RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/10/indoctrifornia/

California governor Gavin Newsom is a force of nature. He leads a state which has record homelessness, rising crime and exploding pension debt. But wait, there is so much more! Ruling more like dictator than an elected official, Newsom ordered a draconian lockdown in March to stem the spread of COVID-19. But more than anything, his autocratic move unnecessarily killed many businesses and livelihoods. Then in September, Newsom ordered a ban on gas-powered cars starting in 2035 because California is facing “a climate damn emergency.” For good measure, he then happily signed off on a bill that mandates the “study and development of proposals for reparations for blacks who live in the Golden State.” Newson insisted in a Tweet that our past is “one of slavery, racism, and injustice.” Could he not know that California was not part of the Confederacy?

But then he went against form. In a major surprise, he vetoed Assembly Bill 331 on Sept. 30th. This wretched legislation would have made taking an ethnic studies class a requirement to graduate high school in the state. “There is much uncertainty about the appropriate K-12 model curriculum for ethnic studies,” Newsom wrote in his veto statement. “The latest draft, which is currently out for review, still needs revision.”

Revision? Mercy killing is more apt. Bills like this invariably come replete with a strong political agenda, and more than anything promote victimology and anger, as well as providing a future army for the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. As I wrote two weeks ago, the model curriculum approves of classes that stress “modern day movements and intersectional struggles for social justice like the Immigrant Rights Movement, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the Environmental Justice Movements, Feminist Movements, LGBTQIA Queer Movements, and others.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/10/09/doj-sues-yale-university-over-race-based-admissions-policies-n1027040

After complaints from Asian-American groups, the U.S. Department of Justice is suing Yale University for discriminating against applicants based on race.

The suit alleges that Yale violated federal civil rights laws for the last 50 years. The suit also says the university uses an “oversized, standardless, intentional use of race” to favor black and Hispanic students over whites and Asians.

The Hill:

DOJ alleges that Yale University’s practices place “undue and unlawful penalties on racially-disfavored applicants, including in particular most Asian and White applicants,” according to a press release.

“Instead of using race in a narrow, time-limited, and targeted manner to achieve specific and defined educational goals, Yale has institutionalized its use of racial preferences as a permanent feature of its admissions process and decisions,” the complaint said.

There are hundreds of schools that give a wink and a nod in the law’s direction in order to favor black and Hispanic candidates for admissions. They don’t use race as the sole determinant in choosing students, they say. Indeed, as long as their policies conform to the statutes, they believe they’re in the clear.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/black-law-students-demand-racism-thought-police-richard-l-cravatts/

In George Orwell’s dystopian view of the totalitarian state in his novel 1984, freedom of speech and expression is controlled completely, and if the individual seeks to articulate his views openly it is considered to be something called “thoughtcrime,” “the essential crime that contained all others in itself.” And in that repressive future, the enforcers of intellectual conformity, using the mandatory relinquishing of individual thought and imagination, were the Thought Police, who forced “the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”

Now, in an effort to filter out any visible or invisible racism in their law school classrooms, the Black Law Students Association of University of San Diego’s Law School have proposed creating their own version of Orwell’s ThinkPol.

“As Black law students we are privileged with the opportunity to pursue a legal education and seek membership to the legal profession, however, we are not immune to the oppression that is inextricably linked to our Blackness,” the group whined in a six-page letter to USD law school faculty and students in the wake of the George Floyd death. And in order to create a brave new anti-racist world at USD, the BLSA letter presents a long list of specific demands, including the predictable ones which appear regularly in lists of anti-racist demands at other schools, such as: mandatory diversity and inclusion courses, access to complete biographies of law faculty, presumably so students can avoid taking courses from professors with unacceptable views, more scholarships for black students and students of color, and a call to hire more minority professors.

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.