It has become increasingly common in recent years for universities to contract out their international recruitment efforts to private companies. These companies also often provide a pre-college set of courses designed to get them ready for undergraduate or graduate studies. These “pathway” or “accelerator” programs have come under scrutiny from Inside Higher Ed, the Associated Press, and others over tuition-sharing arrangements.

The University of Kansas’s partnership with Shorelight was one of that company’s first two ever. It began its “accelerator” program in the fall of 2014, and curriculum was decided upon jointly between the company and the university. I taught two of these courses as a masters student. These teaching roles come with considerably more responsibility than a graduate assistant generally has: we teach every class, we assign grades, and so on.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this, and at first I found it very exciting. I think college students at all levels would benefit from being given more responsibility. Most people thrive when given responsibility, and even the failures are usually instructive. Here was a program that was really doing it. I may not have ever taught before, but I had been an editor for five years before coming to grad school, I thought, of course I could help these students with their writing.

I have since come to believe that the reasons for this system have less to do with injecting a little disruptive energy into a moribund academy and more to do with deflecting accountability for the program’s shortcomings. An accelerator program offers to help the university acquire (part of) another year’s worth of pre-college tuition from lucrative international students. Participating academic departments receive a handful of graduate appointments to hand out. Searchlight takes a 50 percent cut as long as students are in the program, which drops to 10 percent when they enter normal classes. Thus there is an incentive, from the university’s perspective, to run students through it, regardless of their level of preparedness. The CEO of Shorelight says 90 percent of their students at KU proceed from their first to their second year, but that is sort of begging the question.

My first course was An Introduction to American Studies, which used films to introduce students to key concepts in the field. It was my first semester teaching and, by a stroke of luck, only five students had signed up for my class. All of them were Chinese. To get a sense of the average student that comprises the boom of Chinese matriculation at American universities, you have to understand a few things. For the most part these are not the entitled children of some high-level party functionary. Those kids are at Oxford or Yale. These are the children of the new Chinese middle class. They come from families that, ten or fifteen years ago, would not have been able to send their children to a university at all. But today, like any family would, they are spending their newfound disposable income on their children.

While I had some flexibility to add or skip certain movies, the curriculum, down to the lecture slides, had been written for me. In the course of the semester, we would take the enormous, world-shaping corpus of American film and feed it through the leftist salami slicer: race, class, sexuality, gender, ability (notably not religion). One film would be assigned to each identity category: Salt of the Earth for Latinos, Karate Kid for Asians, Some Like it Hot for alternative sexualities, and so on.

It occurred to me very early on that this is not the best way to introduce students to film, but that of course is not the point. The course fulfills a core requirement to teach students how to “respect human diversity and expand cultural understanding and global awareness.” We aren’t here to study anything so jejeune as movies. Movies are merely the tortilla chip meant to bear the warm gooey dollop of cultural leftist queso. They’re the delivery vehicle.

....

It’s ironic, given the current debates about Chinese trade, that one of the few sectors where the balance is in our favor is higher education, an enterprise that could not be more antithetical to our protectionist president.

There are probably strategic motives behind a certain amount of Chinese enrollment in American universities; the genuine espionage issues at American universities are evidence enough of that. But the vast majority of Chinese students are here for the same reasons the rest of us dopes are: that we decided, against all evidence, that higher education was a product that was worth buying at the absurdly inflated price at which it is now sold. We value it not because of skills we may learn, but because a degree will give us access to a certain tier of jobs. We buy the product, despite its defects, and the expectation that if you want to work in the ruling class, you have to talk like them. And what could be more baizuo than that?

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