The Right v. Claudine Gay

Calder McHugh at Politico:

Almost a month after a widely panned congressional hearing where she said it was context-dependent whether calls for genocide against Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct, President Claudine Gay announced that she was resigning, a coda that followed a pronounced pressure campaign led by conservatives in Congress, prominent donors and right-leaning media and activists.

Gay’s departure marked the rare exit that occasioned widespread congressional comment. House Speaker Mike Johnson argued “the resignation of Claudine Gay is long overdue,” giving voice to the disdain held for Harvard and other elite institutions by an increasingly populist Republican Party.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the Harvard grad whose line of questioning during the hearing produced the viral moments that doomed Gay — and led to University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill’s resignation — took a victory lap Tuesday.

“TWO DOWN,” wrote Stefanik in a post on X.

Yet it was the conservative media ecosystem, not Stefanik, that struck the crowning blow leading to Gay’s resignation. Gay managed at first to escape Magill’s fate with the support of the Harvard Corporation, the smaller and more powerful of Harvard’s two governing boards. But a sustained pressure campaign that focused on allegations of plagiarism in her scholarship ultimately led to her downfall.

It began Dec. 10, when conservative activists Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet published a newsletter on Substack titled “ Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?”

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“The right has excelled at and outperformed the left when it comes to television and radio opinion … where the right has always lagged is in reporting,” Eliana Johnson, the editor-in-chief of the Free Beacon, said (Johnson formerly worked at POLITICO).

Civic Thought and Deliberation

Many posts have discussed deliberation.

Civic Thought: A Proposal for University-Level Civic Education b Benjamin Storey & Jenna Silber Storey at the American Enterprise Institute

• There is widespread, bipartisan concern that American universities are not adequately preparing students for citizenship. The most ambitious efforts to attend to this problem to date have been undertaken by Republican-led state legislatures, which have mandated that state universities create new academic units for civic education.
• While this innovation has been undertaken to meet political needs, its success or failure will be determined by academic standards. To meet those standards, these new academic units will need to define and execute a distinctive intellectual mission.
• An intellectual mission in the fullest sense requires a coherent program of teaching and research in a specific and demanding discipline. This report sketches the outlines of such a program, which we call “Civic Thought.” As its core elements are derived from a consideration of the intellectual demands of citizenship, it may be useful to all those working toward the renewal of university-level civic education.

.In a democratic republic such as our own, citizens need to learn howto deliberate with others who have different perspectives and experiences. They need to be capable of evaluating different arguments and considering different needs as they consider the best possible course of action for the country as a whole.

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Contemporary citizens should learn to consult and evaluate different forms ofexpertise in the course of deliberating between alternative courses of action. Insofar as the citizen’s responsibility is, however, for the whole of our common life in all its complexity, political decisions cannot be derived from the counsel of any particular specialist.

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 Since citizens need to learn to deliberate together about problems that call for action, the approach of Civic Thought is best characterized by a phrase borrowed from Hannah Arendt—the “willingness to take joint responsibility” for the problems one’s country faces and the remedies that might be employed to address them. For example, while considering the national debt, scholars of Civic Thought would consider it as our problem, and they would inquire into how fiscal accountability might be restored without neglecting areas where spending is truly necessary. The willingness to take joint responsibility for the challenges facing one’s country means, in Arendt’s words, refusing to adopt a posture of “estrangement” from it, an attitude of unquenchable “dissatisfaction . . . and disgust with things as they are,” and striving rather to understand oneself as implicated, for better and worse, in the unfolding history of one’s political community

Meta Influence at KSG

Many posts have discussed the political uses of philanthropy. 

 Joseph Menn at WP:

A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.

Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.

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As the main attraction at a Zoom meeting for top Kennedy School donors on Oct. 29 that year, Donovan said the papers showed that Meta knew the harms it was causing. Former top Facebook communications executive Elliot Schrage asked repeated questions during the meeting and said she badly misunderstood the papers, Donovan wrote in a sworn declaration included in the filing.

Ten days after the donors meeting, Kennedy School dean Doug Elmendorf, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, emailed Donovan with pointed questions about her research goals and methods, launching an increase in oversight that restricted her activities and led to her dismissal before the end of her contract, according to the declaration. Donovan wrote that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s $500 million gift for a new artificial intelligence institute at the university, announced Dec. 7 that year, had been in the works before the donor meeting.

