Archives for category: Higher Education
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

An Israeli Professor at Yale Denounces Efforts to Squelch Palestinian Protests and Harass University Leaders

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2023 //
31

Naftali Kaminski is a professor of medicine at Yale University and an Israeli. He speaks out here in the Israeli publication Haaretz against efforts to shut down Palestinian protests, as well as the vilification of university presidents who insist on free speech.

Dr. Kaminski writes:

In the flurry of denouncements, op-eds, and social media posts that followed the testimony in Congress by three elite university presidents’, the subsequent resignation of Elizabeth MaGill president of the University of Pennsylvania, and the unprecedented congressional resolution calling on Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth to also resign, a picture began to emerge, one that eerily reminded me of a poem we read when I was a boy in Israel.

The poem, written in 1943 by Nathan Alterman, one of Israel’s most beloved poets, uses the Greek philosopher Archimedes’ statement about the law of the lever “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth” as a metaphor for the role of antisemitism in politics. He suggests demagogues and tyrants use antisemitism as the ultimate “Archimedean Point”, a leverage point allowing them to achieve their most outrageous goals.

This, I think, is what we are experiencing, but now the Archimedean Point is the claim that university presidents are “not doing enough about antisemitism”. It is used with the immediate aim of suppressing pro-Palestinian voices as well as the strategic and, as now is being more explicitly stated, long- term ominous aim of reversing progress towards diversity, equity and inclusion at American universities.

I am aware this is a far-reaching statement. As an Israeli, a son to Holocaust survivors, my family history is one of oppression, discrimination, and genocide. Before joining Yale, my family lived in Pittsburgh and were members of the Tree of Life congregation in Pittsburgh, site of the deadliest attack ever on Jews on American soil.

The Hamas atrocities of October 7 triggered fears and thoughts I never thought I had. I find displays of support or efforts to minimize them despicable. I fear the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and believe it should be fought. I also feel that the current rage against university presidents of elite institutions is not indeed targeting antisemitism. And this feeling is colored by my own experiences in the last few months.

Waking up on that cursed morning in October and hearing about the Hamas attacks, I was immediately caught up in a flood of communication as I frantically sought to confirm that friends and family in Israel were safe, offer help, sympathy, horror and support.

But then I received a different kind of message myself. It was from an American Jewish faculty member at Yale. There was no expression of concern or empathy, no check-in about my well-being or the safety of my friends and family. Instead, it spoke about “Yale antisemites” and requested we “act preemptively” to “alert” Yale leaders. The message suggested a campaign of letter writing. It was obvious to me its intention to help foster an atmosphere that would label any pro-Palestinian expressions as antisemitic.

That message and those that followed were deeply distressing to me. They sounded as if they assumed that the president of Yale, himself Jewish with strong ties to Israel, would not do anything unless cajoled and pressed. There was never an expression of concern about me, or other Israelis on campus, except in one context – fighting the perceived threat of antisemitism by using the horrors to score ideological points.

In the following days, as the unfathomable extent of Hamas atrocities was coming to light, my attention was all on the suffering and killing in the region. I helped the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office at Yale School of Medicine organize a solidarity event in which Israeli members of the Yale community who had family or friends who were victims of October 7 attack spoke, and shared their experiences. The event was well publicized and attended and supported by leadership.

On subsequent days, I was on a previously scheduled lecture tour — five talks in ten days at different institutions and venues. I felt I could not simply speak about science and medicine, and decided to start each talk by introducing myself as a Jewish Israeli, and saying “I am shocked and infuriated by the atrocities launched last week in southern Israel, I am also deeply concerned and horrified by the ongoing violence and exponentially escalating threat to civilians in the region. I hope and pray that violence ends, those abducted are released and threats to civilians are stopped and that all people in the region, regardless of ethnic or religious identity, will finally be allowed to live in peace, freedom, and dignity.” The statement was accepted nearly universally with applause.

In the meantime, at Yale, there were pro-Palestinian demonstrations, pro-Israeli vigils, as well as educational events; I did not attend most, and if I did, I might have probably not agreed with everything said, but I doubt I would feel unsafe. Indeed, despite the attempts by some provocateurs, the events were decidedly non-violent. On one Friday, at the Beinecke Plaza at Yale, there were three contrasting events, including an Israeli Palestinian Humanity vigil, attended by Israelis and Palestinians on campus, but there were no conflicts or arguments. There were no calls for genocide or threats of violence.

At the Yale-Harvard football game, I was walking to my seat, when a pro-Palestinian protest erupted; the students waved flags, chanted their slogans, but there was no sense of threat. There was definitely no call for genocide for Jews. Some in the crowd cursed the protesters and one even spit at them, but they did not respond, and the protest ended with the opposing students staging a walk out.

On that day I also saw the infamous doxing van, showing photos of young students, naming them as Harvard or Yale’s top antisemites. I felt it was a blatant and despicable “attempt to intimidate and harass” students as Yale’s president said.

At a panel discussion on the Public Health Implications of the Israeli-Gaza war, at Yale’s School of Public Health, discussions were concrete, professional and somber. One heckler was quickly silenced, and the rest of the event was very civil. This past Saturday, a pro-Palestinian protester hung briefly a Palestinian flag on a public Hanukkah Menorah in New Haven. The protester quickly removed it at the urging of other participants in the protest. This event met with wide condemnation by the organizers of the protest, Yale president and local officials, and local vigils were held in response

On social media, I have received multiple solidarity notices from colleagues and friends, Jewish and Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian. I have gotten some antisemitic responses, but mostly from bots. Notably, most of the personal attacks I experienced were from self-proclaimed friends of Israel, even colleagues of mine, especially when I expressed support for the first ceasefire and hostages release, when I expressed concerns about the toll on Gazan civilians from Israel’s response or when I mentioned that Palestinians in the West Bank were targets of an unprecedented wave of violent attacks by Jewish settlers.

When one such acquaintance attacked me, I did not hold back, and reminded them that unlike them, I had served in the Israel Defense Forces, and had saved Israeli lives as a physician. The argument ended there, but I couldn’t help but reflect, if this was how I was treated as an Israeli, a tenured professor, how are Palestinians being treated? Are they silenced by the fear of being tagged as antisemitic, for expressing their anguish?

