What to do, what to do, what to…
So, now, MIT is abolishing the requirement for a DEI statement from applicants. Have the woke awakened? Are they acknowledging that knowledge, skills, and accomplishments are more important in candidates than commitments to political correctness?
But then there’s all that antisemitism raging on campus. “Hey, keep the noise down out there. How’s a researcher supposed to think about Commonwealth Fusion Systems ramping up a high-temperature superconducting electromagnet to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth? You guys think Hamas is interested in furthering research in anything other than death and destruction?”
Come to Jesus Moment
MIT released this statement: “…the threat of outside interference and potential violence is not theoretical, it is real: We have all seen circumstances around encampments at some peer institutions degenerate into chaos. As recently as this weekend, we were presented with firm evidence of outside interference on US campuses, including widely disseminated literature that advocates escalation, with very clear instructions and suggested means, including vandalism.”—Sally Kornbluth, President
Who would have thunk it? Duh!
Why do academics fear taking a stand against anarchy? Can they not distinguish between free speech and hate speech or between peaceful protests with reasoned arguments and shouting epithets, defacing statues, breaking stuff, and threatening Jewish students by the obviously uninformed young pawns of foreign adversaries?
President Sally released her statement on May 6, well into a budding campus crisis. Contrast her delayed statement with Father Hesburgh’s “15-minute rule” at Notre Dame in the late 1960s (see my “Delusions of Wisdom in Ivy League Schools” 5/7/24). Hesburgh was a firm believer in accountability and consequences who also had the insight to anticipate brewing trouble.
Reeling Them in on a Line with Only a Hook
Is there something in the background that makes university administrators feckless? Is it their “feel good” liberalism? Is it their ivory tower isolationism? Maybe their protective aegis of tenure?
University managers come largely from the ranks of university professors. Sure, there are some people with business and finance backgrounds in the mix; they run the business side of universities. But academia proper lies mostly in former or current academics’ hands, many of who spent their careers without the pressure that, say, an industry leader faces to produce or leave: Industry and business thrive in an unforgiving world of strict accountability. Not so in academia, where the privilege of unaccountability provides a context for ineffective and often wasteful decisions; a context recently controlled by wokeness. Vacillating former professors, secure in their employment, have enabled the loudest voices to control campuses. I believe that today’s campuses are the product of a trend of trends.
Academics seem to love trends. It’s this penchant for trends that has been a contributor to today’s campus problems. Once a trend is popularized in colleges, few academics have the temerity to speak against it. The trend typically runs its course toward failure before a replacement trend takes over. This permeates all of academia, even the sciences. Take physics, for example. The job market was open during recent years, as Peter Wolt points out, almost exclusively to “string theorists.” *
String theory was trending—and still is. It has been vogue to hire string theorists even though string theory has no experimental support. Academics love trends. They make them feel secure. The product of the trend? An America with fewer physicists dedicated to practicality and more with their heads in clouds.
Remember one-room schoolhouses? I witnessed the construction of a new elementary school that had no interior walls. The cacophony of different classes simultaneously occupying the same space almost immediately made effective teaching untenable as teachers of different classes struggled to “get control and keep attention.” Lacking the insight of commonsense, those responsible for designing the school wasted a million dollars on open spaces had to spend more tax dollars on installing walls. Duh!
My experiences with academics through a four-decade career taught me that people managing education are suckers for anything “new” or popular, especially that promulgated through neologisms. This is evident in just about every curriculum’s development. Managers, eager to demonstrate they serve some purpose, latch onto methodologies and “philosophies” that promise a revamping of the current system. These “new” programs come and go in a blink and are usually based on subjective principles or very limited studies. Today’s most recent example with a neologism? Gamification. **
Glad you asked.
According to the Stanford Report, “Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.”
Games, you say?
“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said [Dan] Schwartz, Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”
And as in all such trends, from one-room schoolhouses through wokeism majors to gamification, academics “jump on the bandwagon.” In most instances trends grow out of hypotheses that have never been rigorously tested.
A Far Stretch?
For me, the relationship between academic trends and campus unrest requires little stretching of the imagination. Like string theory, and the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus, campus antisemitism, the most recent trend, arrived already packaged or, in the words of Obama for his 800 billion-dollar stimulus, shovel ready. Little development required. Open and use.
Tell me. Could not even Jewish faculty members detect the growing hate? Didn’t they see any evidence of a trend, such as the persecution of German Jews prior to Kristallnacht? Did the recent Kristallnacht on campuses catch everyone by surprise? Did the trend of feckless wokeism blind administrators and faculty to the antisemitic takeovers? Did no one anticipate? Was everyone hoping that ignoring was the best tactic?
Recently, I faulted university administrators and faculty for their lack of wisdom. I now fault them for their cowardice and/or indifference. Their willingness to jump on popular social trends coupled with their inability or unwillingness to buck or thwart those trends meant exacerbating a seething hatred or instilling one in young minds unfamiliar with true evil. They further coddled an already soft coddled youth of privilege and affluence, youth who would not survive life under Hamas in Gaza.
