Education in America Has Become a Snare and a Racket, Part V

By Rich Kozlovich, Tags, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

Andrea Widburg published an article in American Thinkers Members Weekly Newsletter entitled, The root of evil in 21st century America, dealing with the destructive impact academia is having on America's youth with this profound picture.  

I knew public education in America, as we now know it, was really organized in the late 19th century, and it was done so by socialists.  So, I decided to do some research about how public education came into being in western civilization.  

As far back as I could tell public education as we know it started in Scotland in the sixteen hundreds in order to create a good Christian society. As Andrea notes it's now being used to teach students to hate Christianity. She went on to say: 

Once, they were places to teach the young in wisdom and logic; now they exist as leftist indoctrination centers. They used to expose young people to a broad panoply of ideas and information, but these were always centered on the virtues of Western values and accomplishments; now they teach one narrow discipline: to hate the West.

She also went on to make what I think is a profound point; that being why they want student debt erased and to make "higher" education free.  That way they can indoctrinate and contaminate an unending number of young minds to destroy western culture at the expense of western culture.  The internet now begs the question:  Do we really need academia?

“You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.” For a thousand years, universities held one monopoly. Access. You paid the toll or you stayed ignorant. The internet erased that in a decade. Every lecture. Every framework. Every textbook. Free. From any screen on Earth. The six-figure tuition is no longer buying knowledge. It is buying a signal.........

The American university system isn't functioning. It's not focused on producing young adults with marketable skills. It has been co-opted by the far-left, coddled by leftist politicians, and devoted to spewing out a plethora of useless Ethnic Underwater Dog-Polishing Studies degrees. Maybe only the few that are dedicated and focused enough to learn on their own should be employed in fields where they are, in essence, selling their knowledge. That's how the world worked for hundreds, even thousands of years. Now, with all the knowledge in the world at our command, why shouldn't it work that way again?

The system is totally corrupt graduating thousands of students with no job skills and huge debt, but they're being  taught Mao was perhaps the greatest historical figure of the 20th century.  I guess academics think murdering tens of million of people for political purposes is a sign of greatness?  

 Public schools are in a downward spiral as failure to teach starts at the lower levels of education.  At Berkeley 94% of the students they accepted from one school failed math.   Not only are they failing to educate students, they're abusing these young people financially. 

• The biggest problem in higher education It isn’t racial quotas, political ideology or tuition prices: it’s bloated internal costs.  Universities have many problems, and are constantly in the news. They are a major part of public policy.  Higher education is among the largest “industries” in the U.S., and linked to sectors like pharmaceuticals, defense, and technology. Universities also include major labor unions, and are used by political parties to organize voters. But at the end of the day, their most prominent feature is a lack of internal cost control. ......

•  Syracuse student questions ‘value’ of degree as university misses enrollment target amid tuition hike, budget woes -  Syracuse University is increasing investment in what Chancellor Michael Haynie calls an 'outstanding student experience' despite falling short of its enrollment target and projecting a budget deficit for the upcoming academic year.  Syracuse recently approved a 3.9 percent tuition increase for the 2026–27 academic year, raising undergraduate tuition from $66,580 to $69,180........

•  Six-figure price tag: 16 colleges now cost more than $100,000 per year, data show -  When combining tuition, fees, room and board, books, transportation and other expenses, the cost to attend 16 colleges and universities across the nation tops $100,000 per year, according to new data from the Princeton Review. “We just keep going up and it just never stops,” Jeff Selingo, author of “Dream School,” told CNBC, which reported on the data.

“For the 2026-27 academic year, 16 institutions — including Duke, Georgetown, New York University and University of Chicago — have a sticker price of more than $100,000, according to data exclusively provided to CNBC from The Princeton Review’s upcoming ‘The Best 392 Colleges’ list,'” the outlet reported. “Others, like Brown University, Northwestern and Pepperdine, cost more than $99,000.”

Failure to teach is now the standard and that failure is being protected.  Here's an interesting side bar; Lupita Nyong’o, is a black woman who was cast as Helen of Troy in the movie "The Odyssey", says she never heard of the Odyssey before this.  She's a Yale graduate.  Imagine that. 

• A Professor Called His Colleague’s Vacuous Course Proposal “Word Salad” Now he’s being formally charged with harassment.  One of the most sacredly held tenets of academic freedom is the duty of academics to vigorously disagree and critique one another’s work. But when Hofstra University professor Richard Himelfarb made an innocuous comment criticizing his colleague’s course proposals in a faculty meeting, he found himself hauled before Hofstra University’s Harassment Review Board.
• University of Michigan Drops Grades for Freshmen Pilot pass/fail policy will cover half of incoming freshmen for fall semester 2027 - Freshmen at the University of Michigan will soon experience a first semester without a final letter grade or GPA. Starting fall 2027, newcomers in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts—meaning about half of the 8,000 first-years—will see only "pass" or "no credit" on their transcripts. It comes as part of a pilot program the school says is aimed at "curb[ing] the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals" and helping them "acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys." Students will still receive grades during their first-semester courses, just not a final one. Some context:
• What do grades have to do with student mental health?   The University of Michigan, an elite “public ivy,” was highlighted in the New York Times about how it is changing its freshman grading policy from letter grades, to pass-fail.   The reason, Michigan explains, is that it will “improve student mental health.”   They go on to claim that this will “help first-year students acclimate to the demands of college” and that “they can explore a subject that may not come easily to them or take a course in a new field without the fear that a low grade may have long-term consequences.”  ....... See also Andrea Widburg's 'The University of Michigan is now hiding grades from fragile freshmen'

Higher education has been thoroughly infested with leftist ideologues who unendingly screamed about academic freedom, but in reality, university professors are against any academic freedom that dares to stand in opposition to their leftist ideology, or perhaps I should call it their idolatry of leftism. 

