Harvard has refused to accept the orders of a Trump administration commission concerning its chronic problems with anti-Semitism, campus violence, and racial tribalism, bias, and segregation.
Yet, unlike some conservative campuses that distrust an overbearing Washington, Harvard and most elite schools like it want it both ways. They do as they please on their own turf and yet still demand that the taxpayers send them multibillion-dollar checks in addition to their multibillion-dollar private incomes.
Aside from the issues of autonomy and free expression, there are lots of campus practices that higher education would prefer were not widely known to the public.
But soon they will be, and thus will become sources of public anger. Perhaps envision elite private colleges as mossy rocks, which seem outwardly picturesque—until you turn them over and see what crawls beneath.
So, if there are protracted standoffs, our elite campuses will be hard-pressed to defend the indefensible. This effort will be difficult because public confidence in higher education has already plummeted to historic lows in the most recent polls.
In Amerispeak public surveys, those expressing very little confidence or none at all in higher education have soared to about 30 percent of respondents, while those polling only “some” confidence rose to 40%.
Polls show that less than a third of Americans have quite a lot of confidence in our college campuses.
No wonder: Over the past half-century, tuition has generally risen at twice the rate of inflation. In part, that price-gouging became standard because federal aid to our most prestigious schools has skyrocketed, hand-in-glove with the federalized student loan program. It has become a $1.7 trillion entity in which the combined rate of both those students who defaulted on their guaranteed loans or are currently late on payments is nearing 12-13 percent. In sum, colleges counted on an ensured stream of tuition money and so raised their prices inordinately, given federal guarantees.
Note that small private Hillsdale College, which takes no federal money and is the guarantor of its own generous student aid, charges about $45,000-50,000 for combined tuition, room, and board—about half the going rate in the Ivy League and similar elite campuses.
Half the youth of the country who choose to go straight to work and not attend college might object to such use of their tax dollars. They would assume that universities with multibillion-dollar endowments and huge annual incomes have plenty of resources to guarantee their own student loans. That way, campuses would have a financial interest in seeing their own students graduate in four years, get jobs, and pay back their alma mater promptly and fully. Instead, as long as universities are paid upfront, they seem to care little that their graduates leave heavily in debt and occasionally default on their loans.
There is almost no intellectual diversity on campus. Some recent studies have found Democrat/liberal professors outnumber their Republican/conservative counterparts by a 10-1 margin, especially in the social sciences and humanities. There are plenty of conservative PhDs on the market, but higher education has used insidious methods such as diversity oaths and covert political bias to find ways not to hire or retain them.
Colleges no longer believe in their ancient mission to teach students the ancient, disinterested, and inductive method of pursuing knowledge. Nor do they care much that their graduates leave college without a broad classical education in history, literature, language, philosophy, science, and math. Instead, they are missionaries who believe their duty is to indoctrinate youth in progressive ideology, found mostly in studies courses and deductive classes, as part of a greater project to fundamentally alter the nature of the United States.
The Supreme Court in a recent case ruled against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, stating that their use of racial and gender bias is illegal under the 14th Amendment and thus affirmative action and associated racial essentialism are forbidden.
Yet, many of our campuses simply rebrand their offices of “diversity/equity/inclusion” —the campus euphemism for using race and gender bias in applications, hiring, retention, and promotion—with newer Orwellian names like the “Office of Belonging” or “Community Outreach.” Universities are higher education’s version of sanctuary cities that likewise cavalierly believe they can largely ignore federal laws with impunity.
For example, it’s illegal to segregate university events or facilities by race. But universities sidestep the law by offering race-based graduation ceremonies as “auxiliary” or “additional” events and commemorations. Racially segregated dorms are deemed “theme” houses open to all but de facto widely known as racially exclusive. If the so-called “white” minority at Stanford—some 22 percent of the student body—opted for an “extra” white graduation ceremony, theoretically open to all students, the university would—and should—shut it down promptly.
In business and private entities, “overhead deductions” or “surcharges” usually run from 10 to 20 percent. But elite private universities charge the federal government for their faculty research grants, often between 40 and 60 percent. Apparently, they operate on the principle that their supposedly prestigious brands deserve private exemption from gouging the government.
Over the past few decades, foreign governments, without audit, have poured some $60 billion into America’s purportedly most prestigious universities. Communist China and illiberal Qatar alone gave $500 million last year. And they expect and receive something for their ideologically driven investments.
