This will address grading, but contet is important. Five years ago I taught as an emergency middle-school sub for an entire semester in a very tough inner-ring suburban school near Kansas City. That was not allowed, because I don't have Kansas teaching license, but they were desperate because not only was it a specialty subject, but the original teacher had killed himself after the first week, and I had earlier taught the subject in western Canada. Every one agreed to look the other way.
Certainly a "diverse" crew -- about one-third each of AAs, hispanics, and dog's-breakfast everyone else. Several were proud of having terrorized the previous teacher. First day, first class, I asked the SRO and the Counsellor to leave and said that anyone wishing to talk with the Counsellor was free to leave at any time.
Then I gave my "Here's how it's gonna be." talk, knowing that the SRO and Counsellor were just outside the door. Alternating English and Spanish, with nibbles of "AA street". First, "I ain't scared of you, 'cause I was in the Army during Nam." And "I've been shot at in four guerrilla wars in South America." ... "So I won't put up with any bullshit from any of you. Your job is to LEARN and my job is to help you learn."
"My assignments will be tough, not long, and the quizzes and exams will be just plain wicked. Even worse, I'm a very hard grader, because you'll start out with a ZERO and you have to earn every single point. If a question is worth 10 points and you give me what I expect, you get 10 pts. But maybe you've studied some of the extra material and you give a really good answer ... you might get 15 or 20 points, and it'll make up for one where you have no clue. And even then, give it a try -- you'll remember something and might scrounge 4 points ... but if you don't even try, you'll get jack-shit which is what LOSERS do."
After class the SRO and Counsellor said they couldn't believe what they'd heard. I smiled, and said "It comes with this grey hair." Now, to the grading itself.
I threw it all into Excel and generated MEDIAN and STDEV, for each class and for all the students combined. MEDIAN defined a 75. One-sigma defined the A-threshold and the F-threshold. Kids loved it, especially the graphs for each class, and they wanted to know how the statistics worked, so I taught them not only that, but how to use Excel.
And they understood basic stats better than most college kids. Four years later two kids came running over to me in the high school lunch room. "Mr. Hall. Mr. Hall !! We're both on Dean's List, and we got accepted at K-State. Thanks for kicking our butts."
If it can work with middle-schoolers from a tough neighborhood it certainly can work at post-secondary, but only if teachers aren't scared of the kids, and constantly sucking up to them.
Suggestion: Federal student loans *only* for majors that are deemed necessary and with a demonstrated need for more graduates. Not for $GrievanceStudies. And where it can be proved that graduates earn enough money in that field to pay back the loan in ten years. Other majors can be financed by the universities from their gargantuan endowments and they can take the risks associated with them.
While I agree that grade inflation is a problem, I would object to mandating results. I hate grading on a curve. If a student does A work, he/she deserves an A. (This semester I have a small class, just four students, each of whom has done all the work, passed the tests, demonstrated understanding and mastery, and turned in quality work. They all earned A's, and giving the student with 92% a D, and the one with 94% a C, just because two classmates got 96%, seems grossly unfair.)
I think a better solution is redefining what A, B, C etc mean: setting some tough standards and holding to them. I try to do that. I tell them that A means "excellent," which to me means you are doing work at the level expected of a new hire or an intern -- not perfect, but good enough that I wouldn't be embarrassed to bring it to a meeting or circulate it for review. (And every year they complain that's too tough.) And perhaps adding more rigor to the courses -- mine could probably use some, TBH.
I think all of these ideas are great, and I wish they could all be implemented. But they won't. The rot is too deep. The ideologues running higher education, and indeed, nearly all public secondary and primary school education, have had 30 years to burrow like ticks into the academic system. Oh, they may throw the 3 ladies from MIT, Harvard and Penn under the bus in an effort to deflect all the negative attention, but what about the layers of administrative plaque that have accumulated? It will take 30 years of concerted effort to root them out, and that assumes anyone is willing to try.
I agree with all of this, but I can’t imagine there are enough people in higher education who could, let alone would, do these things. The disciplines have largely been wrecked by Gramscian sabotage for at least two generations. The professors and administrators are all products of that intellectual and moral corruption. And the malignant influence of vast money from foreign enemies, billionaire masters of the universe, agenda-driven government agencies, and vast foundations whose leaders are also products of the same Gramscian wreckage, and who’s left to even have a clue what’s been lost? The only thing most of them “know” is ideological humbug and endless variations of the same, tired old Marxist template. Where do the saviors and reformers come from?