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The Donovan case comes at a time when researchers who focus on social media platforms find themselves under increasing attack. Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s legal foundation has sued academic and independent researchers, claiming that they conspired with government agencies to suppress speech, and Republican-led congressional committees have subpoenaed their records, adding to the pressure.

In addition, Big Tech companies themselves have sponsored research, made grants to some colleges and universities, and doled out data to professors who agree to specific avenues of inquiry.

AI Fellows on the Hill

Many posts have discussed the political uses of philanthropy. 

Brendan Bordelon at Politico:

Top tech companies with major stakes in artificial intelligence are channeling money through a venerable science nonprofit to help fund fellows working on AI policy in key Senate offices, adding to the roster of government staffers across Washington whose salaries are being paid by tech billionaires and others with direct interests in AI regulation.

The new “rapid response cohort” of congressional AI fellows is run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Washington-based nonprofit, with substantial support from Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, IBM and Nvidia, according to the AAAS. It comes on top of the network of AI fellows funded by Open Philanthropy, a group financed by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

The six rapid response fellows, including five with PhDs and two who held prior positions at big tech firms, operate from the offices of two of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s top three lieutenants on AI legislation — Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) — as well as the Senate Banking Committee and the offices of Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).

Alongside the Open Philanthropy fellows — and hundreds of outside-funded fellows throughout the government, including many with links to the tech industry — the six AI staffers in the industry-funded rapid response cohort are helping shape how key players in Congress approach the debate over when and how to regulate AI, at a time when many Americans are deeply skeptical of the industry.

The apparent conflict of tech-funded figures working inside the Capitol Hill offices at the forefront of AI policy worries some tech experts, who fear Congress could be distracted from rules that would protect the public from biased, discriminatory or inaccurate AI systems.

Oswald Acted Alone

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

Oswald acted alone.  The more education you have, the more likely you are to know that. Gallup:

The latest poll, conducted Oct. 2-23, finds majorities of most key demographic groups believing that more than one person was involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Americans with postgraduate education are the exception, with more who say a lone gunman (50%) rather than multiple people (44%) killed the president. This was not the case when this question was last asked in 2013.

The views of college graduates (those without any postgraduate education) are closer to those of Americans with at least some postgraduate education compared with those without a college degree. Still, 57% of college graduates think there was a conspiracy among multiple parties, while 41% say Oswald acted alone.

Although majorities of all party groups believe Kennedy’s assassination involved a conspiracy, that view is less prevalent among Democrats (55%) than Republicans (71%) and independents (68%). Conversely, Democrats (39%) are more likely than Republicans (25%) and independents (25%) to support the idea of a lone gunman.

Paul Roderick Gregory at WSJ last year:

Less than a year after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Warren Commission released its findings to the public: JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted alone. The new tranche of files the National Archives released last week contains nothing that calls that conclusion into question. But many Americans do anyway.

When the Warren report came out in September 1964, some 80% agreed with its finding that Oswald acted alone. Today more than 60% don’t believe Oswald acted alone. The persistent belief in a conspiracy has been fueled by the 400 books published on the Kennedys, most on the multitude of conspiracy theories revolving around Cuba, the Soviet Union, the Mafia, Texas oil interests, Lyndon B. Johnson and so on. One of the most amusing, in an effort to shift the blame from the leftist Oswald, lists my father and me as part of a White Russian conspiracy.


We did have a connection with Oswald. My father, a native Russian speaker, taught the language at a public library in Fort Worth, Texas. Oswald wanted a certificate of fluency in Russian and invited my father and me to his brother’s house. There we met Lee’s wife, Marina, for whom my father translated after the assassination. Moscow and some American leftists accused him of mistranslating her to shift the blame to Lee. Lee’s brother identified me as Lee and Marina’s only friend during their stay in Forth Worth.

I never doubted that Lee did it, or that he did it alone, when I saw his image on the TV screen as he was brought into Dallas police headquarters. As I told the Secret Service the next day, the Lee Harvey Oswald I knew would be the last person I would recruit for a conspiracy. He was genetically incapable of being either a leader or a follower.

