Category: colleges and universities

More sit-ins: the good news (from Vanderbilt) and the bad news (from Smith)

April 3, 2024 • 10:30 am

I presume you want the good news first. Sadly, it comes not from the University of Chicago but from Vanderbilt, now headed (as Chancellor) by our ex-provost Daniel Diermeier. As reported by the Nashville Tenneseean, last week more than two dozen students decided to hold a sit-in in Vandy’s administration building protesting—what else?—the University’s so-called complicity with Israel in its war with Hamas.

The students began protesting Tuesday morning after an amendment to the Vanderbilt Student Government Constitution, which would prevent student government funds from going to certain businesses that support Israel, was removed by administration officials from a student ballot in late March.

. . . .More than two dozen students entered Kirkland Hall, an administration building which houses Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier’s office, to hold a sit-in around 9 a.m. Tuesday, along with over 30 more students who sat on the steps outside.

Students at the protest — both inside and out — shouted chants asking for Diermeier to allow students to vote on the amendment that was removed from the ballot by administration.

Students entered the administration building around 9 a.m., and a second, larger group gathered in front of the building.

Those inside the building stayed for around 22 hours before being escorted out by Vanderbilt University Police.

The students outside protested for hours, with numbers fluctuating as students rotated in and out of class. A number of students stayed outside protesting until the students inside the building emerged.

After letting the students stay in the building for all of 22 hours (a generous dispensation!), Vanderbilt began removing them, taking names and arresting some while giving others suspensions.

Three students who sat in the chancellor’s office were arrested for assault and bodily injury to another, according to a statement from Vanderbilt University, though online jail records do not currently list any charges.

A fourth student was charged with vandalism after breaking a window on Kirkland Hall Tuesday night.

All four students have been released.

In addition to arrests, students confirmed that interim suspensions were issued to all demonstrators who entered the building.

Below is a video of the three students who were arrested for assault and causing bodily injury, pushing and shoving the poor guy who was opening the door and then trying to close it before The Entitled rushed in en masse.  From the campus to the administration office, Vandy will be free!

Seriously, this kind of assault is unconscionable.  Of course verbal protest that doesn’t violate university rules or block buildings, much less injure an employee, is fine. That’s freedom of speech, and as you’ll see below, Chancellor Diermeier took the Chicago Principles of Free Expression (and also the Kalven Principles of Institutional Neutrality) south with him when he migrated.

This was not a kneejerk reaction by the administration, which tried to persuade the demonstrators to leave for nearly an entire day. But, unlike the timorous administration of my school, there will be serious consequences for the students, including suspension (which will go on their records), and the arrested students will likely not have their charges dropped.

Below, after the first tweet in which the Entitled Students lecture a black Vanderbilt cop on why he should be on their side, you’ll see a tweet showing the letters Diermeier wrote to the parents of Vandy students as well as to the University community itself (there are three pages total). They are tempered letters but also strong and principled ones, asserting that free speech does not allow disruption of speech. That’s something that many colleges don’t seem to have learned.

An excerpt from Diermeier’s letter to the Vandy community:

Now the best news: Chancellor Diermeier wrote an eloquent defense of Vandy’s principles, and an explanation of the University’s actions, for the Wall Street Journal. It hasn’t been archived as far as I can see, so try clicking on the screenshot below.

Because it’s not archived, I’ll give a longish excerpt:

Vanderbilt has worked hard to nurture a culture of free expression built on three pillars. The first is a determination to provide an open forum: opportunities for dialogue and debate. The second is the practice of institutional neutrality, by which university leaders refrain from publicly taking political positions to avoid indirectly stifling free thought and expression among students and faculty. Last and most distinctive is a commitment to civil discourse, the practice of respectful argument rooted in facts, which our undergraduates agree to uphold when they sign a student-authored community creed before taking their first classes.

These commitments were tested for about 24 hours starting March 26. Vanderbilt, like many universities, is home to a group of students who support the international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. The BDS effort encourages economic and political pressure aimed at ending Israel’s current policies toward Palestinians, which organizers say are oppressive, immoral and in some cases illegal. The movement calls for economic and cultural boycotts, financial divestment and government sanctions.

. . .Some students supporting BDS declared their opposition to Vanderbilt’s institutional neutrality, calling it a cop-out, or worse. They advocated for a reversal of course on a campus referendum that would have required student government funds to follow BDS restrictions, which the university had disallowed because following those restrictions would put Vanderbilt in violation of Tennessee law. The student government isn’t legally separate from the university, and student-government funds are university funds. The law requires the university to certify each year that it isn’t involved in any boycotts of Israel, which the state defines broadly. Failing to make the certification, or acting contrary to it, would put large state contracts for the university at risk. Implementing the BDS restrictions with university funds also potentially conflicts with federal laws governing boycotts of countries friendly to the U.S.

Like all Vanderbilt students, those supporting BDS are free to speak out and demonstrate on our campus—subject, like all student groups and as at all universities, to reasonable limits on the time, place and manner of their protests.

