RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/stripping-jews-their-self-defense-what-u-illinois-richard-l-cravatts/

Led by the virulent anti-Israel, often anti-Semitic group Students for Justice in Palestine, the student government at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently passed a resolution calling on the university to oppose anti-black racism and also to divest from Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Company, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar Inc. and Elbit Systems Ltd., firms, the activists allege, that are “involved in human-rights violations and violations of international law, including the confiscation and destruction of Palestinian lands, criminalization of immigrants and communities of color, and other human rights violations,” offenses that would “make UIUC complicit in these crimes.”

Although this was the third time in four years the toxic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has appeared on this campus, this permutation included, predictably, language on anti-black racism and police brutality. In fact, the anti-Israel portion of the resolution was furtively obscured by the language of racial equity, defunding law enforcement, and emptying prisons—even the absurd idea to defund the University’s own police department.

Conflating the alleged oppression of the Palestinians by the IDF with the oppression and racist treatment blacks in the United States purportedly experience at the hands of police officers, the resolution garnered support from those currently energized by the Black Lives Matter movement as well as those anti-Israel campus activists who promiscuously malign, slander, and libel the Jewish state.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/top-ten-america-hating-professors-sara-dogan/

#1: Nicholas De Genova, University of Houston

#2: Joshua Clover, University of California-Davis

#3. Seif Da’na, University of Wisconsin-Parkside

#4: Angela Davis, University of California-Santa Cruz

#5: Robin DiAngelo, University of Washington-Seattle

#6. Ibram X. Kendi, Boston University

#7: Christine Fair, Georgetown University

#8: Cornel West, Princeton University

#9. James M. Thomas, University of Mississippi

#10. Russell Rickford, Cornell University

The ivory tower has long been a refuge for those who hate our country. For decades past, students have been forced to endure scholarly lectures on the evils of American hegemony, imperialist dominance, Western civilization and festering racism. But never before in our history has the very concept of our nation—founded on our inalienable rights to life, liberty and property, equality before the law, freedom of speech, press and association, and control of individual destiny—been so trampled by the institutions that exist to educate our next generation.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/29/college_no_place_for_free_speech_fans_rankings_show_.html

When it comes to protecting free speech, America’s colleges and universities are earning a failing grade. That’s the upshot of a comprehensive new study that asked almost 20,000 students at 55 schools how tolerant and open to controversial ideas their campuses are.

The University of Chicago received the highest score – just 64.2 points out of a total of 100; DePauw University was at the bottom, with 44.2 points. The University of Arkansas, the University of Minnesota, UC-Berkeley and Princeton were bunched in the middle with about 53 points.

Even accounting for grade inflation, that still smells like an F.

The College Free Speech Rankings generated by the survey – which was commissioned by RealClearEducation (RCE) in partnership with The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) – are significant because they offer the first-ever national ranking of free speech based on student perceptions.

RCE and FIRE, which ranked the schools, based  80% percent of each school’s  score on a series of questions that measured two key aspects of free speech: tolerance for allowing controversial speakers on campus and students’ responses when asked how free they feel to hold open conversations about controversial topics such as abortion, transgender rights, and racial justice. The remaining 20% of the score was based on the freedom students feel to express their opinions, their perception of the administration’s support for free speech and FIRE’s rating of each school’s official policies toward free speech.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/26/the-molotov-diploma/

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives, September 17, 2020.

Just before Halloween in 2015, Erika Christakis, a lecturer at Yale and associate master of one of Yale’s residential colleges, sent an email advising students to “ignore or reject things that trouble you,” rather than throw fits of rage. She was referring to Halloween costumes, which had suddenly become a major issue to supposedly mature Yale students and some Yale deans who had cautioned the students to avoid culturally insensitive garb. Christakis wrote as a specialist in child development and was counseling what most of us would consider common sense.

Yet some students at Yale erupted in overwhelming fury. In a now-famous video, a mob of students surrounded Erika’s husband, Professor Nicholas Christakis, and taunted him for over 30 minutes. Shortly after that, finding themselves lacking any public support from faculty colleagues or the Yale administration, Erika and Nicholas resigned. 

This incident marked a turning point in America’s campus culture. But it was not the only one. Barely a week later, Melissa Click, a professor at the University of Missouri, was caught on video summoning brute force (“We need some muscle over here!”) to prevent a student journalist from photographing a protest in which she was participating. 

