Your tuition dollars at work

You have to love this quote from Mark Steyn at SteynOnline:

It is a testament to the wholesale moronization of our culture that there are gazillions of apparently sane people willing to take out six figures of debt they'll be paying off for decades for the privilege of being "taught" by the likes of Professor Bray. 

The Professor Bray to which he refers is Professor Mark Bray of the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth University, a man whom Steyn says is part of "what passes for the intellectual wing of Antifa." He's one of those guys who thinks that if we just outlaw "hate speech," i.e. speech that he happens to disagree with, then we'll be able to prevent "hate crimes." Says Bray, "We don't look back at the Weimar Republic today and celebrate them for allowing Nazis to have their free-speech rights. We look back and say, Why didn't they do something?"

But as Steyn points out, that isn't exactly how it works:

But the problem with it is that the Weimar Republic—Germany for the 12 years before the Nazi party came to power—had its own version of Section 13 and equivalent laws. It was very much a kind of proto-Canada in its hate speech laws. The Nazi party had 200 prosecutions brought against it for anti-Semitic speech. At one point the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Hitler from giving public speeches.

And a fat lot of good it all did.

If these college professors aren't intelligent enough to know this - especially if they teach, say, history - then they oughtn’t be teaching your children in the first place. And if they do know, then not only are they intellectually dishonest, they're lying in order to prove an ideological plot, and in that case you have no business shelling out your (presumably) hard-earned dollars, while these cheats pollute what Rush Limbaugh refers to as the "young skulls full of mush." The ones who populate groups like Antifa while they spread their own fascist ideas to stamp out freedom of speech on college campuses - and they'll soon be coming to a neighborhood near you.

Either way, this speaks as yet another example of how higher education is destroying the fabric of this nation - while they laugh all the way to your bank.

College classes turning into "wrestling" gimmicks?

As colleges return to full crowds, the absurd classes that have become popular with a niche have appeared again.  Sometimes, it seems these classes are the collegiate equivalent of professional “wrestling” and the gimmicks used for certain characters in such performances.  A recent report from the Heritage Foundation noted such “wrestling” type gimmick classes analyse certain aspects of popular culture that have reached the gutter.  Such include courses in English and Sociology on any number of popular culture figures from current youth literature (anything from J. K. Rowling) to the worst pop stars (Stefani Germanotta, Miley Cyrus, Mr. and Mrs. Carter, et al) that if they had been around when these students' parents were young, they would have resulted in a gang gong on Chuck Barris' naughty NBC daytime programme!  There's one heretic PCUSA college that is doing a study on a popular college sport as a religion within a certain conference.  Don't forget either the gimmick classes that focus on literature or history from “social justice” groups elites have forced down on us to erase the classics – especially when race-baiting or erotic liberty is involved while the study of the classics is ignored.  We have seen the results of eliminating God from school, as in music classes the classics are ignored because they are not politically correct, so they sing whatever flows in the Top 40 charts, and that later is seen in churches where younger music leaders, with nary any appreciation of masterpieces, devolve to playing top 40 hits in their churches and creating the emergent class where Biblical appreciation is ignored.  It makes me wonder as I listened to a radio talk show in college why classical education – not the gimmick classes – matters, and long after the popular culture figures fade away, those who studied the classics have a greater appreciation of society.

Can you honestly think colleges have resorted to being home of more gimmicks than a professional “wrestler”?

These absurd classes have led to such ideals such as the current anti-gun protest in Austin, Texas, where genitalia, not guns, is what they are promoting in an anti-gun protest.  What in the world are they doing by glorifying such inappropriate material in schools?  This is turning more into shock value.

Speaking of these bad figures being glorified, a friend recently noted that Jaime Harrison, the head of the South Carolina Democrats that rely on other states to overturn state laws and constitutions based on “social justice,” and his organisation purged the name of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from their annual dinner.  Once again, considering the absurd pop culture college class discussion, a friend of mine noted eliminating the founding fathers allows them to push revisionist ideals on who both men were, one a Founding Father and one the leader who won the Battle of New Orleans and led populism to the point that it has come back with a certain Presidential candidate.  He asked what the modern Democrat has for principle, but he said it was “bigger government and identity politics,” finishing off this comment by saying it would be a dinner named for a sexual perversion hero that the Left wants to replace Memorial Day with his birthday as a national holiday.

I fear what absurd figure will be glorified as part of revisionist history in order to push social justice for left-wing heroines while historical greats are pushed into the ash heap.  Just wait when Friday autumn nights are empty as federal authorities ensure boys no longer can play sports in schools or take STEM classes, while they force family cars to have a displacement smaller than a motorcycle used in racing series that air on Al Jazeera (MotoGP and both domestic and World Superbike, about 1200cc) that families cannot use for groceries or taking children to ballgames for girls only.

