RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/culture/gwendolynsims/2021/10/06/look-what-happened-when-a-professor-questioned-his-universitys-diversity-equity-inclusion-efforts-n1522219

In today’s repressive atmosphere of woke leftist culture, it’s rare to see faculty members stand up to the mob in academia, but that’s exactly what happened when tenured Professor Dorian Abbot questioned his university’sDiversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) efforts in a series of YouTube videos and articles.

Abbot, a Geophysical Sciences professor at the University of Chicago expressed his alarm over the way DEI was being implemented not only to stifle “dissenting viewpoints” on campus but how almost every decision made on campus, “from admissions, to faculty hiring, to course content, to teaching methods, is made through the lens of DEI.”

Couple that alarm with years of noticing “the increasing number of issues and viewpoints [that had] become impossible to discuss on campus”; witnessing the leftist “justifications and dishonesty that accompanied” the violence in the streets of Chicago; having a colleague at a seminar conclude, ‘If you are just hiring the best people, you are part of the problem,’ Abbot was convinced he “could no longer remain silent” about DEI’s detrimental impact on academic freedom and individual worth.

“In the fall of 2020,” writes Abbot, “I started advocating openly for academic freedom and merit-based evaluations. I recorded some short YouTube videos in which I argued for the importance of treating each person as an individual worthy of dignity and respect. In an academic context, that means giving everyone a fair and equal opportunity when they apply for a position as well as allowing them to express their opinions openly, even if you disagree with them.”

Dignity. Equal opportunity. Respect. Who could argue with that? Cue the woke outrage mob.

Abbot was “immediately targeted for cancelation, “primarily by a group of graduate students in [his] department.” It was later discovered the targeting was at least partially planned and coordinated on the far-left Ford Foundation Fellowship Program listserv. From there, a group of 162 “members of the Department of Geophysical Sciences Community at the University of Chicago” sent a letter of denunciation to the department’s faculty.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/exactly_who_or_what_is_the_national_school_boards_association.html

I’m willing to bet that, before this week, most Americans, including parents whose kids are or were in public school, had never heard of the National School Boards Association (“NSBA”). When its president, though, wrote to Joe Biden suggesting that parents who complain about Critical Race Theory, masks, and transgenderism are domestic terrorists, it popped up on our radar. And when the DOJ promptly agreed with that suggestion by promising to send FBI agents to become involved with local school boards, people started wondering just who or what the NSBA really is.

Here’s how the NSBA describes itself:

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) is a federation of state associations and the U.S. territory of the Virgin Islands that represent locally elected school board officials serving approximately 51 million public school students regardless of their disability, ethnicity, socio-economic status or citizenship. Working with and through our state association members, NSBA advocates for equity and excellence in public education through school board leadership.

The NSBA claims to “represent more than 90,000 local school board members….” Those are big numbers.

There’s more but you get the gist: It’s a do-good lobbying organization for American public-school boards. It’s when you get into the details of exactly what constitutes doing good as far as the NSBA is concerned that you realize that it is a group completely dedicated to leftist policies.

The word “equity” crops up repeatedly. As we’ve learned in the last decade, while the Founders were concerned with equality, which means that all people are entitled to equal treatment under the law, along with a citizen’s right to a voice in representative government, equity is different. Equity is a zero-sum game of winners and losers, with the government determining who wins and who loses. It pits groups against each other, treats individuals based on external, immutable characteristics, glories in victimhood, and generally is antithetical to a free people and a free society.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/educated-idiots-critical-race-theory-and-other-bad-bruce-thornton/

“Educated idiots” is how my old man described college-educated people who were completely devoid of common sense and moral intelligence, or what Aristotle called “practical wisdom.” But what made them especially annoying was their arrogance, their assumption that because they were professionally credentialed in one area, they were equally knowledgeable about everything else.

This perennial character flaw was recognized by the ancients. Socrates in his defense speech noted this presumptuous claim among the Athenians he questioned during his search for someone wiser than he. The poets and artisans, for example, because they had many useful skills and technical knowledge, “thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.” Nor were the highly educated immune: “There is nothing so absurd,” the Roman orator Cicero wrote, “that hasn’t been said by some philosopher.” Humans by nature are vain and crave recognition for being superior to their fellows, which make us vulnerable to this willful error of thought and character.

