I taught at a private university five years ago, having left industry to teach a specialized major in my field that was new and emerging at the institution. I went through the exact same thing (minus the grade changes as far as I know). I was not on a tenure track, got a glowing review from my department chair, but got blown in by students for teaching class "too hard." I was encouraged to give a "C" or better in all of my classes and go along with the program. As a person of principle and recently having left my industry...I refused as I felt that it would not only be a reflection on the institution...but on me personally if industry contacts knew that substandard academics and knowledge were coming out of the program and specifically from me.
While I was not renewed, it turned out to be a blessing. Being in business over 20 years and then going to the academic side...I saw why the cost of college was so incredibly high and why the results of new graduates in the workforce were so pitiful.
I'm sorry for your experience and hope that you found a better way, as I did, to take your wealth of knowledge and use it in a more profound way.
It's the substandard academics leading to lower industry standards that we can probably expect to affect us in the long run. And, perhaps even more damaging than the poorer services and goods we can expect to receive, is the prospect of these teens and young adults growing into the next generation of parents who will encourage their children to shirk responsibility and view failure or rejection as a personal attack, as opposed to an opportunity to learn and improve.
Sir - I turned 18 in 1972 and voted against Richard Nixon - this college sophomore was bright enough to do that - and I had a public school regents diploma earned at James Monroe HS in the Bronx. So let’s not go there
Thank you for sharing your experience. This is the end game of DIE. A society full of entitled useful idiots, too demoralized to think or work so they vote and protest for handouts.
Yup; I feel like this competency crisis is about to completely ruin corporate America. Of course, AI is going to swoop in and "fix" it. So you can hire someone completely incompetent and lazy, pay them $300k, and all they have to do is remotely push a few buttons while AIs do all the work for them.
Corporate America is moving away from degrees required for hiring. Especially in big Tech. It is better and more efficient to teach them what they need to know on the job and develop them for higher positions.. Hopefully, it is the death knell for higher ed day cares.
The statement from bobbybob still stands though. Agree they will hire those without degrees, but the managers will still be pushed to hire people without the skills or real desire to do hard work and pay them $300k and promote them.
Par for the course, universities are adult daycares these days that prolong childhood. Then theres a freak out when these grown up children hit the real world. Every week libsoftiktok finds videos of 20 somethings complaining about a 40 hour workweek or not being handed a job with a six figure income.
Why not complain about the grade? If you have come through a system where whining gets an extra credit project, where your mom calls if your genius is not recognized, and the goal has been the GPA rather than learning. Long before college, students learn to game the educational system rather than gain an education.
When I was a graduate teaching assistant (more accurately, we were warm bodies sent to teach freshman and sophomore English on our own), it was common enough to become a cliché to hear the complaint in freshman English classes, "But I was an honors student in my high school!" or "But I was Valedictorian!" It was a severe shock for these students--who had been coddled and praised throughout high school for being the smartest among their peers--to discover that they had never been expected to work at the level necessary to do well in college.
Of course! In my engineering orientation, almost 40 years ago, we were told that while we had been the best among the average, we were now average among the best. It was a very humbling - and necessary - knockdown of our inflated sense of ourselves.
The math and chemistry classes that were so cruel because it was almost impossible to get a C and receiving a B was like winning the Nobel prize were also kind classes. These classes forced a re-think on how to study and an evaluation where talents were and were not.
My engineering orientation was almost 40 years ago too (at UIUC).
We were told at the time: "Look to your left and then to your right. One of the three of you will finish your engineering degree." I never tried to verify that claim, but I did meet a fair number of former engineering students who'd decided to major in Business. ;-)
The message, of course, was Hard Work Will Be Expected. It turned out to be a great education and a great experience.
I only hope the rise of DEI programs in engineering schools doesn't change that. 🤞
I think colleges find it difficult to fail many students because the students are paying so much in tuition and fees that both the students and the people footing the bill will complain. It is one thing to have a weed out course if the college has only a modest price tag. It is another altogether to try to have a weed out course if a single year at the institution sets you back by $80k.
I went to a Public university in So America where you don't pay tuition. The engineering classes would start with 30-35 freshman and by the end of the four (or five) years they had 5-6 students graduating
That sounds like an engineering meme. I heard the same thing at my engineering orientation 50 years ago. Managed to be one of the "one out of three" but took an MBA a decade later and went over to the dark side...finance.
Most of the college-bound guys in my high school friend group wanted to be engineers. I'm not sure any of them made it past the "weeder" classes required to get into the program. Smart guys, but not smart enough.
Bet the really smart students understood their struggles as their problems and not the professors and are very successful in other careers. There is little learned about yourself or life if a challenge or failure is the fault of other things and people.
I can't think of ANYONE in my peer group who thought that the problems were anyone's fault but their own.
I actually flunked out of my original undergrad (in my 4th year!!!), due to depression. It never occurred to me for a moment to blame the university or my professors for that.