Works Cited:
Walter Williams, “From a course on Miley Cyrus to Identity Based Housing, Examples of lunacy on college campuses,” The Daily Signal, 24 August 2016.

Wish I'd written that - some things never change

The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”

- H.L. Mencken (H/T to Ace of Spades)

Entitlement generation

Much has been said of a nationwide campus walkouts by college students starting in Missouri and Yale, claiming discrimination and demands of equality, which includes "sexual" equality (re: men in women's bathrooms, elimination of prohibitions on sex offenders, and of course, illogical thinking that requires us to pay for all forms of sexual perversion), racial equality (certain people are allowed to loot, dismissal of leaders opposed to their extremist views, and permanent repatriations that everyone else must pay certain people for slavery from over 150 years ago, and other types of absurd ideology that we are seeing in academia from such wicked worldviews.  They are demanding a "safe space" for their antics -- and the courts have forced the entire country to be a "safe space" for sexual perversion though majorities nationally (and over 75% in many states) have said no.  Now they are pushing it on every view they demand.  This is why ENDA and other "discrimination" laws are designed to force conformity with the sexual elites' demands for sexual freedom as the only freedom, and create a worldview apartheid that is worse than racial apartheid of South Africa.

The unruliness of the left's activists everywhere shows no boundaries.  They have automatic excuses for everything, and anyone opposed to them must be removed from campus.  In effect, they are using the campus to develop, in accord with the courts on their side packed with urbanites as noted by Justice Scalia, a dictatorship where all opposing views must be erased from the area and replaced with the one view these crybabies demand must be obeyed by everyone else, even if over 85% oppose it.  Isn't this what led to the Declaration of Independence?

The latest in protest rage has been against college professors such as Carol Swain, who called the modern extreme Islam a threat to security (see the rash of homicide bombers in Paris, Hannover, and other European cities), and other similar professors.  The protesters do not want anyone to read and think about the issues. Rather, they demand a total obedience to the left-wing orthodoxy that they see in Hollywood and certain academics, and most notably, the Executive and Judicial Branches of the government.  And if you do not believe in their ideology, you will be shouted down by the left wing activists in ways you would never believe.    It has become an expansion of Occupy Wall Street to a new generation of college students.

As I simmered over dinner, it dawned on me.  For the past 25 years, since Zell Miller's victory in Georgia, and his idea of expanded government by making the state a bookie through the form of state-run gambling, called a "lottery for education," where the money does not go to academics but instead goes more to the gambling service providers, states have been riding the bandwagon of "gambling for education".  Many states voted a certain way to push the state-run gambling racket.  They have been massive failures, and the result is with more "free" money for kids to attend college, the price of graduate schools and tuition for college as a general rule has gone up considerably because of gambling money funding certain students.  Add to that the Obamacare funding ruse where the government controls all student loans, and we have the perfect storm for disaster in academic funding.  This entitled generation that has been told government is everything demands the government forgive their loans.

Is that the problem in a nutshell?  An entitled generation protesting in college today has not had to work for their tuition; they have had their college allegedly paid by the state-run casinos and the the state-run bank under the socialised medicine programme that prohibits your local First Citizens Bank (North Carolina), South State (the only two banks where I live, I hold shares in both), Toronto Dominion, credit unions, or other well known banks from financing education.  When they learn they must work for it, they refuse and demand more.  Now think about it.  A state-run casino funds students' education, and state-run student loan financing is a monopoly.  They are taught government is their deity, and no education into the free enterprise system, but the virtues of the CCCP by the state-run everything, has created an entitlement generation.  When will they learn the government is the problem?

These students protesting need to be expelled, and the federal monopoly on student loans imposed in Obamacare must be abolished, along with the state casinos that fund education.

The students who suffer from SBS

Pardon the language in the graphic at right; I apologize if you're offended, but there seems to be no better way to describe the escapades of those wacky college kids nowadays. Rod Dreher and others - I mention him because I first heard it used by him - call them SJW, Social Justice Warriors.  You know, they way they're shutting down free speech on campuses, along with substantial help from their instructors. SJW.  That's good, but I think they suffer from SBS - Spoiled Brat Syndrome.  (There's also the fact that the last two letters make up BS, which is what I think their rhetoric is. So bonus points for that.)

