Coyote Blog

In what has become something of an annual tradition, here is this year's response to Princeton's annual giving request

My short answer is that I am not interested in donating to the University. 

What follows is the longer answer.  I probably should have found a previous year’s version of this letter that was better organized and sent that again, but lacking access to my files here are a few thoughts.

When I was at Princeton, the University used to reject the idea that it was a “trade school” whose sole mission was to teach future professionals the details of their craft.  Instead, the University insisted its mission was to create better citizens – and I bought into that when I was there in the 80’s.  But I no longer believe this is true.   I don’t see many graduates of any Ivy League school participating in our polity in a reasoned and mature manner or bringing to bear a sophisticated understanding of history, economics, and political theory to public discourse.  Heck, in many cases I don’t even see them acting like adults.

I suppose it will be easy to write this off to being more of the same from supporters of the current US President, except that I am not a supporter of the current Administration and have been sending these same concerns in letters to both the current and former Princeton presidents.

A partial list of these concerns include:

• Reduction of standards in admissions, grading, and even the seriousness and rigor of the academic material itself. To some extent the meta problem is the complete collapse of K-12 education (and more narrowly K-5 education) but rather than highlight and push back against falling levels of preparation, Princeton has joined the parade to mediocrity and lowered its own standards to paper over the problem.
• Hostility to certain races and ethnic groups that became so bad it caused me to quit participating in Princeton recruiting in 2017 because I could no longer look qualified Asian candidates in the eye and tell them honestly they had a chance
• Lack of intellectual diversity in the faculty and administration. I find it astonishing that a university – which is primarily an institution of ideas – would focus primarily on diversity of skin pigment and reproductive plumbing rather than diversity of ideas. Universities like Princeton refuse to admit that a diversity of ideas and political outlooks/assumptions might even be important.  Such a monoculture is never healthy.
• Rewarding virtue signaling over rational debate combined with a rejection of reason in favor of some sort of emotional calculus. Not only has the university developed a monoculture, but it is one based on a post-modern, anti-enlightenment, anti-rational philosophy that ironically rejects almost every principle on which modern universities were founded.  It is almost like a return to medieval scholasticism, where students are taught to torture facts into defined narratives and dogmas.
• Emphasis on promoting activism over other paths to living a productive life, an emphasis that starts in the admissions process
• Releasing graduates with no comprehensive understanding of history or economics but with fabulous AI- and consultant-polished application essays and theses based on personal lived experience. Why are schools training students to wallow in their own experience when their mission is supposed to be (or used to be) about broadening knowledge and awareness – exactly the opposite?   Is this education or mental health therapy? The one thing I did NOT need Princeton for was to contextualize how much it sucked to be a 16-year-old academically focused student at my high school.
• Making all the personal political, with 100% litmus test scores necessary to avoid exclusion. I remember at Princeton we had a table of 8-12 shifting members (“creatively called ‘the table’”) who ate together every day for two years.  The group had everything from Christian Conservatives to Marxists and we argued about everything, but we have all been friends for life. 
• Lack of any sane control on administrative spending, which has caused costs to skyrocket. I know that due to the generosity of Princeton alumni, these costs are manageable, but just because the school can afford this administrative bloat does not mean that it should.  I would never donate to a charity where more than half the money goes to administrative overhead.

All this ignores more recent issues with which I am less familiar, such as the horrifying return of overt antisemitism and student use of AI to thwart both learning objectives and the honor code.  Princeton’s response to both of these seem puzzlingly slow, but I have lost some of my connections on campus and don’t want to speak from ignorance.

When I graduated from Princeton in the 1980s, I would have gladly hired any 10 random people in my class for a corporate startup (if I had such a thing at the time).  After 2003, when I did own my own large company of about 1600 employees, I would never have hired an Ivy League grad.  Many of my managers had no degree at all (up to my COO and director of HR) and if we needed a college grad we would look for a scrappy young community college student long before someone from the Ivy League, even without considering the difference in price.  As a minimum, the local kid was less likely to hold a sit-in in my office.

I would love someday to support higher education again and would happily fund any institution that was demonstrably taking a shot at even some of these issues.

Yes, it is "systemic" not "systematic".  Oops.  I will not re-edit the post because I am past feeling the need to cover up my dumber moments.

I pretty much hate the term "systematic racism," which is a clever rebranding by the DEI folks of the Christian concept of "original sin."  Try to tell the Church that you have behaved ethically?  Doesn't matter, you still need us to remove the stain of your original sin.  Try to tell the DEI trainer you don't have a racism problem?  Doesn't matter how you act, you are part of the systematic racism.

I want to go on a brief (but typical of this blog) digression.