The Warren report itself is a masterpiece in careful investigation. Its agents interviewed almost everyone who crossed paths with the Oswalds, down to fellow passengers on Lee’s bus to Mexico City and a landlord who once knocked on their door. The explanation of the sustained rejection of its findings rests with incredulity that history-changing events can happen by chance, especially through the actions of a nobody like Lee Harvey Oswald—a paranoid, delusional high-school dropout who expected his Historic Diary to make him an intellectual figure of the left.

I have a quite different picture as I remember waving goodbye to Lee and Marina as they boarded the night bus from Fort Worth to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1962, exactly one year before the assassination. Lee had all the attributes for a “low-tech” assassination: motive, resources, persistence, street smarts and the soul of a killer. He also needed a string of the coincidences that formed the brew for the conspiracy theories that seem to have won the day.

The loss of national innocence begun with JFK’s assassination has only gotten worse—the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks, Russiagate, evidence of a partisan bureaucracy, and questioning of formerly revered institutions such as the Supreme Court and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Can public trust be regained after such damage?

The Hamas Issue and the Spiral of Silence

Recent posts have discussed the Hamas terror attack on Israel

Emma Pettit at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In the aftermath of Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel and the country’s subsequent siege on Gaza, the University of Texas at Arlington’s political-science department did what political-science departments often do: It held a Q&A with a scholarly expert.

The idea, said Morgan Marietta, the department chair at the time, was for students to pose their questions to Brent E. Sasley, who studies Middle East politics, and learn from him about the conflict. But the event, held on October 18, was not a calm, scholastic exchange. It was tense. There was some interrupting, shouting, and, according to Marietta, some cursing. At least one student was peacefully escorted out of the room by a police officer.

Days later, Marietta’s dean expressed “concerns” about his performance as department chair and said she might consider removing him from the position if he didn’t accede to a few “preliminary requests,” according to a memo, which Marietta shared with The Chronicle. Those requests included that department events not be scheduled without prior approval, and that he submit a written plan for managing any event seven work days in advance, including “a copy of comments you plan to give by way of introduction.”
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This was unthinkable to Marietta, who then resigned as chair. “These policies,” he wrote in his resignation letter, “are transparent attempts to halt public talks by political science faculty, curtail the academic freedom of scholars, and quash discussion if it might lead to criticism.” (The Shorthorn, the student newspaper, first reported Marietta’s resignation. He’s still on the faculty.)

Antisemitism on Campus

Recent posts have discussed the Hamas terror attack on Israel

Erwin Chemerinsky at The Los Angeles Times:

I am a 70-year-old Jewish man, but never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks. I have heard antisemitic things from time to time through my life. I remember as a child being called a “dirty Jew,” and my friends and I being called “Christ killers” as we walked to Hebrew school. I recall a college girlfriend’s parents telling her that she should not go out with me because “Jews are different.” I had an incident in a class I was teaching about the ethics of negotiations, where a student matter of factly said, “the other side will try to Jew you down,” without the slightest sense of how that was a slur.

But none of this prepared me for the last few weeks. On Friday, someone in my school posted on Instagram a picture of me with the caption, “Erwin Chemerinsky has taken an indefinite sabbatical from Berkeley Law to join the I.D.F.” Two weeks ago, at a town hall, a student told me that what would make her feel safe in the law school would be “to get rid of the Zionists.” I have heard several times that I have been called “part of a Zionist conspiracy,” which echoes of antisemitic tropes that have been expressed for centuries.

I was stunned when students across the country, including mine, immediately celebrated the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7. Students for Justice in Palestine called the terror attack a “historic win” for the “Palestinian resistance.” A Columbia professor called the Hamas massacre “awesome” and a “stunning victory.” A Yale professor tweeted, “It’s been such an extraordinary day!” while calling Israel a “murderous, genocidal settler state.” A Chicago art professor posted a note reading, “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement…. May they all rot in hell.” A UC Davis professor tweeted, “Zionist journalists … have houses w addresses, kids in school,” adding “they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.” There are, sadly, countless other examples.