I am not making this digression to dismiss or minimize the rise of antisemitism or threat and isolation of Jewish faculty, staff and students feel, but to highlight how my own experience allowed me to realize that the anguish experienced by Jewish students and communities has been weaponized to suppress and delegitimize pro-Palestinian voices.

Moreover, and worse, for some groups this looked like the perfect opportunity to reverse the progress American Academia has made towards more diversity, inclusion and equity. And now this coalition of populists, rich donors, politicians known to be enemies of science and democracy and other bigots, is feverishly hoping that their Archimedean point will bring them a first achievement: the reversal of one of most impressive achievements for equity for women in recent American academic life – by forcing the presidents of Penn, Harvard and MIT to resign.

Watching that congressional hearing felt like revisiting the public hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy Years. The presidents made powerful statements, expressed shock at Hamas atrocities, denounced antisemitism and described actions they took on campus. But what followed was a highly orchestrated circus, with targeted questions, aimed to trap them into indefensible answers. In the public eye, the five-hour hearing, crystalized into 30-second viral clips, based on misrepresentations and lack of nuance made the university presidents look indecisive and equivocal, while their previous statements and actions were not.

And when I watched the public shaming of these amazingly accomplished women, one voice kept ringing in my head, that of Counsel Joseph Welch words to Joseph McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency?”.

I hope the decision by Harvard to retain President Claudine Gay, despite the powerful campaign and false allegations against her, will once be remembered the same way Joseph Welch’s statement is now remembered, a turning point. A moment in which voices of reason, rejected the use of the justified fear of antisemitism as an Archimedean Point, and allowed all of us to focus on continuing making our universities and colleges more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and safe for all.

Naftali Kaminski MD is an Israeli Physician-Scientist and Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine. On Twitter/X @KaminskiMed 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Reform, Higher Education, International

Gayle Greene: Higher Education and the Triumph of Hype Over Experience

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2023 //
66

Recently, I have read alarming articles about state universities eliminating majors in the humanities as a cost-cutting measure while expanding departments that grant degrees in computer science, business, and other job-related fields. Just last week, The Atlantic published an article about the downsizing of foreign languages, linguistics, and other majors at the University of West Virginia, even though the state has a surplus of nearly $2 billion. Other universities are cutting majors in history, the arts, and political science in favor of majors that enhance immediate employability.

Gayle Greene, professor emerita at Scripps College in Claremont, California, contends that such actions are short-sighted. Today—in a world of disinformation, fake news, and Artigiani intelligence—we need the humanitities more than ever so we can discern and weigh facts and reality. In this essay , she shows how tech titans like Bill Gates have encouraged the destructive trend of favoring job-ready degrees.

Greene writes:

“College is remade as tech majors surge and humanities dwindle,” announces Nick Anderson in the Washington Post, May 2023. “Remade” is an understatement, when more students today are majoring in computer science than in all the humanities– English, history, philosophy, languages, the arts— combined. And what for? In the past year, tech has laid off more than 200,000 workers, with more layoffs predicted.

 

There was a chorus of Cassandras warning against this remake: do not whittle education down to preparation for jobs that might not exist in a decade; do not sacrifice the humanities to STEM. But the hype was so loud, it drowned out the warnings. The STEM skills shortage was broadcast by business leaders, lobbyists, politicians, think tanks, media, and especially by Bill Gates, who spread the word far and wide. He announced to Congress, in 2008, “U.S. companies face a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs.” Obama echoed him in his 2012 State of the Union Address: “I hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the U.S. but can’t find workers with the right skills.” Obama reiterated the message in his 2011, 2013, and 2016 State of the Union Addresses, announcing, in 2013 a competition “to redesign America’s high schools,” rewarding those developing STEM classes to deliver “the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.”

 

The hype was hot air. “If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising” rather than staying flat as they have “for the past 16 years,” wrote Ron Hira et al in USA Today, 2014. Obama might have heeded him or Andrew Hacker, Ben Tarnoff, Matt Bruenig, Michael Teitelbaum, Gerald Coles, Walter Hickey, Michael Anft, who raised similar alarms. Or Paul Krugman, who warned, “the belief that America suffers from a severe ‘skills gap’ is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true”; it’s “a zombie idea… that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.”

 

When an idea persists against all evidence, you have to ask: who profits? A 2012 Microsoft publication warned that the U.S. faces “a substantial and increasing shortage of individuals with the skills needed to fill the jobs the private sector is creating”—even though, in the summer of 2014, Microsoft laid off about 18,000 workers. Other companies,Boeing, IBM, Symantec, were also laying off thousands, sometimes rehiring them at lower salaries, even as they lamented the “lack of qualified applicants,” wrote Hacker.

 

The problem for a company like Microsoft has not been a lack of skilled workers, but that U.S. tech workers expect to be well paid. Foreign tech workers in the U.S. make about 57% what their U.S. counterparts make. Hence the tech industry’s push for easier immigration policies and H-1B visas, visas that allow U.S. businesses to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty work like IT. If we don’t ease up on immigration policies, Gates told Congress in 2008, “American companies simply will not have the talent they need to innovate and compete.” Hence Gates’spush for coding and computer classes in schools and colleges. “Nothing would make programming cheaper than making millions more programmers,” wrote Tarnoff, “and where better to develop this workforce than America’s schools.”

 

The STEM skills shortage was the PR of an industry wanting a large pool of workers ready to work for less, an industry with enormous lobbying power. The campaign has been so successful that now hundreds of thousands of trained workers are newly unemployed in a market flooded by as many as qualified as they. It’s succeeded in bending higher education to its purposes, re-directing it to training for jobs, with tech jobs the most hyped–even though tech comprise less than 8% of the economy. Colleges and universities direct resources that way, private donors pour enormous sums that way, and students follow the money and the buzz, whatever their interests and talents. Humanities enrollments have plummeted, courses, programs, departments have been gutted, and tenured faculty let go.

 

But what even the most dire of Cassandras failed to see, even those working in AI, was the seismic upheaval AI was about to create.

