RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Peter Boghossian become newsworthy about four years ago when he co-published in legitimate academic journals nonsensical papers about dog rape at dog parks and the penis as a social structure. Academia, rather than being embarrassed and reforming itself, doubled down, turning him into a pariah. His efforts to teach open inquiry and logical thinking in his classes also saw his woke students turn on him. Boghossian has finally given up. He resigned from Portland State University and published an illuminating open letter explaining exactly what drove him out.

In his open letter, which you can read in its entirety at Common Sense with Bari Weiss, Boghossian describes an academic system that has completely abandoned any fealty to the old values of curiosity, rationality, open-mindedness, and the art of challenging people’s ideas without seeking to destroy them. Indeed, given that his specialties “are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method,” and his classes cover topics such as “Science, Pseudoscience, and The Philosophy of Education,” Boghossian has built his academic life around principles of free inquiry, free speech, and logic.

Boghossian explains that, in the past, universities supported these principles but, at least at Portland State University, they have abandoned each one:

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. 

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nikole-hannah-jones-schools-teacher/

Jen Tafuto, an elementary school teacher in Manchester, Connecticut, posted a two-minute video on Twitter in which she announced her resignation from her position. She explained, ‘After six years as a teacher in Connecticut, I decided to resign from what I thought would be my forever career because I felt more like a political activist than a teacher in my own classroom.’

Her announcement, originally posted by 1776ActionOrg on August 30, quickly drew a lot of attention in the media. Fox News, RealClearPolitics, USA Today, the Daily Caller, a local Hartford station and a great cloud of bloggers too. Tafuto resigned because she was forced to teach an ‘anti-racism’ curriculum in which she was ‘pitting students against each other based on the color of their skin’. In her clip she reads a prepared statement from a teleprompter, which is a bit unfortunate. When you see her in subsequent interviews off-script, her distress at having to push ‘critical race theory’ on her seven- and eight-year-old students comes across more naturally.

In the original video she says that among the classroom prompts she was expected to use was, ‘I wonder why many white people didn’t want black people to have an education?’ In her interview with Samantha Renck at the Daily Caller, she explains, ‘Obviously I taught academics throughout the day but we had this block that was designated for “equity”. And in this block we were getting “read-alouds” to read to our students and prompts, questions, thought-provoking conversations starters that were just not [right] for seven- and eight-year olds.’ One such prompt about teachers failing to make ‘black boys matter’ felt like a ‘kick in the gut’. Tafuto regarded this forced pedagogy as a challenge to her ‘moral integrity’.

She need not have wondered, since that’s exactly the point of critical race theory. Tafuto, who is white, was feeling demoralized because she was being cast as someone whose motives in teaching non-white students were inherently illegitimate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/09/social-justice-schools-burn-books-educational-daniel-greenfield/

They’re spinning the book burning as a “symbolic gesture”. 

Of course, book burnings were always symbolic. There are easier ways to destroy books. Certainly, there were easier ways by the time the National Socialists started burning books. Some years before they began burning people.

This is really a test though to see if you can make book-burning palatable by dressing it up as some sort of New Age spiritual ceremony with fake Indian overtones.

The answer, maybe not quite yet.

The “flame purification” ceremony, first reported by Radio Canada, was held in 2019 by the Conseil scolaire catholique Providence, which oversees elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Ontario. Some 30 books, the national broadcaster reported, were burned for “educational purposes” and then the ashes were used as fertilizer to plant a tree.

The Nazis would have approved of the fertilizer part too. But burning books for “educational purposes” is gloriously Orwellian.

“We bury the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow up in an inclusive country where all can live in prosperity and security,” says a video prepared for students about the book burning, Radio Canada reported.

… or be burned at the stake.

In total, more than 4,700 books were removed from library shelves at 30 schools across the school board, and they have since been destroyed or are in the process of being recycled, Radio Canada reported.

4,700 books being destroyed is Library of Alexandria stuff.

Lyne Cossette, the board’s spokesperson, told National Post that the board formed a committee and “many Aboriginal knowledge keepers and elders participated and were consulted at various stages, from the conceptualization to the evaluation of the books, to the tree planting initiative.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/07/finding-a-remedy-for-the-crt-pandemic/

Critical race theory is metastasizing at a rapid rate, spreading into many American institutions. The woke ideology has even inserted itself in the medical field. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “How Structural Racism Works—Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities” argues that modern American medicine has “historical roots in scientific racism and eugenics movements,” and asserts that “Black communities became medical training grounds and a source of profit, reinforcing the American medical caste system that we have today.”

The American Medical Association also endorses CRT, and denounces equal opportunity and meritocracy as “malignant.” The AMA also claims that the “detrimental effects of colonization, racial capitalism, and enduring forms of supremacism . . . have upheld slavery, genocide, abuse and exploitation of resources.”

At the same time, medical schools are lecturing future doctors about intersectionality, implicit bias, identity, oppression, power and privilege, etc.

Our legal system is no better. As George Leef writes, “Progressivism Surges Through America’s Law Schools.” He cites Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, a former law dean, who insists that introducing CRT is “urgent and necessary.” In the same vein, Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School is going to mandate that students take a CRT course in order to graduate.