The sad reality was that my depression (not meaningfully treatable back then) might or not not cripple my ability to attend class and do my assigned work during any given semester. If I could go back and parent myself, I would say, "Don't take classes (or only take one or two) during Winter semester. The added burden of seasonal depression is going to wreck your ability to function." But we had never even heard of a "gap year" back then, let alone approaching college in any other way except "full time, four years."
I had an intern who was valedictorian of her inner city high school in some city in Ohio if memory serves. Two quarters in at Northwestern and she was on academic probation. I don't know how that worked out.
I am well past in age worrying about hiring the right candidates. However this is emblematic of what most progressives and certainly black Americans think of as systemic racism. If I were in the employment dept. having to hire an economics major what would I think of about a student from Spelman College after reading this. For most of my life the issue regarding affirmative action, quotas, tests for firefighters or police....all the race based discussions we’ve been grappling with for the last 40 years or so have been, have American blacks been getting jobs or promotions not based on ability but on skin color. You combine this with the nonsense that black Americans are not capable of learning difficult subjects, have a learning disability based on their race, tests are based on a white perspective etc. The idea that math only has to be mostly right, that showing your work is racist....Nobody wants to hire a civil engineer who gets his math mostly right. I want the bridge I’m going to go over designed by an engineer to have gotten all his math right. I get college leads to better jobs but these stories actually hinder black Americans. I want the black to be doing surgery because he has the knowledge and talent and skill....I wouldn’t want to know that his medical school and internships and residency marks were unearned. It is a huge disservice to him and only perpetuates the issue of discrimination. Is the black professional not a competent as the white or asian professional? It is unfair and bad for the country and for black Americans.
"Nobody wants to hire a civil engineer who gets his math mostly right. I want the bridge I’m going to go over designed by an engineer to have gotten all his math right."
A lot of conservatives point to the example of the pedestrian bridge that collapsed in Miami. The design, IIRC, was by a female engineering firm that on their website, emphasized that they designed from a feminist/feminine perspective.
Now, technically this should have been reviewed by the City, but would you want to face the possibility of ending your career by rejecting it?
WTF is a female perspective on a pedestrian bridge? What does it have to do with engineering? I’m screaming in my head like Edvard Munch. Bridges don’t have a female perspective. They don’t have a male perspective....They have cement and steel. Can they be pretty in pink? Not if they fall down.
The Florida International University (FIU) bridge collapse was a tragedy. However there's a few things here that should be pointed out...
FIGG bridge group was the engineering firm responsible for the design. It is headed by a woman, but is certainly not a "female engineering firm", since the engineer of record (EoR) was a man (who has since surrendered his license and retired). These do not go through normal plan-checking services, but would be peer-reviewed by a second design firm (I have a friend that did this kind of work). There would be no pressure to accept the design calculations as originally shown, as the revenue from the design check is not dependent on the structure getting built; and the peer reviewer doesn't care what the aesthetics are like. (For their part in the tragedy, Louis Berger Group, the peer reviewer, was also sued and settled).
The Figg design lead did have a quote suggesting she cared solely about aesthetics... but that was probably because she didn't do any of the underlying calculations, you hand off "grunt work" like that to more junior engineers. When I reviewed available materials at the time of the collapse, it looked probable that there was undersized reinforcing on the webs near the ends, especially given the load reversal from the construction method (they cast it off the side of the road using temporary shoring, then swung it into place - a practice FIU championed), and the single structural element down the middle had no redundancy in case of errors. The biggest failure was that the EoR waved off suggestion of temporary shoring while the contractor was attempting a fix for concrete cracking. As it turns out, the "suggested fix" made things worse; as with most concrete failure, there is nothing nice about it... concrete fails in what's called a "brittle failure mode" - often instant and violently.
Well, I cannot question you. I am a mechanical engineer by degree not a civil engineer (so a little overlap) but have never actually done design work and now work in the financial sector.
Structural engineering is pretty underappreciated as a profession - not a ton of jobs that one small mistake in a relatively mundane daily calculation can be a career ender and kill a bunch of people in the process. Commercial airline pilots are about the only group I can think of with similar sorts of daily liability as what I see.
I did find that the NTSB released a full report, which indicated the peer review process was a little more incestuous than I thought (FIGG hired Louis Berger, who had misrepresented their abilities to check). Looks like NTSB points the finger at a serious underdesign - not enough reinforcement - along a cold joint at the north end as the most likely culprit; a little different than my armchair prognostication, but then, they had access to a lot more material than I did): https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HAR1902.pdf
The bottom line: the design wasn't inherently "feminist", the EoR wasn't a woman, everyone wants their bridges to stand up, and thank God that Spelman doesn't have a college of engineering.
