RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the past 30 years, a Philadelphia-based organization called Need in Deed (NID) has been training elementary and middle-school teachers “to use the classroom to prepare young people for civic responsibility and service to others.” And how, exactly, does NID do this? By training its teachers to engage students in long-term “service projects” whose objective is to: (a) inculcate youngsters with the notion that America is an oppressive wasteland where nonwhite minorities, women, homosexuals, the poor, and even the natural environment are routinely exploited and abused; and (b) turn children into budding political activists and community organizers who seek to fundamentally transform that deeply flawed society.

For example, in one NID project at Grover Washington Jr. Middle School in Philadelphia, eighth-grade students explored “some of the discriminatory housing forces – practices like redlining, steering, predatory lending and ethnic intimidation – that have influenced the[ir] city’s racial and economic segregation” over the years. As part of their instruction, these students watched an ABC Nightline segment titled “Race in America,” which examined the case of a black family that had fearfully fled their new home in a mostly white section of Philadelphia after neighbors harassed them with racial epithets and threatening letters. After watching the video, the students were asked to express, in writing, their outrage over how the black family had been mistreated.

As part of that same NID project, Princeton sociologist Doug Massey, author of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of an Underclass – a book claiming that black urban poverty is largely a result of massive discrimination in U.S. cities – addressed the students personally. In a subsequent lesson, the youngsters watched a documentary titled Race: The Power of an Illusion, which, in the words of its producer, “reveals how our social institutions ‘make’ race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.”

Another NID project – designed to introduce young people to purportedly heroic women who have battled the forces of “racism, homophobia, [and] sexism” – required the pupils to read the Kate Schatz book Rad American Women A-Z. The women who are profiled and lionized in Schatz’s book are almost all leftists, and in some cases Marxists or political revolutionaries. Among them:

Angela Davis, a lifelong America-hating Communist, and a former member of the murderous Black Panther Party;
Rachel Carson, a staunch anti-capitalist and the founder of the modern radical environmental movement;
Sonia Sotomayor, a Supreme Court Justice whose worldview is thoroughly steeped in identity politics;
Wangari Maathai, a pro-socialist environmental activist who once charged that “some sadistic [white] scientists” created the AIDS virus “to punish blacks” and, ultimately, “to wipe out the black race”;
Qiu Jin, a Chinese feminist and revolutionary who believed that the traditional family structure was oppressive to women;
Dolores Huerta, a longtime socialist, labor leader, and advocate of mass immigration; and
Ella Baker, an influential civil-rights leader and avowed socialist who had ties to the Communist Party USA, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, and the Weather Underground.

I want to make a prediction: The next successful Republican politician will rally the Right by making America’s universities his punching bag — and said universities will prove even more vulnerable to that politician’s attacks than the media were to Donald Trump’s.

A new study from the Pew Research Center shows that Republican opinion of the nation’s higher-education system has deteriorated remarkably in a very short time. In 2015, 58 percent of Republicans thought that colleges and universities had a positive effect on the country; an only slightly larger share of Democrats, 65 percent, agreed. Just two years later, the numbers are dramatically different: Only 36 percent of Republicans view colleges positively, compared to 72 percent of Democrats. A whopping 58 percent of Republicans think that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country.

Now imagine what could happen to that number if a Republican presidential nominee tweeted every day and gave speeches around the country attacking our colleges. Imagine how many more Republicans would come to view the nation’s academic enclaves negatively if their party’s standard-bearer complained daily about the indoctrination of our children, the ceaseless rise in tuition costs that bleeds regular folks dry, the decline in pedagogical rigor, the political bias, the lies. Imagine what would happen if such a politician branded universities as the “enemy of the American people.”

Post-Trump, the Republican party will likely be disunited. Voters and politicians will wonder what the party stands for anymore. Is it pro– or anti–military intervention? Pro– or anti–free markets? Culturally conservative or vulgar? The GOP will need a message around which to coalesce. More precisely, it will need an enemy. Republican voters may disagree on policy and principle, but they can agree on whom they don’t like:

Radical professors, race-obsessed provocateurs, gender-studies grifters, anti-Israel fanatics, weak-kneed administrators, disgusting libertines, angry feminists, and illiberal student protesters.

Conservatives can get on board with this critique. They have long railed against the liberal bias of colleges and their effect on America’s young. They might get uncomfortable when the critique gets extreme, of course, but the extreme version of the message is not meant for them. It will hammer the same themes as before but excite populists with different terms. “Radical professors” will become “anti-American” or “Communist.” “Racial provocateurs” will become “anti-white racists.”

