Category: Colleges acting badly

Sadly, academia got what it asked for

November 22, 2024 • 11:00 am

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Clune (a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University) reprises the familiar idea that the “wokeness” of academia—the explicit aim of turning higher education towards reforming society in a “progressive” way—has largely destroyed academia and reduced its standing in the eyes of the public.  It has done this, he says, by alienating the public via professors making pronouncements outside their area of expertise, something that simply turns off the average Joe or Jill.

The blame for this, says Clune, rests to some degree on academics themselves, but is largely the responsibility of administrators who feel compelled to comment on every issue of the day in the name of their university, creating an “these are our values” atmosphere that chills speech. In other words, they abjure institutional neutrality.

But you can read it yourself by clicking on the screenshots below. I’ll give a couple excerpts to whet your appetite.

The problem: (note the link to articles on the decline in public opinion of higher education, the big price we pay for politicizing academia):

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus. Public opinion of higher education is at an all-time low. The incoming Trump administration plans to use the accreditation process to end the politicization of higher education — and to tax and fine institutions up to “100 percent” of their endowment. I believe these threats are serious because of a simple political calculation of my own: If Trump announced that he was taxing wealthy endowments down to zero, the majority of Americans would stand up and cheer.

Here are the results of several Gallup polls on Americans’ confidence in higher education over only the last eight years. There’s been a big change:

Why faculty have no more credibility than anyone else when it comes to pronouncing on politics:

Let’s take a closer look at why the identification of academic politics with partisan politics is so wrongheaded. I am not interested here in questioning the validity of the political positions staked out by academics over the past decade — on race, immigration, biological sex, Covid, or Donald Trump. Even if one wholeheartedly agrees with every faculty-lounge political opinion, there are still very good reasons to be skeptical about making such opinions the basis of one’s academic work.

The first is that, while academics have real expertise in their disciplines, we have no special expertise when it comes to political judgment. I am an English professor. I know about the history of literature, the practice of close reading, and the dynamics of literary judgment. No one should treat my opinion on any political matter as more authoritative than that of any other person. The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to deal with climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.

The second problem with thinking of a professor’s work in explicitly political terms is that professors are terrible at politics. This is especially true of professors at elite colleges. Professors who — like myself — work in institutions that pride themselves on rejecting 70 to 95 percent of their applicants, and whose students overwhelmingly come from the upper reaches of the income spectrum, are simply not in the best position to serve as spokespeople for left-wing egalitarian values.

. . . . Far from representing a powerful avant-garde leading the way to political change, the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports. The hierarchical structure of academe, and the role it plays in class stratification, clings to every professor’s political pronouncement like a revolting odor. My guess is that the successful Democrats of the future will seek to distance themselves as far as possible from the bespoke jargon and pedantic tone that has constituted the professoriate’s signal contribution to Democratic politics. Nothing would so efficiently invalidate conservative views with working-class Americans than if every elite college professor was replaced by a double who conceived of their work in terms of activism for right-wing ideas. Professors are bad at politics, and politicized professors are bad for their own politics.

Who’s to blame? Faculty and, mostly, administrators who refuse to accept ideological neutrality of their universities.

It would be wrong to place the blame for the university’s current dire straits entirely on the shoulders of activist professors. While virtually all professors (I include myself) have surrendered, to at least some degree, to the pressure to justify our work in political terms — whether in grant applications, book proposals, or department statements about political topics — in many cases the core of our work has continued to be the pursuit of knowledge. The primary responsibility for the university’s abject vulnerability to looming political interference of the most heavy-handed kind falls on administrators. Their job is to support academic work and communicate its benefits. Yet they seem perversely committed to identifying academe as closely as possible with political projects.

The most obvious example is the routine proclamations from university presidents and deans on every conceivable political issue. In response to events such as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020, administrators broadcast identifiably partisan views as representative of the university as a whole. This trend has mercifully diminished in the wake of the disastrous House of Representatives hearings on antisemitism that led to the dismissal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and others. But the conception of the university as a vehicle for carrying out specific political ends continues in less visible ways.

What do we do?  The answer is clearly that professors should “stick to their last” and administrators should stop making pronouncements on social issues that have nothing to do with the mission of their university.  For it is our concentration on teaching and learning that really commands the respect of the public. When the public loses respect for universities, they stop wanting to attend them, which is a loss for both them and America, and it also turns them into people who, by disliking self-professed “elites,” become populists who vote for authoritarians like Trump (this last bit is my take, not Clune’s).  Here’s a last quote from his article:

If we have a political role by virtue of our jobs, that role derives from dedicated practice in the disciplines in which we are experts. Teaching students how to weigh evidence, giving them the capacity to follow a mathematical proof, disciplining their tendency to project their own values onto the object of study — these practices may not have the direct and immediate political payoff that has been the professoriate’s reigning delusion over the past decade. But they have two overwhelming advantages.

