed. Their men fought in WWI, many were successful businessman. None of this saved them.
I agree.
The inevitable car crash that identity politics will cause. Everyone's POV depends on if it's their ox getting gored or not.
Yes. But some of these people were shocked. To which I say, why ?
Tigers eat their young. Even Robespierre ended up on the guillotine
Yes. And, it is about time. Your choice of words "Frankenstein's monster" caught my attention.
I thought this was a terrific essay. I also strongly agree with the part I paste below. Something is missing though... I am glad people are catching on regarding unfairness in sports and the insulting female caricature used for Bud Light... but - we also have a problem with people run out or shouted down on campuses when they speak against the Gender Ideology Frankenstein money making project which is allowed to happen under a cult ideology surrounding a made up thing called "gender identity". Before, a handful of fully grown adult men and fathers who gave in to their paraphelias had "sex changes" but today we confuse the young at school and Frankenstein them as children or at the magic age of 18 . They do not understand what they are doing. Please see today's PITT: "I’ll Visit You in Prison" https://pitt.substack.com/p/ill-visit-you-in-prison
"Liberals and centrists seem to have paid attention to conservative boycotts of Bud Light and Target. Then came the scandal surrounding Ibram Kendi’s antiracism center at Boston University. Having burned through over $20 million, he now faces an inquiry from the university. Kendi’s disgrace cracked the window—and the horrific responses to the Hamas attacks opened the door.
And yet it is only now—after all the histrionic and outraged statements about #MeToo and BLM and Ukraine and Roe v. Wade—that universities are discovering the virtue of institutional neutrality."
DIE has brought us the State of CA v. parents. This is a Current Thing where the Woke Left squelches dissent. We must stop letting them.
"In Chino Valley case, courts should choose parents rights over state supremacy"
https://www.ocregister.com/?G2I_ActionId=122617&returnUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ocregister.com%2F2023%2F10%2F09%2Fin-chino-valley-case-courts-should-choose-parents-rights-over-state-supremacy%2F%3FclearUserState%3Dtrue
We live in Orwellian times.
"LJC represents the Chino Valley Unified School District to defend it against California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s lawsuit, which attempts to block the district’s recently implemented parental notification policy."
https://libertyjusticecenter.org/cases/california-v-chino-valley-unified-school-district/
Excellent piece here. Thanks to Bari and TFP. It might interest others here to know that the pro-Palestinian demo at Harvard three days ago led the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, to restrict (and it seems pretty much shut down entirely) all comments. I participate regularly in discussions there. I and most others keep it focused on substance, though it does result at times in the venting of strong feelings. The Crimson's current shutdown of debate is one instance of what has been a long, ongoing process of thought control and utter insecurity in the face of dissent.
Today, the Crimson has an editorial ("Don’t Bully Students With Dissenting Views. Protect Them") claiming the PSC demonstration was, while ill-advised, not antisemitic. I posted a response that disappeared awaiting "moderation," which so far has meant almost entirely complete elimination. So, if I may indulge, here is what I wrote today in response to that editorial:
MY COMMENT:
This is a big diversion. The issue of doxing is a big diversion. Doxing is wrong, and it is nice this particular outbreak of it has aroused such concern, since it has become a regular tool of the left, to no great concern expressed by Harvard before this event.
It is false to claim the PSC statement merely displayed "a troubling lack of empathy and compassion." It was in fact also antisemitic. In that, it not merely failed to condemn the violence Hamas inflicted, but in blaming Israel as primarily responsible, it failed to identify the very nature of the ideas motivating the barbaric pogrom. Those ideas are purely and simply a hatred and disgust at Jews. All Jews, not merely those living in Israel.
Hence, the PSC statement was NOT "seeking a deeper discussion of the roots of Israeli-Palestinian violence." Those roots lie within the ideology Hamas embraces. Hamas is not motivated by any nonsense about Palestinian rights or a two-state solution. Those have never been its concern. No one violates Palestinian rights more than it does. As for a separate Palestinian state, Hamas is a purely genocidal group. Its charter makes clear, slaughtering Jews (ultimately ALL Jews) is its aim, not a means to any other aim. It was shaped by the Nazi-Islamist fusion fashioned by the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas' progenitor) and the Mufti of Jerusalem and his accolades in the fires of World War II. Its purpose was and is Hitler's, plain and simple. This historical background needs to be far better understood than it is now - due in part to the duplicity of our media and our own leaders always seeking to accommodate these fanatics, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran.
