Bulgutch | Canada’s international student crisis was predicted — and ignored

2024/12/11 Leave a comment

Indeed:

…All of this is bad news. But what I find remarkable about the frenzy to deal with the apocalypse is that it was all foreseeable. In fact, it was foreseen. And no one did anything about it.

An advocacy group called One Voice used the Freedom of Information Act to unearth, “internal government documents,” warning that, “international student tuition has been increasingly supporting the financial sustainability of post-secondary education institutions.”

But who needed some internal secret document to figure that out? The 2022 report of Ontario’s auditor-general, which is freely available, was released with the usual fanfare, and was covered extensively in the media, said this: “Relying heavily on international student fees makes universities more susceptible to steep and sudden drops in revenue that could result when global circumstances and federal immigration policies change, and international student intake declines.”

It could not have been said more clearly.

In the movies, when some scientist discovers that an asteroid is going to collide with our planet and destroy us all, the powers-that-be spring into action, and figure out how to prevent disaster.

In real life, either no one read the auditor-general’s report, or everyone concluded it was best to keep taking in all that foreign money today and worry about tomorrow only after the asteroid hits.

We could blame the universities and colleges, but it’s hard to do that. They were hungry for foreign tuition money because the Ontario government doesn’t support them nearly enough.

Last year, a panel of experts appointed by the government itself noted that provinces outside Ontario provide universities an average of $20,772 per full-time student. Ontario coughs up $11,471. To catch up — that is to be just average — would require spending another $7 billion a year. Ontario has responded by promising $1.3 billion over three years. 

The Colleges and Universities minister called that an “historic investment.” She also told the schools they were stuck with a tuition freeze first imposed in 2019 for at least three more years.

Most people would be hard pressed to come up with the name of the auditor general of Ontario. People who dig into the government’s books are not superheroes. They’re just public servants in a relatively small department (total budget — $26,194,700) who report on whether taxpayers are getting value for their money.

That 2022 auditor general’s report by Bonnie Lysyk concluded that the government of Ontario had, “no clear strategy or long-term vision for the post-secondary sector.”

It appears the auditor general’s report was worthy of an A-plus.

Source: Opinion | Canada’s international student crisis was predicted — and ignored

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Quebec calls for anti-Islamophobia adviser’s resignation after she recommends universities hire more Muslim professors

2024/09/16 Leave a comment

Tone deaf with respect to Quebec sensitivities, whether these sensitivities are warranted or not.

Apart from her questionable premise, Arab and West Asian professors and lecturers form 8.1 percent of the total, greater than their share of the total population (NOC-based). So on the surface, not a case of under-representation:

The Quebec government renewed its call for Canada’s special representative on combatting Islamophobia to resign Friday, after she sent a letter to college and university heads recommending the hiring of more Muslim, Arab and Palestinian professors.

The existence of the letter, dated Aug. 30, was first reported by Le Journal de Québec, and a Canadian Heritage spokesperson said Friday it was sent to institutions across the country.

In her letter, Amira Elghawaby says that since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023, a dangerous climate has arisen on campuses. She offered a number of suggestions to ease tensions within educational institutions: supporting freedom of expression and academic freedom; briefing campus leaders on civil liberties and Islamophobia; and hiring more professors of Muslim, Arab and Palestinian origin.

It was the reference to hiring that drew the immediate indignation of Quebec’s higher education minister, who called on Elghawaby to resign, saying she should “mind her own business.” Minister Pascale Déry said hiring professors based on religion goes against the principles of secularism the province adheres to.

“She has no legitimacy to ask our colleges and universities what to do,” Déry said through her X account, adding that Elghawaby had “insulted” Quebeckers on “several occasions.”…

Source: Quebec calls for anti-Islamophobia adviser’s resignation after she recommends universities hire more Muslim professors

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McWhorter: Harvard, Brown and Other Top Schools Are Thinking About Black Freshmen the Wrong Way

2024/09/14 Leave a comment

Interesting suggestion on how to interpret the numbers:

Several highly selective universities have recently reported that in their first freshman classes admitted after the Supreme Court banned racial preferences in admissions, the number of Black and Latino students has fallen.

The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent for this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.

The conventional wisdom is that this is alarming, but I’m not seeing it that way. We are trained to regard news on racial preferences in a way that makes us see tragedy where, through different glasses, we might just see change.

A first question to ask: Will Black students who weren’t admitted be OK? There is every reason to suppose so. Racial preferences were banned for the University of California in 1996, and the way critics discussed it back then, one would almost have thought that the highly selective U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A. were the only campuses in the entire university system. I taught at Berkeley at the time, and some young Black filmmakers had me audition (long story) for a film about a fictional Black teenager who was so devastated by being denied admission because of the new rules that he took his own life in despair.

