Category Archives: Education

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

The University Of California

4 Comments

…goes full fascist:

Alumni of the UC system should immediately cease wasting their charitable dollars on such an anti-intellectual, fascist institution. And any intelligent young person should avoid it like the plague. The system has clearly been captured by individuals with micro-brains possessing micro-tolerance and micro-confidence.

It’s fascinating to sit back and watch the academy destroy itself. Unfortunately, it’s also tragic, and destroying millions of young peoples’ lives, with taxpayer dollars.

[Update a while later]

“The Left’s “microaggressions” are a sign of their micro-totalitarian tendencies.”

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Camille Paglia

10 Comments

An interesting interview:

Next was the argument over hormones. Again, screaming argument over hormones. I was told by the founding members of the Women’s Studies Department at the State University of New York at Albany that I had been brainwashed by male scientists to believe that hormones even existed, much less had any role in the shaping of our identity and character.

So I was banned from the women’s movement from the start, but I kept going on. I was pro-pornography, pro-prostitution on libertarian grounds. For years, my wing of feminism—which had been silenced and ostracized by the Steinem wing, the establishment wing, partisans of the Democratic party, my party, but nevertheless, I don’t feel that feminism should be subordinated to any party—finally, we rose in the ’90s and the pro-sex wing of feminism won in the ’90s thanks to Madonna having changed the culture.

…If you’re going to be a woman president, she must communicate strength, reserve, and yet compassion. That formula—I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for it. The only person in America who’s had it as far as I’m concerned was Dianne Feinstein, and she didn’t put herself forward for whatever reason as president.

But Hillary does not have it. Hillary is a mess. And we’re going to award the presidency to a woman who’s enabled the depredations and exploitation of women by that cornpone husband of hers? The way feminists have spoken makes us blind to Hillary’s record of trashing [women]. They were going to try to destroy Monica Lewinsky. It’s a scandal! Anyone who believes in sexual harassment guidelines should have seen that the disparity of power between [Bill] Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was one of the most grotesque ever in the history of sex crime. He’s a sex criminal! We’re going to put that guy back in the White House? Hillary’s ridden on his coattails. This is not a woman who has made her own career. The woman failed the bar exam in Washington! The only reason she went to Arkansas and got a job in the Rose Law Firm was because her husband was a politician.

And then there’s this:

I’m happy that this talk about medical sex changes was not in the air, because I would have become obsessed with that and assumed that that was my entire identity and problem. This is why I’m very concerned about the rush to surgical interventions today.

At any rate, I was attracted to men—I dated men—but I just fell in love with women and always have. Yes, there’s absolutely no doubt: I was on the forefront of gay identification. When I arrived at graduate school at Yale, 1968–1972, I was the only openly gay person, and I didn’t even have a sex life. To me, it was a badge of militance. And I was the only person doing a dissertation on a sexual topic. It’s hard to believe this now.

I’m sorry, but isn’t it blindingly obvious that if you’re attracted to men, and also attracted to women, that you are not gay, but bi? I wonder how she’d respond to this question.

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

White Is The New Black?

13 Comments

Some thoughts on race and affirmative action:

If gender is merely a matter of self-identification, should not race be also? I have always thought that, given the affirmative action-laden higher education admissions process, applicants should self-identify as “black” or “Native American” whenever they so desire. I mean, why not? If they feel black or Native American, should not they be able to claim such an identity, as Rachel Dolezal has done? Doing so would quickly cause affirmative action to collapse of its own ridiculous weight.

Indeed, all of this race balkanization–with such extreme emphasis as belonging to this or that race–only further divides us, as race baiters like Al Sharpton well know. So why not accept the progressives’ terms of the debate–that our gender and race is all simply a matter of self-identity–and identify as a member of races that are favored/more protected by law? After all, no one can ever really know what lies in another’s heart. Does Bruce Jenner sincerely believe he is a female, or does he simply like to dress up in women’s clothes? Does Rachel Dolezal sincerely believe she is black? No one can possibly know the answer, perhaps not even Mr./Ms. Jenner and Ms. Dolezal.

What would a university do if an applicant self-identified as “black” on an application but showed up looking “white”? And if the university made such a judgment, what on earth would that mean? How would the university defend its belief that a student didn’t “look” black? What sort of bizarre racial stereotypes would it rely upon in making such an appearance-based judgment? And if the university actually decided to take action against the student for racial misrepresentation, what on earth would that mean? How would the university judge whether the student was really “black”? What percentage of blood would suffice for such a progressive institution? Fifty percent? Ten percent? One percent?

For decades I’ve been saying that “white” people should put down “black” on racial quiz forms, and defy anyone to prove them wrong. Race is, after all, a social construct.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Tulip Subsidies

5 Comments

A parable:

Higher education is in a bubble much like the old tulip bubble. In the past forty years, the price of college has dectupled (quadrupled when adjusting for inflation). It used to be easy to pay for college with a summer job; now it is impossible. At the same time, the unemployment rate of people without college degrees is twice that of people who have them. Things are clearly very bad and Senator Sanders is right to be concerned.

