A Game Changer for Higher Education

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 Yet, in the past decade, exhilaration has been replaced by suffocation, to the point that I feel genuinely sorry for today’s undergraduates.”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 Generational Unfairness of COVID Restrictions: European Edition

 

Young people in Europe increasingly view the never-ending lockdowns and COVID restrictions as unfair to their generation.  Young Europeans have sacrificed their careers and education to address a virus that only presents a risk to the very old. 

Moreover, the restrictions and lockdowns have made no difference in fighting the virus.

Laure Mandeville lays out the reasons that young Europeans are angry.  Ms. Mandeville is the chief U.S. correspondent for Le Figaro and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Below is a clip from Ms. Mandeville’s appearance on Feudal Future podcast with Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky.

You can see the whole podcast here.

He’s Not Wrong: Vladimir Putin Knocks Woke Culture

 Social justice warriors in the modern West are no different that the Bolsheviks of the old Soviet Union says Russian Leader Vladimir Putin. 

If Putin is right, modern progressives are ushering in a world that is very dark indeed.  Young people should take note.    

Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club, Putin laid bare the parallels between the old oppression of the Soviet past and the now oppression of the woke progressives in the modern West.

Putin calls out the erasure of the great works in art and literature: 

“Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

Citing Martin Luther King, Putin call out the obsession among the left in dividing people on racial lines:

"Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour.”

Putin also cites the parallels between modern progressive ideologies on sexuality and gender and those of the old Soviet Union:

“Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised. “Parent number one” and “parent number two,” “'birthing parent” instead of “mother,” and “human milk” replacing “breastmilk” because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times. Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life.”

It has often been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Putin’s discussion of the parallels between the old Soviet Union and modern Western progressive ideologies is a good one.  One question remains.  Is it that modern progressives have failed to learn from the old Soviet Union or are using the old Soviet Union as a “how to” manual?

 

Poll: Young People Reject Defunding the Police

 

A new poll by the Pew Research Center shows solid support for more funding for the police among young people.  The poll, taken in September 2021, found that 36 percent of Americans aged 18-49 support more funding for the police and another 40 percent support maintaining current funding levels.  Less than one in four—23 percent—want funding reduced.

Older Americans are overwhelming supportive of more funding with 59 percent supporting more funding and only 7 percent supporting less.

Americans of all races, ethnicities and political leanings all reject defunding.  Only one in four Democrats wants funding reduced.  Details from Pew appear below.

The unfortunate truth is that the defund the police movement has been terrible for young Americans.

Young people are more likely to live in urban areas than are older Americans and therefore more likely to be in cities like New York, Chicago, Portland, or Boston where funding for the police has been cut by progressive left-wing Democratic mayors. 

The toll on young people from the murder and mayhem resulting from police cutbacks has been enormous. 

Take the case of Chicago.  In 2019 Chicago elected a mayor who backs the defund the police movement.  Since that time the number of homicides involving young Chicagoans has skyrocketed.

In 2019, 365 Chicagoans under the age of 36 we killed.  In 2020, 570 Chicagoans between the ages of 0 and 35 were killed (including 101 teenagers and 14 that were younger than thirteen).  Chicago is on pace to beat 2020.  So far in 2021, 509 young Chicagoans have been murdered. 

The additional deaths of 400 young Chicagoans over the past two years provides stark evidence of the harms caused by the defund the police movement.   

The same trends are evident in Portland, Seattle, New York City, and Minneapolis—all cites with mayors and city councils that have defunded the police. 

Perhaps it is direct experience or that of friends or family with rising crime that is turning young people off to the defund the police movement.  In any event, the newfound appreciation for the police and law and order among young Americans is good news indeed.   

Senator Scott Explains What's Wrong with the Federal Reserve

This blog has been highlighting how Federal Reserve policy hurts young people:

• How negative interest rates harm young people by making it very difficult to accumulate wealth as inflation erodes the value of savings.
• How QE and low interest rates pump up asset prices forcing young investors to buy into overvalued asset markets and exposing young people to losses from asset price crashes.
• How low interest rate policies lead to the accumulation of government debt the burden of which will be borne by future taxpayers.
• How the accumulation of debt by government leads to greater risk of economic downturns and how these downturns harm the long-run prospects of young people that come of age in bad economic times.

Recently Florida Senator sent Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell a letter outlining his concerns.  The letter addresses many of the above topics albeit without specific reference to the impact on young Americans.

The Scott letter deserves a close read.  Follow this link to Senator Scott's letter.

 

This Blog Stands Against Censorship

 

The Truth About Free College

Democrats claim that free college would be a panacea for young people.  But what does free college really mean?  Generally, free education means poor quality education. 

Germany provides a great example. While German universities are free or at low cost (tuition is generally less than 1000 euros) the quality of education they provide is poor.  I can attest to that.  It is very rare to encounter a faculty member at a German university at a research conference.  No German university ranks in the top 50 worldwide whereas there are 8 in the United Kingdom.  

An excellent review of the state of higher education in Germany and the problems with tuition-free higher education is provided by Andrew Hempel in Quillette.   

"Yet the tuition-free system also has disadvantages. The first difference an American will notice is that most German universities look dingy and threadbare. Many were erected hastily in the 1960s and 1970s to house new students brought in by liberalizing reforms, and these cheap, poorly maintained structures are notoriously ugly (a German magazine recently ran a feature on “German Universities Ranked by Ugliness”). Most classrooms still feature rigid wooden or metal desks bolted into rows. Wireless coverage, library stocks, laboratory gear and classroom A/V equipment lag far behind the average American state university. It’s still possible to arrive to give a lecture and find an overhead projector awaiting your transparencies. Professors’ salaries are much lower than in the United States, and Germany’s problem with “adjunctification” and precarious conditions for aspiring scholars (known by the German neologism Prekarisierung) is becoming as urgent as it is in the United States.

This bare-bones regime also dominates student life and counseling. German universities are sink-or-swim: if you have scholarly or personal problems while studying, help will come only from overburdened counselors with hundreds of cases, or from student volunteers. Along with lax admissions standards, this fact helps explain the high dropout rates; one-third of all students who enroll in German universities never finish. A recent OECD study found that only 28.6 percent of Germans aged between 25 and 64 had a tertiary education degree, as compared to 46.4 percent of Americans (although classification issues mean these numbers must be handled with care). This chronic lack of resources—in addition to the understandable fact that many outstanding German scholars publish in German—also helps explain why German universities punch below their weight in international rankings, a topic of obsessive concern to German politicians.

Eliminating tuition also means that universities become more like primary schools, or public utilities. This changes the dynamic in subtle ways. Universities will become more vulnerable to funding decisions by agencies, leading to more intrusive control and bureaucracy. Gather any group of German professors, and talk will immediately turn to the burgeoning bureaucracy which distracts them from teaching and research. This changed dynamic also makes it harder to get funding from alumni and third parties. Would you donate to the local sewage treatment plant? Hardly; these things should be funded from tax revenue and, of course, user fees. Making universities fully state-supported also raises a host of issues under competition and public-utilities law. For this reason (among others) naming buildings or professorships after private donors is still fairly uncommon at German public universities, and “executive education” or outreach courses may be banned or regulated to prevent unfair competition with private-sector offerings."