I am persuaded that the progressives who reign in the academic industrial complex don't really care about minority students.
If they did, they would challenge them with rigor and accountability.
I witnessed the video of the black students complaining about having to complete homework. The students are embarrassed and don't want the video distributed because it gives off a negative impression of them that fulfills the stereotypes some people have about them. I don't agree, but they are generally young and emotional people.
The video is valuable. Young minority students are no different than non-minority students. If you don't hold them accountable, they will take advantage. I see a failure by the administration in that video, bowing to the shibboleths of diversity rather than caring for the kids. if led well, young people can do great things.
The academic industrial complex deserves all of the grief it receives. I am in the technology business (an intellectual property lawyer). We have struggled for years with Moore's law and its various unnamed variants, meaning we have had to deliver more value for far less revenue, and this has been a continuous challenge for decades. What then, have the apparatchiks who run academia do (and they virtually all vote one way)? They raise the price of education 3 times the rate of inflation, using students as conduits for federal loan and grant money to support their institutions and themselves. It almost never occurs to them that given the advances in technology, the price of education should have radically decreased, rather than drastically increased, over the past decades. They are a politically protected class of elitists, who are not involved in an enterprise which consistently delivers value.