 

*******

Obama might have been more cautious about dismantling an educational system that’s served the U.S. so well, a system widely believed to have been the engine of this country’s power and productivity. The U.S. still has the universities that rank highest internationally and have world-wide draw, in spite of the assaults higher education has lately endured. But he went ahead and based his educational policies on the vision of a technocrat (Gates’ word for himself) who sees the purpose of education as making a workforce that will allow U.S. industries “to compete in the global economy,” as Gates said in Waiting for Superman, 2010, a public-school-bashing documentary film he funded and starred in. Obama turned his education department over to the Gates foundation, as Lindsey Layton documented in the Washington Post, 2014: “top players in Obama’s Education Department who shaped theadministration’s policies came either straight from the Gates Foundation in 2009 or from organizations that received heavy funding from the foundation.”

 

With K-12, Obama uncritically adopted No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the test and assess regime George W. Bush inflicted on public schools in 2002 in the name of “reform”—even though NCLB was an acknowledged disaster by the time Obama took office. Schools could be closed if test scores declined— many were closed, especially in underprivileged areas, where kids don’t test well—which left teachers no choice but to teach to the test and strip curricula of subjects not tested, including literature, history, philosophy, the arts, languages, social sciences. The panic about test scores made a boondoggle for new ventures supplying materials for test- prepping, test-administering, test-scoring, and assessing. In fact, what test scores most reliably measure is how well kids take tests, which penalizes students from disadvantaged backgrounds and makes a mockery of claims that testing levels the playing field, the rationale for so-called reform.

 

Obama tightened the screws on Bush’s program, requiring states to agree to certain conditions to qualify for federal funding, each of them high on the Gates agenda. States had to agree to make room for more charter schools, and they did—more charters were founded on Obama’s watch than Bush’s. Gates claims that charters will create “choice” and “competition” and incentivize teachers to raise test scores. In fact they have not raised test scores, though they have succeeded in routing public funding to private interests, as they were meant to. States also had to agree to adopt a standardized curriculum. This came in the form of the Common Core State Standards, Gates’ brainchild, which wedded teaching even more closely to testing, assessing, and technology, since standardized material is easily computer-administered and scored. The Common Core has reduced reading and writing to decontextualized skills — “find the main point,” “identify the figures of speech”— which has been a major turnoff for kids. The moaning we hear lately about declining test scores is beside the point: the point is that kids are massively alienated from school because “drill, kill, bubble fill” is all they’re fed.

 

Gates has admitted that transforming K-12 is harder than he’d anticipated: “We really haven’t changed outcomes” (i.e. test scores). But he should not underestimate his impact. His perpetuation of the broken-public-schools narrative, his attack on teachers and tenure, his imposition of mechanization and measurement on an enterprise he knows nothing about, have driven teachers out of the profession in record numbers, with few lining up to take their places. Teachers have written and spoken against the Common Core, forming advocacy groups to resist it, and tens of thousands of parents have opted their kids out of testing— but the machine rolls on. The foundation “has influence everywhere, in absolutely every branch of education…federal, state, local,” with politicians, journalists, administrators, think tanks, summarizes Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute.

 

Higher education has been harder to get hold of, on account of the respect it commands throughout the world. But harping on its failures to meet market needs has done much to skew it the Gates way. “The [Gates] foundation wants nothing less than to overhaul higher education, changing how it is delivered, financed, and regulated,” wrote Marc Parry, Kelly Field, and Becky Supiano, in a brilliant expose, “The Gates Effect.” It “would like college to be cheaper, more accessible, and more targeted towards the specific skills desired by employers. Instead of a broad education where a college student might take courses across a range of subjects, the new model has students demonstrating ‘competencies’ by passing tests in specific areas, and receiving a certificate upon completion.” Thefoundation “hasn’t just jumped on the bandwagon,” the authors conclude; “it has worked to build that bandwagon.”

 

And its stranglehold on mainstream media is murderous. As with K-12, “Gates buys up everyone and engineers the appearance of a consensus,” writes Diane Ravitch. Ravitch was in the first Bush education department and a proponent of No Child Left Behind, but turned against it when she realized its purpose was to route public resources to private interests; she has been a powerful advocate for public schools ever since. As with K-12, “the foundation has bought the research, bought the evaluations, bought the advocacy groups, and bought the media to report on what the foundation is doing. It has lavished support on education journals, while also saturating them with ads and ‘sponsored’ articles.” As with K-12, this creates the sense of a hue and cry from many quarters, of widespread agreement that higher education is broken, resists change, resists innovation, needs technology, needs to produce more STEM workers.

 

​**********

Fifty years ago, the humanities had a “national mandate,” writes Nathan Heller in a widely read New Yorker article, “The End of the English Major,” February 2023. The liberal arts had pride of place. Now the mandate has moved to STEM, with more than a little push from business interests keen to transform higher education to job preparation and right-wing anti-education agendas.

 

In 2013, Obama’s administration produced a “Scorecard,” an online tool to show “folks” where they can get “the most bang for the buck,” as he promised in his 2013 State of the Union address. The Scorecard has Gates’ fingerprints all over it. It ranks colleges according to number of graduates, speed to graduation, starting salaries, time taken to pay back student loans—which makes a college rise higher in the rankings for graduating a hedge fund manager than a teacher. And higher education has cooperated, inviting managerial administrators in to make education “more like business,” lean, mean, and cost effective. They’ve stripped away courses and programs with no “real world” value and cut back in areas they deem inessential— like teaching, which has been turned over to part-timers or online programs, while tenured faculty are let go, and with them, tenure. Administrators hire more administrators, offices and functionaries proliferate, and academia is saddled with a top-heavy bureaucracy that drains resources. Then along comes a pandemic that cuts into college enrolments and devalues any enterprise without immediate utilitarian value—and here we are. The humanities are beyond crisis; they’re “on life support,” writes James Engell, Harvard Magazine, February.