Additionally, many businesses have submitted to CRT orthodoxy. The latest domino to fall is Verizon. Christopher Rufo explains that the telecom conglomerate’s diversity trainers “instruct employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and, according to their position on the ‘privilege’ hierarchy, embark on a lifelong ‘anti-racism journey.’”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/we-cant-let-foreign-influence-compromise-our-universities/

Donors, and the terms of their gifts, must be disclosed to reveal possible conflicts of interest.

Tucked inside the Innovation and Competition Act, recently passed by the Senate and now on the House’s agenda, are crucial updates to foreign-gift transparency laws — and some big opportunities for improvement.

The public should know when foreign donors make substantial gifts to colleges and universities. In the last few years, foreign governments have bought the right to pick curricula, as the Chinese Communist government did with Confucius Institutes. Royal-family foundations endow campus centers in their own names, as did Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal with $20 million gifts to Harvard and Georgetown. Foreign tech companies such as Huawei and ZTE, both designated by the FCC as “national security threats,” contract with colleges for research collaboration.

Since the 1980s, colleges have been required to disclose gifts and contracts with foreign sources that exceed $250,000 per year. But from the beginning, colleges and their lobbyists have fought that law, Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. Many institutions simply do not file the required disclosures.

When the Trump administration reviewed Section 117, it found widespread noncompliance. A scathing 2020 report from the Department of Education found that Yale “underreported its foreign gifts and contracts by $375 million.” Another university, whose name is redacted, professed itself “dumbfounded” when the department asked how it forgot to document more than $760 million in foreign funding. In 2020, colleges back-reported over $6.5 billion in foreign funding that should have been disclosed years before, but never was.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-tearing-down-princeton-11630965255?mod=opinion_major_pos4

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics, in a video shown at Princeton University’s freshman orientation:

When I speak about the privileges that we have I am particularly intent on one of those privileges. This is the privilege—especially for those of us who have the benefits of tenure—to exercise free speech. But I don’t mean free speech in the masculinized, bravado sense . . . I envision a free speech and an intellectual discourse that is flexed to one specific aim, and that aim is the promotion of social justice, and an anti-racist social justice at that.

And in order for that work to be realized richly and capaciously it behooves all of us who are on the faculty to think about ways in which we can provide effective mentoring to our students—instruct and guide them about the institutional peculiarities of Princeton and Princeton culture—but not with a view to habituating them into a practice of assimilation or indoctrinating them in the belief that somehow this is the best damn place of all, but in order to supply them with the tools with which they can tear down this place and make it a better one.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/american_education_is_rotten_from_top_to_bottom.html

In reading the “overview” of Dr. Jill Biden’s 2006 doctoral dissertation from the University of Delaware, I am reminded just how rotten, from top to bottom, are America’s schools of graduate education.  That a doctor of anything could write a sentence like the one that follows speaks to the historic worthlessness of most graduate programs in education:

Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American; one seat will hold a Latino; and the remaining seats will be filled with students of Asian descent or non-resident aliens.

An advisory committee had to approve this mumbo-jumbo. Apparently, none of the committee members noticed that when you add three fourths to one fourth, you’ve pretty much exhausted all the “fourths” available — all the seats as well.  Although the temptation is to write Dr. Jill’s dissertation off to the power of political pull, her dissertation, from my experience, represents something of a norm in the illiteracy, innumeracy, and race obsession of grad-level education.

My oldest brother, an exceptional high school principal, refused to pursue a doctorate in education — the key to becoming a school superintendent — because he thought the courses he took to get his Master’s a waste of everyone’s time.  My middle brother became a very good high school math teacher without getting any education degrees.  He simply retooled through a special quickie program after retiring as an engineer from Exxon.

On the other hand, an in-law, since deceased, did go on to get his Ed.D.  As a “doctor,” he quickly climbed the ranks and became a school superintendent.  Oh, one caveat: I took his Graduate Record Exams for him.  He could not have passed on his own.  My bad.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/the-intellectual-conformity-of-international-relations-faculty/

A dearth of conservative professors deprives students of crucial perspectives.

Americans may be repulsed by the fiasco in Afghanistan — a recent poll suggests only 25 percent approve of President Biden’s handling of the situation — but there is one constituency that fully supports his decision: the ivory tower. International-relations professors have been near-unanimous in their calls for American retreat from Afghanistan (and elsewhere.) When surveyed, fewer than 3 percent believed the war in Afghanistan is a top-three foreign-policy issue for the United States. In a May poll, nearly three quarters of international-relations faculty endorsed President Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Similarly, 85 percent of professors approved of Biden’s handling of national security and 81 percent approved his approach to international human-rights issues. When the Trump administration temporarily called off peace talks with the Taliban in January 2020, a stunning majority of academics said the decision would have a negative effect on U.S. credibility with our allies, whereas today many argue the debacle will likely not damage U.S. credibility elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the academic debate about Afghanistan is the norm, not the exception. As survey after survey demonstrates, university faculty — particularly international-relations faculty — harbor worldviews that are wildly out of step with the American people and leaders of both political parties. Their worldview informs the courses they teach and the syllabi they assign. Absent greater exposure to more sensible and realistic points of view, we risk producing a generation that is out of touch and out of depth with the challenges at hand. From a totalitarian and expansionist Chinese Communist Party to a revisionist Russia to a murderously ideological Iran and North Korea, challenges to American leadership cannot be overstated. Given the generational nature of these challenges, one would think that our faculty’s priority would be to educate college students on these threats and equip them with the skills to emerge victorious, however defined.

