Professors are often highly resistant to change. They have a comfortable life and don’t like it when new ideas and technologies disrupt them.

In today’s Martin Center article, Wenyuan Wu writes about the opposition to changes meant to make college more beneficial for students in California. The legislature has approved moving toward competency-based education (CBE) in the state’s community colleges, but the faculty are putting up roadblocks, using woke excuses for their opposition.

She writes:

But fundamental and irreconcilable disagreements have led some to view the reform as “an existential threat.” In the case of Madera Community College, the conflict is about “equity.” As early as August 2023, when the school’s academic senate voted unanimously for a resolution urging administrators to reconsider participation, faculty leaders opined,

The Academic Senate of Madera Community College is supportive of equity-focused programs, and CBE is being presented as equity-focused, yet some “experts argue that … these programs will only serve to exacerbate class and race-based inequalities in higher education [and] establish a separate-but-equal landscape in higher education, with poor students relegated to CBE programs.”

Actually, CBE is apt to help many of those “poor students” by enabling them to get a useful education in less time. Those academics are concerned about themselves, not the students.

I think her conclusion is spot on: “Half a million dollars in state funding has been easily offset by unforeseen hurdles, both bureaucratic and administrative, to meeting an arbitrary deadline. Some barriers can be overcome with careful planning and stakeholder coordination. But others, political in nature, can’t be mitigated. Perhaps the best course of action would be to let reforms proceed organically, as responses to evolving demands in the marketplace rather than as capitulations to the strong hand of government.”