• Universities sowing the seeds of their own obsolescence

    From (David P.)@21:1/5 to All on Sun Dec 19 00:57:34 2021
    Universities sowing the seeds of their own obsolescence
    By Victor Davis Hanson, July 4, 2020

    When mobs tore down a statue of U.S. Grant & defaced a
    monument to African American veterans of the Civil War,
    many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned
    anything in high school or college. Did any of these
    iconoclasts know the difference between Grant & Robert E. Lee?
    Could they recognize the name “Gettysburg”? Could they even
    identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?

    Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident,
    loud & self-righteous. But the media blitz during these past
    several weeks of protests, riots & looting also revealed a
    generation that is poorly educated & yet petulant & self-
    assured without justification. Many of the young people on
    the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s.
    But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their
    grandparents — survivors of the Great Depression & WWII.
    How can so many so sheltered & prolonged adolescents claim
    to be all-knowing? Ask questions like these, & the answers
    ultimately lead back to the university.

    Millions of those who graduate from college or drop out
    do so in arrears. There is some $1.5 trillion in aggregate
    student debt in the U.S. Such burdens sometimes delay marriage.
    They discourage child-rearing. They make home ownership hard
    — along with all the other experiences we associate with
    the transition to adulthood.

    The universities, some with multibillion-dollar endowments,
    will accept no moral responsibility. They aren't overly
    worried that many of their indebted graduates discover their
    majors don’t translate into well-paid jobs or guarantee
    employers that grads can write, speak or think cogently.

    One unintended consequence of the chaotic response to the
    COVID-19 epidemic & the violence that followed the police
    killing of George Floyd is a growing re-examination of
    the circumstances that birthed the mass protests.

    There would be far less college debt if higher education,
    rather than the federal government, guaranteed its own
    students’ loans. If universities backed loans with their
    endowments and infrastructure, college presidents could be
    slashing costs. They would ensure that graduates were more
    likely to get good-paying jobs thanks to rigorous coursework
    and faculty accountability.

    Taxpayers who are hectored about their supposed racism,
    homophobia & sexism don’t enjoy such finger-wagging from
    loud, sheltered, 20-something moralists. Perhaps taxpayers
    will no longer have to subsidize the abuse if higher education
    is deemed to be a politicized institution and thus its
    endowment income ruled to be fully taxable.

    If socialism has become a campus creed, maybe Ivy League
    schools can be hit with an annual “wealth tax” on their
    massive endowments in order to redistribute revenue to
    poorer colleges.

    It's hard to square the circle of angry graduates having
    no jobs with their unaccountable professors who so poorly
    trained students while enjoying lifelong tenure. Why does
    academia guarantee lifetime employment to those who can't
    guarantee that a graduate gets a decent job?

    The epidemic & lockdown required distance learning, but at
    full price. The idea that universities can still charge
    regular rates when students are forced to stay home isn't
    just an unsustainable practice, but veritable suicide.
    If one can supposedly learn well enough from downloads,
    Zoom talks & Skype lectures, then why pay $50,000 or more
    for that service from your basement?

    Universities are renaming buildings & encouraging statue
    removal & cancel culture. But they assume they'll always
    have a red line to the frenzied trajectory of the mob they
    helped birth. If the slaveholder & the robber baron from
    the distant past deserve no statue, no eponymous hallway or
    plaza, then why should the names Yale & Stanford be exempt
    from the frenzied name-changing & iconoclasm? Are they seen
    as billion-dollar brands, akin to Windex or Coke, that
    stamp their investor students as elite “winners”?

    The current chaos has posed existential questions of fairness
    & transparency that the university can't answer because to
    do so would reveal utter hypocrisy. Instead, the university’s
    defense has been to virtue-signal left-wing social activism
    to hide or protect its traditional self-interested mode of
    profitable business for everyone — staff, faculty, admini-
    stration, contractors — except the students who borrow to
    pay for a lot of it.

    How strange that higher education’s monotonous embrace of
    virtue signaling, political proselytizing & loud social
    justice activism is now sowing the seeds of its own
    obsolescence and replacement. If being “woke” means that
    the broke & unemployed are graduating to ignorantly smashing
    statues, denying free speech to others & institutionalizing
    cancel culture, then the public would rather pass on what
    spawned all of that in the first place.

    Taxpayers do not yet know what to replace the university
    with — wholly online courses and lectures, apolitical new
    campuses or broad-based vocational education — only that a
    once hallowed institution is becoming McCarthyite, malignant
    and, in the end, just a bad deal.

    https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-davis-hanson/victor-davis-hanson-universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence-2067860/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From El Castor@21:1/5 to imbibe@mindspring.com on Sun Dec 19 13:18:46 2021
    On Sun, 19 Dec 2021 00:57:34 -0800 (PST), "(David P.)"
    <imbibe@mindspring.com> wrote:

    Universities sowing the seeds of their own obsolescence
    By Victor Davis Hanson, July 4, 2020

    When mobs tore down a statue of U.S. Grant & defaced a
    monument to African American veterans of the Civil War,
    many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned
    anything in high school or college. Did any of these
    iconoclasts know the difference between Grant & Robert E. Lee?
    Could they recognize the name Gettysburg? Could they even
    identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?

    Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident,
    loud & self-righteous. But the media blitz during these past
    several weeks of protests, riots & looting also revealed a
    generation that is poorly educated & yet petulant & self-
    assured without justification. Many of the young people on
    the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s.
    But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their
    grandparents survivors of the Great Depression & WWII.
    How can so many so sheltered & prolonged adolescents claim
    to be all-knowing? Ask questions like these, & the answers
    ultimately lead back to the university.

