'America's Elite Universities Have Lost Their Way' (bloomberg.com) 354
Trust in America's elite universities has declined sharply over the past decade [non-paywalled source]. A Manhattan Institute survey conducted in June 2025 found that only 42% of Americans have significant trust in higher education, down 15 percentage points from a decade earlier. Trust in Ivy League institutions stands at just 15%.
Harvard is considering building trade schools as part of a settlement with the Trump administration. The proposal comes as elite universities face criticism for shifting focus from academic excellence to shaping students' political and moral values. Princeton changed its informal motto in 2016 to "In the Nation's Service and the Service of Humanity." Grade inflation has become prevalent at elite schools. A Bloomberg column argues universities should adopt more objective admissions criteria, reduce grade inflation, and make education their primary mission again rather than attempting to fix societal problems.
Harvard is considering building trade schools as part of a settlement with the Trump administration. The proposal comes as elite universities face criticism for shifting focus from academic excellence to shaping students' political and moral values. Princeton changed its informal motto in 2016 to "In the Nation's Service and the Service of Humanity." Grade inflation has become prevalent at elite schools. A Bloomberg column argues universities should adopt more objective admissions criteria, reduce grade inflation, and make education their primary mission again rather than attempting to fix societal problems.
Cost and Culture War (Score:3, Insightful)
Our colleges are too expensive to go to meanwhile our conservatives have spent decades demonizing them as places where kids get brainwashed into thinking that LGBTQ people should be respected just like anyone else who's never done you wrong or that Palestinians deserve the right to self determination just like any other people and don't deserve to be starved and butchered in mass because a small group of them did something awful.
And no, I don't care that you think it's antisemitic to support the basic human rights of the Palestinians.
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Thank social media algos for some of that, foreign interests push the Palestine/Israel wedge kinda like they push vaccine skepticism. Anything to fray the social fabric.
And to finish your thought, the reason they don't push the Russia-Ukraine stuff is presumably because pro-Russian troll farms are one of those foreign interests, and they don't want the negative attention.
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No one has a problem with supporting the Palestinians.
No, that is absolutely not true. What world do you live in where calls for ending what Israel is doing over there don't get routinely labeled as antisemitism? This happens on both sides of the Atlantic.
Where are the street marches for the 19K (yes, that is correct) of the Ukrainian kids abducted by Russia?
In the US at least the Ukraine war gets far more support from the Left then it does from conservatives https://www.pewresearch.org/po... [pewresearch.org] .
Where are the ernest hashtags and tiktok videos about the the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar?
That's not a left wing thing, that's an everybody thing. Don't ask me why either, I think it's outrageous what's happening in that country.
Where are students lying down in the street over the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong by the chinese regime? Then there's abuses in Venezula, mass kidnappings of women and children in Nigeria - do the bien pensant middle class protesters care about them?
You mean the things that aren't a
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"You mean the things that aren't anywhere near as bad as what's happening in Israel / Palestine?"
Are you fucking serious? Get your head your arse and go learn about the world. And don't give me that standard issue drop the mic signoff about whataboutisms. Its a fatuous response redolent of people who have no counter argument.
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Are you fucking serious?
Yes. How many people are dying because of a lack of free speech in Hong Kong (A place within communist China that no one in the West has any hope of influencing)?
And don't give me that standard issue drop the mic signoff about whataboutisms. Its a fatuous response redolent of people who have no counter argument.
No, that's what whataboutisms are. That's why you have multiple posters making fun of you for using them.
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"Yes. How many people are dying because of a lack of free speech in Hong Kong (A place within communist China that no one in the West has any hope of influencing)?"
You have any idea whats been happening in Nigeria in the last decade? Congo? What about Myanmar? What about the Yazidis in Iraw and Syria? Rohingya , heard of them?
Yes, whataboutisms, they matter. You're just another clueless dick focused on a single issue because it probably goes down well with your equally clueless peers.
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You have any idea whats been happening in Nigeria in the last decade? Congo? What about Myanmar? What about the Yazidis in Iraw and Syria? Rohingya , heard of them?
