Sharad Karkhanis Book Fund

John Drobnicki sent me the following announcement:

The Office of College Advancement at Kingsborough Community College has established the Prof. Sharad Karkhanis Fund in memory of its namesake, Sharad Karkhanis, who was a library faculty member there from 1964 until his retirement in 2003.  He passed away on March 28, 2013 in Boca Raton, Florida at the age of 78. Dr. Karkhanis, who also taught Political Science classes, was President of the Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY) from 1967-1969.  He was also one of the founders of APALA, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, serving as that organization's very first President from 1980-1982.

Contributors should make their checks payable to the Prof. Sharad Karkhanis Fund and send to:

Office for College Advancement

Kingsborough  Community College Foundation, Inc.

2001 Oriental Boulevard

Brooklyn, NY 11235-9978

Dr. Sharad Karkhanis, Professor Emeritus at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY, who served as President of the Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY) from 1967-1969, passed away on March 28, 2013 in Boca Raton, Florida at the age of 78.  Sharad was born in Khopoli, India, on March 8, 1935, and came to the US in 1959.  He worked as a librarian trainee in NJ while attending Rutgers (MLS, 1962), and then worked briefly at Brooklyn College/CUNY (1963-64) before being hired in 1964 by Kingsborough, where he remained as a librarian until his retirement in 2003.  Aside from his duties as a librarian, Karkhanis also taught political science classes at Kingsborough, holding both an M.A. in Political Science & International Relations (Brooklyn College/CUNY, 1967) and a Ph.D. in Political Science & American Government (NYU, 1978).  He was one of the founders of APALA, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and was that organization's first president from 1980-1982.

Karkhanis was the author/editor of:  New Directions for the City University Libraries (LACUNY, 1968); A New College Student: The Challenge to City University Libraries (LACUNY, 1969); Open Admissions: A Bibliography, 1968-1973 (CUNY, 1974); Indian Politics and the Role of the Press (Asia Book Corp., 1981); A Select Bibliography on Retention (CUNY, 1981); Jewish Heritage in America: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland, 1988); How to Avoid Dead End in Your Career, an Asian American Perspective; and, Library Services for the Asian American Community: Papers of the 1987 Program of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, June 1987, San Francisco, California (APALA, 1988); and Educational Excellence of Asian Americans, Myth or Reality?: Papers of the 1988 Program of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, July 1988, New Orleans, Louisiana (APALA, 1989).  Karkhanis served for many years as a university-wide officer in the CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, when Irwin Polishook was President.  Much of his time in his later years was devoted to publishing a newsletter, first in print and then online - called The Patriot Returns.  In 2008, Karkhanis was honored as the Educator of the Year by the Queens Village Republican Club.

How Universities Induce Bad Ethics

The mass murder that anti-capitalist, socialist states have engaged in since the days of Lenin pose a much greater threat to ethics than profit making. Since the anti-profit, socialist mentality has turned out to result in serial mass murder (China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Nazi Germany), the anti-profit camp needs to address its own moral bankruptcy. That opponents of profit making are in charge of and predominant in education, including in business schools, has led to a confusion between ethics and opposition to capitalism. Since opposition to capitalism has resulted in the world's worst crimes, and universities have led the opposition, universities have created a moral vacuum. Positivism reflects this vacuum. An example is finance theory, which holds that meaningful action is impossible because the market already anticipates all knowledge (rational expectations). For a good description of the workings of socialism in the Nazi (National Socialist) regime in Germany, see Gunter Reiman's Vampire Economy. Because universities are still wedded to primitive, 20th century opposition to profit, they induce bad ethics.

The Higher Education Bubble

A colleague from a public, western university told me that for an economics final exam he asked an exam question that required basic arithmetic. Unable to do the arithmetic, a student wrote in the allotted answer space: "Millennials don't do math."  Another colleague from an East Coast community college wrote this in a recent email:

Unfortunately, the whole enterprise has become a mockery. At my community college this semester, over 85% of our entering freshmen need math remediation -- that's 85 percent! Many do not know the multiuplication tables!

