RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-survived-cancellation-at-princeton-11595787211?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Now is the time to debate with renewed vigor existential questions of what counts as justice and how to fashion an equitable society. But the stifling of dissent is impeding the search for answers and driving people who disagree still further apart. Because students like to push boundaries and professors like to argue, colleges and universities are a crucible.

Take the university where I teach, Princeton. The campus—or at least the online campus, in the age of the coronavirus—has been in uproar since early July over a letter of demands to the administration signed by hundreds of my faculty colleagues, and especially over my response to that letter. I was immediately denounced on social media and condemned publicly by my department and the university president. At the same time, the university spokesman announced ominously that the administration would be “looking into the matter further.” On July 14, the Journal’s editorial board commented: “Princeton is demonstrating how a lack of leadership enables the cancel culture.”

It is therefore gratifying to report that Princeton’s leadership has done the right thing. I learned recently that I am not under investigation. The story of how I survived cancellation should be of interest to others, since I have no doubt that many more people, from once-obscure professors to public figures, will be vilified and in some cases materially punished for thought crimes.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/noah-rothman/the-racism-of-anti-racist-education/

Amid an aggressive campaign by teachers unions to prove that the work public-school teachers do is so essential that they cannot be allowed to do it, it would seem an inopportune time for the New York Times to mount an attack on those schools. But that is what it plans to do—at least, implicitly, and only in the most socially acceptable of ways: by attacking the white parents of white students, who make up a plurality of public-school enrollees.

“[W]hen we look at how our schools are failing, we usually focus on who they’re failing: Black and brown kids,” the Times noted in announcing a new podcast series contemptuously entitled “Nice White Parents.” Indeed, we usually ask that question because those are the demographics public schools are failing—a condition that has gotten worse in the age of distance learning (an objective assessment rendered by no less a source than the New York Times itself). “If you want to understand what’s wrong with our public education system,” the podcast’s pitch continues, “you have to look at what is arguably the most powerful force in our schools: White parents.”

In truth, they’ve got a point, though not the one they’re intent on making. A national effort to purge from the American political landscape even the subtlest remnants of racist thought long ago captured the primarily white educational establishment. “Anti-racism” may be relatively new to the American political vocabulary, but it’s been an objective America’s educators have pursued for some time. Unfortunately, the forms this well-meaning mission has taken look to a skeptical observer like marginally more benign forms of racism.

For example, English grammar is now racist. Or, translated into the inscrutable language of the academy, the expectation that minority students should be as competent as their white counterparts in the syntax and morphology of the written word is an outgrowth of internalized racial constructs.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/sacrificing-children-progressive-politics-bruce-thornton/

California governor Gavin Newsom along with other states has ordered schools to be closed to in-person instruction this fall. Against the wishes of the majority of parents, millions of students will continue to be cooped up at home, trying to learn from “virtual” curricula with hit-and-miss instruction and support. An educational system mediocre in the best of times has now descended into a dystopian world redolent of the old Soviet Union: Teachers pretend to teach, while students pretend to learn.

Education, our most important social institution already long corrupted by ideological fads and deteriorating standards, is heading for complete collapse in order to serve the political and pecuniary interests of the progressive technocracy: Removing Donald Trump and the Republicans from power so that the Democrats can achieve their long-term goal of “fundamentally transforming” the United States. Children are just collateral damage.

Of course, these decisions to sequester the cohort least vulnerable to the virus are being sold as the result of “science” and a concern for “safety.” But across the world evidence from real science shows that kids in school pose little danger to themselves or others. Hence the American Academy of Pediatricians “strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.” As this spring’s experience in educational sequestration has shown, the AAP continues,

Lengthy time away from school and associated interruption of supportive services often results in social isolation, making it difficult for schools to identify and address important learning deficits as well as child and adolescent physical or sexual abuse, substance use, depression, and suicidal ideation. This, in turn, places children and adolescents at considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality. Beyond the educational impact and social impact of school closures, there has been substantial impact on food security and physical activity for children and families.

https://spectator.org/brown-university-palestine-studies-chair-mahmoud-darwish/?u

They’ve created America’s first-ever chair in Palestinian Studies.

Brown University, the Ivy League college founded in 1764, is the latest high-profile academic institution to go all in for Palestine, a country that does not exist. Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, a Ramallah on the Hudson, still occupies first place in excusing Palestinian violence, exaggerating Israeli responses to Palestinian terrorism, and inculcating new generations of BDS ideologues. But Brown has just upped the ante by endowing America’s first-ever chair in Palestinian Studies.

