Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
Making the world safe for Jews in an age of skyrocketing antisemitism isn’t something American universities tend to believe they need to stand for. In a review of 24 major college and university diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, the advocacy group Stop Antisemitism found that only two of them had any specific programming or … Read more
The managerial class props up the devalued diploma. Only a paradigm shift can end the grift. Although taken for granted by millions of Americans, the choice to obtain a college degree mystifies economists. Teenagers making the first significant financial decision of their lives are paraded through prospective student tours—essentially timeshare presentations for minors—and finally make … Read more
On one level, it’s obvious: If someone asked you to pay $60,000 in tuition to stay at your parents’ home and take in some video lectures and sit through daily Zoom seminars, would you buy? Some of us would pay to get out of such an arrangement — forget about paying for the “privilege” of … Read more
COVID-19 hysteria has done more to embolden the power-mad than a massive terrorist attack. Once content to whisper among themselves about the danger of “too much freedom” (any amount, in the final analysis, being too much for them), they slither out of the shadows now to champion every new idea or policy that treats people … Read more
Universities are dying. They have long ceased being the best way to gain knowledge. More recently, the degrees they confer have ceased being the best way to signal employability; the only exception being jobs that legally require them. (Such jobs are increasingly stodgy, unattractive, bureaucratic, backwards, and subservient to tyrannical governments). The final leg universities … Read more
The white upper middle class is deranging American politics. We should have seen it coming. In 2010, America’s last famous novelist, Jonathan Franzen, launched on the reading public Freedom, his tale of a striving family headed by Walter and Patty Berglund. They were gentrifiers in St. Paul, Minn. The paterfamilias was a lawyer at the … Read more
The concept of inflation (the depreciation of purchasing power of a specific currency) applies to other goods besides money. Inflation is related to the Law of Supply and Demand. As the supply of a commodity increases, the value decreases. Conversely, as the good becomes more scarce, the value of the commodity increases. This same concept … Read more
I am not radically opposed to letting smart people into universities, though I think the process has got out of hand. That to the “best” universities, only the smartest should apply, is now generally accepted. The flip side of this is that self-styled “smart people” are uniquely welcome in these universities, which become, as it … Read more
The MBA isn’t what it used to be. Over the past decade or two, the MBA has seen a dramatic evolution. Once a “must have” for executive management positions, it was downgraded to a “nice to have” for those privileged enough to take a two-year workforce sabbatical for a full-time MBA. And for tech giants, … Read more
[P]rograms offering educational doctorates don’t exist to shape scholars who will contribute to knowledge. They exist because they are cash cows for universities, selling easy degrees to people who want to have that “doctor” appellation, but even more because such “advanced” degrees usually mean automatic pay increases. Supposedly, institutional status is raised by having another … Read more
If there’s a silver lining to COVID-19 other than improving people’s hygiene, it is the way the pandemic is deflating the college bubble. There’s plenty of evidence and, in this Oct. 1 Wall Street Journal piece, Steve Moore provides a bit more. He writes about his son’s experience at Villanova. Instead of returning to school … Read more
Victor Davis Hanson | Nationalism Good and Bad: Lessons from History Take all the signature brand names that the Baby Boomers inherited from prior generations—Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, the Oscars, the NFL, the NBA, the FBI, the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and a host of others. And … Read more