Not that anybody would miss the sicko, but gay boy porn peddler and quack enema maven Thomas Vernon "Chip" White has not posted at his porn front operation DegreeInfo.com since December 26, 2018, nor has he been seen on the board since August 16, 2019. Insiders report he is not answering emails either. One can only hope that the answer lies at the bottom of Folsom Lake. Worms gotta eat too!

Gone, or just dead? Or who cares?

Quote:Chip was last seen: Aug 16, 2019

Another byproduct of the ChiCom virus: Small schools get crushed, rich schools get richer.  More profits and power for the big players.  Small players decimated, driven out of the market as big and wealthy will wield more power.

Quote:American Colleges Are Headed for a Meltdown
The coronavirus crisis could sink many schools—and leave a windfall for the survivors



Charles Fain Lehman - May 18, 2020 5:00 AM

They've been through riots, protests, and natural disasters—but America's colleges have never seen anything like the financial meltdown the coronavirus is about to bring to their campuses.

The rising wave of health fears, added costs, and vanishing tuition payments could crush small colleges, many of which were already hanging by a financial thread. Those that can weather the crisis—including big-name universities with billions in their bank accounts—in turn stand to gain big from the fallout.

The emptying out of schools and the mass transition to distance learning has already been "the largest all-sector hit that we've ever seen," Jim Hundrieser, a vice president with the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), told the Washington Free Beacon. But the challenges of this spring pale in comparison to the shock many colleges are expecting in the fall, when social distancing measures and a possible second wave could create the most surreal semester ever.

That strangeness, experts project, could in turn cause a massive drop in college revenue. Well-endowed colleges and big research schools have the savings to weather those effects. But many schools are beholden to semi-annual tuition payments, which are about to undergo the biggest shock since the Second World War.

The result could see the shuttering of many universities, particularly small liberal arts colleges, accelerating a trend of rising closures since the Great Recession. At the same time, experts predict, the drop off in demand will be temporary, as a prolonged recession sends millions back to school—resulting in renewed profits, and power, for the schools that make it through to the other side.

When 20 million college students return to school this fall, their campuses will look very different. Schools are considering shortened school years, smaller class sizes, and keeping classes partially virtual. In addition to social distancing measures, Purdue University will use its on-campus laboratory to test students and trace contacts. The California State University system will be entirely online through the fall—its University of California sister schools are expected to follow suit.

These changes will radically alter not just campus life, but schools' balance sheets.

Added safety measures mean more expenses, Brown education professor Susanna Loeb told the Free Beacon. Colleges will need to pay fixed costs, like staff salaries and facilities maintenance, while simultaneously spending more on cleaning, testing, and added space for socially distanced classes and living. At the same time, money will stop flowing in; Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University, said that colleges are expecting a 20 to 30 percent drop in revenue next year.

The net effect will be monumental. Hundrieser, whose organization represents over 1,900 schools, predicted that the crisis "will transform the finances of a lot of institutions, and they'll have to be incredibly fiscally prudent and innovative in order for them to rebound in a year."

"The effects of this crisis are likely to be much larger than the Great Recession," Kelchen said.

Universities, Kelchen explained, have four sources of income: tuition, public funding, on-campus fees (for housing, food services, etc.), and donations/endowments. Those funding streams are not equally distributed, however. Among 768 endowments surveyed by NACUBO, more than half of the value was held by the top 25, just 3 percent of schools.

Research funding is similarly concentrated: Data from the National Science Foundation show that the top 5 percent of recipient universities get over 60 percent of federal research dollars.

Wealthy Harvard or well-funded Johns Hopkins can smooth the coming bumps. But most colleges are dependent on either state budgets that are rapidly drying up, or on tuition and activities payments.

That explains why universities are scrambling to reopen. As Brown University president Christina Paxson wrote in the New York Times, "remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue." Even larger schools are afraid. Cornell University has a $7.3 billion endowment, but its president recently wrote that without a reopening, the school is looking at "hundreds of millions" in losses.

Unfortunately, absent a medical miracle, any reopening will only be partial—which still means substantial losses.

College costs a lot, over $40,000 at the average four-year school. For that much money, students expect the full package: not just classes, but the extracurriculars, parties, and social connections that come with attending a college.

Corona-college will be nothing like that, leaving many education consumers considering other options. Some will just be unwilling to keep forking out for online courses: Georgia resident Alex Popovich told the Free Beacon that his daughter, who is a freshman at William & Mary, is considering taking a semester off or taking classes at a local university in the fall if her school remains online.

Others are worried about in-person education: Thirty-five percent of students in a recent poll said that if colleges reopened in the fall, they would either only attend online (31 percent) or not attend at all (4 percent). Others are indecisive. One in six were considering taking a gap year as of April.

Those numbers might change further as it becomes apparent that many classes will remain online—63 percent of current students say e-learning is worse than in-person classes. Tuition will also be disproportionately affected by declining foreign enrollment, as foreign students generally pay full price.

Even if colleges manage a partial reopening, therefore, they will inevitably take a hit to their revenue. That's a recipe for financial disaster. As Paxson put it, "It’s not a question of whether institutions will be forced to permanently close, it’s how many."

Which colleges will be hardest hit? Kelchen said he was most worried about "small, rural private colleges," where students will be less willing to travel to or live. Losing tuition and housing revenue, Kelchen said, "will be more than these colleges can handle."

