College

Twenty-five years ago I published an essay titled “Dogfish.” It was not about the little sharks that skim along the bottom of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and only rarely end up on the American dinner table. It was rather a fanciful way to draw attention to the brevity of the average tenure of the college president. Back then the average president served 6.7 years. The spotted dogfish, by contrast, was believed to live almost three times as long. A lot has changed in the intervening quarter century. For one thing, it is now believed that the natural lifespan of the dogfish is thirty-five to forty years, though some say eighty.  Meanwhile the average term of a college president has shrunk to 5.9 years.

Early on the morning of September 27, 2021, Middlebury College president Laurie Patton had a stone bearing the name of the campus chapel removed from the building. It was done deftly. I don’t imagine she showed up with her own hammer and chisel, but the campus groundsmen executed her orders. Later that day, Patton and the chairman of the board of trustees sent out a message to the community announcing that they had de-named Mead Memorial Chapel, which henceforth would be known simply as Middlebury Chapel. The de-naming was a stealth operation. Outside of a small circle, no one knew it was coming.  Picture a small liberal arts college tucked away in the American hinterland. Picture on the crest of a hill a white marble church with an impressive spire flanked by academic halls.

Thanks to a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, firing faculty members for “lack of collegiality” is suddenly a bright prospect for college administrators eager to rid themselves of gadflies, diversiphobes, conservatives and other riffraff. The case involved Stephen Porter, a tenured professor in the school of education at North Carolina State University, who had had the bad grace to object to various forms of mandatory diversity saluting. Some details to follow, but let’s first roll around in the hay of “collegiality.”  The two members (out of three) on the Fourth Circuit who invoked the term were not entirely breaking new ground. The woker sort of faculty and college administrators have been fondling the idea for a while.

The Biden administration announced on Friday that they would erase $39 billion for 800,000 borrowers due to inaccurate payment counts made under income-driven repayment (IDR) plans.  The plan will automatically and retroactively credit qualifying borrowers for mistakes made by federal loan services. It will also credit borrowers for late and partial payments and forbearances before the pandemic. The Department of Education said the plan will fix “historical failures in the administration of the federal student loan program in which qualifying payments made under IDR plans that should have moved borrowers closer to forgiveness were not accounted for.

I have been pondering ways to rescue young Americans from the trouble and often the waste of the four-year undergraduate college education. Many young people as I recently pointed out are looking for alternatives. But there aren’t very many good ones. In what follows, I propose we put some of these discontented souls in a ship and sail them around the world. It is not entirely a new idea, and before I turn my rudder in that direction, I’d like to survey the horizon. Once, long ago, I was asked by the senior administration of my university to look after the playboy son of a wealthy European family who had decided to enroll in an undergraduate degree program. He was handsome, smooth, reckless and not very bright.

NPR thinks Asian Americans should stand against the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action whether they like it or not. In an article published Sunday, NPR’s race and identity correspondent Sandhya Dirks argued that white conservative activists have used affirmative action to divide Asians from other communities of color for far too long. In fact, Asian students have nothing to lose by embracing the practice.  Per the article, Asian Americans became proxies for white privilege when affirmative action lawsuits brought by white students failed in 2013. To beat the legal system, Edward Blum, the head of Students for Fair Admissions, approached Asian students who he claimed had been hurt by biased college admissions.

Northwestern University’s student government is retaliating against its College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation chapter for hosting James Lindsay, a conservative speaker, by freezing their funding and demanding the university open an investigation that may or may not already be ongoing. In an emergency meeting, the school’s Associated Student Government, or ASG, scrambled to pass a resolution that condemned the two groups for their event flyers, which mimicked the design of one of the guest speaker’s books, by adding a skull and crossbones cartoon onto sunglasses with the Pride flag.

A “Chinese puzzle” in its classic version is a game where you must fit a variety of ill-assorted boxes inside other boxes. The term came to mean any intricate problem, especially one in which what looks like the way forward leads only to new obstacles.   These days, in which we are warned not to use ethnonyms for fear of giving offense, it might be safer to say something like “brainteaser.” But the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to manipulate American society genuinely deserve the old term. The news this past week adds a few curious details to those efforts. Details first; explanations to follow.

Last week Stanford University students elected a new government led by a coalition calling itself “Fun Strikes Back.” You won’t have caught this development in the mainstream news, though it was noticed by the distinctly non-mainstream press — outlets such as Pirate Wires and OutKick. It is, however, a very significant event. One of the most important American universities that has spent a generation groaning under the dour, self-righteous domination of progressive virtue-signaling witnessed a rebellion. Students rose up and demanded a campus social life free from the onerous control of the university’s moralistic busybodies.

If you’re a professor at the University of Memphis, you are required to sit through a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training where you’ll learn that you should send polite emails and what basic words like “skills” and “motivation” mean. And taxpayers get to foot the bill!The taxpayer-funded school’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, requirements, obtained in full by The Spectator, are expected to take twenty-six minutes. Professors learn about every kind of diversity (from diversity of “spiritual practice” to “public assistance status”) except political.

Iowa Wesleyan is the latest. Finlandia University before that. Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences as of January 2024. Many others you have probably not heard of: Stone Academy, Cazenovia College, Bloomfield College. These are colleges and universities that have breathed their last. Most often they are just local stories. A college that has been reduced to a few hundred students and perhaps two dozen faculty members comes to its final, final end.  In most cases, that final end has been dragged out long past the point where there was any realistic hope of saving the institution. As a former college president once told me, “Colleges die hard.” The faculty and administrators rarely have other career options.

When a federal appellate judge speaks at a major law school, he should expect tough questions from a learned audience. He should not expect to be shouted down. When he tries to speak but is heckled, jeered and disrupted, he should expect a university administrator to step in, read the students the riot act and restore order. He shouldn’t expect that administrator to sympathize with the disruptive students and let the trouble continue, as the feckless bureaucrat at Stanford Law School did.   Her shameful behavior is hardly unique. It’s characteristic of mid-level bureaucrats hired to push “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” at universities across the country. They show very little concern for free speech, alternative views or robust debate.

Livvy Dunne is in a “cute lil jammy set Santa got me” when she answers questions from some of her 3.7 million adoring Instagram fans. You’ve probably never heard of her unless you spend a lot of time on TikTok. But twenty-year-old Olivia Paige Dunne is now the highest-valued women's college athlete, with an estimated net worth of $3.3 million. And fair play to her: at twenty years old, I was working for minimum wage as a waitress. I know very little about college sports or gymnasts such as Livvy, but nowadays having 7.1 million TikTok followers, as she does, means something. If she were to never partake in another event, she could still bring in a monthly salary far higher than most. https://www.tiktok.

The latest news in the Hamline University saga is that a large majority of the faculty — seventy-one of ninety-two members — have called on university president Fayneese Miller to resign. Miller had played the principal part in the dismissal of art history instructor Erika López Prater, after Prater had shown two images of the Prophet Mohammed in her online art history class. One image was a slide of a fourteenth-century painting by a Muslim artist; the other was Muslim painting from the sixteenth century in which the Prophet is veiled. Condemnation of the Hamline administration for dismissing Prater has been nearly universal in American higher education.