RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/princeton-removes-greek-latin-requirement-for-classics-majors-to-combat-systemic-racism/

Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin in a push to create a more inclusive and equitable program, an effort that was given “new urgency” by the “events around race that occurred last summer.”

Last month, faculty members approved changes to the Classics department, including eliminating the “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, according to Princeton Alumni Weekly. The requirement for students to take Greek or Latin was also removed.

Josh Billings, director of undergraduate studies and professor of classics, said the changes, which were approved by faculty last month, will give students more opportunities to major in classics.  

Billings said the changes had been floated before university president Christopher Eisgruber called for addressing systemic racism at the university, but the curriculum shift resurfaced as a priority after the president’s call to action and the “events around race that occurred last summer.”

“We think that having new perspectives in the field will make the field better,” he said. “Having people who come in who might not have studied classics in high school and might not have had a previous exposure to Greek and Latin, we think that having those students in the department will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.” 

Billings said students will still be encouraged to take either language if it is relevant to their interests in the department and that the course offerings remain the same.

A diversity and equity statement on the department’s site says that the “history of our own department bears witness to the place of Classics in the long arc of systemic racism.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/30/the_civic-education_battles_145849.html

Civic education has emerged as a major front in the bitter clash spilling over into many domains between left and right in America. Since the civic-education battles revolve around the nation’s core principles and fundamental character, they may prove the decisive front.

Education in general and civic education in particular shape students’ understandings of themselves, fellow citizens, the nation, and other nations and peoples. Consequently, the outcome of the raging debate about the content and goal of civic education is bound to have a major effect on America’s ability to secure freedom and protect equality under law, provide economic opportunity and spur growth, revitalize civil society, and defend the free and open international order against antidemocratic and unfree regimes’ ambitions to bend it toward authoritarianism.

Civic education is an old idea. According to the classical tradition rooted in Plato and Aristotle, the whole of education should aim at forming the soul by cultivating the virtues. Education, in this view, involves both the training of the body through disciplined physical exertion and the formation of the mind through study of science and the humanities — not least the principles of one’s own nation’s political order. For the classical tradition, education is civic education.

To a significant extent, the modern tradition of freedom agreed, with the crucial proviso that education’s principal goal was to prepare students for the rights and responsibilities of freedom. Accordingly, liberal education puts study of the principles of a free society at the core of the curriculum. At the same time, liberal education places a good deal more emphasis than did classical education on introducing students to the diversity of views on the great moral, economic, legal, political, philosophical, and religious questions, and on equipping students to think for themselves. Such study — concentrating on great works of literature, history, philosophy, and theology — is part and parcel of civic education well understood because it cultivates the virtues of reasoned inquiry, tolerance, and civility, all of which contribute to good citizenship in a liberal democracy.

Civic education as Americans tend to think of it today involves telltale innovations. Contemporary American educators treat civic education as a specialized undertaking, walling it off from other subjects. They increasingly ascribe to it a participatory component, believing correctly that engagement in political affairs and the life of the community is an important part of citizenship in a free and democratic society while supposing dubiously that schools are well-suited to direct outside-the-classroom action. And for some time now, a large swath of American educators has treated the proposition that the United States is “systemically racist” as civic education’s indisputable premise.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/yale-universitys-war-against-alumni-and-accountability/

Fearful of transparency and change, Yale’s governing body has resorted to procedural tactics to keep alumni from joining that wouldn’t be out of place in a dictatorship.

Back in March 2020, I signed up to gather the 4,394 signatures required to become a petition candidate for the Yale Corporation. In a four-month period, I gathered over 7,200 signatures and won a place on the ballot for the Yale Corporation (which is the governing body of Yale University). It hires the president, grants tenure, adopts the annual budget and sets policy on whatever it wants to affect.

I ran because, as a Yale alumnus, I was tired of getting two names each year of persons I did not know, with no information on why they were running provided. All we got was a bio, and now a video lacking any comments from candidates on issues facing Yale. In my campaign, I also emphasized openness, and my opposition both to expensive administrative growth and to rising tuition during the pandemic.

While the 2021 election, for which I was a candidate, was transpiring from April 14 to May 23, the Yale Corporation, chaired by President Peter Salovey but guided by Catherine Bond Hill, former Vassar president, moved to abolish this system and give total control to the existing 19 members on filling vacancies. Regulations permit two to five candidates. A special unannounced meeting of the corporation was held May 18. Two members, the governor and lieutenant governor of Connecticut, were not notified or informed of the agenda of the meeting. Why? I realize I’m a biased party, but it seems hard not to conclude that Yale, frightened by my efforts and by the possibility that either I or — since I did not, ultimately, win under the old procedures — some other committed individual might shake things up, moved quickly to secure power. Such a step is unbecoming of Yale University.

