Universities themselves should guarantee student loans. You would see a tremendous drop in tuition expenses when the schools couldn't afford students not repaying their loans.
FP: I love the idea, that "many universities endowments throw off enough interest to cover tuition for all students" but that seems like a bold claim. Do you have convincing evidence to support your claim ? It may be that some prestigious universities have sufficient endowments to "cover tuition for all students" but I suspect many do not.
Short of "covering tuition" (and further supporting the false idea that things in life are free"), why not require universities to use a significant percentage of their endowment funds for low cost student loans. That way, universities could encourage / court the students they deem highly desirable and their students would be beholding to their alma mater rather that the Fed govt. Or just give those "gifted" & 'underprivileged" students they seek outright grants -- much like they do for coveted athletes.
Either approach would get tax payers off the hook and perhaps imped the extravagant country club / resort building projects.
Yes, it is Wikipedia, no, I don’t know if it is entirely accurate, but it shows 82 private and 53 public universities with over $1 billion in endowments, most of them well known and/or popular. At 2.5% annually, that’s $25 million a year, not enough to cover all students, but enough to cover some tuition.
But neither should taxpayers be forced to subsidize the loans by guaranteeing them, nor especially by bearing the cost of Dems’ student loan forgiveness gambits, which have lower income folks subsidizing higher income ones - and the universities themselves!
POSITIVELY--there would definitely be a LARGE drop in tuition. Maybe even be improvement in course offerings. So that students would actually receive an education which would led to a real job after graduation.
Great how to. Glad you are advising the DoE on this. Endowments should be seized to help pay off student loans. They helped create it and perhaps some administrator salaries should be clawed back. University endowments manage billions in assets, running like a hedge fund with a school attached to it. Many of them have ESG/DEI mandates for their portfolios, which should also be ended.
Brown is a JOKE. I have family members that went there. None of this recent generation have anything that resembles a real job--and not much future. Eventually the "public policy" job for making things softer, easier, less competitive, less creative etc. will be ended.
I’m going to guess when my tuition at the University of Kansas was $500 per semester in 1983 that my university was not receiving billions in grants from the federal government. I received a solid education…and Western Cvilization was a required, 2-semester course.
"The academy’s pied-piper hold on the young minds of the future ‘opinion-forming’ elite – including crucially the teaching profession - has proceeded unchecked, such that its seductive virtue-signalling mentality has now taken hold in most graduate-entry professional walks of life.....If a re-invigorated GOP ever did really get its act together (and the votes to back it), what kind of fight-back could they mount?
It would need to be an unashamedly sledgehammer legislative approach and pursued with Machiavellian sleight of hand. It might include:
* ending the decades-long absurdity of left wing proselytising organisations being actually funded by the taxpayer.
* a clear-out of the kind of senior academics who have so cravenly caved in to spoilt-brat ‘radicalism’.
* a complete clear-out of the multi-billion ‘diversity’ bureaucracy racket.
* a complete overhaul of teacher training (that has long been allowed to become a training ground in progressive ideology).
* an end to public sector security-of-tenure unrelated to performance."
I never truly expected that day to come but (somewhat to my amazement) is has come in the shape of Trump2....Let's not waste it.
there is far too much focus here & elsewhere on equal/fair distribution of the education that is available, when the root of the problem is very clearly that the quality of the education that is available is highly variable.
if every student at every accredited university were guaranteed to graduate with a real competency, it would not matter so much which university each particular student went to. in other words, this great battle over university seats would not matter so gosh darn much.
the extent of the disappearance of any real competency-based standards for graduation may necessitate standardized testing at a university level - and not by some unaccoutable nonprofit like the college board, which under pressure from student & parent groups has progressively softened its sats and aps so that scores appear to keep increasing even while international tests show americans falling far behind. (we were catching up for a while a few years ago, but not anymore.)
etiam, cogito educationem universitatis habeat multas areas acerbicorum, ut quomodo limes et contralimes mundum facent, scholasticus habebit multior baculi, cum illis orbem lustrare. e: non credo non dicevim, sed si voles unus bonus occidere, trumpus delenda est. si non illud, nefas crescit.