So because attention isnt being brought to every bad thing happening in the world we should ignore what Israel is doing in Palestine?
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Among other things: The United States is FUNDING the genocide in Gaza and supplying weapons..
Actions in the US can have a direct effect on what is happening there.
Re:Selective issue politics (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, whataboutisms, they matter.
Nope. People call something a whataboutism precisely because you're bringing up a completely different situation and trying to use it to distract attention from something else.
Why do people on the left in the United States care so much about what's going on in Israel right now? Because the U.S. built up Israel into the military force that could do those things. More to the point, by continuing to back Israel in spite of their actions, in the eyes of the people protesting, the U.S. government is, at least in effect, supporting genocide.
The United States did not arm the government of Myanmar and continue to support them after they started attacking the Rohingya.
The United States did not arm warlords or gangs or terrorist organizations in Nigeria or the Congo, to the best of my knowledge.
The United States pretty much stopped supporting Venezuela as soon as Maduro took over, and massively sanctioned that country.
The United States massively sanctioned Russia after their invasion of Ukraine.
The situations that people are protesting about are the ones that they can legitimately affect by changing U.S. foreign policy, whereas the situations that they are not protesting about are largely the ones where the U.S. has already done everything that they can do short of sending in troops.
These are not the same.
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No one has a problem with supporting the Palestinians
Simply not true. A very visible example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I wonder if the people who advocate boycotting isreali products take the same approach about chinese ones for their genocide of the Uyghurs, you know, phones, laptops, clothes etc. Of course not. Its very easy to polish your halo and seem virtuous with some high profile but vacuous actions when they'll make zero impact on your daily life.
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Wow. If your goal was to create an undiluted example of what-aboutism in a post then congrats! You really succeeded.
The state I live in will not let me do business with them unless I promise to toe the line on Palestine. That means, for example, that I cannot do any consulting with my city or substitute teaching at my school without first promising to sign away my first amendment rights to support Palestine.
So to get back to your first post: Yes, there are a lot of people who have problems with others suppo
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Do you think you sound clever cut and pasting some pat response? Whatabout matters when there's a heavy bias towards one action with others being ignored for no good reason.
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Israeli is starving and butchering Palestinians whether the Left or anyone else is paying attention to Myanmar (as an example) or not. None of the "whataboutisms" you list changes the human rights abuses happening in Israel right now nor do they diminish the fact that people should care about them.
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Your clear and vicious antisemitism is not in your desire for Palestinian Arabs to have human rights. It's everywhere else.
Never mind the only Jews I've spoken poorly of are those running Israel and Zionists who think they're entitled to others people's land. Nice attempt at slander though.
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The first way is "Zionists, who think they're entitled to other people's land". In other words, defining Zionism as fundamentally illegitimate. That implies that you think that not only this particular state of Israel is illegitimate, but that any conceivable state of Israel would be fundamentally illegitimate, and that Jewish inhabitants of the state of Israel have no connection to that land, no right to live there, and need to, by implication, leave and go somewhere else. That is an antisemitic view, because it denies the concept of Jewish self-determination, pretends that Jews have no links to the land -- historical or otherwise, and will result in the annhilation of the state and the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the land.
I completely disagree. Just because Jews used to live on the land that is modern day Israel doesn't mean they had claim to it thousands of years after they lost control of it. If that's that way the world worked the US would go back to the Native Americans and most countries would have radically different borders.
No one is entitled to the homes and land other people live on. Israel was built on the homes of millions of Middle Eastern Muslims with many of these people still living in exile to this day in Jor
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A somewhat overlooked point: the 600 year old Ottoman Empire fell in WWI.
New powers decided the new borders.
Re:Cost and Culture War (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm concerned about Gaza because my tax dollars are helping to commit a genocide. I'm appalled that more people aren't of the same opinion, we've been made party to a genocide and **no one cares**. How is that even possible in this age? I just don't understand it.