In real life it was hard to see tragedy in a Black student having to go instead to one of the many other excellent options, like U.C. Davis and U.C. Santa Cruz. As regards that student’s future success, time has borne out that intuition. A study by the Berkeley economist Zachary Bleemer found that the ban had no effect on the post-college wages of Black applicants to University of California schools. (There was, however, a differential for Latinos, an effect that was difficult to explain.)

A second question to ask is whether the universities themselves are OK. There seems to be an assumption that they suffer if Black students are represented at less than our 14 percent presence in the population. But it is difficult to specify just what that assumption is based on.

For example, at Brown, almost one in 10 freshmen is Black (and that doesn’t count applicants who did not specify their race). Black America has suffered too much genuine tragedy for it to be considered ominous that “only” one in 10 students in a matriculating class at an Ivy League school is Black.

Nevertheless we are told to bemoan the decrease in general diversity. But wait — how many Black students do the white ones need in order to get an acceptable dose of diversity? The same question applies to whether Black students will feel there are enough people who look like them to feel at home at the school. I would think that at Chapel Hill, for example, 7.8 percent — about one in 12 freshmen — is enough to build a healthy community.

Plus, there is no real evidence that diversity enhances a good college education. No reasonable person is seeking lily-white campuses. But the idea that diversity means, specifically, better learning has turned out to be difficult to prove. Terrance Sandalow and others observe that what are considered Black views — on topics like police conduct or the availability of quality schooling — are as likely to be aired by non-Black students as by Black ones (a good thing, by the way).

The 1999 report by the psychologist Patricia Gurin, which is often cited as demonstrating that diversity improves college education, was based on students self-reporting vague, self-congratulatory qualities such as whether they came out of college with a drive to achieve or with a sense of satisfaction with their college work. Nor is there much proven benefit post-graduation: This spring, a meta-analysis of 615 studies has shown that workplace diversity does not substantially enhance team performance and cooperation.

There is, however, one other argument for giving extra points to Black applicants. Despite the California data I mentioned, nationwide it is true that going to an Ivy League school rather than a solid non-Ivy increases lifelong earnings, as well as the chance of attending graduate school or getting a job at a top-ranked law firm.

But that one advantage is not worth the endless dissonance that racial preferences in admissions would continue to create, whether we liked it or not.

There would always have been a sense among many non-Black students (and even professors) that many Black applicants got in for different reasons than white and Asian applicants did.

Asian families would always have felt they were evaluated more stringently than Black students, as was clearly shown to be the case at Harvard. This feeling would have persisted especially because they, too, are part of minority groups that experience racism.

Eliminating both Black students’ stigma and Asian students’ sense of foul play is more important than closing any gap in future earnings, which in any case hardly indicates that Black students outside of the Ivies are relegated to washing cars for a living. Admissions preferences intended to promote socio-economic rather than just racial diversity would encounter much less pushback and confusion.

Here’s a proposal, radical though it may (unfortunately) seem: Colleges should be very happy with the new numbers. Brown, for example, should be saying, “Hey look — even without that outdated and condescending Blackness bonus, we’re still at 9 percent!” Getting into an elite college is hard, and we should celebrate Black applicants pulling it off in such high numbers, even if they don’t happen to fall precisely at 14 percent. We are taught that on race, professional pessimism is enlightened. I don’t get it.

Source: Harvard, Brown and Other Top Schools Are Thinking About Black Freshmen the Wrong Way

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Brest and Levine: D.E.I. Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach.

2024/08/31 Leave a comment

Good thoughtful discussion:

With colleges and universities beginning a new academic year, we can expect more contentious debate over programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Progressives are doubling down on programs that teach students that they are either oppressed peoples or oppressors, while red states are closing campus D.E.I. programs altogether.

For all of the complaints, some of these programs most likely serve the important goal of ensuring that all students are valued and engaged participants in their academic communities. But we fear that many other programs are too ideological, exacerbate the very problems they intend to solve and are incompatible with higher education’s longstanding mission of cultivating critical thinking. We propose an alternative: a pluralist-based approach to D.E.I. that would provide students with the self-confidence, mind-sets and skills to engage with challenging social and political issues.

Like many other universities, our university, Stanford, experienced a rise in antisemitic incidents after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s response. We were appointed to the university’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which was charged with assessing the nature and scope of the problem and making recommendations. The upshot of hearing from over 300 people in 50 listening sessions is that many Jews and Israelis have experienced bias and feel insecure on our campus.

A parallel committee formed to address anti-Muslim, Arab and Palestinian bias reached similar conclusions for those groups.