• Socialist Revival In Academia The recurring nightmare: forced collectivism and the menace of historical amnesia.  In both the lecture halls and quads of America’s elite universities, a disturbing paradox unfolds. The youngest generations of students, beneficiaries of unprecedented material prosperity and intellectual liberty, actively suppress or deny the grim ledger of socialism as it was brutally implemented across the twentieth century. This phenomenon is due partly to ignorance and partly to a cultivated historical amnesia—one that imperils the very freedoms that the West still possesses, however precariously.......
•  From Columbia to UCLA, faculty activists remain in the classroom  By Anna Miller| Professors who supported campus encampments and defended disruptive anti-Israel activism continue to hold positions of authority over students.   As students return to campus, professors who supported the protest movements that disrupted universities after October 7 are returning to the classroom with them. Shayoni Mitra at Barnard College and Nour Joudah at UCLA are two examples.  They teach at different institutions, but their records show a similar pattern: both used their positions to support student organizers, defend encampments, and lend academic credibility to disruptive activism.....
•  When tenure becomes a shield for reckless faculty conduct -  On July 5, 2026, a senior Stony Brook University professor was involved in a heated confrontation at Lulu Kitchen & Bar in Sag Harbor, Long Island. Public reports, video footage, and material posted from his own X account appear to show Dr. Josh Dubnau, a tenured Professor of Neurobiology and Anesthesiology and Director of the Center for Developmental Genetics, engaging in an aggressive public incident that has generated significant concern.......Dubnau is not a marginal activist on the edge of campus politics. He is a senior faculty member at a public university, and within its medical school. That level of authority comes with responsibility, judgment, and trust.......
  
  

It's time to fix this mess.  Right now we have a window of opportunity, but when that window closes, it may never open again.

•  Ivory Tower Rumble: Florida Politicians Battle Professors Have gone past assault on progressivism to challenge idea teachers are 'experts who determine course content'.  Universities across the country are facing unprecedented government scrutiny of everything from the rise of antisemitism to the lack of viewpoint diversity in the left-leaning social sciences. Nowhere is the ideological battle over higher education more contentious and consequential than in Florida, home to the second-largest university system in the country......
• Trump Admin Applies Common Sense Test to Useless College Degrees - College enrollment is booming not because there’s any real need for it or any real value to it (just the opposite) but because there is the perception that college is the only viable path to a career and enough jobs are gated off behind college diplomas to create the pressure for massive student loans to finance a worthless woke degree to get a job that it turns out will pay less than anticipated.......Then come the cries about student loans. The Trump administration is using a common sense test to try and break the cycle.......
• Bye, Bye, Black Studies -  If you’re collecting evidence that wokeness is on its way out, here’s one thrilling new development: the apparent demise of Black Studies.  Of course, Black Studies (sometimes known as African-American Studies or Africana Studies) predates the woke era by decades. It’s a product of the Black Power movement of the 1960s – and of the white guilt that reached unprecedented levels among academic administrators (and others) during that decade. It was founded, and funded, not because university officials around the U.S. suddenly realized that a legitimate field of study was being sorely neglected, but because a small army of semi-literate activists – who, as the distinguished author Shelby Steele (a witness to Black Studies’ birth) told me in an interview for my 2012 book on identity studies, The :Victims’ Revolution, were “obvious hustlers” out to enrich themselves  – successfully shook down those officials and were rewarded with their own brand-new discipline that, academically speaking, had no reason whatsoever for existing......
• Party’s Over for Foreigners at College -  New rules announced by the Trump Administration are addressing the flood of foreign students at American universities. Half a million of them are illegal aliens, while more than a million additional college students are here from foreign countries on student visas.....
• Trump DHS Announces HUGE Change to Student Visa Program That Will Stop the Practice of ‘Endless College’ -  For decades, foreign students have been able to come to the United States on a student visa and stay in the country for decades, as long as they were still enrolled in a class or two. That ends now. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has announced a new set of rule changes to the student visa program, first and foremost, the amount of time that a foreign student can spend here. They’re limiting it to four years, the amount of time typically needed to obtain a college degree. The changes were made in July, but this is getting noticed now because the new policy goes into effect next month. This system has been abused for years by people who come here and never leave. The changes are long overdue......
• The Trump administration is right to redirect university research - There are better ways to do research, and the White House found it: the private sector.   The White House is emphasizing a new science research model that places emphasis on private American citizens, and private American enterprise. It is right to do so. ......

Foreign governments are corrupting academia with it's funding.  That has to stop.   

• Chinese pipeline inside 83 U.S. colleges. A new report from Defending Education has identified at least 83 universities and 26 K-12 schools across 30 states that exposed their students to Chinese Communist Party propaganda through the Young Envoys Scholarship program. According to the report, titled “Little Red Classrooms: China’s Infiltration of American K-12 Schools,” the program is monitored by the China Education Association for International Exchange, or CEAIE, and serves as an alternative to the Confucius Institutes, which Congress began restricting in 2021. On its Chinese website, the organization states that it is guided by “Marxism-Leninism” and Xi Jinping thought on socialism. It aims to “always adhere to the leadership of the Party and integrate the Party’s work into the entire process of the association’s operation and development.”......
•  Harvard Tops List of American Universities Taking Money From Foreign Countries — Including China - When it comes to accepting cash from foreign countries, including China, Harvard tops the list of American universities.  This is a major concern. Some might even call it a national security issue. China steals millions in intellectual property from the United States every year and higher education gives them direct access.  At the end of Trump’s first term, Senate Republicans began to focus heavily on this issue. Now they are looking at it again and Senator Tom Cotton is leading the charge......
•  Bill to Defund Universities With CCP Ties Gains Momentum in Congress  - Legislation aimed at cutting taxpayer funding to universities with ties to the Chinese Communist Party is gaining traction on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers raise concerns about espionage and national security risks linked to Chinese influence on U.S. campuses. “We have to make sure that our largest geopolitical adversary, the Chinese Communist Party, isn’t infiltrating at will our research institutions and our institutions of higher learning,” Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, told Fox News on Monday.
•  America Doesn’t Need ‘International Students’ - There are over 1 million foreign students in the United States. The largest group by far are Chinese students whose numbers have fluctuated between a third and a quarter of a million. These students are in America to gain training in this country, not only at top universities like Harvard, but at tech companies, before taking their knowledge and skills back to China.   Saudi Arabia, the tenth largest source of foreign students, had the single most famous foreign students of any country who didn’t win any Nobel prizes, but did successfully fly passenger planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, but didn’t quite make it to the White House.......