 

And the STEM bandwagon rolls on, powered by Gates lobbying, onto the floor of Congress, where the Higher Education Act, the federal law governing crucial policies such as accreditation and standards that qualify colleges for financial aid, is overdue for reauthorization. In May 2019, the Gates foundation established a new lobbying group, “Commission on the Value of Postsecondary Education,” to make sure Congress understands the “value” of postsecondary education, “value” defined in terms of graduates’ salaries and social mobility. Prior to this lobbying group, the foundation exerted its influence from behind the scenes, but launching a 501c (4) nonprofit enables them to “talk directly with legislators about laws,”explains Nick Tampio. In May 2021, the Commission published a 117-page report, Equitable Value: Promoting Economic Mobility and Social Justice through Postsecondary Education, which spells out elaborate systems of measurement and assessment to make sureschools render dollar for dollar return on investment. The foundation is now in a position to assure that federal funding gets routed to majors leading to jobs Gates sees as vital to the economy.

 

*********

In 2018, Benjamin Schmidt cautioned against remaking higher ed to meet alleged market needs because nobody could predict what jobs would look like in ten years. Now, with AI to do the work of many humans, we might ask what jobs will look like in ten months. In March, Goldman Sachs released a report estimating that “generative AI may expose 300 million jobs to automation,” work that “might be reduced or replaced by AI systems,” summarizes Benj Rfestfd in Ars Technica. An insider, “Scott,” comments on a NYT article, March 28, on likely effects of GPT (“generative pre-trained transformers” that produce human-like text and images):

 

As a software entrepreneur who is part of a think tank that studies AI, I can tell you that GPT is not overhyped… it impacts every job from manufacturing to knowledge work, and with some imagination even agriculture, food production and restaurants… People are focusing on a single job? You should start thinking of entire professions, industries and companies (thousands of which GPT will put out of business this year). Our politics are not ready for the disruption, deflation and unemployment.

 

“We have summoned an alien intelligence,” write Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin in the NYT in March. Our first contact with AI, they note, the relatively simple manipulation of attention by social media, was catastrophic: it “increased societal polarization, undermined our mental health and unraveled democracy.” What comes next is anybody’s guess, but a lot of people are worried, including more than a thousand tech leaders and researchers who signed an open letter in March calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of GPT, citing its “profound risks to society and humanity.”

 

“It’s a completely different form of intelligence,” says Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” who resigned from Google so he could speak freely; and it’s likely to be “much more intelligent than us in the future.” It has the capacity to flood the internet with fake images and misinformation so convincing that we may “not be able to know what is true anymore”—which is dire for democracy. There are calls for regulation, including from Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, the company that created GPT-4: “the current worries I have are of disinformation problems, economic shocks, or something else at a level far beyond anything we’re prepared for.”

 

Meanwhile the titans, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, are out of the gate, racing for the spoils.

 

​*********

How to deal with an alien intelligence that’s faster and smarter than we are? Killing the humanities has left us a bit understaffed in this department. By eliminating subjects that might teach us about ourselves and our fellow beings, we’re exacerbating the problems confronting society. Misinformation and conspiracy fantasies flourish, racism and hate crimes are on the rise, along with mortality rates, not only from Covid but “deaths of despair.” Quality of life in the U.S. has plummeted.

 

Many people fear that the STEM craze may be turning out graduates ignorant of the past and their world, ill equipped for the challenges of an increasingly uncertain future. Spending one’s college years mastering the practical skills of a specialized field does not cultivate a broad understanding of the world. Minds need to be developed all around, if they are to “understand human behavior” and achieve “emotional intelligence and mental balance”— the capacities Yuval Harari says young people most need as they face dizzying change. They’ll need, above all, ”the ability to keep changing,” qualities of adaptability and versatility cultivated by the kind of education we’ve trashed.

 

“Major in being human,” David Brooks advises young people who are wondering where to turn with AI threatening to steal their futures. Ask yourself, “which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human?” Gravitate toward classes that will help you develop “distinctly human skills… that unleash your creativity, that give you a chance to exercise and hone your imaginative powers.” That would be the humanities, small, discussion-based classes where students learn about the past and creations of their kind, about what humankind has been and might be; where they learn to articulate their positions and see that others have positions too, that they can disagree yet get along—which goes a way toward learning to live in society. Find the human, urges Douglas Rushkoff in Team Human, and find the others who can help us resist the anti-human agenda and “restore the social connections that make us fully functioning humans.”

 

The stakes are high. A 2020 study, “The Role of Education in Taming Authoritarian Attitudes,” found that in all the countries surveyed, higher education correlated with resistance to authoritarianism, but it made the greatest difference in the United States, on account of our unique system of general education based in the liberal arts. Yet this is the system we’re letting go. Authoritarianism thrives on misinformation, on simplistic, us-them thinking. Democracy requires that people deal with complexity, think, question, interpret, inquire, sort out information from misinformation, push back against agendas being pushed on us, take nothing on authority. It requires that people know how to read their world, interpret, evaluate, inquire, consider context and consequences, and know how to seek sources other than social or corporate media. Decoding has a longer shelf life than the coding Gates is pushing. It’s crucial to democracy –and to employability, it turns out, since skills alone become rapidly obsolete.

 

To disinvest in the humanities is to disinvest in the human, to give up on the hope of a livable world and more humane future. Which is why it’s urgent to resuscitate the humanities and not outsource our humanity to Hal.

##################

Gayle Greene is Professor Emerita, Scripps College, Claremont, CA. Her most recent book is Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), which makes a case for the humanities by actually showing what goes on in a small discussion class.

Gaylegreene.org

Categories Budget Cuts, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Higher Education, Technology

Florida: New College Wants $400 Million to Expand

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2023 //
24

New College in Sarasota is the state college that used to be progressive. Then Governor DeSantis filled its board with rightwing cronies with the goal of turning it into the Hillsdale of the South. To change the culture, the politician who became its president has been recruiting athletes. They are not the type to want to major in gender studies.

Now, Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell reports, New College wants $400 million to grow. That’s a lot of money for a small college. The Florida press will have to keep watch on where the money goes.

Maxwell writes:

Today we’re catching up on controversy at New College, revisiting one of Central Florida’s stranger environmental debates and bidding adieu to one of Florida’s funniest novelists.

We start with what increasingly looks like the biggest public money-grab in Florida — the orgy of incestuous spending at New College of Florida.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ trustees at this school already generated national controversy when they hired former House Speaker Richard Corcoran, a guy with no higher ed experience, as the school’s president and hiked his compensation package to up to $1.3 million a year — all to run a school that says it has fewer students (698) than many elementary schools. (Seriously, Apopka Elementary has more than 800.)