These findings are discouraging, given that institutions of higher learning have spent several decades and vast sums of money establishing institutional infrastructures to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Discouraging, but not surprising — because our inquiries revealed how exclusionary and counterproductive some of these programs can be.

Our committee was pressed by many of those we interviewed to recommend adding Jews and Israelis to the identities currently recognized by Stanford’s D.E.I. programs so their harms would be treated with the same concern as those of people of color and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people, who are regarded as historically oppressed. This move would be required of many California colleges and universities under a measure moving through the California Legislature. But subsuming new groups into the traditional D.E.I. regime would only reinforce a flawed system.

D.E.I. training originated in the corporate world of the 1960s and migrated to universities in subsequent decades, initially to rectify the underrepresentation of minority groups and then to mitigate the tensions associated with more diverse populations. In recent years, the goals of diversity and inclusion have become the bête noire of the political right, in part to avoid reckoning with our nation’s history of slavery and discrimination in ways that might cause, as some state laws have put it, “discomfort, guilt or anguish.” We do not share this view. We believe that fostering a sense of belonging among students of diverse backgrounds is a precondition for educational success. That said, many D.E.I. training programs actually subvert their institutions’ educational missions.

Here’s why. A major purpose of higher education is to teach students the skill of critical inquiry, which the philosopher and educator John Dewey described as “the active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it.” Conscientious faculty members teaching about race and gender require their students to critically consider differing views of the status and history of people of color, women and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people. Teaching critical thinking about any topic is challenging and humbling work.

While issues of diversity, equity and inclusion are sometimes addressed in rigorous classroom courses, university-based D.E.I. programs tend to come in two basic forms: online or off-the-shelf trainings that are more suitable for airline safety briefings than exploring the complexities of interracial relations, and ideological workshops that inculcate theories of social justice as if there were no plausible alternatives. The Intergroup Dialogue, developed at the University of Michigan and used on many campuses around the country, “assist[s] participants in exploring issues of power, privilege, conflict and oppression.” The program’s success is measured by students’ acknowledgment of pervasive discrimination and their attribution of inequalities to structural causes, such as deeply rooted government policies.

D.E.I. programs often assign participants to identity categories based on rigid distinctions. In a D.E.I. training program at Stanford a few years ago, Jewish staff members were assigned to a “whiteness accountability” group, and some later complained that they were shot down when they tried to raise concerns about antisemitism. The former D.E.I. director at a Bay Area community college described D.E.I. as based on the premises “that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.” She was also told by colleagues and campus leaders that “Jews are ‘white oppressors,’” and her task was to “decenter whiteness.”

Rather than correcting stereotypes, diversity training too often reinforces them and breeds resentment, impeding students’ social development. An excessive focus on identity can be just as harmfulas the pretense that identity doesn’t matter. Overall, these programs may undermine the very groups they seek to aid by instilling a victim mind-set and by pitting students against one another.

Research shows that all students feel excluded from academic communities at one point or another, no matter their backgrounds. The Stanford psychologists Geoffrey Cohen and Greg Walton have found that “belonging uncertainty”— the “state of mind in which one suffers from doubts about whether one is fully accepted in a particular environment or ever could be” — can afflict all of us. From our perspective, if one student is excluded, all students’ learning is diminished. Belonging is a foundation for the shared pursuit of knowledge and the preparation of students as citizens and leaders of a diverse society.

American campuses need an alternative to ideological D.E.I. programs. They need programs that foster a sense of belonging and engagement for students of diverse backgrounds, religious beliefs and political views without subverting their schools’ educational missions. Such programs should be based on a pluralistic vision of the university community combined with its commitments to academic freedom and critical inquiry.

An increasing number of educators are coming to this conclusion. Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, presents a holistic approach to diversity. Conflicting viewpoints must be “brought into conversation with one another in a constructive way — to form a picture that is more complete and reliable than we would have were we to look at only the dominant perspective or only at subaltern perspectives,” he has written. Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy at Harvard, champions “confident pluralism,” in which we “honor our own values while making decisions together.” And the philosopher Susan Neiman invokes a tradition of universalism that allows for — indeed requires — empathy with others rather than a competition among sufferings. “If you don’t base solidarity on deep principles that you share, it’s not real solidarity,” she has said. The group Interfaith America, which promotes interfaith cooperation, has developed a comprehensive Bridging the Gap curriculum that offers a practical guide for discourse across differences.

At the core of pluralistic approaches are facilitated conversations among participants with diverse identities, religious beliefs and political ideologies, but without a predetermined list of favored identities or a preconceived framework of power, privilege and oppression. Students are taught the complementary skills of telling stories about their own identities, values and experiences and listening with curiosity and interest to the stories of others, acknowledging differences and looking for commonalities.