    Millions of those who graduate from college or drop out
    do so in arrears. There is some $1.5 trillion in aggregate
    student debt in the U.S. Such burdens sometimes delay marriage.
    They discourage child-rearing. They make home ownership hard
    along with all the other experiences we associate with
    the transition to adulthood.

    The universities, some with multibillion-dollar endowments,
    will accept no moral responsibility. They aren't overly
    worried that many of their indebted graduates discover their
    majors dont translate into well-paid jobs or guarantee
    employers that grads can write, speak or think cogently.

    One unintended consequence of the chaotic response to the
    COVID-19 epidemic & the violence that followed the police
    killing of George Floyd is a growing re-examination of
    the circumstances that birthed the mass protests.

    There would be far less college debt if higher education,
    rather than the federal government, guaranteed its own
    students loans. If universities backed loans with their
    endowments and infrastructure, college presidents could be
    slashing costs. They would ensure that graduates were more
    likely to get good-paying jobs thanks to rigorous coursework
    and faculty accountability.

    Taxpayers who are hectored about their supposed racism,
    homophobia & sexism dont enjoy such finger-wagging from
    loud, sheltered, 20-something moralists. Perhaps taxpayers
    will no longer have to subsidize the abuse if higher education
    is deemed to be a politicized institution and thus its
    endowment income ruled to be fully taxable.

    If socialism has become a campus creed, maybe Ivy League
    schools can be hit with an annual wealth tax on their
    massive endowments in order to redistribute revenue to
    poorer colleges.

    It's hard to square the circle of angry graduates having
    no jobs with their unaccountable professors who so poorly
    trained students while enjoying lifelong tenure. Why does
    academia guarantee lifetime employment to those who can't
    guarantee that a graduate gets a decent job?

    The epidemic & lockdown required distance learning, but at
    full price. The idea that universities can still charge
    regular rates when students are forced to stay home isn't
    just an unsustainable practice, but veritable suicide.
    If one can supposedly learn well enough from downloads,
    Zoom talks & Skype lectures, then why pay $50,000 or more
    for that service from your basement?

    Universities are renaming buildings & encouraging statue
    removal & cancel culture. But they assume they'll always
    have a red line to the frenzied trajectory of the mob they
    helped birth. If the slaveholder & the robber baron from
    the distant past deserve no statue, no eponymous hallway or
    plaza, then why should the names Yale & Stanford be exempt
    from the frenzied name-changing & iconoclasm? Are they seen
    as billion-dollar brands, akin to Windex or Coke, that
    stamp their investor students as elite winners?

    The current chaos has posed existential questions of fairness
    & transparency that the university can't answer because to
    do so would reveal utter hypocrisy. Instead, the universitys
    defense has been to virtue-signal left-wing social activism
    to hide or protect its traditional self-interested mode of
    profitable business for everyone staff, faculty, admini-
    stration, contractors except the students who borrow to
    pay for a lot of it.

    How strange that higher educations monotonous embrace of
    virtue signaling, political proselytizing & loud social
    justice activism is now sowing the seeds of its own
    obsolescence and replacement. If being woke means that
    the broke & unemployed are graduating to ignorantly smashing
    statues, denying free speech to others & institutionalizing
    cancel culture, then the public would rather pass on what
    spawned all of that in the first place.

    Taxpayers do not yet know what to replace the university
    with wholly online courses and lectures, apolitical new
    campuses or broad-based vocational education only that a
    once hallowed institution is becoming McCarthyite, malignant
    and, in the end, just a bad deal.

    https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-davis-hanson/victor-davis-hanson-universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence-2067860/

    I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in economics and no
    particular job prospects. Joined the navy and because of that college
    degree -- off to OCS. Five years in the navy, saw the world, and
    supervised as many as 60 men. Returned to the US as a civilian and
    jobs were mine for the picking.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From (David P.)@21:1/5 to El Castor on Sun Dec 19 22:35:55 2021
    El Castor wrote:
    "(David P.)" wrote:
    Universities sowing the seeds of their own obsolescence
    By Victor Davis Hanson, July 4, 2020
    [ . . . ]
    https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-davis-hanson/victor-davis-hanson-universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence-2067860/
    -------
    I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in economics and no
    particular job prospects. Joined the navy and because of that college
    degree -- off to OCS. Five years in the navy, saw the world, and
    supervised as many as 60 men. Returned to the US as a civilian and
    jobs were mine for the picking.
    ------
    There are a lot more jobs in economics nowadays, aren't there?
    --
    --

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From El Castor@21:1/5 to imbibe@mindspring.com on Mon Dec 20 11:55:10 2021
    On Sun, 19 Dec 2021 22:35:55 -0800 (PST), "(David P.)"
    <imbibe@mindspring.com> wrote:

    El Castor wrote:
    "(David P.)" wrote:
    Universities sowing the seeds of their own obsolescence
    By Victor Davis Hanson, July 4, 2020
    [ . . . ]
    https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-davis-hanson/victor-davis-hanson-universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence-2067860/
    -------
    I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in economics and no
    particular job prospects. Joined the navy and because of that college
    degree -- off to OCS. Five years in the navy, saw the world, and
    supervised as many as 60 men. Returned to the US as a civilian and
    jobs were mine for the picking.
    ------
    There are a lot more jobs in economics nowadays, aren't there?
    --
    Mine was a 4 year degree. A job specifically in economics would
    generally require a graduate degree. I started out in the back office
    of a brokerage firm. When the firm appeared to have been sold to the
    Mafia, I moved into banking, always in the headquarters, never a
    branch, and retired from there. A knowledge of economics has always
    proved helpful, and is a strong influence on my view of politics.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)