It isn't just China either.  Wealthy Muslim nations have been fueling academia for years to the tune of millions of dollars and that's being reflected in their embrace of Islam and the attacks on Jewish students in America.  

• Haverford College’s Honor Code Divided Students Into “Privileged” and “Marginalized” Groups.  -  Haverford College is in the news this month after reaching a settlement with the Deborah Project, a public interest law firm that sued the College on behalf of Jewish students who reported horrific abuse and harassment which was repeatedly ignored by campus administrators.  The small liberal arts college located in Pennsylvania never received the same degree of public scrutiny for its failure to protect Jewish students as did larger Ivy League institutions such as Columbia and Harvard, but the physical and verbal abuse those students suffered was just as extreme........

Academia has been a purveyor of racial disharmony for decades.  It's called DIE now, but in days gone by they used different euphemisms, but the goals were the same.  Force unqualified personnel into jobs, classrooms, positions of power and authority working to dismantle merit and undermine the nation's stability, which is the real goal of leftism; promoting social unrest.

• California Professor Wins Permanent Victory Against DIE Policies at Bakersfield College -  A federal judge in California has issued a permanent order protecting Bakersfield College History Professor Daymon Johnson from punishment for refusing to endorse “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” and “anti-racism” ideologies in a Tuesday ruling. “Professor Johnson’s speech regarding political and social issues, including his speech about Bakersfield College and its preferred ideologies, criticism of other faculty and administrators, and his advocacy and expression related to [Renegade Institute for Liberty], all constitutes speech on matters of public concern and petition protected by the First Amendment from viewpoint discrimination,” the settlement states.......
•  The Worst Academic Scandal in 817 Years! The Jason Arday Story - This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years.
• Facts, Jason Arday, Western civilization, and the Overton window - The left sees the truth about Arday as a mortal threat not just to their goals but also to their very existence, and that it must be crushed. They are right.  Objective facts are not racist, nor are they ideological. They are neutral. Yet today, the public revelation of the facts about “Professor” Jason Arday causes a furor, with many on the left claiming that merely noticing objective facts is an -ism worthy of punishment. Objective facts show, beyond any doubt, that Arday, late of Cambridge University, was a plagiarist and a fabulist, on his own merits, should never have held any academic position:......
• Academia: How Corrupt Can It Get? More corrupt, I suspect, than we can imagine. This is a big topic, but for now let’s take the case of Cambridge University professor Jason Arday. Arday’s story, as related by himself, is almost miraculous. And, it turns out, almost entirely false. Greeted as a hero just a few years ago–Cambridge’s youngest black professor!–his career is now on the rocks.  The story can be told in a chronological series of London Times articles:......
• The Decline Of Academia A defense of Western meritocracy against the academically destructive DEI incursion. In The Decline of the West (1918–1922), Oswald Spengler introduces a biological metaphor, comparing Western civilization to a living organism. Within this concept, Judeo-Christian ethics forms the pulsating heart—the wellspring of compassion, human dignity, and the moral imperative to see the face of the other. Yet it is the brain—cold, discerning, hierarchical, and relentlessly oriented towards truth—that has propelled the West to unparalleled heights of inquiry, innovation, and ordered liberty. That brain is the academy, predicated on uncompromising meritocracy. When this cerebral faculty falters, the body politic convulses into senescence......

Is academia doomed?  

• University Indoctrination Centers Are Being Abandoned —As I wrote last week, public schools are depopulating on a large scale for a variety of reasons, including a declining birth rate, the fact that many of them don’t offer a worthy product, the advancement of school choice, and others. Colleges are faring even worse for many of the same reasons. In January, Arthur Levine, president of Brandeis University, asserted that 20 percent to 25 percent of colleges will close in the coming years.
• The University As We Know It Is Finished —When University of California President Clark Kerr delivered the Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1963, published shortly thereafter as The Uses of the University, he was doing something unusual for an academic administrator: he was offering a sophisticated social theory, and doing so with wit. In these lectures, Kerr coined the term “multiversity” to describe what the postwar American research university had become. In Kerr’s account, the modern university was no longer to be understood as a community of scholars united by a shared ideal of learning, but rather as a sprawling institutional conglomerate serving at once as a research engine, a job-training facility, a credentialing mechanism, a coming-of-age experience, and an incubator of the national technical elite. The University of California, which Kerr had just finished steering through a near-decade of explosive growth, was his exemplar........
• Academic Armageddon Advances Even at top schools, leaders must cut needless costs.  Robert Kelchen of the University of Tennessee, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, described the most dire problem facing higher education today: “The list of institutions trimming academic programs, implementing furloughs, and laying off employees is long and growing…”  A massive financial crunch has hit many schools because of sagging tuition revenue growth (reflecting falling enrollment or more aggressive discounting of tuition fees) and reduced public financial support in the form of federal and/or state aid and stagnant private philanthropy, all occurring in an environment of heightened inflationary pressures increasing the dollars needed to operate.  .....