Professor, I think fixing #4 will significantly help if not eliminate the first three. Thinking of the loan money, the schools got their money, the bank gets it's interests and if it is not repaid, the taxpayers get the bill (otherwise known as "student loan forgiveness"). Maybe the school only gets 50% of the money up front, their financial interests are in collecting the remaining 50%. That will certainly hit them hard in the finances, hence #1 - DEI will at least be viewed as a financial drag and reduced or eliminated. And the need for the students they now have a 50% stake will also address #2 and #3. They'll need to admit the vast majority students from the pool who have the potential to repay their loan (#2). And then they need to sufficiently "educate", actually prepare, for those students to have the skills and knowledge to get gainful employment to repay the loan, which is now the school's problem if it's not repaid (#3). Regarding #5, I don't think installing a new set of speech restrictions is the answer. The problem is the prevention of speech by violent means. Colleges require all kinds of agreements that students must sign, how about a $10.000 fine for impeding the speech of others. We have laws about threats that should also be enforced, but give the school some incentive to stop it. A bit longer than planned but these are two hills worth dying on, so to speak. Jew Hatred and terrorists veto must be defeated.
1. Though DEI and CRT are an issue at colleges, many colleges ae private, thus somewhat free in the market place of idea. However, all those little NAZIs were radicalized in public K-12. Government and voters can cauterize the infection there where the public funds it
2. Has anybody asked DR Kornbluth @ MIT how her Jewish son feels in the middle of Jew Genocide demonstrations?
3. I think the average grade needs to be 2.7 not 2.0. In a well performing school, thee should be more B's than D's
One suggestion I heard a while back was to make colleges the issuers of student loans, not the government. I thought this was absolutely brilliant. Currently, they have zero skin in the game and, as a graduate student, your borrowing power (regardless of creditworthiness) is essentially unlimited. If one is going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a graduate degree with virtually no market value, make the issuer of that degree (and the recipient of the funds to achieve it) take a little pain. It might correct some bad behaviors.
Yes, yes, a million times yes to all your suggestions, Glenn!! I would add one. State university presidents control vast amounts of taxpayer money - so make the bastards directly accountable to the voters of the state. No more hiding behind useless Board's of regents.
"5. Require universities to protect their students from bullying and assault by fellow students by making them liable for civil suits when they fail to do so." Who is "them"? The University or the bully?.
Imagine a situation where a Black student greets a Black student with, "Hey, my n*****r". Presumably amiable. Contrast that with a White student greeting a Black student in the same way. Could that be considered bullying? "Hate speech"?
Or in the case of threats, is "I'm gonna kick your ass" different from "I'm gonna kick your black/honky/Jew/tranny/etc. ass"?
Seems to be a challenge when civility is replaced with rules, but here we are.
There seems to be a lot of corruption in general in the non-profit space. These entities do not appear to be held to the same audit and regulatory standards as the public sector.
Universities must at some point have had to justify their non-profit status. Just calling yourself an educational entity should not be enough. These entities should have a detailed mission statement and written policies describing their goals and how they intend to achieve them - a non-profit prospectus if you will. If a university is found to be not following these disclosures to the letter then their non-profit status should be in jeopardy. And they should be subject to civil suits by students and donors.
I am not a lawyer, but had a career in financial services and prospectus liability was a very important issue. If you did not do what you promised in your prospectus or did something that you did not disclose, the mere fact that you exposed your client to risks for which they did not contract opened you to law suits and regulatory sanctions.
Case in point, these three Ivy League schools have policies in place to punish speech etc. that creates "hostile" or "toxic" environments, or "behaviors that offend or which others find threatening." Yet, they have manifestly failed to enforce those policies in an equitable manner. They have violated an important contract with their students and other stakeholders. Along with the institution itself, the administrators responsible and the trustees who oversee them have failed in their duties and should be held personally liable.
"Follow up with standardized post-graduation testing." I'd argue we need go a step further and separate the teaching function from the evaluation function completely. Instead of the feckless "accreditation" we do now, an accreditation authority could run actual examinations, and they would evaluate universities based on how well their students perform on these examinations. This would align the student-as-customer paradigm strictly with teaching, and would eliminate the student's ability to use his/her status as customer to leapfrog directly to influencing the evaluation function.
As I'm sure you agree there is a world of difference between speech, even hateful speech and the kind of menacing threatening near riots that have been taking place all over. There needs to be a ZERO tolerance for this among students. Any student participating in harassment must be expelled. End of story. Then we can start to talk about this other stuff.