Success would be an academic community of equally respected learners who possess critical thinking skills and are actively engaged in navigating challenging questions throughout the curriculum — an approach that teaches students how to think rather than what to think.

Pluralism does not ignore identity or pervasive structural inequalities. Rather, it provides a framework in which identity is construed broadly and understood as a starting point for dialogue, rather than the basis for separation and fragmentation. It commits questions about the causes and persistence of inequalities to the classroom, where they can be examined through the critical, evidence-based methods at the root of a university education. Respecting the diverse perspectives of one’s fellows and adhering to norms such as active listening, humility and generosity enable classroom conversations about contentious social and political issues.

Nonprofit and religious leaders are translating these ideas into an emerging movement. A collaborative of philanthropic funders called New Pluralists is organizing and supporting groups that are putting pluralism into practice. Such efforts face headwinds both from conservatives who are suspicious of all efforts to foster inclusion and from groups that believe they benefit from the current system. And it will require heavy lifting by educators to work together with their students to create the preconditions for authentic critical engagement.

The current system is not good for Jews at Stanford and other universities. It’s not good for Muslims, either. And it’s certainly not good for society as a whole.

Paul Brest is former dean and professor emeritus at Stanford Law School. Emily J. Levine is associate professor of education and history at Stanford.

Source: D.E.I. Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach.

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Preventing the Next Wave of Progressive Radicalism—Before It Arrives

2024/08/27 Leave a comment

Interesting database and analysis:

Recent developments suggest that the influence of social-justice ideology on American university policies has finally crested, and may even be in retreat. Both Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced that they will no longer be requiring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements from candidates seeking jobs or promotions. Harvard, along with Stanford University, has also announced a policy of neutrality on political and social controversies, a move that likely reflects the toxic spillover from the campus controversies that erupted in connection with Hamas’s 7 October 2023 terrorist attacks and the Israeli military invasion of Gaza that followed. Meanwhile, at the University of Pennsylvania, officials are mulling over strategies to recruit more moderate and conservative voices as a means to balance the otherwise (overwhelmingly) progressive slant of its faculty. While these institutions constitute just a small fraction of American universities, they act as bellwethers within higher education more broadly, as their policy shifts often influence decision-makers at less well-known schools.

But before we begin celebrating the adoption of more sensible, classically liberal policies by university administrators, it should be acknowledged that proponents of aggressive DEI requirements, speech codes, forced anti-racism training, and other illiberal policies still dominate the commanding heights of university life, especially at elite institutions. And even once dislodged, they will likely be back, in keeping with patterns that have been observed on American campuses since the 1960s.

And this is no accident: Numerous published works, such as John McWhorter’s Woke Racism and Coleman Hughes’ The End of Race Politics, have explained how Critical Theorists such as Herbert Marcuse promoted identity-based criticism as a means to advance the goal of restorative equity. Predictably, this process of ideological radicalisation elicits a backlash, as we are now observing. And the cycle will eventually repeat itself.

But rather than rely on this kind of reactive process to repeatedly correct universities’ social-justice overreach, we should be taking steps to empirically study and predict the process of ideological capture before things get so bad that university presidents humiliate themselves in front of legislators while trying to answer basic questions about how campuses should be governed.

In furtherance of this goal, scholars and researchers at various universities, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and Heterodox Academy (HxA) are using quantitative methods to analyse why different universities have succeeded or failed in upholding liberal values over the last decade. This exercise focuses on independent variables relating to six categories: university characteristics, leadership, faculty, administration, students, and outside influences. The three of us, all scholars at the University of Arkansas, have taken up the task of analysing the data as it becomes available.

University Characteristics

An analysis of FIRE’s data suggests that universities located in America’s northeast region tend to have the weakest commitment to free speech. Moreover, schools that are seen as more prestigious, and which charge students higher tuition, score particularly poorly. We suspect, as Williams College scholar Darel Paul argued in his 2018 book From Tolerance to Equality, this is because promoting DEI-oriented mantras has become a positive class marker among elites, a key part of the “classification struggle” by which they distinguish themselves as high-status individuals.

Private institutions, likewise, tend to score more poorly than their public counterparts. Only two of the top-scoring (which is to say, least illiberal) twenty universities in our analysis are private, compared to thirteen universities in the bottom twenty. This may well be related to the fact that private institutions generally have more autonomy to determine their policies without interference from elected policymakers, and are less likely to be constrained by the First Amendment considerations that affect public institutions.

It’s hard to say if these trends reflect the fact that young progressive students seek to inhabit homogeneous ultra-elite ideological silos governed by similarly minded administrators; or if it is a case of institutions inflicting illiberal policies on students who may be (at least somewhat) open-minded about accepting ideological diversity. Hopefully, further study will cast light on this question.

