RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/bribed-how-hostile-foreign-actors-subvert-american-raymond-ibrahim/

A recent governmental report exposes the “purchased” influence foreign nations have on America’s most prestigious universities and, as a result, on what America’s current and upcoming generations of analysts and policymakers  think and believe.

More than one-third of the nearly $20 billion in foreign donations and contracts made to American universities between just 2014 and 2020 were never disclosed as required by federal law, according to “Institutional Compliance with Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965,” a Department of Education report released on October 20, 2020.

Among those “gifts” were more than $3 billion from the Muslim Brotherhood’s number one state backer, Qatar; more than $1.1 billion from the chief disseminator of “radical” Islamic ideology, Saudi Arabia; and nearly $1.5 billion from China.

According to the report:

[A]t least some of these foreign sources are hostile to the United States and are targeting their investments (i.e., ‘gifts’ and ‘contracts’) to project soft power, steal sensitive and proprietary research, and spread propaganda. Yet, the Department is very concerned by evidence suggesting the higher education industry’s solicitation of foreign sources has not been appropriately or effectively balanced or checked by the institutional controls needed to meaningfully measure the risk and manage the threat posed by a given relationship, donor, or foreign venture.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/bryan-preston/2020/12/06/texas-am-threatens-student-for-posting-trump-signs-n1194499

The fifth-ranked Texas A&M Aggie football team whomped Auburn on Saturday, 31-20. But today there’s a question of whether Aggieland is losing its soul.

Campus Reform tells us about student Dion Okeke (Class of 2022) finding himself on the receiving end of a threatening letter from one Jessica Welsch, who is Student Code of Conduct Office Assistant Coordinator. In the letter, Welsch demands Okeke’s presence at a meeting in January regarding an “incident” that occurred in November 2020.

Okeke’s crime? He placed Trump signs on campus prior to the election. The campus police were aware, and after initially trying to stop him on a claim of “ground damage,” allowed him to proceed. But they or someone reported him to the university, involving Welsch’s office.

Welsch wrote to Okeke:

“In response to this information, I would like to meet with you to discuss the circumstances surrounding this incident, your perspective, and how you can be successful as a student at Texas A&M University,” Welsch wrote.

Okeke is “required” to reach out to the Student Conduct Office by phone before January 22, 2021 to schedule the meeting, or an “administrative hold [may be] placed on [his] registration.”

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2020/12/04/bringing_history_to_the_classroom_the_gilder_lehrman_institute_of_american_history_651924.html

Though it’s easy to be pessimistic about America’s future after such a traumatic year, James Basker, president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, feels optimistic: “History teaches us that our country has faced terrible crises in the past and still found its way forward.”

GLI offers a full-spectrum view of American history to classrooms and the general public by providing a vast collection of primary source documents, along with education programs and interactive online exhibits.

Housed at the New-York Historical Society, GLI’s publicly accessible archive contains a treasure trove of documents from 500 years of American history, from Christopher Columbus’s 1493 letter describing the New World to letters soldiers sent back home while fighting World War II and in Vietnam.

GLI’s namesakes are the late Richard Gilder, an investor who helped revitalize New York’s Central Park and the New-York Historical Society, among other important New York City landmarks; and Lewis Lehrman, an entrepreneur, academic, and author of many well-received books such as Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point and Lincoln & Churchill: Statesmen at War.

Basker has fond recollections of Gilder, who died earlier this year. “Dick rejoiced at the flow of immigrants into America and did everything he could to encourage it,” he says, “because of his passionate belief that our country was based on a set of ideals anyone of any background could embrace and make their own.”

https://quillette.com/2020/12/01/race-and-social-panic-at-haverford-a-case-study-in-educational-dysfunction/

“You have continued to stand as an individual that seems to turn a blind eye to the stuff that’s going on, as a black woman that is in the [college] administration,” said the first-year Haverford College student. “I came to this institution”—and here she pauses for a moment, apparently fighting back tears—“I expected you, of any of us, to stand up and be the icon for black women on this campus… So, I’m not trying to hear anything that you have to say regarding that, due to the fact that you haven’t stood up for us—you never have, and I doubt that you ever will.”

