Tag Archives: education

Disingenuosity in our “Elite” Universities

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Recall that the Department of Energy has frozen or cut Federal funding to a number of our allegedly elite universities over their refusal to deal with the antisemitic bigots and terrorist supporters in their student bodies and professor work force, and recall the Department’s decision to cap at 15% what those universities skim off the top of the research grants the Department sends for what those universities are pleased to call indirect costs. Now, MIT, Brown University, Cornell University, and Princeton University among others, are suing DoE over the cuts.

Per their lawsuit:

The pace of scientific discoveries in the national interest will be slowed. Progress on a safe and effective nuclear deterrent, novel energy sources, and cures for debilitating and life-threatening illness will be obstructed. America’s rivals will celebrate, even as science and industry in the United States suffer.

This is disingenuous. The universities do not have an inherent right to those Federal—our tax-remitted—dollars, which is the only rational reason for that claim. To the extent the pace will be slowed, to the extent that progress will obstructed, that’s entirely on these universities, and their demand for continuing the Federal spigot flow. These universities each have large and burgeoning endowments that would support their programs for decades, which would be plenty of time into which to shoehorn in the weeks required for the required reforms.

To the extent our national rivals—the universities’ cynical lumping in of our enemies with our competitors—will celebrate, that’s also on these universities and their desperation to continue receiving the…donations…these enemy nations and competitors pay over.

Excellent but Insufficient

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Kristin Shapiro, of the Independent Women’s Forum, has an excellent idea for checking up on colleges’ and universities’ admissions criteria and seeing whether they’re still using race and gender in their admissions decisions, even though those plainly racist and sexist criteria are illegal.

[R]equire colleges and universities to report the average standardized test scores and grade-point averages of admitted and enrolled students by race.

This can be improved on, however. In addition to publicly reporting those averages for admitted and enrolled students, the institutions should be required to post the averages’ standard deviations, which measure the degree of dispersal of those scores around their averages, and they should be required to post as well the median scores of those distributions. Medians tend to be less heavily influenced by extreme outliers. In addition, the institutions should be required to do that for the populations of students whose applications were rejected.

Better still, would be to require the institutions to make publicly available and searchable their databases of raw scores and GPAs, redacted only of student-identifying data while leaving in the identifications of the high schools and transferred-from colleges and universities of admitted students and of students whose applications the institutions rejected.

Let independent analysts conduct their own investigations rather than requiring the public to rely on the claims of institutions whose integrity already is questionable.

Reviewing Harvard’s Federal Funding

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The Trump administration has begun reviewing Harvard University’s $9 billion in Federal funding. The question I have is how badly does Harvard need any Federal funding?

Harvard’s endowment is some $53.2 billion as of last year, and the school got a 9.6% return on its endowment’s investments last year. That allowed its endowment to grow by nearly 5% year-on-year despite disbursements from the endowment.

Harvard claims $6.4 million in annual operating expenses as of last year, and it spent $749 million in scholarships and its own grants for its students.

With all of that, I ask again, how badly does Harvard need Federal funding? The school’s endowment doesn’t seem to be doing much more than collecting dust, investment returns, and net growth, while the school collects billions of average citizens’ tax money for its programs. Given that, why should citizens of Iowa, or Montana, or Utah—or New York, or Illinois, or California—pay for Massachusetts-domiciled Harvard’s spending decisions?

My answer: Harvard has little to no need for taxpayer monies.

Professorial Disingenuosity

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Columbia University professors who support pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian protests, mostly humanities and liberal arts professors, claim that those “protests” are actually innocent students exercising their free speech rights. Other professors at the school, mostly medical and STEM types, claim they’ve been too busy “doing their jobs” teaching and researching to worry about such mundane things as campus disruptions.

Those former either know better, and they’re being disingenuous in their wide-eyed innocence claims, or they’re breathtakingly ignorant of what free speech actually means. It’s not free speech when the “protestors” block others’ right to their own free speech by shutting off their ability to speak at all, or by shutting down the campus altogether, or by preventing others from exercising their free speech right to not listen to the “protestors.” The “protestors” are engaging in the abhorrence of censorship.

Neither are the “protestors” exercising free speech when they seize and occupy campus buildings and prevent the ordinary course of business in those buildings. Those “protestors” are executing illegal takings of others’ property and denying them and the users’ their accesses.

Neither are those “protestors” exercising free speech when they damage or destroy equipment in those illegally seized building or paint graffiti on and in the buildings. Those “protestors” are engaging in criminal destruction and in vandalism.

The medical and STEM professors also know better. As Pericles said a while ago, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” And Plato: “Those who think they’re too smart to engage in politics are destined to be ruled by those who are dumber.” These professors are just being cowards, hiding away from their responsibilities.

They’re all worthless; they all need replacement.

Chit Chat

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The Trump administration has cut $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University, and a number of Federal agencies have ended their association with the school, both over the school’s management team’s overt decision to support pro-Hamas “protestors'” assaults on the school’s Jewish students and those “protestors'” seizure of and vandalism in school buildings. That tacit support clearly illustrates that management team’s own intrinsic antisemitic bigotry.

Now—and only now—is the head school manager, Interim President Katrina Armstrong, talking about beginning to enforce long-extant rules of comportment as applied to Jewish students and all other students and student groups. She wrote a letter.

“[T]he funding cuts will “immediately impact research and other critical functions,” she wrote.

She takes the cuts “very seriously” and is prepared to work with the government on its “legitimate concerns[,]” she wrote.

“When I accepted the role of Interim President in August 2024, I knew Columbia needed a reset from the previous year and the chaos of encampments and protests on our campus[.] The University also needed to acknowledge and repair the damage to our Jewish students, who were targeted, harassed, and made to feel unsafe or unwelcome on our campus last spring[,]” she wrote.

She “accepted” her role seven months ago.

Chit chat.

What has she actually done? She could have called in campus police and the city’s police to arrest these lawbreaking sham “protestors.” She didn’t do that beyond a couple of token/scapegoat arrests.

She could have expelled every one of those lawbreaking “protestors.” She didn’t do that.

She could have identified to the Federal government those lawbreaking “protestors” present on student visas with a view to having their visas canceled and those students sent back to their home countries. She didn’t do that.

In response to the funding and contract cancelations, she at the least could have done those last two. Instead, she chose to write a letter and call it a day. ‘Twas a very famous…victory.

Her words are insulting to our intelligence, and they’re insulting to the school’s Jewish student population.