But now New College wants more money — a lot more.

The Sarasota Herald Tribune recently reported that its tiny hometown college has requested a “minimum” of $400 million in additional public money to spend over the next five years and increase enrollment by a few hundred students.

Even if the school grew to 1,200 students, you’d be talking about $333,000 per student. For that price, we could practically buy every student their own school. Or at least a classroom.

If only Florida’s political policymakers were as eager to fund public education when their buddies aren’t involved.

Given the cronyism at play — New College also hired a former senate president as its general counsel and the wife of a former GOP party chair as a fundraiser — there will be a lot of people watching to see who gets the contracts dished out when the new largesse is spent.

Then there’s the lawyer

Speaking of New College’s general counsel, that’s former Senate President Bill Galvano, who generously offered to serve the school and President Corcoran “at a reduced rate of $500 per hour.”

Well, keen Orlando Sentinel readers noticed that Galvano’s name also popped up in other stories the Sentinel has written about a lawsuit filed by a GOP Senate candidate from Lake County who claims former party officials conspired to sabotage her campaign in favor of another Republican candidate.

Corcoran has been subpoenaed in that case. And Galvano is representing him — meaning the school’s president is now using the school’s attorney for personal legal needs. How convenient.

Galvano said in an email last week that Corcoran is paying his legal fees but wouldn’t say if Corcoran is getting a discounted rate or answer questions about whether the school’s trustees approved the overlapping representation, saying he considered those details “confidential attorney/client information that I do not disclose.”

Theoretically, it’s up to the trustees to ask probing questions about all that and share the details with taxpayers to instill public confidence. Also theoretically, I could enter and win a bikini pageant.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Higher Education

Florida: Students Protest DeSantis Ban on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Activism

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2023 //
8

As a buildup to his Presidentisl campaign, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis launched legal stacks in “woke,” which meant banning programs to study or promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The Board of Governors of the University of Florida met to enact the new directives, and UF students showed up to protest the state’s efforts to quash DEI, as well as “social and political activism.” They rightly saw these restrictions as interference with their right to speak freely.

Annie Martin of the Orlando Sentinel wrote:

Dozens of students and others attended a meeting of the board that governs the state university system on Thursday in Orlando, hoping to speak against proposals that would ban funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, as well as “political or social activism.”


The crowd at the meeting of the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the state university system, spilled out of the chambers into a hallway and overflow room at the University of Central Florida.


Many were there to speak on proposed rule changes prompted by a new state law prohibiting universities from funding diversity, equity and inclusion programs.


But the panel set a 15-minute time limit for public comment, which Chair Brian Lamb said was customary. About a dozen people spoke before the allotted time expired. After the board cut off the public comment period, people waiting outside the meeting room started chanting, “Let us speak!”

The board granted initial approval to the proposal, which is expected to come back for a final vote at the board’s next meeting in January.


DeSantis described diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as “an attempt to impose orthodoxy on the university,” during a signing ceremony for the bill earlier this year.


“This has basically been used as a veneer to impose an ideological agenda, and that is wrong,” he said.
The law was part of a broader push by Gov. Ron DeSantis to overhaul higher education in Florida.

The most sweeping changes have taken place at New College of Florida, the state’s small liberal arts college, where DeSantis replaced trustees with conservative activists, who appointed former House Speaker Richard Corcoran as president and have sought to transform the campus into a conservative stronghold.

At the same meeting, the Board of Governors appointed a new trustee for the board of New College:

The Board of Governors for Florida’s state university system on Thursday appointed Don Patterson to the New College Board of Trustees.

Patterson, a Sarasota resident, was the co-founder and chief operating officer of Ascend Wireless Networks and is a graduate of Liberty University, a private evangelical Christian college in Virginia.

DeSantis tightens his grip on the once progressive New College.

Categories Censorship, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Higher Education, Students

Florida: DeSantis’ Ally Gets $1.3 Million to Lead State’s Smallest College

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2023 //
16

New College is the honors college of the state university system. It cared too much about race and gender, so Governor Ron DeSantis grabbed control by appointing hard-right conservatives to the New College board of trustees. The new board fired the President, a respected scholar who earned $350,000 a year and replaced her with politician Richard Corcoran, who served as Speaker of the House and State Commissioner of Education. He has no experience in higher education, but is an enthusiastic proponent of charters and vouchers, as well as DeSantis’ ally in fighting “woke,” liberalism and progressivism.

His charge is to turn this small bastion of progressivism into a small bastion of conservatism.

The New College Board voted to give him a five-year compensation package of salary and bonuses that may total $1.3 million, equal to that of the president of the University of Florida, which enrolls 61,000 students. New College has about 800.

So far, Corcoran has succeeded in driving out one-third of the faculty and has abolished diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as well as gender studies. He has established athletic teams and is recruiting athletes.

Mel Brooks said in his film “A History of the World, Part 1,” that “It’s good to be the king.” In Florida today, it’s good to be a crony of DeSantis.

Categories Academic Freedom, Curriculum, DeSantis, Florida, Higher Education

Texas Observer: McCarthyism Rides High Again at Texas Universities

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2023 //
12

Gabriel Arans of the Texas Observer writes about the revival of McCathyism at universities in Texas. Republicans are intent on pushing out professors they think are too liberal.

Arana writes:

Texas A&M University’s disgraceful treatment of celebrated journalism professor Kathleen McElroy should terrify anyone who cares about academic freedom, education, and equality in Texas. The state’s Republican leaders, along with Governor Greg Abbott, have launched a radical, McCarthyite crusade to purge education of liberal bias.

Only in Texas or Florida would decades of experience at the country’s most prestigious newspaper and a track record of championing newsroom inclusivity disqualify someone for a job relaunching A&M’s defunct journalism program, which was shuttered in 2004 after 55 years.

McElroy’s ordeal is just the beginning.

At first, A&M officials seemed to realize how lucky they’d been to snag McElroy, a Black woman who served in various managerial positions at the New York Times for 20 years before completing a doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she served as the director of the School of Journalism and Media and now teaches.

