See Thru Edu is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation
Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D., Editor in Chief and Director, Center for Higher Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation
The pressures to grade inflate are many: to attract students and boost enrollment; to appease graduating students seeking employment; and the desire on the part of universities to be “feeder schools” for graduate programs.
As detailed in the landmark national study of collegiate learning, Academically Adrift, there is a nationwide college-student-learning crisis: 36 percent of college students across the country demonstrate little-to-no increase in critical-thinking skills after four years spent in college.
Traditional universities want to have it both ways: they want the tax subsidies and exemptions associated with their non-profit status, but they also want to claim they own private intellectual property and make millions from that as well.
Until our academic culture embraces again what is truly higher in higher education—our capacity to discover Truth—expect still more exoduses from the liberal arts, regardless of how much attention STEM studies receive.
Harry Lewis, former dean at Harvard, writes that often “governing boards do not know what is going on,” that they are “notoriously inattentive” and “carefully managed and quite docile.” He argues that trustees “must not return to functioning as the University’s honorees and cheerleaders rather than governors.”
Federal subsidies for college have simultaneously lowered educational quality and increased the number of Americans who have college credentials but little useful knowledge or skill.
Oberlin has supplied teachers with a trigger-warning guide, advising them to consider not assigning works that could spark upset because of their “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.”
How far the sustainability movement has spread into American higher education is the subject of a deeply researched study by the National Association of Scholars, Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism.
“I think we can all agree that U.S. colleges and universities should not be outsourcing academic control, faculty and student oversight, or curriculum to a foreign government — in this case a dictatorship.”
The “trigger warnings,” “the safe spaces,” the entire racket is just an expedient way to wield political power. It’s a pretext for enforcing ideological censorship.
