Archive for October 24, 2023

Fixing the college mess

Posted: October 24, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

It’s heartening for me to see higher education in trouble.

The anti-Israel bias of some prominent institutions, such as the University of Pennsylvania, has made headlines recently. But the problems are much more profound.

I spent nearly 30 years watching the demise of the essence of teaching and learning at three colleges and universities that slid into a bureaucratic morass and a political mess.

I’ll start with the less sexy side of the equation. When I started at Temple University in 2005, I could pop in to see the dean whenever I wanted to do so. The entire staff of the dean’s office stood at eight people.

I met privately three times with the current dean, whom I helped get the job a decade ago, after battling through some of the 20-odd bureaucrats who stood in the way.

The expanding bureaucracy in the Klein College of Media and Communication was typical for much of higher education. The outrageous cost of higher education has more to do with the nonteaching staff at colleges and universities than the expansion and pay of teachers.

For example, I paid $559 a year in tuition to a state school in 1973. That comes to $3,896.77 in today’s dollars. Higher education might be competitive if tuition stood at only two or three times that amount.

Is college worth it? The public is increasingly skeptical. This year, a Wall Street Journal poll found that 56% of adults said a four-year college was “not worth the cost,” up from 40% in 2013.

What first looked like a pandemic blip has turned into a crisis. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As a result, many colleges and universities will have to tighten their budgets by reducing staff, including hiring fewer tenured professors.
In my opinion, that’s good.

Second, politics became increasingly leftist as I moved along in academia. Here are a few examples. I lost one job because I was a conservative and couldn’t advance at another institution because of my views. At one point, a fellow professor slammed the door in my face because she disagreed with my politics.

Tenure is what protects many leftist professors from criticism. It’s almost impossible to get fired once a teacher has tenure, which keeps many leftists from getting called on the carpet for their opinions.

Take, for example, Marc Lamont Hill, who recently left Temple for the City University of New York.

Five years ago, Hill, a media professor and network pundit, called for countries to boycott and divest from Israel in a speech for the U.N.’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. “We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grass-roots action, local action and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” Hill said in prepared remarks.

CNN fired Hill. Temple couldn’t touch him because he had tenure.

With fewer tenured professors and economic pressure from students maybe there’s a chance higher education will get less political and more useful.

The Right To Be An Ass With an Evil Opinion & Hate in Your Heart as Long as You Leave People Alone

Posted: October 24, 2023 by datechguy in internet/free speech
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Ben Rumson: It’s where people can someday look civilization straight in the eye and spit. and you don’t have to please anybody and you don’t have to love thy neighbor, you leave the bastard alone!

Paint Your Wagon 1969

Anyone who had read this blog over the last couple of weeks know the following:

  • I say without equivocation that Hamas is a bunch of evil murderous bastards.
  • I saw without equivocation that the anti-Semites marching for Hamas and supporting them are at best deluded useful idiots and at worst murderous bastards who are only held back by a land full of armed folks.
  • I say without equivocation that I support the law firms that have rejected candidates who have expressed support for the murder of women and children and the beheading of babies.
  • I say without equivocation that I support those who would withhold funds from schools who have defended and or expressed support for Hamas.
  • I say without equivocation that I believe schools, pols and public people who express support for those bastards should be denounced.

I believe all of those things and have expressed opinions to this effect

I also believe the following

  • I say without equivocation that the anti-Semites marching for Hamas have an absolute 1st amendment right to march in support of Hamas and even loudly express their antisemitism and even their disgusting support of beheading babies if they so choose.
  • I say without equivocation that voters if they so choose have the absolute right to support and elect if they can people who support Hamas and loudly express their antisemitism if they so choose.
  • I say without equivocation that such elected officials have the right to support policies consistent with Hamas if they so choose

All of those opinions and actions can and should have adverse consequences for said people (all of said consequences being legal) but as long as they don’t

  • physically harm the people they profess to hate,
  • destroy the property of those they hate
  • put the people they hate in physical danger
  • inhibit the rights of those they hate
  • Take any such action(s) that violate local, state or federal laws.

Then as far as I’m concerned these people can believe what they want and say what they want and even hate who they want as long. People have the right to be evil assholes but we also retain the right to call them out for the assholes that they are.

Or to paraphrase Ben Rumson: They don’t have to love their neighbor, they just need to leave him the hell alone.

I suspect they won’t leave them alone and if they don’t they deserve all they get from the law or from folks using their 2nd amendment rights to protect themselves.

Update: Apparently the right to be an ass in public is not restricted to the supporters of beheading babies:

It’s all one horrific attack, and its earliest recorded instance is John 8:44 (of the Jews): “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

One might forgive Mr. David Mamet for completely misinterpreting Christian scripture figuring that a Jewish man of a Jewish mother whose followers where all Jewish including some members of the Jewish elite and teachers was attacking Jews as a race. He would not be the first to do so. In fact Christ requires us to forgive him for this.

That being said I submit and suggest that at a time when Jews in general and the Jewish state in particular is under attack by enemies within and without who apparently are all in on the idea of slaughtering men women and children raping Jewish women (even the dead) and beheading babies and that the allies of said killers are marching in the streets of European and American Cities and have a huge presence of Universities and that Jews in and outside of Israel are more in need of allies than ever it just might be a bad idea to insult Christianity and Christians by a public statement claiming that the Son of God’s rebuke of those who wanted to kill him was the original blood libel against the Jewish race that he was a member of. That’s seems a pretty damn stupid thing to do right now.

But that’s just me.

Have no fear even a public insult to my God is not enough for me to change my opinion on these events or the right of Israel to respond to them. It simply forces me to pray or Mr. Mamet because that’s a non-optional doctrine of Christianity.