If we're really sincere about fixing education, then we need to defund it.  I think it's possible these insane increases in education might be the best thing that has ever happened to higher education. I know that may sound insane, but in the real world it's the cost of things that re-focuses people’s attention, and we really need to get rid of the idea education is a Golden Calf, irrespective of it's failures.  Success in life is about persistence and hard work, and that success can be achieved with or without graduating with a degree! As , who I think was the finest President of the 20th century noted:

 

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On!' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” 

 

At some point someone will stand up and force this issue of funding for higher education by the government and the demands the Department of Education imposes on the institutions, and that's where the problem lies entirely.  Furthermore, these universities deliberately raise tuition costs in order to make it possible for more students to qualify for government loans or funding of some kind, many of whom shouldn't be there in the first place. Another good reason to get rid of the Department of Education, and to end this student loan fiasco.  

Amy Wax Is the Rock in the Current!

Heterodoxy isn't for the faint of heart

By Rich Kozlovich / Tags:  

For years I've stated the two groups mostly considered to be leaders are Ph.D.'s and military officers.  But the fact is both got to the top by being part of the go along to get along crowd, and to the vast majority of them rowing against the tide, or being a rock in the current is totally alien to their thinking, or their character.  But there are exceptions, and they pay a price.  I've added her to the John Boyd Legion of Honor.

In 2019 I posted a link to this article, In Defense of Penn Law Professor Amy Wax, and to my surprise I got thousands of hits on this piece, saying:

The hard left doesn’t want to nominate another white male for president in 2020, or in the words of Politico, “a candidate that looks like Bernie or Joe.” In fact, according to most liberals, police departments would be better off with more nonwhites and fewer whites, as would fire departments, school districts, small businesses, Hollywood,Major League Baseball, U.S. Congress, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, to name a few places.

Whether this is ultimately true is debatable. What’s not is the fact that it’s perfectly okay to call for more diversity in America -- to publicly state things would be better off with more nonwhites and less whites.    

Then back in 2022 this article appeared, Edunomics, which I thought was a great article with a really dumb title, discussing how academia has been totally corrupted with leftist dogma totally destroying free speech.  Amy Wax is at the heart of that discussion saying:

The law school currently has her under review with the hope, it would appear, of taking away her tenure and then her job. Why is this occurring? Dr. Wax is doing what lawyers are taught to do: ask simple but hard questions, relying on facts that result in hard truths and more difficult questions. Dr. Wax has had the audacity to ask if bourgeois culture, which includes hard work, studiousness, delayed gratification, work, marriage, and having children in, rather than out of wedlock might be a good thing. 

She has questioned if it is problematic that most black students in the Penn law school are at the bottom of their classes. She has had the nerve to suggest that some cultures might be superior to others. For asking these impertinent questions, the dean of the law school has her under review.  Apparently, the principle of freedom of expression at Penn is good for me but not for thee. Wax has apparently crossed a “line,” transgressed “appropriate expression,” is a “racist” and a “white supremacist,” and she has yet to receive a “comprehensive and complete statement of all the charges lodged against her.” One can only describe the situation as Kafkaesque. 

I published that piece and tagged these articles thinking her plight wouldn't be much of an issue down the road.  That was a serious error in judgement, and since I had so many hits on the first piece, I should have known better! 

Here we are again, The Amy Wax Inflection Point for 'Elite' Higher Education, saying:

Higher education has been a cesspool of anti-Americanism, censorious leftism and cultural radicalism for longer than I have been alive. The moral rot is, and always has been, particularly acute at Ivy League or otherwise putatively "elite" institutions. The pro-Hamas "protests" that have rocked university campuses since Oct. 7 are indicative.....

......there was the triumvirate of "elite" university presidents who testified before Congress last December that the permissibility of campus calls for the genocide of the Jewish people "depends on the context."......But perhaps the single biggest disgrace to rock academia in recent years has been the University of Pennsylvania's years long crusade against its own tenured law professor, Amy Wax.

It appears it's perfectly acceptable to promote the genocide of Jews in Academia, but to declare mass immigration and multiculturalism is destructive to America and state factually that "black students rarely finish in the top half of graduating law school classes" is totally unacceptable.  Facts and history are anathema to leftists.   

When you consider that in one New York university it's been claimed about 90% of the student freshmen needed remedial reading classes, it's clear questions need to be raised.   How does someone graduate from high school and be incapable of reading?  That alone justifies questioning a lot about what's going on in education in America, including academia, and make no mistake, culture is king, and if that's true, and it was when Herodotus said it 2500 years ago, and it's still true today, then the culture that molded these kid's performance, activity, and attitude, must also be brought into question.

There's one thing abundantly clear, America's schools are failing to teach students fundamental skills.  They can't read, they can't write, they can't work basic math.  Then it must also be clear no matter how much money we're told to keep throwing at the teachers - teachers are failing to do their jobs.  Ergo-----they're overpaid, underworked and need to be fired, starting at the administration level!   If kids never learn to read why in the world would we think they're learning how to think? The socialist goal of making sure the apple falls as far away from the tree as possible is now a leftist success story - students are now too stupid to resist any stupidity the leftists promote. 

In Chicago teachers are being told to pass migrant children irrespective of their performance.  That's an outrageous abuse of these children.  If they can't do the basics how are they be expected to succeed in society?  Turn to crime?  That's not a long term success story.  

Here's what's acceptable to this corrupt cabal of so-called educators these days:

• Democrats are intentionally dumbing down the kids - For decades, most of the media and other Democrats have lied to the public, insisting that they, and not Republicans, care about our children… but their actions and policies show that this propaganda is clearly not true. They only care about money and power, a fact clearly seen when you look at the results in the public education sector. According to a report from US News, the Los Angeles school district spends over $18,000 per student; yet after thirteen years of schooling, only 46% of high school students could read at grade level, and a measly 18% were at grade level in math......
  
