RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://freebeacon.com/campus/thousands-of-massachusetts-parents-pull-kids-from-woke-sex-ed-classes/

Thousands of Massachusetts parents opted their children out of a federally funded sex education curriculum that teaches kindergartners about genitalia.

Worcester Public Schools this week announced that 13 percent of its students opted out of sex education, including 20 percent of K-4 students. The “Rights, Respect, Responsibility,” or “3Rs,” curriculum teaches elementary students about gender identity and instructs high school students to act out scenes in which gay and transgender couples decide to have sex. The curriculum’s  authors include one current and one former Planned Parenthood employee. It is published by Advocates for Youth, a progressive group that since 1995 has received $26 million from the Centers for Disease Control.

Progressive advocacy groups are escalating efforts to expand sex education curricula to elementary schools and cover controversial issues such as gender identity and abortion. Commonly known as “comprehensive sex education,” this approach has angered parents, many of whom have flocked to school boards to oppose curricula.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/12/university-of-maryland-adds-new-ethnic-category-for-students-of-color-minus-asian/

On Thursday, a photo went viral of a student admissions chart from the University of Maryland, which depicts a bizarre new racial category for non-White students titled “Students of Color, minus Asian,” the Daily Caller reports.

The photo, shared by investigative journalist and leading opponent of Critical Race Theory Chris Rufo, depicts freshmen admission rates over the course of four years, from 2017 to 2021. At the bottom of the chart, newly-admitted freshmen are separated into two categories: “Students of Color, minus Asian,” and “White or Asian students.” Across all four years, the latter category notably made up roughly 80 percent of all admissions in every Fall semester.

“We’re at the point in the discourse when colleges have created the highly scientific and totally legitimate racial category of ‘Students of Color, minus Asian,’” Rufo sarcastically remarked on Twitter.

In response to the controversy, the University of Maryland issued a statement in which it defended maintaining these two categories, saying that the chart was meant to depict the data of students that the university considers “underrepresented.”

“During his annual State of the Campus address,” said a university spokesperson, “President Pines shared information about the demographics of the freshman class, including information about the diversity of the class. The data in this specific section of the slide refers to student populations that are considered underrepresented on our campus.”

This approach is echoed by the university’s Diversity and Inclusion Dashboard, which specifically lists its “underrepresented minority” category as consisting of “African-American/Black, Hispanic, American Indian, and Native Hawaiian.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/11/yale-has-more-administrators-faculty-daniel-greenfield/

The proliferation of administrators has long been the ticking time bomb of academia. 

The number of executive, administrative, and managerial employees on university campuses nationwide continued its relentless rise right through the recession, up by a collective 15 percent between 2007 and 2014, the federal data show. From 1987 to 2012, it doubled, far outpacing the growth in the numbers of students and faculty. 

And the numbers keep getting madder to the point where the American university is on the verge of becoming a Monty Python sketch with administrators outnumbering students and faculty.

Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members. 

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike.

The scale of administrative growth continues to increase exponentially like some sort of virus.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/we-cant-wait-for-universities-to?token=ey

So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows.

These are soaring words. But in these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth—once the central purpose of a university—remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end—freedom of inquiry and civil discourse—prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?

The numbers tell the story as well as any anecdote you’ve read in the headlines or heard within your own circles. Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

The picture among undergraduates is even bleaker. In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented students from saying things they believe. Nearly 70% of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports at least 491 disinvitation campaigns since 2000. Roughly half were successful. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/do-children-belong-state-william-kilpatrick/

Do children belong to their parents or to the state?  That was one of the central questions raised in the recent Virginia gubernatorial race.  Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party candidate started the debate when he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” 

The issue came to a head when parents in Loudoun County, Virginia loudly complained at school board meetings about the introduction of Critical Race Theory and transgender policies—policies that resulted in the rape of a 14-year-old girl by a boy wearing a skirt in the girl’s bathroom of a local high school.

In reaction, the left-leaning National School Board Association (NSBA) called such parents “domestic terrorists” and requested that the Department of Justice intervene to protect school boards from angry parents.  In turn, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to look into the NSBA complaint.

But the NSBA’s complaint seemed to be that unless parents are quiet and compliant, they should be viewed as right-wing extremists. Although the letter gives lip service to encouraging “varying viewpoints,” it’s written in a self-righteous tone that portrays educators and school boards as heroic defenders of children, while parents who challenge the schools are a threat to children. Reading between the lines, one gets the impression that for the NSBA, what goes on in schools is none of a parent’s business.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/a-theatre-professor-suggested-students-should-have-thicker-skins-so-they-demanded-he-be-fired/?utm_

Coastal Carolina University (CCU) recently bowed to a woke mob of theater students who demanded professor Steven Earnest be ousted from his role after 16 years at the university — because he suggested that a misunderstanding on campus was not a big deal.

The controversy began with a September 16 incident in which students discovered a list of names on a classroom whiteboard. The students, realizing that the names all belonged to students of color, quickly assumed that racial foul play was behind the list, and they organized a protest.

However, a prompt investigation by the university revealed that the list had come out of a discussion between a visiting artist and two students of color who said they were hoping to connect with other non-white students on campus. The trio wrote down the names of other students of color who might wish to form a group to discuss their shared experiences.

The committee explained the misunderstanding in an email to campus but wanted to make clear that the investigation — which revealed the whole to-do had been over nothing — “in no way undermines the feelings that any of you feel about this incident.”

