New book recommendation about higher education for your Public Library

Richard Vedder, "Restoring the Promise; Higher Education in America" his final points.

• "College administrative staff often exceeds the teaching staff. Vedder says, “I doubt there is a major campus in America where you couldn’t eliminate very conservatively 10% of the administrative payroll (in dollar terms) without materially impacting academic performance.”
• Reevaluate academic tenure. Tenure is an employment benefit that has costs, and faculty members should be forced to make trade-offs between it and other forms of university compensation.
• Colleges of education, with their overall poor academic quality, are an embarrassment on most campuses and should be eliminated.
• End speech codes on college campuses by using the University of Chicago principles on free speech.
• Require a core curriculum that incorporates civic and cultural literacy.
• The most important measure of academic reforms is to make university governing boards independent and meaningful. In my opinion, most academic governing boards are little more than yes men for the president and provost."

As reported by Walter E. Williams "Smart Ways to Make College Cheaper and Better," Daily Signal, May 15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=A6ryUtm4W9g  A YouTube of Vedder’s lecture on this topic.  Very little has changed since I went to college in the 1960s, except for the soaring costs, and I didn't have to take any diversity or retraining classes.

He reports that “Harvard and Bridgewater State are 15 miles apart--Bridgewater is a better school" (audience laughs). I looked it up--Harvard is 5X more expensive than Bridgewater.

Vedder says had been teaching for 53 years (he’s emeritus at Ohio University) and was told he needed to report for "diversity training" and he refused.  He says University of Michigan has 93 diversity coordinators and wonders if black and Hispanic students are better off. I think OSU beats that, and has more. But IED departments are not intended to help minorities and women, they are intended to punish and terrorize the white majority and provide jobs for administrative staff who graduated with "studies" degrees (my comment, not his).

There's a war against white males on American campuses. Alumni--check out your donor status and demand a change. One question from the audience was from a parent who said her son was required to take a course on "Climate Change" at his college which was not taught by any professor and contained no science, only opinion and popular magazines. She wants her money back! I don't blame her.

Slicing and dicing the quotes

When you see something that doesn’t sound right, check it out.

"Hoodwinking Americans is part of the environmentalist agenda. Environmental activist Stephen Schneider told Discover magazine in 1989: "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. ... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." Walter E. Williams, April 25, CNS

I love Williams economic and social pieces, but this just didn’t sound right—too much like the pre-legal abortion stuff I’ve read. (numbers vastly inflated) So I decided to check out that quote by a scientist, because all sides slice, dice and edit, and at his webpage he explains it more fully--that it was not his intention to say that, it had been edited. So I read the full statement--and it still said to me, pretty much the same thing although it had been edited. . . when you are an "expert" you need to put things in sound bites so the general public will understand.
Hmmm. What makes it dishonest is Williams' use of the term "hoodwinking." I don't like it when the left does it; and right doesn't need to. Temperatures in earth climate models may well rise half a degree in the next century, but there's no evidence that taxing the rich more will do anything other than give governments--republics, fascists, communists, or dictatorships--more power.

Low expectations

The liberals' racism of low expectations--absolving a  shakedown artist and presidential buddy, Al Sharpton. "Despite such racism [by Sharpton], President Barack Obama has made Sharpton his go-to guy on matters of race. But not to worry. Obama himself spent 20 years listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic and racist sermons. The news media and intellectual elite don’t condemn Sharpton or Obama, because they have two standards of behavior: one for whites and a lower one for blacks." Walter E. Williams

http://blackcommunitynews.com/liberals-use-black-people-part-ii

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/01/06/report-al-sharpton-shakes-down-corporations-to-make-racism-claims-disappear/

http://nypost.com/2015/01/04/how-sharpton-gets-paid-to-not-cry-racism-at-corporations/

http://nationalactionnetwork.net/

http://joeforamerica.com/2015/01/al-sharptons-money-train/

I wonder what he’s got on Obama?

Our fading heritage

Remember to vote Tuesday, but be informed--all politics is local as the saying goes. If there's anything distressing to me about our being in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is that Bush took us into war believing they deserved democracy, and meanwhile we are destroying it in our own country through desire for entitlements, redistribution of our wealth and property in the name of marxist "social justice," and corrupt, power hungry politicians on both sides of the aisle.

“How about a few civics questions? Name the three branches of government. If you answered the executive, legislative and judicial, you are more informed than 50 percent of Americans. The Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) recently released the results of their national survey titled "Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail a Basic Test on Their History and Institutions." The survey questions were not rocket science.

Only 21 percent of survey respondents knew that the phrase "government of the people, by the people, for the people." comes from President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Almost 40 percent incorrectly believe the Constitution gives the president the power to declare war. Only 27 percent know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States. Remarkably, close to 25 percent of Americans believe that Congress shares its foreign policy powers with the United Nations.

Among the total of 33 questions asked, others included: "Who is the commander in chief of the U S. military?” "Name two countries that were our enemies during World War II." "Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the federal government. What is one power of the federal government?" Of the 2,508 nationwide samples of Americans taking ISI's civic literacy test, 71 percent failed; the average score on the test was 49 percent.

More at Walter E. Williams.