HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC Berkeley ‘decolonization’ column argues in favor of ‘violent resistance.’ “‘There is no ‘civil’ way to resist ongoing occupation and war,’ writes paper’s decolonization columnist.”

Oh, you really don’t want Americans in general thinking that way.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Campus black privilege, explained: History prof spells out what it is, why it’s counterproductive.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Thanks to Coronavirus and Zoom, We’re Looking at the End Stages of College as a Commodity.

And now we get to the essentializing, because the pandemic has made something undeniable: To a large extent, students have become customers. And professors should acknowledge their own role in getting us to that point, because the commodification of higher education is a direct byproduct of the transformation of college into the entrance examination for America’s middle class, something the professoriate has cheered on.

Sure, students are buying a complex bundle that’s rarely described as a “product.” But if you doubt colleges are selling, you need look only at the glossy marketing campaigns. And if you think they’re mostly selling learning, consider this thought experiment from economist Bryan Caplan: If you had to choose, would you rather have four years of Princeton University classes but no diploma, or the diploma, but no classes?

Maybe you’d choose the classes; if so, you’re in the minority. Most students are primarily buying something else — a credential, a social network — not a “community of learning.” Which is not to say that this is what they should be buying, or that we should even think of it as a “purchase.”

Markets are terrific, and we need them, but we also need institutions that are buffered from them. When those buffers break down, as they have in America’s colleges, dysfunction ensues. University business-think has meant bureaucratic overgrowth and an obsession with useless “metrics” — assessing faculty using student evaluations rather than student learning, goosing “selectivity” by soliciting applications in order to reject them.

Professors rightly resist these developments. But what else could you expect once colleges became the gatekeeper to all the good jobs? Now most everyone needs to go, regardless of their interest in learning. And an essentially scholarly enterprise doesn’t serve most of those people well.

So instead, U.S. higher education bundled “teaching and research” with a bunch of other things — residential amenities, sports teams, networking opportunities, career coaching, dating service and so forth. Among other effects, all this initially created a booming demand for professors; their numbers quintupled from 1940 to 1970 and then almost doubled again by 1988. Without that shift, most of the professors complaining about the commercialization of education would have had to take jobs in actual businesses.

You don’t want that. I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results. Well, unless you’re a diversity officer or something.

Plus: “The bundle was still tightly woven enough, however, that we could tell ourselves the learning was still the heart of the package. Then covid-19 came, and suddenly, the lectures and the homework were the only part schools could still deliver. Yet somehow, few students seem reassured that they’re getting most of what they were paying tuition for. Deep down, even university presidents knew this would be the case, which is why so many spent the summer pretending they were going to find some way to reopen, in many cases announcing the truth only when the tuition checks were well in hand.”

Super-cynical, and entirely correct.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: WATCH: Princeton prof compares Trump to ‘plantation owner.’

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS, HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE EDITION: University Of Georgia Says Students Should ‘Consider Wearing A Mask During Sex’: Report.

A friend on Facebook comments: “Millennials and Gen Z don’t even wrap it up for hook ups.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CORONAVIRUS EDITION: Princeton Scraps Plan to Return Undergraduates to Campus.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Tulane cancels event about book condemning white supremacy amid student backlash.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, COLLUSION EDITION: Republican lawmakers to universities: Show us your foreign funding.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: In age of coronavirus, mother finds UNC-Chapel Hill didn’t even clean son’s dorm room.

While university administrators across North Carolina have spent weeks preparing to bring students back to their campuses amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, one mother says University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill missed a basic step: cleaning the dormitories.

Amanda Edwards said that, when she walked into the Ram Village 5 building to help her son move in, the filth she saw was a complete disconnect with all of the talk during the pandemic of frequent cleaning and sanitizing surfaces to limit the spread of the virus.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.’ They did not clean anything, Edwards said. “You figure you’re going to have to do some cleaning because you want to do what’s right for your kid. But given the current times, I was, like, ‘Wait a minute.’ This is just inconsistent. This makes no sense.”

The filthy floor included a condom wrapper. The common area was even worse, she said.

UNC is a dump.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Cancel culture’ crew nearly got me ‘expelled’ before I’d even started college.

For every public figure or pundit denouncing cancel culture — the wave of leftist coercion and censorship sweeping America’s institutions — there are many more who deny that such a thing even exists.

Before you believe the deniers, allow me to tell you what it’s like to find yourself in the jaws of this culture as a recent high-school graduate.

I wanted to attend Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis., because I sought a faith-based education. The university touts itself as “Catholic and Jesuit,” but I knew that as a conservative and a supporter of President Trump, my views were likely to be controversial. But I never imagined that months before ever setting foot on campus, I’d be subject to ridicule, incendiary comments and even death threats.

I was about to be “canceled” before moving into my dorm.

Cost of attending Marquette University, $60,252.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Face Historic Summer Admissions Melt Of 25% Or More, With Higher Rates For Students Of Color.

