Tag: college

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crime and punishment education and schooling

A Cheating Culture

Cheating has always been a problem in higher education, but ChatGPT has caused it to metastasize.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the percentage of students at one college who admit cheating has jumped “from 35 percent in 2019 to 65 percent in 2024.” This school is not an outlier.

Teachers can see how bad it’s gotten. One professor emailed a student caught using ChatGPT to write a paper to warn that she would fail the course if she did it again. The student replied with a heartfelt apology but soon did it again. It turned out that the apology itself had been spewed by ChatGPT.

How to combat the trend? 

There are many ways if one is serious about it. Detecting prose that is ChatGPT-​spawned is usually not hard. But if students suffer no real costs for cheating, as is often the case, cheating will only remain routine.

“Researchers have long documented that many students cheat at some point in their educational career,” the author of the Chronicle article explains, “and that their motivations are situational rather than character based.”

Talk of motivations is off-​point. Students’ actions are “situational”-based in terms of incentives. Students come in a wide range of character, I hazard, each individual’s integrity built up by a long string of past decisions, which were, undoubtedly, influenced by incentives. When strict honesty is not taught and rewarded, and gross dishonesty not condemned and punished (with bad grades or expulsion), then even students with strong character will be tempted to cheat, and weaker students will cheat.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom

Letting DEI Die

MIT, DEI, college, racism, collectivism, sexism

The good news? 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will no longer require applicants to make DEI statements.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth says the school can “build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Correct on both counts, but a bit blah as indictments go. And inadequate. Forget “inclusive.” This is merely a pledge to refrain from being arbitrarily exclusionary.

But the new policy is better than the status quo.

DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) may sound innocuous, at worst pointless. But DEI guidelines have functioned as a particularly odious form of ideological litmus test. The goal has been to force instructors to toe certain leftist (or collectivist) ideological lines as if the ideas imposed were as self-​evidently true as declarations that the cloudless sky is cerrulian blue.

For example, if you dare disagree that race-​conscious “antiracist” policies making skin color — and maybe also “gender” — more important than quality of work or some reliable leading indicators of productivity, your views may put you on the wrong side of the DEI divide.

So MIT’s dropping of mandatory DEI-​fealty statements is a big step in the right direction. By as prestigious an institution of higher learning as any in the world.

The bad news? 

MIT has apparently not fired the “diversity deans” that it hired in 2021 — and hired not on the basis of excellence of qualifications: serious plagiarism complaints have been filed against two of these personnel!

If MIT retains six “diversity deans” in place, able to run around causing trouble for those faculty who reject DEI edicts, it hasn’t purged itself of the poison quite yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

College Censors Squelched

college, censorship, academia, woke, wokeism

If you attend Oklahoma State University, you are, I hope, now free to speak.

OSU will shut down a “bias response team” instituted to harass speech on campus. We can thank a group called Speech First, which sued the school.

“We are excited to announce that OSU will be eliminating their insidious bias reporting system that told students to anonymously report on one another for ‘bias’ and that they will have to rewrite their harassment policy to include important speech protections so that students can no longer be punished for merely expressing their views,” says Cherise Trump, executive director of the organization.

“We have also secured a change to their computer policy so that it no longer targets the protected political speech of students.”

The settlement also requires the school to pay Speech First $18,000 for legal expenses.

OSU had tried to get the lawsuit dismissed because Speech First protected the names of its plaintiffs, OSU students.

Speech First’s reason for using pseudonyms is pretty commonsensical: to protect plaintiffs from retaliation. That a university with a policy of punishing students for renegade speech might also punish them for participating in a lawsuit to end this policy doesn’t seem like a farfetched concern.

The resolution of the case hardly means that the fight for freedom of speech on campus is over. But it may help other universities realize that, as Cherise Trump puts it, “there is a high cost to violating students’ constitutional rights.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Hope for Campus Free Speech

university, college, free speech, censorship

The Understatement of the Month Award goes to David Lat, who says in a recent post that “when it comes to free speech and intellectual diversity, U.S. law schools continue to face challenges.”

One Big Challenge, more like: the contempt university policymakers routinely show for the speech of members of disfavored groups, if and when they say things that members of favored groups dislike.

Lat points to a decision, last month, by the Law School State Senate of Columbia Law School. The organization denied official recognition to a group formed to combat antisemitism, Law Students Against Antisemitism.

Reason: some pro-​Palestinian students objected to LSAA’s definition of “antisemitism.”

The objection is cause for debate, sure, but not for preventing an organization from formally operating. Fortunately, after much attention was paid to the Senate’s decision by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and others, the Senate reversed itself.