“It should have never happened and the DEI committee will be discussing with faculty and students the gravity of the situation and how to handle these requests in the future,” the email said.

Earnest dared to question that pandering attitude, writing back: “Sorry but I don’t think it’s a big deal.”

https://davidlat.substack.com/p/the-newest-insanity-out-of-yale-law?token=

I realize that the tag line for Original Jurisdiction is “news, views, and colorful commentary about law and the legal profession,” not “the latest controversies and scandals at Yale Law School.” But one of my missions is telling readers about what we’d be gossiping about at the water cooler if we were all back in the office—and right now, the subject is once again YLS.1

Some of you are rolling your eyes right now and saying, “Seriously, Lat—Yale Law School, again?” If you have YLS fatigue, stop reading here; I take no offense.2

For those of you still reading, here’s the latest out of Yale Law School, reported in the Washington Free Beacon by Aaron Sibarium (who really owns this beat, having previously broken the news of the YLS party-invite controversy):

The Yale Law School administrator caught on tape pressuring a student to apologize for an allegedly racist party invitation pushed the Yale Law Journal to host a diversity trainer who told students that anti-Semitism is merely a form of anti-blackness and suggested that the FBI artificially inflates the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes.

The comments from diversity trainer Ericka Hart… shocked members of the predominantly liberal law review, many of whom characterized the presentation as anti-Semitic, according to a memo from Yale Law Journal editors obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

“I consider myself very liberal,” a student quoted in the memo said. But Hart’s presentation, delivered September 17 to members of the prestigious law review, was “almost like a conservative parody of what antiracism trainings are like.”

The administrator involved in both incidents is Yaseen Eldik, YLS’s director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. There’s some dispute over the exact nature of Eldik’s involvement in bringing Hart to the YLJ editors, with Yale law professor Monica Bell claiming on Twitter that Eldik didn’t urge the hiring of Hart and simply provided her contact info to the YLJ.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/04/the-year-of-the-parent/

Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, my parents could send me off to school and assume I would be taught by people who shared their values. As the recent Virginia election demonstrated, however, those days are long gone. To be sure, most educators today work hard, and do their best to give kids a balanced education. But there are too many who don’t, and parents, who are rightly worried, are now speaking out. In fact, according to a Fox News survey, 80 percent of parents are “extremely” or “very” concerned about what our public schools are teaching. Whether it is the sexualization of six-year-olds, white kids being told they are oppressors, or children being forced to chant Aztec prayers, many parents are fed up. A few recent examples:

In Broward County, Florida, a teacher took her elementary school students to a gay bar as a way to learn about the homosexual community.

In eastern Kentucky, students gave lap dances to the staff as part of Hazard High School’s homecoming week festivities.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, a high school boy wearing a dress has been accused of raping a girl in the women’s bathroom, the second time he has been accused. Neither case was pursued by the district superintendent, who, when asked about why he didn’t act, incoherently blamed Donald Trump’s rejiggering of Title IX regulations. One particularly insightful student put things into perspective: “If you can make a child stay home for refusing to wear a mask, you can also make a child stay home for raping another student.”

With parents now awakening, there is a campaign afoot to diminish their input on what children are learning in school. After the National School Boards Association sent a well-publicized letter to Joe Biden on September 29, in which the organization contended that there is a serious threat to our “schools and its [sic] education leaders” due to a “growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation (at school board meetings) occurring across the country,” the organization was rightly excoriated for it, and on October 22 issued an apology. It seems that the communiqué was the work of NSBA CEO Chip Slaven and president Viola Garcia, with no board input. But apparently, there’s more to the story.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/teachers-unions-are-serpent-cradle-americas-jim-mccoy-and-lloyd-pettegrew/

Abraham Lincoln once warned us that “The philosophy of the classroom in this generation will be the philosophy of politics, government and life in the next.” It is no secret that the founding fathers had grave concerns about the new emerging federal government becoming too large and intrusive in the lives of our nation’s citizens. In fact, over-reach by those serving and administering in the central government almost seemed to be a predictable outcome.  As a result, the founding fathers took very specific steps to limit the powers of the new federal government. The Supremacy Clause of our Constitution is found in Article VI, Section 2, specifying which powers the federal government has and which powers are retained by the state and local governments.

President Andrew Johnson signed legislation creating the first Department of Education in 1867. Its main purpose was to collect information and statistics about the nation’s schools. However, due to concern that the Department would exercise too much control over local schools, the new Department was demoted to an Office of Education in 1868. Until 1979, the organization and administration of education in America was solely in the hands of each state government and its local communities. With this model, America’s public education system became the envy of the world…until October 1979, under the Jimmy Carter Presidency, when Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88), amalgamating offices of several federal agencies, and creating our present serpent in the cradle—the DOE in May 1980. This has become the mindless federal bureaucracy beholden to national teacher unions.

A true political democracy in America requires an educational system and processes that are free from overt political pressures and prejudices. As Thomas Sowell recently pointed out, the social and political institutions and traditions need to be objectively taught, along with science, mathematics and the language arts. Screed like Marxism and CRT have no place in state-sponsored schools. An example of the teacher union mindset comes from New York School Talk that pushes the educational union point of view. They say, ”Every adult in a school building gets a union. Most are members of the United Federation of Teachers, and together they are incredibly powerful and effective. They negotiate all the rules. They can influence hiring and firing procedures, and everything about teaching.” Absent in their “objective” talk line is anything about students’ and parents’ educational interests.