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Women voluntarily join Mormon cults that take away all their rights, it's not uncommon for people, both men and women, to do stupid things under the influence of religion.
Thatâ(TM)s got nothing to do with the univers (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have the president of the United States, who is blindly followed by millions, slandering you, of course trust in you goes down. Itâ(TM)s not the universities that have lost their way, itâ(TM)s the orange turd in chief who never was on the way.
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We have 1/4 of the US population that spend their whole day in a Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, right wing radio bubble hearing continuous slander of educational institutions and anybody who doesn't suck up to our dear supreme leader (of course, say anything negative about right wing institutions and get shutdown immediately - so freedom of speech only applies for one point of view)
Re:Thatâ(TM)s got nothing to do with the univ (Score:4, Insightful)
It's amazing how often you can tell when you're talking to the type of conservative who turns on Fox news or the like the moment they get home and just leave it running the rest of the day versus a conservative who doesn't. The prior often have awful, bitter outlooks on life and are generally pretty radicalized.
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Well that and he's the only act of that type targeted towards conservatives (conservatives typically aren't the most gifted comedians) where as there are a ton on the left competing with each other and he has a much better time slot relative to every other show of its type.
Re:Thatâ(TM)s got nothing to do with the univ (Score:4, Insightful)
The numbers weren't much better three years ago.
Everyone should become plumbers and electricians (Score:5, Insightful)
What if we got rid of the typically college educated STEM jobs and doubled the number of plumbers and electricians in the US from 1.5 million to 3 million? That's adding 1.5 million people ready for those high paying jobs fixing the leaky faucets. Just think 3 million people earning the current median electrician/plumber salary of $30 an hour (because doubling the number of plumbers won't reduce their salaries?) instead of the STEM worker average of $50 an hour.
Oh and mechanics .. we'll certainly need more of those (median $25 an hour jobs) when we switch to EVs?
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Don't get me wrong, I think we need to focus more on trade/vocational education. But this is not a zero-sum game. All jobs, and all forms of education are complimentary so long as they match demand.
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There is a demand but just as soon as comptia starts offering Handyman+ to meet the demand you'll wages for actual plumbers fall through the floor. But the most important objectives will have been met:
- Lower the cost of construction projects.
- Keep a whole generation of people from knowing about things outside their labor and profession so they have to believe whatever is on social media.
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B) Flooding the market with tons more people in these areas will certainly depress salaries and wages even more.
Re:Everyone should become plumbers and electrician (Score:5, Interesting)
“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” -- John Gardner: [carnegie.org]
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Oh and mechanics .. we'll certainly need more of those (median $25 an hour jobs) when we switch to EVs?
wat
Do you have any clue how many car repair jobs involve the engine, or the emissions system, or the fuel system? Those jobs are going away. There's never been a worse time to become a mechanic in the history of the automobile.
Polls have lost their way not Universities (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Polls have lost their way not Universities (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why those Charlie Kirk events were so popular? Actual free thinkers felt it was the only place on campus they could safely articulate their ideas
No, the Charlie Kirk events were popular because he'd tell conservative kids what they wanted to hear. These were not events for "free thinkers", most of his debate offers were nothing but a professional debater debating random individuals who had not prepped for his topics like he had. They were nothing more than "owning the libs" events.
Re:Polls have lost their way not Universities (Score:5, Insightful)
The main purpose of the events was to make edited clips for social media with titles like "Charlie Kirk DESTROYS ignorant liberal." Kirk could then use the associated attention to fundraise for his organization.
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Thanks for finishing my point :)
It's amazing the historic revisionism we're getting in regards to this guy. Political violence is awful and he certainly didn't deserve to die but this making him out to be some sort of enlightened saint above partisan politics is just ridiculous. He was up to his neck in political nastiness and bigoted beliefs.
Re:Polls have lost their way not Universities (Score:4, Insightful)
Political violence is how democracies die. Not a fan.