This will address grading, but contet is important. Five years ago I taught as an emergency middle-school sub for an entire semester in a very tough inner-ring suburban school near Kansas City. That was not allowed, because I don't have Kansas teaching license, but they were desperate because not only was it a specialty subject, but the original teacher had killed himself after the first week, and I had earlier taught the subject in western Canada. Every one agreed to look the other way.
Certainly a "diverse" crew -- about one-third each of AAs, hispanics, and dog's-breakfast everyone else. Several were proud of having terrorized the previous teacher. First day, first class, I asked the SRO and the Counsellor to leave and said that anyone wishing to talk with the Counsellor was free to leave at any time.
Then I gave my "Here's how it's gonna be." talk, knowing that the SRO and Counsellor were just outside the door. Alternating English and Spanish, with nibbles of "AA street". First, "I ain't scared of you, 'cause I was in the Army during Nam." And "I've been shot at in four guerrilla wars in South America." ... "So I won't put up with any bullshit from any of you. Your job is to LEARN and my job is to help you learn."
"My assignments will be tough, not long, and the quizzes and exams will be just plain wicked. Even worse, I'm a very hard grader, because you'll start out with a ZERO and you have to earn every single point. If a question is worth 10 points and you give me what I expect, you get 10 pts. But maybe you've studied some of the extra material and you give a really good answer ... you might get 15 or 20 points, and it'll make up for one where you have no clue. And even then, give it a try -- you'll remember something and might scrounge 4 points ... but if you don't even try, you'll get jack-shit which is what LOSERS do."
After class the SRO and Counsellor said they couldn't believe what they'd heard. I smiled, and said "It comes with this grey hair." Now, to the grading itself.
I threw it all into Excel and generated MEDIAN and STDEV, for each class and for all the students combined. MEDIAN defined a 75. One-sigma defined the A-threshold and the F-threshold. Kids loved it, especially the graphs for each class, and they wanted to know how the statistics worked, so I taught them not only that, but how to use Excel.
And they understood basic stats better than most college kids. Four years later two kids came running over to me in the high school lunch room. "Mr. Hall. Mr. Hall !! We're both on Dean's List, and we got accepted at K-State. Thanks for kicking our butts."
If it can work with middle-schoolers from a tough neighborhood it certainly can work at post-secondary, but only if teachers aren't scared of the kids, and constantly sucking up to them.
Suggestion: Federal student loans *only* for majors that are deemed necessary and with a demonstrated need for more graduates. Not for $GrievanceStudies. And where it can be proved that graduates earn enough money in that field to pay back the loan in ten years. Other majors can be financed by the universities from their gargantuan endowments and they can take the risks associated with them.
While I agree that grade inflation is a problem, I would object to mandating results. I hate grading on a curve. If a student does A work, he/she deserves an A. (This semester I have a small class, just four students, each of whom has done all the work, passed the tests, demonstrated understanding and mastery, and turned in quality work. They all earned A's, and giving the student with 92% a D, and the one with 94% a C, just because two classmates got 96%, seems grossly unfair.)
I think a better solution is redefining what A, B, C etc mean: setting some tough standards and holding to them. I try to do that. I tell them that A means "excellent," which to me means you are doing work at the level expected of a new hire or an intern -- not perfect, but good enough that I wouldn't be embarrassed to bring it to a meeting or circulate it for review. (And every year they complain that's too tough.) And perhaps adding more rigor to the courses -- mine could probably use some, TBH.
Amen
I think all of these ideas are great, and I wish they could all be implemented. But they won't. The rot is too deep. The ideologues running higher education, and indeed, nearly all public secondary and primary school education, have had 30 years to burrow like ticks into the academic system. Oh, they may throw the 3 ladies from MIT, Harvard and Penn under the bus in an effort to deflect all the negative attention, but what about the layers of administrative plaque that have accumulated? It will take 30 years of concerted effort to root them out, and that assumes anyone is willing to try.
I agree with all of this, but I can’t imagine there are enough people in higher education who could, let alone would, do these things. The disciplines have largely been wrecked by Gramscian sabotage for at least two generations. The professors and administrators are all products of that intellectual and moral corruption. And the malignant influence of vast money from foreign enemies, billionaire masters of the universe, agenda-driven government agencies, and vast foundations whose leaders are also products of the same Gramscian wreckage, and who’s left to even have a clue what’s been lost? The only thing most of them “know” is ideological humbug and endless variations of the same, tired old Marxist template. Where do the saviors and reformers come from?