• Arizona State University prof claims current abortion policies could lead to forced breeding camps and cannibalism - Arizona State University professor of English Jennifer Irish recently used a school workshop called “A Speculative Future for Reproductive Rights” to express her concern that the country’s current abortion policies could somehow lead to “forced breeding camps” and “cannibalism,” according to a story in The College Fix.  Our abortion policies will lead to cannibalism?! WTH?! Ms. Irish, is it not enough to kill your kids, do you want to eat them, too? English professor Irish, (not to be confused with Irish professor English) stated: “So much of our reality points toward those futures.” Say again. Like what, precisely?......
•  Major Medical School Claims Timeliness, Individualism, And Professionalism Are Part Of White Supremacy  Radical leftism is a disease that, if left unchecked, will destroy our medical system.   Imagine a medical school that believes being on time, acting professionally, and displaying individualism is a display of white supremacy. Duke Medical School claims it is "White supremacy culture" to expect people of color to be on time in a strategic plan for creating an "Anti-Racist Workforce.".....
• The Double Standard on Campus Speech -  After weeks in which college students at campuses from Columbia to Harvard to UCLA celebrated murders and rapes, waved the flags of Islamic terrorist organizations and assaulted Jewish people, one student has finally been held accountable........While no amount of calls for the destruction of America or assaults on Jewish students led to any outrage in the media or actual consequences.....Knocking a Jewish female UCLA student unconscious didn’t do it. Barring Jewish students from being able to go to their classes didn’t do it. Assaulting staff members and faculty at universities didn’t do it. But call a fat black female activist Lizzo” and it’s an instant nationwide outrage.......

But for Amy Wax who calls into "question the academic ability of Black students" question the culture they represent, and invite Jared Taylor to speak in her classroom, who is being classified as a "white supremacist" saying, .... the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration, is unacceptable, and she must be punished.  

Whether you agree with his views or not, that's not the issue.  If academia can spew out all kinds of vile speech about Jews, whites, Christians, and traditional values in America, why should this be prohibited?  Why should she be punished and none of these other academics vile views be found acceptable?  Well, it's simple.  Statistics are racist, and so for "two and a half years, a period spanning successive Penn Law deanships, Wax has been subject to a probe into her alleged wrongthink and misdeeds.", which as "made Penn a pariah among academic freedom advocates."

The judgment finally came this week: Penn Law suspended Wax for a year, reduced her pay for that year by 50%, permanently stripped her of her endowed chair and summer pay, and publicly reprimanded her. Interestingly.......Penn Law had previously offered Wax a settlement that would have lessened her penalty on the condition that she not "disparage the University," not sue Penn and not publicly disclose the exculpatory evidence she had presented during the years long probe. Translation: Shut your mouth and this problem will go away quickly.

Two things are clear, Amy Wax is one tough cookie, and I've no doubt there will be an lawsuit in the near future, and I've no doubt she will win, and there will be another article about this here in P&D.  And secondly, universities are vile breeding grounds for breeding evil: "If you send your child to college, you are playing Russian Roulette with his or her values."

Update 11:15 AM:  This College Just Got an Anonymous $100 Million for Defending Free Speech. - A whopping $100 million donation from an anonymous benefactor found its way into the coffers of the University of Chicago this week, intended to help the university bolster free speech on campus following a case in which a student claims an academic tried to get him expelled over controversial remarks..........The gift comes after a high-profile case involving student Daniel Schmidt, who stated last year that a professor at the University of Chicago was trying to get him expelled for highlighting an anti-white class called “the problem of whiteness.” The professor claimed the student, who has tens of thousands of social media followers, was bullying her. Earlier this week, the president of the university said Schmidt was free to talk about controversial topics like race and IQ, as Schmidt has previously claimed low IQs are the reason  "black people are murdering and mugging my classmates."

Update 9/29/24:   Penn offered Amy Wax $50K to be quiet - ANALYSIS: After years of investigating Wax and impugning her character, the university wanted her to be quiet. The University of Pennsylvania offered Professor Amy Wax $50,000 and reduced penalties if she would promise not to publicly criticize it ahead of tougher sanctions. Wax is a conservative law professor who has faced years of investigations and criticism from university leaders and activists because of her comments on immigration, race, and IQ. The university announced earlier this week Wax will be suspended next year and only receive half of her salary during that time.............“This case is about free expression,” Wax told the Free Beacon. “Penn wanted absolute silence. The big question is: Why do they want to hide what they’re doing?”.............

Penn Professor Amy Wax Punished for ‘Inconvenient Facts’-  The beginning of the end of law professor Amy Wax’s career came on August 9, 2017. That’s when Wax and another law professor, Larry Alexander, published an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer declaring that “all cultures are not equal.”.........The thesis of the 827-word piece was that some people—“working-class whites” with “antisocial habits”; “inner-city blacks” with their “anti-‘acting white’ rap culture”; and Hispanic immigrants who resist assimilation—are at a profound disadvantage in the game of life. This, they argued, is why we should all embrace a 1950s-style “bourgeois culture” that smooths over differences, paving the way for greater national cohesiveness.......

Amy Wax Is Academic Freedom’s Canary in the Coal Mine - Yesterday, (9/24/24) the University of Pennsylvania completed its years-long end run around academic freedom to punish law professor Amy Wax...........Penn is a private school that nonetheless makes First Amendment-like promises to respect its students’ and faculty members’ right to free expression. Whether on a contractual or moral basis, Penn should have kept those promises. Instead, it abandoned principle for the sake of expediency.  While it remains to be seen whether Wax will keep her promise to sue Penn if she’s punished, I told The New York Times yesterday that the university’s decision “should send a chill down the spine of every faculty member, not just at Penn but at every private institution around the country.”......

The Consequence of US Public Schools

An Extremely Alarming Perspective

By John Droz jr. Aug 15, 2024 

I have stated, several times now, that the most horrifying consequence of not fixing what is being taught in US K-12 schools (the curricula), is that these schools graduate, every year, some 4 million non-critical thinking, Left-leaning propagandized students — who shortly become new voting citizens!

