Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education Causes Mass Squealing

Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock reacted to the Trump Administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education by saying the university would accept no new grant money, that professors would be returning what monies they now had, that the university would accept no federal funds of any kind, that they would ban its students from accepting student loans (all are backed by the federal government), and they would refuse all federal and state favors, tax breaks, and any and all other special considerations. They want to be treated like anybody else.

That good lady said this was necessary for Dartmouth to continue its “celebrated history of forging its own path”, and that any deal with the Feds “would compromise our academic freedom, our ability to govern ourselves”.

Kidding! Beilock’s university will still take all of your money they can grub, but they have no intention of being told what they are allowed to do with it, especially by the Great Orange Devil. They feel they are owed the money because Pay Up, We’re A University.

The Compact is not a strong, nor a strong-arm, document. It is not what an “extreme far right wing” person would want, which is to make Beilock, and all universities, to live up to her words and to keep their filthy hands out of the federal till.

Woke originated in universities, lives there still, and can’t be killed until its supply of blood is cut off. About bad science and grants you already know. Alas, the Compact resists this solution.

The Compact asks for minor fixes only, and demands little in return for the great riches government bestows. It would have been better had it announced, “As of tomorrow, no new money. You’re on your own.” However, there is still things in it to delight a cultured mind. Let’s review.

The Compact asks for Equality, when it should have killed that ridiculous concept. Yet, it is a strategy to force DIE mavens to apply their formulas and incantations to all groups equally. Including white men. The government asks universities to banish all discrimination except for sex (all-girl schools are allowed, but not all-boy) and religion.

Hilariously, the Compact asks universities to “publicly report anonymized data for admitted and rejected students, including GPA, standardized test score, or other program-specific measures of accomplishments, by race, national origin, and sex.” My emphasis.

Universities will never agree to that. That would put lie to their most sacred beliefs and commitments. But it would be darn funny if these stats leaked.

Vibrant [their word] Marketplace Of Ideas, demands the Compact. This is a terrible euphemism. Nobody wants a true intellectual bazaar, in which necrophiliacs, Satanists, vegans, purveyors of multiverses and holders of other strange beliefs are charged with educating the youth, and who are paid with your money. What’s wanted are to push out Fantasists and replace them with Realityists.

The Compact wants policies to guarantee “academic freedom”, which sounds well enough, but this is instantly weakened with “universities shall adopt policies that prevent discriminatory, threatening, harassing, or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community”. They’re also keen on banning “calls for murder or genocide or support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.” Universities have these policies now, and use them to push favored political groups (i.e. Victims).

Non-discrimination in hiring. This is another euphemism. Of course we want discrimination in hiring. “Do you now or have you ever listened to NPR?” is as good a question as any to discriminate and keep the riffraff out.

Institutional neutrality. The Compact would bar university employees from protests using the name of universities. The Compact will never get away with this one.

Student learning. Funny this doesn’t come first, since it is the alleged purpose of universities. “Signatories will use public accountability mechanisms to demonstrate their commitment to grade integrity, such as publishing grade distribution dashboards with multiyear trendlines…” This is silly. There’s a million ways to avoid any accountability here. Later the Compact hits upon a better idea.

Student equality. Ugh.

Students shall be treated as individuals and not on the basis of their immutable characteristics, with due exceptions for sex-based privacy, safety, and fairness. Women’s equality requires single-sex spaces, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, and fair competition, such as in sports.

We don’t want women’s equality. What we want is not even for men to stop pretending to be women, because of course that is impossible. What we want is for the sane not to be forced to mouth insanity as if it were sanity. We want to be able to say to a man in a dress attempting to sign up to Ladies Race Day, “Get outta here, pervert.”

Financial responsibility. The Compact buried the good stuff: “Signatories acknowledge that universities that receive federal funds have a duty to reduce administrative costs…” Yet many of these bureaucrats are tasked to deal with all the other regulations and grants government controls.

Next: “signatories to this compact commit to freezing the effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.” How much wiggle room is left with that “effective”?

Finally my favorite:

Further, universities poorly equip students when they fail to inform them about likely life earnings for students’ chosen majors or admit students without the skills or support needed to succeed. Universities shall publicly post statistics about average earnings from graduates in each academic program and shall refund tuition to students who drop out during the first academic term of their undergraduate studies.

If you heard a piercing shriek on the first of October this year, it was university administrators reading that passage. Congress, which cannot even decide what time it is, ought to make this one a law (for any institution receiving federal monies). It won’t.

There’s a little more to it, like demanding avoiding foreign entanglements, but that will work as well as it did for Washington making the same request.

The punchlines.

First:

The university annually shall conduct, or hire an external party to conduct, an independent, good faith, empirically rigorous, and anonymous poll of its faculty, students, and staff, providing them the opportunity to evaluate the university’s performance against this compact. The results of such surveys shall be made public and available on the university’s website.

And second:

Universities found to have willfully or negligently violated this agreement shall lose access to the benefits of this agreement for a period of no less than 1 year. Subsequent violations of this agreement shall result in a loss of access to the benefits of this agreement for no less than 2 years. Further, upon determination of any violations, all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation shall be returned to the U.S. government.

Music, and sweetly played.

Will any of this happen? I doubt it. We already have lists of universities (even MIT) forcefully announcing “Just give us the damned money and we’ll do what we please with it.”

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