When a society extols utter nonsense such as that peddled by Kendi, DiAngelo and the hilarious 1619 Project, as well as excuses riots in the name of a dead thug and career criminal what do you think will happen? There is a madness upon our land. As evidenced by demonstrations worshipping the mutilation and torture of live Israeli children and babies who were forced to watch the rape and murder of their mothers
I admit my darker side is viewing a very long dark tunnel. but I’ve been thinking about this. Cults, cults of personalities usually end when the person dies. Gandhi for example. Things changed when Stalin and Mao died. The funny one for me is how Cuba doesn’t seem different. Castro and his brother are dead...Things should have changed. Chavez in Venezuela was definitely a populist. Yet it seems just as crappy. I am hoping with Trump gone or disgraced....I’ll take either, MAGA virus will dissipate.
What are we creating? Graduates who cant’t think for themselves, who can’t research issues to have a nuanced and informed opinion, who think they deserve everything with little effort. The funny old adage ‘ the gift to stupid people is that they don’t know it’ seems to apply here except this kind of limited thought based on propaganda, lies and entitlement is dangerous.
Hopefully, we stand our ground and refuse to do that. Biden tried and was refused by the courts. It is all part of the grand plan. It is a relief that the scheme by the CRT and DEI folks at our universities is finally being exposed. We must publicly faux-educate, at taxpayers expense, crops of students, indoctrinate them, deliver them a non-meritorious degree and send them out into the world to remind us of how bigoted a country we are. I’m so sorry this poor well intentioned teacher walked into that trap. I hope she finds a place to share her talent and is able to teach worthy students respectful of her efforts no matter what gender or color they may be.
One of the (many) things that appalled me in graduate school was that there were some students in our program who had clearly not attained the ability to produce college-level work in their undergrad years, but had somehow been accepted as grad students.
In my Old English class, cheating was rampant. Groups of students divided up translation sections among themselves, only translating a few sentences each, then sharing and copying each other's work.
In our 18th Century Women's Literature class, we were forced to work from pre-written 4x6 "cheat sheets" when writing essay exams. When I complained about not being allowed to bring the book itself into the exam (as we'd always done in my undergrad department) so as to find more accurate quotes and examples for our essays, the professor explained that it would be "too difficult" for students if they were allowed to do that. Um, only if the students didn't bother to read the book to begin with! (Naturally, the essay questions were exclusively about passages that we talked about in class, so if you marked and copied those passages to your note card, you could do well on the essays without ever reading the book.)
These policies - shenanigans, you might call them - do nothing to help students in the long run. Until my husband retired recently, he was a financial analyst for an oil and gas company. The company, to their credit, had programs for hiring veterans and giving students from underrepresented schools a chance. They hired a couple of young men from an HBCU in our area and the lack of rigor in their college coursework was readily (and sadly) apparent. They simply weren't prepared to do the required work. There were other young accountants & engineers of all races who were unprepared and didn't make it past the probationary period at the company, but the case of the two from the HBCU was particularly stark - they had been trained to be bookkeepers, but told they were accountants and given high grades they did not earn.
As an accountant, this is particularly troubling to me. People like this leave a black mark on our whole profession. We already struggle as it is not to be the redheaded stepchild in the room.
For one thing, I am not convinced that College ever did a good job of preparing people to actually do a job. Perhaps when there is heavy interning at actual jobs.
The second thing is that tactics like inflating grades has nothing to do with helping the students. It is about making sure enough the of the rights kinds of people get degrees.
I had a professor like you in college. Got a D on my first exam. I remember him saying, you’re welcome to stay in my class, I am not lowering my standards. I studied my ass off and got a 95 on the next one and another A after that. I was grateful to him. He taught me the level of work I was capable of and I wished I had had him sooner.
I’m sorry this happened to you, you’re one of the good ones!
My father was a professor (tenured and beloved at the Claremont Colleges) but I was just an adequate student (but a good lawyer). The disservice Spelman is doing to its graduates will echo down the years. Maybe similar practices at other elite schools will blunt any racial effect, but it will simply reaffirm existing prejudices, and in that way perpetuate the opposite of what these Quisling administrators are attempting.
It won't echo down the years for these students; the now reinforced DIE philosophy now in place in all of our institutions guarantees them jobs and promotions.
It will because there are plenty people like me, who held office (in my case as the District Attorney) who will refuse to tolerate these low standards. We are not unique in our beliefs.
It would seem to me if you are in a left-wing jurisdiction, you have no choice. Even if you are in a conservative area, your media is almost certainly leftist and will carry charges of "racism" against you without any investigation.
You and I both know that even if officially non-partisan, in down ballot races, the partisans are the ones involved and get out the vote. I looked up Clatsop County and saw it voted 55-43 for Biden - certainly not Multnomah County numbers, but a double digit win is still solid.
I will say that I hope Eastern Oregon gets the heck out of your state and joins Idaho. Before Ada County's leftist influx ruins that state, too.
In a waiting room, a young man who taught math in a Texas grade school had the same experience. He said that these kids had no clue about math. He was told not to grade objectively, but to just "pass them along."
This is how white people become responsible for the failure of black people. Get it? It's LITERAL. Teacher gives an objective grade according to "the standards of whiteness." Teacher becomes "racist."
Enabling this racial narcissism is why a certain faction of the population will never truly amount to anything if education is required.
