The Abysmal Rabbithole of Higher Ed Corruption

By Professor Doom

     I’ve written before the college paper writing scam, where a significant portion of college papers are written by ghost writers. Every few years, one of these ghost writers “spills the beans,” exposing just how easy this is to do.

      Back when college classes had 25 students or less, when faculty weren’t teaching half a dozen or more such classes a semester, it wasn’t nearly so easy to do this. Faculty had time to ask for a few “in class” writing assignments…a student who was barely literate in class will have a hard time explaining those eloquent papers submitted from home. Now that classes are huge and workloads heavy, a professor really doesn’t have time to assign much writing, and certainly doesn’t have the time to call students in for private conversations about the material of the papers they’ve submitted.

     This isn’t just at the undergraduate level; I’ve seen quite a few PhD-holders, English as their first language, who can barely compose a coherent paragraph…I suspect the problem is common enough that this is the reason I never see a campus faculty message board.

       Anyway, a few years have passed, and so it must be time for another ghost writer to come forward. Gentle readers, I introduce to you Jaimie Leigh. I don’t completely buy everything she has to say…but nevertheless I’ll add some details:

I think a lot of people seriously have no idea how thoroughly the system is rigged. I spent several years as a for-hire writer who couldn’t afford to turn work away. This means I accepted a lot of jobs I feel icky about now, but it also means that I’ve seen firsthand how this all shakes out.

     The for-hire paper writing business isn’t just for college, high school students also need “help,” particularly when it comes time to submit writing samples to those few campuses with admissions requirements.

See, getting little Asshole McGloatyFace III into Harvard is just the first domino en route to prestige and pedigree.

     She’ll refer to McGloatyFace often in her rant, and tries to make it a racial thing. It’s really a money thing. As long as there are limited resources (in this case, college admissions), the wealthy are going to use their advantages to get more of those resources.

The richest of rich parents get him there by donating a library collection or buying a building.

       Now, I don’t think it’s unfair the wealthy hiring tutors for the kids, or buying them extra books, or even by making a large donation to the school. The ranter here disagrees, but, if the school managed those donations wisely (instead of admin pouring the money into their own pockets), it could easily provide scholarships to the poor-but-qualified kids. This is, in fact, how things often worked in higher ed in times past, when schools were run by educators. Today’s admin don’t think like educators…because they aren’t educators.

       Please understand, to some extent we’ve always had this system: rich-but-unqualified paid tuition, poor-but-talented got scholarships. The student loan scam killed that system, since the loans went “to everyone,” which sounded fair. Like the rich were going to take out loans…

The lowly rich hire people like me to write their kids’ essays and letters, pull together their resumes, and figure out how to make years of abject mediocrity sound good. And they don’t only hire people like me. They also hire special tutors and test prep gurus to teach their kids to hack the tests. They pull strings to get their kids special accommodations they don’t need, so they have more time to get all the math problems done on the SAT. They get interview coaches who teach their kids what to say when they go for their appointment.

      The author lumps all these “advantages” together, and some of these are fraud, while others? So what if they hire an interview coach, there really is always going to be something the rich can buy which the poor cannot…it’s what makes the rich, rich.

When Asshole McGloatyFace is in school, his parents hire people like me again. Want to know how many papers I’ve written for undergraduate students? Graduate students? I couldn’t even tell you. It’s a higher number than I can remember offhand. Need a magic paper to save your grade in the class you’re failing? Need to save your half-assed thesis? I’ve done it all. I’m a better-than-average writer and I made my clients look good.

      We really need to ask some hard questions about a higher education system where the professors simply don’t know their students well enough, not even at the graduate level, to tell when a paper has been ghost-written (allow me to distinguish this from plagiarism).

       Of course, there’s more to it than that. I was punished for catching cheaters, and I’m hardly the only faculty who’ve gotten the memo. You can’t fail a cheater, you see…he’ll trash you on the student evaluations, and admin gets rid of faculty with low evaluations. You can’t remove a cheater from your class, because admin isn’t about to reduce the number of sweet, sweet, student loan checks coming in.