Attention to Political News

Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

There are wide differences in the amount of attention paid to national political news by age and educational attainment. In the current survey, 51% of U.S. adults aged 65 and older say they follow political news very closely, as do 40% of those between the ages of 50 and 64. Far fewer 30- to 49-year-olds (26%), and especially 18- to 29-year-olds (9%), are following politics very closely.

More than four in 10 college graduates (including those with and without a postgraduate education) follow political news very closely, while fewer than three in 10 adults without a college degree do.

There are modest gender differences in attention to politics, with more men (35%) than women (30%) following politics very closely. Republicans and Democrats pay similar levels of attention, but independents pay less than either of the two major party groups.

These subgroup differences are similar to what Gallup has observed since 2001, although the levels of attention measured in the 2023 poll are lower than usual for postgraduates and young adults and higher for senior citizens. Postgraduates typically pay the closest attention to politics, with an average of 51% doing so since 2001.

Education and Overdose

Many posts have discussed iinequality and higher education.

October 6, 2023  

David Powell, "Educational Attainment and US Drug Overdose Deaths"

JAMA Health Forum. 2023;4(10):e233274. doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2023.3274

Key Points

Question  Was educational attainment associated with overdose death rate growth in the US from 2000 to 2021?

Findings  In this cross-sectional study of 912 057 overdose deaths in the US from 2000 to 2021, overdose deaths increased sharply among individuals without any college education. The overdose death rate increased substantially between 2018 and 2021 for those without a high school diploma, primarily due to increases in deaths with synthetic opioid involvement.

Meaning  In this study, educational attainment, an important component of socioeconomic status, was found to be associated with overdose deaths, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Two-Parent Edge

Many posts have discussed marriage and family.

W. Bradford Wilcox, Wendy Wang,  Spencer James, Thomas Murray, "Do Two Parents Matter More Than Ever?" Institute for Family Studies, September 20, 2023

• College graduation and economic success are more common for young adults from intact families.
• Children who have the benefit of two parents are comparatively more advantaged today than they were in previous decades.
• The relationship between family structure and college graduation is stronger today than it was for Boomers.

The Changing Politics of Race

Many posts have dealt with racial issues.

Joseph Simonson at The Washington Free Beacon:

Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research made headlines this month when it announced it would axe a third of its workforce. But those layoffs may not have much of an impact, considering the center has hardly produced any original research at all.

The Boston University-based center has produced just two original research papers since its founding in June 2020, according to a Washington Free Beacon review. Output from the center’s scholars largely consists of op-eds or commentary posted on the center’s website. The group’s plans to "maintain the nation’s largest online database of racial inequity data in the United States" quickly fizzled out, and the database has been dormant since 2021.

The Center for Antiracist Research is the latest left-wing group to fall on hard times. George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which gave $140,000 to Kendi’s center, cut 40 percent of its staff in June. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s revenues fell 88 percent from 2021 to 2022, as support for the movement plummeted to an all-time low.

It is unclear how much money remains in the Center for Antiracist Research’s coffers. Boston University did not respond to a request for comment.

Liam Knox at Inside HIgher Ed:

The Supreme Court’s June decision striking down race-conscious admissions may have been the most significant higher ed case in years, providing a concrete answer to questions that have spurred dozens of court cases since the 1990s. But it hardly put an end to the legal fight over affirmative action.

In fact, the outcome has unleashed a stream of new challenges to colleges’ race-conscious policies and revived cases that had been dismissed or lost before the ruling was handed down.

Just yesterday, Students for Fair Admissions, the group that spearheaded the Supreme Court cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, filed a lawsuit challenging the race-conscious admissions policies of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. SFFA began building the case after the Supreme Court left open the possibility that military colleges could be exempt from the affirmative action ruling due to their “potentially distinct interests” in enrolling racially diverse student bodies.

Affirmative Action at Yale

 Liam Knox at Inside Higher Ed:

A lawsuit against Yale University over its affirmative action policies was dropped on Thursday after the university agreed to make significant changes to its admissions policies.

The lawsuit was filed in 2021 by Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought the affirmative action cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina that resulted in the Supreme Court decision in June striking down race-conscious admissions. The Yale case was stayed pending the outcome of the Harvard and UNC cases but reopened in July.

The agreement stipulates that Yale make some of the most significant and wide-reaching admissions policy changes to be spurred by the Supreme Court’s ruling so far, encompassing not only race-conscious admissions but financial aid and data transparency as well.