Leadership

We looked at biographies of university presidents and governing board officers, and set them against data contained in FIRE’s 2022 Free Speech Rankings. We found that leaders with experience outside of academia tend to be more supportive of free speech than leaders who have spent their entire careers in the ivory tower, suggesting that free speech and free inquiry are now less valued in academia than in other high-status professions—an unsettling thought.

We also found apparent gender differences in leadership support for free speech. While only one of the top twenty universities for free speech was found to have a female president, five of the bottom twenty were led by women. It should be emphasised, however, that this difference might be explained by confounding factors, such as a divergence in male-female participation in academic areas that tend to act as feeders for top administrative positions. (More men have terminal degrees—the highest degree available in a given academic discipline—in business and economics, while more women have terminal degrees in liberal arts and music.)

According to even more recent (2023) FIRE data, other variables that seem to be significantly correlated with differences in ideological climate on campuses include the size of university governing boards, the manner in which board members are trained, and how members view their responsibilities toward their universities.

The average board size at the best free-expression universities was less than twenty, significantly lower than the average for the schools that had the poorest records (with some boards at these universities having more than eighty members). One theory is that larger boards contribute to a diffusion of responsibility among board members, making it less likely that anyone will speak up to hold administrators to account. While our research is ongoing, we suspect that many of the board members at low-performing universities are more likely to view their roles as being oriented toward supporting the administration’s decisions as opposed to providing independent oversight.

Faculty

Scholars at the University of Arkansas and FIRE have put together a project whereby researchers will contact and interview more than 800 academics who have faced speech-related sanctions since 2020, as well as the administrators who sanctioned them.

It’s well-documented that university faculty are overwhelmingly left of centre in their politics; and a 2022 FIRE report on faculty attitudes toward free expression and academic freedom shows a worrying trend toward illiberalism among faculty members aged under 35, as compared to older colleagues.

Over sixty percent of surveyed young faculty said they supported shutting down campus speakers with whom they disagreed in at least one of the survey-listed scenarios; and 21 percent expressed support for students using violence to prevent speech they deem offensive (a figure that increased to 36 percent in the case of faculty who are both young and self-identified progressives).

Many faculty members report being afraid that their words could be used as weapons that endanger their employment. Specifically, 25 percent say they’re very or extremely likely to self-censor in their academic publications, and 52 percent said they’re afraid something from their past will show up and hurt their career, including 40 percent of left-leaning faculty members.

These figures are aggregated across all seniority levels, but likely would vary considerably if broken down according to survey respondents’ career status. In particular, one might expect that tenured and tenure-track faculty would express less apprehension than adjunct or contingent teachers, who often earn less than $3,500 per course, and who sometimes rely on welfare programs and food banks. Adjuncts and contingent faculty often have no benefits or long-term contracts, and so can see their jobs vanish without explanation or recourse.

One might expect that few such instructors would dare offend activist students, faculty, or administrators, although one of us stands as an exception. I (Nathanial Bork) didn’t mind the low pay and substandard working conditions at my Colorado community college because I loved the work. But I did mind being told to lower my standards in the name of DEI until no single race- or gender-defined group had an overall pass rate below 80 percent. I also objected to being forbidden from assigning more than eight pages of writing during the entire semester.

The administrator who fired me was subsequently promoted, and now serves as the school’s Vice President of Academic Success. To give the man his due, I won’t dispute that artificially boosting grades based on race and gender, and ensuring that students have trivial workloads, are indeed surefire means to encourage some nominal form of “academic success.” Whether these students are getting an education worth paying for is another question.

Administration

Another ongoing research project involves tracking the effects of DEI policies, as well as the budget and staffing levels of university DEI departments.

Certainly, the amount of money committed to these areas is enough to warp institutional priorities—especially in Virginia, Oregon, California, and Michigan—states whose major universities have been identified as having especially bloated DEI bureaucracies.

A 2023 report from The Heritage Foundation found that while the University of Michigan employs the most DEI officers of all surveyed schools (163, as of September 2023), it was Virginia’s major universities that led the nation in DEI personnel per 100 faculty members (6.5). Senior bureaucrats in these areas often earn six-figure salaries, while using their offices to explicitly promote political causes.

Students

Having been trained to be wary of microaggressions, many students now enter college with a sophisticated understanding of what to say, and not say, on social media or in classroom environments. They also typically understand how they can leverage the services of a university’s DEI and Title IX bureaucracies if they feel offended by others.

We know that 80 percent of students self-censor their viewpoints as a means to avoid criticism or punishment, a phenomenon that’s likely closely connected to the progressive monoculture on many campuses. Indeed, much of the remaining 20 percent may feel little need to self-censor—precisely because their views accord in all respects with doctrinaire progressive viewpoints.

