Category Archives: education

“here’s an idea”

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Allison Leigh Cowan, late of The New York Times had one concerning college admissions and how to weed out lawbreakers. Do some actual prescreening.

Start by asking applicants to pledge that they will be respectful, law-abiding members of the community if admitted. Assuming no one quibbles with that minimal threshold, delve a bit further using moral-reasoning prompts drawn from recent headlines. Applicants can reply with a simple “yes” or “no,” or submit longer answers:

      • Is it ever justified to spit on another human being?
      • Is it ever justified to pull a fire alarm in a crowded auditorium to protest a speaker some find offensive?
      • Is it ever justified to mar public spaces with hard-to-remove graffiti? Should perpetrators pay to clean it up?
      • Is it ever justified for a private individual to assassinate another private individual?
      • Is it ever justified to burn a Quran? What about destroying a mezuza on someone’s door?
      • Is it ever justified to restrain custodians or other bystanders as part of a protest?
      • Is it ever justified to set fire to the homes of authority figures?

These are, as Cowan acknowledges, navel-gazing questions, but diligent reviews of the answers can serve as useful prescreening.

Here’s another idea: in addition to that prescreening, a good idea in concept but as with all prescreening, it’s imperfect, take the follow-on step: those inclined to foment chaos or who change and become prone, should be expelled promptly and with prejudice when they do start to foment chaos, and those who broke laws in the doing should be criminally prosecuted, equally promptly.

Price Fixing

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And this time it’s by the Republican caucus in the House. Among the moves they’re making in the reconciliation bill currently being debated in the various House committees is a badly needed move to reform the cost of college/university education and so improve the value of that education. The goal is to hold colleges accountable for student outcomes and curb the open-ended loan buffet.

The specific plan under consideration, though, is a terrible idea.

The House would reduce the aggregate limit for undergraduate loans to $50,000 from $57,500. The bill would also impose a $100,000 borrowing limit for master’s degree and doctoral programs and $150,000 for professional programs like law degrees. Graduate student loans are currently uncapped.

This is just price-fixing by another name, though, and worse than not addressing the underlying problem, it hides—like any price-fixing scheme does—the true costs and gains of the services being offered.

Better, and more efficient, would be to let free market forces solve the problem. I’ve offered this alternative before; it bears repeating, with a couple of additions.

• statutorily require colleges and universities to publish the average, median, and range of income at the five years employment mark for their graduates in each of the major fields offered
• [added] statutorily require colleges and universities to publish their graduates’ employment percentages at the five year post-graduation mark for each of the major fields’ graduates
• statutorily require student loans to be originated by private lenders or colleges and universities
• statutorily require colleges and universities to guarantee at least 50% of each loan granted their students [added:] by private lenders
• [added] bar any government or government-affiliated entity from guaranteeing any part of any student loan
• statutorily allow current and future student loans to be discharged in “ordinary” bankruptcy proceedings

With private lenders and colleges/universities having skin in this student loan game—and being the only players in the game—loans and their borrowers would be carefully screened for repayment risk. Just as importantly, prospective students and parents could better evaluate which majors to pursue and which schools best teach those majors. A happy side effect of that will be better use of us taxpayers’ money.

My Irony Meter…

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…is pegged. In their letter published in The Wall Street Journal‘s Friday Letters section, David Wippman and Glenn Altschuler of Hamilton College and Cornell University, respectively, object to comparisons of Harvard to Hillsdale College, even as they misleadingly mischaracterize the latter’s relationship with Federal dollars (writing that Hillsdale has for decades refused federal funding, when the fact is Hillsdale has never taken Federal dollars at any time in its 180 years of existence).

The letter writers acknowledge that Harvard’s taking Federal dollars makes it “vulnerable” to Federal pressure, citing supposed risks to Harvard’s research capacity. In truth, Harvard still could conduct effective research, were it to get serious about the bigots and terrorist supporters entrenched in its student and faculty and staff populations.

That brings me to the irony of their letter.

[I]t is absurd to compare this Christian college with 1,700 students and 170 faculty with Harvard, one of the leading research universities in the world with almost 25,000 students and more than 20,000 faculty and staff.

Actually, two: Wippman and Altschuler call out Hillsdale as an explicitly Christian college as though that were somehow important to their discussion, while ignoring Harvard’s more religiously and areligiously ecumenical bent—as though that does not matter at all.

