The rankings nourish the myth that the richest, most selective colleges have some corner on superior education; don’t adequately recognize public institutions that prioritize access and affordability; and do insufficient justice to the particular virtues of individual campuses.
.. He said that he’d never trade his faculty position here for one elsewhere, though he has been wooed, because of U.M.B.C.’s almost unrivaled record for guiding African-American undergraduates toward doctorates and other postgraduate degrees in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math).
.. Diversity, socioeconomic or otherwise, doesn’t factor much into U.S. News rankings, though a broadening of perspectives lies at the heart of the best education. U.M.B.C., with its acceptance rate of nearly 60 percent, places 159th among national universities.
.. One of the main factors in a school’s rank is how highly officials at peer institutions and secondary-school guidance counselors esteem it. But they may not know it well. They’re going by its reputation, established in no small part by previous U.S. News evaluations. A lofty rank perpetuates itself.
Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces and Free Speech, Too
The implication was that students who support trigger warnings and safe spaces are narrow-minded, oversensitive and opposed to dialogue. The letter betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of what the terms “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” mean, and came across as an embarrassing attempt to deflect attention from serious issues on campus.
.. A safe space is an area on campus where students — especially but not limited to those who have endured trauma or feel marginalized — can feel comfortable talking about their experiences. This might be the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs or it could be Hillel House, but in essence, it’s a place for support and community.
.. Nobody sought to “retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” as Dean Ellison put it in the letter, nor did these measures hinder discussion or disagreement, both of which were abundant.
.. The administration wants to appear as an intellectual force beating back destabilizing waves of political correctness that have rocked college campuses.
.. Instead, many protesters want the university to evaluate how it invests its money, improve access for students with mental illnesses and disabilities, support low-income and first-generation students, and pay its employees fair wages. They have been pushing for more transparency in the school’s private police force, which has resisted making most of its policies public in the face of complaints.
.. While the university accuses students of silencing opposing voices, it continues to insulate itself against difficult questions.
.. In this context, it’s hard to see the dean’s letter as anything other than a public relations maneuver.
.. Campus advocacy groups will not be deterred by a letter, as their goals have nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with holding universities accountable to the communities they are supposed to foster.
Trump, The University of Chicago, and the Collapse of Public Language
Writing long articles always involves muscle strain, but the parturition of this piece (which ran in the summer of 2014) was excruciating, because the material seemed to lack any conceptual edges. The ferment had been billed in the press as a “culture war.” And yet the two sides of the conflict—in terms of beliefs, ideological lineage, and language—were almost entirely the same.
.. The trouble in San Francisco, I realized, wasn’t that the warring tribes followed different doctrines. It was that they followed the same doctrine, abstractly stated, but had less and less of a way to gather and work from the abstract into the specific. Everyone was operating as a good San Francisco liberal, struggling against the establishment, outside the system, for the people.
Ironically, this meant there was less and less system left, no common terms by which the whole community could move ahead. Public language, as I put it in the piece, was coming unmoored from public process. I wondered what the future would bring if the rhetoric of our best ideals kept moving in this direction—if people of a single political identity couldn’t agree on the real sense of the words that, they were certain, gave voice to their values.
.. public conversation has begun to seem performative, incapable of producing results.
.. Self-defining language has grown easy to pass around but hard to translate into social results. “Diversity,” we know, is crucial. Yet the word means disparate things to a housing activist, a tech executive, and an admissions dean, and they end up talking past one another.
.. our community is the people who appear to understand our language, more or less, the way we do.
.. The Trump campaign, since its inception, has traded in counterfactual hyperbole, praeteritio (“a lot of people say . . . I won’t say”), and dubious innuendo. But using words as if they have no definition marks a shift.
.. Trump does not demur when it’s suggested that abstract nouns such as “bigot” and “founder” have meanings he’s transgressed. (“He’s their Most Valuable Player,” Trump said, of Obama, by way of clarification, three days after his isisremarks. “He was the founder.”) Oddly, though, the outlandish words seem not to obscure his message. When he makes his isis-founder remark, there are immediate cheers.
.. When newscasters quote Trump’s statements back to his representatives, they reply, “That’s not what Mr. Trump is saying”; his words aren’t held to convey a fixed message.
.. To know what Trump means, despite the words that he is saying, you have to understand—or think you understand—the message before he opens his mouth. That way of interpreting language is unassailable because it allows no persuasion, only self-revelation: the words don’t convey information but, like candles and jasmine perfume, serve as aesthetic trappings, prompts that may lead listeners to locate certain passionate moods in themselves.
.. In a climate where common language is not held accountable to common meaning, “taking a stand” becomes a mostly theatrical exercise.
.. He can say anything these days—because the rest of us can, too.
.. It is hard to talk about politics and language without mentioning George Orwell.
.. His point was that, especially at such moments, imprecision and easy idiom in public language carry political stakes.
.. I’ve increasingly found myself a supporter of messy public process: the legislation pushed through government slowly, in curtailed form; the interminable, fruitless-seeming town-hall meeting; many of the government’s lumbering, error-prone efforts at regulation. These processes are cumbersome, often wasteful, and inevitably infuriating. But at their best they have the virtue of occurring in a common arena, the place where all parts of a population meet. They force us, if we hope to get anything done, to translate our values and thoughts into language that communicates broadly.
We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
The ability to draw from other disciplines produces better scientists.
if American STEM grads are going lead the world in innovation, then their science education cannot be divorced from the liberal arts.
.. Scientists are often unable to communicate effectively because, as Cornell University president David J. Skorton points out, “many of us never received the education in the humanities or social sciences that would allow us to explain to nonscientists what we do and why it is important.”
.. “It doesn’t make you a better doctor to know how fast a mass falls from a tree,” Gail Morris, head of the school’s admissions, told Newsweek. “We need whole people.”