First, a chemist, or an art historian, really does possess authority in their subject of expertise. They can show us things we couldn’t learn on our own. This genuine authority is the basis for the university’s claim to public respect and support.

Second, the dissemination of academic values regarding evidence and reasoned debate can have powerful indirect effects. I have argued, for instance, that even so apparently apolitical a practice as teaching students to appreciate great literature can act as a bulwark against the reduction of all values to consumer preference. The scientific and humanistic education of an informed citizenry may not in itself solve climate change or end xenophobia, but it can contribute to these goals in ways both dramatic and subtle. In any case, such a political role is the only one that is both sustainable in a democracy and compatible with our professional status as researchers and educators.

I think the second point has been underemphasized. In fact, I haven’t seen it made in arguments about how to fix academics. But a good liberal education turns you on to thinking about what you believe, and above all constantly questioning your beliefs and seeking out further knowledge to buttress or refute them. It is the love of learning, combined with tutelage in how to assess what you learn, that will in the end restore the stature of academia—if it can be restored at all.

Bret Stephens indicts American universities for placing relevance above excellence

November 19, 2024 • 11:45 am

A reader called my attention to a new quarterly online magazine called Sapir. It’s edited by the NYT writer Bret Stephens, it’s free, and it has a number of intriguing articles (check out this interview with Daniel Diermeier, our former provost and now chancellor of Vanderbilt University). It also offers a free one-year hard-copy subscription here.

The magazine appears to deal largely but not exclusively with matters Jewish (Stephens’s background). Among the secular pieces is a fine new article by Stephens himself that you can access by clicking on the title below. It’s about the demise of liberalism in American universities, including a defense of what Stephens considers true liberalism and a list of obstacles to university reform. It’s short and well worth reading.

Stephens defines true liberalism this way:

By liberalism I do not mean the word in the usual ideological or political sense. I mean it as the habit of open-mindedness, a passion for truth, a disdain for dogma, an aloofness from politics, a fondness for skeptics and gadflies and iconoclasts, a belief in the importance of evidence, logic, and reason, a love of argument rooted in intelligent difference. Above all, a curious, probing, independent spirit. These were the virtues that great universities were supposed to prize, cultivate, and pass along to the students who went through them. It was the experience I had as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago 30-plus years ago, and that older readers probably recall of their own college experience in earlier decades.

And how it’s disappeared from universities:

Except in a few surviving corners, that kind of university is fading, if not altogether gone. In its place is the model of the university as an agent of social change and ostensible betterment. It is the university that encourages students to dwell heavily on their experience of victimization, or their legacy as victimizers, rather than as accountable individuals responsible for their own fate. It is the university that carefully arranges the racial and ethnic composition of its student body in the hopes of shaping a different kind of future elite. It is the university that tries to stamp out ideas or inquiries it considers socially dangerous or morally pernicious, irrespective of considerations of truth. It is the university that ceaselessly valorizes identity, not least when it comes to who does, or doesn’t, get to make certain arguments. It is the university that substitutes the classics of philosophy and literature with mandatory reading lists that skew heavily to the contemporary ideological left. It is the university that makes official statements on some current events (but not on others), or tips its hand by prominently affiliating itself with political activism in scholarly garb. It is the university that attempts to rewrite the English language in search of more “inclusive” vocabulary. It is the university that silently selects an ideologically homogeneous faculty, administration, and graduate-student body. It is the university that finds opportunistic ways to penalize or get rid of professors whose views it dislikes. It is the university that has allowed entire fields of inquiry — gender studies, ethnic studies, critical studies, Middle Eastern studies — to become thoroughly dogmatic and politicized.

A charitable term for this kind of institution might be the relevant university — relevant in the sense of playing a direct role in shaping public and political life.

He calls the new kind of universities the “relevant university” in that their raison d’être is to improve society. But in so doing, they put Social Justice above merit and excellence, a point that we made in our joint paper “In defense of merit iu science” published in The Journal of Controversial Ideas.  The demotion of merit in favor of ideology—something that Scientific American excelled at (see the previous paper)—has a very palpable downside: the lost of public confidence in institutions:

In fact, there are many less political and more productive ways in which universities can credibly establish their relevance to the world around them: by serving as centers for impartial expertise, making pathbreaking discoveries, and educating students with vital skills, not just academically but also with the skills of good citizenship and leadership.

But the latter kind of relevance does not emerge from a deliberate quest for relevance — that is, for being in tune with contemporary fads or beliefs. It emerges from a quest for excellence. And excellence is cultivated, in large part, by a conscious turning away from trying to be relevant, focusing instead on pursuing knowledge for its own sake; upholding high and consistent standards; protecting the integrity of a process irrespective of the result; maintaining a powerful indifference both to the weight of tradition and the pressure exerted by contemporary beliefs. In short, excellence is achieved by dedicating oneself to the ideals and practices of the kind of liberalism that gives free rein to what the educator Abraham Flexner, in the 1930s, called “the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.”

