Virginia Postrel has a column about Harvard’s bizarre PC loyalty oath:
Course registration versus niceness; success versus compassion; “attainment” versus kindness. Something is missing from all these dichotomies, and that something is the life of the mind.
Where in the list of ranked values are curiosity, discovery, reason, inquiry, skepticism or truth? (Were these values even options?) Where is critical thinking? No wonder the pledge talks about “attainment.” Attainment equals study cards and good grades — a transcript to enable the student to move on to the next stage. Attainment isn’t learning, questioning or criticizing. It’s getting your ticket punched.
Just one more sign of the decline of the academy, as costs continue to rise.
Students at Northern Arizona University had the police called on them by the administration for handing out American flags to commemorate 911:
The first administrator was followed by another administrator, who told the students that the university could use “time, place and manner” rules to determine that they were not allowed to pass out flags there without a permit. This administrator was followed by yet another administrator who claimed that the First Amendment meant “free speech in a designated time, place, and manner.”
That’s a reading of the First Amendment that only a bureaucrat could love. The Supreme Court has indeed determined that the government may enforce time, place and manner restrictions on expression, but these restrictions must be reasonable, content-neutral, narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest and must leave open ample alternative means of communication. So when the expression consists of a couple of people handing out flags while standing against the wall of a large room, one wonders what “governmental interest” is involved in telling students they can’t do so.
The fourth administrator to confront the students repeated “time, place and manner” four times when the students challenged her on how the university could stop its own students from standing around and passing out flags. After that, NAU called the cops. A police officer (who looked like she’d rather be somewhere else) came and took the names of the two remaining participants, saying that it wasn’t a legal matter but a university code of conduct matter.
Until Monday evening, when NAU most likely realized how bad punishing people for this was going to look, the students faced charges of “failure to comply with a university official” and “interfering with university activities.” The first charge only made sense if “Hey, you two, stop passing out flags to commemorate 9/11” is the sort of order you think university officials should be giving, while the second only made sense if “not observing the anniversary of 9/11” counts as a university activity.
These are the people who should be first to go when the bubble pops.
In Argentina, everyone acknowledges that fascism, state capitalism, corporatism – whatever – reflects very leftwing ideology. Eva Peron remains a liberal icon. President Obama’s Fabian policies (Keynesian economics) promise similar ends. His proposed infrastructure bank is just the latest gyration of corporatism. Why then are fascists consistently portrayed as conservatives?
Because the Left are always historical revisionists. They have to be to sucker the next generation of rubes.
As he says, it’s just basic physics. Unfortunately, not many people (and even fewer of the people actually running the country) understand basic physics. Or even basic economics.
Democrats furiously oppose Walker because public employees unions are transmission belts, conveying money to the Democratic Party. Last year, $11.2 million in union dues was withheld from paychecks of Wisconsin’s executive branch employees and $2.6 million from paychecks at the university across the lake. Having spent improvidently on the recall elections, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the teachers union, is firing 40 percent of its staff.
Progressives want to recall Walker next year. Republicans hope they try. Wisconsin seems weary of attempts to overturn elections, and surely Obama does not want his allies squandering political money and the public’s patience. Since 1960, no Democrat has been elected president without carrying Wisconsin.
Walker has refuted the left’s sustaining conviction that a leftward-clicking ratchet guarantees that liberalism’s advances are irreversible. Progressives, eager to discern a victory hidden in their recent failures, suggest that a chastened Walker will not risk further conservatism. Actually, however, his agenda includes another clash with teachers unions over accountability and school choice, and combat over tort reform with another cohort parasitic off bad public policies — trial lawyers.
These estimates of high lifetime earnings levels make a common error: They assume that the current generation is going to get the same financial benefit from college that people did who graduated 40 years ago.
But things are different today. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 70% of all high school graduates go on to college — compared with 45% in 1960.
Then, only the brightest and best-prepared students attended college and the schools offered academically rigorous courses that prepared students for the future.
Now even middling high-schoolers attend college — and often learn very little. Then they enter a job market where a bachelor’s degree is relatively common — and must compete against many others for the same jobs.
Overpriced and underperforming, combined with government subsidies: thus are bubbles made.