RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/03/24/the_war_on_merit_110552.html

New York City’s gifted and talented students are in the crosshairs of woke activists who seek to impose “racial justice” in the city’s school system, not by improving education but by destroying opportunities for the city’s most advanced learners. And we can’t let them win.

A consortium of activists, including celebrity lawyer Ben Crump, has filed an 81-page lawsuit against the State of New York, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, and other state and city education officials, demanding the elimination of merit-based admissions to the city’s Gifted and Talented programs. The lawsuit argues the city’s gifted program and its specialized schools, including Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science, perpetuate an illegal “racial hierarchy,” “racism,” and “segregation” because black and Hispanic students qualify for them at a lower rate than white and Asian students.

The proposed remedy – eliminating gifted and talent programs and schools and punishing smart kids – will not fix the systemic academic problems in New York City elementary and middle schools that are the root cause for this “racial hierarchy.” Instead, it will promote another discrimination: against advanced learners. The legal activists demand discrimination against students whose academic performance ranks in the top 1.5 percent of their peers, and they disparage these students as having “in-the-know” parents. It is common sense that we will accomplish nothing as a society and surely do much harm if we embrace a conception of “fairness” that involves attacking and delegitimizing excellence as a form of “racism.”

That’s why a new organization, Parents Defending Education, filed a motion today to intervene on behalf of New York City parents whose children attend gifted and talented schools.

Attacks on gifted education programs have been a front in the national culture war that has heated up over the past year. “Social justice” advocates promote a concept of “equity” that any deviation in racial outcomes – such as gifted enrollments – can only be explained by racism. From New York to Seattle, these activists are working to dilute the most advanced and rigorous coursework with concepts from the ideology of critical race theory, including curriculum infused with discussions on “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “structural inequity,” and “white supremacy.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/columbia-universitys-ultra-woke-idea-segregated-graduation-ceremonies/

My university’s decision shows how an obsession with diversity has corrupted modern academia.

Last week, Columbia University, where I am currently a junior, made national headlines over commencement ceremonies demarcated by race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. Such multicultural ceremonies have a history at many schools, but Columbia’s was apparently the one to receive nationwide media attention. Though discussion and discourse are always important, most of the resulting social-media frenzy focused on the wrong ideas. It is not about getting into the weeds and arguing over which historically marginalized group deserves to be recognized or whether these ceremonies are optional. The very creation and existence of such events is fundamentally problematic right out of the gate.

To segregate students by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status is inherently harmful to the fabric of college communities and harms the social progress these events ostensibly intend to achieve. The embrace of resegregation in this scenario to combat “inequality” centers on one uncontrollable characteristic of an individual and reduces a person’s identity to superficial stereotypes, neglecting his or her nuanced existence. It also bears more than a passing, uncomfortable resemblance to the racism of decades past. People are multifaceted with their own experiences, talents, interests, and strengths. Failure to recognize that is not only ignorant, but also dehumanizing.

A common rejoinder to criticisms of these ceremonies is that those who want to end them do not care about the achievements of the students the ceremonies celebrate. This is not only untrue, but also condescendingly assumes that Black, Asian, “Latinx,” First-Generation/Low-Income, “Lavender” (LGBTQIA+), and Native-American students can only have their accomplishments celebrated through the uplifting of an institution that cannot see past their mere identities. It also assumes that America is so racially bankrupt that those in these groups must depend on an institution to be recognized as human. In this way, the university’s focus on identity reinforces campus division, as students depend more on institutional labeling to define who they are. The result is the undermining of campus unity to an almost irreparable point.