McElroy didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but A&M insisted on a public ceremony to celebrate her appointment as head of the university’s new journalism program. On June 13, she signed an offer accepting a tenured position in front of a crowd gathered at the school’s academic building, pending approval from the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.

Over the next few weeks, the deal unraveled. After conservative activist site Texas Scorecard published a scare-mongering article about McElroy’s work on newsroom diversity, right-wing ideologues on the board of regents started scrutinizing her hire. Six or seven regents called and texted now-disgraced University President Katherine Banks to express concerns.

“I thought the purpose of us starting a journalism program was to get high-quality Aggie journalist [sic] with conservative values into the market,” regent Jay Graham texted Banks. “This won’t happen with someone like this leading the department.”

Another regent, Mike Hernandez, added that McElroy was “biased and progressive-leaning” and called giving her tenure a “difficult sell” for the board.

Members of a conservative alum group called the Rudder Association and other right-wing Aggies flooded Banks’ office with calls and emails.

Text messages show that Banks—who initially denied any involvement in McElroy’s bungled hiring, then was caught lying—was fully behind conservatives’ efforts to rein in liberal academia: “Kathy [Banks] told us multiple times the reason we were going to combine [the colleges of] arts and sciences together was to control the liberal nature that those professors brought to campus,” Graham wrote.

So Banks watered down the offer to McElroy. Still eager to return to her alma mater to train the next generation of journalists, she agreed to accept a revised five-year, nontenured teaching position, which would not require the regents’ approval.

“You’re a Black woman who worked at the New York Times,” José Luis Bermúdez, the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, warned McElroy. Her hire, he said, had been caught up in “DEI hysteria.”

But then, Banks diluted the offer further, offering McElroy a one-year, “at will” position. McElroy declined and spoke about how the university had treated her with the media.

“I’m being judged by race, maybe gender,” McElroy told the Texas Tribune. “I don’t think other folks would face the same bars or challenges.”

(Editor’s note: McElroy sits on the parent board of the Texas Observer. Because of our editorial independence policy, she has no say in our editorial decisions. Alongside this piece, today the Observerpublished a heartfelt essay from McElroy about her journalism journey and the irony of being the subject of media coverage rather than the one behind it. )

Over the summer, with the governor’s support, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 17 (SB 17), which requires institutions of higher education to do away with all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and initiatives by 2024. Already, the University of Houston has shut down its Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as well as disbanding its LGBTQ+ Resource Center (under pressure, however, it appeared to backtrack, but it is only a matter of time before the offices are officially closed). Public universities across the state have formed committees to implement the law and seek input from the academic community. It’s clear, however, that days are numbered for all the offices and programs that help students from different backgrounds.

While the ostensible goal of anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts is to prioritize merit over race in higher education—and get rid of all the “divisive” diversity stuff that liberal academics champion—the real intent is to put radical, uppity queers, minorities, and liberals in their place. A key part of the plan is to strip liberal academics of the protections that allow them to pursue research and speak publicly without fear of reprisal; this past session, right-wing legislators tried to get rid of tenure but settled on more modest restrictions. The Senate also passed a ban on “critical race theory,” an academic theory that posits racism is embedded in society, but the House failed to pass the measure….

Anti-DEI hysteria will lead to a brain drain at Texas’ public universities. Academics at most institutions enjoy the freedom to conduct scholarship without interference. To ensure they can pursue ideas that may be unpopular to the public and pursue knowledge for its own sake, they are granted protection after demonstrating excellence in their field. The best scholars don’t want to work in a place where they have to worry that criticizing wingnut politicians will get them put on leave—as A&M did when Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick complained to administrators about criticism levied against him by opioid expert Joy Alonzo—and the best students from around the country will choose institutions that value academic freedom, openness, and inclusion rather than those under siege by the radical right.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Censorship, Cruelty, Disruption, Extremism, Higher Education, Republicans

Florida: New College Board Chooses DeSantis Crony as President

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2023 //
2

Since Governor Ron DeSantis engineered the hostile takeover of Florida’s progressive New College, the interim president was Richard Corcoran. Corcoran was a hard-right Speaker of the House of Representatives and Dtate Commissiober of Education, in which role he led the state’s attacks on public schools and the expansion of charter schools and vouchers. His wife founded a charter school and is now associated with the Hillsdale College Barney charter schools.

After a few months of deliberation, the hand-picked, stacked board decided to hire Corcoran as the permanent president of New College.

To be clear, he has no academic or scholarly credentials to be a college president.

He dropped out of the University of Florida and enrolled in St. Leo University, a Catholic college. After graduating, he received his law degree from Regent University, a private Christian university.

He has no previous experience as a professor, a college administrator, or a scholar. He is uniquely unqualified for a college presidency. Since he took charge of New College, one-third of the faculty has resigned, faculty have been denied tenure without reason, and students have protested the decisions of the board.

He has been successful in rightwing politics.

The original New College was founded as a school for creative, free thinkers, educated by faculty who were highly credentialed. The new DeSantis board intends to turn New College into the Hilllsdale of the South.

Corcoran claims to have boosted enrollment, which he did by recruiting athletes, not aesthetes or free thinkers.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, DeSantis, Education Industry, Elections, Florida, Higher Education, Vouchers

North Carolina: Legislature Mandates Creation of a School for Conservative Thought at UNC

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2023 //
14

The North Carolina General Assembly took a highly unusual step by mandating the creation of a center for conservatives values on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Typically, new programs or centers are instituted by the institution or the faculty, not the legislature. Apparently the Republican supermajorities think that conservative college students are snowflakes who must be protected from divergent views and carefully indoctrinated.

When the General Assembly’s Republican majority revealed and passed a new budget in a whirlwind 48 hours last week, it set an aggressive timeline for an unprecedented new school at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The budget provides $2 million in funding in each of the next two fiscal years for the new School of Civic Life and Leadership, described as early as 2017 by its supporters and architects as a “conservative center.” The budget provision also dictates a few specifics:l

  • UNC-Chapel Hill’s Provost Chris Clemens must name the school’s first dean by Dec. 31, 2023 — just over three months from now.
  • The school must hire, with that dean’s approval, “at least 10 and no more than 20 faculty members from outside the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill” — all with permanent tenure or eligibility for permanent tenure.
  • The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees must report to the legislature’s Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee and the Fiscal Research Division on progress made toward establishing the School of Civic Life and Leadership and factors affecting the long-term sustainability of the new school.

