RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bari Weiss and other independent thinkers are right in thinking that it’s time for a new approach to college. But the war on wokeism will require more than just advocacy for open discourse.

As toxic as Twitter can be, sometimes the orgies of abuse and mockery for which the social media forum is so well-known can tell us something important. When the woke world is competing to see which blue-checked left-wing wiseacre can come up with the most cutting and condescending snark about a subject or person, it’s often a sign that the object of their contempt is on to something important. That’s exactly the case with the reaction to the announcement of the formation of a new institution of higher learning: The University of Austin, whose avowed purpose is to create a haven for open discourse at a time when academia has become best known for the way cancel culture enforces the new left’s aversion to debate about its orthodoxies.

The public announcement of the effort earlier this week by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who is a member of the proposed school’s board of advisors, set off a tsunami of derision from many of the usual suspects in journalism and academia who think there’s nothing wrong with shutting down those who raise questions about woke sensibilities.

Their contempt for Weiss, who is best known for leaving the Times last year after claiming that the same forces were making it difficult, if not impossible, to report about anti-Semitism or have an open discussion about issues like the Black Lives Matter movement, is already well-established. But as historian Niall Ferguson, another of those who are involved in this project, wrote in Bloomberg, the plague of illiberalism on college campuses is destroying the modern university:

“Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S.”

EXCERPT

What rights do parents have in directing their children’s education?

Parental Rights at the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States first upheld this right of parents in a series of landmark cases in the mid-1920s. In Meyer v. Nebraska (1925) the Court struck down a state law prohibiting instruction in German to students before the ninth grade; in the lesser-known decision of Farrington v. Tokushige (1927), the Court overturned a similar law in Hawaii that forbade instruction in Japanese. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the Court struck down an Oregon law that effectively outlawed private schools.

The primary motivation behind these laws was the nativist impulse to assimilate the children of immigrants, to “standardize” children, into white, Protestant, American culture. In Oregon, for example, the Ku Klux Klan was among the most powerful and vocal supporters of the law forbidding private (read: Catholic) education. In a pamphlet widely distributed in Oregon, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan wrote of Catholic parents and their school-aged children: “somehow, these mongrel hordes must be Americanized; failing that, deportation is the only remedy.” “Democratic education,” he wrote, is the “one unfailing defense against every kind of alienism in America.”

In overturning these laws, the Supreme Court established what William Galston has described as “a rebuttable presumption” in favor of parental liberty: parents have the right to direct their children’s education for the simple reason that parents typically know the unique needs and capacities of their children and desire what is best for them. As the Court wrote in Pierce, “those who nurture [a child] and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” At their best, parents “recognize” what “additional obligations” their children are capable of and called to and then “direct” them to these ends.

In these same decisions, the Supreme Court also upheld the general authority of the state to compel school attendance and require schools to teach, in the language of Pierce, “certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship.”

The Supreme Court was able to balance the specific rights of parents to direct their children’s education and the general authority of the state to form educated citizens by drawing from seven decades of state supreme court decisions on the issue. Indeed, the Meyer Court alludes to this rich history when it identifies the right of parents to direct their children’s education as one of “those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-new-loyalty-oaths/

It’s a growing trend in academia that those who fail to pledge their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion need not apply.

A merican universities’ commitment to merit as the basis for hiring and tenure continues to erode as they increasingly demand adherence to progressive ideology.

The sciences are far from immune to this trend. As reported by Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald in City Journal, earlier this month University of Texas astronomer John Kormendy withdrew an article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences after a draft “drew sharp criticism for threatening the conduct of ‘inclusive’ science.” His book on the same topic has been placed on indefinite hold. Kormendy’s fully peer-reviewed work describes a sophisticated model he developed “to reduce the role of individual subjectivity in scientific hiring and tenure decisions” by predicting scientists’ long-term research impact from early publications. Though he didn’t intend for his model to replace a holistic approach to hiring or granting tenure, as Mac Donald explains, his offense was to focus on the merit of the candidates’ work rather than their race or gender.

Kormendy’s experience is becoming typical. Last month, the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest society devoted to the study of earth and space, declined to name a winner of its most prestigious award solely because all of the rigorously vetted final nominees were white men. In September, MIT abruptly rescinded its invitation to University of Chicago geophysics professor Dorian Abbot to deliver a talk in its prestigious lecture series. Abbot’s offense was an essay for Newsweek that defended the importance of merit in academic evaluations and expressed the view that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) “violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment.”

This trend, which is most pervasive in the humanities, includes Europe. For example, Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia was fired from Europe’s particle-physics consortium, CERN, for observing that, because of inclusion efforts, women were being hired with thinner research records than those of men. Even a visiting dance professor at Oberlin College alleges that she lost out on a permanent position after being told “we can’t just hire another white woman from the Midwest with a husband.”

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.