      Bottom line, faculty don’t dare catch cheaters, and admin doesn’t want them caught. In a system like this, how is it a surprise that cheating is rampant?

      Past this point, the author rants about how once McGloatyface leaves college, he continues to buy advantages, using his wealth to generate more wealth, which he then spends on his children to repeat the cycle.

      And this is where I stop buying her story. See, there’s considerable evidence of turnover in the upper/middle/lower classes. The bulk of CEOs (70%), even at huge corporations, don’t even come from the Ivy League. Yes, the wealthy have an advantage…but it’s not insurmountable. The bulk of our professional athletes sure didn’t come from the Ivy League, either.

      I should also point out: all the money the wealthy spend on coaches, mentors, tutors and whatnot? That’s employing our middle class.

       But the fact remains: we really need to re-examine our higher education system which allows such a professional class of cheaters to exist.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Chinese Hackers Target Research Universities

By Professor Doom

Admin: “Please be aware we had another phishing attempt on our servers, do not respond to e-mails in the following format…”

--I get phishing/hacking e-mails on my institution’s account about every week or so.

     Like most folks, I get many “phishing” attempts on my e-mail. Some are quite good, but many have a weakness which exposes them. English is a ridiculously complicated language, you see, and a non-native speaker, even one very fluent, often reveals himself as such with a phrase that no American would ever use. For example, you can buy “hot water cylinders” (legit site, but clearly not American despite the English language), but in America we just call them “water heaters,” even though, yeah, they’re usually cylindrical.

     Earlier I feel like I came off as an apologist for China, in addressing hysteria over that country’s establishing little fiefdoms on some of our campuses. To be more clear, those fiefdoms aren’t the real issue, so allow me to cover something far more sinister being done by China, though pretty much common to every country on the planet:

U.S. universities urged to step up cybersecurity protections after report reveals Chinese hackers attempted to steal military secrets from dozens of institutions.

     Before moving on to the issues in the article, I want to point out that while most of our campuses are drowning in ideology and corruption we still have universities, particularly “research universities,” where we investigate far more relevant things than the number of possible human genders, where we invent things far more useful than new personal pronouns like “xhe” or “xhim.”

      This vastly more important research doesn’t make the news, because it’s not supposed to be common knowledge. It’s sad that this knowledge must be classified as “military secrets,” but the fact remains, other countries, including China, would like to have that knowledge as well.

Chinese hackers are ramping up their efforts to steal military research secrets from U.S. universities, new cybersecurity intelligence suggests.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Hawaii, Pennsylvania State University, Duke University and the University of Washington are among 27 institutions in the U.S., Canada and Southeast Asia to be targeted by Chinese hackers, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

     Hey, want to know where to go to get involved in real research that will matter? Well, you can bet if China is interested in it, it’s probably worth something, so the serious student should look carefully at the list helpfully supplied above, to get some ideas of real graduate schools (where the research is done) worth applying to. Do carefully note how few of those schools have time for race riots…

     The primary target, this time, was undersea technology. Our oceans represent a vast source of resources, and the country best able to control/explore/exploit the seas has been the dominant country on the planet for several centuries now, it’s reasonable to think the undersea will be the next big frontier.

     One school is absent from the list:

One wonders why Harvard wasn't on the list of targets. Maybe it has something to do with this?

"The fact that Bo Guagua was a couple months from his Harvard degree has sparked interest in the number of so-called princelings—the offspring of powerful Chinese Communist Party officials—attending elite U.S. universities... But there are people far more important than the children of Chinese party leaders attending Harvard and other elite U.S. universities: Chinese leaders themselves... Carefully vetted officials—a selection of some of the regime’s rising stars—were sent abroad to study in specially designed programs at some of the world’s finest universities. The first crop was sent to Harvard...