On Tuesday, 27 students transgressed those limits when they forced their way into a closed administrative building, injuring a community-service officer in the process. Students pushed staff members and screamed profanities. Our staff took a graduated approach to de-escalating the situation, including several attempts to discuss the issues with the student group and encourage them to take a different course of action. Over 20 hours, the students were consistently informed that they were violating university policies and warned that they were subject to suspension for doing so.

Early the next morning, the Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County Magistrate’s Office charged three students with assault. One student protesting outside the building was charged with vandalism after cracking a window. The remaining 25 students left the building voluntarily. The administration suspended all of those students on an interim basis and will all go through a rigorous accountability process to determine further disciplinary action.

Critics have claimed that Vanderbilt has abandoned its long-held commitment to free expression. They are wrong. Vanderbilt supports, teaches and defends free expression—but to do so, we must safeguard the environment for it. Students can advocate BDS. That is freedom of expression. But they can’t disrupt university operations during classes, in libraries or on construction sites. The university won’t adopt BDS principles. That’s institutional neutrality. As a community, we should always remember to treat each other with respect and rely on the force of the better argument. That’s civil discourse.

Teaching students the importance of upholding rules for free expression doesn’t squelch their right to voice their opinion—it protects it.

In these difficult times, each university will be tested. And each university will follow its own path. Our approach is clear: We clearly state the principles and rules that support our mission as a university. Then we enforce them.

That last paragraph is magnificent. And yes, the University of Chicago was tested, too, and also had—or so I thought—a clear approach, one identical to Vanderbilt’s. The difference is in the last sentence. Vanderbilt enforces their principles; we don’t. (See my post from yesterday.)

I’m not sure whether Diermeier is Jewish, but he certainly fits the criteria for being a mensch.

**************

Now the bad news: In the meantime, the administration of the elite Smith College are acting very un-Deiermeierish, allowing the students to occupy College Hall, the administration building, for over a week. The administration, according to this Inside Higher Ed piece by Johanna Alonso, is sitting with its thumb up its fundament trying to figure out what to do with the Occupiers.

The protestors, are, of course, asking Smith to divest from Israel. (Sitter-inners are always big fans of Palestine.) They appear to be largely (surprise!) members of Students for Justice in Palestine.

The administration has already said that divestment will “not likely be considered unless ‘materially different information is brought forward’,”, so they’ve evinced some moxie, but they need to boot those protestors back onto campus.

Click to read.

An excerpt:

In the latest face-off between students and administrators over the war in Gaza, students at Smith College have been occupying the main administrative building on campus for almost a week, demanding the institution divest from weapons manufacturers that supply military machinery to Israel. The protesters say they will not leave College Hall until the institution commits to divestment, according to statements on the social media pages of the college’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, which is spearheading the demonstration.

Approximately 50 students are participating in the protest, SJP members said on social media; photos show that students have brought pillows, air mattresses, large amounts of food and other items into the building. A photo showed a Palestinian flag bearing the words “Smith divest now” flying above College Hall, where the American flag is typically displayed.

No arrests or student conduct charges have been made, although students “are allegedly in violation of several elements of the Student Code of Conduct including unauthorized entry or use of a building, abuse of property, and disruption of college activities,” Carolyn McDaniel, Smith’s director of media relations, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

This is how sit-ins disrupt the functioning of a college:

According to McDaniel, the protest has had an impact on students’ abilities to access certain offices located inside College Hall, including Student Financial Services, the Office of Disability Services and the Title IX office.

The occupation, she wrote, has made it difficult for “those with pressing needs to get the help they deserve. We are aware, for example, of a family who drove a considerable distance to discuss FAFSA assistance from financial services and they weren’t sure how to proceed upon learning that the office was inaccessible. We were able to help them in other ways, but it caused this family needless concern.”

Now there’s a dilemma for progressives: Title IX and disability services versus SJP. (SJP is winning.)

The articles notes that there are a lot of Smithereens who agree with the protest, but not everyone:

However, others have expressed dismay over the occupation. According to one anonymous email purportedly from a Smith student to Inside Higher Ed, the institution “has become a terrifying place with absolutely no consequence for breaking the law.”

“The college refuses to do anything to hold them accountable, and now the front doorstep of what’s supposed to be a brilliant college for smart women looks like a tent city of anti-Semitic drum circlers,” the author wrote.

Well, someone has a sense of humor! But it appears that a climate of antisemitism is infecting Smith, as it is some other schools.

The sit-in also comes after several antisemitic incidents occurred at Smith earlier in March. Swastikas were found on crosswalks and in two cases mezuzahs, religious symbols that some Jewish people affix to their doorframes, were ripped down near campus, the Boston Globe reported last month.

I would advise Smith’s president, Sarah Willie-Le Breton, to follow Diermeier’s lead—if she has the moxie.

h/t: Ginger K.