The Dems hope that the coronavirus will cost Trump the presidency, but it’s leaving a swath of destruction through all their key institutions, from education (high and low) to Hollywood, to the woke sports leagues, to the bureaucracy, which nobody on the left or right trusts now. Another circling torpedo.

And if I were a freshman, I’d be strongly inclined to take a gap year. Between the virus and the campus madness, why go?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Higher Ed and the Fragmentation of America: With everyone’s liberty threatened by cancel culture, it’s time to restore freedom to academia.

The spirit of the Inquisition is alive and well in today’s cancel culture. The objective is not to root out nonbelievers in the church but ideological heretics in newsrooms and universities. These institutions are supposed to be bastions of free speech. But in 2020 any journalist or scholar who strays from progressive orthodoxy is ripe for cancellation.

Unlike Tyndale, no one is being burned at the stake, but plenty are being fired from their jobs. Take the forced resignation of New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet. Mr. Bennet’s crime was not having the “wrong” opinion but allowing someone else to express his—a U.S. senator who, in suggesting the use of federal troops to prevent violence amid protests, articulated a position with which the majority of Americans agreed, according to polls at the time.

The situation is even direr in academia. Consider the case of Nathaniel Hiers, a math professor at the University of North Texas who ran afoul of the powers that be when he criticized the concept of “microagressions,” a core tenet of the woke gospel. Mr. Hiers argued that the concept inevitably “hurts diversity and tolerance” by encouraging people to see the worst in others. For this blasphemy, he was fired. . . .

Through such strong-arm tactics, newsrooms and universities silence opposition within their own ranks—and in the process expose their own ideological corruption. Americans are waking up to the realization that most media organizations are more interested in advancing their own agenda than reporting the facts. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 41% of adults trust the media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly,” and only 48% have confidence in higher education.

The press and the university are the institutions that are supposed to keep us tethered to an objective reality—to help identify truth and differentiate fact from fiction. By embracing political activism, many of these institutions have abandoned their teleological mission. Growing blurrier by the day is the line between news and propaganda, education and indoctrination. No longer trusting traditional information sources—with good reason—an alarming number of Americans turn to fake news and conspiracy theories, accelerating the breakdown of shared reality.

Is there any going back? Most likely not. The secular clerisy can no more turn back the wheels of innovation than Rome could more than five centuries ago. The answer today, as it was then, is reformation.

To address the politicization of our expert class, we need a complete reformation of the system that feeds it—the universities. That entails a radical overhaul of campus culture, including the elimination of safe spaces, trigger warnings, speaker boycotts and other practices meant to stifle debate and honest inquiry. It entails fostering a philosophical counterbalance to the postmodern ethic that has unseated truth as the academy’s ultimate aim. And it entails a renewed commitment to intellectual diversity, which is critical to creating an environment where free speech and heterodox ideas can flourish.

We shouldn’t be afraid to pull the levers of federal and state power to bring about these reforms. For decades, American taxpayers have subsidized public universities, including some whose humanities and social-sciences departments look like political re-education camps. No more.

Legislators control the purse strings, and they can fight back by withholding funds from schools that enforce unconstitutional speech codes. They can go a step further in strengthening academic freedom by tying federal financial support to a university’s willingness to adopt some version of the Chicago Principles, which protect students and professors with divergent views.

Also, lawsuits galore.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Diversity and Inclusion Enforcement: A Professor’s Account: Title IX bureaucracy at its finest: reactive, unfair, and destructive to the pursuit of knowledge.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Face A No-Win Dilemma: To Cut Or Not to Cut Tuition?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Rutgers profs, students blame ‘peace’ & ‘law and order’ for death of George Floyd.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Stanford Discontinues 11 Varsity Sports Programs.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: If You Love Anti-American Riots, Thank Our Universities.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Law prof wants to scrap US Constitution’s ‘racist’ and ‘gendered’ language.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Fresno State faces calls to remove Gandhi statue.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC-Irvine Law Admissions apologized for spotlighting the campus’ chapter of the Federalist Society on its Instagram page after students commented on the post claiming that the organization “advocates against marginalized groups.” “The Federalist Society President, Richard Angel, told Campus Reform that not only is his chapter non-partisan but that the majority of its members are people of color.”

As usual, lefties are mostly angry at their own fantasies of what the right looks like.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC-Irvine To Be 100% Online For 2Ls/3Ls In Fall 2020; 1Ls May Choose To Be On Ground For 1 Or 2 Classes Each Week.

Related: UC-Berkeley Joins Harvard In Going 100% Online For Fall 2020 Semester.