This isn't the first time we've seen it, of course; in more recent times, the 60s gave us an epidemic of know-it-alls on campus.  This could be the last time, though, at least in the way we think of it. If they're successful in their goals of eliminating any and all opposition, the only revolutions we'll be seeing (if we're allowed to view them at all) will be of the internecine type; the revolution consuming its own. If you think SBSers are paranoid now, just imagine what they'll be like when they start being persecuted by their own kind for not being ideologically pure. Now that's paranoia\ - just ask Robespierre how that went. And since it's Veterans Day today, I'll just add that many men and women over the centuries have died to preserve freedom of speech. They are heroes. Those who try to destroy that freedom should be called by what they are; totalitarian monsters.

I'll have more to say on this tomorrow in our Throwback Thursday feature, but the idea that these people will eventually get what's coming to them is cold comfort for those of us who will get it from them first. I've been around them myself, not on campus but in the workplace, and in a way the thought that they're well-meaning people at heart makes them even more despicable, because they're either dupes, fools, or those who, like our French friend above, believe the ends justify the means. At least those in the third category believe in something; the rest of them don't believe in anything: they just feel.

And so I'll close for today with this quote from Lileks, which I thought was a terrific commentary on what these people are really like, down deep, and what it would be like to have a world full of them:

These people will produce nothing. They will create no great art, write no symphonies, conjure no novels that speak across the decades, sculpt nothing of beauty. The world outside the bubble is irredeemable. It cannot, of course, be remade all at once, but tomorrow's a new day. Rome wasn't wrecked in a day. 

Amen, brother. And that is just the beginning.

Throwback Thursday: "My college actually took me away from logical thinking"

So says Forbes magazine publisher Rich Karlgaard in this article (H/T NRO).  His experience pretty much jibes not only with my own, but with many of my friends who sit in "careers" for which they're vastly overeducated.

A friend of mine, like Karlgaard a PoliSci major, has never had a job for which his degree meant anything other than that he had a college degree in the first place.  "Unless I was actually going into teaching, that degree was pretty much useless from a job standpoint," he told me.  "I didn't take it because I thought it would improve my chances to get a job or to make more money.  I took it because I liked and was interested in politics, and I wanted exposure to the kinds of thought I would be encountering."  Meaning?  "Look, I didn't have any illusions that I'd be getting a good education.  After all, this was a school where the students cheered when they heard Reagan'd been shot.  They had bumper stickers that said 'Reagan in '80, Bush in '81.'  If they were any more left, they would have fallen off the table completely.  But I figure if you want to be involved in 'competitive' politics (as I did at the time), it's good to know what the enemy's saying about you."

But the point he went on to make is this: "Ultimately, it didn't matter what I studied.  I figured a successful school year was one in which I still knew as much at the end of the term as I did at the beginning.  As long as they didn't make me stupid, it was a good year.  But at the end I had that degree.  How many decent jobs can you get now where they don't ask for - demand - a college degree?  Even when it has nothing to do with the job itself?  It's lazy - they just use it as a gatekeeper to keep out the riffraff.  Most of the jobs out there can probably be handled just fine by someone with a degree from a vo-tech school."

I digress with that little anecdote, but only slightly.  Karlgaard's point in this article is similar to my friends - that college has become an enormous (and ridiculous) drain on family and individual finances, oftentimes for nothing more than a piece of paper that does little to prepare the student for life after college - and introduce him or her to a lifetime of debt. Karlgaard posits that the average student would "learn more and spend much less at a community college," and it's hard to disagree with that.  The money quote:

The U.S., I would argue, is driving itself crazy over early achievement. Expensive four-year colleges are a symptom. They’ve become a costly dream trap for too many kids and families. High school grades are overemphasized, SATs must be prepared for years in advance, youthful intellectual experiments (or pranks of the kind Steve Jobs famously engaged in) are discouraged–and for what? Most kids won’t get into the topflight college of their dreams. Worse, some who actually clear that bar will nearly bankrupt their parents in the process. Or they’ll find life so competitive at Elite U. that they drop down into the Mickey Mouse courses–which exist everywhere, even at Harvard–and end up with a worthless degree.

In fact, it's been my observation that education is really one of the last things the modern college is concerned with.  First and foremost is indoctrination, but after that there's the endless quest for prestige, to be able to say "we're the best business school in the world," or law school, or engineering school, or what have you, in the ratings that come out from publications such as US News  There's the desire for research dollars from governments and foundations.  There's the scam being leveraged on alums to provide financial support for the school.  There's a continuing, and growing, alliance with big government and big business to control access to the power in this country.

But don't just take my rantings - be sure to read all of what Karlgaard says, and discuss.

Originally published by Paul Drew on May 7, 2013

The Big Ten and political correctness -- #B1GPC rampant in attacks on the Kyles and the Cathys.

