Author Archives: jimbacon1953

How to Degrade the Honor Code: Issue “Warnings”

Posted on May 2, 2023 | 8 comments

by James A. Bacon

What’s the Honor Committee to do when a student who violated the Honor Code refuses or is unable to comply with his or her “sanction” ordered by the Committee? That’s one of the tricky questions arising from the shift to a multi-tiered system for punishing lying, cheating and stealing that the Committee wrestled with Monday during an Honor Town Hall.

Sanctions under the system of multi-tiered sanctions can range from expulsion and suspension to taking training or making amends. The new Honor constitution approved by UVa students this spring did not address what happens if convicted students don’t meet the terms of their punishments.

The point of having a non-compliance sanction is to ensure that people meet the deadlines for complying with the punishments, said Kasra Lekan, an engineering school representative.

The Committee Monday considered the merits of applying a new sanction for failing to comply with the original sanction… or just issuing a warning. As the Cavalier Daily reports, “These warnings would continue until the student complied with their sanction.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Honor code

How to Degrade Academic Excellence, Lesson #1: Make SATs Optional

Posted on May 2, 2023 | 3 comments

In Bacon’s Rebellion, Jim Sherlock makes a novel point that I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere. The University of Virginia and other elite higher-ed institutions are thriving in an age of declining student enrollment because they are perceived as elite. That perception depends in large measure upon the fact that some of the smartest, highest-achieving students in the country go there. However, by extending the decision to make SATs and ACT scores optional and substituting subjective admissions criteria, UVa is admitting a student body marked by a greater variability in academic aptitude. It remains to be seen if the decline in academic exclusivity will undermine its reputation as an elite institution. But it very well could.

How will UVa reconcile the tension between subjective admissions criteria and its pretense to be an exclusive, elite academic institution? Will it accept a higher attrition rate of less academically prepared students? Will it bolster lower-achieving students with intense tutoring and academic support? Will it steer the lower-achieving students into “gut” courses and majors? Or will it lower academic standards and embrace grade inflation?

Given the acceleration of grade inflation at UVa in the past five years, Virginia’s flagship university appears to be settling for a policy of incrementally compromising its standards of academic excellence. The obvious advantage of this approach is that it is hard to detect and easy to deny, and the results won’t be evident until the current leadership has retired or moved on.

— JAB

3 Comments

Posted in Academic programs, Admissions

The Trivialization of Honor

Posted on April 30, 2023 | 7 comments

Image credit: Microsoft Image Creator

by James A. Bacon

Last week the Honor Council debated the viability of requiring Honor Code violators to perform community service under the University of Virginia’s new system of multi-tiered sanctions. No vote was held on the proposal.

Lukas Lehman, a second-year engineering student, argued that giving back to the community would allow students to re-engage with the university in constructive ways, reports The Cavalier Daily.

“Doing your sanction means committing yourself to the community of trust,” Lehman said. “Cleaning up the corner, cleaning up Mad Bowl, or working with the community for training makes sense because you are recommitting yourself to the community of trust.”

But students shouldn’t be allowed to choose whatever volunteer organizations they want, said Vice Chair Rachel Liesegang. “I think we should provide organizations [to volunteer with], and I think we should certainly accept student proposals, but I also don’t think we should be as relaxed as just saying they can choose whatever organization they want. If they’re just going to keep volunteering for [an organization they already work with], they’re not actually going through any rehabilitation.”

Bacon’s bottom line: It’s not clear from the Cavalier Daily account how much momentum the community-service sanction has. But the very idea is disturbing on multiple levels. First, suggesting that the act of lying, cheating or stealing can be expunged by a stint of community service trivializes the offenses. Second, the community-service requirement could easily devolve into a tool to enforce ideological conformity. Continue reading →

7 Comments

Posted in Honor code

Daily Mail Picks up Bettinger Story

Posted on April 29, 2023 | 12 comments

Protesters harass Morgan Bettinger in her car after rumors circulated that she said they’d made good “speed bumps,” a supposed allusion to the Unite the Right rally three years previously in which a neo-Nazi ran his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one. Photo credit: WUVA News by way of The Daily Mail.

