RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/the-failed-experiment-with-ending-standardized-testing/

When Columbia University announced in March of 2023 that it would become the latest Ivy League school to no longer require applicants to submit SAT/ACT scores for admission, the editors of National Review criticized a move that not only seemed designed explicitly to skirt the Supreme Court’s anticipated decisions banning racial discrimination in college admissions, but threatened the academic quality of the institution as well.

We have been emphatically confirmed in our position by the subsequent course of events. Harvard University announced last Thursday that it would be reversing its “standardized testing-optional” policy for applicants to the Class of 2029. This change in course — Harvard dropped the SAT/ACT requirement for applicants four years ago — comes on the heels of announcements by fellow Ivy League schools Dartmouth and Yale in February that they would be doing the same. We hail Harvard’s decision as one long overdue, and note that — given their influence on elite academic trends as a whole — it represents a setback for the continuing effort by left-wing academics to redirect higher education away from the pursuit of excellence and toward the pursuit of an ideological agenda.

The trend is unmistakable and the timing extremely telling: Unlike Columbia — which only acted last year — Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth all dropped their testing requirements in June of 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 crisis. For each school, the proffered logic was identical, and facially plausible: The chaos and national variation in Covid-19 lockdown protocols made it incredibly difficult (and in certain lockdown-happy states functionally impossible) for high-school students to sit for these tests. The problem was that the testing-optional policy remained in place long after Covid had faded away, which suggested that the pandemic was a pretextual excuse, and ideological considerations rather than epidemiological ones had driven it all along. (The fact that Columbia jumped onto this bandwagon years later and without any Covid rationale underlines the point rather demonstratively.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/law-school-rot-hits-berkeley-dean-close-to-home-literally/

When students turned a party into a protest, Erwin Chemerinsky learned the hard way that coddling activists won’t save you when they become the mob.

The moral and behavioral rot at our elite law schools has hit close to home — literally — for the dean of Berkeley Law, Erwin Chemerinsky. On April 9, about 60 third-year students gathered in the dean’s backyard for a pre-graduation dinner. A few of the students co-opted the occasion to rant about their school’s supposed support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and Chemerinsky’s avowed Zionism. Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, repeatedly pleaded with these students to leave. When Fisk tried to wrest a microphone from the student leading the demonstration, the student accused Fisk of assault and refused to move, insisting that she had a First Amendment right to continue.

In the days before the dinner, posters had gone up around campus that depicted the dean wielding a bloody knife and fork, with the message, “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.”

In his short official statement following the unsettling evening at his home, Chemerinsky used the words “sad” or “sadness” four times. He was “sad to hear” that students wanted him to cancel the dinner, as proclaimed on the posters, and that if he did not acquiesce, they would protest. And he was “enormously sad” that students would be “so rude” as to “use the social occasion for their political agenda.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-inevitable-result-of-intersectional-gender-studies/

Harvard University’s gender and sexuality department will offer a wide range of classes next semester: Gender as Technology; Gender and Sexuality in Korean Pop Culture; Feminism in the Age of Empire; Gender, Race and Poverty in the United States; Decolonization; Love’s Labors Found: Uncovering Histories of Emotional Labor; and more. Decolonization is as relevant to feminist theory as the songs of BTS are to Korean gender roles in Harvard’s gender studies department. As George Leef has written, gender studies is “not really an intellectual enterprise, but ideological posturing,” one that “is not about trying to understand the world, but is all about trying to change it in certain ways.”

Gender studies professors have taken the posture of supporting Palestinians since October 7, and opposing Israel since well before October 7. A recent panel held at Rutgers University, and sponsored by its gender studies department, is a good study of how mad the departments have become and a better example of their ideological ends.

The panel, called “Palestine Is a Queer Feminist Struggle against Imperialism,” was led by Maya Mikdashi, an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Nadine Naber, an associate professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois. Mikdashi went viral for complaining that criticizing Hamas’s persecution of LGBTQ Palestinians is a “homophobic” tactic. Naber delivered a word salad against “settler-colonialism,” which is good enough to quote in full:

Any movement committed to a free Palestine must take seriously how the categorical dichotomization of gender and sexuality is made material — is corporealized through violence, punishment, murder, and disappearance, and that the gender binary is foundational to colonization. And also that the gender binary, like all borders, [is] made possible through state violence. . . .

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/please-harvard-dont-throw-conservatives-into-that-briar-patch/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Folks, I do not regret to inform you even in the slightest bit that Christopher Rufo is at it again. Or rather, he continues at it. After he and the journalistic team at the Washington Free Beacon combined to light a fire that ended up incinerating former Harvard president Claudine Gay — it was not her repulsive testimony before Congress that toppled her but the revelation that her already threadbare academic career had been stitched together in large part from the plagiarized work of other, better scholars — he has now pressed forward with an investigation and public rhetorical assault on others similarly situated in the woker spheres of academia. (“Alphabet-soup land,” as I’ve taken to calling it.) At the present moment, Rufo claims to have made embarrassing revelations about former Michigan State professor Lisa Cook (currently a Federal Reserve governor), and prior to this he had flagged the plagiaristic misdeeds of a Harvard Extension administrator and an assistant professor of sociology there.

And by gum, Harvard’s young and comically ingenuous students are not taking it lying down. They have noticed that each of these people is a black female — Rufo, loquaciously online as always, has been happy to point it out to them — and have begun to harbor suspicions that Rufo might be, well, you know . . . a racist. And almost certainly a misogynist, but no need to overdetermine things. (The fact that all of these people are pretty much nailed dead-to-rights on the merits is of course immaterial in this analysis, in exactly the same way that traffic cameras in Chicago were — this is not a joke — deemed “racist” by ProPublica and the city council because they kept disproportionately flagging the wrong demographic of driver. “Equity” in action, my friends.)

