STOP IT, YOU’RE SCARING THE CHILDREN:

The myth of “woke” indoctrination at American universities (JUDD LEGUM, MAY 16, 2024, Popular Information)

Open Syllabus, a non-profit group, collects syllabi from colleges and universities. The group has collected over 5.5 million syllabi at more than 4,000 American institutions of higher learning. The data is not comprehensive because Open Syllabus relies mostly on publicly available data. But it is the most robust database of what is actually taught on campus in the U.S.

Data collected by Open Syllabus reveals that, in 2023, “woke” terms like “critical race theory,” “structural racism,” or “transgender” appear in just 0.08% of college and university syllabi. These are all legitimate areas of inquiry but are derided by critics as evidence of academia’s decline. In any event, the data shows they are not significant components of college and university curricula.

Even generic terms that encompass these terms appear in relatively few syllabi. The term “race” — allegedly an obsession of the modern university — appears in only 2.8% of the syllabi collected by Open Syllabus in 2023. Moreover, the prevalence of “race” in syllabi has remained relatively consistent over the last 15 years. Similarly, “gender” appeared in 4.7% of syllabi in 2023 — a rate that has held fairly steady since 2008.

ABRES LOS OJOS:

A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum (JEREMY SCHWARTZ, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA, MAY 15, 2024, Texas Tribune)

[Courtney] Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. “Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking, and yes, they’ve tried to do this in Granbury ISD,” she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. “I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.”

But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.

The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”

Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”

The Culture Wars are a rout.

WOKEISM FOR WHITE FOLK:

Safetyism doesn’t belong on campus: Conservatives have adopted social-justice tactics (Kathleen Stock, MAY 10, 2024, UnHerd)

In short, then, the past week served up ample material for riotous mirth or contemptuous eye rolls. Though many students are sincere and well-intentioned in their objections to what is unfolding in Gaza, watching self-appointed leaders role-playing at Left-wing radicalism in the hope of future glittering career prizes will never not be ludicrous. Equally, approaching a bloody war like a rabidly partisan football fan on matchday, as Taal seemingly does — automatically primed to deny atrocities committed by your favoured side, and to downplay the devastating effects on opponents — is hardly a sign of moral sainthood, albeit that the phenomenon is now near-ubiquitous.

But there are more alarming aspects to this situation other than the presence of narcissistic millennials. Scorn should also be reserved for those supine university bosses who — having spent years positively incentivising an entire generation to think of themselves as pleasingly disruptive social radicals, acting on behalf of a variety of oppressed victim classes — have now swung to the other extreme without missing a beat, and are cracking down excessively on behaviour they used to tolerate or even encourage. At Columbia, university president and member of the House of Lords Minouche Shafik eventually gave up on negotiation and brought in police against protestors, resulting in more than 100 arrests. At the University of Texas in Austin, riot gear and pepper spray were employed against those camping out; the encampment at UCLA was also flattened by law enforcement, with 200 arrested there. There have also been large-scale arrests at Dartmouth, George Washington University, Massachusetts Amherst, Wisconsin-Madison, and other places too.

It is often remarked that the modern liberal quest to free both self and society from traditional cultural norms and boundaries tends to coincide with increased acceptance of state surveillance and authoritarian social control. Even so, it is rare to see institutions openly inciting both liberation and repression at the very same time. Small wonder that susceptible young people are confused. “I thought that this university accepted me because I am an advocate, because I am someone who will fight for what they believe in, no matter what,” mournfully recounted one Vanderbilt alumnus, originally lauded by faculty and administrators for making a stand against perceived oppression, but now expelled for the very same thing. You can laugh with enjoyable schadenfreude at the naivety; but you should probably also be horrified at the unprincipled ease with which Frankenstein has set the dogs upon the pious, guilt-ridden young monster he had a hand in creating.

