Tag: colleges

Colleges Attempt To Impose “No Parties, No Trips” COVID-19 Rules For Fall

Via ZeroHedge

Even after big names like Harvard announced “online only” classes through the Fall semester, many colleges and universities across the nation will be opening campus for in-person classes with even sports to resume, albeit with strict coronavirus safety measures in place.

Anxiety is still high, however, as schools deal with a variety of “unknowns” as it will try to enforce everything from regular COVID-19 testing, to socially distanced dorms, to face-masks at all campus events, to a ban on parties for students often paying sky-high tuition. Concerning that last one — a strict ban on parties, which many have long seen as part of the ‘college experience’, this will be much easier said than done. Is it realistic?

Image source: Universitysupplies.co/”Top 50 Party Schools in America”

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Coercion Meets Its Match

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Like the fabled spring zephyr came news that the Golden Golem of Greatness, (a.k.a. President Trump) signed an executive order that would withhold federal funding from colleges and universities that do not demonstrate support for free speech. It has been an amazement to behold the appalling, hypocritical suppression of the first amendment on campuses across the nation, with their ignoble speech codes, asinine safe spaces, sinister kangaroo courts, and racist anti-whiteness crusades.

Most wondrous of all has been the failure of college presidents, deans, trustees, and faculty chairs to assert their authority and do the right thing — namely, take a stand against the arrant muzzling of free expression by campus Stalinists. Their craven passivity is a symptom of what future historians will identify as the epic institutional collapse of higher education, which first made itself into an industry like any other moneygrubbing business, and then became a titanic racketeering operation. And now it is all coming to grief.

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Colleges: A Force For Evil

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Colleges: A Force For Evil

Many of the nation’s colleges have become a force for evil and a focal point for the destruction of traditional American values. The threat to our future lies in the fact that today’s college students are tomorrow’s teachers, professors, judges, attorneys, legislators and policymakers. A recent Brookings Institution poll suggests that nearly half of college students believe that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.

Of course, it is. Fifty-one percent of students think that it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. About 20 percent of students hold that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking, over 50 percent say colleges should prohibit speech and viewpoints that might offend certain people.  Contempt for the First Amendment and other constitutional guarantees is probably shared by the students’ high school teachers, as well as many college professors.

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Professors told to report students who make campus ‘less inclusive’ to Behavior Assessment Team

Via The College Fix
Team to ‘monitor’ individuals to ensure ‘positive behavior change’ 

As colleges across the country struggle with questions related to free speech on campuses, some schools have implemented policies that appear to give administrators significant latitude to discipline students for speaking in unpopular ways.

Most recently, the dean’s office of Utah Valley University, a public institution located in the north-central part of Utah, distributed a guidance letter to all faculty encouraging them to report to the school’s Behavior Assessment Team any students who use “inappropriate language,” are “argumentative,” or who speak “loudly.”

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Colleges: Islands of Intolerance

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Is there no limit to the level of disgusting behavior on college campuses that parents, taxpayers, donors and legislators will accept? Colleges have become islands of intolerance, and as with fish, the rot begins at the head. Let’s examine some recent episodes representative of a general trend and ask ourselves why we should tolerate it plus pay for it.

Students at Evergreen State College harassed biology professor Bret Weinstein because he refused to leave campus, challenging the school’s decision to ask white people to leave campus for a day of diversity programming. The profanity-laced threats against the faculty and president can be seen on a YouTube video titled “Student takeover of Evergreen State College.”

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A Letter Not Sent to Those Who Don’t Care

Submission by Onward

The events described in the below letter occurred recently.  It was written by me shortly after the original phone call to the school, but I decided not to send it.  Even if I did send it, it wouldn’t do me, or my family, any good at this point.  Besides, it could serve as an impetus in improving this college’s public relations and this is something I don’t wish to do.  Therefore, I will only share it here on TBP in order to “purge” my negative feelings.  I feel better already.