Re:Polls have lost their way not Universities (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that Charlie Kirk, and conservative professional debaters like him, did put out invitations for liberal professional debaters to go on these university tours with him. Why didn't they show up? Why was it that only the amateurs bothered to show?
For the same reason physicists seldom bother to debate flat-earthers. Like everyone else, someday physicists are going to die. And from today until then, they want to spend their time doing something productive, not arguing with idiots.
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LOL - Kirk "freethinker" (Score:5, Insightful)
I spilled my coffee reading this...
Watch what Kirk published and watch alternative sources how it actually looked it...
Carefully selected and edited videos promoting his agenda...
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If you want a "free thinker" why would you want to send your children to schools that enforce a rigid belief system on them? Religious schools like Liberty are explicitly about spreading a specific belief system, not encouraging students to evaluate different beliefs and choose for themselves. Even accepting your premise that mainstream universities are about indoctrination, it appears you are simply choosing a different ideological indoctrination rather than freeing them from indoctrination.
Besides that, I
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And you just figured out his coded post. He doesn't at all want "free thinking", he wants conservative thought and nothing else.
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If you want a "free thinker" why would you want to send your children to schools that enforce a rigid belief system on them? Religious schools like Liberty are explicitly about spreading a specific belief system, not encouraging students to evaluate different beliefs and choose for themselves.
Or worse: bible colleges that have students and faculty sign an affirmation of faith before they're even allowed in the front door.
Asserting the bible is inerrant before you can even walk onto the campus is not behavior worthy of a "free thinker."
Re:Polls have lost their way not Universities (Score:5, Interesting)
I realize this is anecdotal.... but I went through school without once being asked about my political views. Unless I chose to make an issue of it. My wife - the same. My 3 children - the same. And the range of educations is: nursing, 2 engineering, and one business MBA.
Again, I challenge people making these wild assertions to provide us proof. And they can't other than anecdotal stories or scare-mongering provided by certain.... individuals.
But let me pop your ballon. Students increasingly are choosing colleges specifically BECAUSE of the college's political alignment. You make these indoctrination claims and act like kids don't have a choice of where they go to school. But beyond that.... a recent study of incoming college students recently found 50% of college students identified as liberal, compared to 26% who were conservative. So are colleges liberal, or do they largely reflect those ATTENDING college? A recent non-partisan review of faculty political leaning in the US shows that 60% were liberal. Which is actually LOWER than the % of liberal students who were attending.
See... that's data. It's one side of the this conversation sorely lacks. But... INDOCTRINATION.
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That's why those Charlie Kirk events were so popular? Actual free thinkers felt it was the only place on campus they could safely articulate their ideas.
That motherfucker said he was scared to fly on a plane if the pilot was black.
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
Ah yes woke Harvard (Score:5, Funny)
It seems like there are plenty of hardcore MAGA Harvard grads. Ted Cruz being a notable example.
So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Trust in America's elite universities has declined sharply over the past decade
Yeah, so has trust in America's electoral process. Except what you find is that the reason that's happened is the deliberate sowing of lies from the same people who then went on to say they had to do bad shit because people didn't trust the electoral process.
The Educated Generation. (Score:3, Interesting)
American capitalistic greed is so fucking pervasive that we turned higher education into The College Experience. And then sat around bewildered as to why the cost increased ten-fold while the grown-ass children graduated with a masters in political activism, and a minor in Follow-Your-Feelings that might land them a volunteer job outside of a campus bubble.
Eat, chew, and shit that for ten years and suddenly you’re calling some of those grown-ass children “boss”. Or “Representative”. With results as predictable as a trillion-dollar pile of education loan debt.
The irony of the Ivy League offering an education in the trades. I’d rather ban them from education altogether, tax their endowments like a lottery windfall, and have them be thankful we’re letting them off lightly.
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I know it sucks to be unable to get into an ivy league school, but you really should see someone about the mental health issues.
Yeah, the ivy-league and other upper-end schools tend to overperform in their graduates finding work in their fields after graduating, and the now-mostly-defunct ITTs, University of Phoenixes, and other trade schools that don't tend to have as much in in-person education and are there mostly to profit off of the student-loans programs for people who would never be accepted at even state-schools tend to have the worst placement after graduating.