Google says you said this: "also, i think university education has many areas of bitterness, like how the limits and counterlimits make the world, the school will have more staff, with them to explore the world. e: i don't believe i said no, but if you want to kill one good person, trump must be destroyed. if not that, the evil grows."
ubi dico ab illa lingua, non semper machina habebit veritas verbarum, vel pro causa litterarum erratarum meum, vel senescitas meum, vel iuvenitas meum, sed non cogito illes res halteat legendum acerum.
si diceam catonis, et audiamur, ubi est clinius meum in domus illi viri, a quid habeam multior pecunii, et melior radices trahere, et magnior verbas torquere.
Top university admissions offices need to be “DOGE-ed” - there is a clear ideology behind admissions which essentially locks out normal hard working kids in favor of an agenda to admit based on lower socio economic status. Never has this agenda been more clear than in the current admissions cycle where admission officers (in protest to SCOTUS decision on AA) have made a concerted effort to admit students who are: first gen, from poorer high school districts, parents who are / were incarcerated, questbridge applicants etc. Kids who do not have any hardships are being systematically locked out.
If you take a look at any top 20 university admissions team on any college website, you’ll see a cross section of DEI applicants to that same school, studied a totally unmarketable major, can’t get a real job so they work in admissions and start the cycle of DEI admits all over again.
Top US universities have become an ideological joke.
Admissions should be merit based - admissions officers should not lock out hardworking kids just because they are not “disadvantaged” in order to serve their own woke ideology
We, as Taxpayers, fund multiple agencies devoted to consumer protection. The universities are clearly and knowingly selling fraudulent, defective products. Why aren't they prosecuted for this as is any other business?
I find the idea of the university-as-business deplorable, since students do not "consume" an education like we do cars or houses, even though the dollar cost might be comparable.
As Rufo points out, the federally guaranteed student loan program flooded universities with tuition dollars while the schools themselves have been gradually lowering their admission standards, presumably to satisfy their idiotic "equity" quotas. To amplify his point a bit, colleges getting this windfall spend it on hiring high-profile celebrity profs, building luxury student life and activities stuff like dorms, "aquatic centers," student centers containing bowling alleys, pubs, restaurants, coffee shops, you name it. Ironically, all these bells-and-whistles designed to attract affluent students are distractions, entitlements that encourage mediocrity. You college grads, reflect on what led to your academic success--avoiding social life to spend more time in the lab or the library than the student center or the pub. In short, a monk's cell is more conducive to intensive study than a comfortable room within walking distance to every imaginable sort of diversion. This is what the so-called "business model" combined with the "equity" boondoggle of higher education has brought us--lowered standards, mediocre graduates, and luxury accommodations intended to draw talented students who are disinclined to take advantage of the marketed luxuries in the first place.
This situation also includes dumber Freshman who drop out before the end of their Sophomore year despite the lowered standards and the access to virtually free money to attend. More precisely, Freshmen entering university right out of high school have driven the lower standards. In my experience, re-entering students who have taken a long hiatus after their first year, or working adults returning to university to retool for career changes are the more diligent students, regardless of innate intelligence. which, counterintuitively, is not a reliable indicator of graduation potential.
YUP---VDH does a great "rant" about this. When we buy a car, we get all kinds of consumer protection info. Why aren't students told: if you major in this field, you will earn __$ and it will take 17 years to pay off your student loan. Or if you major is ___field (some sort of "social justice" ) then you will earn___$ and it will take 35 years to pay off your student loan.
Why didn't Rufo cover political diversity in hiring? Personnel decisions should be made by objective interviewers of multiple political parties, but must include at least one Republican. If you can't find a professor who voted Republican, start the defunding.
Universities can't find enough Republicans with PhDs to get even a small representation in their teaching staff. True story. But even more, political affiliation like sexual preference are questions that aren't and should not be allowed to be asked.
Sexual preferences are private matter and should be respected as such. To the contrary, political affiliations of humanity professors should be balanced, while radicals certainly excluded. We don’t want 100% of Communist sympathizers to teach our children history. We know the result.
The political orientation of faculty is not the problem, per se. Yes, faculty politics influences the kinds of courses offered, and leads some newer faculty to run their classrooms like Maoist struggle sessions. The degree to which this sort of stuff is encouraged is driven by the politics of administrators, who in many cases are not recruited from the faculty. Administrators are required to be included in hiring committees as well, and will overrule faculty members during the hiring process to favor those who give lip service to DEI.