I therefore salute Harvard Crimson opinion columnist Maya Bodnick for standing up to Rufo’s transparently racist, reactionary agenda. She sounds the alarm in the title of her piece: “A Witch Hunt Is Targeting Black Harvard Faculty.” First they came for Claudine Gay, she says. Then the Free Beacon tossed the school’s chief DEI officer into the frying pan for a quick sizzle.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/10/featherbed-ed/

New data for the 2022-2023 academic year paints a disturbing picture. While students are slowly trickling back into public schools post-COVID-19, the same cannot be said for staff. The National Center for Education Statistics revealed an increase of 173,000 students in public schools, yet during the same period, a staggering 159,000 employees were hired, including 15,000 additional teachers.

Researcher Chad Aldeman provides specific examples of hiring trends in various districts across the country. He explains that about one-third of these districts added teachers while serving fewer students. For instance, Philadelphia lost nearly 16,000 students but employed 200 more teachers, dropping its student-to-teacher ratio from about 17:1 to under 15:1.

About a quarter of all districts followed the path of California’s Capistrano Unified School District, which lowered its teaching force over time but not as fast as it lost students. Capistrano suffered a 22% decline in student enrollment but reduced its teaching staff by just 7%.

Another group of districts saw an increase in student enrollments, but their teacher count has risen even faster. The Katy Independent School District, near Houston, added 4,299 students last year, a gain of 4.9%. At the same time, it hired 366 teachers, a 6% gain. Over the period, its student body increased by 22%, while its teacher count grew by 29%.

But as Aldeman notes, the future is murky: “As districts spend down the last of their federal ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief ) dollars, they may have to lay off staff or close under-enrolled buildings.”

If teachers must be laid off, the typical union contract stipulates that it must be done by seniority, or the “last in, first out” (LIFO) regimen. This industrial style of dealing with teacher overstaffing is typified by Michigan’s Ann Arbor Public Schools system, where the teacher union contract states that after considering years of experience with the district, if two teachers have equal seniority, the last several digits of a teacher’s Social Security number would be the tiebreaker for a layoff.

https://tomklingenstein.com/three-pillars-of-education/

Editor’s Note: Nowhere has the group quota regime been more successful in its early years than in higher education, where the ideology of outcome equality is mandatory both as doctrine and as practice. A recent exchange in Public Discourse between Robert George and Yoram Hazony considered whether free speech is still a viable or desirable ideal in this era of the woke university. Here, Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, argues alongside Hazony that free speech cannot be the highest principle of education — that firmer groundings and loftier aims are necessary in the fight against a revolutionary enemy.

As Wood writes,“Real intellectual diversity, the hierarchy of knowledge, the integrity of the individual, civility, and the pursuit of truth have all been captured by the radical left and turned inside out. We win this war only if we realize that education itself is at stake.”

“If I had been asked a year ago about free speech on campus and the doctrine of “institutional neutrality,” I would have given an answer markedly different from what I give today. Not that I would have lined up with those who elevate “free speech” to be the highest principle—or the deepest foundation—of higher education. The intellectual heirs of John Stuart Mill say such things frequently and with firm assurance. Mill’s great essay, On Liberty, is their Mount Ararat. It towers over the landscape littered with discarded speech codes, debunked theories, and zealous enforcers of rules against bias. Just as certain religious enthusiasts believe Noah’s ark came to rest on the top of the Turkish mountain, certain free speech advocates anchor themselves on Mill’s idea that the truth can be approached by holding the doors of academe wide open to any and all views.

This is essentially the position taken by Robert George in his debate with Yoram Hazony in Public Discourse. Hazony, by contrast, cites Mill with an attitude of weary disdain. He says American universities love Mill’s idea that the “free exchange of divergent ideas will eventually lead society to truth and virtue.”  Hazony adds, “Indeed, the belief that free inquiry is the only road to truth has been promoted as the principal dogma of the postwar liberal university for nearly sixty years—since the ‘free speech’ movement of the 1960s.”  

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-university-to-offer-segregated-graduation-ceremonies-based-on-race-class-sexuality/

Harvard University’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging will once again host “affinity celebrations” at its 2024 commencement, according to documents obtained by National Review.

Harvard plans to hold a “Disability Celebration,” a “Global Indigenous Celebration,” an “Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi-American (APIDA) Celebration,” a “First Generation-Low Income Celebration,” a “Jewish Celebration,” a “Latinx Celebration,” a “Lavender Celebration” — which refers to LGBT students — a “Black Celebration,” a “Veterans Celebration,” and an “Arab Celebration.” The university will also hold a central commencement ceremony for students of all backgrounds.

A note on the sign-up form shared with NR by a current student informs registrants that the “Celebration Recognizing Arab Graduates, the Celebration Recognizing Jewish Graduates, and the Celebration Recognizing Veteran Graduates are being planned in collaboration with student groups and campus partners.”

The only publicly available mention of affinity celebrations on any Harvard website is published on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ page. The note does not mention the specific events or groups recognized, simply describing them as “student-led, staff-supported events that recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of graduates from marginalized and underrepresented communities.”

Harvard’s affinity-group celebrations came under fire in 2023 after the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo posted the schedule on his X account and noted that the university had deleted the page from its website. He also mentioned in his post that white and Jewish students were the only two groups without their own events, though Harvard has now added Jews to the list.