Columbia likely started these ceremonies in good faith. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Diversity and multiculturalism can be worthwhile aims. However, they cannot be the sole focus of all university affairs. Yet that is increasingly exactly the case, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to identify what else one might learn at these expensive elite institutions. The imposition of diversity as the reigning prerequisite to any action has soiled good intent, and now facilitates the weaponization of multiculturalism to conduct witch hunts on conservatives, quash free speech, and command political correctness in the classroom. As a result, identity politics now runs rampant, such that no objective debate can occur because of overwhelming affectual censorship. Objectivity is outlawed, and everyone is made to believe he must have an emotional investment in a discussion. Everything is now personal to those in any conversation.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/22/why-we-need-a-civics-alliance/

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is proud to announce the creation of the Civics Alliance, a new coalition dedicated to defending and restoring true civics education across the United States. The Civics Alliance will unite education reformers, policymakers, and every citizen of the United States who wants to preserve civics education that teaches the founding principles and documents of the United States, the key events of American history, the structure of our self-governing federal republic, the functions of government at all levels, how our governing institutions work, and the spirit of liberty and tolerance that should animate our private interactions with our fellow citizens. Such civics education should teach students to take pride in what they share as Americans—an exceptional heritage of freedom, a republic that has succeeded in making liberty a fundamental principle of our government, and the joyful accomplishments of their common national culture.

By the time students leave high school, they should comprehend the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, elections, elected office, checks and balances, trial by jury, grand juries, civil rights, military service, and many other points in the traditional American civics curriculum. College undergraduates, and especially graduates of education schools, should also learn how these civic fundamentals emerged from Western Civilization, including through developments in Western political theory and American history.

This conception of civics education should not be controversial. The Civics Alliance is necessary because American civics education is under sustained assault by radical activists. Their New Civics uses the pedagogy of service-learning to teach action civics, also known by names such as civic engagement, civic learning, community engagement, global civics, and project-based civics. The New Civics threatens to replace traditional civics education with Neo-Marxist “social justice” propaganda, vocational training for left-wing activism, and Alinsky-style community organizing techniques adapted for use in the classroom.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/black-intellectuals-demand-smith-college-apologize-to-smeared-workers-end-anti-bias-training/

More than 40 African American intellectuals are asking Smith College to end the “forced, accusatory ‘anti-bias’ training” that was mandated for campus service workers after a student falsely accused some workers of racially-profiling her.

The letter, obtained by National Review, was sent on Monday to Smith College president Kathleen McCartney by Bob Woodson, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement and founder of “1776 Unites,” and 44 fellow black intellectuals. The signatories ask McCartney to “rethink how you have handled” the fallout over an alleged incident of racial profiling in the summer of 2018, and urge her to “publicly apologize” and “compensate” the school’s service workers that were caught up in the firestorm.

As detailed by the New York Times, a Smith student accused a janitor and a police officer of questioning “my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color” after the service workers asked her why she was eating lunch in a closed dormitory lounge. McCartney immediately sided with the student, who drew national attention and backing from the ACLU, as she held up the incident as an example of an oppressive campus environment.

“This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives,” she wrote.

The student later posted the identities of a cafeteria worker and a janitor on Facebook. “This is the racist person,” she said of the cafeteria worker, who had warned her not to eat in the closed area. The accused janitor was not even working at the time of the incident.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/leftist-mob-targets-law-professor-guess-what-the-dean-does/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

On his personal blog, Professor Thomas Smith of the University of San Diego Law School wrote a post that was sharply critical of Chinese government policies. Shortly thereafter, the academic mob accused him of ethnic bias against Chinese people.

You would think that law students should be able to distinguish between the two, but either their previous education has left them incapable of making such distinctions or they are so intent on finding a pretext to attack a non-woke professor that they will say any foolish thing.

So, the dean of the law school, Robert Shapiro, has to decide what to do — tell the students that their claims about Smith are ridiculous or appease them with a promise to investigate him for thought crimes. If you guessed the latter, you understand the nature of higher education in America today.

Writing on Legal Insurrection, Bill Jacobson has the story (and links to many similar ones). He notes, “It is [reminiscent] of the worst days of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, in which students were the most aggressive in demanding ideological obedience from professors, with public shaming one of the tools used to humiliate the target and scare others into silence.”

He’s right. The great “progressive” project of turning our education system into one for indoctrinating young people so they’ll unthinkingly do what the revolution requires is far along.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/19/higher_ed_approaches_the_antiracism_training_abyss_145442.html

William A. Jacobson is a clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to free expression and academic freedom on campuses.

Free expression and open inquiry in higher education are under attack by ideologues seeking to impose neo-Marxist “critical” theories, most prominently critical race theory, which places race at the center of all political and social issues.