Twenty years ago, I was threatened with "a buck fifty" over a C. I'd been advised by my mentor to give the paper a D. Because the student was black I raised the grade to a 'C' and was subsequently threatened with a knifing. The POC administration refused to do anything about it despite the fact that a Polish student had complained about being threatened by this person. They claimed that "he has a right to an education."
I don't agree with you at all. this issue has NOTHING to do with race. I was a professor for around 27 years, and the issue described in the article applies to students of all ethnicities and races. Public education in the US (primary and high school) SUCKS because teachers are underpaid , classes are way too big, etc. etc. Then, students get to college but colleges can't and don't want to teach students what they didn't learn in high school, so they dumb the material down (in some cases, like at Spellman) to get students through. the issue is not at all about "dumibing things down" for Black people and Im surprised you are taking that angle. It's about treating students as if they are consumers, which is what a lot of universities now do. Thus, it doesnt' matter whether the professor is teaching them anything, just make sure they "like" him/her and that he/she gives them a good grade so they can go to Wall Street or wherever they want to go to make money. as a former professor, (i left academia last June and am studying to be a nurse now) increasingly i saw fewer and fewer students interested in learning and thinking and challenging themselves. Many students (I dont know if it's the majority, but a lot) are in college , in my experience, just to get that degree so they can support themselves. Who can blame them, really? we live in a hyper capitalist society where ideas and culture and nature are not valued. what is valued is money, money , money. I mean, we elected Trump as president, and he may end up getting as second term. That tells you everything!!!
I can agree that lowering standards is a widespread problem and that our educational system is in deep rot mode. Kudos for you in getting out.
However, you sound a bit out of the loop on the racial aspect. Sorry I have too much evidence that there is a racial component.
What you say about Trump in the end discredits your entire comment, unfortunately. Your resistance to considering how CRT might have destroyed education is in effect more about being pious than objective about a serious issue with education.
have you been an academic or professor ? i strongly doubt it. You sound really racist to me. and how does what I said about Trump "discredit" me? Trump is an idiot , racist, misogynistic and an anti-Semite. A blite on this country if there ever was one. I hate it when people who don't have a doctorate and have never taught make proclamations about academia. you don't know what you are talking about, that's very clear.
Everything you just wrote is ad hominem. Fallacious. A professor would and should point that out to you. Now go find a college that would actually teach you how to evaluate evidence and arguments before you dare comment so stupidly again.
You still have not answered my question as to whether you have ever been a professor. I taught at Dartmouth, UC-Irvine, Tulane, UC-Berkeley, and got tenure at North Carolina State University. I have a doctorate from the University of Chicago, so I think I'm a _bit_ more knowledgeable than you, sorry to say. If you know so much, tell us where you learned all this valuable information? my guess is you only have a BA and dont what youre talking about. most people who make the kinds of comments you do speak from ignorance.
Fantastic essay and reporting on a chronic problem - at Spelman and other colleges where acting with personal responsibility is no longer required of students and supported by enabling administrations. I'll bet there's a KIPP high school out there that would love to have you and your standards.
No wonder these "kids" are entitled little shits. Even when they're wrong they're belligerently right. Everyone who was supposed to teach them and discipline them has failed them starting with their parents.
“Another member of the panel said professors should work to instill the idea in students that they represent “black excellence.” As someone who has always lived in the white world (though I’m half Filipino), I found this deeply inspiring. I thought, this is the kind of place where I want to teach.”
—————————————————-
Why would you find something psychopathically racist like “black excellence” inspiring?
This perfectly explains the deafening silence from institutions on the current war in Israel. These colleges and universities, almost to a one, are nothing more than whited sepulchers and their students useful idiots.
I taught at a private university five years ago, having left industry to teach a specialized major in my field that was new and emerging at the institution. I went through the exact same thing (minus the grade changes as far as I know). I was not on a tenure track, got a glowing review from my department chair, but got blown in by students for teaching class "too hard." I was encouraged to give a "C" or better in all of my classes and go along with the program. As a person of principle and recently having left my industry...I refused as I felt that it would not only be a reflection on the institution...but on me personally if industry contacts knew that substandard academics and knowledge were coming out of the program and specifically from me.
While I was not renewed, it turned out to be a blessing. Being in business over 20 years and then going to the academic side...I saw why the cost of college was so incredibly high and why the results of new graduates in the workforce were so pitiful.
I'm sorry for your experience and hope that you found a better way, as I did, to take your wealth of knowledge and use it in a more profound way.
It's the substandard academics leading to lower industry standards that we can probably expect to affect us in the long run. And, perhaps even more damaging than the poorer services and goods we can expect to receive, is the prospect of these teens and young adults growing into the next generation of parents who will encourage their children to shirk responsibility and view failure or rejection as a personal attack, as opposed to an opportunity to learn and improve.
Scary, still, is the thought that we decided to lower the voting age to 18 on somewhat specious grounds.
These morons can vote!