Beth Akers, a higher education fellow at the Manhattan Institute, thinks the colleges most at risk are "the expensive institutions that are offering that kind of boutique college experience, but ones that aren't sitting on the pile of cash that could help them weather this kind of storm." Loeb noted that "many small liberal arts schools" were in financial straits even before the crisis began, adding "that difficulty will likely increase."

Will all of this mean the end of college education? Probably not—paradoxically, colleges which weather the crisis may find themselves on the other side with too many students, not too few. If one in six students take a gap year, then the fall of 2021 will see student populations swell.

There will be even more students if the current financial crisis persists and, as experts project, unemployment remains elevated. That's because in a recession, people return to school; college enrollment rose by 13 percent between 2007 and its peak in 2011.

"People like to go back to school" when unemployment is high, education policy expert Preston Cooper told the Free Beacon.
"They say, ‘the labor market's really weak right now, there aren't a lot of job opportunities, this is my opportunity to go back and get that degree I always wanted.'"

Many of those who return will go back for associate's degrees, as enrollment in two-year colleges rose disproportionately during the Great Recession. Online colleges will likely also do well, as they have the infrastructure in place to absorb recession demand immediately. But high-prestige universities will benefit indirectly. The same demand, paired with lower supply, will necessarily lead potential students to attach more value to degrees.

Higher education resembles many other industries facing the coronavirus crisis. The small players look set to be decimated by the coming storm, while the ones that are big and wealthy enough to survive will wield even more power on the other side.

Coming soon. 

Quote:The Federal Government Owns 92 Percent of Student Loans. Why Do Politicians Lie About It?


04/01/2020   Chris Calton

Representatives Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley just introduced the Student Debt Emergency Relief Act to provide student debt relief during the coronavirus pandemic. In reality, the crisis is a pretext to push through student loan forgiveness of as much as $30,000 per borrower. This should hardly come as a shock. Outstanding student debt is bordering on $1.6 trillion, and many Democrats have made debt relief a pillar of their election campaigns. As if their intentions weren’t already transparent enough, Representative James Clyburn publicly admitted that the crisis was “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”

Although many libertarians and conservatives oppose student loan forgiveness, I have previously argued that as long as the federal government owns the loans, there is no ethical dilemma with forgiveness—libertarians, at least, should be eager to cut off any stream of revenue to the government. The caveat for advocates of free market solutions, however, is that the federal government must accompany forgiveness with a repeal of all programs for subsidizing and guaranteeing loans. Anything less, I warned, would be a formula for socializing higher education.

The US Department of Education (DOE) does, indeed, own more than 92 percent of all student debt. Since Congress passed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act in 2010, putting the Department of Education in charge of administering all federal loans, student debt has more than doubled. Given that these loans are exempt from bankruptcy laws, offer guaranteed access, and target people whose brains are still developing, it would not be unreasonable to describe them as predatory.


Source: "Measure One Private Student Loan Report," June 18, 2019.

And this is exactly the word used by Representative Pressley when announcing the bill, but her full statement seems misleading. Millions of borrowers are “facing financial ruin,” she said in her official press release, especially those “who were preyed upon by the predatory for-profit college industry.” Her language isn’t unique. As a pillar of her presidential campaign, Elizabeth Warren promised to “crack down on for-profit institutions, and eliminate predatory lending”—conveniently omitting the federal government’s role in “predatory lending” while also scapegoating for-profit colleges, which are already on the decline and only make up about 13 percent of total college enrollment.

Seth Frotman was the student loan ombudsman for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for seven years before he resigned in protest of the Trump administration’s failure to protect against “predatory lenders” and “for-profit colleges”—a remarkable act of political theater for somebody who started the job at the very outset of the Department of Education’s amplified role in student lending. As quoted on Pressley’s webpage for the Relief Act, Frotman recently complained that “student loan companies are shutting their doors and turning off their phones in response to the coronavirus pandemic, cutting off borrowers from access to critical protections.” Following the same rhetorical strategy, he neglects to mention that these “student loan companies” are not the lenders, but collections agencies that work exclusively on Education Department contracts. Conveniently, these are the organizations that borrowers deal with, rather than the DOE, reinforcing the misconception that their student loan debts are owned by private companies.

It’s one thing to find these deceptions in political rhetoric, but it’s another thing entirely to see how these myths manifest in the Student Debt Emergency Relief Act. Although media outlets are emphasizing the $30,000 per borrower debt cancellation provision, this would only take place after the coronavirus crisis is over. For the duration of any national emergency, the bill stipulates, the federal government would make the minimum monthly payment each borrower is responsible for.

But why not simply freeze payments instead of pointlessly having the DOE pay itself money? Certainly the loan agencies—whose entire existence is the product of government graft—stand to benefit, claiming the associated fees for processing the payments. This would essentially make the payment process a make-work jobs program.

But the true beneficiary of this bill, it seems, would be the federal education bureaucracy. The bill states that for “implementation and coordination” of this policy, the DOE is authorized to appropriate $50 million from the Treasury, in addition to the total funds necessary to service the loans and provide the $30,000 in cancelled debt per person. Since the DOE owns the debt—and the bill does not apply to the 7 percent of debt that is privately owned—it requires zero funds to simply cancel it or freeze payments. However, by maintaining the pretense that the government has to pay the loans, the DOE can claim Treasury funds as a de facto budget increase.

There are 42.8 million people who still have outstanding federal loans. At the maximum cancellation of $30,000 per person, paid from the Treasury, the Department of Education would receive nearly $1.3 trillion. Many borrowers, of course, owe less than $30,000, so the true total is impossible to know from publicly available data, but it makes little difference. The 2019 budget for the DOE was about $66 billion, so the Relief Act would provide an enormous increase in revenue—all undoubtedly funded through inflationary borrowing.