In addition to bad publicity, one thing that may help improve prospects for free speech on campus is a new rule issued by the American Bar Association, Standard 208.

Standard 208 requires law schools that want to be accredited by the ABA to “protect the rights of faculty, students, and staff to communicate ideas that may be controversial or unpopular.” This requirement is more encompassing than existing (if often ignored) protections of academic freedom for faculty members.

The ABA’s action is a big step, but not sufficient, Lat says. The cultures of our schools must change too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights scandal

The Resignation

woke campus culture

The fall of Harvard President Claudine Gay is not exactly the triumph we were looking for. 

Her resignation letter focused on the recent congressional hearings in which she found herself in the uncomfortable position of selectively defending free speech against a Republican politician slinging charges of “genocide” and “racism.” 

It was all very … the opposite … the upside-​down … of how Democrats and Republicans had been dealing with free speech these last few years.

And that is the most important context. Her letter’s evasion of discreditable cases of academic plagiarism — at Harvard, no less! — while not honorable, was at least politically apt. One administrator’s fraudulent academic history is no match for the issue of freedom of speech.

Which, as a legal matter, is as Ms. Gay said it was, a matter of context. You have the right to advocate genocide or say racist things on your property or on hired property. You do not have the right to shout such things just anywhere.

But college campuses aren’t just anywhere. They are allegedly places for intellectual debate. The practice of academic freedom means that the property and customs of universities and institutions of higher learning allow differing opinions to be aired. 

In classrooms; in papers; in auditoriums. 

Still, these student academic free-​speech norms don’t extend anywhere and everywhere, in all campus contexts. No student may hide behind “free speech” or “academic freedom” to corner and scream hatred of Israel at every Jew on the quad. That’s where Ms. Gay’s answers in congressional hearings were so unsatisfactory. Especially since Harvard and other major higher education institutions have been disallowing some speech from academic contexts and celebrating other quite threatening speech in the university’s public places.

Gay’s resignation reminds us of Al Capone’s imprisonment for tax evasion: a work-​around at best. The underlying issues remain unresolved.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture

Expulsion of the Sick

covid, college, quarantine, masks, lock down, hysteria

Due to the nature of a respiratory disease like COVID, mass quarantine efforts were doomed to failure. 

We’ve got to breathe; we are social creatures — so locking everyone down, as started in the Spring of 2020, didn’t appear to “slow the spread” (the original aim) and it certainly did not decrease the overall infected or death counts (something the policy did not originally pretend to do). Yet that policy, enacted as an emergency protocol in many states by many governors and mayors extended lockdowns far beyond Trump’s original call for “fifteen days.” 

The extensions were never squared with the initial rationale. 

Never. 

Quarantining the sick, or those who “test positive” for the virus, makes more sense. But only in context of options and human behavior.

“Students who test positive for COVID-​19 at the University of Michigan this fall will be forced in many cases to leave campus,” explains Robby Soave at Reason, “an extreme measure that may well encourage sick people to avoid seeking medical attention at all.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya dubs it a “cruel policy” seemingly “designed to spread covid from the university into the wild.” 

That is, this quarantine effort “won’t stop [COVID] from spreading,” the doctor summarizes.

“Instead of creating a police state to punish students for contracting COVID-​19 — something that is, let’s face it, wholly unavoidable,” Mr. Soave speculates, “perhaps university health officials could work harder to provide accommodations for students who get sick and voluntarily agree to quarantine.”

But administrators rule that out: they don’t have the accommodations.

So the policy will inevitably cause hardship while not promoting public health, much less the health of individual students.

Doesn’t make sense. 

I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom

Students Strike Back

College Campus Commie Crybabies

In November 2021, at taxpayer-​funded Clovis Community College, the group Young Americans for Freedom requested permission to post flyers. College officials assented.

The flyers attacked socialism. Uh oh. This was a grave violation of the alleged inalienable right of socialist students on the campus to never be exposed to disagreement with their views.

Some of the aggrieved students complained. We are offended, they told the school.

Administrators furrowed their brows and quickly determined that the school could not permit such offensive speech.

Suddenly censored, the YAF students who had posted the flyers went to court, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They quickly won a district court victory that has now been affirmed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

According to the court’s ruling, “The district court did not abuse its discretion when it concluded that [the students] were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the ‘inappropriate or offens[ive] language or themes’ provision was facially overbroad.”

This means that the case can continue.

Clovis YAF Chair Juliette Colunga hopes that in response to the ruling, Clovis will finally decide “to explicitly protect the constitutional rights of its students to speak freely.”

