RUTHFULLY YOURS

The indoctrination of young Americans is the goal of those who control curricula in public schools and colleges.  Faculty, administrators, and textbook writers all do their part to create a narrative of an America that should be ashamed of its racist  exploitative past, and ready to overhaul a capitalist system that benefits the few and cheats the many by robbing them of their fair share.

The new Advanced Placement history textbook is a case in point.  Paul Mirengoff writes at Powerline:

[B]eginning in 2020, many Advanced Placement students will be using an American History textbook that suggests President Trump is mentally ill and that depicts him and many of his supporters as racists.  The book asserts that “[Trump’s] not very-hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters.” …

The textbook goes further.  It says that Hillary Clinton supporters “worried about the mental stability of the president-elect.” …

The textbook clearly is using “Clinton supporters” as a device to plant the idea that President Trump is mentally unstable, a proposition for which there is no basis other than raw hatred of the man.

The book’s publisher defends its handiwork, saying that it underwent “rigorous peer review to ensure academic integrity.”  No doubt.

Here is an alternative from Steven Hayward of Powerline:

Next month our friends at Encounter Books will publish Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story by Wilfred M. McClay, who is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and the Director of the Center for the History of Liberty. …

Suggestion: urge your high school history teachers and your school district to adopt this book, and if you have a child in history — and especially AP history — get a copy of this book and have your kid read this alongside whatever leftist slop is being thrown at them by their public school.  And everyone else should support this enterprise by buying a copy.

Rich schools, like Yale, always have more money to throw at diversity, equity and inclusion, which is why they are so easy to shake down.  Heather Mac Donald writes at the Wall Street Journal:

Yale President Peter Salovey announced a major expansion of the school’s diversity bureaucracy this month, providing a case study in how not to lead a respected institution of higher education.

The pretext for this latest accretion of bureaucratic bloat was a May 2018 incident in a graduate student dorm. Sarah Braasch, a 43-year-old doctoral candidate in philosophy, called campus police at 1:40 a.m. to report someone sleeping in a common room, which she believed was against dorm rules. Yale administrators knew Ms. Braasch had psychological problems and that she had a history of bad blood with the sleeping student, Lolade Siyonbola, a 35-year-old doctoral candidate in African studies. But because Ms. Braasch is white and Ms. Siyonbola is black, the administration chose to turn the incident into a symbol of what Mr. Salovey called the university’s “discrimination and racism.”

Yale leaders immediately announced a slew of new initiatives: “implicit bias” training for graduate students, grad-school staff and campus police; instruction in how to run “inclusive classrooms”; “community building” sessions; a student retreat to develop the next phase of equity and inclusion programming. Despite this flurry of corrective measures, Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, Yale’s secretary and vice president for student life, ominously declared there was still “much more to do.”

That “more” was soon in coming. Yale commissioned an outside diversity bureaucrat—Benjamin Reese, vice president of institutional equity at Duke—to evaluate its diversity infrastructure, which, predictably, he found sorely lacking.

A small retreat by Amherst College’s P.C. Police: Richard Bernstein writes at Real Clear Investigations:

Sometimes in the culture wars, the identity-politics camp leans so far to a politically correct extreme that liberals and conservatives alike reject it. Or so it would seem. A recent episode at Amherst College is worth examining less as a defeat for political correctness than a tactical retreat illustrating that the cult of identity politics on campus shows little sign of weakening.

Withdrawn from circulation, but why?

What happened is this: Last month Amherst’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion sent all 1,850 or so students at the elite western Massachusetts school an attractively produced 36-page brochure called the Amherst Common Language Guide, with definitions of “key diversity and inclusion terms.” Its clear emphasis: “Marginalized groups” were being oppressed by what the document called the “cisheteropatriarchy” — a system of domination by straight white men – through racism, sexism, oppression, hegemony, and exploitation.

Within hours of the guide’s release, a member of the Amherst College Republicans leaked the brochure to the conservative Daily Wire website, which pronounced it “something out of ‘1984.’ ” A crescendo of ridicule from conservative websites and blogs followed.

