RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-treason-of-the-educational-class?token

Bad ideas owe their advance into mainstream thinking not just to bad people but also to otherwise decent people going along with such notions out of cowardice or other weakness.

The censorship of any thinking which conflicts with the orthodoxies of identity politics is increasingly destroying the western university as the crucible of reason, along with its core purpose to advance knowledge through the free play of evidence, ideas and argument.

This closing of the western mind is now taking place inside schools too. In America, high-school officials are increasingly imposing censorship and speech regulation.  A Vermont district has fired a school principal, Tiffany Riley, for writing on Facebook that she didn’t agree with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. As the legal commentator Jonathan Turley writes:

Shortly after that posting, Mount Ascutney School Board held an emergency meeting to declare that it is “uniformly appalled” and that Riley was “tone deaf” for making such a statement. In what should now be a major free speech case, the Board unanimously voted to fire Riley, citing her “denigrating, derogatory, or contrary to the movement for social equity for African Americans, including the Black Lives Matter movement.” 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/10/23/jewish-students-at-u-of-i-file-complaint-with-education-department-over-anti-semitism-n1082348

Jewish students at the University of Illinois-Urbana have filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education over the school’s handling of anti-Semitic harassment on campus. The complaint was filed last March, with a supplemental memorandum submitted in June and a letter in October. It was filed with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

Brandeis Center President Alyza Lewin said in a statement, “In the face of continuous stall tactics and almost no action from the university, we decided to publicize our efforts.”

Jewish Journal:

The complaint argued that Jewish and pro-Israel students have been subjected to a hostile campus climate over the past five years from anti-Semitism on both the right and the left. The complaint alleges that while the university has taken some action to address the campus climate, their “efforts have been wholly inadequate. In fact, in some cases, UIUC staff members were complicit in fostering this hostility and discrimination.”

The complaint proceeds to list 23 anti-Semitic incidents that have occurred on campus since 2015. Among the incidents were several instances of swastika graffiti, the UIUC Chabad Center for Jewish Life’s menorah being vandalized four times between 2015-17, and rocks being thrown at the window of a UIUC Jewish fraternity in 2017. In the latter incident, the police said they couldn’t do anything because there weren’t any suspects.

One incident involved the vice-chancellor.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/administering_truth_in_our_schools.html

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth is responsible for falsifying historical events and advancing government-approved versions of the ‘truth,’ such as ‘2 + 2 = 5’ and ‘War is peace.’ The ministry, the propaganda wing of the government of Oceania, one of the fictional superstates in the novel, uses ‘doublethink’ and ‘newspeak’ to obscure, distort or even reverse the meaning of words.

That was a fictional dystopia. But a few current examples will leave no doubt that the Orwellian manufacture of ‘truth’ is very much a salient feature of the American educational system.

Last week, the Palm Beach County School Board, FL,  voted four to three to reinstate William Latson, a former principal of the Spanish River Community High School, Boca Raton, who had emailed a parent: “I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee.” His dismissal of  the most well-documented genocide in history, and in a school with the largest Jewish student population in the country at that, caused shockwaves and resulted in his suspension.

In 1994, the Florida Legislature passed the Holocaust Education Bill (SB 660), mandating  lessons of the Holocaust to be part of the public-school curriculum. It said the Holocaust must be taught as “a uniquely important event in modern history, emphasizing the systemic and state-sponsored violence, which distinguish it from other genocides.”

Despite this, Latson was selective in teaching Holocaust material, saying, “I work to expose students to certain things, but not all parents want their students exposed, so they will not be and I can’t force that issue.” This was beyond belief for many in the community: the principal was implying not only that whether the Holocaust happened was open to interpretation, but also that the study of the topic was optional.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/21/top-u-s-universities-caught-underreporting-funding-from-china-other-foreign-adversaries/

A new report released by the Department of Education shows multiple U.S. universities accepted funding from China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other “foreign adversaries,” but did not report all they received.

The findings, reported by the Associated Press, are part of an ongoing investigation by the department spurred by the Trump Administration to crack down on foreign theft of intellectual property, research, and technology in higher education. “Potential enforcement against specific institutions” will come from the Department of Justice.

While the U.S. requires universities to “disclose gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more from foreign sources,” the report suggests that 12 schools of “the nation’s largest and richest universities have aggressively pursued and accepted foreign money,” including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown.

Together, the universities reportedly failed to “disclose a combined $6.5 billion in foreign funding that was previously unreported.”

According to the report, many of the universities maintained financial relationships with previously identified national security threats such as Chinese tech company Huawei and another which “had ties directly to the Chinese Communist Party.”

The department also denounced “rapidly expanding their foreign operations and relationships,” by some institutions including the Ivy League university Yale, which admitted failed “to submit foreign funding reports for the years 2014 to 2017.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/racism-cancel-culture-and-hypocrisy-harvard-richard-l-cravatts/

As racism continues to engulf campuses in paroxysms of aggrievement and perceived oppression by black students, Harvard University has become another in the growing list of universities where professors found themselves victims of the cancel culture. At UCLA, University of Chicago, Cornell, and Skidmore, faculty members were maligned and threatened with termination for purportedly critiquing Black Lives Matter, defending the police against attacks for perceived racist brutality, and even questioning the extent and reality of anti-black racism at their respective institutions and outside the campus walls.

At Harvard one of the current faculty targets is David Kane, Preceptor in Statistical Methods and Mathematics in the university’s Department of Government, who first made the apparently unforgivable error of inviting Charles Murray to speak to his Gov 50 class. Murray, of course, is a political scientist, libertarian, and the author of the still-controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, in which the authors demonstrate, in the most inflammatory section, genetic differences in intelligence between whites and blacks. Although Murray was going to discuss his new book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class in Kane’s class, it was Murray’s reputation as an alleged racist white supremacist that was on students’ minds when they learned of the upcoming speech.

To make matters worse for Kane, some of his assiduous students uncovered racist posts he had allegedly written on his website EphBlog. over the course of several years under the pseudonym “David Dudley Field ’25.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/16/liberal_totalitarianism_on_campus_144472.html

American liberals once prided themselves on their fidelity to the First Amendment. Indeed, they had an expansive understanding of it. They defended unpopular speech and even the most provocative examples of “freedom of expression.” One could question their hesitation to set limits in these areas, but there was something admirable about their principled defense of the free exchange of ideas.

This kind of liberalism, however, is in massive retreat today and is barely present on our colleges and university campuses. Instead, the forces of ideological correctness demand intellectual and even political conformity and seek out dissenting voices to humiliate and silence. Two recent examples from Harvard University and Middlebury College illustrate the illiberalism that has become ascendant on many campuses and in many of our cultural institutions. The responses to these incidents, however, provide some grounds for hope.

Last week, Harvard student Joshua M. Conde, an “editorial editor” for The Harvard Crimson, wrote an op-ed demanding that two instructors be fired for offenses against the new racial norms animating the woke left. The case of one of them, Diana J. Schaub, is best known to me. I have admired her writings and thoughtful presence in the conservative intellectual community going on 35 years now. She is also a friend. Dr. Schaub is a political theorist who has written gracefully and profoundly on the political thought of Montesquieu, the liberal French philosopher who was an inspiration for the federalism and separation of powers championed by the authors of the Federalist Papers. Her work also includes deeply thoughtful expositions of African American political thinkers.