Years ago, probably in 2017 after the Charlottesville / proud boys kerfuffle, I had a Jewish friend express his concern about rising Right-wing antisemitism.  He and I don't really talk politics much but my sense is that -- like many Jewish voters in the Northeast -- he is a reliable Democratic vote.  I remember telling him that I really did not think the sort of knuckleheads at Charlottesville presented much of a threat.  He asked me why.

I had to think about if for a minute -- I had a gut feel my statement was true but I had not really thought about it carefully enough to understand why.  After pondering it for part of dinner I finally said that I didn't think the antisemites (and overt racists) on the Right were a threat because most of them were low-status.  They did not have the power to do anything.  It's not like they were hiring for Bank of America or on the admissions committee at Harvard.  People with any sort of status or authority on the Right did not respect or follow these people (they might shill for their votes, but politicians of all stripes pander to the most absurd fringes of their part for votes).  [Almost without thinking about it I said that if I were he, I would be more worried about antisemitism from the Left, because the folks in the BDS movement (for example) on universities are just the opposite of antisemites on the Right -- they are among the elite.  I seldom am very prescient on cultural trends, but at the time I was very involved with the issue of discrimination against Asians at Princeton, and I thought I saw some parallels with Jews.  I think we have all seen the explosion of antisemitism that has come out of the mainly Leftish elite over the last year].

When I grew up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, racism was overt.  Things began to improve remarkably in the by 1980, though I remember at that point my dad could not get the Exxon CFO into our country club because he was Jewish and there was pushback when George Forman tried to buy a house in tony River Oaks.  By 2000, a generation later, much of that crap was gone, or at least way better.  But they key change that should have made these changes sustainable was that racism was not only isolated to lower-status groups, but it became seen as a marker for being low-status.  Demonstrating racism became the reverse of virtue-signaling -- it marked one as a loser.

If there is such a thing as systematic racism, then it has to be perpetrated by people who are part of the system.  People like the proud boys are outsiders -- I guarantee they are not on any country club membership committees.  They are not determining Ivy League admissions.  They are not hiring at Goldman Sachs.

I do think the system goes wrong for blacks but it is not in any arena controlled by the proud boys.  And I  have a strong opinion on where that system failure lies:  K through 12 education, and probably even more specifically K-5 education.  We have affirmative action in the workplace for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  Before that we have affirmative action in college for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  We keep changing the SAT test.  Why?  Because blacks historically struggle to score as well as whites and other races on the test.  We keep changing (lowering) high school graduation requirements.  Why?  Because to many black children fail to graduate with the higher standards.

All of this stuff are after-the-fact attempted work-arounds that avoid fixing the real problem:  K-12 education is totally failing black kids.  Any root cause failure analysis would get to this conclusion.  You want to say that systematic racism exists?  Well here is the place where the system is totally failing one race.  If I were more of an expert, I could probably tell you which grade it is where things go off the rails but my guess is that it is an early grade where reading and basic math are not getting taught.

If I were the biggest racist in history and wanted to come up with a Dr Evil scheme to destroy blacks in America, I could not come up with a better plan than the K-12 education system, particularly in many large cities.  So here lies systematic racism, right?

Well, here lies the systematic failure to help African-Americans towards prosperity.  But it is hard to call it racism when in most of these cities the entire school board, the city council, and the mayor are all black or mostly black.  Here is the school board in E. St Louis -- not many proud boys there.  Here it is in Chicago.  Both of these districts are lavishly funded -- East St Louis spends over $25,000 per student and has a 12:1 teacher ratio  (the national average is about $18,000 per pupil and 14:1).  The student body is 96% black and US News report that in E. St Louis  "4% of high school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 7% tested at or above that level for math."  Well no surprise that Blacks are struggling when freaking 96% of them graduate from public school systems like this without being able to read.  No affirmative action plan ever invented is going to magically create a future for adults who can't read or do math.

This is a f*cking crime, and it has nothing to do with racism or funding.  Trump can make headlines getting rid of DEI programs -- fine, they were a fix for this problem that was never going to work.  But until we seriously talk about public school education, we are not serious about fixing the systematic problems blacks face.  And the system is going to fight back hard.  Already folks in the system are telling us that the testing that shows blacks doing poorly should be eliminated.  Why?  Well they say it is to help blacks but that can't possibly be true.  Its like telling me that I am better off not getting a cancer test and finding out I have cancer.  The push to eliminate testing is a push to cover up this absolute tragedy by the insiders who are a part of it.

Anyone think there are some smart people out there with access to capital that could provide a better education privately for $25,000** a year in a school choice system?

** Postscript:  $25,000 is an average.  Typically in most school systems elementary school costs might be half the average and high school 150-200% of the average.