RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/29/why-our-universities-have-failed/

Where did Antifa youth rioting in the streets receive their intellectual and ethical bearings? Why are the First and Second Amendments no longer fully operative? How did the general population become nearly ignorant of their Constitution, history, and the hallmarks of their culture? Why do employers no longer equate a bachelor’s degree with competency in oral and written communications, basic computation, and reasoning? How in the 21st century did race and ethnicity come to define who we are rather than become incidental to our individual personas? In answering all these questions, we always seem to return to higher education—the font of much of our contemporary malaise.

The Perfect Storm

A perfect storm of events—many of them reforms with unintended consequences—have conspired to end disinterested education as we once knew it.

The passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18—in response to widespread resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War—turned rhetorical campus activism into real progressive block voting. The campuses were no longer just free-speech zones, but woke reservoirs of millions of young voters, a new political and mostly subsidized constituency with clout, to which universities catered.

Globalization enriched the coasts. Seven-billion-person markets were translated into multibillion-dollar endowments of a magnitude never imagined. The Ivy League, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, the UC system, and dozens of other research universities between Boston and Miami, and San Diego and Seattle, partnered with corporations and solicited foreign government money. They opened up overseas satellites, welcomed in hundreds of thousands of foreign students, and began adjusting their curricula to reflect transnational issues.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2020/11/28/california-isis-jihadi-stabs-four-in-university-classroom-university-blames-toxic-masculinity-n1179840

The FBI last Wednesday released new details about the case of Faisal Mohammad, who in November 2015, while he was a freshman at the University of California, Merced, entered a classroom and stabbed four people. It was already known back at the time of the attack that young Mohammad was a jihadi: The College Fix reported that he “was found to have an image of the ISIS flag, a handwritten manifesto with instructions on how to behead someone, and reminders to pray to Allah.” The new information that has just been released about the case only confirms this, and shows up the abject idiocy of the university’s utterly predictable reaction to the attack.

Mohammad, according to the Associated Press, “planned to praise Allah while slitting the throats of classmates and use a gun taken from an ambushed officer to kill more.” Then he planned to call 911 to report the killings, “read the Quran until he heard sirens, and then ‘take calm shot after shot’ with the gun” when the police arrived. He mapped out a detailed for his jihad; it “included putting on a balaclava at 7:45 a.m. and saying ‘in the name of Allah’ before stepping into his classroom and ordering students to use zip-ties he provided to bind their hands. Mohammad also planned to make a fake 911 distress call to report a suicidal guy [sic; this is how they write at AP these days] and wait for police outside the classroom before ambushing from behind ‘and slit calmly yet forcefully one of the officers with guns.’” Presumably in the officer’s throat, in accordance with the Qur’an’s directive, “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (47:4).

All this stands in stark contrast to how the attack was initially reported, and even more to the reaction to it at the University of California, Merced. Mohammad’s attack, as The College Fix noted back in November 2015, was widely characterized as “revenge for being kicked out of a study group.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/11/taxpayer-funded-islamic-terrorists-sent-millions-daniel-greenfield/

Open question: Is there any enemy nation or power, from Communist China to Qatar, that isn’t buying up academia? 

It’s one thing when wealthy enemy nations like China and Qatar do it, but the whole thing reaches a new level of obscene absurdity when it’s a terrorist entity that we fund with our tax dollars that’s doing it.

It’s not often that I’m surprised, but Mitchell Bard’s research in The Spectator turned up something I didn’t even imagine existed.

A new study that I compiled for the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise found that U.S. institutions received more than $10 billion in foreign gifts from Arab sources from 1981 to October 2020. While it is not surprising the wealthy Gulf countries were responsible for the lion’s share, it was startling to see the non-existent “State of Palestine” made nine gifts worth $4.5 million in the last four years. While the amount may sound relatively trivial, the impact can be exponential.

The PLO and its defenders keep claiming that they’re struggling with a state of miserable poverty. Meanwhile they’re funding chairs at American universities.

The “State of Palestine” also made gifts in 2017, 2018, and 2019 to Harvard of $275,000, $775,000, and $525,000, respectively. The university did not report the purpose and Harvard would not provide an explanation when asked. Because it fell below the $250,000 threshold required for reporting foreign gifts to the DoE, Harvard did not have to disclose a 2011 gift of $150,000 from the Palestinian Monetary Authority to establish an annual graduate public service fellowship to support a student from the “occupied Palestinian territories” for three years. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-assault-on-selective-high-schools-11606349353?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring has fired the latest salvo in America’s assault on meritocracy: a 61-page opinion holding that the suburban Loudoun County school system discriminated against black and Hispanic youngsters because its selective-admission high school, the Academies of Loudon, hadn’t admitted enough of them. Never mind that—as Mr. Herring acknowledged—the school’s test-based admissions process is open to all and fairly managed. Because its results have a “disparate impact,” the school system must scrap it.

