RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/31/the-book-of-nameless-women-at-yale/

March was supposed to be Women’s History Month, but at Yale University this month they were busy erasing it.

Last fall, the university sponsored a convocation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the admission of the first women undergraduates as well as 150 years of women attending the university’s graduate and professional schools. Many distinguished alumnae attended and members of the first three undergraduate classes contributed their reminiscences in video compilations as well as essays about their experience. So far, so good.

Two of the 141 women who wrote essays asked to keep their submissions anonymous for personal reasons. But when the books were published, the Yale Alumni Association had deleted the names of all the women – without asking the authors’ permission or even warning them of what had been done to their work.

After centuries of women being suppressed, diminished, pushed into the background, or having their work appropriated by others, this unexpected anonymization produced the reaction you might expect. The complaints raised in a first letter of protest were dismissed by the administration, and when the campus newspaper took up the story in February, the people responsible responded placidly, assuring readers that only a few people were upset – saying, in effect, let’s move on, there’s nothing to protest here.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/30/virginia_universities_unholy_alliance_with_china.html

The Chinese Communist Party is using Virginia universities to spread its malign influence, and it is both wrong and unconstitutional. 

It is well understood the CCP is America’s greatest long-term threat, so we must defend against China’s broad-scale aggression against America. The challenge ahead is for every American – and every state government – to play a role in fighting back, especially in Virginia. 

For several decades, China has waged a non-violent war against the United States. The tactics don’t reflect war as it is understood traditionally, but the CCP is committed to infiltrating the West by any means necessary. The most infamous aspect of this effort is China’s centrally planned and executed stealing of massive amounts of American intellectual property. Even FBI Director Christopher Wray has repeatedly noted China’s theft has been “on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.” 

They have also established major influence in corporations, Hollywood, and sports leagues — all of which have capitulated to China’s communist regime. 

Disney faced backlash for filming a movie in the Xinjiang region, where China has enslaved an entire ethnic group. When one NBA team owner had the temerity to publicly support the peaceful protesters in Hong Kong, the league was confronted by its largest revenue source: China. Pathetically, the NBA folded to the tyrants rather than standing for freedom. Instead of expressing support for those seeking freedom in Hong Kong, the NBA caved to the communist regime.  

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/03/27/part-2-whatever-hap

In Lee Child’s thriller Personal, his audacious hero Jack Reacher lays down the four attributes of good spycraft: hard work, attention to detail, lateral thinking (“outside the box,” as the phrase has it) and unconventional or creative adaptations to circumstance. These are precisely the traits that characterize the mindset and practice of the good writer in any field or genre. Apart from the pragmatic aspects of, let us say, writecraft, one may add, as Ernest Hemingway did in A Moveable Feast, a moral component as well. “All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Hemingway said. “Write the truest sentence that you know.” The rest follows.

Honesty of purpose in Hemingway’s terms and fidelity to craft in the Lee Child/Jack Reacher sense entail both the writer’s fealty to himself or herself and commitment to the reader. These are the qualities that are demonstrably missing, for instance, in propaganda, in hortatory manuals of self-improvement, in government reports, in social media’s verbal expulsions, in academic jargonfests, and in almost all contemporary journalism.

I have begun to notice that many Internet writers and even notable scholars whom I’ve long respected have begun writing ever shorter paragraphs, culminating in the forlorn, one sentence taglet, a sort of stichometry catering to the growing problem of attention deficiency. Moreover, these sentences are often pimpled with typos, attesting to an author’s lack of diligence—I recall one well-known writer who wrote “the Pubic wars” for “the Punic wars,” without noticing. Another common solecism is the jagged or wrenching transition from one sentence to another, obscuring the thought. Of course, everyone is prone to such errors, and this writer is not exempt—to err is human—but the question here is one of frequency, of an all too casual unawareness or lack of care. The best one can say of such writing is that it may be serviceable, but it does not stride on the page with athletic confidence. It exhibits neither grace nor muscle. 

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/03/29/a_third_way_on_the_place_of_critical_race_theory_in_the_classroom_110556.html

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently banned Critical Race Theory (CRT) from being taught in Florida’s public schools. He stated that “Florida’s civics curriculum will incorporate foundational concepts with the best materials, and it will expressly exclude unsanctioned narratives like Critical Race Theory and other unsubstantiated theories…we will invest in actual, solid, true curriculum, and we will be a leader in the development and implementation of a world-class civics curriculum.”

CRT, a school of thought that focuses on the effects of race on one’s social standing, is a distinct lens that sees racial disparities embedded in power structures and perpetuated by the people who benefit from them. Drawing on postmodern ideas that humans perceive reality through an array of power structures, animating how we think about race and other social issues, it upholds systemic deconstruction as the only way to progress. To start, marginalized people have special insight into their own plight and should define race and racism for the rest of society. Emotion and lived experience matter as much, or more than, rational discourse.

That said, both the common use of CRT, which is to teach it as established dogma, and the governor’s exclusion of it, strike us as highly illiberal. Perhaps we can draw on Martin Luther King’s wisdom: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.” Like DeSantis, we decry the dogmatic application of CRT as the only way forward, but unlike the Florida Governor, we also see value in CRT as one way to explore social power dynamics. And so we encourage a third way: a pluralistic civics education that teaches Critical Race Theory alongside numerous other approaches to social science and social justice.

DeSantis’s move comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s ban of CRT in September 2020 in Federal agencies. The Biden Administration rescinded the Executive Order in the President’s first week in office. Still, it remains a hot topic, with many Republicans favoring the ban and many Democrats supporting CRT education. Numerous states, especially those with Republican-dominated legislators and governors, are trying to ban CRT altogether.

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.