Sir - I turned 18 in 1972 and voted against Richard Nixon - this college sophomore was bright enough to do that - and I had a public school regents diploma earned at James Monroe HS in the Bronx. So let’s not go there
Dear Charles...do you think the average 18 year old of today is as well educated as you were in 1972 (we graduated the same year btw)...g.
Yes in fact on the whole I believe they are better educated and more informed than we were in 1971. They may silly views sometimes but educated - yes
How can you claim this after having read this essay?
So there’s an intelligence litmus test to vote?
No, nor is there any requirements for “skin in the game” and therein lies the problem. I see zero prospects for a solution.
Thank you for sharing your experience. This is the end game of DIE. A society full of entitled useful idiots, too demoralized to think or work so they vote and protest for handouts.
Only the trustees can take action to effect change, but too few of them have the courage it takes: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-get-into-harvard-open-letter-to-trustees
Yup; I feel like this competency crisis is about to completely ruin corporate America. Of course, AI is going to swoop in and "fix" it. So you can hire someone completely incompetent and lazy, pay them $300k, and all they have to do is remotely push a few buttons while AIs do all the work for them.
Corporate America is moving away from degrees required for hiring. Especially in big Tech. It is better and more efficient to teach them what they need to know on the job and develop them for higher positions.. Hopefully, it is the death knell for higher ed day cares.
I hope you are right. Most careers do not require a college education, but they require a college degree to be hired.
Just Google "degrees not needed to be hired".
The statement from bobbybob still stands though. Agree they will hire those without degrees, but the managers will still be pushed to hire people without the skills or real desire to do hard work and pay them $300k and promote them.
Our country is in real trouble and I fear the future if this is the state of our young people.
Such a broken world that progressive belief is creating.
Endlessly metastasizing cancer
Par for the course, universities are adult daycares these days that prolong childhood. Then theres a freak out when these grown up children hit the real world. Every week libsoftiktok finds videos of 20 somethings complaining about a 40 hour workweek or not being handed a job with a six figure income.
Why not complain about the grade? If you have come through a system where whining gets an extra credit project, where your mom calls if your genius is not recognized, and the goal has been the GPA rather than learning. Long before college, students learn to game the educational system rather than gain an education.
When I was a graduate teaching assistant (more accurately, we were warm bodies sent to teach freshman and sophomore English on our own), it was common enough to become a cliché to hear the complaint in freshman English classes, "But I was an honors student in my high school!" or "But I was Valedictorian!" It was a severe shock for these students--who had been coddled and praised throughout high school for being the smartest among their peers--to discover that they had never been expected to work at the level necessary to do well in college.
And that was 20 years ago.
Of course! In my engineering orientation, almost 40 years ago, we were told that while we had been the best among the average, we were now average among the best. It was a very humbling - and necessary - knockdown of our inflated sense of ourselves.
The math and chemistry classes that were so cruel because it was almost impossible to get a C and receiving a B was like winning the Nobel prize were also kind classes. These classes forced a re-think on how to study and an evaluation where talents were and were not.
My engineering orientation was almost 40 years ago too (at UIUC).
We were told at the time: "Look to your left and then to your right. One of the three of you will finish your engineering degree." I never tried to verify that claim, but I did meet a fair number of former engineering students who'd decided to major in Business. ;-)
The message, of course, was Hard Work Will Be Expected. It turned out to be a great education and a great experience.
I only hope the rise of DEI programs in engineering schools doesn't change that. 🤞
I think colleges find it difficult to fail many students because the students are paying so much in tuition and fees that both the students and the people footing the bill will complain. It is one thing to have a weed out course if the college has only a modest price tag. It is another altogether to try to have a weed out course if a single year at the institution sets you back by $80k.
I went to a Public university in So America where you don't pay tuition. The engineering classes would start with 30-35 freshman and by the end of the four (or five) years they had 5-6 students graduating
That sounds like an engineering meme. I heard the same thing at my engineering orientation 50 years ago. Managed to be one of the "one out of three" but took an MBA a decade later and went over to the dark side...finance.
Most of the college-bound guys in my high school friend group wanted to be engineers. I'm not sure any of them made it past the "weeder" classes required to get into the program. Smart guys, but not smart enough.
Bet the really smart students understood their struggles as their problems and not the professors and are very successful in other careers. There is little learned about yourself or life if a challenge or failure is the fault of other things and people.
I can't think of ANYONE in my peer group who thought that the problems were anyone's fault but their own.
I actually flunked out of my original undergrad (in my 4th year!!!), due to depression. It never occurred to me for a moment to blame the university or my professors for that.
The sad reality was that my depression (not meaningfully treatable back then) might or not not cripple my ability to attend class and do my assigned work during any given semester. If I could go back and parent myself, I would say, "Don't take classes (or only take one or two) during Winter semester. The added burden of seasonal depression is going to wreck your ability to function." But we had never even heard of a "gap year" back then, let alone approaching college in any other way except "full time, four years."
Yes: medical school is full of valedictorians. I was nowhere near the top; it was hugely humbling.
