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.
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