It is already unprecedented for a new school at a UNC System campus to be instigated not by the faculty or administration — but rather by the legislature and its political appointees on the system’s board of governors and board of trustees — faculty representatives told Newsline this week. They said they had never heard of state government mandating the number of faculty members, whether they will be tenured and how and when they will be hired.

“It’s demoralizing, to be honest,” said Beth Moracco, a professor in the university’s Department of Health Behavior and chair of the faculty. “In my experience it’s very unusual, for a number of reasons, to have that level of direction in legislation for hiring at the university. I haven’t ever seen anything quite like it. And it’s concerning.”

Open the link to read the rest of the article.

Categories Education Reform, Higher Education

Michael Hiltzik: The Republican Plan to Dumb Down America’s Youth

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
24

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, finds a pattern in the Republican attacks on the schools and universities. Their hostility to teaching Black history, their encouragement of book banning, their strategic defunding of higher education, their treatment of teaching about race, gender, and climate change as “indoctrination”—together point to a goal: the dumbing down of American young people.

Republicans say they want to get rid of “indoctrination” but they are busily erasing free inquiry and critical thinking. What do they actually want? Indoctrination.

He reminds us of the immortal words of former President Donald J. Trump: “I love the uneducated.” Republicans do not want students to think critically about racism or the past. They do not want them to reflect on anything that makes them “uncomfortable.” They want to shield them from “divisive concerns.” They want them to imbibe a candy-coated version of the past, not wrestle with hard truths.

He writes:

For reasons that may not be too hard to understand, Republicans and conservatives seem to be intent on turning their K-12 schools, colleges and universities into plantations for raising a crop of ignorant and unthinking students.

Donald Trump set forth the principle during his 2016 primary campaign, when he declared, “I love the poorly educated.”

In recent months, the right-wing attack on public education has intensified. The epicenter of the movement is Florida under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, where the faculty and course offerings of one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, New College, have been eviscerated purportedly to wipe out what DeSantis calls “ideological indoctrination.”

The state’s K-12 schools have been authorized to supplement their curricula with animated cartoons developed by the far-right Prager University Foundation that flagrantly distort climate science and America’s racial history, the better to promote fossil fuels, undermine the use of renewable energy and paint a lily-white picture of America’s past.

Then there’s West Virginia, which is proposing to shut down nearly 10% of its academic offerings, including all its foreign language programs. The supposed reason is a huge budget deficit, the harvest of a systematic cutback in state funding.

In Texas, the State Library and Archives Commission is quitting the American Library Assn., after a complaint by a Republican state legislator accusing the association of pushing “socialism and Marxist ideology.”

In Arkansas, state education officials told schools that they may not award credit for the Advanced Placement course in African American history. (Several school districts said they’d offer students the course anyway.) This is the course that Florida forced the College Board to water down earlier this year by alleging, falsely, that it promoted “critical race theory.”

I must interject here that I’m of two minds about this effort. On the one hand, an ignorant young electorate can’t be good for the republic; on the other, filling the workforce with graduates incapable of critical thinking and weighed down by a distorted conception of the real world will reduce competition for my kids and grandkids for jobs that require knowledge and brains.

Let’s examine some of these cases in greater depth.

Prager University, or PragerU, isn’t an accredited institution of higher learning. It’s a dispenser of right-wing charlatanism founded by Dennis Prager, a right-wing radio host. The material approved for use in the schools includes a series of five- to 10-minute animated videos featuring the fictional Leo and Layla, school-age siblings who travel back in time to meet historical figures.

One encounter is with Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist. The goal of the video is to depict “Black lives matter” demonstrations as unrestrained and violent — “Why are they burning a car?” Leo asks while viewing a televised news report. The animated Douglass speaks up for change achieved through “patience and compromise.”

This depiction of Douglass leaves experts in his life and times aghast. Douglass consistently railed against such counsel. Of the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the union but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act — arguably the most detested federal law in American history — he stated that it illustrated how “slavery has shot its leprous distillment through the life blood of the nation.” In 1861, he thundered that “all compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery, is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law.”

Patience? The video depicts Douglass quoting from an 1852 speech to a Rochester anti-slavery society in which he said “great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages.”

But it doesn’t include lines from later in the speech, reproaching his audience for prematurely celebrating the progress of abolition: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … all your religious parade and solemnity, … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Another video in the series parrots the fossil fuel industry’s talking points against wind and solar power: Standing over the corpse of a bird supposedly slain by flying into a wind turbine, the schoolkids’ interlocutor states, “Like many people … you’ve been misled about renewable energy, and their impact on the environment…. Windmills kill so many birds, it’s hard to track how many…. Wind farms and solar farms disrupt huge amounts of natural habitat.”

Acid rain, pollution, global warming — those consequences of fossil fuel energy aren’t mentioned. The video ends with a pitch for nuclear power, never mind the unsolved question of what to do with its radioactive waste products.

PragerU’s sedulous attack on renewables perhaps shouldn’t be much a surprise: Among its big donors is the Wilks family, which derives its fortune from fracking and which approved “future payment” of $6.25 million to PragerU in 2013.

As for New College, its travails under the DeSantis regime have been documented by my colleague Jenny Jarvie, among many others.

In a nutshell, the Sarasota institution possessed a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s outstanding havens for talented, independent-minded students. Then came DeSantis. He summarily replaced its board of trustees with a clutch of right-wing stooges including Christopher Rufo, known for having concocted the panic over critical race theory out of thin air and then marketed it as a useful culture war weapon to unscrupulous conservative politicians, including DeSantis.

Rufo and his fellows fired the university president and installed a sub-replacement-level GOP timeserver, Richard Corcoran, in her place. Faculty and students have fled. Students who stayed behind and were in the process of assembling their course schedules for the coming year are discovering at the last minute that the courses are no longer offered because their teachers have been fired or quit.

Instead of ambitious scholars committed to open inquiry, Corcoran has recruited athletes to fill out the student body, even though the college has no athletic fields for many of them to play on. According to USA Today, New College now has 70 baseball players, nearly twice as many as the University of Florida’s Division I NCAA team.