The Atlantic describes the Israel/Hamas war playing out at Stanford

March 28, 2024 • 12:00 pm

This article in The Atlantic, a very good piece, is written by Theo Baker, who, only a sophomore, is already a skilled journalist. (His reporting also helped bring down Stanford’s President for promulgating bogus research.)  The article is long but engrossing, and describes the intense friction between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli (mostly Jewish) students at Stanford, a school that in recent years has been damaged by an infestation of ideology. (Remember the deplatforming of conservative Judge Duncan, which led to the firing of Stanford’s equity dean?)

Baker takes the trouble to interview almost everyone concerned, including Stanford’s President Saller and Provost Martinez, as well as a number of students on both sides, and in the end manages to convey the view that, as it is here in Chicago, most of the trouble is being fomented by aggressive, angry, and loud pro-Palestinian students. (Baker seems to be Jewish.) But the incidents he describes are fascinating and well researched.

You might be able to read the article by clicking below, but if it’s paywalled you can find it archived here. 

I’ll give just one excerpt, but you really should read the whole thing. If I don’t miss my guess, Baker has a good career in front of him.

Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of  [temporary President] Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)

The image of a rabbi and imam, weeping as they’re trying together to protect the Jewish students, is unforgettable. It reminds me a bit of the Four Chaplains during World War II who went down with their ship.

h/t: Susan

Pamela Paul on why universities can’t stop themselves from promulgating and pronouncing on Social Justice

March 14, 2024 • 9:30 am

Pamela Paul’s new column in the NYT (click on screenshot below or find the piece archived here) is about “mission creep” in American universities: the drift away from teaching, learning, and doing research to
promulgating social justice. As we’ve discussed so often, there are dangers inherent in this transformation, and some of them are occurring now, including Republican attempts to control universities as well as a decline in public respect for universities among Republicans, Democrats and folks among all ages and socioeconomic groups.

The biggest problem, of course, is the ideological slant that universities are taking, nearly all tilting left with some having more than 80% of the faculty describing themselves as liberal (e.g., Harvard). That in itself is a problem as students don’t get exposed to a panoply of views, but it’s worse because those on the Left—particularly the so-called progressive Left—can’t restrain themselves from making “official” university pronouncements on political, ideological, and moral issues, issues that themselves are academically debatable and whose imprimatur by the university as “official views” chills speech. If a University issues an official statement that there should be a ceasefire in Gaza, what untenured faculty member or student dares buck this position?

To keep free speech going without this kind of “chill”, the University of Chicago was the first to adopt and implement a policy of institutional neutrality, so that no University official or department can make such pronouncements. This principle, which went into effect in 1967, is called the Kalven Report, and you can read it here.

Kalven has worked pretty well here. Departments that couldn’t restrain themselves from taking stands on issues from war to abortion to shootings have had their statements taken down, and the University has issued virtually nothing about the Hamas/Israel war (see here for our anodyne acknowledgment, which basically says “there’s a war on and here’s where to go for help”). The only exceptions we have are for issues, like DACA, which can affect the University’s mission directly.

But so far only a handful of schools, like Vanderbilt and UNC Chapel Hill, have adopted institutional neutrality, though others like Williams and Harvard are contemplating it. But since institutional neutrality is essential in propping up a free speech policy, this reluctance to adopt Kalven is distressing, especially given that the Chicago Principles of Free Expression—the First-Amendment-like policy of free speech—have been adopted by over 100 schools. My conclusion: it’s easy to pass policies on free speech (which, as we see from Harvard’s case, have been implemented haphazardly), but it’s hard to make academics stop proclaiming the views they like as the “values of our school.” (Of course Kalven and all of us think academics have the right to say whatever they want as private citizens.)

And so to the piece; again, click to read.

Here’s Paul’s bit on why universities should shut up about taking official stands on issue that don’t bear on their mission. Sadly, she doesn’t mention the Kalven Report, which I think reflects a lack of historical perspective. But the rest is fine:

Right now, the university’s message is often the opposite. Well before the tumultuous summer of 2020, a focus on social justice permeated campuses in everything from residential housing to college reading lists.

“All of this activity would be fine — indeed, it would be fantastic — if it built in multiple perspectives,” noted Jonathan Zimmerman, author of “Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” in a 2019 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “For the most part, though, it doesn’t.”

Instead, many universities have aligned themselves politically with their most activist students. “Top universities depend on billions of dollars of public funding, in the form of research grants and loan assistance,” The Economist editorialized last week. “The steady leftward drift of their administrations has imperiled this.”

One of the starkest examples of this politicization is the raft of position statements coming from university leadership. These public statements, and the fiery battles and protests behind them, take sides on what are broadly considered to be the nation’s most sensitive and polarized subjects, whether it’s the Dobbs ruling or DACA for young immigrants, the Israel-Hamas war or Black Lives Matter.

At last month’s conference [a meeting at Stanford on civil discourse], Diego Zambrano, a professor at Stanford Law School, made the downsides of such statements clear. What, he asked, are the benefits of a university taking a position? If it’s to make the students feel good, he said, those feelings are fleeting, and perhaps not even the university’s job. If it’s to change the outcome of political events, even the most self-regarding institutions don’t imagine they will have any impact on a war halfway across the planet. The benefits, he argued, were nonexistent.