Political correctness on campus has become a weird situation after all.  Yet, it seems one of the "Power Five" conferences has been the centre of the political correctness controversy with the misnomer tag of the Big Ten being at the heart of the issue.  #B1GPC has shown the ugliness of political correctness this spring in three cases, with two appeasing to terrorists of one type, and a third member appeasing to "terrorists" of another type.

Two full-time members of the conference, the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland, have become full examples of the former.  The popularity of the movie "American Sniper," based on the biography of legendary American soldier Chris Kyle, at the box office and sales of the book, was not enough to reward the film at the highest levels of Academy Awards glory, especially in an era of the out of touch Hollywood where judges for award shows have become a Politburo to impose their wanted Communist values.  These Politburo and Supreme Soviets have infiltrated college campuses, where a lack of thought has developed from indoctrinating the students into the values of the progressive mind, which works when you consider how strong-left the urban areas and college towns have become compared to the rest of the state.  In Ann Arbor, Michigan planned to screen the film in the student union, until an Islamic student association complained about the film, which is described from the narratives in Mr. Kyle's biography.  The complaints forced the school to shut down the plan, until the leader on the gridiron, Jim Harbaugh, proved he was more popular than student leaders by effectively overturning the cancellation, forcing the school to show the film as promised.

In College Park, Maryland also planned showing the film, and once again complaints from the Islamic associations erupted.  Cancellations were made, and even a former gridiron star vowed not to support his school because of their behaviour towards the film by appeasement.  The result was the same, as they had to show the film.

But that's not the only place of attack in the college campus world.

Brothers Dan and Donald (Bubba) Cathy, along with sister Trudy White, and their children continue the legacy of their late father, Samuel Truett Cathy, with the Chick-fil-A quick-service restaurants.  Popular in many places (malls, schools, et al), the firestorm that Big Sexual Deviancy has created by attacking the values of the family (many of whom teach Bible studies at their own churches, and believing in the classic "He rested" on the seventh day) and the Bible, has infiltrated Johns Hopkins University, a Division III school that plays lacrosse at the Division I level (schools are allowed to play one sport at the Division I level if they are Division II or III;  this rule excludes sports that are in Division I but not Division II, such as ice hockey and men's volleyball).  As a Division I school in lacrosse, they are associate members of the Big Ten for the sport only, which is often used for "stragglers" who play certain sports in conferences that do not sponsor them, for example the men's Football Association in Conference USA has two Southeastern Conference schools because FA is not a sport offered by the SEC, and both schools play in C-USA.

The Big Ten membership puts them at the forefront of the Political Correctness in the Big Ten issue.  The students, infiltrated by left-wing propaganda taught in schools and popular culture that showed itself in a recent report from The Washington Times, passed a resolution demanding a ban on the faith and family restaurant chain from campus if the local franchisors wanted to come.  It was clear that the erotic liberty folk is doubling down with more hate of Chick-fil-A, just like the hate of American Sniper.

The base of the Left's new tolerance is the college town where thought is replaced by forced obedience of the lobby, and the urban areas.  It is now showing with the examples at the Big Ten.  Is there truly something in the water in Big Ten territory?

Some days I just shake my head...

The University of Michigan - a state-run institution, of course, spending tax dollars with the utmost wisdom:

The University of Michigan reportedly spent $16,000 plastering its walls with posters telling students they shouldn’t use “offensive” language such as “crazy,” “insane,” and “gypped.”

The posters are part of the school’s new Inclusive Language Campaign, which “aims to encourage the campus community to consider the impact of their word choices on others,” according to the official college website.

An advocate says it's a great idea, because it's “helping individuals understand that their words can impact someone.”

Do I need to tell you this is crazy and insane, and that taxpayers in the Great Lakes State ought to feel gypped?  Or is that like fishing in a barrel?  I hope those words do impact someone, at least someone who can stop it.

The shame of North Carolina

L ate last week, we started to find out the real scope of the academic/athletic scandal at the University of North Carolina, and it's ugly.  How ugly?  Try 18 years of fraudulent classes, mostly designed to enable athletes to remain academically eligible, eventually encompassing "thousands" of students.  If this isn't an example of the Scam of Higher Education, I don't know what is.

