Tag Archives: education

Another Progressive-Democrat Foolish Lawsuit

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Blue State AGs don’t like President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order imposing a $100,000 fee on H1B visa applicants.

A group of Democratic state attorneys general on Friday filed a challenge to President Donald Trump’s imposition of a $100,000 fee to apply for an H-1B visa.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, lead AG on the case, based it on this:

Oregon’s colleges, universities and research institutions rely on skilled international workers to keep labs running, courses on track and innovation moving forward. This enormous fee would make it nearly impossible for these institutions to hire the experts they need, and it goes far beyond what Congress ever intended. This threatens Oregon’s ability to compete, educate, and grow.

It may make colleges, universities, and research institutions efforts to hire certain skilled workers more difficult. That, though, is a business model question, not a legal one. No enterprise has an inherent right to pursue the business model of its choice, and government has no obligation whatsoever, to comport laws or regulations to the requirements of any business model. Those entities must alter their business models to accommodate changing legal environments, just as they must with changing market environments.

The only thing threatening [Oregon’s] ability to compete, educate, and grow is those institutions’ insistence on their entrenched models as they are, rather than adapting them. The question of whether the EO goes beyond Congressional intent is a separate matter, and the AGs’ claim of that is wholly conclusory.

This frivolous and foolish lawsuit is just another instantiation of Party’s dislike of all things Trump, independent of merit or lack regarding a Trump move.

Academic Hysteria

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Texas Tech University’s Chancellor has published a decision tree/flow chart regarding the inclusion or exclusion of advocacy/promotion of race or sex-based prejudice in the courses the university teaches, and the ideologs in the professorial population are in an uproar. The decision tree (see the link) clearly reins in the heretofore unfettered professors’ ability to “teach” whatever ideology they felt like and requires them, instead, to show the relevance of their material, first to the course and second to the purpose of the course.

The reaction of the ideologs in that population is hysterical. Andrew Martin, Texas Tech Professor of Drawing and Painting, for instance (although, to be sure, at least he has the integrity to go on the record with his concerns):

This is disastrous. History is full of examples of what happens when authoritarian governments gain control of the educational institutions of a country or a society. That is the death of freedom.

No, today’s examples, rather, center on the results of one-sided, extremist control of education. The Chancellor’s move is a restoration of balance and of a focus on actual education.

Martin’s hysteria continued with this bit:

[I]f I welcome a student, whose identity is controversial, to my classroom, and they make work about that identity, is that advocacy? Does that mean I’m subject to disciplinary action?

The decision tree plainly deals only with what the professor professes; there is no mention of what the students do in his classroom. In Martin’s own example, his concern should be with technique and symbolism in the student’s art effort, not with the professor’s approval or disapproval of the art’s content. That’s clear to anyone not overcome with hysteria over being reined in and returned to a focus on the material he’s hired to teach.

College and Basic Arithmetic

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As Allysia Finley noted in her Wall Street Journal op-ed,

Kids in elementary school learn—or are supposed to learn—how to add fractions and round numbers. But many students at the University of California, San Diego—a top public university ranked sixth nationally by US News & World Report—can’t do either, according to a new analysis from the university. Read, and weep for the future of America.
Roughly one in eight freshmen lack rudimentary high-school math skills, defined as geometry, algebra, and algebra 2. It gets worse: students who had been placed in a remedial high-school math class in 2023 had roughly fifth-grade-level abilities. Only 39% could correctly round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred—a third-grade skill.

The absolutely wrong answer is what UCSD is doing—setting up its own remedial arithmetic classes for its entering freshmen.

No.

Colleges/universities are not places for remedial education. They’re places in which to extend legitimate high school education. The managers of the so-called higher education institutions need to take two steps to reinstall that purpose and capability.

The first is to reject from admission who cannot do proper math—at the very least geometry (including executing proofs) and trigonometry, and then basic differential and integral calculus (Finley accurately described the current nominal requirement, but it’s much too light: algebra is a junior high level of arithmetic)—and dismiss those mistakenly admitted. One way to reduce the latter is to go beyond SAT and ACT scoring, which have dumbed down their math sections, and administer their own mathematics tests, emphasizing geometry, trigonometry, and calculus.

The other step is to start tracking high schools whose applicants cannot do that basic math, and simply reject out of hand applicants from those high schools that have not taught math to that basic level. Those high school administrators will have demonstrated that they do not take education seriously, and so their schools are not worth the trouble of consideration.

Campus Extremism

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Robert George, multiply-titled Professor at Princeton University, had some thoughts on how to deal with this.

So what should we do? The answer isn’t complicated, but acting on it will take determination and courage. Colleges and universities must return to offering a rigorous liberal arts education that refuses to engage in indoctrination and challenges groupthink. College courses must actively cultivate the virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, analytical rigor, and above all, dedication to the pursuit of truth.

He added this:

This might seem like an unattainable ideal, but it isn’t. I’ve seen firsthand that it’s possible. Twenty-five years ago, Princeton University authorized me to establish and direct a program in civic education dedicated to helping young men and women become determined truth seekers, courageous truth speakers, lifelong learners, and responsible citizens.

He succeeded in his small world, and he cited a number of examples at other schools. But these are anecdotes, not a general trend of success. At many of the other schools he touted, antisemitic and terrorist-supporting riots mostly peaceful protests seized buildings and common grounds, vandalized the buildings and generally prevented the sort of free-exchange of ideas George touted. Those destructive disruptions occurred while school managers meekly watched and many of the schools’ professors participated in the disruptions.

No. The only way to achieve George’s ideal, extremely worthy that it is, is to remove from schools those school administrators and professors, whether ideologues or simply too timid to oppose ideology over education. Both kinds are worthless wastes of payroll.

The detritus must be removed before cleanup can begin.

Religious Bigotry

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West Virginia had a requirement that all school students get vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus (my term, not the State’s), regardless of religious views regarding vaccines or how the vaccines are structured or made or from any other religious perspective. The State permitted no religious opt-outs at all. Raleigh County Circuit Judge Michael Froble waved the BS flag at that requirement and has ruled that parents can, indeed, opt their children out of the vaccination program based on their religious beliefs.

The larger question is why a lawsuit and judicial ruling was needed in the first place.

Is the State’s bar of religious exemption demonstrative of religious bigotry by the relevant State officials? Not necessarily. Some religion-based objections aren’t actually based on religion, but those false assertions are quite rare. It is strongly suggestive of officials’ religious bigotry, though.