The proponents of the bill are selling it as student loan relief and debt cancellation, but they’re really engineering a tenfold (or greater!) budget increase for the Department of Education, which almost certainly will be put toward the nationalization of higher education. It makes no provision for paying for these appropriations, but this will ultimately fall to the taxpayers, including the very people that this relief is purported to help. If student loan cancellation were really the goal, the DOE could simply forgive the debts of existing federal loans—as is the prerogative of any creditor—and shut down the loan program, which would almost exactly balance the loss of revenues from loan payments. Instead, we are presented a bill that will inevitably impose massive burdens on the average citizen, only cancel a portion of federal loan debt, and leave in place all the policies that created the debt crisis to begin with.

Even if the bill dies, these rhetorical strategies will not. Politicians will continue to pretend that student debt is the result of private lenders and for-profit colleges, just as they pretend that private prisons are the cause of mass incarceration. These are genuine issues with real-world consequences, so the outcry for relief and reform is understandable. But we should be wary of any politician who deliberately and dishonestly presents capitalism as the cause of government-created problems.

I was bored and the courses were free so I took American History I & II.  Funny how history has changed so much since the last time I took it 40 years ago.  I didn't know that the whole point of settlement of America from 1492 to 2020 was to abuse black people and nothing else.  It was odd the last time I took it from a communist prof in a yarmulke but this is nuts.  The other thing that's nuts is the amount of semi-literate black and female literature they stuff into an American Literature course.  Universities are now re-education camps.  Why do people put up with it?

That was disgusting, Nancy Pelosi tearing up her liquor bill in Congress.

Quote:Preventing Suicide by Higher Education

Arthur Milikh

From the birth of the modern conservative movement, dissidents concerned with civic and liberal education have tried almost everything to reshape America's universities: from refusing to donate to their alma maters (as William F. Buckley prescribed), to funding tenure-track positions, forming independent centers on campuses to host outside speakers, organizing external supplementary seminars to make up for what students do not get in the classroom, and creating new academic departments. Despite 70 years of increasingly sophisticated efforts, conservatives are now begging on many campuses merely to be heard.

America's universities have been progressivism's most important asset, its crown jewel. For over half a century, they have served as the left's R&D headquarters and the intellectual origin or dissemination point for the political and moral transformation of the nation, especially through the sexual revolution and the identity-politics revolution. Universities have trained the new elites who have taken society's helm and now set its tone through the other institutions thoroughly dominated by the left: the mainstream press, mass entertainment, Fortune 500s, and tech companies. Universities have also brought to rural and suburban America these moral revolutions, converting generations of young people to their cause. Universities are arguably the most important institution in modern democracy — no other institution has such power to determine the fate of democracy, for good or ill.

Universities were meant be the one fixed place in democratic society insulated from the ceaseless motion of democratic life, with its petty passions, consumption, and moral and intellectual fashions. They were meant to serve as the guardian of the mind and its greatest fruits. In previous eras, segments of society (especially the clergy and the aristocracy) were devoted to protecting learning and a tradition of books. But democracy does not support such classes, and it was originally hoped that the universities would assume this role. Regrettably, they are no longer animated by their original purpose of serving republican self-government or the freedom of the mind. As such, they must be treated as political entities.

That the freedom of speech is under attack on many campuses should not be surprising, given that the freedom of the mind, of which speech is the expression, is rarely understood as their purpose any longer. Without that purpose, most American universities no longer serve the public good for which they were created and for which they continue to be publicly funded. Their transformation, which in turn has led to the transformation of the nation, has taken place with the unwitting assistance of American taxpayers — and amounts to defrauding the public. If citizens are compelled to pay for others to go to college, it should be to the benefit of the entire nation — forming good citizens and advancing useful sciences, rather than teaching the rising generation that the nation is irredeemably evil. Taxpayers have funded the research, bankrolled the student loans (including generous forgiveness programs), and allowed the universities and their enormous endowments to operate without paying taxes. These funding sources are the operational life blood of universities, but they can no longer be justified. In fact, it seems likely that the nation would be better off if the vast majority of America's more than 3,000 colleges and universities closed down.

An executive order signed by President Trump on March 21, 2019, gives administrators in 12 executive-branch agencies that issue research grants broad discretion to withhold funding from universities that suppress "free inquiry" and "undermine learning." This is a worthwhile half-step to chastening them. But given where things stand, bolder, more aggressive action is needed. If the universities are going to be rebuilt, only external force, rather than pleading or slight policy modifications, will work. Success in this could bring generational change.

THE PURPOSE AND THE PROBLEM

Modern democracies have a special need for universities in a way that other regimes do not. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theater concludes with a scene from Sparta where three generations — the frail, those in full bloom, and the young — sing together a song whose verses articulate the place of each generation in their ancestral order. Such a people does not need modern universities, as their existence is ordered by their traditions, laws, and gods. Our Enlightenment-informed republic, however, requires the production of citizens in accord with it. We cannot be a nation of war-like men guided by ancestral gods; we need citizens capable of commerce, modern science, rights-based self-rule, and political prudence. Perhaps most critically, our universities must actively correct certain vices stemming from the nature of our regime, seeking to forfend the mass production of souls modeled on mass tastes, suited mainly for intellectual and moral conformity, consumption, and industriousness alone.