Across the country in colleges large and small, a new race-themed grievance movement sprang to life after the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. That movement had a shallow premise. The officer who shot Brown in self-defense, Darren Wilson, was acquitted, and the stories about Brown having surrendered (“Hands up! Don’t shoot”) were revealed as fabrications. But out of these sparse materials, a group calling itself Black Lives Matter was able to spread its narrative far and wide. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/the_university_as_madrasah.html

A progressive and tenured professoriate who luxuriate in a rewarding lifestyle and station have held sway over the student body politic in higher education for generations.  Bred of a style of campus Marxism seeded in the sixties and disbelievers of free-market capitalism, they shunned the rigors of the competitive workplace and snuggled up to academia as the best excuse for employment.  Their avocation is a latter-day version of critical race theory (CRT), the brainchild of a Harvard law professor and early mentor of Barack Obama that breaks everything down to race, law, and power and views the American DNA as strands of intolerance, greed, and systemic racism.  Its most recent variant ascribes social and racial injustices to frame a system so corrupt in its origins that it must all be burned to the ground. It embraces a social studies syllabus that has replaced an even-handed warts and all view of American history with an all warts set of grievance studies.

With increasing audacity, progressive faculty in social sciences and gender studies programs are preaching a groupthink that brings undergrads to a low opinion of themselves and their country.  They impugn whole races and genders over privilege and power, promote class warfare as atonement, and give a wink and nod when rioting overtakes propitious moments of social unrest.  Allegiance to this thinking requires the abrogation of all opposing views.  

The oppression of conservative views and speech on campus is an alarm few university administrations have heeded.  A study of campus speaker and teacher disinvitations and disruptions by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) found that since the Trump administration took office in 2017 there have been 113 attempts or actual incidents of speaker cancellations, protests, or disturbances at public and private colleges.  In 76 of these cases, the controversy came from individuals and groups with leftist political leanings and 24 came from those on the right.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/cultural-marxism-kids-larry-sand/

The results of a survey released last week revealed that two-thirds of 18-39 year-old Americans do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. One-half of the respondents could not name a single concentration camp. One-fourth said the holocaust was a myth and one-tenth blamed it on the Jews.

I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise. It is very much in line with other recent polls which find that just 27 percent of those under the age of 45 nationally can demonstrate a basic understanding of American history. Additionally, 57 percent  of all Americans don’t know we have nine Supreme Court justices, 60 percent don’t know which countries we fought in WWII, and only 32 percent can correctly name all three branches of government.

Instead of cleaning up its act, the education establishment is doubling down. In fact, America’s children are in the process of having their brains scrubbed clean. Instead of teaching actual history, we are seeing more and more curricula that is pointedly critical of America and its traditional values. Facts are irrelevant. Objectivity is non-existent. Lies are truth.

The new indoctrination is for the most part of the far-left race-obsessed variety. In Virginia, the state Board of Education is in the process of discussing recommendations set forth in a report commissioned by Governor Ralph Northam. It proposes revamping Virginia’s school curriculum, to include “critical race theory,” which claims that “whiteness” is a moral blight and that all white people are complicit in oppressing people of color.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-to-take-back-american-history/

Our schools have buried the glory and beauty of America’s story under a mountain of misplaced guilt and tendentious ideology. Yes, there are faults in our story — the stain of slavery above all. Yet the weight and significance of our tale lay in the striving to overcome our failings. American history is, in part, the chronicle of our attempts to more perfectly realize the principles of liberty and equality that inspired our founding. There is a way for America’s schools to grasp this truth and again impart an honest and confident pride in our story. That path emerged last week when President Trump spoke at the National Archives. Yet the full significance of the education strategy laid out by the president has been missed.

President Trump’s remarks were delivered at the White House Conference on American History. So far, news out of that event has highlighted the president’s intention to appoint a 1776 Commission to forward patriotic education in our nation’s schools. That is only a part of the picture, however. The fuller story emerges when you attend to the conference that preceded the president’s address, and to an important yet overlooked moment in his remarks.

The White House Conference on American History helped to introduce a new solution to the decline of history education in this country. American Achievement Testing (AAT), a new non-profit company, has formed an alliance with the historian Wilfred McClay, whose extraordinary new American history textbook, Land of Hope, is unlike any text currently available. In partnership with the National Association of Scholars (NAS), AAT recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), to design instructional materials for K–12 U.S. history courses, with Land of Hope as their core text. Theodor Rebarber, CEO of AAT, Wilfred McClay, author of Land of Hope, and Peter Wood, president of NAS, all spoke at the White House Conference on American history, as did Jordan Adams, who supervises history instruction at the system of charter schools associated with Hillsdale College, where Land of Hope is used as a text. (Other presentations less directly related to AAT’s project are well worth watching.) President Trump touted the NEH grant during his speech and asked Rebarber, McClay, and Wood to stand and be recognized. (You can see a video of the conference, with talks by Wood, McClay, Rebarber, Adams, and others here, and video of the president’s remarks here.) AAT’s U.S. history course materials — and the way they will be adopted — hold the key to the president’s new education reform plans.