But over the last 150 years, the broadening of formal education to include the masses, the increase and hyper-specialization in university disciplines, and the prestige of the natural sciences from the technologies that improved material existence, have made this bad habit ubiquitous. Worse yet, the aggressive promotion during the last fifty years of “college for everyone”–– which necessarily required lower standards and a decline in foundational skills––multiplied the numbers of people with this affliction, even as the quality of their degrees was degraded.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gwendolynsims/2021/10/05/epic-427000-parents-respond-to-national-school-board-association-labeling-them-domestic-terrorists-n1521936

Last week, PJ Media covered the hysterical and threatening letter written by National School Boards Association (NSBA) president Viola Garcia. In the letter sent to none other than President Joe Biden, Garcia accused America’s concerned parents of threats, intimidation, and even “hate crimes” rising to the level of “domestic terrorism” for having the gall to speak up at their local school board meetings. The NSBA also requested “federal assistance to stop threats and acts of violence against school board members, school officials, and teachers.”

This week, however, the leaders of almost two dozen parent organizations fired back with a scathing letter of their own—and it is epic. The letter, written on behalf of members of several parent organizations, made clear that the NSBA’s claims of  “hate” and “terrorism” were shameful:

NSBA cites a tiny number of minor incidents in order to insinuate that parents who are criticizing and protesting the decisions of school boards are engaging in, or may be engaging in, “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” NSBA even invokes the PATRIOT Act. The association of legitimate protest with terrorism and violence reveals both your contempt for parents and your unwillingness to understand and hear the sincere cries of parents on behalf of their children. To equate parents with terrorists dishonors the thousands of victims of actual terrorism around the world. Have you no shame?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/06/liberal-states-flunk-the-education-equity-test/

Race-obsessed liberals talk a good game when it comes to “equity.” But they could learn a thing or two about delivering it from conservatives who focus on opportunity, not outcomes. That’s one conclusion you can safely draw from a state-by-state analysis of education equity by WalletHub.

In a report released in August, WalletHub looked at 12,927 school districts throughout the U.S. and ranked them comparing average household income and per-pupil spending at public schools in those districts. The bigger the difference, the worse the state scored on equity.

It’s not hard to see a pattern in the results. Of the 10 states with the least equitable school districts, seven are solidly blue: New York, California, Illinois, Oregon, Maine, New Jersey, and New Mexico. On the map below, the darker the color, the more equitable the schools.

Of the 10 with the best equity scores, all but one – Minnesota – are Republican-leaning states.

I am a professor who just had a prestigious public science lecture at MIT cancelled because of an outrage mob on Twitter. My crime? Arguing for academic evaluations based on academic merit. This is the story of how a cancellation is carried out, why it should worry all of us, and what we can do to stop this dangerous trend.
I have been a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago for the past 10 years. I work on topics ranging from climate change to the possibility of life on extrasolar planets using mathematics, physics, and computer simulation.
I have never considered myself a political person. For example, a few days before an election I go to ISideWith.com and answer the policy questions, then I assign my vote using a weighted draw based on my overlap with the candidates. It’s an efficient algorithm that works perfectly for a nerd like me.
But I started to get alarmed about five years ago as I noticed an increasing number of issues and viewpoints become impossible to discuss on campus. I mostly just wanted to do my science and not have anyone yell at me, and I thought that if I kept my mouth shut the problem would eventually go away. I knew that speaking out would likely bring serious reputational and professional consequences. And for a number of years I just didn’t think it was worth it. 
But the street violence of the summer of 2020, some of which I witnessed personally in Chicago, and the justifications and dishonesty that accompanied it, convinced me that I could no longer remain silent in good conscience.
In the fall of 2020 I started advocating openly for academic freedom and merit-based evaluations. I recorded some short YouTube videos in which I argued for the importance of treating each person as an individual worthy of dignity and respect. In an academic context, that means giving everyone a fair and equal opportunity when they apply for a position as well as allowing them to express their opinions openly, even if you disagree with them. 
As a result, I was immediately targeted for cancellation, primarily by a group of graduate students in my department. Whistleblowers later revealed that the attack was partially planned and coordinated on the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program listserv by a graduate student in my department. (Please do not attack this person or any of the people who attacked me.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/the-new-battle-at-yale/

Conservatives fighting for the soul of William F. Buckley’s alma mater should not abandon academic freedom.