Professor, I think fixing #4 will significantly help if not eliminate the first three. Thinking of the loan money, the schools got their money, the bank gets it's interests and if it is not repaid, the taxpayers get the bill (otherwise known as "student loan forgiveness"). Maybe the school only gets 50% of the money up front, their financial interests are in collecting the remaining 50%. That will certainly hit them hard in the finances, hence #1 - DEI will at least be viewed as a financial drag and reduced or eliminated. And the need for the students they now have a 50% stake will also address #2 and #3. They'll need to admit the vast majority students from the pool who have the potential to repay their loan (#2). And then they need to sufficiently "educate", actually prepare, for those students to have the skills and knowledge to get gainful employment to repay the loan, which is now the school's problem if it's not repaid (#3). Regarding #5, I don't think installing a new set of speech restrictions is the answer. The problem is the prevention of speech by violent means. Colleges require all kinds of agreements that students must sign, how about a $10.000 fine for impeding the speech of others. We have laws about threats that should also be enforced, but give the school some incentive to stop it. A bit longer than planned but these are two hills worth dying on, so to speak. Jew Hatred and terrorists veto must be defeated.
Glenn thanks for the timely article. I am hoping that Trump will make you Secy of Education in his upcoming administration. No joke intended.
some random comments:
1. Though DEI and CRT are an issue at colleges, many colleges ae private, thus somewhat free in the market place of idea. However, all those little NAZIs were radicalized in public K-12. Government and voters can cauterize the infection there where the public funds it
2. Has anybody asked DR Kornbluth @ MIT how her Jewish son feels in the middle of Jew Genocide demonstrations?
3. I think the average grade needs to be 2.7 not 2.0. In a well performing school, thee should be more B's than D's
One suggestion I heard a while back was to make colleges the issuers of student loans, not the government. I thought this was absolutely brilliant. Currently, they have zero skin in the game and, as a graduate student, your borrowing power (regardless of creditworthiness) is essentially unlimited. If one is going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a graduate degree with virtually no market value, make the issuer of that degree (and the recipient of the funds to achieve it) take a little pain. It might correct some bad behaviors.
Yes, yes, a million times yes to all your suggestions, Glenn!! I would add one. State university presidents control vast amounts of taxpayer money - so make the bastards directly accountable to the voters of the state. No more hiding behind useless Board's of regents.
Your third paragraph about grade inflation is shocking. I guess I'm a dinosaur, but academic grades used to mean something real.
Professor, could you clarify #5?
"5. Require universities to protect their students from bullying and assault by fellow students by making them liable for civil suits when they fail to do so." Who is "them"? The University or the bully?.
Imagine a situation where a Black student greets a Black student with, "Hey, my n*****r". Presumably amiable. Contrast that with a White student greeting a Black student in the same way. Could that be considered bullying? "Hate speech"?
Or in the case of threats, is "I'm gonna kick your ass" different from "I'm gonna kick your black/honky/Jew/tranny/etc. ass"?
Seems to be a challenge when civility is replaced with rules, but here we are.
There seems to be a lot of corruption in general in the non-profit space. These entities do not appear to be held to the same audit and regulatory standards as the public sector.
Universities must at some point have had to justify their non-profit status. Just calling yourself an educational entity should not be enough. These entities should have a detailed mission statement and written policies describing their goals and how they intend to achieve them - a non-profit prospectus if you will. If a university is found to be not following these disclosures to the letter then their non-profit status should be in jeopardy. And they should be subject to civil suits by students and donors.
I am not a lawyer, but had a career in financial services and prospectus liability was a very important issue. If you did not do what you promised in your prospectus or did something that you did not disclose, the mere fact that you exposed your client to risks for which they did not contract opened you to law suits and regulatory sanctions.
Case in point, these three Ivy League schools have policies in place to punish speech etc. that creates "hostile" or "toxic" environments, or "behaviors that offend or which others find threatening." Yet, they have manifestly failed to enforce those policies in an equitable manner. They have violated an important contract with their students and other stakeholders. Along with the institution itself, the administrators responsible and the trustees who oversee them have failed in their duties and should be held personally liable.
"Follow up with standardized post-graduation testing." I'd argue we need go a step further and separate the teaching function from the evaluation function completely. Instead of the feckless "accreditation" we do now, an accreditation authority could run actual examinations, and they would evaluate universities based on how well their students perform on these examinations. This would align the student-as-customer paradigm strictly with teaching, and would eliminate the student's ability to use his/her status as customer to leapfrog directly to influencing the evaluation function.
As I'm sure you agree there is a world of difference between speech, even hateful speech and the kind of menacing threatening near riots that have been taking place all over. There needs to be a ZERO tolerance for this among students. Any student participating in harassment must be expelled. End of story. Then we can start to talk about this other stuff.