Tag Archives: education

The Planned Racism of the Illinois State Legislature

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An Illinois legislatively created commission established…to come up with ways to make appropriations to state universities more “equitable” has issued a report delineating how to achieve that.

…lawmakers would determine how much funding a school deserves. They would do this using a variable called the “adequacy target,” which takes into account the school’s mission and enrollment as well as the programs it offers. … Larger amounts would be set aside for groups the commission considers underenrolled—say, with a $6,000 bonus for each enrolled black student, $4,000 for each enrolled low-income student, and $2,000 for each enrolled rural student.

And

The commission pretends that universities charge different prices for different races. Specifically, the plan wants lawmakers to assume that universities will charge minority students a lower tuition rate than whites and Asians, regardless of income.

And so on.

No. This intrinsically racist plan will only codify the inability of minority students to compete in higher ed and subsequently in the work force and in the managerial teams that manage enterprise work forces.

To increase minorities’ educational opportunities and improve their education in Illinois’ colleges and universities, these legislators must lose their DEI sewage. Beyond that, they must take the currently politically unpopular steps of divesting themselves of their teachers unions yokes, and then move decisively to expand parents’ school choices by making K-12—kindergarten, elementary, junior high, and high school—charter and voucher schools, whether privately or publicly run, ubiquitous throughout the State.

And this: to the extent that Illinois insists on using its tax code for social engineering purposes, it should reallocate its existing tax collections toward having school-directed taxes follow the student rather than remaining trapped—along with minority students—in failing public schools. Beyond that, additional existing tax collections should be placed into a fund for providing education scholarships to all students whose parents wish to transfer their children out of failing schools and into different, better performing schools.

Waiting until post-high school to begin even to pretend to address educational failure is far too late to have any serious effect.

For Illinois, I’m not holding my breath.

Adult-Run Universities

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Ben Sasse, President of the University of Florida, had an opinion piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that is, in the main, spot on. The thrust of his article was that, with adults in charge of our colleges and universities, and with those adults holding misbehaving students responsible for their behavior, actual idea-centric debate and education can occur.

The thrust of Sasse’s complete remarks are spot on, but I do have a couple of disagreements.

Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police, barricaded themselves in university buildings, shut down classes, forced commencement cancellations, and physically impeded Jewish students from attending lectures.

Pro-Hamas terrorist-supporting agitators have…. The seeming redundancy is necessary to clarify who and what these…persons…are.

Second, these terrorist supporters and the student populations who have consciously decided to go along with the agitation have not shut down any classes or forced any commencement cancelations. The cowardice of college and university management teams and of far too many “professors” has done that with their craven decisions.

It’s also the cowardice of those teams and “professors” that has facilitated those terrorist-supporting agitators’ and their student accomplices’ clashes with police, building occupations, and obstruction of Jewish and all other students’ attempts to attend the classes and lectures for which they’re paying more than a few pretty pennies.

A Coward’s Copout

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the Los Angeles police response to the disruptions and outright riot on the UCLA campus, there was this bit of attempted deflection:

Some universities and officials have blamed outsiders for coming to schools to escalate the protests.

This is a coward’s copout. It’s true enough that some outsiders are involved and fomenting some of the agitation. However, the students are voluntarily choosing to be agitated and choosing, on their own initiative, to participate in the pro-terrorist support, the antisemitic bigotry, the vandalism, the explicit threats of violence that are at the core of the disruptions.

The presence of outsiders in no way absolves these students of their participation in these…disruptions…and in no way mitigates their responsibility for their choices and actions.

A Statement of Responsibility…and of Consequences

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‘Way back in 1969, the University of Notre Dame’s then-President Father Ted Hesburgh had this to say about the consequences of student disruptions [emphasis in the original]:

Now comes my duty of stating, clearly and unequivocally, what happens if…. Anyone or any group that substitutes force for rational persuasion, be it violent or non-violent, will be given fifteen minutes of meditation to cease and desist…. If they do not within that time period cease and desist, they will be asked for their identity cards. Those who produce these will be suspended from this community as not understanding what this community is. Those who do not have or will not produce identity cards will be assumed not to be members of the community and will be charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace on private property and treated accordingly by the law.
After notification of suspension, or trespass in the case of non-community members, if there is not within five minutes a movement to cease and desist, students will be notified of expulsion from this community and the law will deal with them as non-students.
There seems to be a current myth that university members are not responsible to the law, and that somehow the law is the enemy, particularly those whom society has constituted to uphold and enforce the law. I would like to insist here that all of us are responsible to the duly constituted laws of this University community and to all of the laws of the land. There is no other guarantee of civilization versus the jungle or mob rule, here or elsewhere.

It must be noted that Hesburgh’s consequences are just as applicable to today’s crop of school professors who participate in such disruptions.

It’s too bad that today’s school administrators lack Father Hesburgh’s clarity and moral courage in executing the duties attached to school administration.

Misguided

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The Wall Street Journal‘s subheadline summarizes the error.

Biden administration, rocked by a wave of protests at college campuses, needs Israel to cut a deal to stop the fighting

The article centers on Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Israel, among other visits in the Middle East, and Blinken’s Presidential charge to cut a deal with Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in order to distract (my term) from the turmoil on so many American college and university campuses and that turmoil’s negative impact on Biden’s reelection chances.

The “deal” is this:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is beginning a visit to Israel to press for a cease-fire deal in the Gaza Strip….

Its relationship with campus turmoil is this:

…as protests against Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip spread across US college campuses. Biden needs the Israeli leader to deliver a halt in fighting that could ease domestic pressure over the conflict.

No. The two are wholly unrelated, beyond the tangential point of contact between the disruptors’ claimed purpose and the war Israel is fighting for its own survival against the terrorist gang operating out of the Gaza Strip.

The disrupters—they’ve long since crossed the line between legitimate protest to disruption with their violence, vandalism, threats to murder “Zionists,” active blocking of students from attending class, demands (a toddler’s temper tantrum) that their positions be satisfied entirely and immediately—either are actively supporting the terrorists of Hamas or are toddlers (never mind chronological ages) throwing temper tantrums, and in either case, they are acting out their antisemitic bigotry.

College and university management teams need to stop condoning, if not actively supporting, these terrorist supporters’, bigots’, and toddlers’ behavior, and instead call in the campus and city police to eject them from campus, arrest them, and bring them to trial for their violence and threats of murder and their vandalism.

As a University of Florida spokesman said as UF started just these actions,

This is not complicated. The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children—they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.

Not complicated at all. It may be that some managers are starting to do that, but it’s far too soon to say with any confidence.

With Israel engaged in its war for its existence, Biden needs to get out of Israel’s way and instead actively support it as it goes into Rafah and a couple of nearby villages to finally destroy Hamas, the terrorist gang that has promised an endless repetition of October 7s.