The Campus Conservative

(Source: Pexels.com; public domain)  In the coming months, UT-Tyler will propose its new strategic plan to its oversight board, The Board of Regents. In the new plan, the University intends to include a provision to adopt a "JEDI" orientation (a commitment to pursue "justice, equity, diversity and inclusion") as an institutional commitment. This is a big deal. The JEDI tenants all appear nice until one realizes that this is an ideology, not a rational response to fact and evidence.   Ideological commitments blind a person from the real world since they start with hypotheses rather than facts. In the case of the JEDI framework, the foundational assumption is that disparity of outcomes is always the result of discrimination. Adopting this false assumption in the JEDI ideology into the intuitional plan will create a blind spot in the university and ultimately lead UT-Tyler to be irresponsible with its mission. UT-Tyler should reject the JEDI commitment from its strateg...

 (Source: DS Bigham via Flickr) The Black-White Test Score Gap. It is a disparity that has existed on standardized tests for decades. On exams that claim to measure reading, vocabulary and math skills, Blacks and Hispanics consistently underperform Asians and Whites.  Conservatives have long blamed culture for this disparity, but Liberals often derided this as prejudiced and instead asserted that the cause is poverty, not culture. Hence, Liberals have now spent decades working to equalize Black schools to their White counterparts. They have increased teacher pay, school resources and the whole lot. Yet, after equalizing all other variables and with still no change, some observers are coming back to what many Conservatives have been saying all along: it's culture. So why have Liberals resisted culture as the explanation for the test score disparity? Why have they chased every other explanation to no avail while this explanation was here all along?  Why Liberals Can't Accep...