     It’s certainly an interesting theory, and I rather believe it to be true. We have an analogue here in the U.S. Most of our higher education system is corrupted or outright fraudulent, but each state still generally keeps one school, the “flagship university” mostly legitimate. Why? Because the political leaders need a place to send their kids. They can’t all go to Harvard, after all…

     Again, a hidden takeaway: if you’re looking for a legitimate university to send your kids, see where the political leaders of your state send their kids. It’s not a sure thing mind you, but it’ll increase the odds of getting an education.

China is not the first country to target U.S. universities with a coordinated cybercampaign. Last year nine Iranian hackers were charged for their role in a phishing scam that ran from 2013 to 2017 and attempted to steal the passwords of hundreds of thousands of professors.

     Yeah, no kidding. While I don’t want to underestimate the legitimacy of this kind of threat, there’s a slant to this article, expressed in two ways.

     The first way is from the above, the “nine Iranian hackers.” Yeah, sure, but that’s not Iran, those are hackers who happen to be from Iran. I get hit with phishing attempts from foreigners on a very regular basis, you don’t need a government to do that sort of thing. Why didn’t the article go ahead and mention the Nigerian scam as well? I mean, at least a dozen people have died there, leaving me tens of millions of dollars, after all.

     The second? What moron thinks the United States government doesn’t do much of the same, at least when we can’t get their Secretary of State to simply just sell the secrets off her private e-mail server (like many countries did with us)? I respect our government is going to do that sort of thing, and thus we should not be so quick to anger when other countries do unto us as we do to them. We should be quick to guard our secrets, of course.

It is "just inevitable" that research universities will be targets, Wheeler said. "The open culture of universities make us an enduring target."

      Jeez, these people. I’m sorry, criminals and thieves have always been a big part of society, and while universities are certainly targeted by them, so is every business, and I daresay every human being on the planet with anything worth taking.

      That said, yeah, we need to safeguard things we value…but no harm in letting them take all they can from our converged campuses.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Another College Dies, Stranding Students And Enriching Admin

By Professor Doom

     Before the days of the student loan scam, universities were renowned for their endurance. The oldest university in the world is over a thousand years old, and even “abandoned” universities like in Timbuktu still endure, because they were collections of scholars…not institutions devoted to siphoning off student loan money.

     Despite the money pouring into higher ed, we’re starting to see school closings, either due to fraud, or horrific plundering and “mismanagement” by a caste of looters far more interested in personal gains than building an institution to withstand the test of time.

      At some point, we need to ask questions, and a recent article comes close:

A College Chain Crumbles, and Millions in Student Loan Cash Disappears

--yeah, it’s the New York Times…just because they print much fake news, doesn’t mean it’s all fake, though I’ll be dissecting this piece.

     It’s funny that the title says the student loan cash “disappears,” as we all know that’s impossible. Every dollar is tracked, when I was reimbursed for a tank of gas at the community college, I assure the gentle reader the forms were filed and signed off in quintuplicate. So there’s a question here in the title, but does the NYT bother to answer it?

     So what happened at this school?

When the Education Department approved a proposal by Dream Center, a Christian nonprofit with no experience in higher education, to buy a troubled chain of for-profit colleges, skeptics warned that the charity was unlikely to pull off the turnaround it promised.

…Barely a year after the takeover, dozens of Dream Center campuses are nearly out of money and may close as soon as Friday. More than a dozen others have been sold in the hope they can survive.

     Great, more questions. So, the sleazy for-profit sold out to the non-profit. Was there really no expertise left at the school? One of the reasons “old” universities survived is because the leadership and the faculty were the same people—the only way to kill the school was to eliminate all the scholars (hi Chairman Mao!), but past that it was basically impossible. That’s not the case at many schools, especially the for-profits, where the people running the schools have no education or interest in such, and so all the faculty are just temp workers. You get rid of the “leadership” at these types of schools and you indeed do have nothing.

      So when Dream Center bought this school, they had nothing but a name (besmirched by being for-profit), and no expertise. They couldn’t really hire anyone, either, because all they could get would be more plunderers.