Over at Fox Sports, college football writer Stewart Mandel wonders what kind of punishment the university athletics programs face from this "shadow curriculum."  It doesn't seem to have been limited to the football and men's basketball programs, as is often the case (though they were the most highly represented), but in fact was pervasive throughout the entire athletic department.  And there's no chance that the academic counselors who put the jocks through these sham classes were unaware of what they were doing, as Mandel writes:

Jan Boxill, a philosophy professor whose formal title is director of the Parr Center for Ethics, steered women’s basketball players to Crowder [Afro-American studies office manager Debbie Crowder] and literally named their grade. “Did you say a D will do?” Crowder wrote to Boxill in an e-mail about one player who had apparently recycled an old paper. “Yes, a D will be fine; that’s all she needs,” Boxill replied.

That this is a state college and not a private institution makes this even more sickening, because it means the tax dollars of North Carolina residents (as well as all of us, for that matter, insofar as Federal funds are routed to UNC) are paying for this fiasco.

The so-called Death Penalty, in which the NCAA can ban a school from taking part in certain sports, has only been administered a handful of times.  Even those who are most concerned about corruption in college sports have been reluctant to call for it, because it often winds up punishing innocent athletes for sins that may have been committed several years ago.  But in this case, considering the amount of institutional corruption involved, as well as the timeframe over which it's taken place, I think that the death penalty is the only possible answer.  As a matter of fact, I'd call it a good start - before any UNC sports program can compete again, let the university itself show that it actually knows how to educate and graduate students honestly.  When they can prove that, then we'll talk about bringing sports back.  If something isn't done to answer this disgrace, we might as well give up on any pretense of college sports; let's just make them professional minor leagues and leave it at that.

PC on campus (yawn) - how much dumber can they get?

The astute social critic John Leo makes some trenchant comments on political correctness at Marquette, ostensibly a Catholic school but in reality a university that should take credit only for its basketball team.  But lest I single out one institute of higher education, be assured that this is commonplace everywhere.

The truly sad thing about this is that universities are supposed to be places where young people go to learn how to think, debate, discover ideas.  Instead, they're just diploma factories that serve the secondary function of indoctrinating, as Rush Limbaugh put it, "young skulls full of mush."  And we wonder why this nation lacks the will to do so much.  I've got a quote appearing on Thursday that's apropos for this kind of thinking.  (Or lack thereof.)

(H/T NRO)

How "elite" higher education is destroying our society

I got this link from Mitchell over the weekend; he knew this was bait for another "Scam Alert" on higher education.

It comes from the website of the Dallas Morning News, where William Deresiewicz pulls back the curtain on the scam that is an Ivy League education.  It's a damning indictment, and you really ought to read the whole thing, but this excerpt should give you an idea of what Deresiewicz, who used to be on the faculty at Yale (and thus, knows of what he speaks), sees in today's "elite" higher educaton:

Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

Now, we used to think of college as the place wherein young people prepared to face the world, and in an ironic way the Ivy League has done exactly that.  For Deresiewicz describes perfectly what kind of a world we now live in.  Look at U.S. foreign policy, for example - don't the words "anxious, timid and lost" describe it to a T?  Of course, what else would you expect from a society that displays these very traits?  One has only to look at the breakdown in religious belief to see a people with no sense of purpose, little to no curiosity, no idea why they do what they do.  Remove belief from life, and that's what you get.

More:

When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them — the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine. In short, our entire system of elite education.

Deresiewicz speaks of the students he taught at Yale, and once again it's hard not to see the cause-and-effect, in that the system is producing exactly the kind of society one might expect when it's made up of young people who bring these experiences into the world.  There were many wonderful young people,

But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice. [...] Look beneath the facade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.

Well, it's hard to argue with any of this, especially when we don't even know what college is meant to achieve:  "Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job?"

In the midst of the gloom, Deresiewicz offers the start of the solution: "I’ve come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education."  You may or may not agree with his conclusions, but be sure to go here and read them.

What if democracy, like higher education, is just a scam?

Yeah, I know I've been away for awhile.  Don't remind me; I hear enough of that from The Boss (M. Hadley, if you're wondering.)  Just consider this a cameo if you want, but I promise I"m going to try and come back here more often.

A couple of pieces for your consideration.  The first hearkens back to the "Scam of Higher Education" series I did a couple of years ago, and it concerns the new director of Islamic Studies at Duke University. (I asked Mitchell if he wanted to take this one, since he used to work at Duke; his reply was more or less unprintable, but by and large suggested that if I wanted to write about Duke, now or at any time in the future, I was more than welcome to do so.)

Anyway, this gentleman, Omid Safi, compares recent Israeli "crimes" to the Holocaust.  I'll let you read all about it here, but what bothers me about this is not only the dishonesty that apparently accompanies his "scholarship," but the laziness of it all.  I mean, how many times do we have to read about something being compared to the Nazis or the Holocaust?  It's just plain lazy - lazier than the number of F-bombs that show up in a Martin Scorsese movie.  I used to think that just dropped them in there to meet the word count minimum, but it's a stroke of pure creativity compared to how many times liberals compare _________ (fill in the blank) to the Holocaust and equate ___________ (various conservatives) to Nazis.