But it wasn’t just the right piling on. Members of the predominantly liberal Amherst faculty, who were not consulted about the guide as it was being drafted, criticized it too.

At a post-release meeting of some 70 faculty members, “the people who departed most strenuously from the guide were on the left, including transgender faculty members,” said one of those present, Francis G. Couvares, the chairman of the Amherst History Department, speaking by phone.

Soon after, the language guide was withdrawn from circulation, erased from the college website, with college President Carolyn Martin proclaiming it “counter to the core academic values of freedom of thought and expression.”

Heather Macdonald, writing in City Journal, on a couple of campuses where Administrators appear to have the semblance of a spine:

On April 9, at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Professor Camille Paglia, famed nemesis of victimology feminists everywhere, gave a university-wide lecture entitled “Sexual Duality and Sexual Multiplicity in Western Art.” A self-described “non-binary” student, Joseph McAndrew, had organized a protest against the speech after failing to get it moved off campus. McAndrew was upset by recent interviews Paglia had given. (snip)

McAndrew masterfully blended victimology and the consumerist model of education in his complaint against Paglia. “We’re giving a space for her following to come, into our safe space that we pay to be in,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. A photo of the protest shows a group of well-fed, healthy, eminently protected, privileged teenagers sitting in a lobby under a large banner reading “Camille Paglia, Stop Victim Blaming.” They hold signs such as “Sexual Assault Is NEVER the victims [sic] fault.” A male lays his head on the shoulder of a female, who gives him a supportive hug; presumably both procured affirmative consent for this Platonic embrace.

About 30 minutes into Paglia’s lecture, someone pulled a fire alarm, following the Middlebury precedent. All 17 floors of the building where Paglia was speaking had to be evacuated …

On many other campuses, such tactics would have been greeted by either dead air from the administration or an expression of concern for the University of the Arts’ wounded “survivors.” President David Yager, however, denounced the repressive mindset spreading from American campuses to the culture at large. The suppression of speech “simply cannot be allowed to happen,” he wrote in a campus-wide email the day after the shutdown. “I firmly believe that limiting the range of voices in society erodes our democracy. Universities, moreover, are at the heart of the revolutionary notion of free expression: promoting the free exchange of ideas is part of the core reason for their existence. . . . Artists over the centuries have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work. My answer is simple: Not now, not at UArts.” While his email did not mention the protest or the fire alarm activation, which would have been ideal, the protesters understood that Yager was referring to them. …

The University of Arizona has gone one better than Yager. On March 19, two agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol were giving a presentation at a job-recruiting fair, having been invited by the undergraduate Criminal Justice Association. Protesters invaded the room and continuously screamed “murder patrol” and “murderers,” preventing students from listening. “We won’t stop until you get off our campus,” the protesters shouted, as they hounded the agents into their cars. In a sharp departure from the norm, the campus police have filed criminal-misdemeanor charges against the disruptors, for “threats and intimidation” and “interference with the peaceful conduct of an educational institution.” And the university president, Robert Robbins, after issuing a bland statement about “ensuring safety” for students and respecting others’ right to speech, followed up with a far more explicit denunciation. The “incident with the Border Patrol officers” was a “dramatic departure from our expectations of respectful behavior and support for free speech on this campus,” Robbins wrote. “Student protest is protected by our support for free speech, but disruption is not.”

Another horror story at Sarah Lawrence — none dare accuse administrators of bias.  David French writes at National Review Online:

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias — in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things — a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. “Liberal staff members,” he wrote, “outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most left-leaning group on campus.” (snip)

Abrams told an important truth. And he’s been punished for it. As our Madeleine Kearns reported last November, his office door was vandalized, students called for him to be punished, anonymous individuals falsely accused him of sexual misconduct, and when Abrams urged the college president, Cristle Judd, to take a strong stand in favor of academic freedom, he said that she “asked whether he thought it was appropriate to write op-eds without her permission and further suggested that his article had been hostile toward his colleagues.”

It turns out that Abrams’s ordeal isn’t over. Yesterday, a group of students calling themselves the “Diaspora Coalition” began a sit-in and issued an extraordinary set of demands, including demands aimed directly at Abrams.