They include:

• Updating the university’s training materials to make the ban on considering race explicit to application readers and admissions counselors.
• Taking “technological steps” to ensure that nobody involved in admissions decisions has access to data on the racial identity of individual applicants during the review process.
• Refraining from producing reports on the aggregate racial or ethnic makeup of applicants or admitted students during the review process.
• Ensuring that race is not a factor in any financial aid calculations or rewards

College, Debt, and Wealth

Paul Tough at NYT:

In the fall of 2009, 70 percent of that year’s crop of high school graduates did in fact go straight to college. That was the highest percentage ever, and the collegegoing rate stayed near that elevated level for the next few years. The motivation of these students was largely financial. The 2008 recession devastated many of the industries that for decades provided good jobs for less-educated workers, and a college degree had become a particularly valuable commodity in the American labor market. The typical American with a bachelor’s degree (and no further credential) was earning about two-thirds more than the typical high school grad, a financial advantage about twice as large as the one a college degree produced a generation earlier. College seemed like a reliable runway to a life of comfort and affluence.

A decade later, Americans’ feelings about higher education have turned sharply negative. The percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Only about a third of Americans now say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. Among young Americans in Generation Z, 45 percent say that a high school diploma is all you need today to “ensure financial security.” And in contrast to the college-focused parents of a decade ago, now almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

He writes that the opinion has some basis in fact.  Younger college graduates do not have much of a wealth advantage over young non-college adults.

 Millennials with college degrees are earning a good bit more than those without, but they aren’t accumulating any more wealth. How can that be?

Lowell Ricketts told me he had a pretty good idea of the cause, even though the group’s data couldn’t be conclusive on this point. The likely culprit, he said, was cost: the rising expense of college and the student debt that often goes along with it. Carrying debt obviously diminishes your net worth through simple subtraction, but it can also prevent you from taking important wealth-generating steps as a young adult, like buying a house or starting a small business. And even if you (or your parents) were able to pay your tuition without loans, the savings you used are gone when you graduate, and thus are no longer available to serve as a down payment on a starter home or the beginning of a nest egg for retirement.

A few decades ago, tuition costs were manageable for many Americans. But since 1992, the sticker price has almost doubled for four-year private colleges and more than doubled for four-year public colleges, even after adjusting for inflation. Today the average total cost of attending a private college, including living expenses, is about $58,000 a year. After financial aid, the average net price for private-college students is about $33,000 a year; at public institutions, it is about $19,000. Those averages conceal a great deal of variation, however; at the University of Michigan (a public university), tuition, fees and expenses for out-of-state juniors and seniors total more than $80,000 a year.

Politics and the American Political Science Association

Robert Maranto at The Hill:

From what I can tell, not a single open Republican now serves on the 31-member APSA governing council. That leaves half the country unrepresented politically in an organization whose job is to promote political research about all the country, and the world.

 Reflecting behind-the-scenes pressure from activists, since the 2012 conference in New Orleans, no APSA annual meeting has occurred in a red state, with only one in a purple state (Philadelphia in 2016). Last year, APSA met in Montreal, but it seems unlikely that we might meet in Dallas, Phoenix, Charlotte or Orlando.

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When I mention this lack of representation, older APSA members admit it is a problem. For younger members, raised under the spell of critical theory, responses are mixed. In the meantime, many conservatives (including some anti-Trumpers like myself) have just given up, keeping their heads low in a sort of academic Benedict Option.

New College in Chaos

 Johanna Alonso at Inside Higher Ed:

When a committee of the New College of Florida Board of Trustees met in July, a whopping 36 faculty members had already left since Florida Governor Ron DeSantis initiated a conservative restructuring of the institution in January. That number has subsequently grown to more than 40, Amy Reid, the sole faculty member on the board, told Inside Higher Ed.

Now, as students prepare for the fall semester, the impact of the faculty exodus is becoming apparent: many classes won’t be offered at New College this term.