______________________________________

(DATE REDACTED).

 

(REDACTED).

Director of Admissions

University of (REDACTED).

 

Dear (REDACTED),

Please allow me to tell you a tale of a Midwestern family struggling to find the right college for an amazing daughter.

Through the years, my wife and I have raised remarkable children.  We had to work hard to provide for our family and have never once depended upon any governmental assistance of any kind.

My daughter is a junior in high school.  She currently maintains a 4.0 GPA.  She obtained a 34 on the ACT as a sophomore.  Moreover, she is a very accomplished individual involved in part time work, extracurricular school activities and currently holds positions of leadership in both her school and within our community.

Because of her accomplishments, it is our desire to find the best college in her chosen major.  We are also considering Ivy League schools at this time.

However, after some initial research, we were very seriously considering the University of (REDACTED).   I will admit to some initial reservations because your school is known as one of the most liberal university conclaves in the Midwest.  However, your college seemed to meet several of our desired criteria and we thought we would explore our options there.

In fact, we were actually scheduled to attend your honors program seminar on (DATE REDACTED).

Because we would be traveling from out of state, we did have some questions.  Therefore, we called and spoke to (REDACTED) in your Office of Admissions on (DATE REDACTED).  During the phone call (REDACTED) was very rude.  Her answers were mostly monosyllabic and she was not very friendly or helpful to say the least.

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Missouri: Taking the National Temperture

Guest Post by

 

It warms the heart of a curmudgeon: As I suppose we all have heard by now,  black semi-pro football players at the University  (sic) of Missouri have forced white officials to resign because of “White Privilege.” This Privilege is a great upsettance to them.

White Privilege is real, of course. It is a combination of high genetic intelligence, studiousness, a tendency toward intellectual exploration, the capacity to organize, sustained hard work, and conscientiousness. There is a reason why whites design Mars landers and black athletes do not.

To make this point clearly (See? It is my tendency toward intellectual exploration), let us consider the following questions:

How many of the black athletes, or black radicals at Missouri, or anywhere, have any business being at a university? How many have IQs below ninety? How many are way below? How many are studying real subjects, such as chemistry, languages, philosophy, literature, or history—as distinct from subjects for the enfeebled, Black Studies, Sociology, Education, and Breathing for Credit?

How many of the jocks can read? In many universities the black athletes are kept in special dorms and get high grades for courses they never attend and can’t spell. Is that happening in Missouri? Can we see their SATs? No one, I promise, will want to check.

Stray thought: If universities accepted only those with intelligence and interest, the noise level would drop appreciably. I am for it.

But the antics at Missouri are only one instance of a far larger disease. Daily the country ties itself in knots to keep blacks happy, which is impossible—to placate them, to soothe their disturbances, give them everything they want but can’t or won’t earn. Nothing satisfies them. They shut down political meetings, loot shoe stress, burn cities. We back away. Always we back away.

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Good Little Maoists

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Sometimes societies just go batshit crazy. For ten years, 1966 to 1976, China slid into the chaotic maw of Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.” A youth army called the Red Guard was given license to terrorize authorities all over the nation — teachers, scientists, government officials, really just about anyone in charge of anything. They destroyed lives and families and killed quite a few of their victims. They paralyzed the country with their persecutions against “bourgeois elements” and “capitalist roaders,” reaching as deep into the top leadership as Deng Xiaoping, who was paraded in public wearing a dunce-cap, but eventually was able to put an end to all the insanity after Mao’s death.

America’s own cultural revolution has worked differently. It was mostly limited to the hermetically-sealed hot-house world of the universities, where new species of hierophants and mystagogues were busy constructing a crypto-political dogma aimed at redefining status arrangements among the various diverse ethnic and sexual “multi-cultures” of the land.

