Every now and again instinct serves me well. Three years ago, expecting the worst, I made my review of Ed Dutton's Why Islam Makes You Stupid . . . But Also Means You’ll Conquer The World very short. Amazon did indeed stop carrying the book, orphaning my review. They will, however, apparently still allow me to update it. I think I will do a proper review, post it on my Substack, and put a reference to it in the Amazon review. I cannot imagine that the blue noses who work there will be interested in applying community standards to a review of a book they no longer sell. I will let you know.
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I think my life's experience could be the subject for an interesting book. I have had two families of three children each, the first born in the 80s, the second in the second decade of the next century. Approximately the fifth and eighth decades of my life. One raised in affluence in progressive Montgomery County Maryland, the other raised frugally in a war-torn former Soviet country. One in which the mother was a successful career woman, the other where Mom spent a lot of time with the kids. One with childcare from Latin Ladies and au pairs , the other cared for by grandmother and a woman from the community. One where the children went to expensive private schools and enjoyed tutors, the other relying on homeschooling, neighborhood private schools and public school. And ultimately, the first one a thorough disaster by every measure, and the second one showing promise by about every measure.
An author has to have a readership in mind. Who would want to buy such a book, and why would they buy it? Are there lessons that could be applied in their lives? How relevant are the issues in their own lives? These are the questions I fear. I don't sense that there are a vast number of people who share my concern that the social and school environments of the United States and Western Europe are too toxic for raising a successful family. I don't sense that there are people who would conclude, as I did, that it is best to look overseas. If there were such widespread interest, I think I would enjoy more subscribers to this blog. What do you think?
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Noticing that Zoriana's first grade English workbook is put out by an outfit called Oxford, Eddie asked me what that was. His question about Oxford led to quite a long discussion, concerning many things that will be relevant to his future.
First is the fact that reputation is based on what you have done in the past. A university's reputation is built on academic and intellectual excellence. Oxford and Cambridge have been around since the Middle Ages. Like their feeder schools Eton and Harrow, they have been attended by a large portion of the country's elite.
Of course, a university cannot claim full credit for the accomplishments of its graduates. That depends mostly on the qualities that students have upon entering the university – intelligence, drive and connections. When a company hires an Oxford graduate, they assume that the University would not have admitted somebody without a fairly good intellect, that said graduate must have enjoyed pretty good connections upon entry to the University, and improved them through the acquaintances made over the few years they were there.
It has been the same in the United States. Here is Forbes magazine's list of the top 10 universities in the world as of 2024: University of Oxford, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, University of Cambridge (UK), Princeton University, California Institute of Technology, Imperial College London, University of California, Berkeley and Yale University.
I derive small satisfaction from the fact that my Cal Berkeley remains among the top ten. I described the phenomenon of "reputation mining" to Eddie. That's what happens when an institution coasts on past glories. In my youth the University of California was the home of phenomenal research in nuclear physics. Alfred Kroeber, whom I briefly met when my mother edited his manuscripts, was one of the founding fathers of anthropology. My mother also had occasion during the 50s and 60s to edit for other leading lights such as Hyman Minsky and Erving Goffman. These people built the University's reputation. Everybody wanted to be where they were.
The University of California sustained its reputation by admitting smart students and holding them to high standards. A diploma such as mine (mathematics, ΦΒΚ) meant something when I received it in 1966. However, only seven years later Alan Bakke was denied admission to med school in favor of less qualified minorities. In the 50 years since, the University has gone out of its way to implement diversity and stymie court decisions that would require colorblind admissions. In 2021, rather than submit to the courts, Berkeley decided to stop requiring the standard measurements of academic ability, the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the American College Testing scores, in favor of admitting students solely on subjective criteria.
Unqualified students have now been being admitted for decades. The first of them were subjected to the rigorous grading regimes that had earned Cal its longstanding reputation. However, the diversity bureaucrats reached the conclusion that they could not tolerate disparate impact, with blacks receiving lower grades than whites/Jews and Asians. Since most minority students were in the humanities, that is where the grading standards were first lowered.