The first traditional purpose of our colleges and universities is civic education, which aims to preserve the nation by creating citizens suited to it. Through civic education, citizens are prepared for political self-rule by developing rational habits of mind, the capacity for forming political judgments, and a moral character capable of self-restraint and toleration. Civic education also teaches reverence for something beyond the very strong forces silently guiding democracies, especially public opinion, with its overwhelming capacity to determine all tastes, objects of worship, and moral horizons. Civic education thus attempts to preserve images of human greatness against the sea of intellectual and moral conformity, while instilling at least a modicum of reverence and affection for the nation and the tradition upon which it is built — its history, its greatest individuals, and its contributions. Individuals are thus trained to become parts of a whole. Our natural-rights republic does not require mindless assent but can (and should) be defended rationally.

The second purpose of our universities is modern natural science. The origin of this goal is found in the works of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. Modern natural science, distinct from ancient science, is concerned with two different ends according to its inventors. The first is unlocking the inner secrets of material nature in order to increase human powers and thereby relieve man's estate. The second is articulating a comprehensive opinion of the material world and thereby ridding man's mind of reliance on natural and conventional prejudices.

The scientific enterprise requires large institutions, public respectability, and the employment of a multitude of minds that would otherwise be badly used in what Descartes calls scholastic "disputations." Moreover, because of the brevity of a single life, Descartes writes, "one man alone cannot perform all the experiments that can be useful." Generations of scientists must accumulate and build up scientific knowledge in order to penetrate more deeply the laws of matter. And since no one man is sufficiently wealthy to take on this expensive enterprise, entire nations must be engaged.

The power of the new nations created on the basis of Cartesian and Baconian Enlightenment depends on the new power of science. Alexander Hamilton, second only to Benjamin Franklin in his understanding of this aspect of the modern project, discusses in the Federalist Papers the extent to which industrialization and commerce, based on science, will be America's main comparative advantage against other nations, since conquest and empire, which contradict the natural-rights teaching, are not feasible sources of wealth and power for republics.

Science applied to industry is for Hamilton both defensive and offensive: It compels other traditional nations to compete on America's terms — scientific and commercial — a battleground on which we have great advantages. It is defensive because the effectual truth of science and industry will weaken other nations' attachments to traditional pieties, which can inflict harm on us. Moreover, since the genie of modern science is now out of the bottle, and other nations, some of them enemies, possess it and threaten to out-compete us, the United States has no choice but to succeed in this area.

But modern science is not and should not be the university's highest goal. In important ways, modern science exists uneasily alongside both civic education and liberal education, the highest goals of the university. Liberal education is concerned primarily with philosophical self-knowledge, which consists in confronting our own contradictions and errors: the prejudices that come from our own times (like the authoritative opinions that order the lives and self-understanding of most), and the prejudices given to all by nature. This purpose includes the quiet questioning of the modern scientific account of material nature as the final, comprehensive view. In this sense, the university's duty is to resist becoming merely utilitarian; that is, devoting itself wholly to serving the public's needs or demands, and thereby becoming its flatterers.

Today, these three ends are either corrupted or on their way to corruption in the great majority of America's universities. In their confusion about or open rebellion against these ends, America's universities too often create students in the opposite vein: ideologues with technical skills, despisers of tradition without insight (not to mention wisdom), or scientists without perspective. These problems are hardly new and have been the centerpiece of the conservative critique of higher education for more than half a century. What is new, however, is the thoroughness of the corruption, the impossibility at this point of changing course through conventional means, and the extent of the pernicious effects of these institutions on the nation as a whole.

DO OUR UNIVERSITIES UNDERMINE THE COMMON GOOD?

Allan Bloom's remarkable 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, is still unmatched in its treatment of the problem of America's universities. According to Bloom, beginning in the 1940s but blossoming in the 1960s, many American academics superficially and gleefully appropriated the tenets of Friedrich Nietzsche and his followers (especially Freud and Weber) in adopting a thin relativism suitable for democracy. Moral and intellectual relativism, these academics argued, would lead to a tolerant and open social order called multiculturalism. But relativism had two effects. The first was the thinning out of all cultures and opinions to make them serve the genuine goals that guided these academics: moral permissiveness and a conflict-free existence. The second, unanticipated, though truer outgrowth of relativism — which yielded the opposite of its first goal — was the elevation of "commitment," or unyielding moral attachment in the absence of an intelligible justification of its truth.

The contemporary manifestation of commitment is called "identity," and it is expressed especially through race and sexuality. Identity, as it is broadly understood today, is an unfalsifiable, self-created opinion of oneself or one's group that others must recognize, accommodate, and celebrate. Identity has become sacred, placed beyond questioning or criticism. But the sacredness of identity applies only to allegedly oppressed or marginalized groups. These are allowed to possess an identity, while the alleged oppressors must not only be denied an identity but must perpetually atone for the oppression stemming from it. Herbert Marcuse's goal of getting universities to teach that "history was the development of oppression" has not only succeeded — it is now publicly financed.

These doctrines stand in stark contrast to natural rights, the foundational teaching of America. Natural rights mean that human beings belong to a common humanity, not to an identity group. As such, all human beings have the same rights, which can be grasped rationally. Since all human beings possess rights, a political common good is possible, as is mutual understanding and rational persuasion. Deep commitments, to the contrary, imply real conflict.