Indeed! Such statements are purely attempts to flaunt virtue and have no effect on social policy. Do you think that any statement by a university or school on the war in Gaza will have the slightest effect on the war itself? Yet such statements are being made everywhere, including from city councils and secondary school boards. Even the city of Chicago issued a call for a cease-fire. I’m sure Israel and Hamas are paying attention!

Paul continues:

As for the cons, Zambrano continued, issuing statements tends to fuel the most intemperate speech while chilling moderate and dissenting voices. In a world constantly riled up over politics, the task of formally opining on issues would be endless. Moreover, such statements force a university to simplify complex issues. They ask university administrators, who are not hired for their moral compasses, to address in a single email thorny subjects that scholars at their own institutions spend years studying. (Some university presidents, such as Michael Schill of Northwestern, have rightly balked.) Inevitably, staking any position weakens the public’s perception of the university as independent.

The temptation for universities to take a moral stand, especially in response to overheated campus sentiment, is understandable. But it’s a trap. When universities make it their mission to do the “right” thing politically, they’re effectively telling large parts of their communities — and the polarized country they’re in partnership with — they’re wrong.

When universities become overtly political, and tilt too far toward one end of the spectrum, they’re denying students and faculty the kind of open-ended inquiry and knowledge-seeking that has long been the basis of American higher education’s success. They’re putting its future at risk.

If you want schools to be Truth Universities and not Social Justice Universities (do see Jon Haidt’s excellent lecture on this bifurcation), then the cons far outweigh the pros when it comes to taking stands.  Paul’s last three paragraphs are succinct, clear, and correct. To universities and departments who are itching to take political stands that don’t affect their school’s mission, PLEASE SHUT UP.  Members of university communities have plenty of venues, like “X”, Facebook, or websites like this, to express their own private opinions.

After I saw that Paul had left out the Kalven Principles, I posted a comment after her piece—the first time I’ve ever commented in the NYT. Here it is, with one comma that shouldn’t be there:

What’s the matter with American universities?

March 7, 2024 • 10:15 am

I was sent this article from The Economist (as usual, authors’ names aren’t given), and I’m not sure whether that site leans right or left.  Nor do I really care, except that people might tend to dismiss its argument and its data on political grounds. And, as usual, that would be a mistake.

The thesis here—and I’ll show data—is that American universities are going downhill in many ways: bigger bureaucracy, less respect from the public, grade inflation, lazier students, declining in world rankings, and so on. Some of these contentions are new to me, but the article does paint a picture of a system going downhill. I’ll show the data and the Economist‘s indictment below.

Click to read the headline, or find the article archived here.

Excerpts from the piece are indented.  First, their thesis:

But thoughtful insiders acknowledge that, for some years, elite universities, particularly those within the Ivy League, have grown detached from ordinary Americans, not to mention unmoored from their own academic and meritocratic values.

In theory, these difficulties could promote efforts to correct flaws that are holding back elite education in America. But they could also entrench them. “America’s great universities are losing the public’s trust,” warns Robert George, a legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton. “And it is not the public’s fault.”

This is accurate: other surveys show that public trust in American institutions of higher education is waning. And this despite the article’s claim that elite universities, at least, are getting richer and richer, both because tuition has risen so rapidly and because universities are now managing their endowments in a riskier manner. That new style of management has paid off since the stock market and real estate have boomed in recent years,

What this has done is created a two-tier system of universities: the “elite” ones, where everyone aspires to go, and the rest of the pack, which hasn’t changed that much:

All this has opened a chasm between America’s top-ranked colleges and the rest. A mere 20 universities own half of the $800bn in endowments that American institutions have accrued. The most selective ones can afford to splash a lot more money on students than the youngsters themselves are asked to cough up in tuition, which only makes admission to them more sought-after. Acceptance rates at the top dozen universities are one-third of what they were two decades ago (at most other institutions, rates are unchanged). Lately early-career salaries for people with in-demand degrees, such as computer science, have risen faster for graduates from the most prestigious universities than for everyone else. Higher education in America “is becoming a ladder in which the steps are farther apart”, reckons Craig Calhoun of Arizona State University.

Despite this, the reputation of elite universities has dropped, especially compared to Chinese ones, whose scholars are producing relatively highly-cited scientific papers. Two figures from the paper. These changes in research reputation are small, but they are all negative for the elite U.S. universities:

Same for highly-cited scientific papers; the Chinese are booming here while American papers are falling:

Now I don’t really care that much about whether other countries are doing okay or booming in scientific papers compared to the U.S., as science is a worldwide endeavor and, as I’ve said about this trend, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” But I care more about the reputation of elite universities, largely because I went to one for my Ph.D. and worked at one for 3 decades. I would care if the top American colleges stopped providing quality education, though maybe that’s just snobbery on my part. And of course the reduction in highly-cited papers is a side effect of a relative degeneration of quality education in the U.S.

But perhaps that’s just compared to China, and we’re doing as well as ever. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Here are some of the factors that the article points out are dragging down our top universities.