The real irony though is that 1:10 faculty to student ratio at Hillsdale compared to that 8:10 ratio of faculty and staff to students at Harvard. Clearly one school is focused on actual teaching, while the other is focused on…nothing in particular, apparently, other than faculty and staff activism, antisemitic bigotry, terrorist support, and condoning when not actively encouraging the same in the student population. That only creates an environment where that vaunted research is merely an afterthought and a source of Federal largesse rather than a serious focal point for the institution.

Harvard’s Professoriate…

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…according to a supposedly conservative professor. James Hankins, a Harvard history professor, had some thoughts on how to cure Harvard of its wokeness. I have some thoughts on his thoughts.

Hankins’ basic idea is that Harvard should reduce its acceptance rate of Federal dollars and rely more on private funds from Harvard alumni.

[W]e should strengthen ties with loyal alumni who know and love Harvard. Alumni are loyal in part because they remember with gratitude the teaching they received as undergraduates. That makes them more closely aligned with the university’s real mission: to teach and to produce high-quality, unpoliticized research. Empowering alumni would carry its own risks, no doubt, but in my experience, they have a much sounder sense than politicians and government bureaucrats of what Harvard should be doing to help the country and itself.

This is naïve, and it misstates Harvard’s—any college’s or university’s—mission. That mission is to teach, full stop. They’re also ideal places to do research, including basic research, but even in an ideal world, research would come second to teaching, not be placed on par with it.

Withal, Hankins exposed the core of his error in a couple of ways.

My sense is that the great majority of my colleagues don’t care for campus political activism. As an out-of-the-closet conservative, I often find myself playing the confidant to my liberal colleagues. They sidle up and say, sotto voce, “Please don’t tell anyone I said this,” then proceed to unload their disgust with the latest activist outrages. They might have identified as leftists in their college years, but a frequent refrain I hear from them now is “this is not what the left used to stand for.”

That silence, that refusal to say out loud what they’ll say sotto voce, however fearfully, is the professors’ cowardice. These cannot be trusted to do any sort of unpoliticized research. They’ll bend to whatever their woke liberal masters tell them to do with whatever dollars come their way.

And this:

Faculty at Harvard for the most part are serious scholars and scientists who just want to get on with their work. They have books to write and papers to publish. … They resent it when activists create turbulence at department meetings and waste everyone’s time.

Faculty at Harvard openly favor their personal careers over doing a right thing. They resent having their quiet careers interfered with, but not enough to stand up and object out loud. This is the cowardice of immorality. This sort cannot be trusted, either, not with their writing, certainly not with teaching our children.

Hankins has successfully identified his colleagues as perfectly happy to sit on the sidelines, if not all the way up on their porches, in what they see as safety instead of taking a stand, doing a right thing.

Don’t take the Federal government’s—us taxpayers’—money? The question has another direction, also: the Federal government shouldn’t be sending our tax money to an institution like this in the first place.

Good for Them

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A number of universities are raising cash in large amounts, though not as large as suspended Federal government transfers to them, in their efforts to shield themselves from government pressure to rid themselves of antisemitic bigots and terrorist supporters among their student and professor populations.

Princeton University is issuing $320 million in bonds, while Northwestern secured $500 million and Harvard raised $750 million. Yale University, which has flown under Trump’s radar so far, is trying to sell billions in its private-equity holdings.

I say good for them.

These institutions are under no obligation to accept Federal dollars, and the government is under no obligation to send those dollars to them. So long as the institutions accept Federal dollars, though, the government gets to specify how those dollars get used, just as is the case with any other donor. No Federal dollars, no Federal strings.

Beyond that, though, with all of that money-raising—and the institutions are just getting started on this round—these institutions are demonstrating how little they actually need Federal dollars to carry out the various researches they cry so piteously are at risk from losing those dollars.

Even as these institutions “free” themselves from Federal strings, though, so long as they tolerate—condone, actually—those bigots and terrorist supporters, they are no fit institutions for our children’s post-high school education.

It’s true enough that colleges and universities can be highly useful centers of technology development and of basic research, including in areas critically important for our national security, and Federal dollars can be highly valuable impetus and support for those efforts. There are a plethora of such schools, though, that are not hotbeds of bigotry and support for terrorists; these are the schools who should be getting those dollars.