4± Million non-critical thinking, Left leaning new voters EVERY YEAR!

The obvious conclusion is that America can not survive without this being fixed. Quickly! Yet — stunningly — no major US Conservative organization (like Heritage) is doing anything meaningful about this!

This next information just came from PragerU (8-13-24). Maybe the maps below will bring home this extraordinary point better than I have been able to…

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This first map shows how hardworking Americans and patriots feel about our country. In EVERY state (even California, Oregon, and New York!), the majority of citizens age 45+ voted Republican, in the last midterm elections…

Below is how 18-29-year-olds voted in the last midterm elections. In EVERY state (even Texas and Florida) the majority of those people voted Democrat…

This second map shows the current future of America, as things have been headed for the last decade or so. Further, as years go by there will be fewer voters in the upper category (due to deaths), and more in the lower one (due to more K-12 graduations)…

How did this happen?

The major reason is that we have allowed our K-12 public education system to be infused with Leftist ideology. Their objective is to teach impressionable children WHAT to think, rather than HOW to think — and the WHAT is things like SEL, DEI, CRT, etc. This is especially problematic in Science (e.g., the NGSS) and History.

Critical Thinking is not only not taught, but the OPPOSITE of Critical Thinking is being effectively communicated: be a conformist.

That means accepting without question what is currently politically correct, following without questioning what the consensus positions are, acquiescing to authority without questioning, going along without questioning what computer projections say, etc., etc.

That is the mindset of 4± Million new US voters, every year!

So the choice is simple: 1) shrug your shoulders and say “What can I do?”, or 2) start getting your fellow citizens educated about this tsunami threat (e.g., by getting ALL of them to subscribe to this free Substack!).

PS — You can also send a donation to a courageous woman who is sticking her neck way out trying to fix this. She is Michele Morrow, a Christian Conservative who is the GOP candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction in North Carolina. She is an outside-the-system reformer and an ardent supporter of Critical Thinking. If she wins it will be one of the most significant developments in the US K-12 education space in a hundred years… She has an 80%± chance of winning, but is being heavily outspent by her Democrat opponent who has more funds. Please be generous for this worthy cause!

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Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time - but why would you?

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Putting Things in Perspective

Do we need immediate urgent action or not? 

By John Droz jr. Aug 09, 2024 @ Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues

After hearing me go on and on about Critical Thinking, I suspect that there are some readers who think I’m overstating the urgency that our K-12 school system needs MAJOR fixing.

Although I showed this short video before, it’s worth repeating, as it makes clear the effect our progressive education system is having on a cross-section of students.

The initial reaction is that most people will likely find this humorous. However, further thought should make it clear that this is no laughing matter.

For example, consider that all these individuals will soon be VOTING CITIZENS! How many of these individuals will be able to competently choose between different energy, climate, health, economic, immigration, etc. policies?

{Click on the picture to have the video play.}  

Editor's Note:  I can't reproduce this video here so go to the original article to view it, and you really do need to see it. RK

Give this some critical thought and decide how important it is to FIX this…

My view is that in a world with a LOT of bad things going on, this is at or near the top!

The #1 purpose of K-12 education should be to teach students how to think, not what.

Why is not a single major US conservative organization (like Heritage) doing anything meaningful about what our children are being taught (curricula) in K-12???

Unless we prioritize this quickly, EVERYTHING will be lost

PS — I am trying to do something significant about this in North Carolina, that can be replicated elsewhere. I’ll report on that in the near future, as you can help…

---

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time - but why would you?

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Thanks for reading Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues! Please pass a link to this article on to other associates who might benefit. They can subscribe for FREE to receive new posts (typically about once a week). 

Whatever happened to... (Part 1)

A troubling walk down memory lane

By Michael D. Shaw March 10, 2024 @ Mike's Point of View

Whatever happened to… 

School—My personal experience was in public institutions until grad school. When I was in the third or fourth grade, I observed that perhaps 20% or so of the teachers were… “off.” Some were a bit sadistic, while others were overly nasty, or enjoyed openly playing favorites. This percentage of “off” teachers would increase as I made my way through high school.

Midway through high school, the material became more difficult, and it was clear that some teachers simply did not have the intellectual wherewithal to go anywhere beyond the assigned textbook, and a few even had trouble with that. The joke among the smarter kids was “What else can you do with a 2.0 from Chico State?” Still, they were all members of a very strong union, that never held pedagogy or welfare of the students in high regard.

At the same time—and this was during the mid-1960s—few of the teachers made any attempt to hide their political beliefs, which with rare exceptions were Leftist. I remember being assigned a monograph on the Soviet Union in the tenth grade, and there was a small section entitled “What’s wrong with Marxism?” Naturally, the teacher had to add her own spin on it, which she called “What’s wrong with…what’s wrong with Marxism?” In retrospect, I see that several young minds were turned to the Left by these sorts of experiences. And, no, there was never any discussion beyond her own point of view.

By then, it became clear that we students were dealing with a powerful and mostly unsympathetic bureaucracy, whereby we were merely the vehicle that kept the big machine going. Worse, there were far too many teachers in it mostly to indoctrinate impressionable kids, while operating in a setting that artificially empowered and protected them.

In undergraduate college, the “off” percentage grew higher, with some professors consorting with students, and misfit instructors—of whom there were many—giving worse grades to students they did not like. Only, it didn’t stop with grades.

A very dangerous rubric of the time, especially as it applied to recommendation letters for medical school, held that the student could request such a letter from a professor, but he could never see it before it was sent off to the med school. As you might expect, and I know this to be true since it happened to a friend of mine, certain profs were not above agreeing to write such letters to purposely sabotage the future of students they did not like.

Fortunately for my friend, the letter was so egregious, and in those days it had to be typed by a department secretary, that she told him, and it was never sent. Only because this letter was intercepted, did he get admitted to Columbia Med School.