     This is no one room schoolhouse, either:

The affected schools…have about 26,000 students in programs spanning associate degrees in dental hygiene and doctoral programs in law and psychology. Fourteen campuses, mostly Art Institute locations, have a new owner after a hastily arranged transfer involving private equity executives. More than 40 others are under the control of a court-appointed receiver who has accused school officials of trying to keep the doors open by taking millions of dollars earmarked for students.

   

     So they’re already ripping it into smaller pieces and selling the most profitable bits off. You can bet the teachers at those profitable bits will get absolutely nothing for their work.

Now its students — many with credits that cannot be easily transferred — are stuck in a meltdown.

      One of the main original purposes of accreditation was to facilitate transfer students. The schools got together and decided what kind of education a student should receive, so that a student moving from one school to another could do so without “losing” years of credit for education at the former school.

      Accreditation has been debased into a pure money-sucking scheme of no relevance to education whatsoever, as my line-by-line analysis of accreditation regulation reveals.

     Similarly, higher education was never supposed to be supported by a massive student loan scam, though that’s mostly what it is today. Schools are now massive endeavors filled with students loaded up with irrelevant coursework.

     Even if a school collapsed in the time before the student loan scam, you didn’t have thousands of students stranded with nothing to show for it, and you didn’t have billions of dollars supposedly “vanishing.”

 On Wednesday, members of the faculty at Argosy’s Chicago and Northern Virginia campuses told students that they had been fired and instructed to remove their belongings. In Phoenix, an unpaid landlord locked students out of their classrooms.

      The students were fired? I suspect a typo in the article here (it is the NYT, after all). Anyway, about that money?

The fall accelerated last week when the Education Department cut off federal student loan funds to Argosy after the court-appointed receiver said school officials had taken about $13 million owed to students at 22 campuses and used it for expenses like payroll.

     Most students never see their student loan money—it goes directly to the school, and anything left over after tuition goes to the student. Tuition is now so high that it only takes a few students to pay for the teacher of the course, the rest just flows into administrative pockets.

      Think about what the above says: the people running the school stole the tuition money and paid themselves off first. The people running the schools are clearly not educators.

      Note also, “the fall accelerated” when the student loan money runs dry. Most schools are so bloated with plundering administrators they simply cannot survive without all that cash flowing in.

     For-profits have a vile reputation for good reason. They clearly cooked the books to facilitate the purchase:

Almost immediately, the organization discovered the schools were in worse shape than expected, with aging facilities and outdated technology. The universities “were, on the whole, failing without hope for redemption,” the receiver wrote in a court filing last month.

Dream Center had anticipated a $30 million profit in its first year, Mr. Barton wrote in a recent legal filing. Instead, it was facing a $38 million loss.

     “Aging facilities and outdated technology” is hardly a unique description, many schools fit that mark. I remember when I was at a state school in the late 90s, and my computer was a bit, well, dated. When I asked for one with a CD-ROM drive, the department head could only give me a blank look: she had no idea what one of those was.

      Still, isn’t anyone curious what the $38 million was spent on? That’s quite the loss. The NYT isn’t curious, but I am. About 300 admin could burn through that much on their salaries in the first year, and one admin per 100 students is quite a low ratio (1 admin per 6 students is not unheard of).  Such an easy question, too bad the article doesn’t ask it…but I really think there was plundering here.

     While Argosy students have little hope of getting back money they paid out of pocket, the Education Department said the federal loan debt of affected students would be forgiven for this semester. If the schools close, students can seek help under a program covering school shutdowns.

      It’s good that there’s a program for helping students trapped in a school shutdown…but none of this was necessary before the student loan scam. Shut it down already.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The Chinese Government’s Influence on Campus

By Professor Doom

     These are the days where we’re supposed to be very paranoid over other countries’ influence on our institutions…even as our media refuses to mention how our country influences entire governments of other countries.

     That said, the Chinese government does have outposts on our campuses. I see little reason for outrage, as these things are hardly subtle, being called Confucius Institutes—Confucius is a famous Chinese philosopher, so anyone with even minimal education might suspect anything named after him would have a Chinese connection, after all.

     Compare this to our various Diversity Institutes, which push a Marxist progressive ideology that you’d never could suspect simply from the word “diversity” (except, of course, for their track record).