The Department of Education during the first Trump administration fined many campuses millions of dollars for not reporting these often quid pro quo gifts. If one wonders why hundreds of thousands of foreign students from dictatorial and often anti-American nations like China and Middle Eastern autocracies prove instrumental in growing anti-American and anti-Israel protests, then follow the money that funds professorships and programs sympathetic to these agendas.
The Bill of Rights and its later amendments apply to everyone everywhere in the United States. But these laws are especially operative on those entities that take federal government money and, by doing so, forfeit some of their operational autonomy.
Yet disruptions of invited lecturers who are conservative, pro-Israeli, pro-life, or who question biological males competing in female sports are commonplace on campus.
Usually, when an invited conservative federal judge, a Republican officeholder, a traditionalist activist, or a professor deemed not conservative is shouted down, or the lecture hall is swarmed with disruptive and sometimes violent student protestors, campus administrators issue pro forma stern statements about “not tolerating violations of free speech.”
And then, they do nothing.
Most campus officials either empathize with the spirit or the ideology of the disrupters. Or they are far more afraid of their own radical professors and students than they are of the federal government cutting off their funding for refusing to guarantee First Amendment protections. Harvard arguing for federal funds on the principle of protecting the First Amendment is adding insult to the serial injury it has done to free speech.
More cynically, most campus administrators assume that if conservative pro-life students ever swarmed a pro-abortion lecturer, or Jewish students ransacked a Middle East Studies classroom or chased and then trapped foreign students in a library, then they would likely be summarily expelled. Most naturally assume that universities’ selective timidity and laxity are ideologically and politically driven.
There is no guarantee of due process on campus, as understood under the Bill of Rights. Students or faculty who are accused of particular hot-button “crimes,” such as sexual harassment or “hate speech,” are often denied the right to know their accusers or to have an open hearing with legal counsel before a disinterested panel of judges.
The wronged have little redress of grievance except to use the public court system to intervene to force the university to follow the law.
The best-kept secret of our marquee universities is a radical fall-off in standards as once defined by their own, once much ballyhooed, tough requirements. Our best universities customarily now ensure that 70-80 percent of students in their classes receive A’s.
Prestigious campuses, like Harvard and Stanford, have recently introduced remedial math classes. Privately, the supposedly most demanding campuses know that their prior non-meritocratic admissions have resulted in thousands of students who enter college without the high-school preparation necessary to meet their own past traditional university requirements.
Conservative, Jewish, and religious families now doubt whether their offspring would be treated equitably or would receive a first-rate education commensurate with the four-year total $400,000 cost, or are even now safe.
When pressed, universities usually point to their professional and graduate schools in medicine, engineering, math, science, and business as integral to American prosperity. True, they are. But to the degree they are, it is likely because they have either resisted university orthodoxy or were never as politicized as the social sciences and humanities, or are already being weaponized, albeit more slowly.
If universities were smart, they would accept federal conditions to follow the law and protect the safety and interests of their own students.
That way, they would restore their academic rigor and reputations, regain public support, and enhance meritocracy, the key to their former excellence. But even if their officials are either too partisan or timid to change, they could always publicly report to their radical faculties and students that they were “forced” to comply with conditions that they might privately accept were certainly in their own interests.
Otherwise, at the present rate, employers, parents, and the public will make the necessary adjustments, and the brands once deemed the gold standard and prestigious will become mere dross.
A funny thing has occurred with job interviews. At one time most employers looked at minority students with Elite University degrees suspiciously. They wondered if they were given gratuitous instead of meritorious grades. Now, based on qualifications which emphasize DEI and CRT, employers are convinced that they are hiring indoctrinated employees who need to be psychologically rehabilitated and carefully watched else they likely will become counterproductive. What saves these new graduates is the fact that woke corporations, the media, educational institutions and NGOs want such employees. On the other hand businesses which create what people really need and must have in terms of products and services shy away from such those who believe they deserve renumeration based solely upon where they graduated from.