Bloated bureacracy.  If you work at one of these schools, you’ll have noticed this:

As challenges from abroad multiply, America’s elite universities are squandering their support at home. Two trends in particular are widening rifts between town and gown. One is a decades-long expansion in the number of managers and other non-academic staff that universities employ. America’s best 50 colleges now have three times as many administrative and professional staff as faculty, according to a report by Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. Some of the increase responds to genuine need, such as extra work created by growing government regulation. A lot of it looks like bloat. These extra hands may be tying researchers in red tape and have doubtless inflated fees. The total published cost of attending Harvard (now nearly $80,000 annually for an undergraduate) has increased by 27% in real terms over two decades.

The next item explains much of the bloat:

The expansion of DEI initiatives. This is another thing you’ll have noticed if you work at an elite school.  But it’s happening pretty much everywhere. As you probably know, Florida just passed a law, largely in response to the Supreme Court’s banning race-based admission, getting rid of the DEI programs in state universities. In some places, like Michigan, the bloat—and salaries devoted to DEI—is stunning. DEI officials in Michigan colleges can earn more than $200,000 per year. From the article:

More often blamed are administrative teams dedicated to fostering “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (dei). They have grown in size as the number of administrators of all kinds has increased. They have an interest in ensuring that everyone on campus is polite and friendly, but little to gain from defending vigorous debate. In theory they report to academic deans, says Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and a member of a faculty group committed to defending academic freedom; in practice they move laterally from university to university, bringing with them a culture that is entirely their own. Critics of dei departments insist these offices have helped soak campuses with unsophisticated “woke” ideologies that depict complex problems as simplistic battles.

Changing admission policies favoring equity over merit.  This itself may be changing, as in the last several weeks schools like Dartmouth and Brown have reinstated the use of standardized tests like the SAT as requirements for application. (In many places they became optional or were, as in California, not wanted at all.)  Reducing the importance of standardized tests was originally done to boost equity of minority groups, but that wasn’t often admitted by colleges; “holistic” admissions were simply said to be better judges of future success, and schools boasted that there was no tradeoff between merit and equity.. But this is not the case—SAT scores remain the best predictor of academic success as well as admission to good graduate schools. I’m hoping that the pendulum will swing back towards merit again, though I still favor a form of affirmative action: preferential admission of minorities when they are just as qualified as nonminority applicants. From the article:

In theory the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial preferences last year should encourage posh universities to junk admissions practices that are even more irksome—such as favouring children of alumni. Instead many have made their admissions criteria even more opaque, potentially damaging universities’ meritocratic pretensions further. At the start of the pandemic, most stopped requiring applicants to supply scores from standardised tests. Now hard-to-evaluate measures such as the quality of personal statements are having to carry more weight. For some institutions that has proved unsatisfactory: in recent weeks Dartmouth and Yale announced that they will require standardised test scores from applicants once again. They are the first Ivies to do so.

Lowering of standards.  The article implies that students are getting lazier with time.  Over the three decades I taught here, I can’t really vouch for that, at least in undergraduate evolution class.  Because of my lack of experience in more than one class, I’ll just reproduce what the article says, though of course grade inflation everywhere is real and has been amply documented. Nowadays everyone gets As, which of course reduces the value of even calculating grade-point averages. (Putting the median grade in a course on students’ transcripts would help with this.)

Universities stand accused not just of tolerating small-mindedness among their students, but of perpetuating it. One theory holds that, if elite universities worked their students harder, they would have less time and energy to fight battles over campus speech. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s the number of hours a week that an average American student spent studying declined by around one third, notes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. Yet grades do not seem to have suffered. At Yale, the share of all grades marked “A” has risen from 67% in 2010 to around 80% in 2022; at Harvard it rose from 60% to 79%.

Boards of governance (trustees, etc.) have become too weak to enforce a climate of excellence. I know nothing personally about the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees, but at least at Harvard the Board of Overseers’ spinelessness was a major factor in prolonging the kerfuffle about ex-President Claudine Gay. The Overseers first denied charges of plagiarism, threatened the New York Post for trying to publish those allegations, continued to deny them, and then, after the outcry—largely prompted by Bill Ackman—grew too loud, finally asked Gay to resign. Further, the Harvard Overseeers, who are nearly wholly responsible for putting in place policies like freedom of expression and institutional neutrality, have done almost nothing on this account. In the Boston Globe, Steve Pinker called for Harvard to reform itself in five areas, and there’s now a group of professors at Harvard to apply pressure on the administration to behave properly. Fingers crossed.

From the article:

University boards appear especially weak. They have not grown much more professional or effective, even as the wealth and fame of their institutions has soared. Many are oversized. Prestigious private colleges commonly have at least 30 trustees; a few have 50 or more. It is not easy to coax a board of that size into focused strategic discussions. It also limits how far each trustee feels personally responsible for an institution’s success.