      Unlike Diversity Institutes which are funded by a student loan scam destroying the lives of millions of American citizens, Confucian Institutes are funded by the Chinese government:

China has directly provided more than $158 million to U.S. universities to host Confucius Institutes since 2006, according to a report from the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released in advance of a hearing on China’s impact on the U.S. educational system scheduled for this morning.

     I don’t want to come across as a Chinese apologist, but if they’re paying for it and up front about what they’re doing, I’m not sure I see the problem. Around a $100 billion in student loan money flows onto campus every year, and billions in other taxpayer dollars also end up there. China’s little over $10 million a year hardly seems to be an issue, considering all the problems in higher ed today. The article I’m quoting from sees problems, however.

It alleges that “the Chinese government controls nearly every aspect of Confucius Institutes at U.S. schools,” down to having veto authority over events and activities included in the annual budget submitted for approval...

     Oh no! Not veto authority over events they’re paying for! That’s…terrible? Doesn’t the gentle reader have veto authority over everything he pays for (except for taxes, of course)? Someone should tell these people how conservative speakers and Christians are being vetoed off campus. What do these tiny institutes do, anyway?

More than 90 U.S. universities host the CIs, which supporters say offer critical resources for foreign language learning at a time when such resources are hard to find.

     So they teach Chinese, mostly. Considering the tiny amounts of funds involved, that seems about right, and seeing as our own universities are shutting down their language departments, I support China doing this (if they deem it important), and other countries wishing to spread knowledge of their languages should do the same…if our own knowledge centers can’t do it on their own anymore (cuts into the lakefront property for the administrators), why not allow this?

At least 10 U.S. universities have moved to close their Confucius Institutes over the past year as scrutiny of the Chinese government-funded centers for language and cultural education has intensified and lawmakers from across the political spectrum have raised concerns about Chinese influence over American higher education.

     Nothing wrong with scrutiny, but has anything ever been found? Alas, the article gives no instances of what, exactly, these little institutes are doing wrong (the gentle reader should compare to the number of non-Chinese institutes my blog has identified plundering, embezzling, or otherwise looting student loan money…).

      Here’s the worst they have:

The subcommittee obtained a 2018 contract between Hanban and a Chinese instructor requiring the instructor to “conscientiously safeguard national interests.” The contract would terminate if the instructor were to “violate Chinese laws” or “engage in activities detrimental to national interest; participate in illegal organizations and engage in activities against local religions and customs, hence causing bad influences.”

      I’ve been forced to sign loyalty oaths as a college teacher, and I’m sure if I acted not in the national interests of America, I’d lose my job, too…I certainly can lose it for violating quite a number of laws. Goodness, if the above job responsibilities really are a problem, they should consider the starvation wages, no benefits, and being forced to lie about the students in their classes, which are all part of the job description for a typical college adjunct, who also must adhere to the above job responsibilities.

       They’re really trying to make something out of this, but this is yet another big fat nothing-burger:

GAO found that 64 agreements had language saying "that institute activities would be conducted in accordance with the Confucius Institute constitution and bylaws," but also found that "some school officials we interviewed stated there had been no instance in which the constitution and bylaws had been invoked or conflicted with school policies."

    In other words, the evil, draconian policies of China are no different than the policies we already have on campus? Does anybody ever think about the implications of these reports? It’s as cognitively dissonant as taking Cohen’s claims that Trump never intended to win the election…but worked closely with Russia to collude for victory.

     Anyway, yes, the Chinese government does indeed have a tiny sliver of influence over our higher education system. If you want to avoid being influenced by “them,” all you need to do is not set foot in any Confucian Institute, and to avoid taking classes in Chinese from a Chinese citizen. Both are pretty easy to do on our campuses.

      On the other hand, good luck avoiding Gender Studies and other political indoctrination courses, since those are mandatory.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

For-Profit Colleges Disguising Themselves…Trump’s Fault?

By Professor Doom

     Last time I was a bit hard on Trump, so I figure this time to give him a break.