What does excellence achieve, beyond being a good in itself? Public trust. Ordinary people do not need to have a good understanding of, say, virology to trust that universities are doing a good job of it, especially if advances in the field lead to medicines in the cabinet. Nor does the public need to know the exact formulas by which universities choose their freshman class, so long as they have reason to believe that Yale, Harvard, Princeton and their peers admit only the most brilliant and promising.

But trust is squandered when the public learns that at least some virologists have used their academic authority to make deceitful claims about the likely origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trust evaporates when the public learns how the admissions process was being gamed for the sake of achieving race-conscious outcomes that disregard considerations of academic merit, to the striking disadvantage of certain groups. And trust is destroyed when the country sees students from elite universities behaving like Maoist cadres — seizing university property, disrupting campus life, and chanting thought-terminating slogans such as “From the river to the sea.” What those protests have mainly achieved, other than to demoralize or terrify Jewish students, is to advertise the moral bankruptcy and intellectual collapse of our “relevant” universities. Illiberalism always ends up finding its way to antisemitism.

I agree with nearly everything Stephens says, even though he calls himself a political conservative. But he can espouse conservatism in politics all he wants (and he does so judiciously, having voted for Harris) so long as he holds out for classical liberalism as the framework for universities.

At the end of his piece, Stephens lists the obstacles impeding a return to liberal universities, obstacles that include illiberal faculty, a “deeply entrenched DEI bureaucracuy”, a “selective adherence to free expression” (this is what brought down Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill after the House hearings), students taught to identify themselves as victims, and so on.

You may not hear anything new from this piece, but once in a while it helps to have your inchoate ideas clarified by a clear thinker and writer like Stephens, and then buttressed if, like me, your clearer ideas seem correct.

The state of Harvard according to Bill Ackman

October 3, 2024 • 8:50 am

Bill Ackman is the billionaire hedge-fund manager who not only publicized the drop of donations to Harvard because of its purported antisemitism, but also helped bring down President Claudine Gay. But he’s also a double Harvard alum; as Wikipedia notes:

In 1988, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in social studies from Harvard College. His thesis was titled “Scaling the Ivy Wall: The Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions”.  In 1992, he received a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School.

But Ackman’s not a rapacious piker. Wikipedia adds this:

Ackman is a signatory of The Giving Pledge, committing himself to give away at least 50% of his wealth by the end of his life to charitable causes.  He has given to charitable causes such as the Center for Jewish History, where he spearheaded a successful effort to retire $30 million in debt, personally contributing $6.8 million.  The donation, along with those of Bruce Berkowitz, founder of Fairholme Capital Management, and Joseph Steinberg, president of Leucadia National, were the three largest individual gifts the center has ever received.  Ackman’s foundation donated $1.1 million to the Innocence Project in New York City and Centurion Ministries in Princeton, New Jersey.

Apparently Ackman gave an invited talk about the Harvard Corporation, couched in financial jargon. Here’s the tweet with the slides. I’ll highlight some of them, which are pretty damning for Harvard.

There are 49 slides, and they pretty much encompass his thesis, which is that Harvard has become a business aimed not at providing a quality education to students, but to enriching the Corporation, and its mission has changed from promoting learning to pushing a “progressive” ideology.  In the process, it’s become woke and bloated with administrators.  But Ackman does seem some glimmers of hope on the horizon.

Here are some slides that support that thesis. First, a financial summary and the avowed mission of the College.

Here are some figures taken over the last 20 years:

Yet look at this administrative bloat! Why do they neeed so many administrators (in 20 years the administration has grown by 42% while student enrollment has grown by 0.3% and faculty by 0.5%:

And the cost of going to Schmarvard has doubled, “far outpacing inflation”. The cost of living over this period has increased only 61%. The tuition and fees this year are about $83,000 per annum, so a four-year education costs over a third of a million bucks.

Yet Harvard’s endowment has also more than doubled over this period, and is now 51 BILLION dollars. Ackman’s conclusion:

Here are three of Ackman’s plaints (he’s a registered Democrat but appears to support Trump). I can’t verify the first one (Ackman’s figures are likely accurate), but we all know about the second.  As for the slide just below, Harvard is probably LESS liberal than other schools, but we know that the dearth of conservative viewpoints (just 3% of faculty) is a general issue. Whether you consider that a problem, and if so, how to remedy it—these are matters for debate.

Last year Harvard was last in FIRE’s free-speech ranking, now it’s sixth from last:

Grade inflation is something I abhor, but it seems unstoppable; it’s part of the Alice in Wonderland view that “all must have prizes,” and a sign of the devaluing of merit. It cannot be that students have gotten so much smarter in 20 years! No, grading has gotten easier.