I recently met a philanthropist who told me that she thinks it's a waste of money for students who are unable to do college level work  to attend college. Even the mouthpiece of Progressivism, The New York Times, admits that the majority of high school seniors are not college ready:


In New York City, 21 percent of the students who started high school in 2006 graduated last year with high enough scores on state math and English tests to be deemed ready for higher education or well-paying careers. In Rochester, it was 6 percent; in Yonkers, 14.5 percent.

The new calculations, part of a statewide push to realign standards with college readiness, also underscored a racial achievement gap: 13 percent of black students and 15 percent of Hispanic students statewide were deemed college-ready after four years of high school, compared with 51 percent of white graduates and 56 percent of Asian-Americans.

The situtation is just as bleak with respect to performance in college.  According to The Chicago Tribune:

Arum, of New York University, and Roksa, of the University of Virginia, startled the academic world with their finding that 36 percent of students made no significant learning gains in critical thinking and communication skills from their freshman to senior years.

That tends to confirm what reader Jerre Levy, a retired University of Chicago professor of psychology, wrote: 'I wish with all my heart that a college degree implied that the person holding that degree was capable of critical thinking. However, this is, sadly, not true.'


According to Sandra Stosky and Ze'ev Wurman in Minding the Campus:

Estimates of those needing remedial classes before taking credit courses range from 30% of entering students to 40% of traditional undergraduates. According to a 2008 report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs, 90% of 200 City University of New York students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem in their first class at a four-year college.

Except for the top 10 percent of students, college spending misallocates wealth.  There is no evidence that increased college attendance makes economies more productive.  America was a more innovative country when less than five percent of its population attended college.  For instance, Thomas Edison had three months of schooling. In 2012 66.2 percent of high school seniors enrolled in college.

Despite the absence of gains in academic achievement since 1970, K-12 education has, since 1970, tripled in inflation-adjusted cost.  I copied the following chart from Intellectual Takeout.org, which got it from the Cato Institute:

There also has been a higher education cost increase.  According to the American Enterprise Institute's Douglas N. Harris:

 Since the early 1990s, real expenditures on higher education have grown by more than 25 percent, now amounting to 2.9 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP)—greater than the percentage of GDP spent on higher education in almost any of the other developed countries.  But while the proportion of high-school graduates going on to college has risen dramatically, the percentage of entering college students finishing a bachelor’s degree has at best increased only slightly or, at worst, has declined.

I disagree with Harris that the flunkout rate indicates a productivity gap.  Colleges that make their courses easier graduate more students, but the result is not higher productivity.  Rather, attendance of students who cannot graduate at the current watered down level diverts resources from more productive uses.

There is no evidence that college increases the ability to think coherently, to come up with creative solutions to human needs, to become a better citizen, or to become more productive economically.

On the other hand, there is evidence that colleges are politically biased and that they serve to indoctrinate students in left-wing, Progressive,  and big-government ideology.  Although college degrees in fields like engineering, business, and health raise salaries, there is no evidence that a more targeted or online education cannot equally prepare students for careers in those fields.  A large share of the Forbes 400, for instance, does not have a college degree, and that is especially true of the self-made portion that has engaged in areas other than finance.

Research that shows that college education contributes to human capital is tautological and does not control for alternative explanations.  It observes increases in pay from college, then it concludes that the pay is a return to human capital.  One alternative explanation is signaling: The college degree signals personal and intellectual abilities, but its content may be irrelevant to the job.  In that case an IQ test combined with four years in the military or the Peace Corps could be used in its place--and those might more accurate measures. Another explanation is that firms find college to be an easy way to screen job applicants: It is cheap to employers because the job applicants pay; parents are eager to see their children have prestigious or professional careers, and they are willing to foot the bill. 