     So much of our news media is deranged these days. It takes real effort to pick out information from the propaganda, and a recent article from Ctrl-Left hate site The Nation, a “weekly journal of progressive news” that’s been around for ages, highlights the problem:

For Profit Colleges Are Dodging Regulations By Becoming…’Nonprofits’?

Under Trump, the scam-college industry is getting a second wind.

     I’ve been saying the for-profits have been disguising themselves as non-profits for years (here’s a post from before the 2016 election where I said it, on the college debt list of shame). NYU is the most famous “non-profit” school which really puts the screws to students in the name of profits, but…this isn’t a Trump thing, as NYU was founded in 1831.

      Now, just because the site falsely tries to put the blame on this “new” trend on Trump, doesn’t mean it’s not a trend (although a trend identified by me years ago…seriously, mainstream media sucks).

As a prominent college-scam entrepreneur and purveyor of faux philanthropy[R1] …

     Goodness, the hatred guiding the author is palpable, but before getting to what little the article has to say, I want to use the above to inform. Yes, Trump was involved in a dubious “school,” though it wasn’t an educational institution. The profits--if any, he shut it down fast like smart businessmen do with losing propositions--from it pale next to the massive sums “acquired” by the likes of Sanders and Clinton in their own involvement in schools…schools that are actual universities, screwing kids forever in exchange for student loan money. I covered this hierarchy of fraud before, of course. It’s curious how the author neglected to mention this detail. Oh yeah, that’s right: when you’ve a narrative to push, you can’t divulge anything to contradict it. It’s the big problem with our news today, you have to go somewhere else to get the full story.

      Similarly, “faux philanthropy” is a strange thing to say, unrelated to the subject of the article.  But seeing as it was brought up, does the author truly not know about the immense fraud of The Clinton Foundation? Maybe she could go to another site and learn about it.

     Anyway, let’s get to the piece:

…his administration is taking a lax approach to regulating the college business…as the disgraced for-profit education industry revives itself.

      I do wish she could have backed up this claim, as the most recent data sure indicates the for-profit education industry is taking a relentless beating, and is in no way reviving itself. Much as other Ctrl-Left articles talk about “rising hate crimes” even when nobody can see any at all, there seems to be an agenda being pushed, one that cannot respond to facts.

      As far as lax regulations, sure, Trump hasn’t done much. But neither have the last five or more presidents. Again, here’s a piece from 2014 where the Feds knew a school was a fraud, well before the Trump presidency, and the Feds still gave the school well over a billion in student loan money, in a single year, because the regulations allowed even a fraudulent school, if accredited, to get student loan money. Total student loan debt goes up around 100,000,000,000 a year, and has been for years, because there hasn’t been a way to stop the fraud. And then there’s the long-running Pell Grant scam, 20 years or more, where nomadic students go from campus to campus in the same state getting the SAME grant (and taking the same courses, likely), because there’s not enough regulation to even keep student names on record so they can’t get the same “free money” multiple times.

      It’s a real shame the derangement of the site re: Trump gets so much in the way of addressing the very real problems we’ve had in our higher education system for years, if not decades.

            So “these creatures seem to be multiplying.”

     Finally the article gets around to talking about what a non-profit school is supposed to be, and cites the benefits of such a school, assuming it’s run by an administration with integrity. That assumption is a big problem. Sadly, these schools have been systematically plundered (here’s such a school from 2014, getting looted due to the lack of regulations. Because of Trump, being elected 2 years after the looting, you see…), our system is just too vulnerable to having a Poo-Bah come in, and granting him too much power to enhance his bank account and real estate holdings at the expense of the school (cf, Mrs. Sanders, you didn’t think he got the money for those multiple houses from speeches, did you?).

      And what solution is proposed to this “rising” problem of scammy non-profit schools?

            To protect students, simply demanding real transparency through stricter oversight of nonprofits…          

     As is typical of the Ctrl-Left, “more government control” is proposed. Thing is, government had control, and ceded it to accreditation…which in turn became controlled by the very institutions which were to be controlled. This process is called “regulatory capture,” and while higher ed is hardly alone for this type of corruption…you don’t respond to regulatory capture by adding more regulations. Not rationally, anyway, although one doesn’t expect rational thought from the Ctrl-Left.