He then shows a series of slides explaining what has happened to Harvard.  This is the summary: it’s become woke and its mission has become woker, conforming to the ideology of the day rather than seeking truth and knowledge.  You can find the new mission statement below:

The latest mission statement, showing the emphasis on diversity, and it doesn’t mean intellectual diversity. The emphasis is on social diversity, coming from “different walks of life,” and having “different identities.” These differences, asserts Schmarvard, will perforce YIELD “intellectual transformation.”

There follows a series of slides showing that while the “demand” of students for education in economics and computer science has grown modestly (as well as the number of faculty in these areas and the number of degrees conferred), the faculty in “studies” departments has grown much faster.  But the number of degrees conferred in “studies” has decreased sharply.. Ackman concludes that Harvard is allocating its resources according to an ideological, diversity-centered platform.

He supports this by giving an analysis of the words used in Harvard’s course catalogue, presumably reflecting its curriculum:

Truth is mentioned much less often than Gender or “oppression”.

Ackman does note that the interim President (Garber will be there for three more years) has done some good things:

From all of this, and assessing Harvard as an “investment” (possibly aimed at potential donors), Ackman regards the College as a “hold”:

I largely agree with Ackman about Harvard, though the problems he singles out, like grade inflation and an ideological bent, also plague other schools. But Ackman, like me, went to Harvard, and we share a sentimentality about the place that lingers (I had a terrific time and got a terrific education in its grad school).  So here’s his reply when someone questions him about why, given all these problems, Harvard is a “hold” rather than a “sell”:

 

The President of Wesleyan wants MORE political activism in college

September 4, 2024 • 11:30 am

Bring it on! More encampments, more divisiveness, more people rooting for terrorists and demanding divestment from the world’s only Jewish state! This, apparently, is what Michael Roth, the President of prestigious Wesleyan College, is calling for in his new NYT op-ed. Click below to read, or find the article archived here.

Now the title is a bit misleading. Although Roth wants a return to the days when the main mission of colleges was often said to be “producing good citizens” rather than “research. teaching and learning, especially learning how to think”, he’s really not saying much more beyond the latter mission, though he sounds radical at the start (emphasis below is mine):

Last year was a tough one on college campuses, so over the summer a lot of people asked me if I was hoping things would be less political this fall. Actually, I’m hoping they will be more political.

That’s not to say that I yearn for entrenched conflict or to once again hear chants telling me that I “can’t hide from genocide,” much less anything that might devolve into antisemitic or Islamophobic harassment or violence. But since at least the 1800s, colleges and universities in the United States have sought to help students develop character traits that would make them better citizens. That civic mission is only more relevant today. The last thing any university president should want is an apolitical campus.

College students have long played an important, even heroic role in American politics. Having defended the voting franchise during the civil rights movement and helped to end the Vietnam War, they have continued to work for change across a range of social issues. If you went to college in the past 50 years, there’s a good chance the mission statement of your school included language that emphasized the institution’s contribution to society. Like many others, my university’s founding documents speak of contributing to the good of the individual and the good of the world. Higher-education institutions have never been neutral.

Well, that’s not exactly true. First of all, where’s the evidence that college students have produced, on average, more social justice than people who didn’t go to college? (These days, in fact, it seems to be the opposite, as antiliberal wokeness is concentrated in influential colleges.) I’m betting, in fact, that the Civil Rights movement of the sixties was propelled not by traits developed by a college education (granted, Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King did go to college), but by simple awareness of a morality involving equal rights and opportunities. And those things you don’t learn in college.

Further, when Roth asserts that “higher-education institutions have never been [politically] neutral,” he’s just wrong.  Contributing to the good of civilization is not a violation of political neutrality; divesting from Israel is.  And plenty of colleges, most notably mine, refuse to take stands on political issues (viz., the Kalven Report).

But wait! There’s more:

The issue that matters most to many activists right now is the war in Gaza, and protesters will undoubtedly continue to make their voices heard. Last spring at Wesleyan, students built an encampment of up to about 100 tents to protest the war and to call for the university to divest from companies thought to be supporting it. Since the protest was nonviolent and the students in the encampment were careful not to disrupt normal university operations, we allowed it to continue because their right to nonviolent protest was more important than their modest violations of the rules.

I walked through the protest area daily, as did many faculty members, students and staff members. I also met with pro-Israel students, mostly Jewish, some of whom felt beleaguered by what their classmates were saying. I made clear that if any of them felt harassed, I would intervene. I also said that I could ensure their ability to pursue their education but that I could not protect them from being offended.

Good thing President Roth doesn’t lead Columbia (see latest report here) or Stanford, where recent reports show pervasive anti-Semitism as documented by student reports (granted, it’s based on students’ experiences, but that’s exactly what Roth wants to know about). Further, on many campuses the protests certainly did violate campus regulations, as well as the law. Roth seems to be unaware of that.