The course catalogue was already sparse when students first began looking at classes last spring. Dani Delaney, the mother of one former New College student who is transferring to Hampshire College in Massachusetts—which guaranteed admission to all New College students in good standing—said her son could only find two classes that counted toward his “area of concentration” (which is what New College calls majors). When he contacted the institution about the lack of relevant courses, she said, he was told the course catalogue was “in flux” and to “choose something else.”

Michelle Goldberg at NYT:

As of July, New College had 328 incoming students, a record for the school. Of the group, 115 are athletes, and 70 were recruited to play baseball, even though, as Walker reported, New College has no real sports facilities and has yet to be accepted into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. By comparison, the University of Florida’s far more established baseball team has 37 student-athletes.

The accommodations offered to New College’s new student-athletes will be better than those provided to many existing students. Walker reported that the incoming class will be housed in newer, apartment-style dorms that in the past were reserved for upperclass students. Returning students are being moved to older, more decrepit buildings, two of which recently were declared uninhabitable because of a mold problem. (New College has said it won’t put students in mold-affected rooms.)

Some new students may well end up immersing themselves in the great works of the Western canon. But last week, New College’s interim president, Richard Corcoran, a longtime Republican politician who served as DeSantis’s education commissioner, sent a memo to faculty members, proposing new majors in finance, communications and sports psychology, “which will appeal to many of our newly admitted athletes.” As Amy Reid, a New College professor of French who directs the gender studies department, said when I spoke to her last weekend, “Tell me how sports psychology, finance and communications fits with a classical liberal arts model.”

 

First Gen

Many posts have discussed inequality in higher education.  

 Jessica Blake at Inside Higher Ed:

The debate over who qualifies as first generation is not new, and the definitions have long varied. But the Supreme Court’s recent ruling prohibiting affirmative action in college admissions has renewed those discussions. Higher ed administrators are now seeking alternative methods for enrolling diverse classes without running afoul of the law. First-generation students—many of whom are people of color—may be an answer.

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The term “first generation” was first codified in federal law in 1980 and was developed out of a desire to find a common eligibility criteria with a positive connotation for TRIO, federal support programs for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The law deems students eligible if neither of their parents completed “a baccalaureate degree.” It also only considers the education status of the parent or parents with whom the student lived.

Inequality in College Admissions

Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Consequences of Admission to Highly Selective Colleges RAJ CHETTY, DAVID J. DEMING, JOHN N. FRIEDMAN

Leadership positions in the United States are held disproportionately by graduates of a group of 12 highly selective, private “Ivy-Plus” colleges—the eight colleges in the Ivy League, the University of Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford. Less than one percent of Americans attend these 12 colleges, yet they account for 15% of those in the top 0.1% of the income distribution, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century (Figure 1).

Furthermore, the students who attend Ivy-Plus institutions disproportionately come from high-income backgrounds themselves: just 10% of students scoring at the 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT from middle-class families attend an Ivy-Plus college, compared with 40% of similarly high-scoring students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution (Figure 2).

These two facts motivate our central question: Do highly selective colleges perpetuate privilege across generations and, conversely, could these colleges diversify America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies?

We answer this question using a “big data” approach—combining anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to parents’ and students’ income tax records and students’ SAT/ACT scores. We find that certain admissions practices at Ivy-Plus colleges—legacy preferences, weight placed on nonacademic factors, and athletic recruitment—give children from high-income families an advantage in admissions. Furthermore, being admitted to an Ivy-Plus college dramatically changes children’s life trajectories, giving them much greater chances of reaching positions of leadership. Together, these results imply that Ivy-Plus colleges could significantly increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.

KEY FINDINGS

• Ivy-Plus colleges are more than twice as likely to admit a student from a high-income family as compared to low- or middle-income families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.

• Higher admission rates for students from high-income families can be attributed to three factors: preferences for children of alumni (legacies), higher non-academic ratings, and athletic recruitment.

• The three factors underlying the high-income admissions advantage are not associated with better post-college outcomes; in contrast, SAT/ACT scores and academic ratings are highly predictive of post-college success.

• Attending an Ivy-Plus instead of a flagship public college triples students’ chances of obtaining jobs at prestigious firms and substantially increases their chances of earning in the top 1%.

• By changing their admissions policies, Ivy-Plus colleges could significantly diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s highest earners and leaders.

 The pdf of the study

Informing on Faculty

Many posts have discussed the spiral of silence on campus.