Maybe stop attacking them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite the racket they have going on:
1) Attack elite universities for being "woke" and make those attacks central to your culture war
2) Tell your culture war allies the elite universities are not to be trusted
3) Survey people on whether they trust elite universities
4) Use survey as "proof" that the universities have done something wrong
Grade inflation (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a similar problem in all evaluation systems. If you give your Uber driver or Airbnb or Amazon order anything less than the top score, they whine and complain and argue with you. I bought a car, and they said I "had" to give them a 10 out of 10 on the survey; for them, anything but a 10 is considered a failure.
So, what to do? Be a teacher who tries to solve grade inflation all on your own? Be the only harder grader in an ocean of A's? Fight and argue with parents, students, your administrators? And, knowing that giving your students a lower grade, while it might be honest, actually disadvantages them when they try to use that grade to apply for college or graduate school?
We've lost the grading battle. It's over. We might as well turn most courses into pass / fail (where an A is a pass and everything else is a fail). In terms of determining what students actually now, it's probably time to go back to standardized tests and portfolios of work (likely videos as papers can all be written by AI).
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You want to see not-inflation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The Blue Book and the Faraday Cage (Score:3)
Thanks to the Indoctrination of Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny that Republican elites decry indoctrination by indoctrinating their people to hate education.
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The word "indoctrination" was barely in the lexicon until Fox kept mentioning it when bad mouthing colleges. Now when republicans are asked about college it's a word they always think of. A perfect example of propaganda in action.
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You criticize them for allegedly not tolerating opposing ideas - but you have the same issue. So, what Ivy League institution did you attend that taught you to hate so much?
The problem is not "losing their way" (Score:5, Insightful)
For years, kids have been told that they need a diploma to get a good job, not an education, just a diploma.
Those with limited talent or work ethic slouch through college, putting in minimum effort, socializing, binge drinking and cheating on exams.
They then enter the real world where there is an abundant oversupply of poorly educated diploma holders.
Pop culture celebrates the slackers and punishes high achievers.
Well meaning people want to give the disadvantaged a chance, so they lower standards.
College administrators seem to care more about their sports teams than the quality of education they provide.
Student loans are seen as a profit center, so they proliferate with increasingly bad terms and are used to fund useless programs that are sometimes outright scams.
The whole idea of an auditorium full of students listening to a professor hasn't changed since antiquity.
Yes, college needs radical change, but not because of politics.
The only way they lost is kow towing to idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Outside of America, people continue to love America's Elite universities.
Nobody not under the sway of American political cults distrusts Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc. etc.
Internationally, the top ten universities, by reputation are:
Harvard (USA)
MIT (USA)
Standford (USA)
Oxford (UK)
Cambridge (UK)
Berkley (USA)
University College London (UK)
University Washington Seattle (USA)
Yale (USA)
Columbia (USA)
Note, China has a university tied for #11, Canada has one tied at 16, and Singapore has one at 20. All in, 13 of the top 20 world wide Universities are American.
Basically, USA's elite universities are widely respected unless you believe a felon convicted for lying to the government makes for a good President. The key word is not the word felon, but the word lying.
Idiot wrote the article (Score:2)
"Bloomberg column argues universities should adopt more objective admissions criteria, reduce grade inflation, and make education their primary mission again rather than attempting to fix societal problems."
Admissions criteria is a societal problem. Grade inflation is not a problem in any way shape or form. It literally does not matter except to a-holes trying to compare themselves to the younger generation.
Education is and always has been their secondary mission. Elite schools have a primary mission of r
A key “elite” blind spot (Score:3, Insightful)
Progressives, just like conservatives, recognize their take is biased to one side on a wide variety of individual topics but, unlike conservatives, fail to see when their bias is systematic. This is particularly notable in a variety of ways:
- Progressives see Fox as right leaning, as do conservatives, but assessing NPR reveals a schism: conservatives see NPR as distinctly left leaning while progressives see it as close to neutral. The schism is only made obvious to progressives when they’re instructed to carefully use a rubric of individual issues for assessment instead of simply using “vibes”: Israel, lockdowns, teacher unions, defund the police, etc, etc.