Furthermore, trusteeships are often distributed as a reward for donations, rather than to people with the time and commitment required to provide proper oversight. Universities generally manage to snag people with useful experience outside academia. But many trustees prefer not to rock the boat; some are hoping that their service will grant children or grandchildren a powerful trump card when it comes to seeking admission. Too many see their job as merely “cheerleading, cheque-writing and attendance at football games”, says Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organisation that lobbies for governance reform. And at many private universities the way in which new trustees are appointed involves cosying up to current ones or to university authorities. Outsiders can struggle to be picked at all.

There’s a lack of political balance on faculties. Everyone knows that university faculties are almost completely on the Left side of the political spectrum. Look at this plot:

And it’s even more skewed at elite universities:

A second trend is the gradual evaporation of conservatives from the academy. Surveys carried out by researchers at ucla suggest that the share of faculty who place themselves on the political left rose from 40% in 1990 to about 60% in 2017—a period during which party affiliation among the public barely changed (see chart 3). The ratios are vastly more skewed at many of America’s most elite colleges. A survey carried out last May by the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, found that less than 3% of faculty there would describe themselves as conservative; 75% called themselves liberal.

One possible reason is that the definition of “liberal” has changed: that American politics in general have become more right wing, so that more centrist professors will now identify themselves as being far left or liberal. But I don’t think that’s true. Further, the article claims that conservatives have been forced out of academia or aren’t even being hired in the first place.  I don’t know the reason, but it is true that at least in elite universities, there is groupthink that demonizes conservatives. (Remember how Judge Duncan was treated at Stanford Law School?)

But I still think schools would benefit from increasing the diversity of political opinions, because sometimes conservatives have some good arguments, and at any rate without opposition from the other side, liberals have no way to test or hone their ideas. I would personally would benefit from more conservatives in my school, even though I identify as a classical liberal.

Given these problems, the solution is clear; do the opposite of what’s causing them. Pare down DEI, get better boards of trustees, put more emphasis on merit in admissions, require students to do more, somehow curb grade inflation (that seems nearly impossible to me!), hire more conservatives, and inculcate students with more information about free speech (we’re doing that here; see below). The return to an emphasis on merit seems to me the most important, but of course “progressives” define merit in ways that differ from how the term was used historically.

Here are a few suggestions in two paragraphs, with both Lukianoff and Ginsburg (head of the University of Chicago’s Forum to promulgate free expression) being liberals.

Better for universities to heal themselves. Smaller, more democratically selected boards would provide better oversight. More meritocratic admissions would improve universities’ standing. Greg Lukianoff of fire wants to see campuses stripped of bureaucrats “whose main job is to police speech”. Instead universities should invest in programmes teaching the importance of free and open debate, argues Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, who runs a forum designed to do just that: “If your ideas aren’t subjected to rigorous scrutiny, they’re not going to be as good,” he explains.

Reformers would also like more people in the political centre, and on the right, to make careers in academia. No one thinks this will happen quickly. But college bosses could start by making it clear that they will defend the unorthodox thinkers they already have on their payrolls, reckons Jim Applegate, who runs a faculty group at Columbia University that aims to promote academic freedom. They could discourage departments from forcing job applicants to submit statements outlining their dei approach (one study a few years ago suggested this was a condition for a fifth of all university jobs, and more than 30% at elite colleges). Lately these have looked less like honest ways of spotting capable candidates and more like tests of ideology.

h/t: Jean

Quote of the Week

February 29, 2024 • 12:30 pm

The Quote of the Week comes from the Tablet article below, which is worth reading in its entirety (and is free). It’s about how DEI is ruining universities.

But one quote particularly struck me because of its truth and concision, and it’s this one:

As direct forms of discrimination are now virtually nonexistent in academia, discrimination has been redefined as an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be observed directly. Rather, it manifests instead through unequal outcomes. Once justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of truth; these values had to be abandoned or redefined, whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy.

Click headline below to read the whole piece:

h/t: Anna

Larry Summers on Harvard, AI, and other things

February 28, 2024 • 10:15 am

Here’s a longish discussion from Persuasion between Yascha Mounk and Larry Summers. Mounk is a political scientist and author whom you’ll encounter frequently in the liberal media, while Summer was, of course. . . . . well, let’s let Wikipedia summarize it:

[Summers is] an American economist who served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, where he is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School.  In November 2023, Summers joined the board of directors of artificial general intelligence company OpenAI.

In my estimation, Summers was a very good President, though he did attract controversy. The most infamous incident during his tenure at Harvard was his claim, during a closed conference on diversity in science and engineering, that underrepresentation of women in STEM was due to a difference between men and women in the variance in ability in these fields. Although the means (average abilities) were about the same, the variance in ability means that there are more men than women at both tails of the distribution: the “low ability” tail and the “high ability” tail. Since academics and other scientists are drawn from the upper tail, Summers posited that this difference in variation (but not in means) explained the difference in sex representation in STEM.  (I would also suggest that there may be a sex difference in preferences.)