In short, everyone will hear what he or she needs to, and respond accordingly. The alt-right will cheer. Conservative intellectuals will write treatises on the pernicious influence of radical intellectuals and call for a new type of American university. Policy wonks will cite studies demonstrating the decline in intellectual diversity on American campuses, drawing up plans to lower tuition or expand technical education while noting responsibly that universities are not for everyone. Each story about silly student protesters and each intimation of a speech code will spark a thousand “hot takes,” a Fox News interview, and comment from public officials. Populists will decry the “end of free speech.”

These blows will land for three reasons: 1) They’re partially true; 2) universities and the Left are in denial about their truth; and 3) Republican voters have been primed to believe them.

The American college system is incredibly screwed up. Only its most servile apologists will deny that. For one, it’s a bubble. Tuition prices never stop rising, far outpacing inflation, even as the services rendered seem to have deteriorated. Exorbitant tuition imposes immense strain on parents, who often must reshape their lives around paying college bills, and on students, many of whom struggle under the burden of student debt for years after graduation.

Moreover, to what does all that tuition really entitle a student, anyway? The elimination of core curricula in the ’80s and ’90s has destroyed the foundation of American liberal-arts education. The “studies” majors have themselves drawn students in without being able to offer a promise of real erudition or substantial job prospects. Many disciplines have shifted dramatically toward the study of race, gender, and class.

The bias is undeniable: Left-wing professors and students predominate, while conservative thought is often ignored, sometimes marginalized, and occasionally forbidden by oppressive speech codes or threatening mobs. Political correctness and identity politics rule many campus student groups. And college life reliably promises socialization into progressive ideas and sexual mores, as well as a confrontation with the most relaxed attitudes toward drinking and drugs.

Nor do universities themselves recognize the validity and potency of their critics’ charges. In covering the Pew survey, InsideHigherEd laid blame for the shift in Republican attitudes at the feet of “perceived liberal orthodoxy and political correctness in higher education.” This is typical of how these discussions go. There are only “perceived” problems. The evidence of how fields have drastically changed and how the professoriate has drifted radically leftward since the 1990s is ignored.

Does this sort of denialism sound familiar? If so, it is likely because the media made the same arguments for years when they were accused of liberal bias. Conservatives were always either “making it up” or they weren’t, but bias was just unavoidable. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” joked Stephen Colbert. “On the liberal bias of facts,” read the headline on one Paul Krugman column in the New York Times.

By refusing to own up to their own bias and weaknesses, the media didn’t make their critics disappear; they only angered and empowered them, making themselves more vulnerable to attack. Trump took advantage of that vulnerability by proving he could strike at the media harder than anyone else ever had. A lifelong Democrat and buffoon, he proved his bona fides to Republican voters by waging war on mainstream journalists.

A seemingly obscure fight among academic elites might not seem worthy of broad public concern, but a move underway at Harvard University should concern everyone. Kathryn Hinderaker reports at The College Fix:

Harvard University will delete the reference to Puritans from its alma mater song, saying the word is not inclusive.

Its Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging is now taking submissions for a new line to replace the one referencing Puritans.

The final verse of “Fair Harvard” currently reads:

Let not moss-covered Error moor thee at its side,
As the world on Truth’s current glides by;
Be the herald of Light, and the bearer of Love,
Till the stock of the Puritans die.

According to the task force, the alma mater as it stands “suggests that the commitment to truth, and to being the bearer of its light, is the special province of those of Puritan stock. This is false.”

The task force states it is looking for a more inclusive phrase that will appeal to all members of the community, “regardless of background, identity, religious affiliation, or viewpoint.”

This is utter nonsense, of course. Puritans founded Harvard and the Massachusetts Bay Colony that hosted it. They dedicated the new university (originally founded to train clergy) to Truth with a capital T, and phrased it in Latin on the new university’s crest: Veritas.

All who have been welcomed to Harvard in the wake of this magnificent legacy can share in the quest for truth and membership in what was called “the university community” in the two decades I spent there as a student and faculty member. Incidentally, I have no Puritan ancestors, and never for a moment felt excluded by the Puritan heritage.

It appears that this change is top-down, not a response to demands of students:

The “Purtians” line was not even a point of contention among students prior to the announcement that it will be rewritten, the Crimson reports.

Evidently, Harvard’s “Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging” has unlimited powers, if it can reach into minutiae like the historic alma mater song and alter what the decades or centuries have sanctified as a tradition. Could it decide that Truth itself is now a suspicious concept, the product of white, hegemonic, male culture, and this demand the rejection of Veritas as the University’s motto?

The confused thinking of the Task Force is revealed int his tantalizing sniuppet:

In addition to changing the lyrics, the task force would also like to see the whole alma mater in new musical variants, such as “choral, spoken word, electronic, hip-hop, etc.” Inspired by Hamilton, they say they have the goal of “re-inventing [their] past to meet and speak to the present moment.”