- Media Matters similarly uses holistic “narrative” to judge media bias, thus largely aligning with progressive assessments of Fox and NPR, where-as All Sides empirically assesses bias by uses a rubric of positions on several individual issues to judge bias, thus aligning with conservative assessments.
- Not coincidentally, the Critical Theory and Postmodernism that’s particularly dominant in “elite” soft science academia both explicitly claim “narrative trumps empirical observation” or even “empirical observation is a tool of bigotry”. This aligns with the progressive “vibe” approach of assessing NPR and Media Matters as neutral.
- Wikipedia’s political drift over the last ten years is a particularly illuminating example of this phenomenon. Its official “perennial source” list https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org] has evolved over the last decade or so to green light virtually all distinctly left leaning resources as “neutral” (The Guardian, CNN, NPR) but red lights, or at least yellow lights, almost all right leaning resources.
The systemic bias of supposedly neutral mainstream media and soft science “elite” academia becomes ludicrously obvious after examining the highly aligned Biden era CNN, NPR, soft science academia, and progressive positions on a wide variety of topics:
- The border is secure.
- The inflation is “temporary” and “small”.
- The Steele Report is credible.
- The laptop is a Russian plant.
- The lab leak theory is propaganda.
- Opposing long term lockdowns is unscientific.
- Biden is fully mentally competent.
- Defunding police is a great idea.
- The GF riots were “mostly peaceful”.
- Judging by identity instead of merit is democratic.
- Extremely adult books in grades schools are appropriate.
- Hormonal and surgical transitions for children are scientific and moral.
- Eliminating the following “equitably” improves schools: phonics, advanced classes, standardized testing, high school graduation requirements, grouping kids by learning level, and merit based hiring.
- Restarting Nord Stream 2 and refusing to arm Ukrainians was a great idea.
- Funding Hamas and Iran was smart, and it was great that the Houthis were removed from terrorist watch lists. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a success, and Biden’s top military advisers weren’t against it.
- Harris and Biden didn’t begin office with a myriad of restrictions on fossil fuel pipelines, permits, and financing. Stopping PennEast, Keystone XL, etc were helpful actions.
- Support defunding, oppose school choice, oppose VoterID, and support illegal immigration.
That last bullet point is particularly illustrative of the blind spot. Per Gallup the progressive view on each topic - defunding, school choice. VoterID, borders - not only opposes conservative views, but also opposes the majority of Black Americans.
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This is a great example of what conservative propaganda does. Here we have someone that has a list of topics and has assigned to them a position that some progressive might have had or at least a Fox News host says they have had in the past couple decades, then pretends he's solved the problem.
As right-wingers drift further and further from reality, they're starting to just make up what they think the opposition is. Trump recently made an effort to label "AntiFa" as a domestic terrorist group which is sor
Part of a Larger Issue (Score:2)
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
Trust is being eroded everywhere in the United States. We've become a nation divided, and I'm not sure that anything can be done to remedy the situation.
As always, I hope to be proved wrong.
Harvard Bartending Course (Score:2)
Don't forget this gem
The Haravard Bartending Course
https://localbartendingschool.... [localbarte...school.com]
What a load of old bollocks (Score:2)
The same article that says these universities should "make education their primary mission again" has the strapline "Harvard has many strengths but vocational education isn't one of them". Like, pick a fucking lane: are you pushing for a revival of elite education -- in which case the only vocations you care about are things like medicine, law and science -- or trade schools, in which case, to point out the bleeding obvious, that's *not elite education*.
Stupid pointless treatment of bad faith attacks by fas
Those Princeton Bastards!! (Score:2)
Seriously, the author took exception to that? I imagine he really hates JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
Exclusive, not elite (Score:2)
Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:4, Insightful)
Define indoctrination.
Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:5, Insightful)
But they sure know about "indoctrination in collage(sic)".
I spent 10 years in college, and I can only count 2 instructors that were into that kind of behavior (one from the left, and one from the right.)
Every other professor I had was simply trying to do their job. A few sucked, some had terrible personalities, but hey, we are all human. Everybody else did their job, and I thank them for it. Some of them became my mentors who helped me get through my education. Some were even counselors that got me through some dark moments (because college is challenging, specially in STEM fields.)
So I ask, just like you, what indoctrination are these fools talking about?
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Yeah, 10 years in college as well, just one rather strident libertarian prof (in the '80s). Got smart and looked up any papers he had in school library, dropped a few complimentary ideas and themes in my papers; straight As for that year.
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Yeah, I had an aggressively conservative econ teacher one semester who wouldn't even answer a question if it involved anything contrary to his ideals. He'd just scoff and pretend you were an asshole. I quickly learned to stop asking questions and just regurgitated his nonsense. I didn't learn much but it was an easy A.
The students who didn't figure this out earned far lower grades.
Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a great econ teacher who used two textbooks for the course, one written by a conservative and another by a Marxist. He would explain to us why they were both full of shit.
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That sounds great. Talk about actually learning the full spectrum of economic philosophies.
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I had a good econ teacher who would ask questions as assignments at the start of the lesson and we'd have to go out and figure out whatever point it was that he was trying to make as part of the discovery process.
Lots of "oh jeez that's fukt holy shit" and it was way more convincing than if he'd preached whatever at us. It really helped that the students would have various means of finding data but we'd all arrive at the same conclusions.
Dude was weird too, Econ from Harvard and then nothing but low paying
Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the right sees a liberal bias among students and incorrectly concludes the colleges and universities must be to blame. I think it's more likely though that kids at that age and going through that process are full of hope. The act of getting a degree is driven by hope for a new and better future, and hope is the foundation of the left so kids will naturally gravitate toward a liberal bias.
Fear is the foundation of the right. As people age, elements that stir or instill fear become more of a concern. This is likely because we have offspring to care for and protect, and we have ever-less time to achieve our goals.
Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the right sees a liberal bias among students and incorrectly concludes the colleges and universities must be to blame. I think it's more likely though that kids at that age and going through that process are full of hope. The act of getting a degree is driven by hope for a new and better future, and hope is the foundation of the left so kids will naturally gravitate toward a liberal bias.
This is admittedly a supposition on my part, but having sat through college courses where very conservative students tried to push their uneducated mentality that was clearly factually wrong and faced pushback from lecturers or professors with actual research behind their instruction, the act of education itself takes a student out of uneducated provinciality and gives them a more complete view. Someone that's uneducated is usually pretty provincial in their attitude and thinking, and if they perceive even learning about the wider world as change, they will attribute that to liberalism same as if a new attitude were brought into their little provincial area, even if it's merely giving them a more complete picture of what's wider than their scope of influence and experience.
The problem is that this is an outright reactionary approach, actively hostile to anything that requires the individual to do more than continue doing the exact same thing that has always been done. It's also foolish because it makes the individual less adaptable when other situations come along that require rolling with the change because it's happening whether or not it's wanted.
The little secret that people who insist on enforcing what they consider to be conservative values fail to get is that even in a society that is generally more permissive in a liberal sense than they want, generally nothing is stopping them from making the choice to live personally conservatively. One can even have incredibly liberal views and can still personally choose to live in a way that a conservative would find to be pretty normal and acceptable.
Re: At some point....they catch on... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I could go on and on but I suspect your views are your identity and are unchanging. And you'll resort to ad hominems to those who disagree, calling them "fools" who couldn't
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"Search committees want to know that you are willing and able to help them make their department more equitable by working to dismantle structures and attitudes that make it more difficult for some students and colleagues to succeed."
