By Phyllis Wise
This week I have the privilege of welcoming Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Bollinger is well known among people familiar with issues of affirmative action and diversity in higher education. Ten years ago, when he was the president of the University of Michigan, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that school’s affirmative action admissions policies in two landmark decisions. And his presence reminds me that when it comes to creating diverse communities, the process is never going to be easy, and it will require constant effort.
As it turns out, landmarks are apparently transient. Last year, affirmative action in public university admissions was again before the court, in Fisher v. Texas. Creating diverse communities may never be settled with finality in a courtroom.
But it is essential that we resolve these conflicts in our classrooms and beyond. We can debate the best ways or policies to build diversity, but we must have a universal understanding that diversity – in its broadest definition – is inextricably tied to excellence.
Diversity is not merely bound to race, but extends to culture, religion, geography, sexuality, age, gender, beliefs, values and experience. Historically, diversity has been linked primarily to considerations of fairness, but we have moved beyond that – and beyond just numbers or quotas.
The challenges today are simply too complex and too massive to resolve without everyone being at the table when we brainstorm and make decisions. When we leave bright individuals out of the discussions, we are leaving wisdom and innovations behind. That is a risk we cannot take.
And while the definition of success may differ, there are some fundamental elements of excellence that are universal.
Diversity = Knowledge
The very definition of learning requires acquiring knowledge about something new. Learning new things requires one to approach new experiences, new situations, new people. Anytime we are given the opportunity to interact with someone different from us, it is an invitation to learn. It isn't always comfortable or easy. Try having a conversation with someone who doesn't look like you, sound like you, or share your beliefs. You walk away with a different perspective and with an experience that you can apply in another situation at another time.
Diversity = Personal growth
Many people say travel is essential for opening one’s eyes to the world. While that may be true, oftentimes we can have that same kind of exposure by interacting with people in our own neighborhood. My own experiences - meeting students with varied life experiences or befriending neighbors with very different professional backgrounds - have helped to widen my perspective. And though this doesn't often directly translate into quantitative advantage, it makes people more compassionate and empathetic. As we see in the virtual shrinking of the world – where linguistic, geographical and political boundaries are being blurred by social media and communications technology – networks of relationships are beginning to define personal and professional success. Those who are culturally agile have a leg up on the next generation of leaders.
Diversity = Solutions
Similar people tend to produce similar solutions. When attempting to solve complex societal challenges, if the people around the table are more diverse, the conversation is richer, the solutions better. At the university level, if we have a “product,” it must surely be the creation of ideas. And ideas aren't limited by skin color or by the language you speak or where your parents come from. They are born out of life and educational experiences. The more experiences to draw from, the more likely it is that a creative solution emerges.
Diversity = Innovation
In the same way that diversity enhances our chances to find the best answers, it also creates an exciting environment for breakthroughs. After all, sparks of innovation can only come from novel thoughts and ideas. And these are most likely to emerge when one is in a stimulating and unconventional environment. As chancellor of a public research university, I can’t help but think about this in terms of cross-disciplinary research. I have heard repeatedly that often the most innovative ideas came from two people coming together at a lunch spot or at the bus stop. Cultivating a diverse community creates more opportunities for those serendipitous interactions that lead to great innovations.
Diversity = Competitive advantage
Diversity is a competitive imperative. Let me give you an example from where I sit. In Illinois, historically underrepresented populations make up more than 50 percent of the students in our K-12 classrooms. That means within a decade the majority of our freshman class will likely not be white. If we ignore this and do not accelerate our efforts to be more diverse and more inclusive and welcoming, we will not be fully prepared to welcome the class of 2025. This population trend extends far beyond the university sector. The nation is becoming increasingly diverse. As universities, businesses and people we are at our best when we reflect the environment around us. If we don’t, it becomes difficult to remain relevant -- whether you are competing for the best students or the best managers or for new customers. And if you aren't relevant, you certainly cannot be competitive.
All of these ideas come together to create excellence. And without diversity, there is no excellence.
Schools dumbdown children. It's ridiculous to jail children in schools for sixteen years! Basil Venitis, venitis@gmail.com, http://themostsearched.blogspot.com
I regret squandering the most beautiful twenty-two years of my life, from primary school to graduate school, to get a PhD! PhD now is just a toilet paper! 80% of employers consider attitude more important than aptitude, and 70% do not care about college degrees. Nowadays, lazy children go to colleges. Smart children join the real world, getting all information they need from the internet and their employers. All big employers have in-house training programs. The very smart children start their own business as soon as they get some experience.
Free MOOCs (massive open online courses) are replacing colleges. Many students now take the MOOCs of Harvard and Stanford, the two best universities on Earth.
Colleges have a huge negative impact on economy, because they destroy the most productive years of youth, trapping students in concentration camps, denying students experience in the real world, commoditizing their minds, and spreading the cancer of socialism. Colleges also siphon eggheads away from industry, transforming them to lazy vegetables. Donation to colleges is subsidy of your destruction!
Colleges spread the cancer of socialism. Nevertheless, it is the businessmen’s money that supports colleges in the form of voluntary private contributions, donations, endowments, and scholarships. Many billions of euros are donated to colleges by businessmen every year, and the donors have no idea of what their money is being spent on or whom it is supporting. Some of the worst socialist propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.
Studentship and professorship have become sinecures! Scholarships and fellowships are offered to students in order to fill classes, get donations and government money, keep eggheads employed, and lower official unemployment rates. Colleges have become concentration centers for losers and the drones of society, those weak at heart who do not dare to compete in the real world, finding comfortable shelter in ivory towers.