Productive business require productive people who hustle and perform. Even professional schools that offer degrees which are necessary for licensure are not above suspicion by employers. Medicine, Veterinary Medicine, Dentistry, Architecture, Nursing and a host of other professional and vocational institutions, under the Biden Administration, did the very opposite of what the Trump Administration is attempting to do. In other words you weren’t selected until you proved you were already indoctrinated and, if you wanted to graduate unfettered by pre graduation remorseful incidents, you kept your mouth shut and showed solidarity by joining the chorus or remaining silent and uncommitted in public. Indoctrinated employees are often not easy to work with. Opinions can enhance or curtail performance.
Educational institutions are no longer about educated employees that employers need and seek. Every graduate is expected to resonate like Greta Thunberg. Asian and other foreign students are resilient and resistant. They arrive pre-indoctrinated knowing that American education is valuable in only one way. They can take what they learned back home to improve their countries technologically so that they can continue to compete with the country that taught them how.
Alan Dershowitz has an interesting take on the current war between the Trump Administration and Harvard University on his podcast, the Dershow on Youtube. His quick history of Harvard in the 20th Century in regard to its longstanding anti-Israel stance is entertainingly interesting to watch. His observations on Harvard starts about the nine minute mark-----
Lets not ignore the way Democrats attempt to win elections. Consider that their indoctrination tactics are designed to divide. People concentrate on what they were taught and not on core values. They distract to avoid focusing. I posted this on American Thinker in response to an article written by our friend Christopher Chantrill.
Donald Trump won the last three national elections. Without election fraud and the support of educated, white, suburban women America would be what it was designed to be and once was.
Without the Department of Education and Public Service Unions along with College and University indoctrination institutions there would be no DEI, CRT and Affirmative Action. Without DEI, CRT and Affirmative Action there would be no indoctrination.The four women on the SCOTUS will almost certainly vote against the opinion of Justice Thomas, a black conservative man, when it comes to core Constitutional principles.
Women look at the Constitution as a document created by racist, bigoted, misogynistic, pro life, anti-abortion men. They have been taught to believe that just as black people have been taught that Democrats, historically, were not the party of racism and segregation. The chemicals which create the physical differences between men and women do not just do that. They also create a psyche that too often supersedes logic, reason and evidence once a belief becomes solidly accepted. That could, paradoxically, be a good thing, biologically, for raising progeny but not after falling victim to propaganda and indoctrination designed to mitigate nature and fortify employment for Corporate America. Women can’t help themselves from feeling the way they do. What they can do is try and understand what is happening. Some will but the majority won’t. Yet some are so reasonable and logical that they have become my greatest heros.
I have several areas of ability I operate in; can bounce back and forth effortlessly between at this point. I am an artist, a writer, a salesman and a mentor of young men - and in each I will say, naturally, of course, being somewhat constrained - by my inexorable will to adhere to a credo of humility, you understand - can yet honestly attest, that I am not too shabby in terms of my familiarity with and execution of them all! LOL
But, the one that is most meaningful to me that will have the longest lasting effects in terms of the good I hope it (and I) will affect is my role as a mentor; probably because in my yoot I didn’t have one and looking back I see how if I only had had one - it would have saved me untold mistakes, enabled me to sidestep pitfalls that now I look back and wonder how I couldn’t have seen them coming. But - being wise after the fact is always easy.
I could have, if I had desired, been a Professor at basically any university or college on earth - if I had so desired.
After all, it’s not like it’s really THAT hard, is it now? Just be able to amass a body of knowledge about some subject that enables you to spout, pontificate eruditely - get a bunch of equally empty-headed fools of like mind to wax poetic about your erudition and mental abilities - and before you know it - you are on the faculty - safely protected from being fired by tenure - especially if - as is the case now - you are happy to spout the party line (lies) of your particular Poison Ivy League “school”.
So - needless to say, I didn’t opt for the dead, dying, hopefully soon dead - “Halls of Academia” - after all?
Who - who’s really smart - actually lets themselves attend these bastions of propaganda and brainwashing - certainly NOT the best and brightest of this or any generation. No, if they are really smart that get themselves free of their parents and other purveyors of the societal Samsara - lies and illusions - and realize that?
Unless they want to be a brain surgeon? There’s precious little they can’t learn on their own - by getting off their butts and seeking knowledge first hand; or if needed? Find someone really good at whatever it is they want to know and pay them if needed - to teach them. Or, if they must - find a specialized school that does offer that particular specialty - sans the indoctrinating, deadening - guaranteed to stupefy - WOKE poisons.