The evidence is, in fact, in favor of this theory for at least a partial cause of sex inequities, so Summers may have been right. But his mere suggestion that the inequities in sex representation may not have been due to bias was enough to ignite a conflagration among the Harvard faculty, and ultimately resulted in Summers being forced to resign. And this simply for noting that while on average men and women have about the same average ability in STEM, it is the difference in the variance of that distribution—a sex difference in variance seen in several other traits—that led to the outrage.  In my view, firing Summers for this was a mistake, and was a loss for Harvard.

At any rate, in this interview Summers talks about the problems with Harvard, with elite universities in general, and then goes on to discuss AI, finishing with a brief suggestion about how Biden could be reelected. I am not a big maven or student of AI, though I will of course use it when it’s useful, but I’ll skip that part and just quote the discussion about universities. Bits from the discussion are indented, and any comments of mine are flush left. As always, Summers doesn’t pull any punches.

The ruination of universities by “identity essentialism”.

Yascha Mounk: The last few months have been rather eventful at Harvard University. Tell us your view of what has happened and why it matters.

Larry Summers: It’s been a very difficult time. I think what universities do is as important as the work of any other institution in our society, in terms of training young people and preparing them for careers of leadership, and in terms of developing new ideas that set the tone for the cultural, the political, the policy debates that go forward.

Paul Samuelson famously said that if he would be allowed to write the economics textbooks, he didn’t care who would get to perform as the finance ministers going forward. So I think what happens in universities is immensely important. And I think there is a widespread sense—and it is, I think, unfortunately, with considerable validity—that many of our leading universities have lost their way; that values that one associated as central to universities—excellence, truth, integrity, opportunity—have come to seem like secondary values relative to the pursuit of certain concepts of social justice, the veneration of certain concepts of identity, the primacy of feeling over analysis, and the elevation of subjective perspective. And that has led to clashes within universities and, more importantly, an enormous estrangement between universities and the broader society.

This, of course, refers to the eternal struggle among academics involving identity (or “diversity”) versus merit.

It goes on:

Mounk: Tell us a little bit more about the nature of the conflict here. What is the conception of the university that has historically guided it, and how is it that those values have changed over the last ten years?

Summers: I think the values that animated me to spend my life in universities were values of excellence in thought, in pursuit of truth. We’re never going to find some ultimate perfect truth, but through argument, analysis, discussion, and study we can get closer to truth. And a world that is better understood is a world that is made better. And I think, increasingly, all you have to do is read the rhetoric of commencement speeches. It’s no longer what we talk about. We talk about how we should have analysis, we should have discussion, but the result of that is that we will each have more respect for each other’s point of view, as if all points of view are equally good and there’s a kind of arbitrariness to a conception of truth. That’s a kind of return to pre-Enlightenment values and I think very much a step backward. I thought of the goal of the way universities manage themselves as being the creation of an ever larger circle of opportunity in support of as much merit and as much excellence as possible.

I spoke in my inaugural address about how, a century before, Harvard had been a place where New England gentlemen taught other New England gentlemen. And today it was so much better because it reached to every corner of the nation, every subgroup within the population, every part of the world. It did that as a vehicle for providing opportunity and excellence for those who could make the greatest contribution. But again, we’ve moved away from that to an idea of identity essentialism, the supposition that somehow the conditions of your birth determine your views on intellectual questions, whether it’s interpretations of quantum theory or Shakespeare. And so that, instead, our purpose is not to bring together the greatest minds, but is back to some idea around multiplicity of perspective with perspective being identified with identity. We used to venerate and celebrate excellence. Now, at Harvard, and Harvard is not atypical of leading universities, 70 to 75% of the grades are in A-range. Why should the institutions that are most celebrating of excellence have only one grade for everyone in the top half of the class, but nine different grades that are applied to students in the lower half of the class? That is a step away from celebrating and venerating excellence.

Summers expatiates on the debacle of the Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn testifying before a House committee, and notes, as I’ve emphasized, that what brought the Presidents down was not the hectoring of Elis Stefaniks or outrage about people being allowed to call for mass killing of Jews, but the arrant hypocrisy of these schools in their attitudes toward free speech (see below).  In the end, it looked as if demonizing Jews was the only form of free speech acceptable at Harvard, while other and more trivial issues were censored and censured.  Summers notes this below, and the commitment of elite schools to Social Justice and identity politics, led him to say that “. . . the fact that the ways in which great universities have acted have so enabled the Elise Stefaniks, the Bill Ackmans, and the Christopher Rufos, speaks to the danger with which they have been governed.”

Summers on free speech and Harvard’s double standard:

Summers: I think you and I are very much in agreement. I don’t think any reasonable person can fail to recognize a massive double standard between the response to other forms of prejudice and the response to anti-Semitism. And yes, you could have debates about when anti-Zionism or the demonization of Israel is and is not anti-Semitism. But on any reasonable conception of what’s going on, there has been a double standard. And I think those of us who are concerned about the double standard come to a view about how we want it remedied. And I think for the most part, the right way of remedying it is with a de-emphasis rather than a re-emphasis on identity.

