Endgame Solution: the Origins

Roots of the Mass DHE's "Instant University": the “no-show” classes under Holden Thorp (remember him? the Editor-in-Chief of Science, the Merit Slayer) and other stories

In our post from 06/23/22, we described the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education (DHE) vision of an “Instant University” where…

…university admissions will switch to a lottery system…. Each cell of the intersectional hyper-matrix will be assigned a number of winning tickets proportional to the share of the cell in the Massachusetts population at large… To defend the equitability of the outcome against the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the students, admission will be immediately followed by graduation. A tuition, of a size of the former 6-year package, will be charged during a microsecond-long transition period in between.

Nothing can emerge from vacuum. Everything has its predecessors. The DHE plan is not an exception:

• Not fake. The instant university idea with no classes but with tuition had been experimented with already. Holden Thorp, the current Editor-in-Chief of Science, the fearless Merit Slayer, committed, as the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina (2008-2013)…

  …abuses spanning over 18 years, which included “no-show” classes that had little to no faculty oversight¹.

  …[C]lasses… involved no interaction with a faculty member, required no class attendance or course work other than a single paper, and resulted in consistently higher grades… awarded without reading the papers or otherwise evaluating their true quality.

  (The second quote is from a report by a former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein, entitled "Investigation of Irregular Classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill".) There is some deep logic to all of it: when merit is abolished, one can start saving on classes. Given the department involved, Thorp’s newly found “respect” for the world cultures (Western one excluded) can be seen in a new light just as well.

• Not fake. In the Fall 2021, one of the most selective exam schools in the country, Lowell High School in San-Francisco, switched to a lottery admission. D’s and F’s tripled. Last Fall, thanks to the parents and their struggle, merit-based admissions are back.

• Not fake. San Francisco bans eighth grade algebra; Culver City (CA) bans honors English. Curricula are getting shorter and shorter. The future “Instant University” should take a cue.

• Not fake. Since June 2019, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System have been implementing a merit-independent distribution of the admission and graduation numbers, test results, and grades, consistent with the state’s intersectional hyper-matrix population distribution. A detailed critique of the Minnesota plan can be found here, regretfully behind a paywall. Their plan has already earned them a dishonorable mention in our “Whose is bigger” contest, for going where no one has gone before, and explicitly naming critical race theory as their main motive, despite the well known fact that it does not exist.

• Not fake. The Minnesota approach above has been recently recommended by The National Academies (Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine):

  Admissions offices at the undergraduate and graduate levels should assess the alignment or divergence between their current admissions policies and the criteria and values of antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion. They should develop holistic admissions strategies that offer a systematic, contextualized evaluation of applicants on multiple dimensions.

• Not fake. The once revolutionary, allegedly equitable “labor-based” grading system (“any rubbish you produce is worth an A if you spent a sufficiently long time working on it”), innovated by Asao Inoue (Arizona State), has been deemed inequitable just as well:

  But who says how long it’s supposed to take someone… to finish something?

  objects Ellen Carillo (UConn), offering a no-work grading as an alternative. Again, a zero-duration curriculum with pre-determined grades and full tuition is the only solution.

• And, finally, this observation, from “Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?” by Susy Weiss, The Free Press:

  It’s lamentable but not surprising that students and parents increasingly view the college administration as providing them with a very expensive piece of paper—a diploma—and professors, above all, as a hindrance when it comes to service delivery.

Stay tuned: history is boundless and unpredictable.

March 27, 2023 update: Un-grading is becoming a mainstream. What will follow it is an inability to assess if an individual is fit for a societal role s/his diploma tells us s/he is. Why bother with lectures then, nobody will notice their absence anyways? Again, the “Instant University” is around the corner.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holden_Thorp (retrieved on 11/23/2022).