Critical race theory training, misleadingly characterized as “antiracism” training, has spread widely throughout higher education and is often compared to Maoist struggle sessions, where dissent incurs public shaming, job loss, and harassment. This training often turns into race-shaming and Kafka-trapping, using denial of racism as proof of racism. The result is self-imposed racial conflict and systemic retaliatory discrimination masquerading as “equity.”

Claims of “white privilege” and “white fragility” are used to bully people into submission. Columbia University Professor John McWhorter refers to this delusion as “neoracism,” which “teaches that racism is baked into the structure of society, so whites’ ‘complicity’ in living within it constitutes racism itself.”

Rather than lessening racism, these approaches adopt discriminatory racial practices and verbiage that in any other context would be rightfully deemed racist. Instead of focusing on inherent human worth without regard to skin color, race becomes the obsessive focus and measure.

The ubiquitous term “antiracist” thus is one of the greatest linguistic sleights of hand and deceptions of our time, yet it is unmistakably transforming education in America today. As the Manhattan Institute’s Coleman Hughes points out, “the modern antiracist movement is not against discrimination. It is against inequity, which in many cases makes it pro-discrimination.”

The foundational text for this corrosive philosophy is “How to Be an Antiracist” by Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi, who insists that “[t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination” and foments a perpetual struggle session by artificially dividing people into “antiracists” and “racists.” According to Kendi, it is impossible to be “not racist.” Those who do not actively seek to dismantle systemic racism, including in one’s own psyche, are racist by this definition.

Perhaps worst of all is that the so-called antiracist movement sets up an interracial struggle that never can be absolved. Racial struggle is the entire point of so-called antiracist movement, around which a lucrative industry of authors, consultants, and administrators has been built. Too many people are making too much money from so-called antiracist training for a return to the colorblind ideals of the civil rights movement.

This corrosive ideology has swept American culture, especially on college campuses, where it threatens irreversible damage to academic freedom. Cornell University, where I have taught law since 2007, is approaching this abyss under an “antiracist” initiative launched after George Floyd’s death. Unfortunately, Cornell may become an example of how a desire to address racism can go horribly wrong.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/a-harvard-law-professor-wants-democrats-to-disenfranchise-republican-voters/

We should not lightly disregard this as simply harmless academic scribbling.

R emember that brief moment between November and January when Democrats and their voices in the media told us that asking legislators to overturn elections and attacking the legitimacy of the results of elections was a bad thing? Well, Democrats’ old tricks of rejecting outcomes, attacking legitimacy, arguing that it is rigged when their side loses, and spinning conspiracy theories are never far from hand. The latest example comes from Democrat Rita Hart’s ongoing effort to get House Democrats to reverse the election of Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks by the people of Iowa’s second district to represent them in the House.

It is concerning enough that Democratic politicians act in self-serving fashion — that’s what politicians do — but it should particularly alarm us that the progressive intellectual class is continually pressing them to go even further. If misbehaving Republican politicians often embarrass the party’s intellectuals, misbehaving Democrats have their side’s scholars and pundits whispering in their ears like Iago, urging them to ever-more-radical steps. In this case, that means pursuing systemic and draconian “reforms” that aim explicitly at ensuring that a brief moment of narrow Democratic partisan control of the federal government is weaponized to prevent another peaceful transfer of power back to Republicans. This is branded as “majoritarianism,” but it is ultimately the politics of “one man, one vote, one time.”

Take, for example, a forthcoming law-review article by Harvard law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos (no relation, so far as I know, to George). Stephanopoulos argues that “majoritarian democracy” is “under siege.” He draws his diagnosis from the recent writings of former Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, who now serves in the Biden administration as principal deputy-assistant attorney general for the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice (conveniently, a post not requiring Senate confirmation). Both are activist lawyers as well as law professors: Before joining the Biden administration, Karlan was the lead lawyer arguing Bostock v. Clayton County; Stephanopoulos was one of the driving forces behind Whitford v. Gill, which tried to get the Supreme Court to throw out partisan gerrymanders. Given the close relationship between Stephanopoulos’s article and Karlan’s writings — along with Karlan’s powerful government position — we should not lightly disregard this as simply harmless academic scribbling.