Category Archives: Education

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

College Graduates

…don’t know much about the Constitution.

What a mess. This is shameful. They should be learning those sorts of things in high school. But instead, they’re propagandized about how we’re destroying the planet and how the US is the worst country in the history of humanity.

[Update a while later]

Related: Six questions you should ask about your children’s school:

If you want your child to grow up to be an independent thinker and a leader, take a look at the curriculum with this question in mind: Is your child being taught to learn in an objective fashion, or play political ball in a bureaucratic system?

If it’s a public school, it’s most likely the latter.

Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

For Incoming And Returning College Students

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Ashe Schow has a warning:

Students, especially male students, need to stop viewing sex merely as pleasure or as an expression of affection or love, and begin seeing it as a potentially life-ruining moment. And as someone who has never advocated abstinence, that is a painful thing to have to say.

The situation has gotten so bad that one parents’ group has begun distributing flyers on California campuses warning students of how easy it is to be accused and expelled.

The reality of it is this: There is little trust anymore between the sexes. Women are being told that men, especially men they believe are their friends, are waiting to get them drunk and rape them. This in turn is leading men to believe that women are going to accuse them of sexual assault for just about any reason, even for consensual sexual encounters.

I’m glad I’m not attending college these days.

[Update a few minutes later]

Defining deviancy up: Remarks about physical appearance now constitute “sexual violence.”

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Timothy Hunt Witch Hunt

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I don’t think I’ve ever commented on this, but almost three months later, it’s pretty clear now what happened, and there’s a good description over at Commentary. His treatment was shameful:

Like most of the science journalists who covered Hunt’s solecism, Zadrozny and Ferguson were content to rely on a handful of tweets as the only evidence in an obviously controversial story. Sadly, the Hunt affair provides ample ammunition for those who believe Internet reporters are a tribe of third-raters with little or no ethical standards or training in Journalism 101.

But there’s another explanation for the fact that reporters such as Zadrozny and Ferguson felt no obligation to verify the facts of the case or do any old-fashioned reporting. In their cases, the temptation to cut journalistic corners may have been overwhelming. That’s because for anyone with an ax to grind about gender equality or sexism in science, this was one of those stories that the tabloids used to label (jestingly for the most part) “too good to check.”

Kudos to Louise Mensch on exposing this initially. I’d also note that my respect for Deborah Blum has plummeted.

[Update a few minutes later]

And then there’s this burn:

The most generous interpretation of Connie St. Louis’s bizarre behavior is that she was too intellectually limited to recognize irony that was somehow obvious to an audience composed mostly of people who spoke English as a second language. A leak of the unedited version of her “Stop Defending Tim Hunt” piece for the Guardian is so garbled and incoherent that this actually seems plausible, though it also makes you wonder how and why she came to be teaching journalism even at a third-rate institution like London’s City University.

The science journalism community has not covered themselves in glory here.

[Update a few minutes later]

Then there’s this:

One of the more depressing aspects of the affair has been the number of clever and influential people, not all of them women, who have stated that even if Hunt was joking, he still deserved to be punished. These people genuinely believe that jokes about alleged differences between the sexes are beyond the pale—the cause of anti-sexism, like that of anti-racism, being simply too important or too fragile to tolerate subversive humor.

This “even if they’re innocent they deserve to be punished attitude” is not a new one. Christina Hoff Sommers documented it in her book in the nineties, in which in 1991, Catherine Comins at Vassar (who, sadly, may be a childhood friend of mine, though I’ve never seen a bio) said: “Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience.”

Business, Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Punching Back Twice As Hard On Campus

Instapundit has some good advice for a fraternity under siege:

(1) Immediately complain to the Department of Education and the Department of Justice that you’re being targeted because of your race and sex, and denied your First Amendment rights. No, nothing will come of this, but that’s not the point. The process is the punishment. (2) Sue on the same grounds. (3) The real killer: Go to the Virginia Legislature and tell them they should cut Old Dominion’s budget. Come prepared with figures on the number of administrators on campus now, versus 10 and 20 years ago. File freedom of information requests and get the travel expense figures for the folks in the administration. Look over them for suspicious and large expenditures. (You’ll find them!) Make a big stink about those.

Administrative bloat leads to large numbers of “student life” educrats without enough to do, so they’ve created a quasi-police-state to fill the time. State legislators are looking for things to cut anyway, and higher ed doesn’t have the clout it used to have. This will hurt them more than anything else you can do.