The school-wide November 5th Zoom call, a recording of which has been preserved, was hosted by Wendy Raymond, Haverford’s president. At the time, the elite Pennsylvania liberal arts college was a week into a student strike being staged, according to organizers, to protest “anti-blackness” and the “erasure of marginalized voices.” During the two-hour-and-nine-minute discussion, viewed in real time by many of the school’s 1,350 students, Raymond presented herself as solemnly apologetic for a litany of offenses. She also effusively praised and thanked the striking students for educating her about their pain, while “recognizing that I will never understand what it means to be a person of color or be black or indigenous in the United States. I am a white woman with considerable unearned privilege.”

Not only did Raymond announce that she would be acceding to many of the students’ previously listed demands, she also reacted positively to the new requests that students put forward during the call. “All of the recommendations you’ve made here sound spot on and are excellent,” she said. “We can do those—and go beyond them.”

Since 2015, when Yale rolled over in response to student harassment of two husband-and-wife faculty members, such self-abasement rituals have become common—even if the prevalence of teleconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic has given us an unprecedented opportunity to watch them unfold. A Haverford president can expect an annual salary of about $500,000. And before coming to the role in 2019, Raymond was a successful scientist who had herself helped smash glass ceilings in several male-dominated academic programs. But the moral hierarchy dictated by social justice runs directly opposite traditional hierarchies of accomplishment and professional authority. And the president’s repeated attempts to ingratiate herself to the students on November 5th made it clear which of these two hierarchies governed the proceedings. One student even saw fit to call out the school’s provost for “multi-tasking while eating on this call, despite the seriousness of this meeting, which we don’t appreciate.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/federal-student-aid-applications-down-in-2020-signaling-potential-drop-in-college-enrollment/

The number of high school seniors applying for federal student financial aid for college has dropped significantly since the previous year, signaling that college attendance may remain low during the 2021–2022 school year.

Schools and students have struggled to adapt classes during the coronavirus pandemic, with many institutions implementing hybrid remote and in-person learning. This combination has been more difficult to implement in rural areas, where college and high-school students are less likely to have Internet access.

The first two months of the cycle for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) saw a 17 percent decrease in applications compared with the same period last year, according to Education Department data analyzed by the nonprofit National College Attainment Network. High schools with high minority populations have submitted 22 percent fewer FAFSA forms when compared with last year, and high schools with a high number of low-income students have submitted 20 percent fewer applications.

“To still see double-digit percent decreases from last year is alarming to me,” NCAN data director Bill DeBaun told the Journal.

Overall, 24.3 percent of U.S. high school seniors completed the FAFSA by November 27, while 29.3 percent submitted the application in 2019 by the same date.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/02/science-or-science-fiction/

When pressed about the reason for closing schools as a way to limit the spread of Covid-19, the comment you mostly hear from the teachers unions and other shutdown hawks is, “Follow the science!” Typical is American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten who declared in an online interview in August, “Decisions on school re-openings should be left to scientists and experts, not ideologues.” But clearly Weingarten and other power brokers are the ideologues who are making these decisions, often as a ploy to advance their agenda, much of which concerns massive amounts of money being poured into education.

According to the most recent Covid Tracking Project data, 43.5 percent of students in the U.S. were attending virtual-only schools. Big city districts with powerful teachers unions have been especially hard hit. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit and Chicago are offering online-only instruction at this time and for the foreseeable future.

The schools in the unionized Fresno Unified School District in central California are only open for homeless and special needs kids. The Fresno Teachers Association has said the district should remain in distance learning at least through the end of the year, and prepare for a “safe, healthy and limited physical return” in the future. But right next door in Clovis, which has never had a teachers union, parents have a choice. They are free to send their kids back to school, or can have them learn at home via Zoom.