Donors

In ordinary times, the influence of donors might be a difficult factor to study, as few campus controversies at any given university can be expected to attract so much media attention as to move the needle on incoming donations. But since October 2023, the state of campus life has been far from ordinary, with many campuses witnessing protests and slogans that, at least implicitly, have served to glorify terrorism or threaten Jews. As a result, there have been multiple instances of donors publicly announcing their decisions to pull funding from an alma mater.

Indeed, the prospect of Harvard University losing donors is apparently so severe that Lawrence D. Bobo, the Dean of Social Science, was recently moved to write an op-ed urging unspecified “sanctions” against his faculty colleagues—several of whom he lists by name—who, as he put it, “engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors—be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government—to intervene in Harvard’s affairs.” As one of us—Robert Maranto—pointed out in a co-authored article, this recalls the tactics of southern governors denouncing “outside agitators” for pressuring state governments to enforce civil rights. It would not be far-fetched to conclude that Dr Bobo is suggesting that problematic faculty should pay for their behaviour through lost raises, promotions, and sabbaticals.

Although no systematic study has yet been conducted in regard to the pressures exerted by donors, alumni, media, and other outside actors, it’s clear that this dynamic will have a major effect on the ability of administrators to impose or maintain policies that are perceived to be illiberal.

State Governments

Many Republican-controlled state legislatures have sought to rein in the use of DEI programs in schools, corporations, and government agencies. But even if such bills survive political and legal challenges, it is expected that many institutions will respond by attempting to rebrand their DEI programs so as to ensure formal compliance with the new directives without altering the underlying identity-based policies. One of our research projects will be to track institutional behaviour in these jurisdictions in order to determine whether these laws are achieving their purpose.

How campus progressives respond to the increasing backlash against DEI—including conservative legislative attempts to thwart it—will have a large impact on the intellectual environment at American universities in coming years. While some administrators may heed popular pressure and state edicts, others may become all the more wedded to their biases, on the belief that the dictates of social justice trump all other considerations.

Before closing, we will report that some of our research has already borne fruit. For example, one empirical study conducted by a member of our team, focusing on the prevalence of DEI statements as a basis for university hiring, was cited prominently in a recently published Washington Post editorial that opposed academic policies requiring such statements from job applicants.

We hope and expect that more of our research will be used to inform the debate about how best to address the turn toward illiberalism at countless American universities. As with many other problems facing society, the first step toward solving it is to determine its scope and causes.

Source: Preventing the Next Wave of Progressive Radicalism—Before It Arrives

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Stephens: What I Want a University President to Say About Campus Protests

2024/08/22 Leave a comment

Essential reading for some of our more “woke” institutions, academics and students. Money quote:

“It was listening to students and faculty whom we had admitted or hired for their intellectual sophistication, their capacity to understand complexity and nuance, reduce their own thinking to a handful of slogans and mantras written for them by others. It was the absence of intellectual humility and its replacement with moral certitudes.:”

…Some of you may have heard the term “institutional neutrality.” It is the belief that universities like ours should avoid taking political positions of any kind, either through investment decisions or political declarations by administrators or by academic boycotts of foreign scholars, except when the interests of the university are directly affected — like when the Supreme Court weighs in on our admissions process.

You may also have heard about the Chicago principles, which make the case for universities to embrace an almost unfettered principle of free expression as “an essential part of the university’s educational mission,” even when the speech is seen by most members of the community as “offensive, unwise, immoral or wrongheaded.”

Our university embraces both institutional neutrality and the Chicago principles. We do so not because they are ends in themselves but because they are necessary ways to cultivate the spirit of inquiry. That spirit cannot be fettered by formal or informal speech codes that might stop us from asking uncomfortable but important questions, or by university policies that preclude fruitful exchanges with scholars from other countries. At our university you will find scholars from Israel, China, Turkey, Russia and other countries whose policies you may not like; we do not hold them responsible for their governments, nor do we ask them to make political declarations as the price of belonging to our community.

But necessary isn’t sufficient. If all we accomplish by adopting the Chicago principles is that everyone gets to speak and nobody bothers to listen, those principles will have fallen short. If we embrace institutional neutrality at the topmost level while remaining indifferent to the one-sided politicization of classrooms, departments and administrative offices, we will have done little to advance the pedagogical benefits of neutrality, which is intended to broaden your exposure to the widest variety of views and ideas.

And if we permit protests that inhibit the speech of others, or set up no-go zones for Jewish students, or make it difficult to study in the library or pay attention in class, we may have upheld the right to speak in the abstract while stripping it of its underlying purpose. The point of free speech is to open discussion, not to shut it down. It’s to engage with our opponents, not to shut them out. It’s to introduce fresh perspectives, not to declare every perspective but our own to be beyond the moral pale.