Equally depressing has been the way that many conservative commentators, normally professional scourges of wokeness, have become apparent fans of safetyism for Jewish students (please note — not safety, but safetyism). Just as the modern Left either tends to cheer or stay silent as Right-coded views are eliminated from the academy either by stealth or by force, many on the supposedly freedom-loving modern Right apparently have little to say about the violation of the basic right to peaceful speech and assembly, when it comes to defending the perceived interests of Palestinians.

Separate out the rest of the nonsense certain students are saying: the call for self-determination is conservative.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

In Defense of Plagiarism (Alex Tabarrok, March 23, 2024, Marginal Revolution)

If I use AI to help write this post, it’s not fraudulent because the primary purpose of this post is not, as it is with a student essay, to warrant the abilities of the author but rather to convey ideas to the reader. How those ideas came to be expressed in words is secondary and sometimes even irrelevant.

Indeed, using some else’s words and ideas is often how the world progresses.

And we should be preparing students to use AI in their jobs, not perform stunts on papers graded by other AI.

Folklore is philosophy (Abigail Tulenkois, 2/26/24, Aeon)

The Hungarian folktale Pretty Maid Ibronka terrified and tantalised me as a child. In the story, the young Ibronka must tie herself to the devil with string in order to discover important truths. These days, as a PhD student in philosophy, I sometimes worry I’ve done the same. I still believe in philosophy’s capacity to seek truth, but I’m conscious that I’ve tethered myself to an academic heritage plagued by formidable demons.

The demons of academic philosophy come in familiar guises: exclusivity, hegemony and investment in the myth of individual genius. As the ethicist Jill Hernandez notes, philosophy has been slower to change than many of its sister disciplines in the humanities: ‘It may be a surprise to many … given that theology and, certainly, religious studies tend to be inclusive, but philosophy is mostly resistant toward including diverse voices.’ Simultaneously, philosophy has grown increasingly specialised due to the pressures of professionalisation. Academics zero in on narrower and narrower topics in order to establish unique niches and, in the process, what was once a discipline that sought answers to humanity’s most fundamental questions becomes a jargon-riddled puzzle for a narrow group of insiders.

This was inevitable once Physics became obscurantist. It was intolerable for specialists that people could understand their fields but they couldn’t understand others. So they just added phoney-baloney theories too.

WHAT IF WE JUDGED ACADEMICS JUST ON THEIR TEACHING?:

Statistical Significance—and Why It Matters for Parenting (Emily Oster, Jan 29 2024, Parent Data)

Publication bias and p-hacking are two shorthand, jargony ways to describe journal and researcher behaviors that make it more likely that the results we observe in published papers are occurring just by chance.

First: Academic journals are more likely to publish papers that find significant results. It’s not hard to see why this might be true. It’s not very interesting to publish a result saying that M&M color doesn’t impact multiplication speed — that’s kind of what we expected. But a result that says it does matter — that’s more surprising, and more likely to spark the interest of a journal editor.

This is what we call publication bias, and it turns out that this pattern means that the results we see in print are actually a lot more likely to be statistical accidents. Often, many researchers are looking into the same question. It’s not just my research team who is interested in the M&M-multiplication relationship — imagine there are 99 other teams doing the same thing. Even if there is no relationship, on average 5 of those teams will find something significant.

These 5 “successful” teams are more likely to get their results published. That’s what we all see in journals, but what we do not see is the 95 times it didn’t work. When we read these studies, we’re assuming, implicitly, that we are seeing all the studies that were run. But we’re not, and we’re more likely to see the significant-by-chance results.

The issue of publication bias would be problematic just on its own. But it’s even more problematic when it interacts with researchers’ incentives. Researchers need to publish, and (see above) it is easier to do so when results are significant. This can lead to what people sometimes call p-hacking (the “p” stands for probability).

When researchers run a study, there are often a lot of ways to analyze the data. You can analyze the impact on different subgroups of the population. You can analyze the impact of different circumstances. You can test many different treatments. The idea of the xkcd cartoon is that you could test the impact of all the different M&M colors on some outcome.

