Posted on 05/20/2024 4:44:47 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
To be a college president, you have to go through the faculty ranks with one fear: you do not want to get on the wrong side of left-wing students and left-wing faculty. They're not just Democrats; they're hard left now and are predominantly taking over the general education curriculum. It's a diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology.
You see the Columbia president, someone promoted not on merit but on the idea that they are acceptable to the hard left and will continue this drift. The problem they're having is that the nation hadn't seen this. The nation just thought, "Well, it's Harvard. Harvard's always Harvard." Now, they've torn this scab off with these demonstrations, and people are realizing these presidents have no moral compass. They're canceling graduation, going to Zoom classes when you pay them $90,000 per student. They cannot acknowledge the epidemic of anti-Semitism. Every time they're asked to address the issue of people pushing Jews or telling them to go back to Poland, they say, "We deplore anti-Semitism and Islamophobia," even though there are almost no examples of Islamophobia. They have to say that because their constituency demands it.
This is kind of a revolutionary fervor we're seeing on these campuses. To quote Hemingway's great line in "The Sun Also Rises," it was gradual, like bankruptcy, and then it was sudden. People are astonished by what they see. At my university, we were looking for a new president, and everyone panicked because it's a little-known fact that in most of these universities, these multi-billion dollar endowments are long-term investments and locked up. They depend on $6-8 billion a year in fundraising. When you lose 10 or 20% of it, as some of these Ivy Leagues are experiencing, they panic because that's the operating budget.
At Stanford, we hired the Stanford Business Dean, Mr. LaVine. He's very good; he's not politically correct, and he's a professional. His father was president of Yale for 20 years, but he happens to be a white male. Nobody thought that would be possible, but these universities are now facing the reality that their alumni do not want to subsidize this. They may be looking at a Republican president, Senate, and House that have already said they’re going to look at the tax-free endowment income, the $1.7 trillion federal subsidized loans for students, and the massive multi-million dollar federal grants to these universities.
So, I think the universities are now in full panic.
When I watched the testimony of our four-star generals, I thought, "Wow, they're committing institutional suicide." They're making unfounded charges and implementing new protocols directly aimed at supposedly biased young 18 to 20-year-olds who have never had much opportunity in this country. They were the losers of globalization in the Midwest and the South, rural people. Yet, we know from their statistics and battlefield efficacy that these are the very people our enemies fear. These are the people we send into the streets of Baghdad and Kabul, and they are the world's best soldiers. Tampering with that makes no sense.
On the other end of the spectrum, these campuses were the world's most preeminent. Roughly one-third of all students are foreign students. We have a million foreign students coming here to study at these universities. But if you look at what they've done, they've dropped the SAT entrance requirement and do not grade high school GPAs comparatively. If I get straight As at a rural 500-person high school and someone in Palo Alto with 3,000 people gets an A, it's the same. This methodology is not to use merit to let in students, mostly from minority backgrounds or different gender and sexual identities.
The consequences are now visible. In the fourth year of these reparatory admissions, Yale is giving 80% As, Stanford about 65%. They’ve had to stop the traditional workload, soften courses, and introduce new ones. Thousands of diversity, equity, and inclusion people are auditing the faculty to ensure compliance. These universities don't want to die on the altar of standards. We have a million foreign students, mostly from illiberal nations—about 150,000 to 200,000 from Middle Eastern Muslim nations, 350,000 from China, and another 200,000 from autocracies in Latin America and Asia. We don't audit them, but universities recruit these students because they pay full tuition with no discount or scholarships.
One consequence of these campus demonstrations is that many students want to renegotiate their university experience. They find it too difficult or too traditional, and they didn't sign up for that. They can't do the work, want to be excused from finals, and want their senior projects dropped.
Employers have noticed this trend. They don't want to hire these students because they see them on TV every night, protesting and causing trouble. These students are seen as coddled, entitled, and lacking in skills. Employers prefer graduates from schools like Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, or the University of Tennessee over Columbia or Yale graduates. These universities' degrees no longer signify the same level of excellence.
The Ivy League and American higher education elites are going the way of Disney, Bud Light, Target, and CNN. They don't know it, but it's happening as we speak.
I don’t use my android on the internet very much, either.
Thanks for the link to block them on my laptop.
Won't work.
The students are selected for high intelligence but also high academic achievement, which usually means conformity to "what THEY want".
The demonstrators aspire to rule the country, and they are simply conforming to what the silver ponytails who control their future expect.
Please do it La! This u-origin ad block is the first thing I install.
Will do. Thanks again.
He is right about not wanting to hire ivy league students. Leave them for someone else. One of my favorite places to hire engineers was the University of Houston. Why? Almost all the students went there because they had to stay at home and work their way through school. They were also solid students who were not in the top 10% of their high school class and could not get into A&M or UT. Still, they were very solid students, trained well enough, knew how to learn and more importantly, knew how to work and produce results even with outside interference. Topping the list came A&M and Oklahoma State for engineers.
Yep. My go-to AI platforms are Claude, ChatGPT-4o, and Perplexity. I am a monthly subscriber to Claude Pro, but I think most of what I need is available on the free version.
“Ancient College Tuitions”
Back in the 70’s tuition for my Chem E degree at NJIT was, if I remember correctly, all of about $350 for the semester. My son graduated from RPI at, again if I remember correctly, about $50k per year, for his Electrical and Bio Engineering degrees, and that was 15 years ago! ,
One thing about all this DEI stuff, and true for both me and my son, we were both lucky that our respective engineering schools focused only on engineering.
My son, after graduating from FL State law scool, went on for a Computer science masters at Columbia, and was amazed at what was going on there, with respect to DEI. In a nut shell, he commented that the students, professors, and curriculum in the liberal arts section of Columbia lacked the seriousness that he experienced in law or his engineering school.
bump
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