     The simple solution, as always, would be to end the student loan scam. Without the massive profits, the for-profit schools would die, and the fake “non-profit” schools would die as well. Of course, a solution that doesn’t involve “free stuff” from the government (in this case, a free set of regulatory controls created by volunteers with experience in higher ed, and doubtless enforced by an army of free volunteers until the end of time) cannot possibly be suggested by a Ctrl-Left site. This is really the big problem with our media, they so blatantly fail to discuss things in detail, or consider anything outside the statist point of view.

       Sadly but predictably, the article both begins and ends in mindless misleading hate:    

Under the leadership of a politician who built his own fame with the help of a fake university scam…

     Gee whiz, really? The guy had a big TV show, if memory serves, and I seem to vaguely recall he had some real estate and casino interests as well. Far more likely, he was hoping his reputation would drive sales at Trump University. I imagine most people don’t recall his “real estate university,” an unaccredited nonacademic business which never took a nickel of federal student loan scam money (and thus has nothing to do with the topic of the article), and certainly didn’t hurt nearly as many kids as, well, other politicians (double meaning intended here) who involved themselves in schools.

       Anyway, there’s still a tiny piece of truth in the article, despite the author’s derangements: don’t assume that just because the school is “non-profit” that it’s not out to extract every last dollar it can from the students.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

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Reaction To Trump’s “Free Speech” Order Reveals Bias

By Professor Doom

     Trump recently issued an executive order denying Federal funds to campuses which restrict free speech. It’s a bit toothless, since it would only affect research funds (i.e., not the bread-and-butter of student loan money), and doesn’t define “restrict” well…but it highlights that we clearly have a problem on our campuses, even as I acknowledge that this should only apply to publicly funded schools in any event.

      But, we clearly have a problem on our campuses, which use social media to screen students and punish professors for saying the wrong things off campus. We have a system where most critics of higher ed must use pseudonyms because retribution is swift and pitiless from those who run the system. We have a system where the guy who discovered DNA is banned from campus because of something he said decades ago.

     So even if the order doesn’t mean much, the response to the order is interesting.

This is not the first time President Trump has used an incident at Berkeley to suggest that federal research dollars should be cut off over alleged denial of free speech rights.

Berkeley used to be an icon of campus free speech, but, sadly, those days are long gone. Anti-free speech incidents keep happening there for a reason, after all. That said, they tried to dismiss Trump’s assertions:

What he didn't note at that time was that Berkeley officials had allowed Yiannopoulos to speak, calling off the event only amid the violence. Berkeley had defended his right to appear on campus (and he has appeared since), citing principles of free speech even as some on campus said he should be kept away because of views many find offensive.

      What a backhanded defense of Milo Yiannopoulos! Why not instead say “Berkeley defended Milo from the terroristic actions of violent racists…” instead of the limp and ill-defined “views many find offensive.” The article I’m quoting from clearly is biased against Trump, and that’s the reaction I’m noting here:

Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, in an interview shortly after President Trump's Saturday speech, called the proposed executive order "a solution in search of a problem.

     Wait, what? We have so many anti-free speech incidents on campus that we can run statistical tests to correlate them with tuition, assuming my previous examples weren’t evidence enough. You’d have to be extremely ignorant of higher education not to see there’s a problem here. It really seems like a big site like Inside Higher Ed could poke around a bit to see this.

      Instead, the article attacks “The Trump Administration” record, including Trump blocking hecklers from his Twitter. This is very far removed from an Executive Order, and I do hope someone lets Inside Higher Ed know just how much deplatforming of major news sites has been going on of late. How does a site this ignorant of reality and loaded with hypocrisy stay up?

Among organizations that promote free expression on campus, the response to President Trump's Saturday speech was tepid.

