RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-students-dont-need-protection-from-the-truth-11631825498?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The collapsing justification for one university fad brings hope that others may follow. Even within the academic establishment, it seems that no one can mount a fact-based defense for the trendy notion that students need to be protected from potentially disturbing ideas. This week’s encouraging news also presents an interesting test case of whether academic institutions can still perform the basic functions for which they were created.

Carleton College professors Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder write in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When debates about trigger warnings first erupted, there was little-to-no research on their effectiveness. Today we have an emerging body of peer-reviewed research to consult.
The consensus, based on 17 studies using a range of media, including literature passages, photographs, and film clips: Trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress. They do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts, two hallmarks of PTSD. Notably, these findings hold for individuals with and without a history of trauma. (For a review of the relevant research, see the 2020 Clinical Psychological Science article “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories” by Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNally.)
We are not aware of a single experimental study that has found significant benefits of using trigger warnings. Looking specifically at trauma survivors, including those with a diagnosis of PTSD, the Jones et al. study found that trigger warnings “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas.”
What’s more, they found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD, prompting them to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” “Trigger warnings,” they concluded, “may be most harmful to the very individuals they were designed to protect.”

In theory, universities exist to separate truth from superstition, fact from fiction and thereby create knowledge, which they are then supposed to share with the world.

Now that the relevant academic literature says that a highly influential academic theory is wrong, what are college administrators going to do about it? Will they abolish trigger warnings, or will they bitterly cling to a faith-based conviction that free inquiry must come with a warning label?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/corrupt-university-and-911-bruce-thornton/

In the Nineties I wrote frequently about the role of multiculturalism, leftist politics, and postmodern theory in the degradation of the humanities and social sciences. It was clear to many of us tracking these developments that since the Seventies, foundational skills and knowledge had been slowly eroded, their place taken by politics and dubious theory. Back then, the danger seemed confined to the elite groves of postgraduate education. As a consequence, liberal education, the “free play of the mind on all subjects,” as Matthew Arnold put it, and “the instinct to know the best that is known and thought in the world,” was being replaced by the “boots are better than Shakespeare” philistinism of political activism, and the “higher nonsense” of postmodern theory.

But our government’s feckless response during the Nineties to al Qaeda’s serial attacks, and the gruesome slaughter on 9/11 that climaxed those errors, made me realize that much of our foreign policy failures reflected some of the pernicious ideas that had escaped from the diseased groves of academe. The smoldering ruins and 3000 dead was a graphic reminder that ideas do indeed have consequences.

The foundational idea of both Marxist theory and postmodernism is the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the assumption that what we perceive as the true nature of things is a false narrative contrived by hegemonic power to keep us pliant and obedient as it pursues its nefarious, oppressive policies and practices such as colonialism, imperialism, racism, and sexism. In time the list would include homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and a generalized bigotry against “people of color,” a category based on the old, reductive taxonomy of “scientific racism.”

From this perspective, the achievements of Western Civilization were a mere fictive construct designed to mask that history of bloody oppression. “Facts” and “truth” likewise were mere components of a “discourse regime,” arbitrary linguistic signs with no foundation in reality. “Multiculturalism” and “diversity” became the weapons for dismantling this regime by elevating and privileging the “other” of “color.” All political analyses were reduced to the Leninist “Who, whom”––Who is the oppressor, and whom does he oppress.

Of course, it is easy to see the fundamental contradiction in this narrative. If truth is just a construct that enables oppression, on what grounds can the postmodern theorist embrace, or even articulate, any political cause? Where is his privileged space existing apart from the hegemonic discourses that allegedly have so much reach and power over us for obscuring its malignant machinations? If language is reduced to the play of signifiers that can never communicate a meaning, what happens to “human rights” or “liberation” or “national self-determination” or the “workers’ paradise”?

https://quillette.com/2021/09/12/male-underachievement-and-the-gender-turf-wars/

The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a non-profit education organization, published a report earlier this year that ought to have alarmed many Americans. Compared to the prior semester, the decline in male university enrollment was double that of women:

Enrollment declines are steeper for men than for women across all sectors (declined by 400,000 and 203,000 students, respectively). This trend is especially visible in the community college sector, with male enrollment dropping by 14.4 percent compared to a 6 percent decline in female enrollment. Also, the increase of 44,000 female students (+1 percent) is contrasted with a drop of 90,000 male students (-2.7 percent) in the public four-year institution sector.

If this trend continues, an NSC executive confirmed, “In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man.”

