Archive for December 12, 2023

Question: What Do the Board of Harvard and the BBC Have In Common?

Posted: December 12, 2023 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Answer: The both decided their affirmative action hires (Claudine Gay & Jodie Whitaker) must not be seen as failures no matter what the results are.

The BBC saw the rating for Doctor Who crash and burn during the uber woke (as opposed to regular woke) years of her tenure but it would have been unthinkable for the first female doctor who Jodie Whitaker lovingly call Dr. Karen by the good folks at Nerdrotic so they continued to carry her allowing the crashing and burning to continue to the point where not even the return of David Tennant, Catherine Tate and Russell T Davies could saving the ratings numbers.

Now comes the Harvard board having the first black woman president of Harvard not only on national TV being unable to declare calling for the extermination of the Jews against Harvard policy but exposed as a serial plagiarist. Harvard is getting pilloried all over, donors are running for the doors BUT again the first black woman to be president of Harvard MUST NOT be allowed to be perceived as a failure, must NOT be shown to be unqualified and must NOT have the suggestion that she is causing damage perhaps irreparable, to the school’s reputation.

Therefore the Board of Harvard, while having concerns, has decided to stand by her leading Ed Morrissey to quip

Indeed. And now I wait with bated breath to see what Beege can discover on the question of how one gets fired at Harvard, if not for anti-Semitism and academic fraud. Any opposition to identitarian policies and DEI/CRT pedagogy would be an obvious guess

Unexpectedly of course

Saving higher education

Posted: December 12, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

As I have written several times, higher education is an absolute mess, from its leftist culture to its ambivalence toward educating students about essential subjects.

Having suffered through numerous attacks at three universities for my conservative viewpoints, I have some suggestions on how to correct the problems in higher education.

First, eliminate tenure, which provides lifetime jobs and propagates the leftist culture. After only seven years, faculty members who are usually in their twenties when they arrive on campus don’t have to worry much about what they say or do for the next 40 or so years after tenure. 

Faculty members play an important role in hiring new faculty. It’s a bit like closed union shops where you only get accepted if you share political viewpoints or know someone already on the inside. 

Even CNN’s Fareed Zakaria acknowledged recently that higher education policies “use race, gender, and sexuality as political weapons to enforce intellectual conformity, dictate tenure decisions, and punish dissenters.” I guess a broken clock can be right twice a day!

Second, eliminate nonprofit status for private colleges and universities. Since these institutions have become political petri dishes, make them pay for their antics.

Third, look seriously at the amount of tax dollars that flow to higher education. Institutions of higher education get more than $1 trillion in tax money from various governmental agencies. State and local governments allocated about nine percent of their total budgets—more than the amount paid for highways and roads. About four percent of the federal budget goes to higher education—much of it in loans to students who end up heavily in debt. 

I am heartened that the public is starting to see that the emperors have no clothes. 

Americans’ attitudes about higher education have turned sharply negative in the past decade. In a Gallup poll, the percentage of young adults who said a college degree is important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Another poll found that about a third of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. In another Gallup poll, almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

Partly as a result of these attitudes, the number of college students has dropped dramatically in recent years. In the fall of 2010, more than 18 million undergraduates were enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States. That figure has been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021.

It’s time for individuals, colleges’ boards of trustees, and government entities to take a good, hard look at what higher education has become and make sure that the trends of intolerance and leftist thinking stop now!