The Morgan Bettinger case is gaining national notoriety. After Reason magazine detailed the travesty of the University of Virginia student who was punished for using the words “speed bumps” in a way that militant leftist protesters construed as threatening, the Daily Mail has picked up the story. The Daily Mail does not add much new information, but it does crystallize the insanity of the episode, in which rumors spreading on social media panicked UVa officials into running Bettinger through a flawed student disciplinary system.

As the Daily Mail summarized the travesty: “Celebrated BLM activist ruthlessly destroyed white student’s life by accusing her of saying racial justice protesters would ‘make good speed bumps’ — only to later admit she may have MISHEARD.” The chief accuser was Zyahna Bryant, who had been awarded numerous honors in recognition of her student activism. She spread vitriol against Bettinger online, and then demanded that UVa discipline her.

Although UVa’s Office of Equity and Civil Rights (OECR) found no evidence to confirm the allegation that she had verbally threatened the protesters, the student-run judiciary committee compelled her to write an apology to Bryant and perform social justice-related community service if she wanted to graduate. Continue reading →

12 Comments

Posted in Administration, Leftist orthodoxy

Tagged

“DEI Is Dead” at VMI

Posted on April 27, 2023 | 5 comments

Huge news from the Virginia Military Institute with implications for the University of Virginia….

by James A. Bacon

The Youngkin administration has just unloaded a HIMARS rocket attack on Virginia Military Institute’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion program.

Speaking Friday in a session of mandatory “inclusive excellence training,” Martin D. Brown, Youngkin’s chief of Diversity, Opportunity & Inclusion, left steaming rubble where VMI’s DEI program had been standing.

“Let’s take a moment right now to kill that cow. DEI is dead,” said Brown. “We’re not going to bring that cow up anymore. It’s dead. It was mandated by the General Assembly, but this governor has a different philosophy of civil discourse, civility, treating — living the golden rule, right?” Continue reading →

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Posted in Race, Equity and Diversity

Tagged ,

How the Digital Rumor Mill Fed Incoherent Social-Justice Hysteria

Posted on April 27, 2023 | 2 comments

Graphic credit: Reason Magazine

by James A. Bacon

When Emma Camp was a student at the University of Virginia in 2020, she heard the tale of Morgan Bettinger, another UVa student, who was said to have approached left-wing protesters in downtown Charlottesville and threatened to make “speed bumps” of them.

The story, says Camp, was repeatedly endlessly on social media — group chats, Instagram posts, and viral tweets — and then leaped to local television and print media. Bettinger was criticized, ostracized, made to fear for her safety, and ultimately punished by UVa’s student judiciary committee.

After graduating, Camp became an assistant editor of Reason magazine. In that capacity, she has written an in-depth article in the June 2023 issue demonstrating that the story she’d heard at UVa was a fabrication– the outgrowth of social-media rumor mongering run amok.

The article. “How an Ill-Informed Internet Mob Ruined a UVA Student’s Life,” does a brilliant job of tracing the trajectory of that lie from the actual events through the social-media postings by militant UVa activist Zyahna Bryan, to the amplification of the charges by other local activist groups, local journalists and even UVa faculty.

“This is the story of a rumor mill that rushed to collective judgment, a pervasive climate of anger and outrage, a weak campus administration, and a unique higher-ed justice system that faltered just when it was most needed,” Camp writes. “It’s the story of a woman who was informally ostracized and formally sanctioned for a story that seemingly everyone on campus had heard and believed, but which was never proven.” Continue reading →

2 Comments

Posted in Administration, Leftist orthodoxy

Tagged

George Will: “The Bad Ideas Fueling Today’s Attack on The Best Idea — Free Speech.” 