A generation after Bloom's writing, identity fanaticism, having first gained institutional support in the universities, and now in the Democratic Party, has turned to demanding conformity and punishing dissenters. The next logical outgrowth of identity politics is suppression of free speech, as speech is the expression of a free, questioning mind. An example of this fanaticism is captured in a letter written by Williams College students to faculty members who supported the adoption of the University of Chicago statement in defense of free speech on campuses. For these students, enforcing the freedom of speech is merely a reflection of "white fragility" and "discursive violence," and is thus primarily supported by "white faculty," the oppressor group. This letter reflects beliefs widely held by faculty and students across the nation's universities. If universities once understood their purpose as seeking intellectual clarity, now rational questioning of identity theories is itself an act of violence.

In fact, raising the basic contradictions of dangerous and anti-republican theories in the spirit of honest intellectual inquiry has become impossible on most campuses — perhaps the only place in American society where such thinking could take place. How it is, for example, that deeply meaningful identity can emerge from an act of will remains unanswered. Nor can one ask why marginalization itself leads to a special knowledge of justice, rather than to distortion; and if marginalization grants access to the truth about justice, marginalization would then imply superiority in terms of human goods like moral purity and knowledge. Nor can one ask how meaningful identity can be present during the struggle against identity-denying oppression without identity being defined exclusively in terms of opposition and therefore lacking positive content. Finally, as these doctrines are applied to politics, should one conclude that the rights of the oppressor group should be taken away?

Without the moderating force of reason, fanatical identity attachments often terminate in anger and the desire for punishment. Since rational inquiry (or perhaps religious belief) could have once openly moderated these passions, in its absence, the new identities become these passions, and come to dominate the nation. The net effect is fanatical group attachments without a common good.

Writing in the late 1980s, Bloom's book presumed a high concentration of scholars devoted enough to seeking the truth in their fields — scholars whose minds were sufficiently open to the value of truth — so as to care about liberal education. These regrettably have largely disappeared. And Bloom did not witness the radicalization of university administrators, beginning in the early 2000s, who have doubled down on the identity-politics project. Indeed, the purpose of such university administrators, now found on nearly all campuses, is to forcefully secure the dogmas of identity politics and spread them to the nation by teaching students obedience to them.

Not only students' minds but their characters are formed by these new doctrines. Liberal education should cultivate the capacity for self-criticism, the opposite of self-satisfaction, which coheres with republican citizenship or opens them to philosophical self-knowledge. But teaching that all of history is merely oppression has the opposite effect: It creates the sense that the allegedly liberated individual or group is somehow on the cusp of history, and therefore possesses deep knowledge and insight, and it promises that rebellion leads to inner wholeness and honor. This spirit forecloses the capacity for subordinance to higher reason or belief in a political common good.

Moreover, asserting that human happiness is gained through non-rational identity creation — rather than self-exploration, attachment to one's nation, family, or romantic love — creates no wisdom for life, let alone philosophic wisdom, and leaves many young adherents confused and unhappy. Future citizens, statesmen, and free minds cannot emerge from such teachings. For instance, neither love nor families form as a result of teachings about a global patriarchal conspiracy against women. What forms instead is a war between the sexes, an ethic of using and being used, which, in turn, fails to form the virtues of character that are the groundwork from which love grows. Having destroyed any sense of belonging to a just order, what remains is anger and vengeance, the satisfaction of which determines one's self-respect. Students are often left to understand that there is no nation, love, or even gender — only open self-creation and, ironically, dogmatic conformity to this doctrine.

Institutions that aggressively advance such teachings and form young people on such a model are intensely hostile to the core ideals of American life. And such institutions should not be supported with public funds. Universities' tax-exempt status, we might recall, is granted only on account of the promise that they serve the public good. By this criterion, it is time to reconsider that status. The condition of our universities has degenerated to such a degree that action is required. Those still concerned with civic and liberal education have two specific levers of power at their disposal at the federal level: Federal research money can be revoked, and student loans can be returned to the private domain.

RESEARCH FUNDING

A nation that publicly funds institutions must obtain something beneficial from them. America surely benefits from some of the scientific research and discoveries produced by our best universities. But the sciences give many of America's flagship universities public respectability and thereby allow them to hold hostage public funding that supports their other, anti-republican, elements.

Total research funding given to universities is around $40 billion annually. Despite this large sum, there is currently no accurate and reliable publicly accessible online database that accounts for all money issued to all universities from all government granting agencies. Detailed designations of the money, to whom it goes, and exactly how it is distributed, are difficult to trace.

Moreover, since money is fungible, it is not unreasonable to suspect that a portion of these federal funds goes toward the administrators that serve as the ground forces of the identity-politics revolution. Nationwide, the number of university administrators increased by roughly 60% between 1993 and 2009. And universities collect overhead fees from research grants: The base rate averages 52% nationwide, and is far higher at some places, including 67.5% at Yale University. Distribution of these overhead fees is not publicly traceable, though one can presume they support the diversity administration, among other uses.

Just as identity politics has undermined civic and liberal education, so too are taxpayers funding "research" that may undermine science. For instance, as Elizabeth Harrington has documented, the University of California, Berkeley, received $1,999,886 from the National Science Foundation to "zero in on the ways in which students' stigmatized identities may be particularly sensitive to structure and belonging" in STEM concentrations. The University of New Hampshire received $999,752 from the National Science Foundation to "create systemic institutional change by scaling up the levels of awareness about and interventions used to address implicit bias in scientific research and learning settings." California Polytechnic State University received $570,890 from the National Science Foundation to systematically conceptualize "how labor segregation may relate to an ideological hierarchy between the social and technical dimensions [in Engineering and Computer Science] and influence cultural exclusions along intersecting vectors of gender and race." Iowa State University and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University received $368,695 from the National Science Foundation to study building "a gender and race microaggressions psychometric scale" that offers "An Intersectional Perspective to Studying Microaggressions in Engineering Programs." Similar examples abound. While it is easy to snicker at such studies (the costs of which amount to relatively little in the larger scheme of federal spending), one detects their underlying aim: enforcing identity politics in the sciences. The moral purification of the sciences may become more important than scientific progress itself.