I am sure many of the PSC demonstrators harbor no ill feelings toward Jews they know. That is not the form of modern antisemitism. An inordinate and totally double standard hostility to Israel is the form it takes now. The demonstrators participated in that fully.
I wonder if their statement "Don’t Bully Students With Dissenting Views. Protect Them" applies to students with dissenting views on gender ideology or DEI
Bravo and thank you for staying so eloquently what needs to be said repeatedly in the face of this blatant antisemitism.
Well said.
I'm sure it never saw the light of day.
Excellent strategy. But I cannot agree with "We need neutral institutions". Should Harvard have been neutral at the height of the Holocaust or any of the regimes responsible for 100 million genocidal murders over the past century? Universities need to teach the moral compass that has made Western capitalist democracies the most successful and tolerant societies this planet has ever seen, albeit far from perfect. Moral equivalency that equates the values of Islam to the values of the West are a formula for turning successful Western democracies into impoverished, violent, sadistic, primitive hell-holes, like most nations where Islamic values are dominant.
Moral compasses are installed by parents before a child is in kindergarten. Education only helps further define where the true north of morality is located.
Bill Maher cracked that some Harvard students supported the massacre of children but strongly objected to the term and connotations of “blacklisted”. He is correct to note how lost and how far from morality these students have been allowed to wander without a moral compass for years.
The Babylon Bee makes Maher’s observation perfectly with the headline:
Harvard Student Leaves Lecture on Microaggressions to Attend “Kill the Jews” Rally
Universities need to teach critical thinking not indoctrination to ANY ideal. Students of a good teacher/professor won’t ever know which belief the teacher/professor actually holds as they will teach from all “sides” so that the students have to grow and think!
I agree, neutral is not the answer.
It’s not difficult to find the right position to take.
This is a great observation. The problem that bedeviled me lately is that we no longer have a shared baseline of what is "moral" When/how did we lose it? or did we?
Agreed!
“So when Hamas brutally murdered babies, raped women, and took the disabled as hostages, it was business as usual, at least on America’s college campuses”
———————————————————
Donald Trump being sued and forced to pay millions of dollars because Trump University wasn’t really all that he said it was, continues to be the most preposterously unjust banana republic shit we have ever done as a country.
It’s like arresting the one guy who steps outside of the crosswalk for jaywalking, while everyone else is shitting and masturbating all over the crosswalk.
If you look at what is happening at all of our other universities, you could argue that, in terms of net cost/benefit to society, Trump University was the best university in the United States; and it was a total scam.
Whatever you want to call the movement that believes mothers should be called “birthing persons”, or shaming of white people at corporate retreats in to acknowledging white supremacy as a loyalty oath. A push to become aware of the inequities of life. The fact that there have always been inequities between humans seems lost on the people who push for their illiberal behaviors.
The idea what words hurts and therefore should be banned ,is only the least of all the stupidity we have witnessed on college campuses. Looking for safe spaces only to have a college professor scream “get me some muscle over here” at a rally for social justice. Kinda displays their authoritarian methods.
There has been a revolution and it has largely succeeded. The take over of college and universities, media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley....all in lock step with the the political arm of Progressives and the Democrat Party. You often could listen to MSNBC, CNN and read the pages of the NYT and WAPO and see the same language someone at the DNC wrote.
The reason/ It's something that Obama uttered, Joe Biden along with Bernie said. A desire to "fundamentally change America". They don’t like the wage or income gap, they want to guarantee safe spaces for people they consider marginalized. Safe from inequities of life. Bad luck, white supremacy, merit. If they thought the American people would be for it they vote in a basic guaranteed income. The don’t equality, they want equity.... They want equity so much they are willing to discriminate against Asians. In America for centuries now when you were born you got a ticket that said “Admit One”. They now want the ticket to say , Success Guaranteed. As an employer, I wouldn’t want someone that thought the killing, behaving or burning alive of Jews was a good thing. I don’t think they make a good employee. their lack of a moral compass would be a problem.
Equity for thee but not for me. They’ll keep their billions I’m sure.