There is no American Mao, but there are millions of good little Maoists all over America bent on persecuting anyone who departs from a party line that now dominates the bubble of campus life. It’s a weird home-grown mixture of Puritan witch-hunting, racial paranoia, and sexual hysteria, and it comes loaded with a lexicon of jargon — “micro-aggression,” “trigger warnings,” “speech codes,” etc — designed to enforce uniformity in thinking, and to punish departures from it.

At a moment in history when the US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go along with the program of exorcisms. A comprehensive history of this unfortunate campaign has yet to be written, but by the time it is, higher education may lie in ruins. It is already burdened and beset by the unintended consequences of the financial racketeering so pervasive across American life these days. But in promoting the official suppression of ideas, it is really committing intellectual suicide, disgracing its mission to civilized life.

I had my own brush with this evil empire last week when I gave a talk at Boston College, a general briefing on the progress of long emergency. The audience was sparse. It was pouring rain. The World Series was on TV. People are not so interested in these issues since the Federal Reserve saved the world with free money, and what I had to say did not include anything on race, gender, and white privilege.

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COLLEGE ROI

This is a shocking study for liberal minded morons across the land. If you pay $30,000 per year to a shitty college for a shitty degree in arts, education or social work, you will end up with a shitty job, shitty pay and a massive debt that you can never pay off because you have a shitty job with shitty pay. But guess what? Obama and his minions are doling out hundreds of billions of YOUR TAX DOLLARS to these clueless morons so they can get worthless college degrees from terrible schools every year. Even though these morons are virtually unemployable, they don’t show up as unemployed in the government statistics while they’re getting their worthless degrees with your money. There are millions of idiots occupying classroom space at worthless institutions across the land. It’s a scam and you are paying the bill.

Via The Atlantic

These U.S. Colleges and Majors Are the Biggest Waste of Money

You can major in art at a lower-tier public university if you want to. Just don’t expect it to make you rich.

This morning we published a review of recent research by PayScale on the most valuable colleges and majors in America, based on self-reported earnings by individuals who graduated from hundreds of schools.

Some of you asked: What about the least valuable colleges and majors in America? What a mischievous question! So we looked into that, too.

Here are the eleven schools in PayScale’s data with a 20-year net return worse than negative-$30,000. In other words: these are the schools where PayScale determined that not going to college is at least $30,000 more valuable than taking the time to pay for and graduate from one of these schools.

It gets worse. The self-reported earnings of art majors from Murray State are so low that after two decades, a typical high school grad will have out-earned them by nearly $200,000. Here are the degrees (i.e.: specific majors at specific schools) with the lowest 20-year net return, according to PayScale. They are all public schools: Bold names are for in-state students.

The same caveats that applied to our first article apply to this one. First, these estimates come from self-reported income. Self-reported income tends to skew up, because humans are a proud species, and we care more about our feelings than strict honesty with anonymous pollsters.

Second, PayScale calculates the next 20 years in earnings by inferring from the last 20 years. Sounds reasonable. But like any assumption, this carries risks. The “most coveted major” changes from time to time. If biomedical engineering becomes the next big VC category, scientists in California will be in higher demand than software engineers, whose earnings forecast might fall. PayScale can’t predict that future. Moreover, if a school dramatically expanded a high-value program (like engineering) in the last five years, it might raise the financial value of its students in a way that PayScale doesn’t full account for, since this research looks back two decades. In short, like most studies of this kind, the findings are fascinating and worth remembering and quoting—but also worth contextualizing.

Finally, as Jordan Weissmann notes, PayScale can tell us which colleges graduate the richest students. But it can’t tell us which colleges make the biggest delta in student outcomes, which might be a more important question for college counselors and families. For that, you would need to study a huge group of similar kids, some of whom went to great colleges, some to middling colleges, and some to bad ones, and measure the difference. When we measure lifetime earnings of students graduating from elite (and poor) colleges, we’re measuring both the quality of the college and the earnings potential of the student attending that college before they stepped foot on campus.