Education, Jamie O, Political Crack, So Called Liberal Media, The Darnold

The War On Higher Education

Students in Pittsburgh at a protest against gun violence, which Fareed Zakaria believes is the root of America’s higher education problems (the protest, not the gun violence). 

Fareed Zakaria presents himself as a “reasoned” centrist on CNN. So before I get into his ridiculous commentary yesterday, let’s take a look at where the man is coming from:

Not good.

Keep this in mind if you watch his rather ridiculous blather yesterday on CNN about universities. He and his like took down one university president, and they smell blood.

This claim, that “wokeness” is destroying universities, is a classic case of people of ill intent using issues and events in a disingenuous manner to advance an agenda. This is not to say that universities do not have problems, they most certainly do. But “wokeness” is not one of them.

A good rebuttal to Zakaria can be found here.

“For example, the formalization of review policies, procedures and rubrics has helped to reduce the effects of sexism and racism in hiring. I was on a hiring committee a decade ago where male faculty would say ‘I like him, because he was my friend in grad school. He’s smart’...Now such ad-hoc assists by old boys for their buddies have a check via DEI procedures that require actually evaluating scientific competence. That is really what DEI means in universities right now. With all due respect to Zakaria, I think he is wrong.”

Zakaria brings up the pro-cease fire protests, and the George Floyd protests as examples of his point, as if student protests against police brutality are something that just sprung up a few years ago. Also:

The needle-point satire of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency made a similar point.

The people who are praising Zakaria include far-right figures like this woman:

If you think Stefanik is going to go after anti-semitism by Proud Boys, then I have a bridge to sell you. When elected Republicans and presidential candidates repeat the central tenets of the Great Replacement Theory, Stefanik and fellow Republicans are mostly silent.

Meanwhile, last Friday this happened:

Republicans in Wisconsin’s outlandishly gerrymandered state house, which does not truly represent voters in the state, more or less held the University of Wisconsin’s funding hostage unless they greatly weakened their DEI efforts. There is little if any outcry from the cancel culture warriors about this attempt to shutter speech on diversity/inclusion and hurt the university to protect white males, which is expected.

Removing these guardrails against white supremacy is only enabling the likes of Trump. People who want to support this would be best to look around at who is driving this (right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, for example) and ask themselves if they want to be on the same side as those people.

And finally, the part about American universities not being leaders in research and learning? Tell that to international students, who are still coming to American universities to study and do research in very high numbers, for some reason. I work in that world, I see the research that comes out of Universities. I think in Fareed’s case, just because he doesn’t understand the research coming out of US universities doesn’t mean it’s not robust.

The problems within the American university system are not “wokeness” nor “the far-left has taken over universities.”

AHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAHAHHA …HAHAHAA… HAHA… sorry as someone who works at a university and observes how all of them operate, it is very hard for me to not just roar with laughter at the idea that universities are far-left socialist enclaves and not center-left, at best. Sometimes I can’t help giving an opinion the respect it deserves. I mean, have you ever been around a senior university administrator?

Anyway, the problem in U.S. universities is affordability. It’s definitely a huge reason why in 2016 70% of high school students were headed for college vs 62% now. Zakaria provides no proof that it’s because of “American universities abandoning the focus on excellence… to pursue… DEI”.

Another issue is guns and mass shootings. We just had one last week at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. But you can’t offend the sensitivities of pro-gun crazies, so it has to be the woke students.

So it’s not that the quality of education and research has fallen off a cliff over diversity that is the major problem. That is nothing more than a nice, polite way to say “Well, CERTAIN people aren’t smart enough to get into a university.” These types of people are notoriously silent on the years of legacy admissions and stuff like wealthy people creating fake athletic scholarships to get their kids into certain universities.

Their notable selectivity is a tell. We shouldn’t fall for it as a nation, but I fear we are.

The last word goes to some woke garbage about how war is bad, which is an example of the thinking that is no doubt going to bring down America’s higher education system (/sarcasm).

 

5 thoughts on “The War On Higher Education”

  1. it’s even worse in some states. here in WV the WVGOP and its allies at WVU are gutting the humanities school.

  2. I was on the ground on apartheid South Africa at Uno in the 1970s, both in the movement and helping steer the newspaper I worked on to pressure the administration. I knew he was a lost cause as soon as you mentioned that. there are no centrists in America. Overton window has shifted so far to the right that centrists are at best liberal Republicans (Remember them?) or somewhere to the right of that on social issues. CNN is not centrist. the New York times and Washington Post are not centrist. they are following the Overton window to the right. I basically get all my national news from the guardian US edition at this point.

  4. Pingback: Mike's Blog Round Up ... from Crooks & Liars Batocchio - Tom Bettenhausen's

  5. As a small-town school board member, I can say with little fear of contradiction that the reaction by many of my constituents to every budget or teacher contract proposal expands the frame to a war on education at all levels.

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