Everyone’s talking about Jerry Falwell and his scam factory, but there was some other stuff going on this week, too. Joe Biden’s record player, Germany’s Nazi memorials, where those online essays come from, and more:
What’s been going on at Liberty U? At Politico.
“We’re not a school; we’re a real estate hedge fund,” said a senior university official with inside knowledge of Liberty’s finances. “We’re not educating; we’re buying real estate every year and taking students’ money to do it.”
- How did Liberty get so messed up? Historians weigh in:
- Falwell blames it all on a “criminal conspiracy.” At The Hill.
- A tough question on Twitter: Is Falwell an evangelical leader?
- How can so many people think Falwell is not an evangelical? It has to do with historians and Scotsmen, here at ILYBYGTH.
Okay, the “record player” bit proved that Biden was the right candidate for 1988. But it’s not just a matter of out-of-date technology. At WaPo.
Biden was voicing a deeply flawed theory that arose during the 1960s and that blamed parents, especially mothers, for the struggles of poor children and children of color. These parents, the theory argued, doomed their children to fail in classrooms by not offering them enough mental stimulation, such as books, colors on the wall or educational experiences. . . . To actually address America’s troubled racial legacy politicians must reject theories that blame African Americans rather than a system that has and continues to systemically disenfranchise and disadvantage minorities. By continuing to focus on a purportedly broken culture, politicians like Biden are destined to perpetuate the racism and racial inequality they aim to solve.
Think about this: Germany has a total of zero Nazi memorials, but not because lots of Germans didn’t want them. At the Atlantic.
We have learned that unexamined pasts fester, and become open wounds. Like most white Americans, I was taught a history that was both comforting and triumphant. I wasn’t, of course, entirely ignorant of the ways in which the country failed to live up to the ideals on which it was founded, but those failures remained peripheral, and part of a narrative that sloped upward toward progress. Slavery was a crime, but we’d fought a war to outlaw it; segregation was unjust, but the civil-rights movement had overcome it. . . . In Germany, too, the right has always attacked its country’s exercises in self-examination as exercises in self-hatred—in dirtying one’s own nest. In fact, Germany’s willingness to own its criminal past has been an act of cleaning out the nest after years of sweeping all the dirt under the carpet.
Where do those online essays come from? A look inside a Kenyan cheating factory at DM.
After a few years, for technical writing at PhD level, an experienced writer could earn $2,000 per job – still a small amount of the total but very good money for Kenya.
‘At that level, writers subcontract the work, paying peanuts and keeping the lion’s share. But on average, most writers just earn about a dollar an hour.’
What did historians tweet about the Democratic primary debates? A collection at HNN.
From PS: Seven questions any evangelical college should ask a possible president.
Any Christian institution needs to serve something larger than institutional survival. So any Christian college president needs to have a clear sense of the point at which remaining open would require them to compromise the core mission and values of the institution. There are dozens of CCCU schools, and it’s very likely that a significant number of them will close in the next 10-30 years. So those presidents need to accept that, at some point in their tenure, the most faithful act would be to accept the death of a college — with its assets distributed for the good of other ministries that will do as much to extend the kingdom of God.
College students seem to like fun lectures, but that’s not how they learn the most. At IHE.
Talk with a Teacher at Chalkbeat.
The best advice I ever received about teaching is that I will never know everything. Students change from year to year, curriculum advances, new techniques are learned and I will keep evolving. This idea made me realize that I don’t need to be the “perfect” teacher, I simply need to grow each year and develop my skills, which is how I have been working throughout my career.
I Love You but You're Going to Hell 