Now, factor in around 60 years of academia festering in this environment, and is it any wonder that the Ivies have become DEI laughingstocks, replete with transgender “female” athletes and students unqualified to do much of anything? Bear in mind that the Ivies set the tone for lesser institutions and primary/secondary education.

Tolerance aka toleration—This is a tenet of classic liberalism, that echoes the philosophies of John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, among others. The idea is for the government or individuals to provide protections for unpopular groups, even groups they themselves might consider deeply mistaken, or even inferior. An early American example of this was Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia,” passed in 1786.

After World War II, and especially in the 1950s and beyond, tolerance was applied to matters of race, and by the late 1960s, would pertain to sexual orientation, disability, and feminist issues. Ironically, it would be Marxist philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse who would point out the downside of tolerance.

Marcuse held that "the realization of the objective of tolerance" requires "intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed." Thus, his so-called “liberating tolerance” embodied intolerance to anything he considered “right-wing” and welcoming toleration of left-wing movements.

However, for a guy who was wrong about virtually everything, and still remains a guru of the massively intolerant left, he has a point. Mindless “tolerance” has brought us to the present tyranny of countless “marginalized” groups spawning DEI, mutilation surgery on young kids, vastly destructive healthcare policies, and costly and senseless wars.

Here’s a thought: Some things are objectively right, and some things are objectively wrong.

Thanks for reading Mike's Point Of View! 

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Chicago’s Solution to Its Failing School System: Stop Grading Schools on Performance

Jonathan Miltimore

 In 1987, U.S. Education Secretary Bill Bennett famously traveled to Chicago, where he ruffled feathers by telling a closed-room group that the Windy City’s school system was “the worst in the nation.” Local parents and educators bristled at the charge, which resulted in an awkward New York Times story. But decades of data would subsequently prove that Mr. Bennett was basically correct: Chicago’s schools were a total mess............ To Read More....

Our Public Schools Are a National Disaster

Stephen Moore Oct 17, 2023 @ Townhall.com

Perhaps what's most distressing about the latest collapse in high school test scores is that no one seems to be very distressed.

You've probably heard the news that ACT scores have fallen for the sixth straight year. Our high school kids are less equipped for a job or college than at any time in three decades.

Why isn't anyone in Washington or anyone in our $800 billion education bureaucracy sounding the alarm and declaring this a national emergency? It certainly puts our national security, our technological superiority and our economic prosperity in grave danger.

Instead of outrage, it is almost as if Americans have become anesthetized to bad news about our kids.

One theory is that Americans feel about their local schools as they do toward Congress: They love their own representative but think the rest of the members are corrupt and incompetent.

Yes, there are some excellent public schools, and yes, there are thousands of great teachers. But I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is one of the wealthiest counties in the country, and we had to pull our kids out of the public schools because they were so bad -- and because they shut down during COVID. I shudder to think what's going on in the Baltimore schools down the road.

Exactly 40 years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its findings on the state of the schools in its 1983 report entitled "A Nation at Risk." Here was the grim conclusion: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

The nation never paid attention. If you think I'm blowing one bad report out of proportions, the National Assessment of Educational Progress report that came out earlier this year found similarly dismal student performance in the public schools. Reading and math proficiency collapsed over the past four years in part because of the teachers unions' insistence that public school stay closed during COVID -- a national act of child abuse.

The Left obsesses about income inequality and the gap between rich and poor. Yet, they are so captive to the teachers unions that they do (SET ITAL) nothing (END ITAL) about what is arguably the most regressive policy in America: our failing public school system. The decline in test scores is only half the story. The other part of the story is that the biggest declines in learning and achievement are among the poorer families.

I'm the furthest thing from an education expert, but I have had five kids. It's pretty clear that three essential components to an enriching education are discipline in the classroom, high expectations and a classical curriculum. This isn't that complicated. It's not like solving a Rubik's Cube.

Today, most public schools fail all three of these standards.

California recently announced it is going to make climate change a standard part of the school curriculum. Really? They are going to scare the bejesus out of kids with a propaganda campaign telling them the world is coming to an end. Why don't they just try phonics so kids can read?

The school blob's pitiful response to this abject failure to teach is to call for more money. We've tried that for 40 years. Per student spending in the public schools after adjusting for inflation is up 50% in 30 years, which almost entirely inversely correlates with the continual test score slide.

The one glimmer of hope is the burgeoning school choice movement in America, which allows the dollars to follow the students and parents to choose the best schools for their kids -- public, private, Christian, Jewish, or whatever works. Ten states this year have expanded school choice.

Meanwhile, the teachers unions argue with a straight face that school vouchers would hurt the public schools. Have they seen the test scores? How could they possibly perform worse?

 

How to Fix Education? Defund it!

By Rich Kozlovich 

There has been a great deal of talk about the outrageous increase of the cost of education, and especially higher education these days. I think it's possible these insane increases in education might be the best thing that has ever happened to higher education. I know that may sound insane, but in the real world it's the cost of things that re-focuses people’s attention, and we really need to get rid of the idea education is a Golden Calf, irrespective of it's failures.  Success in life is about persistence and hard work, and that success can be achieved with or without graduating with a degree! As , who I think was the finest President of the 20th century noted:

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On!' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” 

 

At some point someone will stand up and force this issue of funding for higher education by the government and the demands the Department of Education imposes on the institutions, and that's where the problem lies entirely.  Furthermore, these universities deliberately raise tuition costs in order to make it possible for more students to qualify for government loans or funding of some kind, many of whom shouldn't be there in the first place. Another good reason to get rid of the Department of Education, and to end this student loan fiasco.  

But, let's try and understand this properly, and that can only be done when we define things properly since it's definition is what leads to clarity.  The question that must be asked and answered in order to properly define what's happening is this:  What's higher education really all about?