Eliminating DEI statements from the hiring process would go a long way toward changing the proportion of left/right faculty. Faculty applications in virtually every American university include instructions like, "Explain in one page how your understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion informs your pedagogy" or "What do you do to insure equitable access to your course material?" or "Attach a sample syllabus that demonstrates your commitment to fostering an inclusive, equitable, and diverse classroom."
I have gone through this inquisition more times than I can remember. Oddly enough, I got hired when I answered such questions honestly, but never made the tenure track, though I won't blame that on my political orientation or white skin.
Absolutely, the first step should be to dismiss diversity and inclusion officers, trainers and shut down the whole DEI enterprise – this growing propaganda machine geared to replace the egalitarian worldview with a gaslight-makes-right mentality.
Imbalance of power, non-existence of formal restraints, and submissiveness of academia’s governing bodies granted diversity and inclusion ‘educators’ overwhelming success.
“The increasing power of college diversity bureaucrats over academic affairs since the 1990s has been stunning. Diversity vice-chancellors oversee faculty hiring searches, mandate quotas regarding whom search committees may interview, and sometimes even mandate quotas regarding whom they must hire. Chief inclusion officers track departmental race and sex demographics, pressuring department chairs to correct diversity deficits. Associate provosts for diversity coordinate campaigns for required courses on identity and grievance within the curriculum. Deans of inclusion teach students to recognize their place on the great totem pole of victimization. Vice presidents for equity monitor campus speech, on the lookout for punishable microaggressions. Senior advisors on race and community lead crusades against faculty who have allegedly threatened the safety of campus victim groups through non-orthodox statements regarding race and sex.”
Progressive franchises launched by the administrative bureaucracy in American high schools, rapidly spread across the Western world from universities to business entities, media, government bodies, law enforcement agencies and so on, disseminating radical ideas, dividing people along identity lines, fostering cancel culture, and, above all, providing the ‘change agents’ with elevated status and cushy jobs.
"One 2020 estimate placed the size of the global diversity and inclusion market at $7.5 billion [with median salaries ranging from $84,000 to $126,000 ], projecting it to reach $17.2 billion by 2027."
“Eliminating DEI statements from the hiring process would go a long way toward changing the proportion of left/right faculty.”
Sorry, eliminating such statements is the correct thing to do for several reasons, but that one change alone would surely NOT go very far in increasing the percentage of non-leftist faculty.
Great thought, but just one Republican is not enough. The leaning of Western academia to the left had been growing for many years strengthening shared biases, reducing the number of academics willing to oppose radical zealotry and shifting the balance of power towards far-left ideas.
To maintain balance of political views and prevent onset of radical ideas, political affiliation should be part of the job description for the senior administrators and humanities faculty vacancies. This information would allow recruiters to hire the applicants whose political views can balance political orientation of staff’s majority (currently left-wing).
In the long run, political checks and balances are not enough to safeguard functional democracy. Our political order is grounded in dignity culture, and this culture also needs protection from upstartism.
To that end, we have to patch the loopholes through which woke monster came into being.
The leaning of Western academia to the left, growing orthodoxy and groupthink was one of these loopholes. We need the balance of the left and right political views among faculty members in humanities departments to withstand potential radical take-overs.
As for meritocracy, we don’t want Marxist professors to teach history, especially if they are very good at it.
Meritocracy is not the only criteria of suitability anyway. For example, you would not hire professor of mathematics to teach students biology regardless of his merit.
Getting these schools to ditch their ideological activism is like pulling teeth with a miniature crowbar.. very hard to pin them down and actually submit to the procedure. Critical social justice, successor ideology, etc.. this is like their life force, their true hill to die on! Although if it goes like New College in Florida did.. we see as soon as there is a break they throw all kinds of hysterical fits and then scatter like cockroaches. Chris I wish you luck, entering the belly of the beast of the education system!
