If you want to improve the state of “diversity, tolerance, inclusivity, equity and social justice” at the Univesity of Arizona, the local Commmision on the Status of Women (CSW) might just have a grant for you if they like your project proposal. Interested applicants should look here.
As I said here recently, whatever else you might think about “social justice,” it really seems to have the money.
In this press release, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education takes a look at New Jersey’s new “anti-bullying” Bil of Rights, and notes its possible threat to freedom of speech on college campuses. As FIRE President Greg Lukianoff comments, most of the attention the new law has garnered to date has focused on its K-12 impact. Its reach, however, will extend to higher education institutions as well, and if the law isn’t modified from its present form, you’re going to have to be careful what you say on campus.
As we noted recently, NAS holds no brief for genuine bullying, and we certainly won’t stand in the way if those engaged in it are dealt with appropriately.
But on the majority of college campuses, long under the heel of sensitivity training, sexual harassment enforcers and “tolerance” educators, we shudder to think what “ant-bullying”policies are in the works right now. If you read FIRE’s analysis, you’ll see that we’re right to worry.
In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I write about college and university trustees, and conclude that it would be a mistake to count on them to do much to steer their schools on a better path. I find illuminating the case of T. J. Rodgers. As a Dartmouth board member, he was stymied in his desire to improve educational quality at his school, but as a CEO, he could demand a board composed of people with expertise who would tell him when he was making a mistake.
Economic professor William Anderson is writing about Duke, but his observation applies to most universities — some professors take scholarly work seriously and others use their positions to beat the drums for their ideological causes. He goes back to the ugly lacrosse case and concludes with the recent uproar over a study showing that black students are apt to gravitate away from hard majors and into soft ones. Whether that’s true or not doesn’t matter. Feelings have been hurt and that trumps everything else.
That’s the title of this piece in today’s IHE, although I’ve turned it into a question because I can’t see where “social justice” in college curricula is such big news. We’ve been complaining about the inevitably “progressive” ideological slant in such courses and programs for some time, as you can see here and here, for example. Courses that aim to crank out student activists have been around for quite awhile.
If anything is new, though, it’s the establishment of entire programs and research centers that the IHE article describes, all devoted to imparting “social justice” in one way or another. They seem to be getting some pretty hefty support: At Michigan’s Kalamazoo College, for example, the new Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership just received a cool $23M to underwrite its efforts to change the world, complete with endowed professorships. Whatever “social justice” is, it’s certainly not poor.
Imagine what kind of Great Books program you could get going with even a quarter of that sum. Oh, well.
KC Johnson has a couple of pieces (see here and here) over at Minding the Campus, where he discusses the US Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights and its recently issued guidelines under which most college campuses must now adjudicate cases involving sexual harassment or sexual assault.
Both of those, as we noted, are serious matters, and genuine cases need to be treated as such. Our problem, however, was the elastic and ever-adaptable definitions of what constituted “harassment.” As KC observes, OCR’s new “guidelines” now stack an already slanted deck even more heavily against the accused. For all intents and purposes, it’s up to you to prove your innocence. And even if you do, well, that may not be sufficient to get you out of hot water. Read his account of the experience of Yale quarterback Patrick Witt if you want exhibit A for this week.
Unfortunately, the New York Times, unchastened by its deplorable handling of the Duke lacrosse case, seems more than eager to run with the ball for the Sexual Harassment Industry, no questions asked. If someone’s accused – especially an athlete – he must be guilty. Doesn’t sound much like investigative reporting, does it?
Believe me, I’ve learned not to ask if things can get any worse where this stuff is concerned.
In this EconLog post, George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan observes that the “college earnings premium” is said to be 34%, but that the “marriage premium” for men is substantially higher — 44%. So if it is good policy to promote college attendance and graduation because people will earn more, why not do the same for marriage? The “marriage premium” helps to show the silliness of the notion that just because someone does something (getting a college degree, getting married), he will therefore vault into a higher earnings bracket.
Read this piece in yesterday’s IHE, and see if you can believe it.
Apparently, a D of Ed statistical study was conducted to examine the impact of race as a factor in student loan default rate, and results were published accordingly. One small problem emerged inadvertantly last December however when, as part of the discovery process in litigation involving the department, it turned out that the study had omitted any data with regard to black students.
Now, let’s note slowly, carefully and specifically what happened here: 1) the US Department of Education conducted a survey in which it sought to demonstrate the impact of race on repayment rates of student loans and 2) it reached its conclusions without including any figures about black students in the analysis. I think I’ve got it right.
One of the commenters noted that a private business enterprise might well face criminal charges for work like this, while several others suggested that the missing data were deliberately excluded because the results would have been politically inconvenient.
At the very least, the episode doesn’t leave you brimming with confidence about the D of Ed’s capacity to produce reliable and accurate quantitative work, especially if it’s going to figure in their rating of individual programs’ eligibility for student loans.
Looks as if Secretary Duncan had better mandate some crash remediation in statistical analysis for his data crunchers, eh?
What exactly is “bullying?” I once thought I knew, but that was long, long ago and far, far away. I could never be quite precise, but I wouldn’t have thought that the idea comprehended activity like eye-rolling, “teasing” or criticizing politicians online.
Well, get ready, because as CEI’s Hans Bader argues here, there’s a whole host of eager anti-bullying enforcers who haven’t yet found any limits to “bullying,” and they aim to protect us from a purported epidemic that’s sweeping the country.
Most of what Bader describes comes from the K-12 context, although even there, he indicates that some major concerns have arisen with respect to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
But you just know that it can’t be very long before the anti-bullying bullies show up on college campuses already awash in sensitivity training, speech and harassment codes, kangaroo-court judicial procedures, anonymous accusations and knee-jerk administrations eager to jump in head first. You can easily imagine how the “anti-bullying” surge is likely to play out in this environment.
Word came late yesterday that the US Supreme Court had unanimously reversed three lower-court decisions ordering Texas to reconfigure in-state legislative boundaries along racial lines. Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity expalins the specifics here. As he notes, it’s beyond irony that the 1965 Voting Rights Act, intended to outlaw racial segregation once and for all, was invoked in these cases to effectively mandate it.
Although this decision is not directly concerned with academic matters, it’s obviously of interest to us in light of another Texas case, Fisher v. Texas, for which we’ve signed onto an amicus brief petitioning the SC to reverse a lower court’s upholding the use of race-based admissions in the University of Texas. To date, the SC has not granted certiorari, and you can’t assume that because the court issued this decision today, it will follow suit and accept the Fisher appeal tomorrow.
Still, we’re moderately hopeful that the court will do so, and reverse or at least trim back its unfortunate ruling in the 2003 Grutter case, which was not a good day for opponents of racial preferences.
Recent Comments