College endowments under scrutiny.

From The Hill via H/T at Instapundit:

The tax-exempt endowments of colleges and universities are coming under scrutiny in a presidential election year where the cost of higher education has become a top issue.

Leading Republican tax-writers in Congress have sent questions to 56 private institutions with endowments of over $1 billion, giving them until April 1 to respond. The answers they receive could lead to legislation.

The letters — which were sent in February and signed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) and Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) — stated that many colleges are raising tuition at rates above inflation despite having large and growing endowments.

The five private colleges with the largest endowments in fiscal year 2015 were Harvard University ($36.4 billion), Yale University ($25.6 billion), Princeton University ($22.7 billion), Stanford University ($22.2 billion) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($13.5 billion), according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the Commonfund Institute.

Private colleges are generally established as nonprofits, which means their endowments are tax-exempt. Unlike private foundations, there is no requirement that the colleges spend a minimum percentage of their endowments each year.

Critics have denounced the schools as hoarding cash, and lawmakers are taking note of that argument.

Populism is blooming, and established institutions won’t like it.

Cash-Strapped Connecticut Wants to Tax Yale Endowments

From Bloomberg News via H/T at Instapundit:

Yale University’s endowment earned $2.6 billion in investment gains in fiscal 2015. A proposed bill in the Ivy League school’s home state of Connecticut is eyeing a share of the bounty as a source of revenue. Schools with funds of $10 billion or more — affecting Yale only — could face a tax on endowment income, according to legislation introduced this month. Yale’s record $25.6 billion fund is the second largest in U.S. higher education, behind Harvard University’s $37.6 billion.

This seems fair. Look at all the other schools that have less. Fight inequality!

Fresh popcorn for all! It will be fun watching different liberal sacred cows fighting each other for funding.

The Campaign to Suppress Asian Success in Schools

From Breitbart's Big Government:

Unz continues that the admission process for Ivy League schools is completely non-transparent and subjective, based more on favoritism and “even outright corruption.”

“In recent years, Asian enrollments at all the Ivies have converged to a very narrow range and remained relatively constant from year to year, a remarkably suspicious result that seems strongly suggestive of an implicit Asian Quota,” he says. “Indeed, the statistical evidence for a present-day Asian Quota is arguably stronger than that for the notorious Jewish Quota of the Ivies during the 1920s and 1930s, the existence of which was widely denied at the time by university administrators but is now universally accepted.”

In fact, the Wall Street Journal also referred to Asian-American students as “the new Jews of Harvard Admissions.”

Unz says Asian elected officials and even Asian-American activists and advocacy groups have kept silent on the existence of Asian Quotas at Ivy League schools, since many of them are affiliated with these schools themselves.

I'm shocked (sarcasm) to find out that asian politicians and advocacy group are corrupt and in bed with these elite schools. Why should they help others, because they have an inside track. These "leaders" are like Jessie Jack, Al Sharpton, et. al. Relentless self-promoters, who stoke the flames, but do nothing to help those they claim to represent.

“Regularly denouncing the perceived misdeeds of ‘white supremacists,’ rightwingers, or even merely Republicans is an easy position to take given that those groups possess negligible influence within the academic community,” he observes. “But Harvard University and its peers dominate higher education like a colossus, and leveling criticism against such targets is hardly conducive to academic career advancement.”

They have to go against their own self-interests. What politician will do that?

American higher education is a house divided

From George Will via H/T at Instapundit:

Higher education is increasingly a house divided. In the sciences and even the humanities, actual scholars maintain the high standards of their noble calling. But in the humanities, especially, and elsewhere, faux scholars representing specious disciplines exploit academia as a jobs program for otherwise unemployable propagandists hostile to freedom of expression.

Ouch!

How to Fix College Admissions

From The American Conservative via H/T at Instapundit:

Instead of litigating affirmative action, simply hold a lottery for all qualified applicants.

In its simplest version, the process would work like this. The application would involve a checklist of more or less objective, externally verifiable criteria. These might include GPA above a certain cutoff, scores of 4 of 5 on a given number of AP tests, and so on. Extracurricular achievements could be considered. For example, there might be a box to be checked by applicants who played a varsity sport. The application could even ask about socio-economic status, allowing applicants to indicate that their parents had not attended college or that they grew up in a high-poverty census tract.

Suppose the checklist contained ten criteria. Applicants who satisfied, say, six of them would be entered into a lottery for admission. Universities would then draw an appropriate number of admits. The whole exercise would take about two seconds.