Stop the scam where people who are already professionals and have been for years are forced to get a college degree if they leave a job and want another one. This began around 2000 and is the biggest scam going. I had to spend $40K which I still have not been able to pay down in order to be eligible for jobs lower than what I had been doing because I left the job market for 5 years to work for myself. I was unemployable - even with an impressive resume - until I got that degree. And even now, getting work is not easy. I've given up on even climbing the corporate ladder because you need yet another degree for that (even though until now some CEOs had no degree and/or just a bachelor's). And I'm 61. So, nope. This has been devastating for a single person trying to save for retirement - it's nearly impossible. There is a corporate-higher learning scam which does not let smart, experienced, proven professionals into a position unless they have that useless degree that they go into debt for. For the record, I work in IT/Communications.
You must be applying to the wrong companies. There's no law requiring someone to have this or that degree to be hired, that's solely at the discretion of the hiring company. There's generally a preference for people with higher education degrees for higher level positions, that's natural because there is believed to be a correlation with the mindset required to get through college with the mindset required to be successful in management. But a good manager is a good manager regardless of pedigree, and industry experience and related instincts matter more than the academic background from 40 years ago. I never look at college degrees as a requirement in my hiring, only at relevant experience and signs of the right mindset.
The result of ditching DEI will be a steep drop of minorities campus admissions. The way to correct for that is to provide safer and better elementary and high schools. That will lie in the hands of the states themselves. We know that the blue states will fail at this and will blame Trump’s higher education reform for failing the minority kids. I am afraid that this will eventually sway public opinion towards, again, supporting affirmative action.
California progressives still blame Reagan for their own failures to reduce homelessness, while funding a homeless-industrial complex that would impress LBJ.
Admission offices are proactively finding ways to continue their DEI agenda despite SCOTUS decision on AA by focusing on socio economic status - DEI at universities is not only alive and well, it’s never been worse than in this current admission cycle for class of 2025
You are so correct. Community colleges are openly discussing all manner of paths to undermine the reformation policies of the president . When education is turned over to the states , local communities and parents will have a Herculean task to foster requirements toward values of classical Western Civilization. Following that back drop, students will go on to any of the sciences and we will advance the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness . What does a college degree mean? A unifying basic knowledge of the humanities should be a given .
"The Trump administration should act before taxpayers are asked to bail out those who borrowed money for expensive degrees. Instead of this upward redistribution, Congress should send the bill directly to those who have benefited the most from the business model: the universities themselves" ... PRECISELY. No other business sector (with the possible exception of certain defense contractors) can raise its prices without improving its product, then pass the costs off to the taxpayer. No thought of ROI for students paying tuition exists in our university system.
We should not be funding universities with taxpayer money regardless of the policies they promote. That's not one of the responsibilities of the federal government delineated in the Constitution. The business model for universities should be the same as other businesses -- offer a product that customers (parents and students) need and want at a price they can afford or go out of business. You failed to mention that Harvard professors don't need to be paid $500K a year, nor do any of the army of administrators deserve their fat salaries. There are a whole lot of reforms that universities would be forced to implement if they had to act like a normal business.
Universities themselves should guarantee student loans. You would see a tremendous drop in tuition expenses when the schools couldn't afford students not repaying their loans.
Many university endowments throw off enough interest to cover tuition for all students and they should be forced to use that interest to do so.
FP: I love the idea, that "many universities endowments throw off enough interest to cover tuition for all students" but that seems like a bold claim. Do you have convincing evidence to support your claim ? It may be that some prestigious universities have sufficient endowments to "cover tuition for all students" but I suspect many do not.
Short of "covering tuition" (and further supporting the false idea that things in life are free"), why not require universities to use a significant percentage of their endowment funds for low cost student loans. That way, universities could encourage / court the students they deem highly desirable and their students would be beholding to their alma mater rather that the Fed govt. Or just give those "gifted" & 'underprivileged" students they seek outright grants -- much like they do for coveted athletes.
Either approach would get tax payers off the hook and perhaps imped the extravagant country club / resort building projects.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment
Yes, it is Wikipedia, no, I don’t know if it is entirely accurate, but it shows 82 private and 53 public universities with over $1 billion in endowments, most of them well known and/or popular. At 2.5% annually, that’s $25 million a year, not enough to cover all students, but enough to cover some tuition.