Posted on April 27, 2023 | 1 comment

1 Comment

Posted in Speakers, Panels and Events

George Will Explains the Totalitarian Impulse

Posted on April 26, 2023 | 2 comments
Photo credit: Bob Turner

Photo credit: Bob Turner

Speaking to a packed house in the Minor Hall auditorium at the University of Virginia last night, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will traced the rise of the totalitarian movement on college campuses. Contemporary totalitarian thought, which arises from the conviction that human behavior is infinitely malleable and that all ills in society can be traced to flawed institutions and pernicious cultural traits, seeks to control every aspect of human culture. Only by ridding society of those flaws can humanity be perfected and justice achieved. Those hewing to this view, Will opined, invariably seek to enhance the power of government at the expense of individual liberty.

Will contrasted the view of a malleable and perfectible man with the notion that there is such a thing as human nature, and that that nature makes humans stubbornly resistant to the efforts of intellectual and political elites to perfect them. From this view arises the doctrine of natural rights and the Jeffersonian idea of government instituted to secure those rights. In this tradition of thought, the rights of individuals supersede the will of the majority.

The perfectibility paradigm rules in higher education today. The increasing threats to free speech and free inquiry in academia flow naturally from the conviction that undesirable ideas and cultural traits cause harm by thwarting progress toward a progressive utopia.

Read the written version of Will’s speech (without digressions) here.

UVA TODAY covers the Will speech: “‘Free and Fearless Inquiry’ Must Prevail on College Campuses, George Will Urges“

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Posted in Speakers, Panels and Events

UVa Is on a DEI Hiring Spree

Posted on April 25, 2023 | 6 comments

The University of Virginia’s vice president for diversity, equity & inclusion told the New York Times that UVa has only 40 DEI employees — half the number counted by the Virginia Association of Scholars. We wonder if his count includes the positions cited in the article below, which is reposted with permission from the Do No Harm blog. –JAB

Forget teaching medicine. The University of Virginia’s medical education programs are too busy hiring woke ideologues. A source recently sent us the job posting for the UVA Comprehensive Cancer Center’s new DEI Program Coordinator, and the School of Medicine is hiring a Program Manager and Events Coordinator. These are the sorts of things the UVA Board should investigate, and better yet, stop.

The job descriptions are everything you’d expect from positions grounded in divisive and discriminatory concepts like DEI. The cancer center job, for instance, will develop “DEI related trainings, programs, seminars, and presentations,” ensuring faculty and students receive woke indoctrination. They will also help implement a “5-year strategic plan,” with the goal of making the Cancer Center more woke every year. Continue reading →

6 Comments

Posted in Race, Equity and Diversity

New York Times “DEI” Article Prompts Questions About Ryan’s Views

Posted on April 23, 2023 | 10 comments

Bert Ellis. Photo credit: New York Times

by James A. Bacon

Kudos to Stephanie Saul for her front-page article in The New York Times this morning. She quotes Bert Ellis and me accurately and in context in an impressively even-handed account of the brewing controversy over Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at the University of Virginia.

Followers of the Jefferson Council will find that the article, which explores DEI issues at UVa through the prism of Ellis’ appointment to the Board of Visitors, covers familiar ground. However, it does contain nuggets of news, mainly by putting UVa President Jim Ryan and other university officials on the record on issues about which they have been largely silent so far.

Most astonishing are the quotes from Ryan, who comes across as totally clueless about the aims of his critics.

James E. Ryan, the university’s president, said he believes the majority of alumni feel the way he does — that diversity is desirable and needed.

“I haven’t heard anyone say we should have a community that is monolithic, unfair and unwelcoming,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Ryan said he wonders about the motives of the critics.

“Whether this is an effort to focus on the aspects of D.E.I. that seem to threaten academic freedom and push toward ideological conformity, or whether it’s an effort to turn back the clock to 1965 — it’s hard to know,” he said in an interview.

Continue reading →

10 Comments

Posted in Administration, Intellectual diversity, Race, Equity and Diversity