But, since at heart - of all my various abilities - all of which have at their core - being an ability to understand people and configure my understandings of them, their potentials and our current situation creatively - thereby resulting in positive outcomes for one for all. The one I cherish most is that of being a teacher most. I needed an outlet for that penchant.
Thus, I came to mentoring over 20 years ago; always of young men (a man’s gotta know his limitations and women’s minds are - beyond mine to most expeditiously and effectively fathom and calibrate!); so my “boys” it has turned out - who are among the best and brightest - almost to the man, except one - come from foreign lands found in back of beyond hinterland places - like Africa Bangladesh, the Middle East or China.
Why? Because. Because despite the natural stultifying and deadening, disparaging of individual initiative qualities of theirs and ALL culture everywhere - designed to maintain the status quo? The young men raised there at least aren’t as corrupted, spoiled, defiled as the young men raised here in America.
Yes, there are good ones raised in America - but it’s not a “target rich environment” rather more akin to - the old saw of them being almost “As scarce as hen’s teeth” apropos.
Case in point my young business partner, who is “Out of Africa”, a son of the continent of Deepest Darkest Africa. Taught himself to read at the age of 5; read everything in his father’s library and then began to purloin works from his Uncle’s too. Till all of them were read as well. Has an IQ I would guess well over 140 and the only man who in 30 years, since I got myself out of the Partnership from Hell - and swore I would NEVER, EVER - if I lived forever - ever have another partner again.
Made a liar out of me and made me want to make him one! And, my decision has proven to be spot on right as rain ever was or will ever be.
In any event, the beauty of working with young men, who are immigrants from countries where for the most part it is literally unsafe and dangerous to one’s health - to manifest their full understanding of life and the way the world works?
Is that you don’t have to convince them that America truly is the land of opportunity - the home of the free and the brave; the place where they come and can “be all they can be”! LOL (I love that Army ad - great musical score and writing.)
You don’t have to re-engineer their minds; teach them how to think pragmatically - make them want empirical evidence to underlie an assertion or determination. They are based - BASED in reality - not BS, WOKE platitudes that some nasty, Machiavellian, evil as sin, blacker than black-hearted Pieces OS like Obama or the American Federation of Communist Teachers Union spout.
And so, when you have such a mentee to mentor - they are capable of understanding the importance of the unique relationship that a formal mentoring relationship - like that which has always existed unnoticed and rarely spoken of - throughout all time and all ages - between an older man and young men of great promise - that, when it happens, when it does, what it means; the gravitas and opportunity it bodes.
What it means when such a friendship, teaching exercise - that can span years even decades are brought into being by?
Seeming happenstance but really never so.
Incidentally, it is the teacher NEVER the student who decides to, has the power, to initiate the incredibly complex paradigm, laborious as hell, painstaking protocols that ultimately result in creating bringing into being the bonds of trust needed; between teacher and prospective student happen - that are?
Inseparable from, the sine qua non of, being able to facilitate the transfer of vast bodies of knowledge - that are only possible when there are no walls, built of doubt or distrust, between two men - both understanding that they are on a mission and that it’s not a job - but an adventure - so to speak!
Needless to say - there’s nothing even that begins to approach that level of teaching and linking of the minds in any of the bastions of perverted, compromised, facist thinking that pass for schools of higher education - in existence anywhere on the earth today.
But - truth be told - that’s always the way it’s been.
First, a brief story: When I was a graduate student at Indiana in the mid-80’s, then Chief Justice of the US, William Rehnquist, came to give a speech. Being a math student, I didn’t attend, but I read about it the next day in the school paper. What I read was that Rehnquist, a Republican nominee (by Nixon), was shouted down by a leftist mob and the speech had to be ended early. This was in the mid-80’s.
The point: The issues Professor Hansen is discussing, and pretty much all the issues being discussed these days on AG, The Federalist, American Thinker, and similar sites, have been around for well over 40 years. During this time, the problems have been allowed to metastasize. We are too far down the road for tinkering with remedies like public shaming (the left is shameless), new laws (the left is lawless and will claim to have found ways around them), or executive actions (the left will ignore those also until the next Democrat president reverses them all within 24 hours of taking office). Much more drastic treatment is needed, but no one seems to know how to fashion it, even if they had the stomach for trying it.