Good article. Thanks
No, they shouldn’t be *forced*.
But neither should taxpayers be forced to subsidize the loans by guaranteeing them, nor especially by bearing the cost of Dems’ student loan forgiveness gambits, which have lower income folks subsidizing higher income ones - and the universities themselves!
Guarantee? Let them make the loans!
And make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy just like car loans.
Watch universities make sure that their students are employable...
POSITIVELY--there would definitely be a LARGE drop in tuition. Maybe even be improvement in course offerings. So that students would actually receive an education which would led to a real job after graduation.
Great how to. Glad you are advising the DoE on this. Endowments should be seized to help pay off student loans. They helped create it and perhaps some administrator salaries should be clawed back. University endowments manage billions in assets, running like a hedge fund with a school attached to it. Many of them have ESG/DEI mandates for their portfolios, which should also be ended.
Brown just hired a white man as its new head of DEI and bragged about ways it will work around the laws to maximize diversity in admissions: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/dievy-league-doubling-down-on-dei-affirmative-action
Wow ! At all levels .. FRAUD , Lies and Deceipt !
Brown is a JOKE. I have family members that went there. None of this recent generation have anything that resembles a real job--and not much future. Eventually the "public policy" job for making things softer, easier, less competitive, less creative etc. will be ended.
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
I’m going to guess when my tuition at the University of Kansas was $500 per semester in 1983 that my university was not receiving billions in grants from the federal government. I received a solid education…and Western Cvilization was a required, 2-semester course.
You DO know that your fellow Kansas taxpayers were subsidizing that tuition, right?
That’s not a defense of today’s ridiculously high tuitions, to be clear, which are primarily caused by government loan guarantees.
A few years back I wrote this: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
"The academy’s pied-piper hold on the young minds of the future ‘opinion-forming’ elite – including crucially the teaching profession - has proceeded unchecked, such that its seductive virtue-signalling mentality has now taken hold in most graduate-entry professional walks of life.....If a re-invigorated GOP ever did really get its act together (and the votes to back it), what kind of fight-back could they mount?
It would need to be an unashamedly sledgehammer legislative approach and pursued with Machiavellian sleight of hand. It might include:
* ending the decades-long absurdity of left wing proselytising organisations being actually funded by the taxpayer.
* a clear-out of the kind of senior academics who have so cravenly caved in to spoilt-brat ‘radicalism’.
* a complete clear-out of the multi-billion ‘diversity’ bureaucracy racket.
* a complete overhaul of teacher training (that has long been allowed to become a training ground in progressive ideology).
* an end to public sector security-of-tenure unrelated to performance."
I never truly expected that day to come but (somewhat to my amazement) is has come in the shape of Trump2....Let's not waste it.
Absolutely correct Graham --- today's liberal college education is a short term --shiny object--- with no lasting or real value.
Great article. Chris Eufo for Secutary of Education!
Rufo! Speed typing leads to many typos
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
there is far too much focus here & elsewhere on equal/fair distribution of the education that is available, when the root of the problem is very clearly that the quality of the education that is available is highly variable.
if every student at every accredited university were guaranteed to graduate with a real competency, it would not matter so much which university each particular student went to. in other words, this great battle over university seats would not matter so gosh darn much.
the extent of the disappearance of any real competency-based standards for graduation may necessitate standardized testing at a university level - and not by some unaccoutable nonprofit like the college board, which under pressure from student & parent groups has progressively softened its sats and aps so that scores appear to keep increasing even while international tests show americans falling far behind. (we were catching up for a while a few years ago, but not anymore.)
etiam, cogito educationem universitatis habeat multas areas acerbicorum, ut quomodo limes et contralimes mundum facent, scholasticus habebit multior baculi, cum illis orbem lustrare. e: non credo non dicevim, sed si voles unus bonus occidere, trumpus delenda est. si non illud, nefas crescit.
I'll give you points for using the Latin, although my own is evidently too elementary or too vulgar to quite parse your meaning.