Just give me a break, will you?

The second item this week is more thought-provoking.  It's by one of my favorite pundits, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and he asks a disturbing question: what if democracy is a fraud?

Yes, I know - there are a lot of conservatives who throw that question around the same way liberals toss around Nazis.  But, setting aside the provocative nature of the headline, there's some real food for thought here:

What if democracy as it has come to exist in America today is dangerous to personal freedom? What if our so-called democracy erodes the people’s understanding of natural rights and the reasons for government and instead turns political campaigns into beauty contests? What if American democracy allows the government to do anything it wants, as long as more people bother to show up at the voting booth to support the government than show up to say no?

He goes on to elaborate with a number of similar points, before he comes to the conclusion, which is a crusher:

What if the late progressive Edmund S. Morgan was right when he said that government depends on make believe? What if our ancestors made believe that the king was divine? What if they made believe that he could do no wrong? What if they made believe that the voice of the king was the voice of God?

What if the government believes in make believe? What if it made believe that the people have a voice? What if it made believe that the representatives of the people are the people? What if it made believe that the governors are the servants of the people? What if it made believe that all men are created equal, or that they are not?

What if the government made believe that it is always right? What if it made believe that the majority can do no wrong? What if the tyranny of the majority is as destructive to human freedom as the tyranny of a madman? What if the government knows this?

What do we do about it?

I've always been one to defend the United States from those (primarily very traditional Catholics) who charge that the nation was conceived in sin, so to speak, that religious freedom itself was license for the kind of hedonistic libertarianism we seem to have today.  While the Founders may not have been Catholics, they were great Americans nonetheless.  As someone once said, the United States is the worst country in the world in which to live, except for all the rest of them.

Nowadays, that defense is harder and harder to maintain.  What do we do about it, indeed?  Thoughts?

Can't read? Can't write? Can throw a football or dribble a basketball? No problem!

I'm a little late coming to the party on this, but did any of you see this article from CNN.com a couple of weeks ago?

It's not a surprise that so many of these college athletes are getting little or no education (a cynic might suggest that at some of these schools, the players are probably better off not learning what the institution has to teach), but that doesn't make it any less disgusting.  My first thought on reading this was that it was child abuse.  How these kids have been let down by the system!  To get all the way through to college, which allegedly prepares students for the real world, without even knowing to read?

As I thought about it, though, a stronger word came to mind.  Obscene.  It is an obscenity that this is happening in this country, that these - well, I don't think the schools even look at them as human beings, but as units of economic currency - are being chewed up, exploited for the school's profit, and then spit out. Excerpt:

"They're pushing them through," said Billy Hawkins, an associate professor and athlete mentor at the University of Georgia.

"They're graduating them. UGA is graduating No. 2 in the SEC, so they're able to graduate athletes, but have they learned anything? Are they productive citizens now? That's a thing I worry about. To get a degree is one thing, to be functional with that degree is totally different."

Yes, I know that many of these athletes stand to make a great deal of money themselves from the unholy alliance into which they've entered, but that's almost beside the point.  As a society - as adults - we're supposed to be stewards of the young, of the next generation.  We're supposed to help them, educate them, steer them in the right direction when they veer off path.  Is that being done here?  No.  Sure, there are plenty of reasons why, but none of them exculpate the responsibility of the college - many of which are being supported by taxpayer dollars.

I suspect there's a special ring in hell for the people letting these athletes down.

"My college actually took me away from logical thinking"

So says Forbes magazine publisher Rich Karlgaard in this article (H/T NRO).  His experience pretty much jibes not only with my own, but with many of my friends who sit in "careers" for which they're vastly overeducated.

A friend of mine, like Karlgaard a PoliSci major, has never had a job for which his degree meant anything other than that he had a college degree in the first place.  "Unless I was actually going into teaching, that degree was pretty much useless from a job standpoint," he told me.  "I didn't take it because I thought it would improve my chances to get a job or to make more money.  I took it because I liked and was interested in politics, and I wanted exposure to the kinds of thought I would be encountering."  Meaning?  "Look, I didn't have any illusions that I'd be getting a good education.  After all, this was a school where the students cheered when they heard Reagan'd been shot.  They had bumper stickers that said 'Reagan in '80, Bush in '81.'  If they were any more left, they would have fallen off the table completely.  But I figure if you want to be involved in 'competitive' politics (as I did at the time), it's good to know what the enemy's saying about you."