The board-selection process is distant and unfriendly. But it has existed since 1927. It produced the first Jewish member of the corporation in William Horowitz in 1965. It produced the first women to serve on the corporation in the 1970s. Now that process has been abolished, and the 160,407 Yale alumni will be able to vote for only the hand-picked choices from the Yale Alumni Association’s 14-member nominating committee in future years. This is similar to what mainland China has imposed on Hong Kong in its future “elections.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/rutgers-university-new-brunswick-chancellor-issues-apology-for-message-condemning-anti-semitic-attacks/

The chancellor of Rutgers University-New Brunswick issued an apology to the university’s Palestinian community on Thursday for sending a university-wide announcement condemning the recent surge in anti-Semitic hate crimes across the country.

The university’s chancellor, Christopher Molloy, and provost and executive vice chancellor for research and academic affairs, Francine Conway, sent a message to students on Wednesday that brought attention to the recent rise in hate crimes against Jews.

“Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us. Tragically, in the last century alone, acts of prejudice and hatred left unaddressed have served as the foundation for many atrocities against targeted groups around the world,” the email said.

“If you have been adversely impacted by anti-Semitic or any other discriminatory incidents in our community, please do not hesitate to reach out to our counseling and other support services on campus. Our behavioral health team stands ready to support you through these challenging times,” the email said.

While the email also mentioned the recent hostilities between Israel and Hamas, the administrators did not take a position on the conflict.

“We have also been witnesses to the increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel” it read.

Just one day later, Molloy and Conway sent students a follow up email titled “An Apology.”

The administrators apologized to the university’s Palestinian Community members and said that the first message “fell short” of their intention to be a “place where all identities can feel validated and supported.”

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article251727288.html

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is considering legal action against UNC-Chapel Hill and its Board of Trustees over the failure to give her tenure, according to a letter to state lawmakers obtained by The News & Observer on Thursday.

The potential lawsuit comes as Hannah-Jones has sparked national controversy over the past week. Some think conservative politicians may be behind the effort not to grant her tenure as UNC’s Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

Outraged faculty, students, alumni, professional journalists and scholars have tied the decision to Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer-Prize winning work on The 1619 Project, which explores the legacy and history of Black Americans and slavery.

Hannah-Jones is set to join the UNC-CH faculty this summer with a five-year, fixed-term contract that does not include tenure, even though previous Knight Chairs in the journalism school have been tenured.

In a letter informing North Carolina lawmakers of their duty to preserve records related to Hannah-Jones’s hiring, the attorneys from the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Levy Ratner PC, and Ferguson, Chambers & Sumter, P.A. said they are representing Hannah-Jones “in connection with the failure of the Board of Trustees (the “Board”) to consider and approve her application for tenure,” the letter says.

“We are evaluating all available legal recourse to fully vindicate Ms. Hannah-Jones’s rights, including possibly initiating a federal action against UNC, the Board, and/or affiliated entities and individuals,” the letter says.

Lawmakers have a “legal duty to maintain, preserve, retain, protect, and not destroy, alter or manipulate any and all documents and data, both electronic and hard copy,” relevant to Hannah-Jones’s potential claims, the letter said.

UNC-Chapel Hill also received a letter from attorneys representing Hannah-Jones, but leaders had no additional comment, according to Joel Curran, vice chancellor for university communications.

‘I am obligated to fight back’

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/video-ami-horowitz-raises-money-woke-students-ami-horowitz/

In his latest “Ami on the Loose” video, filmmaker Ami Horowitz travels to Portland State University to see if he can raise money for the Palestinian terror group Hamas to attack “soft targets” in Israel like cafes and schools. Check out how dishearteningly successful he is in the very short, must-see video below:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/university-denies-1619-project-creator-hannah-joseph-klein/

The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (UNC) declined to approve Nikole Hannah-Jones for a tenured teaching position immediately. She is the prominent New York Times investigative journalist who created the controversial 1619 Project. UNC offered Hannah-Jones instead a fixed five-year contract to teach at its prestigious Hussman School of Journalism and Media as “Professor of the Practice,” which she accepted, with the prospect of future tenure consideration. UNC’s Board of Trustees made the right call by declining to offer Hannah-Jones a tenured professorship for now. Aside from Hannah-Jones’ lack of academic experience, she has shown herself to be ethically challenged as a journalist.

Hannah-Jones was not cancelled from teaching at UNC. She still is eligible for a future tenured position after review of her teaching and academic research record at the university. Nevertheless, there was outrage on and off campus at the cancelling of Hannah-Jones’ hopes for immediate tenure.

The Raleigh-Apex NAACP issued a statement saying the decision not to approve immediate tenure for Hannah-Jones is a “real case of cancel culture.” Faculty members and student government leaders wrote letters of protest.