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

I quickly realized as I shepherded my children through public school and college that leftists in education are incredibly uninformed to the point of abject stupidity. My kids became used to the fact that I would become almost incoherent with rage when I read through illiterate and factually inaccurate lessons or assignments from their teachers. However, I have never come across anyone as spectacularly uninformed as Dr. Linda ManyGuns who works at Mount Royal University, in Alberta, Canada. Dr. ManyGuns has declared war on oppressive capital letters.

What you must appreciate before getting into Dr. ManyGuns’ truly astonishing dive into stupidity is that she really is a faculty member at Mount Royal University, in Calgary, a public university with a $99 million (Canadian) endowment and over 14,000 students. Just this April, Mount Royal University proudly announced that she was its new “associate vice-president of indigenization and decolonization,” responsible for “providing vision, strategy, leadership and direction to advance indigenization and decolonization commitments.”

Dr. ManyGuns is a woman with a long, successful academic career as both a student and educator. In addition to the obvious qualification of being a “Blackfoot woman” and an elder for “the Buffalo Women’s Society and part of the Beaver Bundle Society,”

ManyGuns has a Bachelor of Arts from St. Thomas University, a Master’s from Carleton University, a law degree from University of Ottawa and a doctorate from Trent University. Her academic papers and projects are always on Indigenous subjects and informed by traditional knowledge.

For 11 years, ManyGuns was a professor in the University of Lethbridge’s Department of Indigenous Studies. She understands the importance of Indigenous students succeeding in their education and while serving as chair, updated the 45-year-old curriculum. Previously, as a waitress, high steel construction worker and chef, ManyGuns experienced discrimination and lateral violence but refuses to let it define her.

https://capx.co/why-we-are-reclaiming-history-from-the-distortions-of-critical-race-theory/

Writing history is about critical assessment, not the imposition of a political agenda
Critical Race Theory is a dangerously simplistic way of explaining both the past and the present 
CRT is lightweight, imprecise and totally unconcerned with an authoritative account of the past

In 1984 George Orwell wrote, ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’  The idea of controlling the past can be traced back long before the emergence of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. It is the backdrop to boastful inscriptions on the walls of ancient Egyptian temples at Luxor.

Today this idea has taken a new form. A way of reading the past is being imposed in universities, schools and wider society that is justified not by its historical accuracy but by its political message. The adherents of so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT) have no sense that the task of the historian is to expound the evidence, rather than to indulge in moralising jargon. They have no sense that it is important to engage in argument, rather than to impose one’s views. They have no sense that the dogma they are spreading is not taken seriously by very many historians. Or rather, it does need to be taken seriously by its opponents, for it is a dangerously simplistic way of explaining both the past and the present.

History Reclaimed is a new website that challenges the increasingly dominant dogma of the Theorists, and demands proper debate about the distorted view of history that lies at the heart of the new thinking. History Reclaimed supports the art of writing history as it has been written ever since the time of Herodotus in ancient Greece: collecting the evidence and assessing it before spinning any general theories about the nature of human development.

Interestingly, Karl Marx understood perfectly well the need to accumulate large amounts of data before moulding the arguments of Das Kapital. The days he spent in the imposing Reading Room of the British Museum were given over to serious study, as even those of us who reject his conclusions have to concede. By comparison, CRT is lightweight, imprecise in its use of terms such as ‘capitalism’, ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’, and much more concerned with righting supposed wrongs in the past than in writing authoritatively about the experience of our ancestors.

At the core of the ideas that we are challenging is the notion that history has been moulded by the racism of white people towards black people. Racism is seen as an invention of white people in western Europe who sought to create worldwide empires through the brutal exploitation of the labour of black Africans. These Africans were transported in vast numbers across the Atlantic from the early sixteenth century right up to the nineteenth century, and no one can deny that their treatment was at best callous and at worst murderous. It is possible that as many as 12.5 million slaves were imported to the Americas, the largest number towards the sugar plantations of Brazil, others towards similar plantations producing sugar, cotton and tobacco in the Caribbean islands and in what became the United States.

In this interpretation, the oppression of African slaves was not merely based on pseudo-scientific ideas that different races possess different levels of intelligence. It is also argued that the Industrial Revolution that took off in 18th-century Britain was funded by the profits of the sugar industry, which depended on slave labour. The fact that there were more significant sources of capital in the agricultural transformations taking place in Britain is conveniently ignored. So too is the fact that the main source of slaves was African kingdoms that willingly sold their war captives.