Should the identity revolution fully impose itself on the sciences — among the last places in universities where the freedom of the mind still excels and is celebrated — they will wither on the branch as have the social sciences and the humanities, with untold losses to our national wealth, power, and prestige. This corrosion will be slow and hidden from the public eye, but likely irreversible once it is visible to all. Tocqueville foresaw this possibility and used the image of China as a warning to America. The Chinese, he says, long ago had refined arts and sciences:

Quote:The nation was industrial; most of the scientific methods had been preserved within it; but science itself no longer existed....The Chinese, in following the trail of their fathers, had forgotten the reasons that had directed them. They still made use of the formula without seeking the sense of it; they kept the instrument and no longer possessed the art of modifying and reproducing it. Therefore the Chinese could not change anything. They had to renounce improvement.

We should not assume that science will prosper forever in the absence of the right intellectual conditions.

What suicidal nation would continue to publicly fund institutions that intentionally or even semi-consciously undermine the strength and unity of the society that protects them? To set an example, President Trump (or future presidents) could use his March 21st executive order to remove federal research funds from a single university for a violation of students' freedom of speech. That money could then be given to a university that does fulfill its public purpose, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to use one example. The federal government could even pay to transfer the laboratories and scientists — or fund the creation of new national laboratories.

While this sounds radical, and although there is disagreement among conservatives, it is less radical than tolerating what is already taking place. While it is bad to interrupt scientific research in such a way, it is worse and more dangerous to maintain institutions working to sink the nation while hiding behind the prestige of science. The goal, again, is to make universities serve their fundamental purpose, which at this point can be done only by rebuilding them after they are significantly weakened.

STUDENT LOANS

America's taxpayers also continue to fund the corruption of the nation by footing the bill for student loans. Federal student-loan funding pays for the indoctrination of students and builds up the wealth, reach, and prestige of these institutions. Cumulative outstanding student-loan debt currently sits at over $1.5 trillion. Today, the federal government originates and services 90% of all student loans.

As the quality of education gets worse, the price of college tuition increases. It has grown almost eight times faster than wages over the last three decades, and there is no natural limit in sight. Will the government resist lending to students when, in 15 years, universities offer an even worse education, on campuses with even larger diversity infrastructures, where the cost is $150,000 a year?  In no reasonable world is money lent in such a fashion. But currently the U.S. government, which represents American citizens, does not say "no" to students — no matter how frivolous or corrupting the education they will receive, and regardless of how underqualified the students may be. The present arrangement of limitless lending has become a kind of scheme for universities. They slowly build up their administrative staff and their faux-educational facilities, thereby falsely justifying rising costs, all to create students hostile to the nation.

America's taxpayers lend out money to many students who simply are not suited for college. Among the incoming class of 2010 entering four-year institutions, the four-year graduation rate was 40.6%, the five-year rate 55.8%, and the six-year rate 59.8%. At some universities, the six-year graduation rate was below 10%. Though the decent goal behind allowing everyone entrance into college has not been achieved, the universities have greatly profited. But the students, for whom universities have deflated the entrance requirements with a view to their own enrichment, leave without a degree, indebted, and often humiliated. Since the university does not hold the debt, it has an incentive to let almost anyone in, and thereby gives students the impression that they can succeed, even if they are clearly unqualified.

The federal government must get out of the lending business, which means a return to the pre-1965 system where private lenders fund the education of those whom they believe will be able to repay their loans. Specifically, Congress should end the direct-loan program and the PLUS loan program, which provide federal loans to graduate students and the parents of undergraduate students. It should also, as was the case before 1965, not guarantee private loans. No private lender would give money for a degree in grievance studies that costs $300,000.

One solution for preserving liberal education for the best students is currently being employed by Purdue University. Purdue lends money directly to students whom it believes can successfully complete their educational programs; the university therefore has a stake in the students' success. That Yale's $30 billion endowment goes untouched while students borrow from taxpayers is unconscionable.

If we were to end the federal lending programs, as fewer and fewer graduate from colleges, the employment ecosystem and America's moral horizon would change for the better. Most practical degree programs can return to apprenticeship models. One does not need a four-year college degree to pass a Certified Public Accounting exam. Furthermore, the shortage of working-class labor in America is used to lobby for the importation of immigrants. Few Americans want to hang sheetrock after attending college. While having learned very little in classes, they have, however, often acquired a classist snobbery (and massive debt) that looks down on such labor — even if the wages for it might be higher than for the white-collar jobs to which they aspire.

RENEWAL BY FIRE

Reforms like these would be catastrophic for key elements of the existing model of higher education in America. But they could be enormously helpful to forms of higher education that actually serve the nation and fulfill the purpose of the university.

Addicted as they are to federal funding, the administrators of our flagship universities may become more obliging, while mid-tier schools, having enriched themselves for too long from student loans, will close their doors.

If large parts of the current system collapse, donors can regenerate colleges in new forms. From the ashes, the best faculty could be plucked to teach in new institutions devoted to liberal education. Hillsdale College, for example, has raised nearly $1.3 billion over the past 20 years, entirely from private funds, and it does not accept federal student aid. It is likely that such private funding will be found to buy bankrupted colleges in order to make them anew.