I like that saying. I think I'll share it with my son when he goes to college next year.
I had an intern who was valedictorian of her inner city high school in some city in Ohio if memory serves. Two quarters in at Northwestern and she was on academic probation. I don't know how that worked out.
Wait'll they're in the workaday world.
I am well past in age worrying about hiring the right candidates. However this is emblematic of what most progressives and certainly black Americans think of as systemic racism. If I were in the employment dept. having to hire an economics major what would I think of about a student from Spelman College after reading this. For most of my life the issue regarding affirmative action, quotas, tests for firefighters or police....all the race based discussions we’ve been grappling with for the last 40 years or so have been, have American blacks been getting jobs or promotions not based on ability but on skin color. You combine this with the nonsense that black Americans are not capable of learning difficult subjects, have a learning disability based on their race, tests are based on a white perspective etc. The idea that math only has to be mostly right, that showing your work is racist....Nobody wants to hire a civil engineer who gets his math mostly right. I want the bridge I’m going to go over designed by an engineer to have gotten all his math right. I get college leads to better jobs but these stories actually hinder black Americans. I want the black to be doing surgery because he has the knowledge and talent and skill....I wouldn’t want to know that his medical school and internships and residency marks were unearned. It is a huge disservice to him and only perpetuates the issue of discrimination. Is the black professional not a competent as the white or asian professional? It is unfair and bad for the country and for black Americans.
"Nobody wants to hire a civil engineer who gets his math mostly right. I want the bridge I’m going to go over designed by an engineer to have gotten all his math right."
A lot of conservatives point to the example of the pedestrian bridge that collapsed in Miami. The design, IIRC, was by a female engineering firm that on their website, emphasized that they designed from a feminist/feminine perspective.
Now, technically this should have been reviewed by the City, but would you want to face the possibility of ending your career by rejecting it?
WTF is a female perspective on a pedestrian bridge? What does it have to do with engineering? I’m screaming in my head like Edvard Munch. Bridges don’t have a female perspective. They don’t have a male perspective....They have cement and steel. Can they be pretty in pink? Not if they fall down.
“Pedestrian” Bridge!??? You ableist Nazi!
Good grief - I'm a female engineer, and I would NEVER be so conceited as to think that my "female perspective" is anything special.
The Florida International University (FIU) bridge collapse was a tragedy. However there's a few things here that should be pointed out...
FIGG bridge group was the engineering firm responsible for the design. It is headed by a woman, but is certainly not a "female engineering firm", since the engineer of record (EoR) was a man (who has since surrendered his license and retired). These do not go through normal plan-checking services, but would be peer-reviewed by a second design firm (I have a friend that did this kind of work). There would be no pressure to accept the design calculations as originally shown, as the revenue from the design check is not dependent on the structure getting built; and the peer reviewer doesn't care what the aesthetics are like. (For their part in the tragedy, Louis Berger Group, the peer reviewer, was also sued and settled).
The Figg design lead did have a quote suggesting she cared solely about aesthetics... but that was probably because she didn't do any of the underlying calculations, you hand off "grunt work" like that to more junior engineers. When I reviewed available materials at the time of the collapse, it looked probable that there was undersized reinforcing on the webs near the ends, especially given the load reversal from the construction method (they cast it off the side of the road using temporary shoring, then swung it into place - a practice FIU championed), and the single structural element down the middle had no redundancy in case of errors. The biggest failure was that the EoR waved off suggestion of temporary shoring while the contractor was attempting a fix for concrete cracking. As it turns out, the "suggested fix" made things worse; as with most concrete failure, there is nothing nice about it... concrete fails in what's called a "brittle failure mode" - often instant and violently.
Well, I cannot question you. I am a mechanical engineer by degree not a civil engineer (so a little overlap) but have never actually done design work and now work in the financial sector.
Structural engineering is pretty underappreciated as a profession - not a ton of jobs that one small mistake in a relatively mundane daily calculation can be a career ender and kill a bunch of people in the process. Commercial airline pilots are about the only group I can think of with similar sorts of daily liability as what I see.
I did find that the NTSB released a full report, which indicated the peer review process was a little more incestuous than I thought (FIGG hired Louis Berger, who had misrepresented their abilities to check). Looks like NTSB points the finger at a serious underdesign - not enough reinforcement - along a cold joint at the north end as the most likely culprit; a little different than my armchair prognostication, but then, they had access to a lot more material than I did): https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HAR1902.pdf
The bottom line: the design wasn't inherently "feminist", the EoR wasn't a woman, everyone wants their bridges to stand up, and thank God that Spelman doesn't have a college of engineering.
When a society extols utter nonsense such as that peddled by Kendi, DiAngelo and the hilarious 1619 Project, as well as excuses riots in the name of a dead thug and career criminal what do you think will happen? There is a madness upon our land. As evidenced by demonstrations worshipping the mutilation and torture of live Israeli children and babies who were forced to watch the rape and murder of their mothers
It is an upside down world we live in. I’m not how we get out of this.