Roth also seems to think that the only alternative to the college mission of “developing good citizens” is “helping students get a job”. But of course learning itself, and learning how to think, do research, and analyze arguments, is a third alternative, and one that is a quality we want in our citizens but comes as a byproduct of the third mission:

These days many Americans seem to think that education should be focused entirely on work force development. They define the “good of the individual” as making a living, not working with others to figure out how to live a good life. It’s understandable. In these days of economic disparities, social polarization and hyperpartisanship, it is certainly challenging to talk with one’s neighbors about what we want from our lives in common. But that is the core of political discussion.

In the end, in fact, Roth shows that the qualities that make for effective learning just happen to be the qualities he thinks produce “good citizens”: freedom of thought and speech, and the ability to discuss things rationally and civilly, and, especially, to pay attention to those with opposing views.  Who would have thought that?:

Professors aren’t in classrooms to entice students to share their ideology; they are there to challenge students to grapple with how much more there is to learn about any issue that really matters.

These discussions, like all authentic learning, depend on freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression. They also involve deep listening — thinking for ourselves in the company of others. The classical liberal approach to freedom of expression underscores that discussions are valuable only when people are able to disagree, listen to opposing views, change their minds.

To strengthen our democracy and the educational institutions that depend on it, we must learn to practice freedom better. This fall we can all learn to be better students and better citizens by collaborating with others, being open to experimentation and calling for inclusion rather than segregation — and participating in the electoral process. As for those loud voices in the political sphere who are afraid of these experiments, who want to retreat to silos of like-mindedness, we can set an example of how to learn from people whose views are unlike our own.

Forget about the DEI-ish “inclusion” part, and it’s beyond me why college should teach students how to “participate in the electoral process” when anybody with neurons already knows how to vote. What Roth has produced, under a novel and provocative title, is just the same old (and, yes, salubrious) call for truly free speech and a college ethos of imparting and creating knowledge.  My reaction is “meh.”

I asked Greg Mayer what he thought of the piece, and his first response was this (quoted with permission):

It’s pretty awful, both in overview and detail. God help Wesleyan with people like him in charge.

Followed by this in a second response:

To elaborate a bit, Roth seems nostalgic for the 60s, and wants to regenerate that atmosphere. To do so, he is willing to bend the rules and negotiate under conditions approaching blackmail. He adopts the anti-woke stance of “you have to handle being offended”, but he doesn’t want to offend pro-Hamas protesters. Roth doesn’t seem to know what institutional neutrality is, and he doesn’t know what universities are for.

And a second addendum:

Also, Roth’s attempt to invoke alternatives to the neoliberal consensus is risible. Higher ed is so deep into neoliberalism they don’t even know what it is anymore, him included. (Search “neoliberal consensus” on WEIT for discussion.) His apparent alignment with “progressives” reveals his fondness for neoliberalism. As Adolph Reed wrote, antiracism is a neoliberal alternative to a left.

Greg’s reaction is stronger than my “meh,” he thinks that Roth is basically pushing nonsense. But both Greg and I agree that the article makes no new arguments, and also floats some bad ones.

Anti-Israel protests begin on first day of class at Cornell

August 31, 2024 • 12:00 pm

I’m back in Cape Town, and preparing Kruger Post #1. In the meantime, have another read about college miscreants:

See below. I told you so, but this isn’t rocket science. Anybody with two neurons to rub together could have guessed the protest engine would rev up when classes begin again, for, especially at elite schools, students are more interested in enforcing what they consider Social Justice on others than engaging in learning.

The article below (click to read), written by Judy Lucas four days ago, was published in The Ithaca Voice, the local paper. Click headline to read:

An excerpt:

The spring semester at Cornell University ended with protests, as students erected an encampment on the Arts Quad to oppose the university’s ties to institutions supporting the Israeli state. The war in Gaza raged on through the summer, with reports of thousands of more lives lost. Cornell’s fall semester started much like its last one ended.

A crowd of about 150 student protestors at Cornell University marched into a campus dining hall Monday, the first day of classes, where speakers renewed the call for the university to divest from any institutions supplying weapons and support to the Israeli military in the war against Hamas, among a set of other demands first released earlier this year.

Have a look at the list of demands, especially the “land return” demand (#1) and the usual “and-of-course-we’re-not-to-be-punished” demand (#8).

Twenty minutes into the rally, seven university police officers entered the atrium of Klarman Hall and stood guard near the protestors. At the instruction of lead organizers, students joined arms to form a chain in order to resist interactions with police.

And the kicker: no IDs proferred when asked, and no punishment (bolding is mine, and it’s all bolded because it shows the cowardice of the Cornell administration).

Officers asked protesters to hand over their student identification cards to refer them to the university’s conduct office for potential disciplinary action. None of the protestors followed orders but no arrests were made. 