The purpose of such proposals is not punitive. It is simple sense. Universities that spread poisonous doctrines no longer believe in the purpose of the university. While it is their right to disagree with this purpose, they should not be the beneficiaries of public funds. No society should be expected to subsidize its own corrosion.

Elizabeth Warren looks like she has a chance. She's loonier than Hillary.? Nice video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7FyyVwYEds

Everyone's favorite Miss Asperger 2019, Gruesome Greta, sailed across the Atlantic so as to not use carbon but her crew flew back as she likely will because she now has no crew.  Her flying alone would have released much less carbon but environmental types are normally hypocrites.  And I bet she threw her turds over the side and likely choked a dolphin.

https://ijr.com/thunbergs-sailing-team-w...ndly-trip/

Treble damages and attorney fees. This is what happens when normal people get a load of what is happening on Marxist college campuses. Turtleboy had the best take I saw:

Quote:Dumbass Oberlin College Students Cost The School $33 Million For Destroying A Family Owned Business They Called Racist After A Whiny Bitch Got Caught Stealing



Oberlin College's most famous alumni is Lena Dunham. Nuff said. The private Ohio school also made headlines when their students demanded that the college pay them to protest, protested over cultural appropriation when they served Asian food and fried chicken in the cafeteria, and demanded that the college replace grades below C with a "conversation" with the professor because Karl Marx was racist.

Well, they're back in the news again, and this time it's because a local business called Gibson's Bakery hit back against an Oberlin College outrage mob that falsely labeled them as racist and destroyed their business (which had been around since 1885), and now the college has to pay them up to $33 million:

An Ohio jury has ordered Oberlin College to pay $11 million to a bakery which said it was libeled and wrongfully accused of racially profiling students. Next Tuesday there will be a separate punitive damages hearing which could be a double award (meaning tripling the $11 million to $33 million). According to our reporter in the Courtroom, the jury awarded $11 million. Here are the details: Allyn W. Gibson was awarded $3 million, David Gibson $5.8 million, Gibson Bros. $2,274,500. The case stems from the November 2016 arrests of three black Oberlin students at Gibson's Bakery and market near the college's campus in Oberlin, Ohio. One student, Jonathan Aladin, was accused of attempted robbery for allegedly trying to "steal wine or otherwise illegally obtain wine" from the bakery, according to a defamation lawsuit. He would eventually confess in a written statement to buying alcohol illegally. Two other suspects, Cecelia Whettston and Endia J. Lawrence, were arrested and accused of misdemeanor assault, court documents state.

After that, Oberlin staff members tried to discredit the family-owned bakery, the lawsuit says. Oberlin College staff "including deans and professors and students engaged in demonstrations in front of Gibson's Bakery following the arrests of the three students," the lawsuit stated. The suit also said Oberlin Vice President and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo and other college staff members "handed out hundreds of copies" of a flier to the community and the media stating that Gibson's Bakery and its owners racially profiled and discriminated against the three students.

The court documents include a copy of the flier, which included the words "DON'T BUY." "This is a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION," the flier read, according to the lawsuit. The flier also listed 10 of the bakery's competitors and urged customers to shop there instead.

Then in November 2016, the lawsuit stated, Oberlin College said it severed its business ties with Gibson's Bakery. The shop had provided baked goods for the school's dining services through a third-party company. While those business ties were reinstated three months later, the shop had already suffered severe consequences, the suit said. The combined effects of the "defamation, boycotts, demonstrations, and refusal to do business with Gibson's Bakery was having a devastating effect on Gibson's Bakery and the Gibson family," the lawsuit stated.











Oops!

This is so satisfying in so many ways. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- there is nothing worse than being labeled as a racist in 2019. You're better off being known as the guy who diddles the neighborhood kids, because at least he has a "disease." Once the mob has arbitrarily decided that you're a racist they will not stop until you are destitute. They've been doing this for years, a lot of the time on college campuses, and someone finally had the balls to stand up and say enough is enough.

This is Elijah Aladin, the student who got caught stealing two bottles of wine, hit the clerk's cell phone out of his hand when the clerk attempted to take a picture of him, and then assaulted him, along with two female students, inside and outside the store.



He of course played the "I'm an oppressed and marginalized person" card and got everyone at the school riled up that he was the victim here. According to his LinkedIn bio he attended Phillips Academy in Andover, a very expensive boarding school.

 

Very oppressed.

Now watch the body cam footage from the incident, and see for yourself what the whiniest bitch in the history of imaginary oppression did when the cops got there and found him on top of the clerk.









The best part was around 1:50 when he says, "they're going to kill me," and the white savior lady urging the cops not to arrest him says, "No, he will not kill you." Spit out my coffee at that one.

"Why do you think you're going to get killed?"

"Because I'm scared of police! I'm a black man in custody of police."

"Well I haven't hurt anyone in my life."

"I'm soo scared!!"

Either he's so sheltered and brainwashed that he believes that cops automatically kill every black person they arrest, or he's been trained to never take personal responsibility, blame other people for his own failures, and always play the race card when in doubt. I'm going with the latter.

That spoiled, rich, privileged little shitstain, is everything that is wrong with victimhood culture today. He tried to steal from a local family owned business that's been there since 1885. He then assaulted the guy who he was stealing from, at a store where margins are probably razor thin. After being arrested he acted like he was the victim and asked why the store owner wasn't arrested for defending his property and himself. And instead of the college expelling three ungrateful brats who attacked an institution that has been a business partner of the college for decades, they paid for their lawyers and led a protest outside of the business.