The most prestigious and best paying degrees, however, remained in the STEM disciplines – science, technology, engineering and mathematics - where there were relatively few such minorities. Nonetheless, those sectors to have recently been compelled to lower their standards as well. The upshot is that a Cal Berkeley degree does not signify the same level of accomplishment as it did when I earned mine. Cal's reputation has been mined out. Not only that, it is hard for people of Eddie's pale complexion to get admitted. He should enroll elsewhere.
The same problem applies in varying degrees to every one of the top 10 universities. All of them exist in the woke intellectual climates of the United States and Great Britain. They are coasting on reputations earned long ago. They all discriminate in one way or another against straight white men.
Returning to the earlier question of the value that any university actually adds, it is a matter of how well it is able to encourage the student to learn. Is the University able to get the student to apply the intellect that they brought with them upon admission to read, research, analyze and write? It is not a question of imparting knowledge, but whether the University is able to encourage the student to develop his or her innate skills.
In my opinion, universities in Ukraine, unfettered by diversity mandates, can do a better job than expensive foreign universities. More than that, unaffected by inflated reputations, our universities remain reasonably priced. Overseas universities and employers are increasingly learning to value diplomas from Ukraine.
The downfall of academia in the west is twofold. First, they are not requiring people who are admitted to use their talent, and secondly, they are demanding that those young minds accept dogma in place of fact, indoctrination in place of the search for truth. Universities are no longer places of intellectual curiosity but of stifling intellectual conformity, where dissenting opinions are neither wanted nor allowed, and even actively discouraged – as mine were at the University of Maryland in 2004.
More than that, they still charge prices as if they were as good as ever. In fact, they have raised their tuition significantly to staff with nonproductive people who administer the diversity and other quota systems. To attract students, whose tuition is largely paid by student loans, they construct facilities that are attractive to the students, but expensive to maintain such a sports complexes, recreation halls, and the like. The upshot is that the price of an education is related to external factors, not to the value gained over four-years or so of attendance . Many students assume debt that will be a millstone around their necks throughout their careers. Such imbalances cannot last. Their reputations, and the universities themselves, appear ripe for disruption. We will prepare Eddie to study right here.
In this connection, I gave Eddie a new word for his vocabulary, arbitrage. Eddie's opportunity is to arbitrage between the advertised or reputational quality of a university and the actual quality. He is doing very well in a secondary school here in Kyiv that has no that has only a local reputation but is teaching him well. The stands and significant contrast to the schools that my first family attended in Washington DC, which had good reputations but did not offer an exceptional education.
The same will be true in university. The best universities in Kyiv, Shevchenko, Polytechnic, and Kyiv Mohyla Academy, enjoy reputations local to Ukraine. They teach primarily in Ukrainian. Nonetheless, the quality of the education is pretty good. That is to say that the do a good job of taking advantage of whatever natural talent the student brings to the University.
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Summer is over. The good-looking woman is enjoying the pflaumenkuchen from the recipe handed down from my great great grandmother – as I recall the story – using the last of the plums from this year's abundant harvest. Her mother took a piece with her to Svetlovodsk, where she is going to straighten up her apartment and list it for sale. Those are the notes and musings from Lake WeBeGone. Please do offer comments as to whether you or anybody you know would be interested in reading about my two families if I were to write a book. If so, which topics would be of most interest? Overseas? Method of schooling? Social environment?
Thanks
Thank you for sharing Graham. I tried to find Why Islam Makes You Stupid on any bookstore online, and it's blacklisted everywhere! Funny enough a search of the book name links to your book review here:
https://grahamseibert.com/Reviews_of_books_now_banned/How_Islam_makes_you_stupid.pdf
I pursued this contraband until I found a pdf online. Nothing will stop me from getting to the truth.
If anybody wants a copy, let me know.
In Japan, although there are women's universities, admissions to general national and public universities and private universities above the mid-level are based solely on grades or marks, regardless of whether the student is male,female or disabled person. The current problem is that the national university budget has been gradually decreasing for quite some time.