Have a tweet; this one has three videos and it’s just like the bawling we heard so often last year.

The unions, by and large all anti-Israel (are there any pro-Israel unions?), were part of the demonstration:

The Coalition for Mutual Liberation (CML), which represents the university’s activist organizations and the group responsible for organizing and maintaining the pro-Palestinian encampment on Cornell’s Arts Quad in April, planned Monday’s demonstration.

They were joined by representatives of the United Auto Workers Local 2300, the union representing about 1,200 university employees, including custodians, cooks and food service workers, who are currently on strike demanding an increase in wages and improved working conditions.

As usual, there’s illegal vandalism:

The morning of the demonstration, graffiti reading “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” and “Blood is on your hands” was found, spray-painted in red, on the front facade of Day Hall, the university’s administrative building. The front door was also shattered.

Cornell’s Vice President for University Relations Joel Malina released a statement on behalf of the university Aug. 26. Malina wrote the administration was “appalled by the graffiti spray painted.”

“Acts of violence, extended occupation of buildings, or property damage (including graffiti) will not be tolerated and will prompt an immediate response from public safety,” Malina wrote. “Cornell Police are conducting a thorough investigation, and those responsible will be subject to suspension and criminal charges.”

Joel Malina is Cornell’s Vice President for University Relations, and if you think that anybody will be suspended or subject to criminal charges, I have some land in Florida to sell you.

Finally, the interim Provost and President sent out an email with dire warnings about what would happen to students who engaged in encampments:

Students involved in encampments would first receive a warning of their violation of the university’s policy. On a second violation, the student would receive a “non-academic temporary suspension.” After a third violation, a student would receive “temporary academic suspension.”

I guess to get a “permanent academic suspension,” you have to shoot someone.

This is only the very beginning. When asked for a comment, the University said bupkes. 

Cornell University has not released a statement or comment regarding the specific demonstration Monday evening during which university police officers were involved.

In response to an email from The Ithaca Voice requesting a statement regarding the protest, a media representative for the university said “We don’t have anything specific regarding yesterday afternoon’s protest.”

Have another tweet with two videos:

There are more invertebrates in Cornell’s administration than there are in one square meter of the bottom of Cape Town’s Harbour. But there’s one consolation. While Cornell’s administration is demonstrating its spinelessness, I seriously doubt that it will give in to any of the student demands.

h/t: Debi

More on the decline and fall of science education in New Zealand

August 21, 2024 • 11:15 am

Skip this if you don’t care about science education in New Zealand, but plenty of scientists there are worried about it. And it’s a harbinger of what may happen to science education in the U.S. as science courses add requirements to teach indigenous “ways of knowing” and the curriculum itself pushes out traditional material to make way for content that aligns with ideological and political objectives.

Each faculty at the University of Auckland, for instance, has to have one of these mandatory courses tailored to ideological ends.  The one below, for instance, is being created on a trial basis as a requirement for all science majors. I believe I’ve discussed it before, so click on the headline below to see what’s on tap in science education.

Here is the course overview and the course goals (“learning outcomes”):

Course overview:

Contemporary science is deeply entwined with place, knowledge systems and ethics. This course examines these concepts through the lens of sustainability to demonstrate how they shape research agendas, methodologies, and applications of contemporary science. To address the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability, science must recognise and navigate the complexities of these interrelated concepts.

Explore the role of place-based knowledge, the importance of embracing diverse knowledge systems for science and the ethical responsibilities inherent in contemporary science in Aotearoa New Zealand. This interdisciplinary course will challenge you to think critically, fostering an awareness of the intricate relationships between science and its broader context, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Learning outcomes:

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

    1. Demonstrate how place, and an understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, are significant to your field of study
    2. Critically and constructively engage with knowledge systems, practices and positionality
    3. Employ a reciprocal, values-based approach to collaborating
    4. Communicate ideas clearly, effectively and respectfully
    5. Reflexively engage with the question of ethics in academic practice
    6. Demonstrate a critical understanding of sustainability

Note the worshipful discussion of “Te Tiriti o Waitangi”, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi that is nearly sacred and almost serves as a constitution for New Zealand, though some of its interpretations are questionable and it was not signed by many Māori leaders on the South Island.  It’s not even a document with hard legal status.

The Treaty did assure the Māori that they’d have the same rights as British citizens and would keep control of their lands and properties, and was written to bring New Zealand into being as a British colony. That means that today Europeans are seen as oppressive “colonizers”. The treaty is now used as a rationale to ensure that Māori or those of Māori ancestry are given equity (not just equal opportunity) in admissions, grants, and so on. The Treaty is also the rationale for the current change in curricula, meant to effect “decolonization,” which in my view means changing modern education to one infused with traditional Māori “ways of knowing.”

The course outline and objectives above are ideological in this way, involving not science per se but a postmodern philosophy of science in which reality is shaped by the scientist and the place where he/she came from.