The more of these tests you do, the more likely you are to get a significant effect by chance. If you do 100 tests, you expect 5 of them to be significant at the 5% level. And then, because of publication bias, you write up the results focusing only on the significant groups or significant M&M colors. Of course, those are just accidental. But as a consumer of research, we do not see all the other things that happened in the background.

For these two reasons: some of what we see published, even if it is from a randomized experiment, is likely to be a result of statistical chance. There is a somewhat notorious paper that suggests that “most” research findings are false; I think this is overkill, but it’s a perspective.

IT’S NH, JAKE:

A Top College Reinstates the SAT (David Leonhardt, Feb. 5, 2024, NY Times)

Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. […]

As the four professors — Elizabeth Cascio, Bruce Sacerdote, Doug Staiger and Michele Tine — wrote in a memo, referring to the SAT’s 1,600-point scale, “There are hundreds of less-advantaged applicants with scores in the 1,400 range who should be submitting scores to identify themselves to admissions, but do not under test-optional policies.” Some of these applicants were rejected because the admissions office could not be confident about their academic qualifications. The students would have probably been accepted had they submitted their test scores, Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions, told me.

That finding, as much as any other, led to Dartmouth’s announcement this morning. “Our goal at Dartmouth is academic excellence in the service of training the broadest swath of future leaders,” Beilock told me. “I’m convinced by the data that this will help us do that.”

It’s worth acknowledging a crucial part of this story. Dartmouth admits disadvantaged students who have scores that are lower on average than those of privileged students. The college doesn’t apologize for that. Students from poor neighborhoods or troubled high schools have effectively been running with wind in their face. They are not competing fairly with affluent teenagers.

The conservative Ivy.

…AND THEN THE FACTS PUNCH YOU IN THE MOUTH:

Standardized Tests Don’t Deserve Our Hate (Aidan Muller, January 16, 2024, The Dartmouth)

Until recently, I advocated strongly for the permanent adoption of test-optional admissions and even went so far as to support test-blind admissions. However, empirical evidence does not always echo our feelings — especially about something like test-taking — and what we want is not always what’s good for us. The reality is that standardized tests are actually useful tools for admissions.

A recently published New York Times article by David Leonhardt — which draws on research from Dartmouth’s own Richard S. Braddock 1963 economics professor Bruce Sacerdote ’90 and associate sociology professor Michele Tine — highlights evidence that standardized test scores are better indicators of predicting college grades, chances of graduation and post-college success than high school grades and may also increase diversity on college campuses.

WONDERFUL WORLD:

The Recovery of Wonder in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (Steve Soldi, 11/24/23, Voegelin View)

For Socrates and Aristotle, being a philosopher does not mean reading philosophy books or pursuing a career as a professional philosopher. Rather, a philosopher is someone who wonders and pursues truth “in order to know, and not for a utilitarian end.” On this view, schools should aim to produce philosophers. For example, John Senior, the renowned educator, cultivated in his students the idea that being culminated in wonder. His entire educational philosophy can be understood in terms of wonder. The motto of his self-designed Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas in the 1970s speaks to this proposition: Nascantur in admiratione – “Let them be born in wonder.” Senior wanted his students to renew their gaze upon an enchanted reality and delight with young-eyed zeal in its mystery and intelligibility. For Senior, wonder is natural to everyone and calls us to pursue truth and wisdom. As we know, the word philosophy means “love of wisdom.”

Wisdom and knowledge are mutually supportive. If wisdom is the means by which we discern and acquire our highest good, knowledge of the true and the good in turn frees us to live well and lead a happy life. How, then, do we obtain knowledge that frees us? The answer is a liberal education. The liberal arts free us from thinking about knowledge in terms of mere utility or practice. In this way, they are superior. The humanities include the highest disciplines—philosophy, theology, history, literature, music, and art—because they are subordinated to nothing outside of themselves. They are endowed with intrinsic value and exist for their own sake. They are to be differentiated from the servile arts, which exist for the sake of something else, namely, to produce practical things.

We are now in a position to appreciate why Ray Bradbury advocates for liberal education in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451.