First, let's take for example this issue of racial quotas. They created this to grease the squeaky wheels.  They ended up with more squeaks. When you read the issues regarding racial quotas you begin to realize that absolutely no one had a clue about what's right, wrong, legal, or illegal, including the Congress, and until their recent ruling ending quotas, the Supreme Court.   The whole thing became a racial quota mess.  As Justice Clarence Thomas noted in the Students For Fair Admissions vs Harvard 2023 ruling:

"The solution to our nation’s racial problems cannot come from polices grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equality. Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism."

Universities have been, and continue being forced to be the engineers of social change!  Why?  Isn't imparting knowledge their purpose for being? No, and it's all turned into a mess of leftist propaganda and indoctrination.  An expensive mess that fails to properly educate these kids  having a functionally illiteracy rate that's staggering.  

But I have the answer. Eliminate federal funding of any kind!  Make them totally self funding, tax them accordingly, including their endowment funds, which are massive, then watch now quickly things change.

Let the university regents set their own admission and education standards for whatever reason they please, and then let them justify their positions to the parents paying for all of this.  Reality will force the price down, it will force professors to actually teach their classes, it will drop class size, it will put those universities and colleges out of business that need eliminating, which in my opinion are the largest and most "prestigious", including much touted Columbia,  and it will force most of them to re-evaluate who the professors are and what they teach. In short, make all colleges and universities privately owned and self funding, and effective, if they are capable of it!  And if they're not, just like all private businesses that fail to perform, they'll go out of business.

But here's the most important thing.  All of the problems we see people complaining about will go away naturally.

Wow! Now that is a shocker isn’t it. But that is what it will take. If universities are allowed to set all their own standards will some institutions attempt to keep blacks out? Yes. Will there will be some that will keep Jews out?  Yes!  Will there be some that will keep Asians out?  Yes! Will there be some who will keep whites out.  Yes!  So what?

Let them function as they please and suffer the consequences, or reap the rewards for their decisions. This would be the perfect opportunity for every group that is being unfairly excluded based on race,  ethnicity, or even religion to form their own universities with their own standards. Hopefully higher standards. Setting higher academic standards would almost be an automatic since the standard is so low they're fairly meaningless now. 

If they are unable for financial reasons, or there aren't sufficient numbers of a particular group to form their own institutions, then that will be an incentive to explore other opportunities. 

• They can decide to come together and form as a group totally devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion if they choose.  
• They can come together form an institution that has no exclusionary standards, of any kind, including academic standards if they choose. 
• They can can come together and choose to keep out all those who are academically unworthy if they choose and make merit their standard.
  

Regarding all the issues surrounding education, none of this is as it appears.  We assume public education was to teach reading, writing and arithmetic.  Right? Wrong! That was a byproduct! The goal of public education was to “make sure the apple fell as far away for the tree as possible”!  The goal of the socialist movement is now and has always been (ever since the French Revolution) to undermine any moral authority other than the moral authority of the state. 

As far as I've been able to discover public education as we know it was started in Scotland in the 1600's with the goal of creating good Christian citizens.  Now, one might think that's a good thing, but let's define this properly.  Whether you agree with that goal or not, that's called social engineering, and what happens when socialists, who are opposed to "good Christian citizens" take control of public education?   

Public education as we know it in America was organized in the late 19th century by socialists who called themselves progressives in order to hide who they really were and what their goal really was, and that was to deliberately undermine the moral authority of parents and the churches.

If you take a look at these institutions and what they teach you begin to realize that they aren’t teaching our kids, they are indoctrinating them with Marxist philosophy. These kids come out over educated, under smart, ignorant and arrogant in their ignorance, and just like their professors, as equally incapable of running a business or understanding what sacrifices it takes to become successful, because all they focus on is how unfair American capitalism is, in spite of the fact American capitalism has brought more people out of poverty, misery, and suffering than any system in the history of the world.. 

They constantly fail to get that history right. As Obama said to the real creators of jobs, aka, businessmen:

"If you've got a business, you didn't build that!"

They later claimed that this was taken out of context, but this is the theme of socialism, and nitwits like Obama who never ran anything successfully, other that creating a destructive, treasonous, tyrannous Deep State.  And that's what's being taught and promoted in the universities. 

The very definition of marriage as the bonding of a man and a woman is called into question, and is being tyrannically promoted at all levels of education in America.  In the various psychology and social services courses within academia, any who have difficulty accepting those concepts have been pushed out of those courses, and even fired.

When that becomes accepted by society the very foundation of a stable society, the nuclear family, is subject to disintegration. If the definition of a nuclear family as a man, a woman and their children is no longer accepted then that stable foundation will disintegrate naturally, and the state then becomes the moral arbiter of all values. 

Then, that which has always been the real target of the socialists, Judaic/Christian principles, will cease to exist within society. That has been the focus of public education, especially higher education, going back to Margaret Mead, the Frankfurt School people and others. Once the state has destroyed every vestige of Judaic/Christian principles they can get society to do anything. I would like to draw attention to my article, Let Me Tell You about Trofim Denisovich Lysenko which discusses some of what happens in a society that has become a moral vacuum.  Once we understand all of that everything else falls into place.   

You may also wish to view my article; Pathways of the Past are the Stepping Stones to the Future! 

Do you want to end the insanity?  End the funding! Once again, reality will force the price down, and will force professors to actually teach their classes, it will drop class size, it will put some universities and colleges out of business.   It will force most of them to re-evaluate who the professors are and what they teach. In short, ending all funding and making all colleges and universities privately owned and self funding will allow all of these problems to go away naturally. 

Most importantly, we won’t have a bunch of socialists ensconced in university ivory towers undermining the very system that supports them, and far fewer of the young will be coming out of the universities as socialists, greenies, racists, leftists, over educated, under smart, ignorant, and arrogant in their ignorance.