In addition to its appealing transparency, a lottery would be extremely cheap. Under this plan, universities wouldn’t have to maintain a large and highly paid admissions office. All they’d need would be a good website on which applicants could enter their information and a few IT workers to manage the database.

A lottery would also relieve stress on applicants and their parents. Rather than driving themselves nuts pursuing all possible achievements, high school students could concentrate on doing well in their strongest subjects or activities.

Critics might argue a lottery would reduce academic quality. But there’s no reason to think students taken at random from a qualified pool would be worse than those selected in head-to-head comparisons. In fact, Harvard already attracts applications from more valedictorians than it can accept.

This would be similar to what they do at Bronz Science and the other magnet schools in New York City.

Quote of the Day II

From Ace of Spades HQ:

The next time some academics tell you how important "diversity" is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

-- Thomas Sowell

LOL

Top 10 universities most friendly to terror

From The American Thinker:

University campuses are dangerous places for our children, as “higher education” has morphed into a propaganda machine for leftists. And with the left comes the stifling of free speech. And violence. As in jihad.

Muslim students and Islamophile faculty members are creating an increasingly threatening environment as brainwashing, intimidation, and physical violence become the norm. Life for Jewish students has become particularly harrowing, though the threat extends well beyond them to every American.

To address this growing threat, David Horowitz has started a campaign called “Stop the Jihad on Campus.” He has released a report on the top 10 American universities that provide legitimization and material support to Islamic terrorists who want to destroy the state of Israel, with Muslim Brotherhood front groups (Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine) being deeply embedded on university campuses advancing a message of hate.
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These people with their hate-ridden views are embraced by universities across America, with the following 10 universities (listed alphabetically) being the worst offenders:

Brandeis University

Harvard University

Rutgers University, New Brunswick

San Francisco State University

University of California, Irvine

University of California, Los Angeles

University of California, San Diego

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

University of New Mexico

Why am I not surprised that 4 of the top 10 are in California, including my alma matter.

Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says.

From The NY Times via H/T at Instapundit:

So is "Social Science" just a nice way of saying "Make-up Shit?"

The past several years have been bruising ones for the credibility of the social sciences. A star social psychologist was caught fabricating data, leading to more than 50 retracted papers. A top journal published a study supporting the existence of ESP that was widely criticized. The journal Science pulled a political science paper on the effect of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior because of concerns about faked data.

Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.

The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.

It was a easy way to hire minority "Professors" in non-rigorous fields to ensure "diversity" among college professors.

Can you guess what Yale is not doing with its $24-billion endowment?

From The American Thinker Blog:

Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment.

In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university’s operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes.

Despite the success of its endowment, in 2014 Yale charged its students $291 million, net of scholarships, for tuition, room and board.

The article this is taken from supports legislation that would require schools with more than a $100-million endowment to spend at least 8% on education. That makes sense, given how much money these schools are hoarding.
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Do you think we need the government to form a "Student Financial Protection Bureau" to monitor the finances and spending of elite billionaire liberal schools? Naturally, such a board would have to be well-funded, perhaps by a modest 1% wealth tax on schools with endowments over $100 million. Do you think Elizabeth Warren would call this a progressive thing to do?

It would be nice, but i's not gonna happen.

The Daily Caller’s Official Rundown Of The Worst, Looniest, Most Leftist Professors In America Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/11/the-daily-callers-official-rundown-of-the-worst-looniest-most-leftist-professors-in-america/#ixzz3iwLPSDyS

From The Daily Caller:

This mild summer is winding down. Professors across the fruited plain are preparing for another fall semester of spewing half-baked progressive ideologies at gullible undergrads.

It’s time, then, for The Daily Caller’s second annual, highly definitive list of the worst professors in America. All the professors on the first annual definitive list remain terrible, of course. But we won’t bore you with some rehash.

This list is a lot shorter than I expected.

Newest campus microaggression - “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”

From Hot Air:

That’s according to the University of California, an arm of state government, as Ace reminds us. I don’t get it. Since when does government dislike meritocracy?

More microaggressions per U of C: “America is a melting pot” and “America is the land of opportunity.” We’re very close to the end now, my friends.