This is not merely a symbolic gesture, but a significant commitment, hailed in the press as a “milestone” and proclaimed as Palestinians “Finally getting a place at the academic table.” Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, its Center for Middle East Studies, and its New Directions in Palestinian Studies research initiative will now collaborate in a synergistic venture, spending money and hiring teachers to indoctrinate students and “inform the community” about the evils of Israeli colonialism, while stamping its imprimatur on the virtues of the Palestinian cause. Call it the Providence Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The new position is named for Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whom Brown University calls “a towering and beloved figure of Palestinian and Arab literature and humanistic values.” Humanistic values?  Mahmoud Darwish was many things, but a humanist he was not. As a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), he wrote and edited its monthly journal and served as director of its research center. He was also the author of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. In the picture below he is seated between two of the Palestinians’ arch-terrorists, Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, and George Habash, co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/21/the-two-step-of-the-elite-professors/

The question to pose to our humanities signatories is this: why have your fields proven so discouraging to African Americans?  It takes quite a bit of cluelessness and self-regard to deflect your poor performance onto others.

Grave calls for the end of systemic racism are echoing throughout academia, broadcast in open letters and in-house emails, official declarations on college websites and commentaries in campus newspapers, pledges by college presidents, and promises by professors to remedy longstanding injustice. If one were to grade these self-righteous expressions, they would earn a D- for credibility, but an A+ for brazenness.

The lack of credibility we can prove by consulting the Left’s own measure of disparate outcomes. The now-famous list of demands issued by a good portion of the Princeton University faculty in an open letter to President Christopher Eisgruber has several signatories from humanities departments. Among the demands is this:

Redress the demographic disparity on Princeton’s faculty immediately and exponentially by hiring more faculty of color.

We might point out the illegality of reserving jobs by race, but the credibility problem lies elsewhere. In order for systemic racism to exist in the hiring process at a prestigious university such as Princeton, there has to have been a pipeline of African American job candidates who have faced discrimination. If a group identity is not proportionately represented in the professoriate and more individuals in that group need to be hired, we presume that a pool of persons from that group is waiting to be tapped for a job.

But here is the situation in the humanities. According to the Digest of Education Statistics, in 2016-2017, of the 1,347 individuals who earned a Ph.D. in English, only 54 of them were “black.” That’s a rate of 4 percent. The following year yielded a better number, but not by much: 65 out of 1,295 doctorates (5 percent). Both ratios fall way below the national African American share of the population, just below 13 percent. 

In foreign languages and literatures (several professors in these areas signed the Princeton letter), things are much, much worse. In 2016-2017, the tally was 12 black honorees in a total of 1,168 doctorates granted—barely 1 percent. The following year’s result: 20 out of 1,213.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/mi-school-fires-popular-teacher-for-saying-trump-is-our-president/

Parents, students praise ‘apolitical,’ ‘supportive’ teacher

A Michigan school district fired a popular high school teacher and coach after he pointed out that “Trump is our president” on social media.

Varsity baseball coach and social studies teacher Justin Kucera said Walled Lake school district officials hauled him into a closed-door meeting after he indicated his support for President Trump’s speech to reopen schools. He told the Washington Free Beacon the Walled Lake Western principal and district superintendent gave him an ultimatum: be fired or resign.

“I was required to meet with [human resources], the superintendent, and my principal [on July 10]. They initially took my statement on why I tweeted those tweets and they told me they would have a decision about my future employment in the upcoming days. When they completed the meeting, I was told I had the option to either be fired or resign.” Kucera said.

Neither the school district nor the principal responded to requests for comment.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/tyler-o-neil/2020/07/20/virginia-school-district-ur

When elementary students near Washington, D.C., return to school in the fall, either virtually or in-person, they may learn about race and race-based slavery at the tender age of 5 years. Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) has encouraged teachers to adopt an elementary curriculum from the far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) — a curriculum that includes lessons on race, slavery, and “hard history” for the K-2 age bracket.

“SPLC is pushing Marxist ideology more or less. They’re really pushing those concepts of ‘revolution’ and ‘dismantling the system’ that we have,” a Loudoun County father of two told The Washington Free Beacon’s Chrissy Clark, who first drew attention to the curriculum. “So rather than everyone coming together and building something great together, it’s about destroying what’s been built.”

Following the horrific deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, Superintendent Eric Williams said, “The painful impact of these harrowing deaths is and will continue to be significant, all the more so because of our keen awareness of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color.” He further pledged to implement a strategy aiming for the “disruption and dismantling of white supremacy, systemic racism, and hateful language and actions.”

Recommending the SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance”

In May, LCPS released a “comprehensive equity plan” that included “Utilize Justice Anchor Standards-Teaching Tolerance.org” as an “action step” for the 2020-2021 school year.