Taking Weingarten’s advice, let’s look at what actual scientists are saying.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield asserts that “school is one of the safest places” for children. Also, drawing on an assessment of data from 31 countries, UNICEF  maintains that “there is strong evidence that, with basic safety measures in place, the net benefits of keeping schools open outweigh the costs of closing them.” Moreover, the findings of a major British study reveal that it was a mistake to close schools. “The results demonstrate no evidence of serious harms from COVID-19 to adults in close contact with children, compared to those living in households without children. This has implications for determining the benefit-harm balance of children attending school in the COVID-19 pandemic.” In October’s Great Barrington Declaration, world renowned scientists noted that keeping children out of school is a “grave injustice.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/questioning-diversity-delusion-race-obsessed-richard-l-cravatts/

When he wryly observed that “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,” Orwell may well have had academia in mind, where challenging prevailing ideology can have a calamitous effect on one’s reputation and career—something especially true of faculty.

In 1978, the significant Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case brought the term “diversity” into the lexicon of higher education  Although the Court found that the medical school at the University of California at Davis had used an unconstitutional quota system in denying Alan Bakke admission, Justice Lewis Powell made his now-famous observation that, notwithstanding the inherent defect of such a quota system, universities could likely enhance the quality of their enrollments by striving to create a “diverse student body” engaging in “a robust exchange of ideas,” and that there was “a compelling state interest” in trying to achieve such a goal and in promoting the inclusion of historically underrepresented groups on campus.

Rather than helping students adapt to the real diversity of society outside the campus walls, however, the campaign to increase diversity has served to create balkanized campuses where victims of the moment segregate themselves into distinct and inward-looking racial and cultural groups—exactly the opposite intention of the university diversocrats and their bloated fiefdoms with which they promote this theology of victimization, racial justice, and inclusion.

Coupled with the exclusion of all but liberal thought is the darker side of diversity: as victim groups become aware of their supposed classification as ‘authentic’ victims, they are prone to contradict the stated goal of diversity by limiting real dialogue and interchange between opposing points of view. Thus, while diversity proponents adamantly defend free speech in order to promulgate their own world views, they frequently move to stifle the alternate opinions of those with different opinions—through calls for censorship, threats of censure, and arcane speech codes—and exempt themselves from having to live by the suppressive rules they create for others.

http://American High Schools Go Woke Consultants cash in on radical changes to curricula nationwide

In July, the leadership of Los Angeles’s elite Harvard-Westlake School issued a 20-page confessional about the school’s role in perpetuating “racism and injustice” and promised changes. The school, which sends dozens of kids to the Ivy League every year, will now teach 11th-grade U.S. history from a “critical race theory perspective.” And diversity consultancies, which routinely charge six figures for their services, will facilitate the school’s transformation at every step.

On the East Coast, the wealthy Fairfax County public school district shelled out $20,000 for an hourlong speech from critical-race commentator Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. At one school in the district, faculty went further, disseminating “anti-racist” reading lists to parents and organizing students into “equity” committees.

Dozens of schools across the country, both public and private, have taken similar steps. The perceived need to announce sweeping changes in leadership and curricula has been a boon to the growing diversity-consulting industry, which is designed to profit from racial discontent.

A list of “anti-racism” resources, compiled just days after the death of George Floyd and featuring such writers as Kendi, Dr. Robin DiAngelo, and the authors of the New York Times‘s controversial 1619 project, was shared widely by colleges and high schools across the country.

At Fairfax’s Justice High School, emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show one of the school’s “equity leads” shared the list in an impassioned email to her colleagues. It was subsequently posted to the school’s website with the principal’s approval and shared in multiple community-wide emails. A representative of principal Maria Eck told the Free Beacon the list “represented the diversity of our families and students” and was posted “during a time of broad discussion of these issues in our community and in our society.”

Meanwhile, the tony Connecticut boarding school Loomis-Chaffee has introduced mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training for students and now requires faculty members to read Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and DiAngelo’s White Fragility for “professional development.” San Diego’s public schools have overhauled grading for fear of racist impact, and New York City wants to follow. The KIPP Schools, long a model for charter school excellence, have dumped their “Work hard. Be nice” slogan, claiming that “working hard and being nice is not going to dismantle systemic racism.”