10 and 24: David Thompson: Grigg never would have been decided if union hiring halls and others hadn’t discriminated against blacks. The country could not go forward on one foot. Like voting laws asking some voters for the names of Chinese emperors, employment tests that promoted only people who already had jobs was discriminatory. Maybe its time for it to go: but no one can doubt the need for it then.
13 cato:
High schools insist that all students go to college. Who can blame them? The US Steel fabicating plants, auto assembly lines and what not skipped town. The big paying blue collar jobs are gone, and as Bruce Springsteen says “they ain’t coming back.”
The US shifted used to admire skilled blue collar work: now it regards it with semi-disdain: many people of a certain age remember the “plant” in town. Workers were skilled die makers, designers and production men. But those plants were so dirty, smelly and dangerous. After the EPA, Water Quality boards, unions and courts got thru with them, manufacturing now accounts for 11% of our economy versus 24% not that long ago and 50% before that.
As social conservatives fixated on abortion and flouridation, taxes rose on manufacturing while capital gains sank: rewarding quick buck guys and investors and penalizing manufacturers.
Meanwhile, universities enlarged the course offerings beyond what anyone had intended, eased tenure requirements and now we have Ward Churchills in every university teaching “Poetry of the disabled transgendered Snohomish Indians in the 1700′s”.
Still: there is something right about allowing lots of kids to go to college. Even if some drop out or drink themselves into oblivion. We’re not Japan and don’t screen our college applicants at age 14. Kinds take off at different times an there is nothing wrong with english and history classes. If anything, more history and econ classes would be a good thing. Some modern universities are not passing along acquired lessons from the past, and they should be.
What seems overdue is public control over university course offerings, tenure standards and seemingly endless expansion: there is nothing anti-intellectual about recognizing that people who pay for it ought to have some control over what is taught. Taxpayers are not serfs for professorial hiring and course committees. Women’s studies, queer folk theory, the “hook up culture” at Duke…all these and more could be easily trimmed back and that alone would discourage some of the loafers and cut the cost. Similarly, they ought to have a 4 year and out policy–no lngering students in their 6th year absent illness, miitary service etc. Tenure ought to be cut back. And the universities ought to cut back graduate research into Shakespeare’s punctuation and focus more on undergrads. I frankly don’t think a boatload of Nobel prize winning literature professors are worth raising tuition