The faculty letter claimed that the failure to offer Hannah-Jones tenure “unfairly moves the goalposts and violates long-standing norms and established processes relating to tenure and promotion at UNC Chapel Hill.” The student letter stated: “We cannot stand by as our University routinely diminishes and undercuts marginalized and BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] voices in academia in an effort to bend toward partisan pressures rooted in a fear of America’s historical truths.”

Over three dozen students, faculty and community members protested as the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees was meeting on May 20th. Some of the signs they held said “Abolish the BOT,” “#BlackHistoryMatters,” “#BlackWomenMatter,” “Nikole Hannah Jones is all of us,” and “UNC = Klan University lovers of racist ignorance!!”

Over 200 academics, journalists, and celebrities published a letter on May 25th condemning the failure to grant immediate tenure to Hannah-Jones. “The University’s Board of Trustees has failed to uphold the first order values of academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas,” the letter said. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/26/no_lux_145831.html

The fathers of Yale University, founded more than three centuries ago, chose as their motto Lux et Veritas – “Light and Truth.” Well, it looks like the Lux just went out at Yale. And Veritas? We’ll come back to that later. 

It seems that the Yale Corporation has just learned what successful communist regimes have always known: free speech and free elections are dangerous to the establishment. 

In recent years, the board of this venerable institution has been governed largely by . . . Yale University. Typically, Yale handpicks its slate of candidates. However, a token exception in the rules has permitted alumni to petition the university to nominate a candidate for the slate. It’s a rigorous process, requiring so many alumni signatures – more than 4,000 this round – that few made it onto the ballot.  

In the 2021 elections, such a candidate was Victor Ashe, Class of 1967. Ashe, a former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, and ambassador to Poland, is something of a conservative – and, horrors, a known donor to Republican political campaigns. He was supported by alumni committed not only to him but also to fielding independent candidates in future years. Ambassador Ashe managed to win enough support to make it onto the official slate. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/rallying-support-terror-and-denouncing-israel-woke-richard-l-cravatts/

As Israel and Hamas crafted a cease-fire to end two weeks of military activity in which both Gazans and Israelis have died, student governments and faculty members at many universities have issued statements of support. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, this support was not for the region’s only thriving democracy and American ally, Israel, but for Hamas, the designated terror group which rules over Gaza and speaks for the Palestinians and whose lethal use of more than 3000 rockets raining into southern Israeli towns with the object of killing Jewish civilians actually instigated the current escalation of conflict.

Tellingly silent as rockets were launched indiscriminately by Hamas into southern Israeli towns with the express purpose of murdering Jews (each of which rocket, incidentally, representing a war crime), these virtue-signaling students and faculty only became indignant at the violence and body counts once Israel was forced to protect its citizenry by defensive action to suppress Hamas’s lethal aggression.

At the University of Michigan, as one troubling example, the university’s Central Student Government published a statement in which Israel, not Hamas, was accused of “inhumane, international war crimes,” an ongoing process of “ethnic cleansing and apartheid” by Israel that is “a continuation of the displacement of indigenous Palestinians since the Nakba [the Arab’s term, “catastrophe” for the creation of Israel].”

In language the echoes the sentiment of Israel-haters everywhere, the Michigan statement apparently suggests that Israel is not a legitimate country at all. While anti-Israel individuals regularly refer to the existence of a country called Palestine—while no such country ever existed and does not exist now—they still consider Israel to be illegitimate, a colonial enterprise constructed on the stolen lands of an indigenous people. So the current conflict between Hamas and Israel, in their minds is immoral and unlawful. “This is not a ‘conflict,’” the statement reads, “but emblematic of Israeli settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid” so if the Jewish state is illegal, Israel’s efforts at self-defense are therefore not justifiable.

In a May 12th “Statement by Palestine Student Groups at Harvard University on Violence Against Palestinians,” students similarly denounced Israel, wishing to “acknowledge and express our outrage at the latest wave of Israeli state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians. [which] follows years of systematic oppression and ethnic cleansing committed by the State of Israel.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/05/23/texas-legislature-bans-critical-race-theory-from-public-schools-needs-to-pass-1836-project-bill-n1449095

Late Saturday night, the Texas Senate passed H.B. 3979. That bill would ban critical race theory from classrooms in the state’s public schools.

It states:

No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall be required to engage in
training, orientation, or therapy that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex.

(6) No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall shall require, or make part of a course the following concepts: (1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (2) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (3) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; (4) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex; (5) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex; (6) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; (7) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or (8) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a members of a particular race to oppress members of another race. (h-3) No private funding shall be accepted by state agencies, school district, campuses, open-enrollment charter schools, or school administrations for the purposes of curriculum development, purchase or choice of curricular materials, teacher training, or professional development pertaining to courses on Texas, United States, and world history, government, civics, social studies, or similar subject areas.