But the point he went on to make is this: "Ultimately, it didn't matter what I studied.  I figured a successful school year was one in which I still knew as much at the end of the term as I did at the beginning.  As long as they didn't make me stupid, it was a good year.  But at the end I had that degree.  How many decent jobs can you get now where they don't ask for - demand - a college degree?  Even when it has nothing to do with the job itself?  It's lazy - they just use it as a gatekeeper to keep out the riffraff.  Most of the jobs out there can probably be handled just fine by someone with a degree from a vo-tech school."

I digress with that little anecdote, but only slightly.  Karlgaard's point in this article is similar to my friends - that college has become an enormous (and ridiculous) drain on family and individual finances, oftentimes for nothing more than a piece of paper that does little to prepare the student for life after college - and introduce him or her to a lifetime of debt. Karlgaard posits that the average student would "learn more and spend much less at a community college," and it's hard to disagree with that.  The money quote:

The U.S., I would argue, is driving itself crazy over early achievement. Expensive four-year colleges are a symptom. They’ve become a costly dream trap for too many kids and families. High school grades are overemphasized, SATs must be prepared for years in advance, youthful intellectual experiments (or pranks of the kind Steve Jobs famously engaged in) are discouraged–and for what? Most kids won’t get into the topflight college of their dreams. Worse, some who actually clear that bar will nearly bankrupt their parents in the process. Or they’ll find life so competitive at Elite U. that they drop down into the Mickey Mouse courses–which exist everywhere, even at Harvard–and end up with a worthless degree.

In fact, it's been my observation that education is really one of the last things the modern college is concerned with.  First and foremost is indoctrination, but after that there's the endless quest for prestige, to be able to say "we're the best business school in the world," or law school, or engineering school, or what have you, in the ratings that come out from publications such as US News  There's the desire for research dollars from governments and foundations.  There's the scam being leveraged on alums to provide financial support for the school.  There's a continuing, and growing, alliance with big government and big business to control access to the power in this country.

But don't just take my rantings - be sure to read all of what Karlgaard says, and discuss.   ◙

The higher ed shell game

The John Wilson Pope Center has been a very good source for material regarding the scam of higher education, and this piece on how government failure has led us to a point where college grads are working $10/hour jobs.

The entire piece is well worth your while, but I want to point out a few conclusions that Gary Jason draws:

• You'll frequently see me use a line in these pieces that amounts to, "your tax dollars at work."  That's because "the federal government has taken over and dramatically increased the student loan program. This is the very program that has fueled the growth in the number of students graduating with less-than-marketable degrees, pushed up tuition, and enabled universities to afford administrative bloat (some of it undoubtedly required by unfunded federal mandates)."

• That government loan system does not discriminate in terms of what students might be good investment risks. "What degrees are less than marketable? For one, probably a degree in fine or performing arts. The Wall Street Journal recently analyzed Department of Education data and concluded that the highest student loan debt loads are run up by students at art, music, and design colleges—on average now over $21,500. To repay that, the students will be paying about $3,000 a year. This is a challenging amount for graduates who, with five or fewer years of experience on the job, have average incomes of only about $40,000 per year, according to PayScale.com."

• The K-12 system in this country is for the most part an abject failure. "The reality faced by employers in private industry—which, unlike government, needs to be efficient to survive—is that a high school diploma doesn’t guarantee that the student can actually read, write, and compute at anywhere near the twelfth-grade level, or often even at the eighth-grade level. Chalk that up to decades of “social promotion” along with other “progressive education” theories, all of which have badly undermined our K-12 system."

• The "disparate impact" standard has been a disaster. "[A]ny basic skills test that has a 'disparate impact' (i.e., has scores that show statistical differences between ethnic groups) will subject the company using them to enormous legal risks. That legal minefield is due to a 1971 Supreme Court decision, Griggs v. Duke Power, which many argue, has led companies to insist that applicants have college degrees."  Whether or not they're required in order to do the job. 

• To avoid legal threats, "employers began demanding college credentials as the safest way to screen out applicants who probably were less trainable and reliable. That appears to be a major reason why so many young Americans think they must go to college these days but often end up doing low-skill, low-pay jobs."

The result, Jason says, is "market failure."  Specifically, government failure.  Which leads to more personal debt, higher government debt, unrealistic dreams and frustrated grads. 

When I first proposed this series to Mitchell, he asked if I thought I had enough material to make it worthwhile. I told him there were two ways of covering this - to show the outrageous things going on in higher ed, which I've done in the first couple of posts, and to challenge the perception that higher ed is always needed, which is what we're looking at here.

