Tag Archives: education

Safe Spaces and Timidity

Posted on by
Reply

Antonia Okofor is an advocate for empowering women, and she argues that the 2nd Amendment is a valuable tool in the empowerment.

She was scheduled to speak at two Liberal (note: not Liberal Arts—they’ve long ago lost that breadth) colleges, Hampshire College and Mount Holyoke.

Hampshire College canceled Okofor’s engagement on short notice—two hours’ notice—claiming that her speech was “too controversial.”  Then the place thought better of its excuse and claimed the trivial technicality of a student application not being complete as the premise for canceling.  This is nonsense: if that had been the reason, school management would have said so in the first place.  On the other hand, the lack of dotted i’s and crossed t’s would have been just as indefensible as an excuse.  This is fear, instead, fear of a better argument.

Mount Holyoke “allowed” Okofor’s speech to proceed, but here the pupils displayed their own timidity.  Their “angst” was centered on the horror of “the idea that women’s rights and safety is being linked with their right to bear arms.”  Empower women, sure, but only in terms of the power of others to protect them.  The Holyoke pupils’ solution was to set up a separate “safe space” where their own Precious Ones could go to hide from such uncomfortable subjects.

We feel that creating a deliberately separate space for conversation rather than holding a direct act of protest will be a more productive action for us without fueling the messaging of the Right.

Because actual participation would require determination and positive action.  Because actual participation would require the effort of rational thought and debate instead of the comfort of inchoate feelings and ducking away.

This is the pseudo-education that our children are getting at Liberal not-Arts places like these two.

Higher Education Improvement

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal has a summary of the House’s The Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity Through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act, to be proposed this week.  It’s aimed at

filling that gap [in college graduates’ skills, with 6 million jobs left begging] by both deregulating parts of the sector and laying the conditions for shorter, faster pathways to the workforce. The act focuses on ensuring students don’t just enroll in school, but actually graduate with skills that the labor market is seeking.

Highlights include these:

  • revamp of the $1.34 trillion federal student loan program
    • graduate students and parents of undergraduates would have overall caps on tuition and living expense loans, instead of borrowing whatever schools charge.
    • end loan-forgiveness programs for public-service employees
    • eliminate a program that ties monthly payments to income levels for private-sector workers.
  • community colleges would get more funding to team with the private sector and create or expand apprenticeships and learn and earn programs
  • for-profit college sector would be on equal footing with nonprofit schools regarding limits on federal aid and measurements of graduate success: overall, competency-based education
  • functional repeal of the gainful employment regulation, which ties access to federal student aid to whether career programs lead to decent-paying jobs. Government will no longer be the decider of what jobs are suitable; the graduate and employer will.
  • increased accountability of schools by improving the quality of information available to prospective students
  • “historically black” and developing Hispanic schools would have to provably graduate or transfer at least 25% of their students in order to get funding from the pile otherwise earmarked for these schools
  • require schools to pay back some portion of federal loans if the student didn’t rather than leaving the schools strictly as loan generators that get the proceeds from the loans without regard to suitability or outcome.

All in all, this could represent a major improvement to our higher community college/college/university education system, especially in its core: graduates’ employability and the costs incurred (and by whom) in achieving that employability.

Naturally, the colleges and universities, whose funding oxen are going to get gored, will squawk.  Ignore them, and move past the dinosaurs and vested interests.

Cornell Professors

Posted on by
Reply

…apparently support racism and racist stereotyping.

Recall that George Ciccariello-Maher, Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University, routinely says it’s whiteness, white victimization, all things white that are at fault for mass shootings and violence generally. For instance, this in an interview with Democracy Now!

Whiteness is never seen as a cause, in and of itself, of these kinds of massacres despite the fact that whiteness is a structure of privilege and it’s a structure of power, and a structure that, when it feels threatened, you know, lashes out.

What makes white men so prone to this kind of behavior?

And his tweet a year ago, All I want for Christmas is white genocide.

Cornell University’s professoriate demurred from Drexel’s decision to discipline Ciccariello-Maher ever so lightly (he’s on paid vacation leave) for his inflammatory and racist remarks (over Twitter proximately), wherein he blamed white victimization (and, of course, “Trumpism”) for the Las Vegas mass murder.

Seventy professors signed a letter on Wednesday protesting the university’s decision to take disciplinary action against George Ciccariello-Maher, saying it infringes upon academic freedoms, reported The Cornell Daily Sun.

Of course they do.  It’s entirely appropriate for college professors to “stereotype” groups of Americans of whom they disapprove.

Never minding that their favored groups of Americans became favored through precisely that “stereotyping.”

And Cornell, the school, is silent about it.

Hmm….

Frightening the Snowflakes

Posted on by
Reply

It seems a Cambridge University professor had the effrontery to warn new students of a class of his—Physical Sciences—that life is hard and that it’s harder when you’re stupid.  For instance, this in an email that he sent to his incoming students:

Remember that you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a ‘good time’—and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern is possible or acceptable.

Oh, the wailing and bodice rending that resulted.

Student Minds Cambridge, a “mental health” activist group:

We are very concerned that this could be extremely damaging to the mental well-being of the students concerned, and potentially others as well.

And a Vice-Chancellor of nearby Buckingham University, Anthony Seldon (late of Cambridge):

Frightening impressionable undergraduates into believing that work alone is all-important is irresponsible, unkind and wrong-headed[.]

Wow.

On the contrary, what’s damaging to incoming university students, what stunts their mental development, what’s frightening regarding “impressionable undergraduates” is coddling them, rewarding them for their precious snowflake-ness, and thereby trapping them in a sense of victimhood, instead of confronting them with the difficulties of serious learning, the sterner difficulties of life in the real world, and teaching them how to cope—and especially that they can actually cope.

College Entrance Criteria

Posted on by
Reply

In an op-ed nominally centered on the failure of affirmative action in college admissions, John Katzman (o Noodle CEO and Princeton Review and 2U founder) and Steve Cohen (co-author of Getting In! The Zinch Guide to College Admissions & Financial Aid in the Digital Age) wrote this.

But the work of admissions officers is more complicated than finding the highest test scores. …. They want to put together an incoming freshman class that has aspiring journalists for the school newspaper, great athletes for all the teams, debaters, musicians, actors, dancers, legacies, and development prospects.

No, the work of admissions officers isn’t more complicated than finding the highest test scores. The added “goals” are just artificial complexification for the purpose of justifying admissions officers’ jobs and high salaries. Even the the authors’ jibe of “finding the highest test scores” is a cynical distortion. The task for quality schools is to find the the most academically capable entering freshmen and the freshmen with the best academic fit for the school’s expertise.

The school’s admissions goals most assuredly are not to fill a quota for the school paper or marching band or the semi-pro sports team or whatever else makes the deans feel good.