Wealth Redistribution

Now it’s threatening to spread to our education institutions.

Lawmakers have a new solution for the high cost of college: make the wealthiest universities pay for it.

Of course.  Because competition among colleges to bring down costs, or reducing Federal funding for them under [pick an excuse] programs to reduce the non-student population money available to drive up costs just can’t be done.  Too many special interests would be perturbed by such a thing.

Elite US schools have grown richer since the 2008 financial crisis by investing their endowment money in everything from California vineyards to Chinese startups.  State and federal policy makers now want to tax those profits….

Gotta punish that success.  How dare these institutions accrue moneys without a government’s faretheewell?

…or force the wealthiest schools to spend down their endowments—to defray soaring student bills and refill depleted higher-education budgets.

Which governments could do easily by not sending so much taxpayer dollars to these schools.  But…special interests.

Interestingly, Republicans are in on this move.

Congressman Tom Reed (R, NY)…floated a plan late last year that would require endowments bigger than $1 billion to pay out a quarter of their earnings in grants to working-class families or face steep penalties or even the loss of their tax-exempt status.

It isn’t Government’s place to tell these schools—or any other institution—how to spend its money.  It is Government’s place to not send taxpayer dollars to these schools—or to any other institution.

No wonder Conservatives are so angrified.

The Bias of Professors

One example is from the faculty of George Mason University.

George Mason University’s faculty governing body on Wednesday called on its administration to suspend the naming of the law school after Justice Antonin Scalia.

By a vote of 25-12, the university’s faculty approved a resolution asking for an indefinite delay of the renaming.

Why the delay?  First comes the obfuscation:

The faculty resolution questions how the money was being used and expressed concern that the donation could generate negative publicity and that the donors could wield too much influence over the law school’s mission.

They argue in all seriousness that this has something to do with the new name of George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law.  Apparently the freshman logic classes some of the professors pretend to teach aren’t safe spaces for those same professors.

The heart of the matter had been addressed earlier.

Last week the faculty senate passed another resolution that called the name change “problematic” and characterized Justice Scalia as intolerant to gays and minorities.

This is a cynical distortion of Scalia’s views.  Scalia was a textualist who insisted—and whose oath of office, the same oath that “living Constitutionalists” like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took, bound him to that—that the Constitution and the laws enacted by Congress and the President actually meant what their texts said.  This required Scalia, and it should have required the Ginsburgs on the Court, to rule on what the laws said, not on what the Justices might have wanted the laws to say.

But that’s anathema to current professors, who insist that the law should say what the judge wants it to say, consistent with that judge’s (especially a Liberal judge’s) personal social agenda and sense of justice.

Never mind that it’s the citizens of the United States whose social agenda is the only legitimate agenda, never mind that justice is what the citizens of the United States say it is, through our elected representatives.  For these Liberals, we citizens don’t know what we’re doing, and we need to be overruled by our Know Betters.  Like professors.

Schooling

Recently, some $35 million was raised to support private schooling, in particular Success Academy charter schools.  Naturally, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, thinks this is a terrible idea, an assault.

[It’s] part of a coordinated national effort to decimate public schooling.  Wealthy donors and their political allies [are] pushing unaccountable charter growth in urban centers while stripping communities of a voice in their children’s education.

She’s wrong about the effort to decimate, even if what passes for schooling in the teachers unions’ public schools warrants it.

The unaccountable charter growth in one sense is entirely accountable: it’s due precisely to the failure of the public schools to actually educate our children.

In another sense, Weingarten is being utterly disingenuous with her unaccountable charter growth calumny.  The schools that are stripping—have stripped—communities (and parents, which persons she carefully elided) of their voice are those union-controlled public schools.

Irrationality or Censorship?

Many of you have heard that George Mason University in Virginia is moving to rename its law school after the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.  This, of course, has Democrats, especially those in the Virginia legislature, up in arms.

Delegate Marcus Simon (D) has even gone this far in his objection:

This is a big, in-your-face kind of a move…and trying to shape their young minds and train them in the Scalia way of thinking.  That’s troubling to me.

Because teaching law students the importance of our Constitution to our legal system and to our society is troubling to this…Democrat.  Because teaching law students the importance of the text and origin of our Constitution is troubling to this…Democrat.

Because teaching students to think differently from the Left’s approved paradigm is troubling to this…Democrat.

How irrational can Democrats get in their censorship of thinking?

Elections have consequences.

“Long-Lasting Effects of Socialist Education”

That’s the title of a paper published at the end of last year by Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln of Goethe University Frankfurt and Paolo Masella of the University of Sussex.

Here’s the abstract:

Political regimes influence contents of education and criteria used to select and evaluate students.  We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree and on several labor market outcomes by exploiting the reorganization of the school system in East Germany after reunification.  Our identification strategy utilizes cut-off birth dates for school enrollment that lead to variation in the length of exposure to the socialist education system within the same birth cohort.  An additional year of socialist education decreases the probability of obtaining a college degree and affects longer-term male labor market outcomes.

And yet, we’re getting just that sort of leftist “education” in our secondary schools, colleges, and universities.

Hmm….

 

h/t AEIdeas