Everyone needs to be enabled to feel safe. That doesn’t mean that they have a right to avoid being triggered by speech they don’t like, or to be spared exposure to ideas they find noxious. That doesn’t mean they have a right to bean-counting exercises where the share of members of their group is evaluated against a share of its population. It does mean that they’re entitled to the maintenance of an open and tolerant community where no one is allowed to shut down any set of ideas, that they have the right to be protected from discrimination, and that they have the right for there not to be indoctrination. I think in many ways what would be most problematic would be an indoctrination arms race in which a larger and larger fraction of an education is consumed by a recitation of the grievances of various groups.

In the second paragraph he’s touting equality over equity: equality of opportunity over “bean-counting exercises” (it’s this kind of metaphor that I would have avoided, as it equates university policy to “bean counting”, a phrase with bad optics (or “bad auditory”). But having equity as a goal, especially while maintaining that it’s perfectly consistent with keeping merit high, is a flawed exercise.

The stuff on AI will interest many readers, but I’ll let those folks read it themselves, and just finish with Summers’ response when asked what Biden and the Democrats could do to ensure that Trump doesn’t win in November.  His answer is somewhat lame, but of course he admits he’s not a political pundit but an economist:

I tend to find political experts’ opinions on economic questions to not be very sound and thoughtful. And I’m not sure why I should suppose that my opinions on political questions will be particularly sound and thoughtful. So I answer the question with humility. But my instinct is that political parties prevail and incumbent presidents prevail by returning to a broad American center. And I am hopeful that Joe Biden, whose roots are with an American middle class, will find a broad expressive American voice in the months ahead that will place less emphasis on responding to each particular identity element in the Democratic bouillabaisse and instead speak to the hopes, the obligations, the expectations of all Americans in a universalist kind of language. I think that he has styled himself over many years as “middle class Joe,” and that’s something that goes deep within him.

My hope and my best guess is that we will see that come out and that as it comes out and as the clamor of the various activist groups within the party comes to seem less dominant, he will emerge as a unifier and as a successful candidate. But again, I answer economics questions with confidence and political questions with trepidation.

I agree that Biden has become much more woke than I envisioned when he took office, and he’s been leaning more towards “progressive” Democrats than I hope.  Further, his wokeness will, I suspect, hurt him in the election, and I now think he’s got a better than even chance of losing. Given that many Americans (about 75%, I think) worry that he’s not physically or mentally fit to be President, while the same figure for Trump is about 46%, it seems that all Biden can do is get younger.

Bari Weiss interviews Roland Fryer

February 21, 2024 • 12:45 pm

A lot of readers and heterodox colleagues have sent me this link to Bari Weiss’s interview with Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr., often accompanied by big encomiums. Despite my unwillingness to watch long videos, I did watch all 77 minutes of it.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t mesmerized, or even much interested. There are interesting bits in it, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. Readers who see it, or have seen it and feel otherwise, please weigh in below.

Fryer is famous for two things: his prize-winning economic and sociological work, which sometimes produced counterintuitive results, and also for his suspension from Harvard for two years for sexual harassment. (He’s now back again.) I have only a few comments, but here’s the intro from the Free Press on YouTube:

Roland Fryer is one of the most celebrated economists in the world. He is the author of more than 50 papers—on topics ranging from “the economic consequences of distinctively black names” to “racial differences in police shootings.” At 30, he became the youngest black tenured professor in Harvard’s history. At 34, he won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, followed by a John Bates Clark Medal, which is given to an economist in America under 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

But before coming to Harvard, Fryer worked at McDonalds—drive-through, not corporate.

Fryer’s life story of rapid ascent to academic celebrity status despite abandonment by his parents at a young age, and growing up in what he calls a “drug family” is incredibly inspiring in its own right. Because based on every statistic and stereotype about race and poverty in America, he should not have become the things he became. And yet he did.

He also continues to beat the odds in a world in which much of academia has become conformist. Time and time again, Fryer refuses to conform. He has one north star, and that is the pursuit of truth, come what may. The pursuit of truth no matter how unpopular the conclusion or inconvenience to his own political biases.

He’s also rare in that he isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong, or to admit his mistakes and learn from them.

Bari Weiss sat down with Roland at the University of Austin for this inspiring, courageous, and long-overdue conversation.

The parts I found most absorbing are these:

  1. Fryer’s rough upbringing, raised without a mother and with most of his acquaintances being killed. And, of course, working at the McDonald’s drive-though before college.
  2. His famous paper showing that although there is police bias against blacks for some legal infractions, there is no racial bias in the Big Issue: police shootings. Fryer describes how he had to get police protection for over a month after that paper came out, for its conclusion violated the Aceepted Narrative and angered many people.
  3. His suspension from Harvard and closure of his lab. Fryer appears to have taken it well, but does explain that the incident involved his failure to understand “power dynamics”, for which he’s apologized. It’s curious, and has been pointed out by many, that Claudine Gay, who was a dean at the time (and later President of Harvard), was instrumental in getting Fryer punished. This makes Weiss ask Fryer at one point, “do you believe in karma?”  I can’t say much more about this as I haven’t followed the controversy, but I know many people think Fryer’s punishment was unduly harsh.

A Q&A session begins 49 minutes in.