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
Google says you said this: "also, i think university education has many areas of bitterness, like how the limits and counterlimits make the world, the school will have more staff, with them to explore the world. e: i don't believe i said no, but if you want to kill one good person, trump must be destroyed. if not that, the evil grows."
ubi dico ab illa lingua, non semper machina habebit veritas verbarum, vel pro causa litterarum erratarum meum, vel senescitas meum, vel iuvenitas meum, sed non cogito illes res halteat legendum acerum.
si diceam catonis, et audiamur, ubi est clinius meum in domus illi viri, a quid habeam multior pecunii, et melior radices trahere, et magnior verbas torquere.
Top university admissions offices need to be “DOGE-ed” - there is a clear ideology behind admissions which essentially locks out normal hard working kids in favor of an agenda to admit based on lower socio economic status. Never has this agenda been more clear than in the current admissions cycle where admission officers (in protest to SCOTUS decision on AA) have made a concerted effort to admit students who are: first gen, from poorer high school districts, parents who are / were incarcerated, questbridge applicants etc. Kids who do not have any hardships are being systematically locked out.
If you take a look at any top 20 university admissions team on any college website, you’ll see a cross section of DEI applicants to that same school, studied a totally unmarketable major, can’t get a real job so they work in admissions and start the cycle of DEI admits all over again.
Top US universities have become an ideological joke.
As long as it’s not based on race I don’t see the problem. This also benefits hillbilly kids and first generation Asians
Admissions should be merit based - admissions officers should not lock out hardworking kids just because they are not “disadvantaged” in order to serve their own woke ideology
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
We, as Taxpayers, fund multiple agencies devoted to consumer protection. The universities are clearly and knowingly selling fraudulent, defective products. Why aren't they prosecuted for this as is any other business?
I find the idea of the university-as-business deplorable, since students do not "consume" an education like we do cars or houses, even though the dollar cost might be comparable.
As Rufo points out, the federally guaranteed student loan program flooded universities with tuition dollars while the schools themselves have been gradually lowering their admission standards, presumably to satisfy their idiotic "equity" quotas. To amplify his point a bit, colleges getting this windfall spend it on hiring high-profile celebrity profs, building luxury student life and activities stuff like dorms, "aquatic centers," student centers containing bowling alleys, pubs, restaurants, coffee shops, you name it. Ironically, all these bells-and-whistles designed to attract affluent students are distractions, entitlements that encourage mediocrity. You college grads, reflect on what led to your academic success--avoiding social life to spend more time in the lab or the library than the student center or the pub. In short, a monk's cell is more conducive to intensive study than a comfortable room within walking distance to every imaginable sort of diversion. This is what the so-called "business model" combined with the "equity" boondoggle of higher education has brought us--lowered standards, mediocre graduates, and luxury accommodations intended to draw talented students who are disinclined to take advantage of the marketed luxuries in the first place.
This situation also includes dumber Freshman who drop out before the end of their Sophomore year despite the lowered standards and the access to virtually free money to attend. More precisely, Freshmen entering university right out of high school have driven the lower standards. In my experience, re-entering students who have taken a long hiatus after their first year, or working adults returning to university to retool for career changes are the more diligent students, regardless of innate intelligence. which, counterintuitively, is not a reliable indicator of graduation potential.
Veritas!
YUP---VDH does a great "rant" about this. When we buy a car, we get all kinds of consumer protection info. Why aren't students told: if you major in this field, you will earn __$ and it will take 17 years to pay off your student loan. Or if you major is ___field (some sort of "social justice" ) then you will earn___$ and it will take 35 years to pay off your student loan.
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
Not to mention their tax-exempt status. They enjoy all the tax-funded benefits of their neighborhoods without paying for them.
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
Thank you for sharing!
Why didn't Rufo cover political diversity in hiring? Personnel decisions should be made by objective interviewers of multiple political parties, but must include at least one Republican. If you can't find a professor who voted Republican, start the defunding.
Universities can't find enough Republicans with PhDs to get even a small representation in their teaching staff. True story. But even more, political affiliation like sexual preference are questions that aren't and should not be allowed to be asked.
Sexual preferences are private matter and should be respected as such. To the contrary, political affiliations of humanity professors should be balanced, while radicals certainly excluded. We don’t want 100% of Communist sympathizers to teach our children history. We know the result.
