The College Fix reports on the results of the annual William F. Buckley Institute's survey of college students.
The story from the College Fix is available here.
Also from the survey, slightly more students would prefer to live under socialism than capitalism.
Here is the link to the full survey results.
“We may be the future decision makers, but most of us aren’t
leaders” writes Julie
Hartman in the Wall Street Journal
College students have de minimis risk from COVID. Yet universities have imposed irrational and draconian
mask and vaccination policies on students with harsh consequences for those who
do not obey, or even speak up, against administration edicts.
One Yale
student likened life on campus to that of a “surveillance state.” At the University of Chicago students were
forced to sign a “Required
COVID-19 Attestation” in direct contradiction to the school’s academic
freedom policies.
Hartman writes that all this insanity has infantilized her
generation of college students.
More concerning than the administration’s heavy-handedness has been the zombielike response of the student body. I ask my friends, “Why do young, fully vaccinated students continue to tolerate these irrational Covid restrictions?” While many of my peers acknowledge the excess, they shrug it off. The prevailing mood on campus is resignation, learned helplessness and reluctance to dissent.
These policies have also empowered groups of students to act
as self-appointed enforcers who use COVID policies to bludgeon their fellow students.
There is a smaller group at Harvard that apparently find pleasure in these restrictions. These students will chastise you for not wearing a mask correctly and called one of my brave peers who publicly denounced Harvard’s Covid restrictions a “eugenicist” because he supposedly showed insufficient sensitivity to immunocompromised people. They love Covid for the moral high ground it gives them to condescend to and control others.
Red Guards in training?
Don’t be so quick to dismiss. The
unfortunate truth is that events in early life, including those during the
college experience, have an important role in forming our outlook and behaviors
in later life.
For many, that means sheepish, unquestioning adherence to edicts
of the elites no matter how silly or irrational.
For others, that means becoming hectoring, humorless bureaucrats,
politicians and bosses.
What does that mean for America? As Hartman puts it: “My peers and I are often
told that we are the future leaders of America. We may be the future decision
makers, but most of us aren’t leaders. The inability of Harvard students to
question or oppose these irrational bureaucratic excesses bodes ill for our
ability to meet future challenges.”
Indeed.
How many times have we heard “if you don’t like it here, go somewhere else”? That presents a problem for colleges and university faculty as higher ed in America is uniformly woke. A group of academics has a promising solution—start a new college.
The University of Austin (UATX) is a new university. UATX is dedicated to free inquiry, free speech and innovation in instruction and curriculum. At the same time, UATX plans to keep education affordable by keeping administrative and overhead costs down.
The founders of UATX are established academic and public policy leaders including historian Niall Ferguson, author Bari Weiss, former AEI president Arthur Brooks and economists Larry Summers, Glenn Loury and Tyler Cowen.
Universities were once places of discovery and excitement. As Niall Ferguson writes, UATX seeks to restore the campus environment to that he experienced in his student days.
“Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all this gave rise. Yet, in the past decade, exhilaration has been replaced by suffocation, to the point that I feel genuinely sorry for today’s undergraduates.”
Ferguson is right. I too was an undergraduate in the 1980s. The freedom and excitement of undergraduate and graduate college life that I experienced is rare today.
Study after study have show that cancel culture and conformity have taken over academic life in the United States and other Western countries.
Universities are not just failing to live up to their ideals regarding academic freedom. They are also failing to provide value to students. The cost of attending the typical college has almost tripled since 1980 while earnings of college graduates have remained flat.
UATX promises to provide a home for scholars and students disaffected by the current college climate. It also provides an alternative business model for students and parents fed up with funding bloated university bureaucracies with the tuition and tax dollars.
The consensus, based on 17 studies using a range of media, including literature passages, photographs, and film clips: Trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress. They do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts, two hallmarks of PTSD. Notably, these findings hold for individuals with and without a history of trauma. (For a review of the relevant research, see the 2020 Clinical Psychological Science article “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories” by Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNally.)We are not aware of a single experimental study that has found significant benefits of using trigger warnings. Looking specifically at trauma survivors, including those with a diagnosis of PTSD, the Jones et al. study found that trigger warnings “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas.”What’s more, they found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD, prompting them to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” “Trigger warnings,” they concluded, “may be most harmful to the very individuals they were designed to protect.”
A few weeks ago I was a participant in a webinar Harvard University. The speaker warned the audience before presenting a table of statistics. Yes, statistics. If students can't handle look at a table of numbers, yes numbers, America is lost.
The Wall Street Journal has a long piece on low rates of male college enrollment in the United States. Enrollment rates among white men are lower than among other racial groups after accounting for family income.
Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.
At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.
That men are not enrolling in college. Most colleges are ultra-woke. Nobody wants to be charged exorbitant tuition rates to be treated as an oppressor for four to six years. In addition, most white collar employers discriminate against men in terms of training and promotional opportunities. That is particularly true of government and quasi-governmental organizations.