William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale 70 years ago. Much has changed since then, both at Yale and in the world. Now is a good time to examine what, if anything, has changed for the better since Buckley’s day, as well as what uniquely modern challenges Yale faces.

Michael Samaritano’s recent essay discussing the state of American higher education is insightful on both of these fronts. As Buckley pointed out, conservatives cannot abandon the fight for control over any institution, especially not one as influential as the academy. Lofty aspirations to “academic freedom” are meaningless should they empower collectivists, fanatics, and relativists, after all.

In his debut book, Buckley famously accused specific professors of being outright hostile to faith and provided evidence of subversive teaching within the syllabi of economics courses. Christian organizations were headed by and religious positions were held by atheists. Required textbooks praised the central planning of the USSR and unanimously claimed that government debt was a nonissue.

I haven’t seen much evidence of these specific complaints at Yale today. The economics reading seems far more balanced, and readings no longer imply that government programs tend to increase productivity. The inward-facing, borderline-secular Yale University Christian Association has been replaced with an array of smaller, more fervent, and evangelical faith groups. The Saint Thomas More Catholic Center and Christian Union Lux, unlike their predecessor, would never “refuse to proclaim Christianity as the true religion.” Campus culture has shifted in these areas since Buckley’s day, and he surely deserves some credit.

While I admit that this could in part be due to my own luck, I have yet to encounter required material that has been subversive in the manner that Buckley describes. To be sure, there are some patently absurd courses being taught at this university. “Is that Racist?” and “Latinx Ethnography” do not quite meet my foreign relatives’ expectations of what American higher education has to offer. Nevertheless, the nature of these classes is transparent — only a student who is already a leftist would enroll.

https://www.pacificresearch.org/students-are-abandoning-public-schools-for-charters-private-schools-homeschooling/

The COVID-19 pandemic may have been the crack in the dam that allowed parents’ building frustration with the regular public schools to burst forth.  Public school enrollment is nose-diving across the country, with legions of parents everywhere choosing other learning options for their children.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently issued an analysis which examined data during the pandemic and found that the “public schools, including district-run schools, lost more than 1.4 million students (a 3.3% loss from 2019-20 to 2020-21).”

The report noted that the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics found that enrollment in public schools fell by the largest margin in at least in at least two decades.

Across California, state figures show that K-12 enrollment fell by 160,000 students, which was a 3-percent dip and the largest drop in enrollment in twenty years.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, enrollment dropped by 27,000 students, which was a nearly 6 percent fall.  The Los Angeles Times noted that this percentage decline “is three times what planners in the nation’s second-largest school district predicted.”

Even more ominous for the future of the regular public schools is the plunge in enrollment among the nation’s youngest students.

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/01/the_worst_campus_in_america_for_free_speech_110642.html

Inside the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings

For the second straight year, survey data shows that a small private school in western Indiana is the nation’s worst college for free speech.

DePauw University again finished last in the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings, the second annual campus-speech-related survey and rankings project sponsored by the research firm College Pulse, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and RealClearEducation. More than 37,000 students at 159 colleges and universities participated in the survey, and their responses helped determine each school’s place in the 2021 rankings.

What contributed to DePauw’s low ranking? Survey results and student responses to open-ended survey prompts suggest that DePauw’s biggest speech-related challenge may be the censorious views of its students. Only 30% of DePauw students said it was “never acceptable” to use violence to stop a speech on campus, meaning more than two-thirds of students surveyed feels violence can be an appropriate response to disagreeable speech. Seventy-six percent of students surveyed said they would oppose allowing a speaker on campus who believed abortion should be illegal. Some students feel censorship is the appropriate response to speakers with “harmful” views.

“I do not hold views that are harmful to others so [self-censorship] is not a problem I face,” one DePauw student told pollsters.

Only seven percent of DePauw students reported having “never” felt unable to express their opinion on a subject.

Many DePauw students also lack confidence in the administration’s commitment to free speech. Only 57% of DePauw students felt the administration was likely to defend a speaker’s right to express himself in a speech-related controversy, compared to 89% of students surveyed at top-ranked Claremont McKenna College.