Evidence Shows Trump is Right About Bias in Higher Education
“until professors change our ways, we won’t recover the trust of the public”
The bias is there for anyone to see. It’s nice to hear this confirmation from people who work in the field.
From Scholars for Peace in the Middle East:
Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias
Like most of our academic colleagues, we aren’t supporters of Donald Trump. But we have to admit he has our profession’s number on a critical point—and we’ve conducted a study that proves it. College teaching is politically one-sided to an extreme, and until professors change our ways, we won’t recover the trust of the public.
Our new study, conducted with Stephanie Muravchik, draws on the Open Syllabus Project, a nonprofit organization that maintains a database of more than 27 million syllabi scraped from the web. We use it to see how contentious subjects like racial bias in the criminal justice system and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are taught, with an eye to whether professors expose students to the broad scholarly controversy around these issues. We found they usually don’t.
Take the teaching of racial bias and the criminal justice system. Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (2010) shows up in thousands of syllabi, as it should given its scholarly and public influence. In the U.S. it is assigned more often than “Hamlet” and nearly as often as John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government.”
Ms. Alexander argues that America’s war on drugs is akin to Jim Crow—a system designed to control and subjugate black Americans. Her work invites scholarly controversy, drawing criticism from historians and social scientists. Among them is James Forman Jr., a Yale law professor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (2017). While Mr. Forman is no fan of mass incarceration, he doesn’t think it’s the product of a racist conspiracy. He notes that tough-on-crime policies have enjoyed the support of black leaders trying to halt soaring crime rates in their cities.
In courses that teach Ms. Alexander’s book, Mr. Forman’s book is paired with it less than 4% of the time. Works by other prominent critics of “The New Jim Crow”—including political scientist Michael Fortner of Claremont McKenna, law professor John Pfaff of Fordham and sociologist Patrick Sharkey of Princeton—are assigned with Ms. Alexander even less often.
Who is generally taught with Ms. Alexander? Works that make hers look moderate. The top three titles are by Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michel Foucault. Ms. Davis, a two-time vice-presidential nominee of the Communist Party USA, has said that “the only true path of liberation for black people is the one that leads toward a complete and total overthrow of the capitalist class in this country.” In his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me,” Mr. Coates wrote that “in America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Even Ms. Alexander, reviewing his book for the New York Times, said she was “disappointed” that it offered “little hope . . . that freedom or equality will ever be a reality for black people in America.” Foucault (1926-84), a French theorist, reduced all Western societies to intricate and oppressive systems of social control.
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Comments
I don’t know what kind of black heritage these Leftists are talking about. The only kind of heritage blacks seem to have is a chip on the shoulder, a culture of victimhood, and a culture that in enough cases leads to a life of crime. Nothing good will come from this heritage. Blacks need to change their culture around otherwise nothing will change.
in fact the RELEASING of prisoners IS BASED ON RACIAL IDENTITY being pro poc
the fact that leadership of poc calls for violent overthrow vs actually being educated by the same standards as whites and asians are,
shows that tribalism is the preferred means of “academic” achievement
Under girding the DEI movement are two beliefs. First is the adoption of the Marxist concept that any society is bifurcated between oppressors and the oppressed. And second is that all demographic groups are truly equal respecting skills and desires such that any statistical analysis of professions or activities of different demographics in a fair society would result in identical profiles. American social mobility has destroyed classical Marxism and immigrant success has destroyed the cultural Marxists – assuming that anyone pays attention. And a few simple observations destroy the second belief. Ethnic Chinese clearly have a leg up on Chinese language teaching positions. The nursing profession is predominately attractive to women. The construction trades are predominately attractive to men. This cuts across cultures. Therefore, there should be no expectation that the statistical profiles of any profession or activity should result in equal demographic representation. Equal opportunity is fair. But “equity” is not a good metric for fairness. With DEI movement, we have a mass hysteria that has persisted despite its logical inconsistencies. I hope that will change.
“the Marxist concept that any society is bifurcated between oppressors and the oppressed.”
The real bifurcation is between the productive and the parasite, the ant and the grasshopper. The Marxist concept is simply what you get when you ask the grasshopper his view of the world.
The “second belief” may be true, but those “simple observations” are mostly nonsense. The comment about “ethnic Chinese” is reminiscent of the joke about the couple who were learning Chinese because they had adopted a baby from China and wanted to be able to understand her when she started talking. Civil War historian Gary Gallagher has noted that before all the men of working age went off to fight, nursing and teaching were predominantly [sic] male professions, in part because they were essential to the continued functioning of society. Women took over those jobs to fill the gap. There are differences among groups, but those aren’t among them.
The observation about construction trades is probably correct, women being smarter on average, as measured by IQ scores, and better educated, as measured by highest educational attainment, than men. They would find “meathead” jobs less attractive.
Undergirding the DEI movement is the established principle that a group of people performs better than those same people taken individually. This is a standard team-building exercise in corporate America, where people are given a set of problems to solve as individuals, and then combined into groups to solve a similar set of problems as a group. The group always scores higher than the individuals because they combine the diversity of experience and thinking that those people bring. “We’re better as a team” is the intended conclusion. The fallacy that DEI brings to the table is that color, gender, etc. are markers for diversity of experience and thinking. There is the false assumption that all black people think alike, and differently, from all white people, for example. I am a white male. I had a law school classmate at a top-50 law school who was a black female. She had gotten her undergraduate degree from Wellesley. I guarantee you there was less diversity of experience and thinking between her and me then there was between me and a poor white male Missouri farmer. But under DEI, he and I are unacceptably the same, and she is desirably “different.”