More to the point, the average SAT and ACT scores and high-school grade point averages have fallen from the pre-Corcoran level, while most of the school’s merit-based scholarships have gone to athletes. New College, in other words, has transitioned from a top liberal arts institution into a school that places muscle-bound underachievers on a pedestal. DeSantis calls this “succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission.”

Finally, West Virginia University. Under its president, Gordon Gee — who previously worked his dubious magic at Brown Universityand Ohio State University, among other places — the school built lavish facilities despite declining enrollments. The construction program at the land grant university contributed to a $45-million deficit for the coming year, with expectations that it would rise to $75 million by 2028.

But the main problem was one shared by many other public universities — the erosion of public funding. As the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy points out, “if West Virginia lawmakers had simply kept higher education funding at the same levels as a decade ago, West Virginia University would have an estimated additional $37.6 million in state funding for [fiscal year] 2024, closing the majority of this year’s budget gap.”

The decision on which programs to shutter at WVU points to a shift in how public university trustees see the purpose of their schools, trying to align them more with economic goals set by local industries rather than the goal of providing a well-rounded education to a state’s students. Trustees in some states, including North Carolina and Texas, have injected themselves into academic decisions traditionally left to administrators, often for partisan political reasons.

When it comes to interference in educational policies by conservatives, such as what’s happened in Florida, Texas and Arkansas, there’s no justification for taking these measures at face value — that is, as efforts to remove “indoctrination” from the schools. The truth is that the right-wing effort serves the purposes of white supremacists and advocates of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — they’re moving to inject indoctrination that conforms more to their own ideologies.

Take the attack on critical race theory, or at least the version retailed by Rufo and his ilk. “The right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle,” the Black scholar Robin D.G. Kelley of UCLA has observed, by caricaturing a four-decade-long scholarly effort to analyze “why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality” into “a racist plot to teach white children to hate themselves, their country, and their ‘race.’”

(The inclusion of Kelley’s work in the AP African American Studies course was cited as a “concern” by Florida officials in their rationale for rejecting the course; Kelley’s work was suppressed by the College Board in its effort to make the course more acceptable to the state Department of Education.)

These attacks are couched in the vocabulary of “parents’ rights” and student freedom, but they don’t serve the students at all, nor do they advance the rights of parents interested in a good, comprehensive education for their children, as opposed to one dictated by the most narrow-minded ideologues in their state.

Where will it end? Florida’s ham-fisted educational policies won’t produce graduates with the intellectual equipment to succeed in legitimate universities, much less in the world at large. The only university many will be qualified to attend will be Prager U, and that won’t be good for anyone.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Higher Education, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Racism, Stupid, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Biden’s Struggle to Reduce Student Debt

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
102

President Biden has repeatedly tried to reduce the debt that college students incurred and that remains a financial burden for years after they finish college. Republicans have adamantly opposed any effort to relieve millions of students of their college debt, which some have been paying off for decades.

I can’t help but remember my visit to Finland, where I learned that all education, at every level, is tuition-free. How is this possible, I asked. I was told that education is a human right, and no one should pay for a human right. From an economic point of view, the entire nation benefits when more people get a college education. Yet over the past few decades, state governments have reduced their support of public higher education, shifting the burden to individual students.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the political dimensions of the student debt issue:

Rising costs of college and cuts to government support for education mean that more than 45 million people across the country owe more than $1.6 trillion in federal loans, an amount equal to the size of the Australian economy. That debt absorbs money people at the lower end of the economic scale would otherwise invest in homes, consumer goods, and so on, and the Biden administration has made it a priority to relieve some of that debt.


When she was the California attorney general, Vice President Kamala Harris took on predatory for-profit colleges and won $1 billion for defrauded veterans and students, and when he ran for office, Biden promised to forgive federal student debt for those earning less than $125,000.


Since the Supreme Court on June 30, 2023, rejected the administration’s plan to forgive more than $400 billion in student debt borrowed through government programs, the administration has turned to other approaches.


In April it began to fix the administrative errors that had kept borrowers from receiving relief through income-driven repayment plans and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program under which they borrowed the money. Those plans were always intended to offer a way to eliminate student debt, but the Government Accountability Office in 2022 found that poor record keeping meant that that promise had not been honored. On July 14 the administration announced that fixes to those programs would relieve more than 800,000 borrowers of more than $39 billion in student debt.

At the time, Biden did not mince words. “Republican lawmakers—who had no problem with the government forgiving millions of dollars of their own business loans—have tried everything they can to stop me from providing relief to hardworking Americans. Some are even objecting to the actions we announced today, which follows through on relief borrowers were promised, but never given, even when they had been making payments for decades. The hypocrisy is stunning, and the disregard for working and middle-class families is outrageous.”


Since then, the administration has provided relief to others caught in the system as well, including relief of $45.7 billion for 662,000 public service workers, $10.5 billion for 491,000 borrowers with a total and permanent disability, and $22 billion for nearly 1.3 million borrowers who were cheated by their schools, saw their schools close, or are covered by a related court settlement.


Today the administration released the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, a new repayment plan to bring order and relief to federal student borrowers. It is an income-driven repayment plan that is based on a borrower’s income and family size rather than their loan balance, prevents the balance from growing because of unpaid interest, and forgives the remaining balance after a number of years. “The benefits of the SAVE plan will be particularly critical for low- and middle-income borrowers, community college students, and borrowers who work in public service,” the White House said.


Relieving student debt helps those at the lower end of the economy, which will boost economic growth, but there is also a political payoff in these efforts for the administration. As Democratic strategist and pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller pointed out in the Washington Post in July, in the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, 32 million Americans have become eligible to vote. In the same eight years, as many as 20 million older voters have died.


Lake and Heller note that younger Americans are focused on issues, rather than individuals, and skew progressive (prompting some Republicans to talk about raising the voting age to 25). Fulfilling a campaign promise that overwhelmingly benefits those under 50—parents as well as students—is good politics, blending in with the members of Gen Z (the generation born between the mid to late 1990s and early 2010s) forming political PACs of their own and running for office.

Categories Biden, Education Industry, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »