Progressivism causes low achievement.

Paul Fanlund hates Republicans more than he loves the Universities (plural!) of Wisconsin. 

The publisher of The Capital Times will be the last to understand this, but Republican legislative leaders did the Universities of Wisconsin a favor and system president Jay Rothman knows it. That’s why the Board of Regents Wednesday reversed themselves and approved the Republican compromise 11 to 6. (The 6 all Democrats.)

By agreeing to freeze hiring still more diversity, equity, and inclusion and other bureaucrats for three years, the university system “caved to Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and his culture warriors,” Fanlund wails. (As if the cadres of BLM, Freedom Inc., and Democratic Socialists are not culture warriors!) In the deal, the UW system also gets faculty and staff pay raises and a new engineering building. The UW must hire someone steeped in classical political theory and must scrap an unconstitutional race-based hiring program.

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Our elite universities have gone from being centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas … dogmatic ideology … places where the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.

— Fareed Zakaria, CNN

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Actually, it IS deniable!

Fanlund dishonestly suggests that the deal would terminate African American Studies. We repeat: DEI does not teach history, it is social engineering. He quotes a reliable race-baiter, state Rep. Shelia Stubbs, D-Madison:

“It is undeniable that racialized inequity is a deeply rooted part of our institutions in Wisconsin.” 

There it is! Woke DEI/critical race theory in its purest form!

Progressives like Stubbs and Fanlund blame disparate incarceration rates and poor test scores on racism, not on poor individual choices. Progressives have been enabling dysfunction for decades and nothing changes except that racial relations are more adversarial than any time since the 1960s. (“Don’t know much about history.”)

Higher education across the nation, already over-priced and over-sold, is in disrepute. Add trigger warnings, cancel culture, and general all around pecksniffery and you have a system that is Out Of Touch. Stir in the “Depends on the Context” of campus anti-semitism and you have a crisis of confidence — one that legislative Republicans are addressing and Democrats are pooh poohing.

Harvard, Penn, and MIT may be entitled to their contextual equivocations, being privately endowed universities. The Universities of Wisconsin are taxpayer-supported. We are paying for this university system! But accountability violates the essence of progressivism: rule by expert. They decide, the rest of us shut up and fork over.

What is undeniable (if you want to play that game) is that the race and sex commissars discourage sifting and winnowing through a regimen of shaming, intimidation, denial of tenure, refusal to hire. Submit your DEI statement along with your doctoral thesis.

Bigotry of low expectations

Black educator and NY Times columnist John McWhorter remarks that this week’s congressional hearings “point up how low expectations are for black students on many college campuses — expectations low enough to qualify as a kind of racism.”

The Universities of Wisconsin expelled a 42-ton boulder deposited on the Madison campus 12,000 years ago by the last glacier. Someone, almost as long ago, referred to it with a racist term. The Abraham Lincoln statue is rumored to be next on the flatbed truck. Or beheaded, like the statue in front of the state Capitol of the slavery abolitionist who died fighting the Confederacy. Republicans didn’t do that; ISIS-inspired progressives did.

Professor McWhorter’s Bottom Line: “If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?”

Is any white liberal guiltier than Paul Fanlund?