Nationwide, selective-admission public schools, also known as “exam schools,” are under attack because the demographics of their student populations don’t match those of their communities. Much like elite universities, critics allege, these schools have been admitting far too many whites and Asians and not nearly enough blacks and Latinos.

The ruckus began in New York, where admission to nine of the city’s hundreds of high schools is governed by the eighth-grader’ scores on a specialized admission test. Topping the list are Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, and there’s no denying that they’re full of Asian and white kids, many from low-income and middle-class families. This has raised hackles for decades, but Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools chancellor have recently pushed to make the admissions process more “equitable.” They want to reserve places for black and Latino children, abolish the entry exam, and instead admit top students from every middle school in the city.

But is every middle school churning out eighth-graders with the requisite skills and knowledge to succeed at Bronx Science? Are all children who make good grades eager, motivated learners ready to make the most of what these high-powered schools have to offer?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/if-you-worked-trump-administration-youre-not-richard-l-cravatts/

With the intellectually arrogant but now regular behavior common on university campuses, Harvard students last week circulated an open letter to President Lawrence Bacow and Harvard University deans and leadership proposing that Harvard take proactive measures to prevent Trump administration officials from securing appointments, fellowships, or speaking opportunities on campus.

Clearly indignant at the prospect of someone who worked for an administration they have loathed since inauguration day in 2017, the tendentious students expressed their grave concern “about the impact of the actions of this administration on fundamental democratic institutions.”

Even though these students obviously have found nothing of redeeming value in anything positive the Trump administration may have accomplished, their primary justification for calling for preventing “Harvard [becoming] a temporary home for officials from the outgoing administration” is Trump’s current legal challenge to the November 3rd election and the campaign’s claims that voter fraud and irregularities in many states should be challenged in court. That process, of course, is perfectly legal and is the constitutionally-permitted right of a candidate to launch, especially in an election like this one—with razor thin margins, new voting practices, mail-in balloting as a result of the pandemic, and evidence of blatant fraud and voting irregularities, just as it was in 2000 when the Gore campaign challenged the voting results for 36 days after election day.

Nevertheless, the Harvard students have no time to wait for an audit and full accounting of the November 3rd election, claiming that Trump’s failure to have already conceded eradicates completely his entire record as president, including all of those individuals who made up his administration.

“Most notably, in actively undermining faith in the electoral process and in refusing to concede the 2020 election,” the student’s letter reads, “the Trump administration has trampled norms of free and fair elections and peaceful transfer of power that have defined our republic for over two centuries. These norms are crucial to the global well-being of democratic institutions.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/leftist_academics_compulsively_indoctrinate_their_students.html

A Cambridge University professor can’t resist telling students that he thinks a brain parasite is why people voted for Trump.

Leftist college professors leak hatred out of their pores. No matter the subject, they return obsessively to bashing Trump specifically and conservatives generally. Dr. Robert Asher, a Zoology Professor at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (England), and a Huffington Post contributor, is a perfect example. In introducing students to his course, he can’t resist throwing in his belief that a highly-damaging brain parasite is why people vote for Brexit or Trump.

To appreciate what Asher said, you need to know about the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, long recognized for affecting cats. A few years ago, though, researchers realized that it affected humans as well. Even people without cats can get it from contaminated food and water, contaminated utensils, contaminated (unwashed) fruits and vegetables, and infected organ transplants and blood transfusions.

In healthy people, toxoplasmosis feels like a bad flue. In people with weakened immune systems, it can cause seizures and lung problems. Pregnant women can also transfer it to the fetus, which often leads to stillbirths or miscarriages. If the fetuses survive, they can have serious, lifelong health problems such as seizures or liver and spleen damage.

What distinguishes Toxoplasmosis from other parasites is that it can cause severe mental disorders and behavioral problems:

Infection by the parasite Toxoplasma, which affects about 33% of world population, is associated with an increased risk of several mental health disorders, the most strongly with schizophrenia. [snip] The typical symptom associated with toxoplasmosis was anxiety, and the typical toxoplasmosis-associated disorders were autism (OR = 4.78), schizophrenia (OR = 3.33), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (OR = 2.50), obsessive compulsive disorder (OR = 1.86), antisocial personality disorder (OR = 1.63), learning disabilities (OR = 1.59), and anxiety disorder (OR = 1.48). Toxoplasmosis could play a substantial role in the etiopathogenesis of mental health disorders and its association with schizophrenia is the second strongest association, after autism.