The school has tried to forestall further litigation to require it to set forth an unambiguous policy protecting freedom of speech by conceding that the students may post the anti-​socialist flyers.

That’s not enough for FIRE, though, which is proceeding with the litigation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling judiciary

Thomas & Thomas

race, racism, Supreme Court, college, education

In the Students for Fair Admissions decision, the Supreme Court rules that using race as a criterion of university admissions is unconstitutional.

Ambiguous aspects of the decision and the determination of some universities to keep using race as a criterion mean that qualified applicants may, alas, still be penalized for being the “wrong” color. Unambiguous, though, is Justice Clarence Thomas’s rebuke of the decision’s dissenters for, among other things, assuming that only racism can explain the different average outcomes of ethnic groups.

“[N]one of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race — rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor — and individual outcomes. So Justice Jackson supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds.…”

Has Thomas been perusing the work of Thomas Sowell?

One of Sowell’s career-​integrating insights is that statistics summarizing differences in average group outcomes are mute about the causes. 

One must investigate causally relevant facts.

Consider, for example, differences in characteristics and outcomes between subgroups of a broader ethnic group. Sole possible cause: racism? Or the fact that Asians on average perform better than whites in certain academic or economic categories. Sole possible cause: racism?

Just two of many pertinent questions that Dr. Sowell has asked as he, in his numerous books, surveyed our world’s cultures, lands, and histories.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Affirmative Action Disaffirmed

affirmative action, quotas, college, race, racism

Congratulations to WHITE
SUPREMACY for winning
a huge victory today.

Thus tweeted Gene Wu, District 137’s representative to the Texas legislature. 

That was his reaction to yesterday’sSupreme Court decision striking down racial discrimination in picking students for colleges and universities.

He’s a Democrat and in a tricky situation. The case was brought to the High Court by Asian Americans, who have been most discriminated against in college placement. Rep. Wu, himself Asian American, talks up the compensatory racial preference cause. 

“Asian Americans have consistently been used as a foil to eliminate Affirmative Action programs which serve to repair centuries of intentional discrimination against Black and Latino AND Asian communities,” he argues. “Having Asian Americans as parties doesn’t make it any less racist.”

Actually, of course, discriminating in favor of “Black and Latino” applicants has hurt Asian Americans’ college placements the most, and provably so. Racial discrimination was the criterion. Not academic achievement, IQ, or ability to pay. Asian Americans were the big losers. 

More than whites.

But all Rep. Wu can think about is WHITE SUPREMACY. In all-​caps, no less.

He worries not one whit about racial discrimination against Asians!

As absurd as what we used to call “reverse” discrimination is, we can be sure that, after this current ruling, DEI-​obsessed administrators will still seek ways to continue their discrimination on the basis of race.

Also being raised? The issue of legacy admissions, rewarding with preferential treatment applicants whose parents and grandparents previously attended the institution. Senator and GOP presidential candidate Tim Scott called for public universities to nix those policies as well. Scott was joined by President Biden and AOC.

Sounds like justice and fairness based on merit is on a roll.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling subsidy

Education Fraud

student, debt, relief

It’s a mess.

Families are often sold a bill of goods regarding higher education.

Unless a student pursues a subject like computer science, architecture, engineering, or medicine, it may take decades to pay off student loans.

Graduates who specialized in Advanced Basket Weaving, the Sociology of Postmodern Literary Stylings, and Marxist Techniques for Making White People Feel Guilty just might snag a high-​paying job as an Ivy League professor or senior manager of a corporate “antiracism” task force. But beyond those few spots, opportunities are scant.

And, of course, many people who pursued legitimate studies in the liberal arts or technical subjects also don’t make enough to emerge from massive debt any decade soon. Nor does every STEM grad necessarily cash in. Individual results vary.

What to do?

The Biden administration has decided to wipe out student debt en masse, expanding the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program so that about 40,000 student-​loan borrowers escape debt immediately and the debt of millions of others is slashed.

But is forcing others to pay this debt through their taxes — parents and children who perhaps carefully avoided taking out student loans — a just and practical answer to the problem?

The long-​term solution is to get the government out of the business of subsidizing higher education in any manner, whether in the form of direct payments to schools or loans to students. Without the massive subsidies, tuition costs would decline.

The short-​term solution? Launch an investigation into whether the U.S. Department of Education, colleges and universities — along with both Republican and Democratic administrations — have engaged in fraud against those who took out the loans. 

If students were defrauded, first seek redress from the perpetrators. Not the taxpayers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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