The emphasis on “ethics” doesn’t belong in a mandatory science course, and I think will serve only to confuse students.

Finally there’s this:

“the importance of embracing diverse knowledge systems for science and the ethical responsibilities inherent in contemporary science in Aotearoa New Zealand”

and this:

“This interdisciplinary course will challenge you to think critically, fostering an awareness of the intricate relationships between science and its broader context, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”

I’d be delighted if someone would explain to me why the Treaty of Waitangi should be explicitly discussed in a required science course. Note the emphasis on “diverse knowledge systems”.  I can only guess what that means, but it’s pretty clear.

Now here’s a new course that isn’t required for science majors, but still counts as a science course. Click on the headline below for the course description, even more risible than the one above,

Here is the course prescription, the course overview, and the learning outcomes. Remember, this is a course for which students get science credit:

Course Prescription

Mātauranga is central to the future practice of science in Aotearoa New Zealand. Explores foundational understandings of mātauranga Māori and Kaupapa Māori for scientists. Students will meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori through place-based relational learning and case studies grounded in whanaungatanga. Students will experience Māori ways of being, knowing, and doing.
Course Overview
This course welcomes all students who wish to engage with mātauranga in relation to scientific place-based knowledge. Engagement with Indigenous knowledge, including mātauranga, is increasingly important to the practice of science in Aotearoa [New Zealand] and beyond. Pūtaiao, meaning science curriculum that includes mātauranga, is well established in primary and secondary education. This course will further develop the learning of pūtaiao [pūtaiao] into tertiary science education and scientific research. Enhancing understandings of mātauranga and Kaupapa Māori [Māori practice] for scientists will develop skills in critical thinking, reflective and relational practice, and the application of Kaupapa Māori in science.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this course, students will be able to:
    1. Compare articulations of Kaupapa Māori, mātauranga and science.
    2. Recognise strategies that support, protect, and empower mātauranga in science and the relevance to whānau, hapū and iwi.
    3. Critically explain and communicate understandings of the relationship between Kaupapa Māori, mātauranga and science.
    4. Describe the history of Pūtaiao in science education and relate the development of Pūtaiao to the practice of science in Aotearoa.
    5. Work effectively in a team to develop research skills, including the ability to meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori.

Note that Kaupapa Māori means the practices of the indigenous people and  Mātauranga Māori comprises Māori “ways of knowing”, including some empirical knowledge gained by trial and error (MM isn’t hypothesis-based), as well as a bunch of superstition, ethics, tradition, myths, lore, legend, and religion.

This course appears one designed to demonstrate that indigenous ways of knowing are not only vital to modern science, but nearly coequal to it, something “central to the future practice of science in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

My answer to that last quote is simply “no it isn’t.” In science classes what should be taught is modern science: the general body of knowledge and tools for knowing as practiced throughout the world today.  Indigenous knowledge may be a part of that, but only a very small one, and likely could be omitted without loss.  If traditional lore and knowledge about when to collect eels or berries is to be taught, it should be in anthropology or sociology class, not a class that gives you science credit.

This course shows that the new curriculum in NZ simply has lost sight of the distinction between science and non-science, and is blurring the boundaries between naturalistic modern science, social science, and ideology.

Note in particular this bit from the second course: “Students will meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori”. (Te ao Māori is the specifically Māori worldview.) What would people make of the phrase “meaningful and respectful engagement” if used in a science course, where students are encouraged to question everything? What this shows is data being replaced by motivated reasoning that aligns with social justice principles.

If you think this is irrelevant to America, think again. What we’re seeing is fast-forward time travel of DEI carried to its logical limits, with the sacralization of everything indigenous.  While I don’t think for a moment that we’ll have Native American science courses pervading American universities, American teaching of science is becoming increasingly infected with principles of social justice. I’ve gone into this issue many times before and won’t repeat my thoughts, but do spare a thought for the poor science teachers in New Zealand who have to spoon this stuff into the mouths of their students, impeding what should be a real education in science.

Another one bites the dust: Columbia’s president resigns

August 15, 2024 • 8:15 am

Congressional hearings about free speech and anti-semitism at Penn, Harvard, MIT and Columbia have now resulted in the resignation of the third of these Presidents. Yes, Columbia President Nemat Shafik, following Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magill of Penn out the door, has resigned her post. President  President Sally Kornbluth of MIT remains in her job.

The brouhaha began last December when, facing two House panels, three Presidents said that in some cases, depending on context, calls for genocide of the Jews might not violate university regulations. Indeed, this was correct according to a First-Amendment construal of this kind of speech. The problem was that these universities, purporting to adhere to the First Amendment, didn’t really do so for other kinds of speech, so they were really guilty of hypocritical and unequal enforcement.  And their presentations on the Hill were stiff and unempathic. Shafik, grilled this April, angered those who said she’d done very little to curb antisemitism on her campus.

