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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Is COVID-19 Our New Sputnik Moment? |
| 2020-05-18 |
| American Thinker merican universities are troubled institutions. More serious than the attention-getting P.C. madness, however, has been the subversion of intellectual standards — armies of "diversity and inclusion" bureaucrats tasked with admitting unqualified students academically dependent on easy-to-pass fluff courses in gender studies and the like. Add grade inflation and, if that fails, endless tutoring to push troubled students to meaningless degrees. If that, too, fails, eliminate admissions tests to end "white privilege." So far, efforts to reverse this intellectual decline have fallen short, but, as odd as it may seem, the COVID-19 virus outbreak and the attendant financial crisis offer an intriguing never-waste-a-crisis possibility. A possible parallel exists with the 1957 "Sputnik moment," an event that likewise inspired panic — the sudden dread of being defenselessness against Soviet nuclear missiles. ...The COVID-19 pandemic should be a wake-up call, a message that pushing our universities to pursue racial/sex equality at the expense of intellectual rigor guarantees national disaster. Time to acknowledge that forcing chemistry professors to waste untold hours "diversifying" their now dumbed down syllabus imposes opportunity costs that hardly burden our Chinese rivals. ...Begin with the numbers. In 2017, the proportion of non-U.S. full-time graduate students enrollees in electrical engineering was 81%; in computer science 79%; in mechanical engineering 62%; in chemical engineering 57%; and metallurgical/materials engineering, 55%, If sub-divided by country of origin, the Chinese domination of these non-U.S. students is clear. In 2017—18, there were some 162,000 Chinese graduate students in STEM fields (and 201,000 in non-STEM disciplines). The runners up were Indians (154,000) with a huge gap among other nationalities — Saudi Arabia with 20,000 was in third place, 17,000 from South Korea, and so on. Yes, many Americans are now flocking to high-tech fields, but the data show even larger surges among those from abroad. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #3 ^ Lol. |
| Posted by: crazyhorse 2020-05-18 22:18 |
| #2 Or Kaput-nik? |
| Posted by: Clem 2020-05-18 20:41 |
| #1 Fits well with Billy's treatise. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2020-05-18 15:58 |