A college education can be a fine thing, but to suggest that it is an absolute necessity is not only outrageous, it's not true.  Those who have conspired to make it so - the government, the education industry and big business - are running a shell game, and increasingly the American people are the suckers. ◙

The scam of higher education, continued

Second in a continuing occasional series


Mitchell pointed me to this story, courtesy of Rod Dreher:, of a panic attack at Oberlin College (or, as one commentator put it, they "got their knickers in a knot."  The memo as follows:

To the Oberlin community:

Early this morning, there was a report of a person wearing a hood and robe resembling a KKK outfit between South and the Edmonia Lewis Center and in the vicinity of African Heritage House. This report is being investigated by both Safety & Security and the Oberlin Police Department. This event, in addition to the series of other hate-related incidents on campus, has precipitated our decision to suspend formal classes and all non-essential activities for today, Monday, March 4, 2013, and gather for a series of discussions of the challenging issues that have faced our community in recent weeks.

We hope today will allow the entire community-students, faculty, and staff-to make a strong statement about the values that we cherish here at Oberlin: inclusion, respect for others, and a strong and abiding faith in the worth of every individual. Indeed, the strength of Oberlin comes from our belief that diversity and openness enriches us all, and enhances the educational mission at its core.

We ask that all students, faculty and staff participate in the events planned for today:

12PM | Lord Lounge, Afrikan Heritage House Teach-in led by Africana Studies Department

2PM | Wilder Bowl Demonstration of solidarity

3:30PM | Finney Chapel Community convocation: “We Stand Together” (previously scheduled for Wednesday 3/6 at 12PM)

When faced with difficult situations, Oberlin has consistently met the challenges and affirmed its commitment to the highest quality of education and the noblest aspirations of its community members. We believe that today’s events—and our ongoing work and discussions—will strengthen Oberlin and will strengthen us all.

Marvin Krislov
President

Sean Decatur
Dean, Arts & Sciences

David Stull
Dean, Conservatory of Music

Eric Estes
Dean of Students

Dreher notes that "These are actual adults. Who run a college. Attended by adults. In theory, at least."  Couldn't have said it better, especially when you read on and find out they're not even sure there was a Klansman running around:

Lt Mike McCloskey of Oberlin police told the Guardian on Monday that officers were still following up the KKK sighting, but suggested that the only witness may have been mistaken. “Officers checked the area and were unable to locate anybody. College security later saw a student wrapped in a blanket.”

You just have to love this, don't you?  Talk about shoot first, ask questions later.  Speaking of which, if you shot someone you claimed was invading your home based on the kind of information, I suspect these same Oberlin people would be the first ones clamoring to have you thrown in the pokey.  Perhaps they think racism is more dangerous than robbery.

Dreher concludes with the observation that "it costs over $50,000 per year to attend this pants-wetting academy" - money that you and I, as taxpayers, are probably helping to subsidize.  But I think Dreher's being much too kind - I'd call this school a nursery full of nannies for ninnies. ◙

The scam of higher education (part 1)

Part one of an occasional series

It's no secret (or shouldn't be, at least) that higher education in America is, for the most part, a scam.  Students emerge from college as pampered neo-Communists who expect everything to be given to them on a silver platter and have little to no idea of how real life works.  Employers have fallen into this scam, requiring college degrees for jobs that require little more than a high-school diploma and some real-life experience - mostly because having a degree means students have been taught how to be docile in responding to authority.  In other words, perfect training for business.

And of course it's us, the taxpayers, who increasingly get stuck with the bill for all this.

So from time to time, I'm going to pop by with some info on some of the more ridiculous examples of colleges scamming the public.  I'd been thinking about this for awhile, but I was motivated by this excerpt from an article in today's Star Tribune discussing a hitherto secret extension of Gophers women's basketball coach Pam Borton, which is going to make it all the more expensive for the U if they want to jettison her after yet another unsuccessful season.  Now, my interest in women's sports is somewhere below zero - I think I'd rather work on my worm dissecting skills - but it was this section that caught my eye:

[University President Eric] Kaler faced legislators in January to deny the school’s administrative costs were out of control after the Wall Street Journal reported that, among 72 major research institutions, the Twin Cities campus had the largest share of employees labeled administrators and the school had been “on a spending spree over the past decade.” The Star Tribune also reported last year that former school President Robert Bruininks had agreed to a series of compensation packages worth more than $2.8 million, and that top administrators had routinely been given lengthy paid leaves, then allowed to return or leave the school’s payroll.

Yup, your tax dollars at work.  My guess is that the people making these decisions were all college grads.   ◙