Tuesday, July 12, 2016

WSU Defrauds Students: Nobody Cares





      So, I’m still looking at WSU, which has announced it’s getting rid of the mathematics requirement at the university. In a stunning display of honesty, the  university admits it has been engaging in academic fraud:

This decision was made largely because the current (math) requirement is at a level already required by most high school mathematics curriculum."


    This is a public admission of fraud at WSU! I’m so pleased at their candor!

      I’ve been saying for years that what we call “college” math is the same math in high schools, but I can certainly understand if the gentle reader simply believes I’ve been using hyperbole (though I promise you, the outlandish claims I regularly make in this blog are things I’ve seen with my own eyes).

      Wayne State University has just acknowledged publicly that they have been defrauding the public for years. They’ve been selling high school work as “college math,” forcing college students to pay for it even though the university knew it wasn’t college material. And they’re using their fraud as an excuse to drop math! Every student that went to this school in prior years should file a lawsuit at being forced to pay for “college” courses that WSU admits they knew were not actual college courses.

     This is how wildly incompetent those wildly overpaid administrators are: none of them realizes the admission of fraud here.

      If I had a restaurant, and charged customers for what I told them was steak dinners, and years later I admit that I’ve actually been giving them dog meat…wouldn’t that be fraud? Why should this university get a free ride here? Is Hillary involved somehow?

      Anyway, the gentle reader should understand that the whole point of higher education is to push people to become better. By rehashing the same math our kids learned in high school, WSU has been failing, as well as behaving fraudulently. I openly defy anyone to point out where, before this, WSU said either publicly or in their catalogue “We charge kids college tuition to be in courses where they see the same math they learned in high school.” One should expect that other coursework on this campus is likewise bogus since, obviously, WSU doesn’t care much about education.

      This is an open admission of fraud, but the confession is lost in the furor over what’s going to replace mathematics: mandatory diversity coursework. 

     Before I move on to that outrage, I must point out the hypocrisy here: our kids are heavily indoctrinated into identity politics, also known as diversity, in our public school system. In light of WSU’s reason for eliminating mathematics (it’s taught in high school), how can they justify forcing our students to learn identity politics (also taught in high school)?

     They cannot.

      The madness here is extraordinary. Many of our campuses are asylums now, in constant turmoil due to this bizarre ideology. Putting more of this destructive point of view on campus is, obviously, not going to help. I’m hardly the only one to know this, but faculty voices are silenced on campus.

      No faculty at the university will speak out against this outrage, because they justifiably fear the vicious vindictiveness of administration (I don’t blame them, having seen just how ridiculous it can get). The article can't quote any faculty from the campus that will speak out against this "faculty" proposal; anyone there stupid enough to do so would be fired. A scholar not part of that campus speaks well enough for them. The words of Ashley Thorne, the executive director of the National Association of Scholars:

“Mathematical ability is an objective and practical skill that will serve students the rest of their lives, which is why it has traditionally been a core part of college curricula. ‘Diversity’ is not an academic subject. It is a concept invented to classify people by their social identities,” she said. “Focusing on individuals’ race, ethnicity, sex, and sexuality in this way has been demonstrated to lead to racial animus, segregation, stigmas, discrimination, and poor academic performance. It also politicizes education.”


     I know I risk being accused of conflict of interest, but I honestly believe mathematics has been valid and true for thousands of years, has been a part of every civilization that advanced enough to put one rock on top of another, and I feel this is justification for why educated people should be familiar with it. Identity politics has been around a few decades at best, and seems to only be adopted by a few (apparently disintegrating) cultures…I can see it as a college course (as a study of the subject, however, and not as indoctrination), but not as a mandatory one.

     Granted, it’s not absolutely certain that WSU will mandate indoctrination courses into the curriculum, as there’s another option:

The committee’s proposal for the new curriculum recommended replacing the math requirement with a quantitative requirement and creating “quantitative experience courses.”


    This plan, too, is problematic.  WSU is taking out the fraudulent courses, and this is a good thing; their admission to fraud should have repercussions, but I suspect it won’t. They’ll likely replace the fraudulent math courses with a “quantitative requirement.” These won’t be math courses, courses with centuries of historical effectiveness empirically justifying them.

     Instead WSU might have “quantitative experience courses,” a great name for  completely fake math courses (again, I’ve seen the like in my years of experience teaching college mathematics). It all depends on whether it’ll be cheaper to hire “quantitative teachers” or “diversity teachers,” and I suspect the latter will be far easier to hire for little money--gotta get the money for those huge administrative pay raises somehow! Even if, optimistically, the students will have to learn some quantitative reasoning, another question opens up regarding such a fake mathematics course:

     Is a “fake math course” superior to a “fraudulent math course”? That’s the kind of question best left to philosophers. Too bad philosophy has been long since removed from many campuses as well, replaced by Women’s Studies courses.

     Particularly worrisome about the annihilation of standards here is the concept of “best practices,” which all too often means “because one school is bogus, we have the right to be bogus also.” Now that the precedent for removing a classical, standard, necessary, part of academics is established, other schools will follow suit in ever greater numbers. Again, I’ve seen this many times in higher education, using one fraud to justify another, especially at community colleges, where nobody cares about the everyday criminality and fraud there.

     If anyone is wondering, no, accreditation doesn’t care about any of this. Accreditation has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the school, the education at the school, or anything of the sort…which is why we can have schools operating in open fraud like this for years.


No comments:

Post a Comment