This isn’t news, however. While COVID-19 has played a major part in the overall decline in enrollment, the unfortunate reality is that boys and men have been struggling academically for decades. Male and female academic performance began to diverge in the 1950s:

The Harvard economist Richard Murnane has tracked high school graduation rates since the 1970s and concluded that men have essentially stagnated at around 80 percent (slightly below the ~85 percent indicated by the table above), while women continued to rise, today approaching 90 percent. Women are the principal reason that national graduation rates are up.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/leftists_have_destroyed_yet_another_great_institution.html

I’ve written before about the fact that the leftists at the San Francisco Unified School District were able to use COVID to achieve a long-desired dream: They killed the special academic status of Lowell High School which had been, for decades, one of the top schools in America. The problem was that Black and Hispanic students were having problems qualifying for admission to Lowell. Rather than raising them up, the leftists dragged Lowell down. And nothing shows this more than the two-page introduction to the new administration at Lowell or the racist material on the website.

While I know that most of you don’t care about Lowell, the school’s boastful handout about its administration as it embarks on a new school year is noteworthy because it is a microcosm of the leftism that has infected just about every school, whether public or private, in America. It is a reminder that the best thing you can do to drag America back from the precipice is to get involved in your local school board.

You can see the handout for yourself here. There are a few things to note.

From the very first sentence, the new principle makes it clear that what matters is leftism, not academics. “June was full of reasons to celebrate: Juneteenth, San Francisco’s 51st Pride and the full reopening of our city!” Oh, yay! Ninth graders should definitely start their new school year at a new school thinking about Dykes on Bikes.

Then there’s Kahlila Mae Liverpool, the Assistant Principal of Policy, Accountability & Safety (as well as being one of two “Instructional & Equity Leaders”). And no, I’m not assuming her gender. Every one of these new administrators includes his or her pronouns. I guess we should be grateful that none have they/them, zhe/zhis, or rainbow/snake as pronouns.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/critical-race-theory-aims-to-turn-students-into-red-guards-chinese-american-warns_3988678.html

Critical race theory (CRT) aims to indoctrinate students and turn them into “Red Guards,” akin to those during the Cultural Revolution in China, warned Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese-American living in northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, at a “Rally to Save Our Schools” event on Sept. 8.

She called CRT “communist race tactics” with the goal of “indoctrinating our kids, dividing Americans, and controlling Americans.”

She added that she would talk to Chinese-language media to tell Chinese-Americans not to stay silent.

“If you still want to enjoy the prosperity and the freedom of this country, now it’s your turn—join the fight,” she said.

She said that upon taking over China in 1949, the first thing the CCP did was to indoctrinate teachers with Marxist ideology so they could teach it to students. Red Guards were the “full display” of what indoctrinated children could do, she said.

The Red Guards were communist youth led by then-CCP leader Mao Zedong to persecute those identified as the CCP’s “class enemies” during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. They beat up their teachers in public and tore down temples and statues.

“They became Mao’s bulldogs,” said Van Fleet, adding that she saw a similar phenomenon in America during the “so-called summer of unrest,” referring to the riots during Black Lives Matter protests.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/my-university-sacrificed-ideas-for

Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for the past decade. In the letter below, sent this morning to the university’s provost, he explains why he is resigning.

Dear Provost Susan Jeffords,

​​I’m writing to you today to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.

Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.

I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds. 

I never once believed —  nor do I now —  that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.

But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly. 

https://thejewishvoice.com/2021/09/an-atheist-chaplain-at-harvard/

Active rejection of the most basic concept in Judaism—belief in G-d—by a religious figure is pretty fringe stuff in the eyes of most American Jews.

The news media had a field day recently with the man-bites-dog story of the self-proclaimed atheist who was recently named Chief Chaplain at Harvard University. The New York Times wrote about it positively, even quoting a former haredi Harvard co-ed who approves. After nearly 400 years of having chief chaplains who believe in G-d, Harvard has gone in a surprising new direction. Not only that, but the new head chaplain, Greg Epstein, is Jewish and a graduate of the rabbinical ordination program at an institution called the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism.

Undoubtedly some parents of Jewish students at Harvard will be troubled at the prospect of their sons or daughters possibly coming under the influence of a passionate advocate of atheism. Active rejection of the most basic concept in Judaism—belief in G-d—by a religious figure is pretty fringe stuff in the eyes of most American Jews.

The problem is not that someone is an atheist; that’s his business. The problem is that Greg Epstein presents himself as a rabbi, although his core belief system is rejected by every Jewish religious denomination of note—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist.

The power of the “rabbi” title is that it confers Jewish legitimacy and respectability on whatever the rabbi, even a self-proclaimed one, says. Jewish students at Harvard who don’t know better will hear that “the rabbi” said something, and assume that what he said represents Judaism, not just a tiny fringe element on the Jewish spectrum.

Whether Greg Epstein will influence Jewish students’ religious beliefs remains to be seen. It could be argued that these students are more likely to be influenced by their professors, whom they often perceive as experts and authority figures.