The political orientation of faculty is not the problem, per se. Yes, faculty politics influences the kinds of courses offered, and leads some newer faculty to run their classrooms like Maoist struggle sessions. The degree to which this sort of stuff is encouraged is driven by the politics of administrators, who in many cases are not recruited from the faculty. Administrators are required to be included in hiring committees as well, and will overrule faculty members during the hiring process to favor those who give lip service to DEI.
Eliminating DEI statements from the hiring process would go a long way toward changing the proportion of left/right faculty. Faculty applications in virtually every American university include instructions like, "Explain in one page how your understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion informs your pedagogy" or "What do you do to insure equitable access to your course material?" or "Attach a sample syllabus that demonstrates your commitment to fostering an inclusive, equitable, and diverse classroom."
I have gone through this inquisition more times than I can remember. Oddly enough, I got hired when I answered such questions honestly, but never made the tenure track, though I won't blame that on my political orientation or white skin.
Absolutely, the first step should be to dismiss diversity and inclusion officers, trainers and shut down the whole DEI enterprise – this growing propaganda machine geared to replace the egalitarian worldview with a gaslight-makes-right mentality.
Imbalance of power, non-existence of formal restraints, and submissiveness of academia’s governing bodies granted diversity and inclusion ‘educators’ overwhelming success.
“The increasing power of college diversity bureaucrats over academic affairs since the 1990s has been stunning. Diversity vice-chancellors oversee faculty hiring searches, mandate quotas regarding whom search committees may interview, and sometimes even mandate quotas regarding whom they must hire. Chief inclusion officers track departmental race and sex demographics, pressuring department chairs to correct diversity deficits. Associate provosts for diversity coordinate campaigns for required courses on identity and grievance within the curriculum. Deans of inclusion teach students to recognize their place on the great totem pole of victimization. Vice presidents for equity monitor campus speech, on the lookout for punishable microaggressions. Senior advisors on race and community lead crusades against faculty who have allegedly threatened the safety of campus victim groups through non-orthodox statements regarding race and sex.”
Progressive franchises launched by the administrative bureaucracy in American high schools, rapidly spread across the Western world from universities to business entities, media, government bodies, law enforcement agencies and so on, disseminating radical ideas, dividing people along identity lines, fostering cancel culture, and, above all, providing the ‘change agents’ with elevated status and cushy jobs.
"One 2020 estimate placed the size of the global diversity and inclusion market at $7.5 billion [with median salaries ranging from $84,000 to $126,000 ], projecting it to reach $17.2 billion by 2027."
“Eliminating DEI statements from the hiring process would go a long way toward changing the proportion of left/right faculty.”
Sorry, eliminating such statements is the correct thing to do for several reasons, but that one change alone would surely NOT go very far in increasing the percentage of non-leftist faculty.
I guess you would have to have more Conservatives who actually pursued advanced degrees?
You suggest that they are looking for GOP PhDs.
Or that in today’s hiring environment such PhDs would out themselves as being on the right.
Great thought, but just one Republican is not enough. The leaning of Western academia to the left had been growing for many years strengthening shared biases, reducing the number of academics willing to oppose radical zealotry and shifting the balance of power towards far-left ideas.
To maintain balance of political views and prevent onset of radical ideas, political affiliation should be part of the job description for the senior administrators and humanities faculty vacancies. This information would allow recruiters to hire the applicants whose political views can balance political orientation of staff’s majority (currently left-wing).
I thought balancing of anything is out. Just strictly meritocracy?
In the long run, political checks and balances are not enough to safeguard functional democracy. Our political order is grounded in dignity culture, and this culture also needs protection from upstartism.
To that end, we have to patch the loopholes through which woke monster came into being.
The leaning of Western academia to the left, growing orthodoxy and groupthink was one of these loopholes. We need the balance of the left and right political views among faculty members in humanities departments to withstand potential radical take-overs.
As for meritocracy, we don’t want Marxist professors to teach history, especially if they are very good at it.
Meritocracy is not the only criteria of suitability anyway. For example, you would not hire professor of mathematics to teach students biology regardless of his merit.
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
Getting these schools to ditch their ideological activism is like pulling teeth with a miniature crowbar.. very hard to pin them down and actually submit to the procedure. Critical social justice, successor ideology, etc.. this is like their life force, their true hill to die on! Although if it goes like New College in Florida did.. we see as soon as there is a break they throw all kinds of hysterical fits and then scatter like cockroaches. Chris I wish you luck, entering the belly of the beast of the education system!