Greece has the worst higher education system in Fourth Reich. The Greek Ministry of Education, George Orwell's Ministry of Truth or Minitrue in Newspeak, harasses all private colleges and their professors. Professors of private colleges are required to submit myriad papers certified by lawyers and pay heavy fees. Visiting Minitrue is a very humiliating experience as the building is open for the public only from 12 to 1:30pm, with infinite queues and wild goose chase from room to room. After a professor submits an application to Minitrue, he might have to wait up to fifty days for an answer!
Fourth Reich(EU) has penalized Greece many times for harassing its private colleges, but Orwellian Greece continues the harassment, because it's a matter of its damned socialistic principles. Minitrue has created a special abusive office, the Bureau of Post-Lyceum Education, whose only function is to harass private colleges! Even though the Greek private colleges are much better than the public colleges, the Grand Brothel on Syntagma Square, passed a law that graduates of public colleges should get higher salaries than the graduates of private colleges!
Greek public colleges are covered with communist graffiti, stray dogs and communists run through buildings, professors pollute minds with socialist propaganda, and students dream of immigrating to Anglosphere. Colleges have been battered by kleptocracy and the cancer of socialism. Buildings aren't heated, schools nest sinecures, and professors hate teaching and cannot publish. It's hard to be hopeful with youth unemployment surpassing 50 percent, communists seizing buildings, and professors spreading socialist nonsense.
The naked truth about colleges is that a college degree is not worth the price of the sheepskin on which it’s printed! College education is waste of time and money. The college bubble will burst soon, tearing down all ivory towers. The college degree payback is very long, an expensive education is not a guarantee to higher real wages, and it is not worth going to debt to finance it. A widespread public skepticism is fueled by poor job prospects. Real wages, that is, what you earned after you subtracted inflation and taxes, entered a freefall in the past two decades. Rather than be out of work, most citizens quietly settled for lower real wages.
A college education has a value relative to future earnings, vocational success, and its ability to lift you above the economic burdens of underemployment and stagnant earnings. Right now, that equation just doesn't measure up. The reward to risk ratio of college education is the lowest of all possible investments.
Peter Thiel, the superstar Silicon Valley investor has famously dismissed college as a waste of time and money, and even offered students cash to drop out. Thiel has argued that the brightest young minds should strike out on their own and start companies rather than take on crushing debt to pursue a college degree.
Colleges are frauds. Many administrators rob the funds, many professors trade grades for bribes and sex, and most students dumb down! Anyone who wants to learn anything can do it much better on the Internet, without retreating to fraudulent concentration camps, called campuses. Allons enfants de la Patrie!
As the importance of faculty research and publication increases, the value of teaching tends to decrease. At research universities, prestige is often measured by how little you teach! This creates an incentive for faculty members to design courses that are closely related to their research. Many courses are based on what the professor wants to teach rather than what the student needs to learn.
Colleges have little value, and their graduates cannot find jobs. They are an embarrassment to education. Sending a child to a university is irresponsible. Total college education, direct and indirect, including bygone salaries, costs around 200,000 euros. That money would bring higher reward-to-risk ratio in any other investment. College years are lost years.
The main effect of government student aid programs is not to transfer wealth from taxpayers to students, but from taxpayers to academic institutions. That's because the rise in student subsidies over the decades appears to have fueled inflation in education costs. Tuition and other college costs have soared as subsidies have risen.
It is matter of supply and demand. More and more citizens have sought a college education, which has pushed prices higher. Ordinarily, such upward pressure would be restrained by consumers' willingness and ability to pay, but as government subsidies have helped absorb tuition increases, the public's budget constraint has been lifted. Federal subsidies are seen by colleges as money that is there for the taking. Tuition is set high enough to capture those funds and whatever else can be extracted from parents.
Over the past few decades, a vicious cycle has been perpetuated by college policy. Governments increase subsidies for colleges, inflating students' purchasing power, in turn allowing universities to raise tuition, which ultimately increases the demand for more government subsidies. Not only would an increase in grant funding not break this vicious cycle, but it would also fail to place pressure on colleges to use resources more efficiently. The dysfunctional college market is an arms race where vast resources are targeted toward non-academic purposes such as athletics, building renovations, and administrative overhead costs in order to compete for students.
Most troublesome of all, continuing to increase subsidies for college raises questions of equity. Increasing government subsidies for colleges, whether in the form of grants or student loans, shifts the responsibility of paying for college from the student, who directly benefits from college, to the taxpayer. Transferring the burden of student loan financing from university graduates to the three-quarters of taxpayers who did not attend college is unjust. Kleptocrats should restructure the grant program so that funding goes directly to students, not to universities, and should limit access to grants after four years of undergraduate work.
Dropping out is a smart strategy of cutting losses short! Most top presidents and self-made billionaires dropped out of high school or college! The list includes Bill Gates(Microsoft), Larry Page(Google), Michael Dell(Dell), David Geffen(Geffen Records), Steve Jobs(Apple), Richard Branson(Virgin), Ralph Lauren(Ralph Lauren), Jerry Yang(Yahoo) and Zuckerberg(Facebook). Zuckerberg and Gates went to Harvard.
Page and Yang both attended Stanford. Jobs only completed one semester at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Dell left the University of Texas at 19. Geffen dropped out of three universities before launching his record label. Lauren went to Baruch College in New York City, but left after two years. Branson, a mild dyslexic, never made it out of high school. Han Han, the world's most popular blogger, dropped out of high school in China. Ford Motors founder, Henry Ford, never had any formal education, outside his training as a machinist. Most famous politicians, such as UK Premier Major and EP President Schultz, never went to college.
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