Of course it didn't help the school for the lawsuit when all three of the defendants plead guilty, and issued strongly worded statements saying that Gibson's wasn't racist, and that the students were in the wrong.



Here's video from a day of the protests. Lots of white guil[t] laden 19 year old white kids feeling good about themselves:











Feelin cute. Might destroy a family owned business and in turn cost my college $33 million in order to feel good about myself later. IDK.

Almost every kid the reporter from a MSM outlet tried to interview said no. That about sums up how stupid these idiots are. They're really good at writing "black lives matter" on a cardboard sign, but when you ask them to actually articulate why they're protesting on behalf of three criminals none of them know what to say.

But those are just dumbass college kids, and that's the nature of the beast. The real problem here, just like at 99% of colleges in this country, are the adults who brainwash these kids to think like this, and then encourage them to act like this. And justice was served on Friday when Dean Meredith Raimondo was found guilty along with the school itself. According to witnesses she was at the protest and facilitated it, rather than being the adult and reminding the kids that Elijah Aladin is a thief, not a victim. We know this because a black employee at the store testified against her:

Clarence "Trey" James, an African-American who had worked at the store since 2013, first denied that any racism existed in either the store's treatment of its customers, or how he has been treated. "Never, not even a hint," James said. "Zero reason to believe, zero evidence of that."

James said he had moved to Oberlin from Cleveland to have a better family life for his young daughter. He is a single-father of a teenager, and he said that he and his daughter were invited over Dave Gibson's house for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.

James said he was working at the store during the protests and could see Raimondo directly outside the front door, as he was working the cash register near the front windows and store entrance. Raimondo has claimed she was merely at the protest because it was her administrative duty to oversee the safety of the students and to keep the event "lawful." She has repeatedly said she was not an "active participant."

But James said he saw Raimondo "standing directly in front of the store with a megaphone, orchestrating some of the activities of the students. It appeared she was the voice of authority. She was telling the kids what to do, where to go. Where to get water, use the restrooms, where to make copies."

The copy making was needed to get more flyers for the students to pass out. These flyers said Gibson's had a long history of racial profiling, had assaulted the shoplifting students, encouraged a boycott of Gibson's, and gave a list of other stores to shop with.

James said Raimondo was taking part in the distribution of these flyers. "She had a stack of them," James testified, "and while she was talking on the bullhorn, she handed out half of them to a student who then went and passed them out."







When you hire a woman who doesn't understand that she looks like last call trash at the Blarney when she wears a sleeveless dress knowing that she has a full tat on your left bicep, this is what happens.

Oh, and if you're gonna trash a locally owned business and might get sued because of it, you should probably make sure you don't use your school email address:

When Roger Copeland, an Oberlin College professor of theater and dance (he is "emeritus" status now) wrote a letter to the campus newspaper soon after the protests ended, and criticized how the school was treating Gibson's in the letter, Jones sent a text message in caps saying, "FUCK ROGER COPELAND."

"Fuck him," Raimondo responded in a message. "I'd say unleash the students if I wasn't convinced this needs to be put behind us."

"Fuck him." This woman is what happens when white trash gets a Masters Degree in social justice.

Other administrators called the police liars:

Jones responded that the "Gibsons' hands were not clean" and that the incident with Allyn D. Gibson was "not an isolated incident, but a pattern." He also said the police report on the incident was "bullshit."

While another one physically blocked someone from taking pictures of students protesting in a public area:

McDaniel said he started taking pictures with his cell phone, and a young man came up to him and started blocking his phone with flyers in his hand. McDaniel said he kept moving and the man moved with him, blocking his ability to take picture over and over. "I'm with the college," the man answered when the former Oberlin College police chief asked him why he was blocking his ability to take pictures. McDaniel testified he found out later the man hounding him over picture taking was Julio Reyes, associate director of the school's multi-resource center.

"I told him 'I'm going to just going to wait until your silly ass leaves and [I'll] start taking pictures again without you trying to block me,'" McDaniel testified. "He answered that he was going to come back when I wasn't looking and key my car."

The school did nothing when students published this hilarious op-ed in the school sanctioned newspaper, blaming the Gibson family for pursuing a lawsuit against a school that had caused them financial harm by ending a business relationship because they sided with the thief instead of the victim.

News of the lawsuit -- which is meant to bully and intimidate College students, faculty, and staff, and can be read in full on the Review's website -- was relayed to the College community almost exactly one year after students initiated a protest against Gibson's Bakery following a violent altercation at the store involving College students.

"When people stand up for themselves and call out my bullshit it's bullying."

In reading the legal documents filed by the Gibson family, it is clear that their intention is to provoke an explosive, emotional response from students.

"Holding people responsible for damages is provoking."

The documents also have racist undertones that further expose the core reasons for the lawsuit. The Gibsons have no interest in finding any resolution to this conflict -- instead, they seek to assert their prideful moral superiority over the College, which they view as biased and discriminatory.

"Due process is racist."

Didn't help that they praised the Dean being sued too:

We should also lend our support to Dean Raimondo, who works tirelessly to support students. Even when students do not agree with her, her compassion and commitment to us never wavers.

The school responded to the lawsuit by canceling their contract with the bakery, which made them look a million times worse to the jury.

Let this be a lesson to virtue signaling SJWs -- when you get woke, you go broke. The students in your school are powerless. Their protests mean nothing. They are gone after 3-4 years, but you and the local business have to keep a healthy relationship. Don't let some privileged queefs running up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt put you in financial ruin because you're too gutless to stand up for them. Be the adult, expel kids who get arrested, and side with victims instead of criminals.