You probably heard that late last week Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor caught in a scandal related to the discovery that his academic career, and perhaps even much of his life, had consisted of a series of falsehoods and of taking credit for other people’s work, was found dead in an apparent suicide.
I won’t address such a gruesome outcome here in the newsletter, but this week I will do so on the Tom Woods Show.
I’m covering the issue further only because of the left-wing response, which has been that we have to make sure this never happens again — by which they mean: we have to make sure nobody ever again asks hard questions about a minority resume.
These people didn’t care about, and in fact danced on the grave of, historian Mike Adams when he killed himself — not after being accused of dishonesty, of which none was ever alleged in his work, but for being smeared for holding perfectly normal opinions. So never assume they are being sincere.
At any rate, I refer you to the Tom Woods Show this week for reflections on the fiasco and its morbid outcome.
For today, let’s peek into what’s been happening at UC Berkeley, where by far the fastest growing group — at Berkeley! — is students who can’t do middle school math.Zvezdelina Stankova, a professor there, recently told the story in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The horrendous Janet Napolitano, while president of the University of California system, urged that objective tests like the SAT and ACT be scrapped, citing pandemic disruption but also, of course, the word that corrupts and destroys all standards of decency and excellence: “equity.”
Other top schools did the same, with one difference: they realized their mistakes and reversed the policy: we’re talking Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Yale.
Stankova explains what, on the other hand, has been going on at Berkeley:
Before 2020, Berkeley administered a diagnostic exam to incoming Calculus I students. Between 2018 and 2020, 71% of roughly 2,200 students tested as ready or nearly ready for calculus. At the bottom of the distribution there was almost nobody. Just 0.14% tested below basic algebra.
Among approximately 2,800 Calculus I students tested between 2021 and 2023 with a different diagnostic that measured proficiency in eight mathematical topics, the share who were ready or nearly ready for calculus (meaning, they had proficiency in five to eight subjects) fell to 51%, dropping to 44% by 2023. Most troubling, the bottom of the distribution exploded. Seventeen percent of students answered none of the eight diagnostic topics correctly. By 2022-23, more than one-third had severe math deficits, and the single most common score on the exam was zero.
Read that again: the single most common score on the exam was zero.
The classroom itself changed:
We didn’t end up with one somewhat weaker calculus class. We ended up teaching two different classes in one lecture hall: one for students who were prepared for college calculus and one for students who needed remedial mathematics that nobody had scheduled.
The crisis isn’t simply that readiness declined; it’s that the middle collapsed while the bottom became the largest group in the room.
Stankova took a look at the kinds of students being admitted under the new policy — for example, from San Francisco’s Mission High School. Of 202 juniors there, 193 failed to meet the state math standard. (Stankova neglected to mention that Mission High School is a total of 9% white.)
Yet when 76 of those students applied to Berkeley, a stupefying 45 percent of them were accepted.
(On Wikipedia’s page for Mission High School, under the Diversity heading we read only, “Mission High school is the first public school to hold an LGBTQ/Drag Show Assembly.” And really, everyone, isn’t that what truly matters?)
The left completely dominates the educational establishment, and yet despises every last thing it is supposed to represent.
Keep admitting students like this and you have destroyed Berkeley. Who is going to pay to learn differential equations there when its hapless professors keep having to pause to review linear equations?
I myself left academia exactly 20 years ago. I do miss parts of it, but on the other hand I can now in principle teach whatever I want to anyone in the world who wants to learn.
Naturally I have my history courses, but nowadays I’m just as happy to teach more immediately practical things, like that free session I gave last week on the kind of laptop-based solopreneur business that is going to keep on delivering no matter how clever AI gets. You won’t get displaced from this, and it can be done from just about anywhere you might think to bring your laptop.
I am happy to announce that I will be holding an encore presentation coming up this Thursday, and at a different time from last week’s. But this will be the last presentation I make this year, so be sure to be there. Reserve your spot:
Tom Woods