RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/11/keywords-hoist-petard

Perhaps we ought to have included “chickens” and “roost” among the keywords as well. For many years now, woke administrators, professors, and other activists at all the toniest colleges have been like the parade of flagellants in The Seventh Seal: skirling in public about their sins, above all their institutional or (as we have lately been taught to say) their “systemic” racism. Their cries are accompanied by the demand for alms—$50 million at Yale to support “diversity,” $100 million at Brown for kindred exercises in political penance, and so on.

On September 2, Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, made a major contribution to this emetic genre. In an open letter to the university “community,” he beat his breast about America’s overdue “profound national reckoning with racism.” He didn’t exclude his own university. Indeed, he beat himself harder as he bemoaned Princeton’s long history of “intentionally and systematically exclud[ing] people of color, women, Jews, and other minorities.” Nor, according to him, has that history ended. “Racist assumptions from the past,” President Eisgruber sobbed, “remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”

His confession did not go unnoticed. On September 16, the Department of Education sent President Eisgruber a letter. The letter minutes an interesting discrepancy. Since Christopher Eisgruber became president of Princeton in 2013, the university has received more than $75 million in taxpayer funds. It has also “repeatedly represented and warranted to the U.S. Department of Education . . . Princeton’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” What’s Title VI? Among other things, it’s the law that stipulates that no institution receiving federal funds may discriminate against anyone because of “race, color, or national origin.”

https://www.city-journal.org/northwestern-univ-president-schapiro-stands-up-to-rioters

Since June, a group of Northwestern University students has demanded that the school disband its campus police force and sever ties with the Evanston, Illinois police department. On Saturday, October 17, their protests became unruly. Members of NU Community Not Cops (NUCNC) sprayed anti-cop graffiti on private and public property, broke a window at the local Whole Foods market, set at least one trash can on fire, and burned a school banner. The following Monday, Northwestern’s president denounced the violence in the most unequivocal of terms—and was himself promptly denounced as a racist for having done so. But the president, Morton Schapiro, to his enormous credit, has neither apologized nor backed down on his refusal to abolish the campus police department.

The Northwestern episode is doubly instructive. Schapiro is one of the most woke college presidents in the country. Yet he has done something that almost no Democratic politician or progressive opinion leader has dared do with such forcefulness: draw a bright line between Black Lives Matter protests and violence. Had Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris been as unhesitating in their condemnations of this year’s murderous race riots, the country might have avoided the worst of the anarchy.

But Schapiro is to a considerable extent the architect of his own problems. Over the last several years, he has pandered to the maudlin identity politics that lead students at the most prestigious colleges in the country to think of themselves as oppressed. The ongoing conflict at Northwestern should remind college presidents everywhere that they feed the beast of adolescent narcissism and self-pity at their peril.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/28/the-dojs-lawsuit-against-yale-is-how-to-win-the-culture-war/

For the first time in decades, the diversity bureaucrats dividing the country on the basis of race, class, and sex are worried about losing federal funding and being sued.

In a Bengali poem, one verse roughly translates to “the maddening rage of a caged impotent.” It fits the left’s reaction to the Trump administration’s executive order banning critical race training in federal departments and lawsuit against Yale University for discrimination against white and Asian applicants.

For a long time, the overwhelming majority of sane, hardworking people had to endure being ruled by a handful of ideologues and their crackpot theories, in a long march continued unopposed. Bafflingly, for decades there was zero substantive pushback among Republican lawmakers, even from ostensibly conservative presidents. That has now changed. Whoever takes up the mantle of post-Trump conservatism, things are not going back to meek subservience.

The U.S. Department of Justice has sued Yale for discriminating against Asians and white applicants in undergraduate admissions. The lawsuit argues that qualified Asians and whites are discriminated against in favor of black applicants, and are likely to only win one-quarter of admissions compared to lesser qualified people based solely on race, in what the DOJ considers to be affirmative action.

https://www.peaceandtolerance.org/

On Monday, November 2, the Palm Beach County Public School Board will be holding a hearing on whether to terminate or re-hire William Latson, the former principal of Spanish River High School, who was fired after being caught saying that the Holocaust was not actually a crime. This will be our last chance to make sure that a man with such anti-historical, anti-Semitic delusions is kept out of a position of educational authority over developing minds — and does not receive a cent more of taxpayers’ money.

We call upon all concerned Palm Beach residents to attend the meeting in person, and tell the committee why terminating this man’s contract and not re-hiring him.

If you can come, please register as a speaker at the hearing by emailing Lauren Gross of the Gross Family Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust at LAGpalmbeach@gmail.com.