But, well, when we require doctors to get a college degree before they can go to medical school, we’re throwing out a mere $5 billion, barely enough to house all the homeless people in the country. But Senator Sanders admits that his plan would cost $70 billion per year. That’s about the size of the entire economy of Hawaii. It’s enough to give $2000 every year to every American in poverty.

At what point do we say “Actually, no, let’s not do that, and just let people hold basic jobs even if they don’t cough up a a hundred thousand dollars from somewhere to get a degree in Medieval History”?

I’m afraid that Sanders’ plan is a lot like the tulip subsidy idea that started off this post. It would subsidize the continuation of a useless tradition that has turned into a speculation bubble, prevent the bubble from ever popping, and disincentivize people from figuring out a way to route around the problem, eg replacing the tulips with daffodils.

(yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let’s be honest – if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally for non-economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to get a degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting can be done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)

If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care.

Never happen. It makes too much sense.

[Afternoon update]

“College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one“:

A college education, then, if it is a commodity, is no car. The courses the student decides to take (and not take), the amount of work the student does, the intellectual curiosity the student exhibits, her participation in class, his focus and determination — all contribute far more to her educational “outcome” than the college’s overall curriculum, much less its amenities and social life. Yet most public discussion of higher ed today pretends that students simply receive their education from colleges the way a person walks out of Best Buy with a television.

The results of this kind of thinking are pernicious. Governors and legislators, as well as the media, treat colleges as purveyors of goods, students as consumers and degrees as products. Students get the message. If colleges are responsible for outcomes, then students can feel entitled to classes that do not push them too hard, to high grades and to material that does not challenge their assumptions or make them uncomfortable. Hence colleges too often cater to student demands for trigger warnings, “safe rooms,” and canceled commencement speakers. When rating colleges, as everyone from the president to weekly magazines insist on doing nowadays, people use performance measures such as graduation rates and time to degree as though those figures depended entirely upon the colleges and not at all upon the students.

What a government-driven disaster.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

First They Came For The Male Athletes

4 Comments

“…and I said nothing, because women deserve to play sports, too. Then they came for the frat boys, and I not only said nothing, I cheered it on, because frat boys are the scum of the earth. Then they came after men in general, and I said nothing, because they need to understand the fear women have of rape, and to fear engaging in sex.

Then, oh, wait. Holy s**t, they’re coming after me!”

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

We’re In The Midst Of A College Revolution

1 Comment

…and the “liberals” are leading it:

At this point I have to ask: Where has Schlosser been the past year? He talks about the erosion of professors’ abilities to teach their students topics that may challenge their worldview. But how has he missed that liberal politicians have already adopted the position that an accusation is all the evidence one needs?

California passed “yes means yes” last year, a law that makes it far easier to accuse someone of sexual assault and provides no due process rights to those accused. States across the country have introduced similar bills. U.S. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill are pushing for a national law that also erodes due process rights.

And the same people pushing for trigger warnings and safe spaces are pushing the “terrifying” policy that accusations equal guilt.

It’s great that Schlosser and others have finally realized the problems on college campuses, but they still have a lot to learn.

Yes, they don’t realize that they created this monster.

[Update a few minutes later]

The lowest-paid and least secure in the system are adjuncts.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonathan Chait: The liberal backlash against campus PC is in full swing.

Josh Marshall is unimpressed, too:

In other words, Kipnis wrote a sharp-tongued, one-dimensional caricature of university sexual assault and trigger warning activists at Northwestern. And they turned around and proved her one-dimensional caricature 100% right.

Yup.

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

A Liberal College Professor

8 Comments

Afraid of his own students:

The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.

Does anyone really imagine that such an environment is conducive to actual education?

[Update a few minutes later]

Campus justice: punished until proven innocent:

But I’ll let Leiter argue with Weinberg about the case itself, because I want to take issue with this passage: “As I noted earlier, the Title IX investigation yielded no finding of retaliation against Kipnis. One can only imagine how disappointed she will be with this. It turns out that the process she had been demonizing—which of course may have its flaws—pretty much worked, from her point of view.”

I think this is deeply wrong, and for all that, it is not an uncommon sentiment. You often hear this sort of argument when people complain about the byzantine procedures that colleges use to adjudicate charges of a racial or sexual nature, or when they argue that we should always presumptively believe any rape accusation: “Well, if they didn’t do that, the system will figure it out eventually, so what’s the big deal?”

This ignores the fact that the process itself can become the punishment. Sexual assault, racial harassment and similar crimes are serious charges, that should be treated seriously. This makes being charged with such an offense a very big deal for the accused. The judicial process is time consuming, often confusing, and scary. The accused may need to pay for legal advice, even though they often aren’t allowed to take counsel into the system with them. Then there’s the worry of knowing that however crazy the charge sounds to you, the campus judicial process may have very different ideas.

It’s becoming Kafkaesqe.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Another campus-rape case falls apart. At this point, it’s appropriate to ask if there are any of these high-profile cases that aren’t false accusations and fraud.