Category Archives: ethics

I Want My…Maypo

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Late in the Biden administration, as the lede notes,

Documents obtained by The Free Press from the Environmental Protection Agency reveal that, despite handing out $20 billion in grants to eight nonprofits just before President Donald Trump took office, the federal employees who reviewed grant applications had concerns about high salaries, conflicts of interest, and oversight of taxpayer money.

After he was confirmed to the office, EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin

called for a Department of Justice investigation and had the money, most of which resided in 129 Citibank accounts, frozen.

Naturally, the NGOs are suing, because they want their filch fruits restored. Just to be sure, they’re also suing Citibank, whose since the freezing has been nothing but obeying a government directive, which they have to do unless and until a court overturns the directive.

Never mind that the staffers expressed, in writing as part of their reviews of the grants during the application process, concerns about excessive-seeming pay for NGO executives; NGOs’ cost claims that had no explanation, much less rationale, for them; or apparent lack of oversight planning.

It’s illustrative of these NGOs’ entitlement mentality that they think they should have the money just because they want it. It’s also one more reason for the necessity of taking several machetes to the jungle undergrowth of Federal government spending.

Five Thoughts on Five Takeaways

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The Wall Street Journal interviewed Harvard University President Alan Garber and published “Five Takeaways.” I have five thoughts….

Students at Harvard no longer feel comfortable disagreeing
Upon returning to Harvard as provost in 2011, Garber noticed the spirit of healthy disagreement from his undergraduate days had disappeared. It is something he said concerns him and his colleagues. “Students today find it much harder to have conversations with one another about difficult subjects, particularly with someone they don’t know well with whom they might disagree,” Garber said. “And to me that is a big loss.”

And yet, in all those years he’s chosen to do nothing substantive about any of that. It’s only necessary to see the anti-Jewish and pro-Hamas terrorist physical attacks on Jewish students, protest “encampments” on University quadrangles with associated interference with Jewish students trying to get to class, and above all, his failure to address in any meaningful way those perpetrators and their faculty enablers and encouragers—expulsion of all of the student misbehavers and firing of those misbehaving faculty. He’s done a very few token expulsions while explicitly excusing the vast majority of campers from consequence, and he’s spoken stern words to some of his faculty and masqueraded those as serious moves.

The university wants more diverse viewpoints on its faculty
Garber knows the university has a perception problem with the general public…. …Garber said, “I really understand the resentment that people can feel when they think their problems are not taken seriously enough. That’s something we absolutely must address.”
… “Part of what we need to do is make sure that in the classroom and in other settings, we promote the idea that it doesn’t matter what your personal views are, you need to teach in a way that is fair to multiple points of view,” he said. “And furthermore, you need to enable students to speak up when they have a perspective that is different from the mainstream.”

It’s not perception, it’s fact; this is more Garber downplaying. The rest is empty words. He’s done no substantive hiring, and the nakedly biased teaching and limits on students’ ability to speak differing viewpoints and opinions remain—as he confessed just above.

Antisemitism at Harvard predates Oct. 7, 2023
Garber said he had hints that Harvard had an antisemitism problem but that it hit home for him when he met with Jewish students just after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Two lengthy reports Harvard put out last month detailed the history of antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus, acknowledging longstanding problems.

Here, too, despite knowing of the antisemitic bigots present at Harvard, he’s chosen to do nothing about them. The two “reports” are nothing more than his administration’s moral equivalence sewage, downplaying the real violence perpetrated on Jewish students while exaggerating anti-Muslim bigotry, which is both rare and nonviolent.

Columbia’s actions didn’t influence Harvard’s
Saying that he doesn’t have firsthand knowledge of Columbia’s negotiations, he said: “What I have heard from other people in colleges and universities is that Columbia had still not resolved their issues with the federal government after many weeks of negotiations.[“]

Here he is, relying on hearsay rather than direct knowledge that would come from directly asking the Columbia President. On the other hand, neither has Harvard resolved its issues. His suit is illustrative of his refusal to try.

More is at stake than winning a lawsuit
Federal funding “is not a gift,” [Garber] said, but money that Harvard uses to fulfill national scientific and other priorities.

It is, absolutely, a gift. The government has no obligation to send our taxpayer dollars to the school, and the school has no intrinsic right to it. Our taxpayer dollars are a government donation, nothing more and nothing less. Garber’s claim that Harvard uses the money for national purposes is wholly irrelevant to that fundamental fact; his claim is just more cynical obfuscation.

Another Privileged University Entity?

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The subheadline says it all.

Members of Kappa Alpha Theta, one of the country’s oldest sororities, are fighting for their chosen philanthropy to get its federal funding back

“Their” Federal funding isn’t theirs, or their charity’s, at all. It’s our money, which our elected representatives are pleased to send to them. This is the entitlement attitude of far too many entities associated with our higher education institutions.

According to an April 23 statement by CASA/GAL [KAT’s charity partner], the organization lost its funding because its work did not uphold the department’s new priorities.

That’s reason enough to stop the taxpayer dollar transfers. Donors get to call the shots on how their donations get used, and if the recipient doesn’t want to align, the donations should stop. That includes the Federal government with our money.

Privileged or entitled—or both. It needs to stop, and one way to do that is to withdraw our tax dollars from these spoiled Precious Ones.

Still too many Leakers

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Here’s the lede and second paragraph:

The US is stepping up its intelligence-gathering efforts regarding Greenland, drawing America’s spying apparatus into President Trump’s campaign to take over the island, according to two people familiar with the effort.
Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.

This was a classified message.

There is no excuse for blatting about to other nations our national security efforts, efforts that must by their nature be secretive. These are two persons who must be tracked down, fired for cause, and investigated for the potentially criminal nature of their “leaks” and for their mishandling of classified document(s).

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.