Further, Claudine Gay was later accused of serious and multiple incidents of plagiarism, and, in light of all the bad publicity, Harvard gave Gay the boot. Harvard now has now an interim President, Alan Garber, who will run Harvard for the next two years while it looks for a permanent President.

Click below to read the story. Shafik proved hamhanded in the face of pro-Palestinian and antisemitic behavior on campus, with apparently no students being disciplined, including those who stormed and occupied a Columbia building.

Click to read:

An excerpt:

Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, resigned on Wednesday after months of far-reaching fury over her handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and questions over her management of a bitterly divided campus.

She was the third leader of an Ivy League university to resign in about eight months following maligned appearances before Congress about antisemitism on their campuses.

Dr. Shafik, an economist who spent much of her career in London, said in a letter to the Columbia community that while she felt the campus had made progress in some important areas, it had also been a period of turmoil “where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.”

What she means is that she can’t manage to stop violations of campus rules for encampment and behavior by pro-Palestinian students. This is because Columbia won’t discipline violators.  A lot of the lack of discipline stems from the attitudes of Columbia faculty, many of whom supported the illegal protests and called for Shafik’s resignation after she called the police to dismantle the local encampment. Caught between Jewish faculty and students on one hand and pro-Palestinian faculty on the other, Shafik was rendered powerless. More:

She added that her resignation was effective immediately, and that she would be taking a job with Britain’s foreign secretary to lead a review of the government’s approach to international development.

The university’s board of trustees named Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong, a medical doctor who has been the chief executive of Columbia’s medical center and dean of its medical school since 2022, as the interim president. The board did not immediately announce a timeline for appointing a permanent leader.

. . . But as much as its sudden end, the brevity of Dr. Shafik’s presidency underscores how profoundly pro-Palestinian demonstrations shook her campus and universities across the country.

Facing accusations that she was permitting antisemitism to go unchecked on campus, Dr. Shafik made a conciliatory appearance before Congress in April that ended up enraging many members of her own faculty. She summoned the police to Columbia’s campus twice, including to clear an occupied building. The moves angered some students and faculty, even as others in the community, including some major donors, said she had not done enough to protect Jewish students on campus.

Dr. Shafik’s tenure was among the shortest in Columbia’s 270-year history, and much of it was a sharp reminder of the challenges facing university presidents, who have sometimes struggled recently to lead upended campuses while balancing student safety, free speech and academic freedom.

Few university leaders were as publicly linked to that dilemma as Dr. Shafik, whose school emerged as a hub of the campus protests that began after the Israel-Hamas war erupted last year.

Those protests, as well as accusations of endemic antisemitism, drew the attention of House Republicans, who orchestrated a series of hearings in Washington starting last year.

But make no mistake about it: the protests will continue this next academic year at Columbia and at other schools. The war in Gaza continues, and Israel is still demonized by many academics (remember that the American Association of University Professors just eliminated their two-decade opposition to academic boycotts, undoubtedly to allow boycotts of Israel).

And so Columbia has a color-coded system to indicate the degree of protest occurring on the campus. This is ridiculous:

To prepare for the possibility of renewed protests in the fall, the university announced a new color-coded system to guide the community on protest risk level on campus, similar to a Homeland Security advisory system. The level was recently set from Green to Orange [JAC: there’s also red], the second-highest, meaning “moderate risk.” Only people with Columbia identification are permitted to enter the central campus, which in the past has been open to the public.

College protesters have vowed to come back stronger than ever to push their main demand that Columbia divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies that profit from the occupation of Palestinian territories.

“Regardless of who leads Columbia, the students will continue their activism and actions until Columbia divests from Israeli apartheid,” said Mahmoud Khalil, a student negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the main protest movement. “We want the president to be a president for Columbia students, answering to their needs and demands, rather than answering to political pressure from outside the university.”

I doubt that Columbia, like Chicago and many other schools, will agree to divest, for that is eliminating institutional neutrality in the investment of college funds. As so long as there are calls for divestment, and the universities refuse to divest, the protests will continue.  Coming this fall: Code Red, when almost nobody will be allowed on Columbia’s campus.

Of course free speech, along the lines of the Chicago Prnciples, should reign at all campuses, but there should also be time, place, and manner restrictions so that speech doesn’t impede the functioning of the university (e.g. deplatforming speakers, sit-ins in campus buildings, use of bullhorns during class).  So far these restrictions have largely been ignored by schools like Columbia, loath to have officials or police “lay hands” on protestors since that creates bad “optics.”. But if these illegal protests continue, then we can kiss higher education in America goodbye.  But who cares? The pro-Palestinian protestors aren’t interested in holding universities to their mission. Rather, they want to bend universities to their own ideology, and many, in the end, want to efface the principles of Western democracy.