I’d like to add a personal note as a Jew. Many people objected to last year’s protests, with their chants of “from the river to the sea,” as antisemitic. I find that calling for the elimination of Israel — indeed, of any state — is inherently repugnant, since it would almost inevitably entail an almost unimaginable level of violence, dispossession and destruction.

But antisemitism is not what I found chiefly offensive about the protests. I accept that most of the protesters are not antisemitic, or at least don’t think of themselves that way.

What bothered me, rather, was watching members of our community turn off their critical faculties. It was listening to students and faculty whom we had admitted or hired for their intellectual sophistication, their capacity to understand complexity and nuance, reduce their own thinking to a handful of slogans and mantras written for them by others. It was the absence of intellectual humility and its replacement with moral certitudes. It was the substitution of serious political thought with propaganda. It was the refusal to engage with difference and criticism in any way except denunciation and moral bullying.

In short, the way in which these protests unfolded was an insult to the spirit of inquiry that this university has an institutional responsibility to protect and champion. So does this mean we will brook no form of protest? Of course not. But we do expect that protests, so long as they happen on our campus, on our property, conform with the aims of education as we see them.

That means, at a minimum, that we will enforce clearly established “time, place and manner” restrictions, so that the rights of those who protest are never allowed to impinge on the rights of those who don’t. It also means we will invest in serious programming about the Mideast conflict, including by inviting Israeli and Palestinian scholars to campus and hosting moderated debates where you can cheer your own political side but must at least listen to the other. Our goal is never to make you think one way or the other. It’s to make you think, period.

The spirit of protest will always have a place here, as it must in every free society. Our job is to harness it to the task of inquiry so that knowledge may continue to grow, and human life may be enriched.

Source: What I Want a University President to Say About Campus Protests


Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Dave Snow: When political scientists get political

2024/02/29 Leave a comment

Believe not unique to political science and his conclusions based on extensive article analysis.

Some of my academic friends, in broad agreement with Snow’s depiction of the shift, point out however that most academics prefer to publish in higher profile international journals given greater weight in tenure and related decisions:

…. I draw three main conclusions. First, Canadian political science scholarship is clearly shifting in important ways. For better or worse, papers published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science reflect the discipline itself. While the discipline has not undergone a wholesale change (as seems to be the case in history), a sizeable proportion of Canada’s flagship political science journal is composed of papers using critical approaches and methodologies that place a greater emphasis on narratives of historical marginalization, particularly with respect to Indigenous Peoples and decolonization. 

Second, the journal’s openness to critical methodologies and identity diversity has been accompanied by a narrowing of its ideological diversity. While authors’ policy recommendations are by no means ideologically homogenous, they generally range from centre-left to far-left. This tilt is most obvious in papers that focus on decolonization, but it is present throughout the entire journal. Of 227 papers published over the last five years, I did not find a single one that provided anything approximating a conservative policy recommendation. By contrast, even the journal’s most empirically rigorous quantitative papers often contain recommendations such as “political parties should recruit and promote more women candidates” and “Policy tools specifically designed to problematize, target and alleviate racial economic inequality also seem needed.” Conservative scholars used to publish mildly conservative policy recommendations in the journal. Those days are now long gone.

Third, the journal editors’ statement is sadly reflective of similar statements made in Canadian higher education regarding equity, diversity, and inclusion, insofar as it refuses to acknowledge any previous progressive change. The Canadian Journal of Political Science had already clearly opened itself up to diverse perspectives and methodologies in recent years. Several papers in a 2017 special issue had already identified some of these changes. Yet this did not stop its new editors from claiming that the discipline was still engaged in “gatekeeping” on behalf of “white androcentric paradigms.” Thankfully, political scientists are well-equipped to use data to test the truth of such speculative arguments.

In spite of the challenges facing our universities, Canadians continue to profess high levels of trust in academics, including those in the social sciences and humanities. To retain such trust, we must demonstrate a commitment to the core purposes of the university: intellectual curiosity and the pursuit of truth. We do ourselves no favours when we abandon these goals in favour of political projects. 

Dave Snow is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Guelph.