I would love to see that happen.

Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Campus Sexual Assault

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The policy continues its descent into madness in California:

A student found responsible for campus sexual assault is often branded a rapist in local (and often national) media, his transcript is forever marked and his reputation is forever tarnished. And let’s not forget that a finding of responsibility can be achieved on nothing more than an accusation, with exculpatory evidence and witnesses ignored and a complete lack of due process.

An expulsion with a mark on the transcript could keep him from continuing his education. When accused students have been suspended and allowed to return to campus, outrage has sometimes ensued. Colleges are now being pressured simply to expel. Expelled students — again, expelled based on nothing more than an accusation — find it nearly impossible to transfer to another school. Their education is halted, and if they can’t afford an attorney to sue the university for wrongful expulsion, their lives are put on hold.

As one male student told Buzzfeed: “At first I thought they didn’t want me to participate in campus activities. Then I thought they didn’t want me to graduate. Now they don’t want me to have a job or be part of society. Do they want me to commit suicide? Is that what they want me to do? What is the endgame?”

We need some lawsuits over this. If I had a son, I wouldn’t let him attend school in the state.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The State Of Higher Education

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It’s awful. Who is to blame?

And here we arrive at a way to thread this needle of collective criticism. The one thing that Deresiewicz, Lukianoff, Haidt and McArdle all agree on, surprisingly enough, is that higher education should be a non-market institution. The point of college is not merely to cater to consumer demands, whether one defines the consumers as “college students” or “the firms that will eventually hire those college students.” A vital function of universities is to convert young people into thinkers who can critically analyze the very society that they are about to join. But when people are ponying up vast sums of money to attend these places, it becomes more difficult for college administrations to ignore the whims of their students.

Cut off the spigot. If people were really spending their own money, and couldn’t borrow it foolishly at below-market rates, much of this problem would go away. Of course, so would many universities and university departments. But it’s not clear that would be a bad thing.

Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A Perfect Feminist Storm

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I’ve joked for years that I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, but someone should seriously do this to make their heads explode:

In the Perfect Storm scenario, the ex-boyfriend, when called before the tribunal, refuses to bow down. He does not beg for a lawyer. He does not offer pathetic, chauvinistic attacks against his victimized accuser. He does not beg for mercy.

Instead, the accused ex-boyfriend claims that the charge against him cannot possibly be true. The reality, he says, is that during the time he was dating his accuser, his gender identity was feminine. Not only was his gender identity feminine, it was also lesbian — and to the extent his appearance on campus was externally masculine, he behaved that way because he had discovered that he had much greater sexual success as a lesbian (with sexual success defined as encounters with other women) when those same women believed he was a man. He knew, however, at all relevant times, that he was a lesbian having sex with the woman now hiding behind a screen and accusing him of the heteronormative crime of rape.

Not only does the accused ex-lesbian boyfriend deny the charges against him, he counterattacks.

It would deliciously highlight the contradictions of the fascist SJWs.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Sheltered Students

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…go to college to avoid education:

Why is this happening now? How did colleges manage to guide generations of students through offense and outrage, only to founder at the dawn of the 21st century? Haidt and Lukianoff offer some plausible candidates: the increasingly sheltered lives that middle-class children now live, and expect colleges to sustain.”In a variety of ways,” they write, “children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.” Too, partisanship is higher, and angrier, than it was when I was in college. And today’s students, who live in a world where social media make it easy to launch crusades, may have stronger tendencies in this direction than my generation. (Once upon a time, an offense had to be outrageous enough for people to go to the trouble of exchanging phone numbers, attending meetings and printing fliers.)

There’s also a regulatory component: Under Obama, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has broadened the definition for what constitutes offensive speech. Colleges tremble in fear of lawsuits or visits from regulators, and they send legions of administrators forth to head off any threat by appeasing angry students and making new rules.

But here’s a candidate Haidt and Lukianoff don’t mention: the steady shift toward viewing college as a consumer experience, rather than an institution that is there to shape you toward its own ideal. I don’t want to claim that colleges used to be idylls in which the deans never worried about collecting tuition checks; colleges have always worried about attracting enough students. But cultural and economic shifts have pushed students toward behaving more like consumers in a straight commercial transaction, and less like people who were being inducted into a non-market institution.

Yes. The student-loan program has become a huge disaster.

The Lukianoff-Haidt piece she refers to is here:

There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.

But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.

I think we’re seeing a lot of that.