On their part colleges and their faculties function as special interest groups, pushing for ever greater subsidies, expansion of programs, and licensure requirements in fields like medicine and law. Licensure requirements force the public to subsidize higher education.   Moreover, colleges have succeeded in gaining tax exempt status despite their routine violation of the Section 501 (c) (3) requirement that tax exempt organizations not engage in political indoctrination.  Universities, especially in the social sciences, humanities, and bogus sciences like environmental studies, routinely engage in political propagandizing, and they do so unabashedly.

There is an additional explanation for the higher education bubble:  Federal Reserve Bank counterfeit money that has been allocated to student loans. Without student loans the growth in the number of students attending college, hence wasting public resources and being indoctrinated in Progressive ideology, would be much smaller.  Conversely, firms would not be able to require irrelevant college degrees in fields like retail.  College can be viewed as a Fed-generated economic bubble, much like the tech bubble, the Internet bubble, and the sub-prime housing bubble.

The Anti-Liberal University

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) had a wonderful colloquium at the Union League Club.  Anne Neal, the head of ACTA, organized the event, and chair was Benno Schmidt, chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees.  The audience consisted of trustees like my great friend Candace de Russy, academics, and leaders in the academic reform movement like Greg Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.  Several leading philanthropists were among the 35 to 40 participants.  The speakers included Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School, Neil Hamilton of the University of St. Thomas Law School, and Donald Downs, Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The distinguished group of trustees, donors, activists, and academics engaged in a riveting dialogue.  Professor Downs and I have subsequently exchanged some emails about the nature of the university.  I emailed him my views on the history of the university:  Universities never had a golden age, for they have always been anti-liberal, and the political correctness since the 1980s follows directly from universities' totalitarian roots in Germany.  This is what I wrote to Professor Downs:

I agree except for this question:  Was the university ever a liberal institution?  Americans are liberals, and liberalism in America was due to the American people themselves, neither to the Founding Fathers nor to the Constitution.  As they have been induced to adopt state activism, which by definition is not liberalism (Louis Hartz notwithstanding; he is brilliant until he gets to FDR), they have discarded liberalism, and so has the Supreme Court.   The university has contributed to and possibly induced the rejection. 

Were American universities ever liberal institutions?  They began in America as Christian colleges; they were transformed in the late 19^th century by Daniel Coit Gilman and Charles Eliot mimicking German universities.  The German universities were not liberal institutions, as Readings’s* history implies.  Their role was to support the German state.  State activist liberalism in America came from the German universities via the historical school of economics (Wisconsin’s Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons were pivotal in that regard).  The German historical school had fought with the Austrian school in the 19^th century,  and it was ultimately triumphant when one of its last followers, Werner Sombart, evicted Ludwig von Mises from the German Sociological Society under the Nazi racial laws (Sombart was old then, and he died a year or two later).  

In other words, I suspect that from the beginning Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Wisconsin, etc. were formed by anti-liberal actors; the liberal intonation coopted popular American belief in liberalism and was context or background to the inner impulse of the university, which was anti-liberal from the beginning. 

People who (a) believe in liberalism and (b) believe in learning want to believe that there was a golden age of university liberalism, but I am doubtful.  I don’t think the histories of universities will bear out that belief.  It is true that someone like William Graham Sumner advocated laissez faire at Yale, but the Mugwump, Gilded-Age period was still one when the university was a Christian institution. Yale had not evolved into a research-based university until the end of or after Sumner’s career.   There was, I recall, a conflict involving Ely when he taught at Cornell, which caused him to be fired; he moved to Michigan before Johns Hopkins and Wisconsin. That was still during the Mugwump period, and as Progressivism became ascendant the AAUP adopted the principles of academic freedom based on liberal rhetoric.  But the AAUP and universities themselves were Progressive institutions; in a sense, they were the source of Progressivism.  The rise of Progressivism during the 1890-1920 period (I would argue we are still in the age of Progressivism) followed directly from the influence of the German university on America.

*Bill Readings, The University in Ruins.