We won't
I love your optimism...LOL
But you probably don't disagree with it, do you
I admit my darker side is viewing a very long dark tunnel. but I’ve been thinking about this. Cults, cults of personalities usually end when the person dies. Gandhi for example. Things changed when Stalin and Mao died. The funny one for me is how Cuba doesn’t seem different. Castro and his brother are dead...Things should have changed. Chavez in Venezuela was definitely a populist. Yet it seems just as crappy. I am hoping with Trump gone or disgraced....I’ll take either, MAGA virus will dissipate.
Thank you. I hope the word gets out that degrees from Spelman are meaningless.
There's a news story today about Spelman students holding a rally for "peace". https://www.ajc.com/news/palestine-student-supporters-and-others-rally-for-peace-aid/I7RBSKALQJB7ZI6XW4YOMLBQ6A/?n=@ They're holding signs that say lies like "Israel bombs hospitals. Biden pays for it" and "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free". This shows that Spelman students aren't merely stupid, they're evil, too.
What are we creating? Graduates who cant’t think for themselves, who can’t research issues to have a nuanced and informed opinion, who think they deserve everything with little effort. The funny old adage ‘ the gift to stupid people is that they don’t know it’ seems to apply here except this kind of limited thought based on propaganda, lies and entitlement is dangerous.
And then the rest of us get to pay for their student loans.
Hopefully, we stand our ground and refuse to do that. Biden tried and was refused by the courts. It is all part of the grand plan. It is a relief that the scheme by the CRT and DEI folks at our universities is finally being exposed. We must publicly faux-educate, at taxpayers expense, crops of students, indoctrinate them, deliver them a non-meritorious degree and send them out into the world to remind us of how bigoted a country we are. I’m so sorry this poor well intentioned teacher walked into that trap. I hope she finds a place to share her talent and is able to teach worthy students respectful of her efforts no matter what gender or color they may be.
Ugh! This is what graduate them at any cost will get you.
The students are spending too much time at rallies and not enough time studying.
One of the (many) things that appalled me in graduate school was that there were some students in our program who had clearly not attained the ability to produce college-level work in their undergrad years, but had somehow been accepted as grad students.
In my Old English class, cheating was rampant. Groups of students divided up translation sections among themselves, only translating a few sentences each, then sharing and copying each other's work.
In our 18th Century Women's Literature class, we were forced to work from pre-written 4x6 "cheat sheets" when writing essay exams. When I complained about not being allowed to bring the book itself into the exam (as we'd always done in my undergrad department) so as to find more accurate quotes and examples for our essays, the professor explained that it would be "too difficult" for students if they were allowed to do that. Um, only if the students didn't bother to read the book to begin with! (Naturally, the essay questions were exclusively about passages that we talked about in class, so if you marked and copied those passages to your note card, you could do well on the essays without ever reading the book.)
Wow........really sad. My graduate school experience was exactly the opposite.
These policies - shenanigans, you might call them - do nothing to help students in the long run. Until my husband retired recently, he was a financial analyst for an oil and gas company. The company, to their credit, had programs for hiring veterans and giving students from underrepresented schools a chance. They hired a couple of young men from an HBCU in our area and the lack of rigor in their college coursework was readily (and sadly) apparent. They simply weren't prepared to do the required work. There were other young accountants & engineers of all races who were unprepared and didn't make it past the probationary period at the company, but the case of the two from the HBCU was particularly stark - they had been trained to be bookkeepers, but told they were accountants and given high grades they did not earn.
As an accountant, this is particularly troubling to me. People like this leave a black mark on our whole profession. We already struggle as it is not to be the redheaded stepchild in the room.
For one thing, I am not convinced that College ever did a good job of preparing people to actually do a job. Perhaps when there is heavy interning at actual jobs.
The second thing is that tactics like inflating grades has nothing to do with helping the students. It is about making sure enough the of the rights kinds of people get degrees.
I had a professor like you in college. Got a D on my first exam. I remember him saying, you’re welcome to stay in my class, I am not lowering my standards. I studied my ass off and got a 95 on the next one and another A after that. I was grateful to him. He taught me the level of work I was capable of and I wished I had had him sooner.
I’m sorry this happened to you, you’re one of the good ones!
A terrifying story.
My father was a professor (tenured and beloved at the Claremont Colleges) but I was just an adequate student (but a good lawyer). The disservice Spelman is doing to its graduates will echo down the years. Maybe similar practices at other elite schools will blunt any racial effect, but it will simply reaffirm existing prejudices, and in that way perpetuate the opposite of what these Quisling administrators are attempting.
Hope the author finds tenure at an honest school!
It won't echo down the years for these students; the now reinforced DIE philosophy now in place in all of our institutions guarantees them jobs and promotions.
It will because there are plenty people like me, who held office (in my case as the District Attorney) who will refuse to tolerate these low standards. We are not unique in our beliefs.
It would seem to me if you are in a left-wing jurisdiction, you have no choice. Even if you are in a conservative area, your media is almost certainly leftist and will carry charges of "racism" against you without any investigation.