Nah, they’ll just find a hospital or some other charity. They need to do it for several reasons. Taxes and to wash the guilt off themselves due to their success. We managed to convince ourselves that fabulous wealth is someone ethically and morally wrong. However NYC would have a Public Library system with out Andrew Carnegie. We’re close to having a vaccine for Malaria due to Bill Gates.... I tell my wife that men do come in handy at times. When the smoke alarm batteries die, light bulbs...jars that don’t open. Same with billionaires, their money comes in handy at times.
Totally agree. I was referring to the New Order.
got to start working on my Heil!
The fact is we are all complicit. The current nauseating display of support for the wanton slaughter of innocents is just the logical extension of trends that began in America in the 1960’s. This idea that since America is not a perfect place, it has no right to question or challenge anyone who declares America as irredeemable and deserving of destruction. Some white Americans are racists, ergo all white people are racist (in other words, to defeat racism, we must be racists). So to make amends, we donate $millions to a few charlatans who help no one but themselves, buying multi-$million estates and re-writing our history. A tiny minority of police are unfit to wear a badge. “Defund the police” becomes a new goal, turning once-great cities into cesspools. In short, everything that America believes in and does is evil and must be “cancelled”, an aphorism for destroyed. And replaced with what exactly? The totalitarians of the world are ready to show us if, through our indifference and moral sloth, we allow them to do so.
The Jewish people are used to this. It is their history across millennia. This is just the latest iteration. Well, as Americans, we are all Jews now. And, more to the point, if we don’t stand up and say STOP, and do what’s necessary to defend ourselves and our country, we deserve what comes next.
We should all applaud and support those in positions of power who are actually doing something tangible to address this cancer. Penalizing those who are working to destroy Israel is a good starting point. It is actually not that hard to identify them. The extraordinarily brave members of the site “Canary Mission” have for years been identifying and cataloguing the so-called educators and student leaders who have been calling for Jihad in America and spewing anti-Semitism. The second step would be to begin to review all the visas that have been granted to so-called “students” that are leading these demonstrations.
This is a point of inflection in America and we can only hope that we rise to the challenge.
Thank you for this post full of insight and practical information. I was unaware of “ Canary Mission”. I just googled it and I urge all readers of TFP to do so as well.
Great comment and terrific recommendation. I just checked out Canary Mission for the first time. Wow. They are doing the work the ADL was created to do.
And a quick review of the lists shows that women dominate these left-wing hate groups.
If you spend some time on their site, you will find that there are many, many "professors" who are teaching this filth.
I'm not complicit in any of this. I despise the Left and I saw this coming a million miles away.
Speak for yourself on that "all."
Great post!!
I can’t believe that Google let me see this. Canary Mission must be paying Google advertising fees.
From the NY Post's article: "“We would like to clarify that we stand in solidarity with both Israeli and Palestinian victims and families,” the group wrote."
Sorry, but "both sides-ism" doesn't cut it! That is just a weaselly way of backing down a despicable statement.
Next up: Calls for a cease fire, and charges of disproportionality in Israel's response. In fact, it is already happening! In most news services we are seeing reports of "poor Palestinians" who are suffering at the hands of powerful racist Israelis. Sorry, but this strikes no chord in MY heart! The fact that Gazans are being used as shields for the Hamas terrorists (please do not say "militants") should not deter Israel from prosecuting the war until either the "poor Palestinians" renounce Hamas, or Hamas itself cry "Uncle".
Any entity that calls for the complete destruction of a free nation is itself racist and should be destroyed by their own words.
The FP had a piece by Noah Pollak on October 7th specifically predicting that the “usual course of propaganda” by the Palestinians would soon rear its head in MSM...and it has. (I read that, in the days after the massacre, The Guardian had NO photos of the Jewish victims, but included photos of wounded Palestinians). It ALWAYS works like a charm, so why wouldn’t they? The slaughtered Jews quickly recede in memory in favor of wounded Palestinians, and they can all feel good about their pro-Palestinian rallies and letters. Woke wins again. Because...”oppressed”
And just as you can count on the sun coming up in the morning, today Biden warned Israel about innocent Palestinian casualties! I predict that in less than a week Israel will be condemned by the U.S. media directly, while the Biden crew will issue veiled threats of canceled aid. Count on it!