So KC Johnson is a historian and blogger who made something of a name for himself with his coverage of the rape allegations lodged against members of the Duke lacrosse team a few years back. Johnson returned to the subject of campus sexual assault yesterday with a response to Jaclyn Friedman’s weekend Washington Post op-ed on universities’ judicial policies.
It didn’t go well.
Last week Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote an op-ed for the Huffington Post called Campus Protests Should Remind Us All of College’s Value. The piece itself — mostly a call for passage of student loan reform — wasn’t particularly remarkable, but Duncan’s embrace of the current wave of student protest was striking.
There’s quite a bit of that going around right now. The California protests of the fall boosted student activism’s profile dramatically, and March 4 raised it a lot more.
But the weirdest example of the trend I’ve seen is an ad I caught on television late last night for the for-profit university chain Kaplan University. In it, a young female student stands behind a podium on a campus quad and passionately intones these words:
“There’s a movement afoot in this country. A student-led revolution. A rallying cry for change in an otherwise unchanged educational system.”
It goes on in that vein, in language that slithers from stirring-but-vague activist rhetoric to stirring-but-contentless corporatespeak and back again. (You can see the ad at this page on the Kaplan U site. It’s called “People Like Me.”)
Of course Kaplan University, which was created ten years ago with the purchase of an old correspondence school by the Stanley Kaplan test prep company, is obviously anything but “a student-led revolution” in higher ed.
By coincidence, in fact, yesterday’s New York Times featured a front-page article on how for-profit universities deliver “dubious benefits to students” by “exploit[ing] the recession as a lucrative recruiting device” and “harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.”
(It took me about fifteen minutes of Googling and clicking to find Kaplan’s tuition rates, but it looks like they run about $16,000 per year. That’s $2,000 more than the national average for for-profit colleges, and $11,000 a year more than in-state tuition for full-time online enrollment in New York’s state university system.)
Former University of California Regent and longtime affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly has attracted some attention recently by saying he wants to review an agreement that UC San Diego reached with the campus’ Black Student Union on March 4.
UCSD has been hit by a string of bias incidents in recent weeks, and the UCSD administration and the BSU have been working to craft a response. Connerly has expressed concern that their agreement may violate provisions in the California state constitution that ban racial preferences in college admissions.
There’s nothing out of line about this. Proposition 209 is the law of the land, and it’s legitimate for a Prop 209 proponent to try to make sure it’s enforced. But in attempting to explain why UCSD has such a low African American enrollment rate, Connerly made a false and derogatory claim about black students.
Here’s what he said, in an interview with a Southern California paper: “There just aren’t enough black kids who are academically prepared to go to UC San Diego.”
This isn’t an opinion, it’s a factual claim. It’s checkable. It’s verifiable. And it’s wrong.
Let us know what you’re doing, what you’re reading, what you’re planning. Include links!
On Wednesday, University of California president Mark Yudof posted a link on his Facebook page. The link was to a Wall Street Journal editorial that weirdly lays the blame for California’s higher education funding crisis on a single cause — excessive state spending due to an overly generous government pension policy.
(This editorial is deeply flawed — plenty of states that don’t share California’s pension setups are raising tuition and cutting higher ed spending right now, and California is an extreme case for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with pensions. To the extent that pension policy is an issue in the state, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. But that’s not my primary point here.)
Anyway, Yudof posted this link with a comment: “In case you missed it, WSJ calls it right. The causes for CA’s fiscal crisis lie with lawmakers, not the university!”
Yudof’s note received a number of replies, but my favorite was this one:
Are you trying to tell me we SHOULDN’T occupy everything?
studentactivism.net 
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