I ran for office 7 times in blue Astoria in Oregon for a non partisan office.
I don’t think all politics resolve to “D vs R” dichotomies.
You and I both know that even if officially non-partisan, in down ballot races, the partisans are the ones involved and get out the vote. I looked up Clatsop County and saw it voted 55-43 for Biden - certainly not Multnomah County numbers, but a double digit win is still solid.
I will say that I hope Eastern Oregon gets the heck out of your state and joins Idaho. Before Ada County's leftist influx ruins that state, too.
Eastern Oregon is not going to secede.
I’ve lived there.
Their frustration is shared by all of us outside the PDX metro area.
I have written extensively and most of it is available on the web or at www.coastda.com
Nobody calls me a liberal!
In a waiting room, a young man who taught math in a Texas grade school had the same experience. He said that these kids had no clue about math. He was told not to grade objectively, but to just "pass them along."
This is how white people become responsible for the failure of black people. Get it? It's LITERAL. Teacher gives an objective grade according to "the standards of whiteness." Teacher becomes "racist."
Enabling this racial narcissism is why a certain faction of the population will never truly amount to anything if education is required.
Twenty years ago, I was threatened with "a buck fifty" over a C. I'd been advised by my mentor to give the paper a D. Because the student was black I raised the grade to a 'C' and was subsequently threatened with a knifing. The POC administration refused to do anything about it despite the fact that a Polish student had complained about being threatened by this person. They claimed that "he has a right to an education."
Black privilege.
I don't agree with you at all. this issue has NOTHING to do with race. I was a professor for around 27 years, and the issue described in the article applies to students of all ethnicities and races. Public education in the US (primary and high school) SUCKS because teachers are underpaid , classes are way too big, etc. etc. Then, students get to college but colleges can't and don't want to teach students what they didn't learn in high school, so they dumb the material down (in some cases, like at Spellman) to get students through. the issue is not at all about "dumibing things down" for Black people and Im surprised you are taking that angle. It's about treating students as if they are consumers, which is what a lot of universities now do. Thus, it doesnt' matter whether the professor is teaching them anything, just make sure they "like" him/her and that he/she gives them a good grade so they can go to Wall Street or wherever they want to go to make money. as a former professor, (i left academia last June and am studying to be a nurse now) increasingly i saw fewer and fewer students interested in learning and thinking and challenging themselves. Many students (I dont know if it's the majority, but a lot) are in college , in my experience, just to get that degree so they can support themselves. Who can blame them, really? we live in a hyper capitalist society where ideas and culture and nature are not valued. what is valued is money, money , money. I mean, we elected Trump as president, and he may end up getting as second term. That tells you everything!!!
I can agree that lowering standards is a widespread problem and that our educational system is in deep rot mode. Kudos for you in getting out.
However, you sound a bit out of the loop on the racial aspect. Sorry I have too much evidence that there is a racial component.
What you say about Trump in the end discredits your entire comment, unfortunately. Your resistance to considering how CRT might have destroyed education is in effect more about being pious than objective about a serious issue with education.
have you been an academic or professor ? i strongly doubt it. You sound really racist to me. and how does what I said about Trump "discredit" me? Trump is an idiot , racist, misogynistic and an anti-Semite. A blite on this country if there ever was one. I hate it when people who don't have a doctorate and have never taught make proclamations about academia. you don't know what you are talking about, that's very clear.
Everything you just wrote is ad hominem. Fallacious. A professor would and should point that out to you. Now go find a college that would actually teach you how to evaluate evidence and arguments before you dare comment so stupidly again.
You still have not answered my question as to whether you have ever been a professor. I taught at Dartmouth, UC-Irvine, Tulane, UC-Berkeley, and got tenure at North Carolina State University. I have a doctorate from the University of Chicago, so I think I'm a _bit_ more knowledgeable than you, sorry to say. If you know so much, tell us where you learned all this valuable information? my guess is you only have a BA and dont what youre talking about. most people who make the kinds of comments you do speak from ignorance.
You mean, blight?
Fantastic essay and reporting on a chronic problem - at Spelman and other colleges where acting with personal responsibility is no longer required of students and supported by enabling administrations. I'll bet there's a KIPP high school out there that would love to have you and your standards.
No wonder these "kids" are entitled little shits. Even when they're wrong they're belligerently right. Everyone who was supposed to teach them and discipline them has failed them starting with their parents.
💯
“Babies making babies.”
“Another member of the panel said professors should work to instill the idea in students that they represent “black excellence.” As someone who has always lived in the white world (though I’m half Filipino), I found this deeply inspiring. I thought, this is the kind of place where I want to teach.”
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Why would you find something psychopathically racist like “black excellence” inspiring?
Not her fault. Takes years to erase brainwashing. We've tolerated this nonsense far too long.
This perfectly explains the deafening silence from institutions on the current war in Israel. These colleges and universities, almost to a one, are nothing more than whited sepulchers and their students useful idiots.