January 2013
In
1902, journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote a book called The Shame of the Cities. At the time,
Americans took pride in big cities, with their towering skyscrapers, productive
factories, and prominent cultural institutions.
Steffens showed there were some rotten things
underneath the gleaming veneers — corrupt local governments and political
machines, aided and abetted by business leaders.
In recent weeks, two books have appeared about
another of America’s gleaming institutions, our colleges and universities.
Either of them could be subtitled “The Shame of the Universities.”
In Mismatch,
law professor Richard Sanderand journalist Stuart Taylor
expose, in the words of their subtitle, How Affirmative Action Hurts Students
It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. In Unlearning Liberty, Greg Lukianoff,
president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), describes
how university speech codes create, as his subtitle puts it, Campus
Censorship and the End of American Debate.
Mismatch
is a story of good intentions gone terribly awry. Sander and Taylor document
beyond disagreement how university admissions offices’ racial quotas and
preferences systematically put black and Hispanic students in schools where they
are far less well prepared than others.
As a result, they tend to get low grades,
withdraw from science and math courses, and drop out without graduating. The
effect is particularly notable in law schools, where large numbers of blacks and
Hispanics either drop out or fail to pass the bar exam.
This happens, Sander and Taylor argue, not
because these students lack ability, but because they’ve been thrown in with
students of exceptional ability — the “mismatch” of the authors’ title. At
schools where everyone has similar test scores and levels of preparation, these
students do much better. And they don’t suffer the heartache of failure.
That was shown when California’s state
universities temporarily obeyed a 1996 referendum banning racial quotas and
preferences. UCLA Law School had fewer black students but just as many black
graduates. The university system as a whole produced more black and Hispanic
graduates.
Similarly, black students interested in math and
science tend to get degrees in those subjects in historically black colleges,
while those in schools with a mismatch switch to easier majors because the math
instruction is pitched to classmates with better preparation.
University admissions officers nevertheless
maintain what Taylor calls “an enormous, pervasive and carefully concealed
system of racial preferences,” even while claiming they aren’t actually doing
so. The willingness to lie systematically seems to be a requirement for such
jobs.
The willingnessto liesystematically is
also a requirement for administrators who profess a love of free speech while
imposing speech codes and penalizing students for violations.
All of which provides plenty of business for
Lukianoff’s FIRE, which opposes speech codes and brings lawsuits on behalf of
students — usually, but not always, conservatives — who are penalized.
Those who graduated from college before the late
1980s may not realize that speech codes have become, in Lukianoff’s words, “the
rule rather than the exception” on American campuses.
They are typically vague and all-encompassing.
One school prohibits “actions or attitudes that threaten the welfare” of others.
Another bans e-mails that “harass, annoy or otherwise inconvenience others.”
Others ban “insensitive” communication, “inappropriate jokes,” and “patronizing
remarks.”
“Speech codes can only survive,” Lukianoff
writes, “through selective enforcement.” Conservatives and religious students
are typically targeted. But so are critics of administrators, like the student
expelled for a Facebook posting critical of a proposed $30 million parking
garage.
Students get the message: Keep your mouth shut.
An Association of American Colleges and Universities survey of 24,000 students
found that only 40 percent of freshmen thought it was “safe to hold unpopular
views on campus.” An even lower 30 percent of seniors agreed.
So institutions that once prided themselves as
arenas for the free exchange of ideas — and still advertise themselves as such —
have become the least free part of our society.
How? One answer is that university personnel
almost all share the same liberal-left beliefs. Many feel that contrary views
and criticism are evil and should be stamped out.
It also helps to follow the money. Government
student-loan programs have pumped huge sums into colleges and universities that
have been raising tuition and fees far faster than inflation.
The result is administrative bloat. Since 2005, universities have employed more administrators than teachers.
There are signs that what
instapundit.com’s
Glenn Reynolds calls the higher-education bubble is about to burst. And
perhaps people are waking up to the rottenness beneath the universities’
gleaming veneer.
Michael Barone is senior
political analyst for The Washington Examiner.
National Review Online, November 29, 2012.
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