Here’s a bit from the UCLA diversity handout. On the left is what “microaggressors” say, on the right is what they supposedly mean:



My favorite is “gender plays no part in who we hire,” a policy feminists have spent decades demanding from American businesses only to dismiss it now as aggressively sexist, a self-delusion promoted by the corporate world to disguise their bias against women. Gender inescapably plays a part in who they hire; the only way to cure the bias is with quotas. That explains why “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” an anti-quota philosophy, is microaggressive. But … if you hired a women and emphasized that you don’t necessarily think the most qualified person should get the job, wouldn’t that be microaggressive? Show of hands, ladies: Who wouldn’t be insulted at being told by your new boss that you were brought on in the name of “social justice,” not because you were the best candidate who applied?

So meritocracy is bad, except in sports? Well, that's gonna have to change soon. The SJW will be demanding that soon, I predict!

Liberal Professor - My Liberal Students Terrify Me

From Ace of Spades HQ:

I say it's sort of worth reading because the writer is such a leftist coward. The entire piece is framed around the argument that this New Reign of Terror is bad chiefly because it limits the potential for leftist political victories. He's such a scaredy-cat he cannot go two paragraphs without coming back to his major point -- or, possibly, his chief defense at the academic kangaroo court which will be investigating him for his heresies -- that his real problem is that this gonzo identity politics militancy just blocks us from effective action to protect abortion rights. (No really, he says that.)

The real problem: a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice

This shift in student-teacher dynamic placed many of the traditional goals of higher education -- such as having students challenge their beliefs -- off limits...

The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed's current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.

This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics....

So leftist finally realize that the safe zones, trigger warning, and PC language is being used against the teachers, so now it's a problem.

Just another example of liberals easting their own and discovering, they don't like it. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, of Instapundit, throws in his comment:

Well, I predict that more lefty professors will experience this personally, and their views will change. Remember, the entire notion of academic freedom was boosted mostly to protect campus communists. Once lefties were fully in charge, their commitment to academic freedom evaporated. If lefties find themselves in the crosshairs again, I predict a newfound movement in favor of free speech and free thought.

The Feminist Revolution is Eating It's Own

From The NY Post:

The revolution always eats its own. That’s the lesson from a recent essay by Northwestern University’s Laura Kipnis.

Two students were so offended by her article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on why banning romantic relationships between faculty and students was silly that they filed a Title IX complaint against her.

Yes, that’s right, legislation that was originally supposed to combat sexual discrimination in public education and athletics is now being used to silence professors who write essays that contradict progressive wisdom. .................. It’s hard to work up too much sympathy for Kipnis, though. One wonders where she’s been for the past two decades when kangaroo courts were set up at institutions of higher education all over the country.

Has she been rushing to defend all the men convicted by campus courts of sexual assault with no lawyers present?

I'll give you a hint. SILENCIO!!!!!!

Today's college feminists are too fragile to read

From Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Instapundit via USA Today: Some background:

Feminist professor Laura Kipnis of Northwestern University published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education in February, decrying "sexual paranoia" on campus and the way virtually any classroom mention of sex was being subjected to an odd sort of neo-Victorian prudery: "Students were being encouraged to regard themselves as such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark could impede their education, as such hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke was likely to create lasting trauma. ... In the post-Title IX landscape, sexual panic rules. Slippery slopes abound."

This article sat poorly with campus activists, who in response reported her for sexual harassment, on the theory that this article (and a follow-up tweet — yes, that's right, a tweet) somehow might have created a hostile environment for female students, which would violate Title IX as interpreted by the Education Department.

So anything that upsets the collegiate feminist world view must now be punished!

At least, that's what happened to Kipnis, who describes what she calls her Title IX inquisition in a lengthy essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Friday. The university's investigators wouldn't tell her who made the charges or even, for some time, what the charges were, which is typical of these Kafkaesque proceedings. While Kipnis was allowed to bring a faculty "support person" to her hearing, "support person" was not allowed to speak. After the hearing, a Title IX complaint was filed against the speechless "support person."

So you CAN'T know the the charges! You CAN"T know who made the charges, and your speechless "support person" is also charged, just for being there.

The good news is that Kipnis' experience has generated a national wave of outrage. Even feminist website Jezebel wrote: "As feminist student activists fight to expand their circle of vulnerability in collegiate life, Title IX has gone from a law designed to protect college students from sexual misconduct and discrimination to a means by which professors are put on trial for their tweets." 

In New York magazine, Jonathan Chait observed: "I highly doubt that the inquiry against Kipnis will result in any important formal sanction. ... But the slim possibility of actual administrative punishment is not the problem her story reveals. The problem is that a major body of progressive campus thought believes her publication of a dissenting column merits punishment."

So, radical feminist are starting to eat their own and finally realize, this is not a good thing.