      Really? They go on to quote from places in higher education I’ve never heard of (I remind the gentle reader I’ve been in higher ed for 30 years). They couldn’t find anyone excited about this? How hard could it be? I’ll take a few seconds and see if I can find anyone excited about it. Yeah, that was tough:

It was the moment I’ve been waiting for.

      Yeah, I guess Fox News isn’t big enough for Inside Higher Ed to know about it. Conservative voices are silenced on campus, but I guess Inside Higher Ed doesn’t know that. It took me all of 30 seconds to find it, and I bet I could find more by going to other conservative and religious sources…in other words, the people who’ve been silenced. The fact that the site I’m quoting from doesn’t know such sources even exist demonstrates how those sources have been snuffed as much as possible.

      While it’s being blown off as a non-issue, the comments section agrees with me that there might be something going on here:

Around two dozen states have passed some kind of legislation or issued executive orders requiring the respect of free speech on campuses. Ontario has done the same thing. So many public officials have seen a problem with the restriction of free speech on campuses. Obviously the rote assurances of education bureaucrats did not convince the states. There have been too many ugly campus incidents, with way too little serious response from administrations.

     If it’s a non-issue, why are various states and other countries thinking there’s a problem?

     Moreover, it’s very clear that at least in some (probably many) cases, admin supports the squelching of free speech. Time and again we see riots on campus, and the students involved in the riots, if not conservative, are approved. Meanwhile lone conservative students get punted off campus for violations which pale in comparison to violence.

      The poster above gets attacked for daring to support anything by Trump, even something so weak as this executive order, which at worst only tweaks the nose of our plundering leaders in higher ed.

Way to go out of your way to avoid the issue here, which is that whatever problems of free speech exist on campus Trump addressing them is planting a flag on Mount Hypocrisy.

     It saddens me to see such irrational thinking on a site supposedly for academics. Even if Trump kicking a troll off his own personal Twitter feed is a “violation of free speech,” even if we can ignore how Twitter regularly shuts down pundits and independent news organizations who say uncomfortable things…neither is relevant to the fact at hand, that free speech is very much in danger on many of our campuses, and that it doesn’t matter how much you hate Trump, we should probably appreciate that he did a tiny and nearly irrelevant something about it, rather than deny the problem.

      One comment pretty much wins the thread:

The pervasive 'bile for Trump' behavior now on full display is not lost on families of high-school juniors and seniors who are in process of making that crucial decision: Where will we invest the time, money and energy for a particular child's higher education?

This decision is not so much ideological as pragmatic: If University A is constantly embroiled in political controversies, athletics scandals, financial scandals, reports of violent behavior on campus--do we send our child there? My alma mater hits a number of those markers, thankfully not the violence reports, yet.

Until I see the tide turn, my wallet remains closed, and I steer all inquiries from other families around me to safer options.

     Our leaders in higher ed have turned many of our campuses into ideological indoctrination centers where, absolutely, free speech is discouraged. The leaders are thrilled at the lack of opposing views but, bottom line, are the students and parents of those students happy about it? For those students who have parents who care about their education, you better believe these schools are the ones losing the most enrollment, and for good reason.

     Get woke, go broke, is a catchphrase for a reason, after all.

     Now, Mr. President, can you amend this executive order so that student loan money can likewise be denied?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

A Minor Post...

...while I weigh which madcap option gives me a better than minute chance of not dying from cancer in the near future. It's so tough to pick between a 10% chance (with brutal side effects), an unknown chance (with unknown side effects), and straight up hopeless chance.

     My book has received a highlight on a non-fiction book site. I write a bit there of why I wrote my main book:

  This was a book I needed to write. I’ve been in higher education 30 years, all my adult life, and I’ve seen it change from the inside. You don’t have to work in higher ed to know something is very wrong, from the Diversity Commissars making a half million a year to the race riots to the endless graduates who can’t answer even rudimentary questions about our country, much less write even a single sentence without struggling, not to mention the roughly 50,000,000 citizens now trapped in student loans (including over 100,000 senior citizens losing their social security to pay for their loans).

The interested reader can read the rest here.