If you do not live in Palm Beach, you can call the board’s office and leave a polite voice message at (561) 434-8000; please also email these a

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/cancel-culture-spells-demise-academic-freedom-lloyd-pettegrew/

Many academics of the libertarian or conservative bent have learned from experience that it is better to keep one’s thoughts and voice to oneself. We self-sensor reluctantly and only out of necessity. In these troubled academic times rank no longer has its privileges regarding first Amendment rights on campus. Failure to follow publicly the progressive academic orthodoxy can bring one trouble in the form of being canceled.

Before canceling became de rigueur on campus and throughout the academy, opposition was largely confined to voicing opinions in the academic public square. With the rise in the popularity and power of neo-Marxism, canceling has become the new academic armament. Neo-Marxism emanated from Marxist theory in the 1970’s and 80’s as a framework for explaining the repressive functions of the capitalist state; its adherents could be found in political science, philosophy and public policy. Fifty years later it has birthed young scholars from economics to medicine and the STEM subjects, who think nothing of censoring or discarding people and texts they find objectionable.

The Neo-Marxist cancel culture has been most readily demonstrated in the violent protests against visiting campus speakers like Charles Murray, Christina Hoff Summers, Ben Shapiro, Heather Mac Donald and myriad others. Even in academic meetings like the American Political Science Association, U.C. Berkeley Law Prof. John Yoo, who had served in the George Bush Justice Department, was disrupted while speaking. As contradictory as it may seem, even an ACLU executive was prevented from speaking at two different university gatherings.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/alex-newman-false-history-taught-in-schools-incite

The history taught in public schools is “a complete and total reversal of reality” and the root cause of the civil unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis that has spread across the nation, said Alex Newman, an author, and award-winning international journalist.

President Donald Trump said during the Independence Day celebration at Mount Rushmore on July 3, “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains.”

“The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions,” Trump said.

“He hit the nail right smack on the head. That’s what I’ve been arguing for years,” said Newman, co-author of the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

“Now, when i say [what’s been taught is] a complete and total reversal of reality, that’s what i mean,” he told The Epoch Times‘ “Crossroads” program. “It’s not hyperbole, that’s not exaggeration.”

He said what defines American people as Americans are principles enshrined in the country’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and that everyone is endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights,” Newman said.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/english-departments-ideological-thrall-identity-richard-l-cravatts/

In July, the English Department of the University of Chicago posted an odd statement on its website. In response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the supposed “thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence,” the department announced that, “For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.” What is the motivation for the targeting of that particular area of study now? The statement, in the tortured language academia is so adept at generating, explains that English as a discipline “has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction and anti-Blackness,” and is “responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why.”

Apparently, the Chicago faculty believe that it is part of the mission of the English Department to mobilize its intellectual resources to address social problems and that the work of “undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere,” as the statement pretentiously proclaims.

While some observers lauded the department’s decision to focus graduate study on Black Studies, critics, including University of Chicago’s own president, Robert Zimmer, were quick to question a department committing itself to a political movement and activism supporting it. “[S]ome members of the University community have expressed concern that the exclusive disciplinary commitment effectively represents a political test for admission,” Zimmer wrote, in responding to the controversy, and “[t]he idea or even implication that there would be a political criterion applied to admission to our doctoral program would be incompatible with the fundamental principles of our University.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/disgusting-professorial-teachings-walter-williams/

The ugliness that we have recently witnessed including rioting, billions of dollars of property destruction, assaults, murders and grossly stupid claims about our nation has its origins on college campuses. Two websites, College Reform and College Fix, report on the despicable teachings on college campuses across the nation. Let us look at some of it.

In response to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s tweeting that he supports “citizen soldiers” in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a black professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science declared that “they have deputized all white people to murder us.”

Jesse A. Goldberg, professor in the English department at Auburn University who teaches classes in African American literature, American literature and composition wrote a now-deleted post on Twitter, “f—- every cop. Every single one.” Goldberg added, “The only ethical choice for any cop to make at this point is to refuse to do their job and quit.”

Eddie Glaude Jr., a Princeton University professor and chairman of the Department of African American Studies said that when it comes to policing in America “Black people still live under the slave codes.” Glaude’s tweet came in response to news that Jacob Blake was handcuffed to his hospital bed after being shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Glaude added:

“Placing shackles around the feet of Jacob Blake amounted to a physical reminder that he was still, no matter the protests, a n——r in the eyes of these policemen.”

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.”