RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/gov-desantis-proposes-plan-to-bolster-floridas-civics-curricula-denounces-critical-race-theory/

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday proposed putting $106 million in pandemic-related federal funding toward the state’s civics curricula — $17 million of which would be earmarked for developing civics curricula with “foundational concepts” and not “unsanctioned narratives like critical race theory.”

“Our schools are supposed to give people a foundation of knowledge, not supposed to be indoctrination centers, where you’re trying to push specific ideologies,” DeSantis said at a news conference in Naples, Fla.

“There is no room in classrooms for things like critical race theory,” the Republican governor said.

Critical race theory “presupposes that racism is embedded within society and institutions.” The theory’s implementation in classrooms nationwide has drawn outcry from parents, some of whom have received emails from their children’s schools about “Decentering Whiteness at Home” or have elementary-school aged children who have been read “a book about whiteness” that suggests “color matters” and encourages them to dissect “the painful truth” about their “own family,” regarding potential racist behavior.

In September, former president Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to “cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund” critical race theory training programs which he called “divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions.”

DeSantis suggested a civics education should turn down the heat in the U.S., which is increasingly divided by politics by giving everyone a common foundation of values.

https://www.city-journal.org/what-school-shutdowns-have-wrought

Though Covid-related restrictions are easing across the country, fewer than half of America’s students are back in school full-time, according to Burbio, a website tracking school reopenings. A look at the national map shows that the most populous state, California, is also the most locked down, while the third-most populous, Florida, is almost completely back to normal. In October 2020, Brown University reported that politics and teachers’ union strength best explain how school boards approached reopening. In a September 2020 study, researchers Corey DeAngelis and Christos Makridis found that school districts in places with strong teachers’ unions were much less likely to offer full-time, in-person instruction in the fall.

In the early days of the lockdowns, medical experts were mixed on reopening schools, but a solid consensus now exists in favor of doing so. Last month, the CDC urged the nation’s elementary and secondary schools to admit students for in-person instruction as soon as possible. Around the same time, the New York Times “asked 175 pediatric disease experts if it was safe enough to open school.” The experts, mostly pediatricians focusing on public health, “largely agreed that it was safe enough for schools to be open to elementary students for full-time and in-person instruction now. Some said that this was true even in communities where Covid-19 infections were widespread, as long as basic safety measures were taken.” Reopening doesn’t lead to increased cases in a community, and closing classrooms “should be a last resort,” according to a March 11 analysis of more than 130 studies by AEI’s John Bailey.

The science is also clear that remote learning has been a disaster for children. A study by FAIR Health, a company that “possesses the nation’s largest collection of private healthcare claims data,” reveals that young people are suffering profoundly. Comparing August 2019 with August 2020 reveals an almost 334 percent increase in intentional self-harm claims in the Northeast for 13- to 18-year-olds. Drug overdoses more than doubled from April 2019 to April 2020 for the same age cohort. From spring 2020 to November 2020, obsessive-compulsive disorder and tic disorders increased for six- to 12-year-olds.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/03/16/whatever-happened-to-reading-n1433000

I’ve been thinking lately about the pervasive decline in reading, a phenomenon I noticed as a college prof over many years of teaching, and which now seems to have become even more prevalent. These reflections were spurred by two films which I’ve recently re-watched, the rather gruesome three-part Hannibal series starring the inimitable Anthony Hopkins, and the ever-delightful six-episode Oliver’s Travels featuring a charming performance from Alan Bates.*

What struck me about the Hannibal trilogy was the surname Lecter, a homonym for the word “lector” from the Latin for “reader,” and which gives us the common word “lecture.” Hannibal the Cannibal is a reader of sorts, a rather voracious one. A forensic psychotherapist by profession, he is deeply educated, can lecture on Renaissance art and history and recite Dante in the original, loves and understands music, knows precisely how to detect life histories from a modicum of cues—and devours people as if they were texts, relishing choice passages.

Oliver, for his part, is an inveterate wordsmith, an anagram maestro, a crossword buff, an incorrigible punster and an excellent scholar who has been “rendered redundant” as a lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University of the Rhondda Valley in Wales, which has revised its curriculum to reflect “market strategy.” What is now important is “accessing information,” whereas “history,” as Oliver quips, “has become a thing of the past.” The university has become a vast computer lab and erudition is now regarded as quaint and obsolete. There is no place any longer for a playful and richly-stocked mind like Oliver’s. One surveys printouts rather than reads Aristotle.

I was intrigued by these productions in part because each in its different way had something to do with the problem of reading, of “ingesting” knowledge, of “devouring” a complex world as if it were a book, of scholarship in a world dedicated to markets, mere information processing and the devaluation of wit (both Hannibal and Oliver evince a lively capacity for witty utterance). It is a world obsessed with droids rather than people, with mediocrity rather than meritocracy, with surfaces rather than depths, and with artificial intelligence rather than real intelligence. The director of the Hannibal films, Ridley Scott, dealt with the concept of artificial intelligence in Blade Runner, whose replicant anti-hero assumes a human quality only at the end with his “tears in the rain” speech. It is no accident that a leading software system is called “Android.” Novelist Alan Plater’s and director Giles Foster’s Oliver’s Travels gestures toward the great satirist Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and to the comic Restoration dramatist George Farquhar, who figures waggishly in the plot.