Source: Dave Snow: When political scientists get political

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Horn: The Return of the Big Lie: Antisemitism is winning

2024/02/19 Leave a comment

Long read with concluding thoughts applicable to all groups on what universities and other institutions need to do:

It is fairly obvious what Harvard and other universities would need to do to turn this tide. None of it involves banning slogans or curtailing free speech. Instead it involves things like enforcing existing codes of conduct regarding harassment; protecting classroom buildings, libraries, and dining halls as zones free from advocacy campaigns (similar to rules for polling places); tracking and rejecting funding from entities supporting federally designated terror groups (a topic raised in recent congressional testimony regarding numerous American universities); gut-renovating diversity bureaucracies to address their obvious failure to tackle anti-Semitism; investigating and exposing the academic limitations of courses and programs premised on anti-Semitic lies; and expanding opportunities for students to understand Israeli and Jewish history and to engage with ideas and with one another. There are many ways to advocate for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence that honor the dignity and legitimacy of both indigenous groups and the need to build a shared future. The restoration of such a model of civil discourse, which has been decimated by heckling and harassment, would be a boon to all of higher education.

Harvard has already begun signaling change in this direction: The university recently reiterated and clarified rules regarding the time, place, and manner of student protests. For Harvard to take more of these steps would be huge, but I have struggled to understand why all of them still feel so small. Perhaps it’s because the problem is a multi-thousand-year fatal flaw in the ways our societies conceive of good and evil—and also because somewhere deep within me, I know what has been lost. There was a time, not so very long ago, when we didn’t have to prove our right to exist.

Among the mountains of evidence that Jewish students sent me, one image has stayed in my mind. There are videos of crowds chanting “Long live the intifada!” inside Harvard’s Science Center, and “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!” in Harvard Yard, along with other places equally familiar from my student days. But I keep coming back to the crowds marching and screaming in front of Harvard Law School’s Langdell library, because Langdell is a sacred place for me. On my 22nd birthday, in 1999, when I was a senior at Harvard, a law student I’d met at Hillel took me up through Langdell’s maintenance passageways to the library’s rooftop, where he asked me to marry him. I said yes.

I watched the video of the students marching and screaming in front of Langdell, and in an instant I remembered everything: studying in campus libraries for my Hebrew- and Yiddish-literature courses, talking for hours with Muslim and Christian and progressive and conservative classmates, inviting friends of all backgrounds to join me at Hillel, scrupulously following the Jewish tradition of “argument for the sake of heaven” in even the most heated debates, gathering for Shabbat dinners crowded with hundreds of students—and over those long and beautiful dinners, falling in love. My classmates and I often disagreed about the most important things. But no one screamed in our faces when we wore Hebrew T-shirts on campus. No one shunned us when we talked about our friends and family in Israel, or spat on us on our way to class. No crowds gathered to chant for our deaths. No one told us that there should be no more Jews. That night, my future husband and I worried only about getting in trouble for sneaking up to the library roof.

Source: THE RETURN OF THE BIG LIE: ANTI-SEMITISM IS WINNING

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Clark: It’s too late for universities and colleges to complain about the foreign student cap

2024/02/02 Leave a comment

Indeed. They and others should have seen this coming as it was untenable:

Canada’s universities and colleges sent an open letter to Immigration Minister Marc Miller this week about the cap he has imposed on new foreign students.

The gist was this: Please no, don’t do this yet, wait, hold on, we’re not ready, this is too sudden, can you give us a break?

Mr. Miller’s answer should be, in a word, no.

The warnings were ignored for too long – by the feds, by provincial governments especially in Ontario and British Columbia, and by colleges and universities. That left no option apart from ripping the Band-Aid off.

Source: It’s too late for universities and colleges to complain about the foreign student cap

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Black-only swim times, Black-only lounges: The rise of race segregation on Canadian universities

2024/02/02 Leave a comment

Sigh, hard to see how this will improve social integration and inclusion:

…While the idea of explicitly race-segregated spaces at Canadian universities would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, recent months have seen a wave of Black-only lounges, study spaces and events at Canadian post-secondary institutions.

The University of British Columbia recently cut the ribbon on a Black Student Space featuring showers, lockers and even a nap room.  To gain access, students must apply and affirm that they are one of the following: “Black African descent, African-American, African-Canadian, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latinx, and Afro-Indigenous.”

Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly Ryerson, opened a Black Student Lounge in 2022. The space is intended as a shelter from “the harms of institutional racism.” In multiple public statements, TMU has referred to itself as a hotbed of colonialist institutional oppression, and the lounge is intended as a place where students can “heal” and “recharge” from said oppression, and “promote Black flourishing.”

The University of Toronto maintains a distinctive office of Black Student Engagement that curates a series of Black-only frosh and orientation events. While there are university-sanctioned “engagement” programs for Latin American and Southeast Asian students, these are mostly limited to mentorship appointments and workshops.

And it’s not just U of T pursuing Black-only frosh events. As noted in a feature by VICE, as recently as 2015 Canada didn’t feature a single Black-only frosh. But after Ottawa universities debuted BLK Frosh that year, the practice soon became commonplace….

Source: Black-only swim times, Black-only lounges: The rise of race segregation on Canadian universities

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