Jessica Blake at Inside Higher Ed:

Nearly three-quarters of all college students, regardless of their political affiliation, believe professors who make comments the students find offensive should be reported to the university, according to a new report.

A similar rate of students would also report their peers for making insulting or hurtful remarks.

The report by the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University is based on a survey of 2,250 students from 131 public and private four-year institutions across the country and was released Wednesday.

...

Over all, the percentage of students who said they would report a professor was higher among self-identified liberal students (81 percent) than among self-identified conservative students (53 percent). Sixty-six percent of liberal students and 37 percent of conservative students said they would also report peers who made offensive comments.

51% of liberal students said a professor should be reported for saying, “there is no evidence of anti-black bias in policing.” pic.twitter.com/H9bTPWldq1

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) July 20, 2023

Race-Based and Legacy Admissions

 Drew DeSilver at Pew:

In general, consideration of race and ethnicity is more common among schools with the lowest admission rates.

In the Center’s analysis of selective schools with publicly available CDS data, all 24 schools that admit fewer than 10% of applicants say they consider race and ethnicity when deciding whom to admit, although only one rated it as an important factor. And among the 48 schools that admit between 10% and 30% of applicants, all but seven consider race and ethnicity in admissions, with five rating it as an important factor.

But among the 51 schools that admit between 30% and half of all applicants, just over half (26, or 51%) consider race and ethnicity, and only four call it an important factor. Nearly half of those schools (25, or 49%) say they don’t consider race and ethnicity at all.

Among the colleges in our study group, the average admissions rate is lower among schools that consider race and ethnicity than among those that don’t (21.7% vs. 37.4%).

Also, consideration of race and ethnicity is more common for private colleges and universities, at least among the institutions we studied. All but 10 of the 92 private colleges and universities we examined (89%) considered race and ethnicity in deciding whom to admit, with 10 of those ranking it as an important factor.

But among the 31 public schools, only nine (29%) considered race and ethnicity at all, and none rated it as an important factor. (One partial explanation: Nine of the 22 public schools that don’t consider race and ethnicity in admissions are in California, where voters banned the practice in a 1996 ballot initiative.)

Nick Anderson at WP:

The Post reviewed the latest available answers for more than 140 prominent colleges and universities. Nearly all said course rigor and academic GPA were “important” or “very important.” Fewer than half put that much emphasis on test scores, with a majority stating instead that scores were “considered.”

More than 100 said race was considered or important — answers the court ruling will presumably change.

More than 100 also said they consider alumni-applicant relationships. Among them are Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the schools that defended race-conscious admissions before the Supreme Court. Oberlin College in Ohio called alumni relationships important.

 

Confidence in Higher Education and Other Institutions

 Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Americans’ faith in major societal institutions hasn’t improved over the past year following a slump in public confidence in 2022.

Last year, Gallup recorded significant declines in public confidence in 11 of the 16 institutions it tracks annually, with the presidency and Supreme Court suffering the most. The share of Americans expressing a great deal or fair amount of confidence in these fell 15 and 11 percentage points, respectively.

Neither score recovered appreciably in the latest poll, with confidence in the court now at 27% and the presidency at 26%. However, the survey was conducted June 1-22, 2023, before the Supreme Court issued decisions affecting affirmative action in education, college loan forgiveness and LGBTQ+ Americans’ access to creative services. Any or all of these decisions could have altered the court’s image as well as that of President Joe Biden, who spoke out against the rulings.

Public confidence in each of the other 14 institutions remains near last year’s relatively low level, with none of the scores worsening or improving meaningfully.

Megan Brenan at Gallup:

Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%). In addition to the 17% of U.S. adults who have “a great deal” and 19% “quite a lot” of confidence, 40% have “some” and 22% “very little” confidence.

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In 2015, majorities of Americans in all key subgroups expressed confidence in higher education, with one exception -- independents (48%). By 2018, though, confidence had fallen across all groups, with the largest drop, 17 percentage points, among Republicans. In the latest measure, confidence once again fell across the board, but Republicans’ sank the most -- 20 points to 19%, the lowest of any group. Confidence among adults without a college degree and those aged 55 and older dropped nearly as much as Republicans’ since 2018.