Also related: Rising 2L Sues Harvard Law School, Demands Lower Tuition For ‘Inferior’ Online Classes.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Facing revenue shortfall, Georgia Tech implementing furloughs.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Concordia Is Sixth Law School To Close Since 2017.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Rising 2L Sues Harvard Law School, Demands Lower Tuition For ‘Inferior’ Online Classes.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, SCAM-ALERT EDITION: Moritz Family Seeks To Reopen Estate To Enforce Terms Of Ohio State Law School Naming Agreement. “Moritz’s son, Jeffrey Moritz, sought to reopen the estate in 2017, after he discovered the $30.3 million gift his father gave to Ohio State in 2001 had shrunk by $8.4 million over the years to $21.9 million, a decline of 28%. University officials said an annual development fee, which cumulatively totaled about $3 million in 2017, had been taken from the endowment since its inception. Such fees go toward pursuing and entertaining potential donors, and pay the salaries of university fundraising employees.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Princeton poll presents potential problem for enrollment this fall. “In a survey by Princeton University’s Undergraduate Student Union, 63.4 percent of those surveyed said they would ‘seriously consider taking a leave of absence’ if fall 2020 classes were online or remote. The poll, published in May, was based on responses from 2,237 students.”

You might go online to save money, but if you’re paying Princeton tuition, why?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College ‘deeply sorry’ for letting police use restrooms.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: She called him a white supremacist. He accused her of doxxing threats. Inside a University of Texas tempest.

Message to Lauren Luveras: If you hear the whistle, that makes you the dog.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: I chose a community college. It was the best decision I’ve ever made, and it saved me $80,000 too.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Over 40% Of Colleges Project A 10% Or More Decline In Fundraising Due To COVID-19 (20% Project A 20% Or More Decline).

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Examples of anti-Semitism on campuses abound — enough is enough.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Lower The Boom On Faculty/Staff Retirement Plans.

The good news is, I don’t have a generous pension for them to take away. In fact, I don’t have a pension at all, just a 401k type plan.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, COLLUSION-COVERUP EDITION: Colleges stonewall feds on China records: The Department of Education says colleges are blocking attempts to obtain documents pertaining to foreign gifts. Among the countries from which the colleges have received money are China, Russia, and Iran.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, INSTITUTIONAL GREED EDITION: California State University: ‘no plans to reduce’ fall tuition despite keeping classes online.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Before COVID-19, Tuition Discount Rate Hit All-Time High Of 52.6%; Pandemic May Force 340 Colleges Out Of Business.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Universities with large student populations and capacious class enrollments are essentially cruise ships on steroids.”

Meh. If you believe the CDC’s newest infection fatality rate estimate, we’re looking at something moderately worse than a bad seasonal flu. Of course, I wish I had more confidence in the CDC.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: COVID-19 May Cause Higher Ed To Finally Confront Runaway Academic Spending, Including 67% Of Tenured Faculty Who Are Underproductive. Hmm. “Underproductive” senior faculty are usually underproducing research and publications; the higher ed bubble is more about teaching. I doubt many senior faculty teach fewer classes, as teaching loads are usually fairly uniform.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Higher Education At The Covid-19 Crossroads.

The Covid-19 pandemic is placing many universities under extreme budget pressure, owing to the loss of high-margin international students. And, if schools cannot open on campus this fall, many may be forced to discount their tuition to students. Some observers think it likely that many universities will be forced to close, as a result of these pressures.

The longer term picture is not much better. Higher education costs have been rising at an unsustainable rate for decades. Tuition at four year private schools now runs above $40,000 per year, while tuition at public universities runs above $15,000 per year, not including living costs. Public universities were free in the 1960s, and tuition at UC Berkeley ran about $500 per semester as recently as the late 1970s. “Working your way through college” was quite feasible in those days, with a 10 hour per week job and a summer job. No more. The rate of increase has been much higher than inflation, and has even been higher than medical inflation in the US, which is really saying something. The Covid-19 pandemic is merely accelerating a reckoning in higher education, a reckoning that has been coming for quite some time.

I agree.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Coronavirus’s Economic Blow Forces Universities To Adapt: Pandemic is increasing expenses while decimating tuition and research revenue.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, GREED RULES EDITION: Georgetown gives raises after getting millions in coronavirus aid.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, COLLUSION EDITION: Former Emory U. professor pleads guilty of hiding ties to Chinese government.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UDPATE: Higher Education: The Coming Disruption.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen, only faster all of a sudden. (Bumped).

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Harvard Faces $1.2 Billion Shortfall Due To COVID-19.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University Of Chicago Students Demand 50% Tuition Cut Due To Coronavirus.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: RealClearInvestigatons: ‘Where the Federal Corona Bucks Are’: Spring Break for Iffy Schools.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Official GW University Twitter account fond of hashtag calling Mike Pence an ‘idiot.’

Related: Rutgers prof: ‘F*ck each and every Trump supporter.’ Remember when they told us higher education was an important part of maintaining a civilized polity?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges get creative to boost fall enrollment.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Diversity officer slams Trump for ‘inflaming’ ‘mostly conservative white’ lockdown protesters.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges nationwide cut costs with hundreds of layoffs, furloughs.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University Of Michigan Faces Up To $1 Billion Loss From COVID-19, Announces 5%-10% Executive Pay Cuts, Salary And Hiring Freezes, Voluntary Staff Furloughs.

Flashback: Michigan Deals With Election Reactions.