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
Stop the scam where people who are already professionals and have been for years are forced to get a college degree if they leave a job and want another one. This began around 2000 and is the biggest scam going. I had to spend $40K which I still have not been able to pay down in order to be eligible for jobs lower than what I had been doing because I left the job market for 5 years to work for myself. I was unemployable - even with an impressive resume - until I got that degree. And even now, getting work is not easy. I've given up on even climbing the corporate ladder because you need yet another degree for that (even though until now some CEOs had no degree and/or just a bachelor's). And I'm 61. So, nope. This has been devastating for a single person trying to save for retirement - it's nearly impossible. There is a corporate-higher learning scam which does not let smart, experienced, proven professionals into a position unless they have that useless degree that they go into debt for. For the record, I work in IT/Communications.
You must be applying to the wrong companies. There's no law requiring someone to have this or that degree to be hired, that's solely at the discretion of the hiring company. There's generally a preference for people with higher education degrees for higher level positions, that's natural because there is believed to be a correlation with the mindset required to get through college with the mindset required to be successful in management. But a good manager is a good manager regardless of pedigree, and industry experience and related instincts matter more than the academic background from 40 years ago. I never look at college degrees as a requirement in my hiring, only at relevant experience and signs of the right mindset.
Please do go look at any and every job description for any big company. Even secretaries are required to have degrees at 99.9% of them.
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
LOL
The result of ditching DEI will be a steep drop of minorities campus admissions. The way to correct for that is to provide safer and better elementary and high schools. That will lie in the hands of the states themselves. We know that the blue states will fail at this and will blame Trump’s higher education reform for failing the minority kids. I am afraid that this will eventually sway public opinion towards, again, supporting affirmative action.
California progressives still blame Reagan for their own failures to reduce homelessness, while funding a homeless-industrial complex that would impress LBJ.
And replace marriage penalties with marriage incentives. Stop paying single mothers to be single.
Admission offices are proactively finding ways to continue their DEI agenda despite SCOTUS decision on AA by focusing on socio economic status - DEI at universities is not only alive and well, it’s never been worse than in this current admission cycle for class of 2025
You are so correct. Community colleges are openly discussing all manner of paths to undermine the reformation policies of the president . When education is turned over to the states , local communities and parents will have a Herculean task to foster requirements toward values of classical Western Civilization. Following that back drop, students will go on to any of the sciences and we will advance the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness . What does a college degree mean? A unifying basic knowledge of the humanities should be a given .
So we should make doubly sure that no poor teen can get to college? No help up to a better life?
You get more of what you subsidize. Rather than subsidizing poverty, encourage excellence and productivity.
Hard working kids who are not “disadvantaged” are proactively getting discriminated against and this is not right
Has this happened? Minority kids often know education is a ticket out. Grants are incentives to aspire for them.
Going to a school where kids around make it difficult to learn and, in some cases create an unsafe environment, won’t result in many kids succeeding.
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
"The Trump administration should act before taxpayers are asked to bail out those who borrowed money for expensive degrees. Instead of this upward redistribution, Congress should send the bill directly to those who have benefited the most from the business model: the universities themselves" ... PRECISELY. No other business sector (with the possible exception of certain defense contractors) can raise its prices without improving its product, then pass the costs off to the taxpayer. No thought of ROI for students paying tuition exists in our university system.
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
Great piece like usual. Agreed on everything. Trump will/is trying.
Chris Rufo is a Maoist who hates women and black people. He is an enemy of America.
We should not be funding universities with taxpayer money regardless of the policies they promote. That's not one of the responsibilities of the federal government delineated in the Constitution. The business model for universities should be the same as other businesses -- offer a product that customers (parents and students) need and want at a price they can afford or go out of business. You failed to mention that Harvard professors don't need to be paid $500K a year, nor do any of the army of administrators deserve their fat salaries. There are a whole lot of reforms that universities would be forced to implement if they had to act like a normal business.
Colleges and Universities and Trade Schools are definitely a higher good that benefits all of society. They are not just another business.