*Wolt, Peter. 2007. Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law
**https://news.stanford.edu/report/2024/02/14/technology-in-education/
So, now, MIT is abolishing the requirement for a DEI statement from applicants. Have the woke awakened? Are they acknowledging that knowledge, skills, and accomplishments are more important in candidates than commitments to political correctness?
But then there’s all that antisemitism raging on campus. “Hey, keep the noise down out there. How’s a researcher supposed to think about Commonwealth Fusion Systems ramping up a high-temperature superconducting electromagnet to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth? You guys think Hamas is interested in furthering research in anything other than death and destruction?”
Come to Jesus Moment
MIT released this statement: “…the threat of outside interference and potential violence is not theoretical, it is real: We have all seen circumstances around encampments at some peer institutions degenerate into chaos. As recently as this weekend, we were presented with firm evidence of outside interference on US campuses, including widely disseminated literature that advocates escalation, with very clear instructions and suggested means, including vandalism.”—Sally Kornbluth, President
Who would have thunk it? Duh!
Why do academics fear taking a stand against anarchy? Can they not distinguish between free speech and hate speech or between peaceful protests with reasoned arguments and shouting epithets, defacing statues, breaking stuff, and threatening Jewish students by the obviously uninformed young pawns of foreign adversaries?
President Sally released her statement on May 6, well into a budding campus crisis. Contrast her delayed statement with Father Hesburgh’s “15-minute rule” at Notre Dame in the late 1960s (see my “Delusions of Wisdom in Ivy League Schools” 5/7/24). Hesburgh was a firm believer in accountability and consequences who also had the insight to anticipate brewing trouble.
Reeling Them in on a Line with Only a Hook
Is there something in the background that makes university administrators feckless? Is it their “feel good” liberalism? Is it their ivory tower isolationism? Maybe their protective aegis of tenure?
University managers come largely from the ranks of university professors. Sure, there are some people with business and finance backgrounds in the mix; they run the business side of universities. But academia proper lies mostly in former or current academics’ hands, many of who spent their careers without the pressure that, say, an industry leader faces to produce or leave: Industry and business thrive in an unforgiving world of strict accountability. Not so in academia, where the privilege of unaccountability provides a context for ineffective and often wasteful decisions; a context recently controlled by wokeness. Vacillating former professors, secure in their employment, have enabled the loudest voices to control campuses. I believe that today’s campuses are the product of a trend of trends.
Academics seem to love trends. It’s this penchant for trends that has been a contributor to today’s campus problems. Once a trend is popularized in colleges, few academics have the temerity to speak against it. The trend typically runs its course toward failure before a replacement trend takes over. This permeates all of academia, even the sciences. Take physics, for example. The job market was open during recent years, as Peter Wolt points out, almost exclusively to “string theorists.” *
String theory was trending—and still is. It has been vogue to hire string theorists even though string theory has no experimental support. Academics love trends. They make them feel secure. The product of the trend? An America with fewer physicists dedicated to practicality and more with their heads in clouds.
Remember one-room schoolhouses? I witnessed the construction of a new elementary school that had no interior walls. The cacophony of different classes simultaneously occupying the same space almost immediately made effective teaching untenable as teachers of different classes struggled to “get control and keep attention.” Lacking the insight of commonsense, those responsible for designing the school wasted a million dollars on open spaces had to spend more tax dollars on installing walls. Duh!
My experiences with academics through a four-decade career taught me that people managing education are suckers for anything “new” or popular, especially that promulgated through neologisms. This is evident in just about every curriculum’s development. Managers, eager to demonstrate they serve some purpose, latch onto methodologies and “philosophies” that promise a revamping of the current system. These “new” programs come and go in a blink and are usually based on subjective principles or very limited studies. Today’s most recent example with a neologism? Gamification. **
Glad you asked.
According to the Stanford Report, “Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.”
Games, you say?
“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said [Dan] Schwartz, Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”
And as in all such trends, from one-room schoolhouses through wokeism majors to gamification, academics “jump on the bandwagon.” In most instances trends grow out of hypotheses that have never been rigorously tested.
A Far Stretch?
For me, the relationship between academic trends and campus unrest requires little stretching of the imagination. Like string theory, and the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus, campus antisemitism, the most recent trend, arrived already packaged or, in the words of Obama for his 800 billion-dollar stimulus, shovel ready. Little development required. Open and use.
Tell me. Could not even Jewish faculty members detect the growing hate? Didn’t they see any evidence of a trend, such as the persecution of German Jews prior to Kristallnacht? Did the recent Kristallnacht on campuses catch everyone by surprise? Did the trend of feckless wokeism blind administrators and faculty to the antisemitic takeovers? Did no one anticipate? Was everyone hoping that ignoring was the best tactic?
Recently, I faulted university administrators and faculty for their lack of wisdom. I now fault them for their cowardice and/or indifference. Their willingness to jump on popular social trends coupled with their inability or unwillingness to buck or thwart those trends meant exacerbating a seething hatred or instilling one in young minds unfamiliar with true evil. They further coddled an already soft coddled youth of privilege and affluence, youth who would not survive life under Hamas in Gaza.
*Wolt, Peter. 2007. Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law
**https://news.stanford.edu/report/2024/02/14/technology-in-education/
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