What part of that statement, specifically, do you have a problem with? You don't think that I, a middle-aged white man, could write a compelling paragraph that met that assignment? Is "While I have had my own trials and tribulations, I recognize that there are others who have faced different and potentially higher obstacles in their lives." really that hard of a concept to understand?
Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank you for smoking. I mean sharing your observations. I thought I'd quote you since you got voted down for unvarnished honesty.
DEI is a serious problem. Front page of the National Post here in Canada tells that story:
TOP STORY
As part of the Carney government's push to pour money into A.I. research, Dalhousie University has announced that it will soon be hiring a new federally funded Canada Research Chair in artificial intelligence.
There's just one major caveat: The position is barred to applicants who are men or able-bodied.
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DEI isn't a problem, it's a solution. The reason restrictions like that exist is because if they didn't, people in equity-deserving groups would be quietly bared by prejudice, the position ultimately filled by some nepobaby or good ol' boy with a transcript full of "gentleman's Cs".
There is no shortage of qualified people. Unfortunately, there are also quite a few bigots that keep better qualified applicants out because they don't like the idea of a woman, a person with a disability, or a person of color
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Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:5, Informative)
Anything MAGA doesn't like
Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:5, Insightful)
Define indoctrination.
The process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.
Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:4, Insightful)
So ... MAGA and religion in general?
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Re:At some point....they catch on... (Score:5, Informative)
Define indoctrination.
Parents telling their children their religion or political view is the only correct one to follow.
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This is the future... (Score:4, Informative)
This will happen even more in the future...
During my time at academia the most vocal "indoctrination" were libertarian data guys - Musk/Thiel followers.
Another ones I remember are Christian agitators on campus and their stands.
With Trump I expect even more of both.
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Well, that, and they're likely to start harassing their coworkers, because they have be inculcated with the belief that every utterance that comes from their is not merely profound, but their absolute right to blurt out.
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Obama's nationalization of student loans has increased the ratio of administrators by 10x by guaranteeing tuition without regard for value.
Boy would I like to see a citation for that bit of wisdom. You werent just completely making shit up, right?
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Obama's nationalization of student loans has increased the ratio of administrators by 10x by guaranteeing tuition without regard for value.
Boy would I like to see a citation for that bit of wisdom. You werent just completely making shit up, right?
No he's not. I've worked in higher education for several decades. When I first came here, the administrative wing was one side of one floor of one building. Now they have an entire building, filling three floors and are discussing taking over the basement and kicking out the department there. That doesn't even count the administrative departments for marketing, enrollment management, retention, advising and campus life that fills half the student union. Most of that didn't exist back then. Our enrollm
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Once again, show me a citation confirming a 10 fold increase in staff since Obama's term in office. If you're being honest you should be able to do this faster than you typed out your anecdote.
Re:Academia (Score:4, Informative)
Colleges have (mostly) never been run by the professors. They have always been required to have boards that have financial and strategic responsibilities. Those boards *RARELY* involved themselves in how subjects are taught.
Obama's "nationalization" simply took away the middle man. Student loans have ALWAYS been guaranteed by the government, so when private banks were in the middle they really didn't need guiderails and would loan to everyone because.... guaranteed. Removing those banks saved students 68 billion dollars in interest and fees charged by those banks.
This is almost entirely a result of: The structure of the poll. The hatred that has been engendered by the right with regards to education. The distrust of educated people that has long been an undercurrent in American society. The demonization of all educational assets as 'woke' and 'left' and 'radical.
Re:Academia (Score:5, Informative)
Obama's
That guy really did break your brain.
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And the funny thing is that the best white guy they could find after is ... Trump.
I can't think of a better argument against racist attacking black's IQ than putting Trump next to Obama.
It's ok though, Trump is going to decrease the price of drugs by 1200% and stop migrants from applying to "insane" asylums (or whatever is going on in his brain).
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Obama's nationalization of student loans
Oh you sweet child, American student loans were an internet meme long before anyone knew who Obama was.
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Yep. And given that 26% of Americans can't read above 3rd grade level, they're afraid... esp. as the line goes, "facts have a known liberal bias".