RUTHFULLY YOURS

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

We are a polyglot nation, a people of all races, ethnicities and religions. We come from the four corners of the globe. But we are who we are. None of us chose to be born where we were. We did not choose the color of our skin. We did not choose our sex, height, or the color of our hair and eyes. We did not choose our physical prowess or our intellectual aptitude. Those are factors we are born with and cannot change; though we can, and we should, enhance them to our advantage. But we can also improve our lives through education. We can read, train and practice. And we can be taught that tolerance and civility are critical to survival as a society, community and nation.

Education has been called the civil rights issue of our time by George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. There are, however, disagreements as to how it is achieved. Democrats believe in the power of money, that more should be spent in poor districts and on inner city schools. Republicans favor choice. Money is important, but dollars expended do not always guaranty a positive result. New York City spends more than twice what the average school district in the United States spends per pupil ($25,199 versus $12,201 in 2017). Yet less than half of New York City students in grades three through eight passed State exams, according to the New York Times. Democrats are influenced by their dependence on the two major teachers’ unions, the National Educational Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Ninety-five percent of the $30 million they spent on elections in 2018 went to Democrats.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/22/canceling-yale/

By all means, cancel Yale. Remove the horrid name from clothing and other merchandise. But replace it with a more honorable name: Dummer. Dummer University. The Dummer School of Law. The Dummer School of Art. A Dummer degree. The name, as Gwendolen Fairfax said in a different context, produces agreeable vibrations. 

I see that #CancelYale is trending on Twitter and elsewhere in social media. It’s a development I’d like to encourage—not, to be frank, because I think that canceling things is a good idea. Quite the opposite. But if the Left is going to pursue its dream of destroying every reminder of our past it doesn’t like, and if woke institutions like Yale, bloated with too much money and far too much self-regard, are going to betray their raison d’être and join in the effort to control the present by destroying the past, then I think an example should be made of corrupt institutions like Yale and craven leaders like Peter Salovey, the university’s president.

Besides, if the Left can deface or destroy statues of George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and countless others, shouldn’t we insist that they live up to their own ideals and cancel racially tainted liberal institutions like Yale? 

https://www.nysun.com/national/if-fear-can-strike-at-university-of-chicago/91171/

In a 2017 New York Times column headlined “America’s Best University President,” Bret Stephens praised Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago as a defender of free speech.

The column quoted speeches and letters from Zimmer and other University of Chicago administrators and professors, including a committee that issued a 2015 report finding that, as Mr. Stephens quoted it, “Concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”

So it was surprising to see a blog post from John Cochrane, who until recently was a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Mr. Cochrane wrote on June 15, “I spent much of my last few years of teaching afraid that I would say something that could be misunderstood and thus be offensive to someone. Many of my colleagues report the same worries.”

If that level of fear accurately describes the situation at the University of Chicago, where the university administration has deservedly won national attention for coming down clearly, decisively, and publicly on the “open debate” side of the campus speech wars, imagine just how bad things are in the rest of academia.

In a moment when black Americans fear being killed by police, the concern that tenured professors might be inconvenienced might seem trivial. The worry at Chicago, as described by Mr. Cochrane, was less that university administrators would, on their own initiative, rule speech out of bounds.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/why_are_university_students_so_stupidityfriendly.html

The contemporary political landscape is mired in a tsunami of bad ideas. Who would have ever anticipated that defunding police departments, emptying out prisons, eliminating cash bail, free health care, free college, looting as a legitimate form of social protest politics, among other screwball ideas would go mainstream?  Socialism? How did views resting on blatant falsehoods jump from the academy’s ideological wet markets to the New York Times?

A full explanation must wait until passions cool, but in the meantime let me offer a personal account based on decades of university teaching where this nonsense initially metastasized from a few quirky campus ideas to a conquering idiocy.  

I began teaching government at an ivy league school in 1969. Yes, the students were exceptionally bright, but the faculty were unafraid of pushing them hard and an occasional Marine drill sergeant mentality was necessary. Stupidities were immediately confronted, often sarcastically and grading was tough. Some colleagues especially relished slicing and dicing fools, and students years later, would praise these martinets for “making me think and work hard.” Survivors could boast of a world-class, rigorous education.    

Matters began shifting in the ’70s as some faculty conflated easier grading (which facilitated student draft deferments) with opposing the War in Vietnam. Affirmative action admission now appeared and while these admittees lagged far behind regular students, most faculty anticipated no long-term harm, believing that blacks would eventually catch up. In any case, faculty still confidently dominated, students were still considered ignorant, and periodically informed of their failings. 

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Did you go to college? If so, then it is overwhelmingly likely that you have been the recipient of a nauseating communication like this one from ‘Maud’ (that would be Maud S. Mandel, President of Williams College) explaining how Williams will ‘confront and fight racial and social injustice.’

I hope that you are impressed by both Maud’s bravery and her virtue. In an earlier communication, just as the wave of violent hooliganism began rolling over the country at the end of May, she let us know that she is ‘disgusted, saddened and angered by ongoing racism in all forms and places’ (every last one!). What a paragon she is! Maud then went on to ‘state unequivocally’ (unequivocally!) ‘that Williams condemns racism, violence, and injustice and will continue using its resources’ (almost $3 billion) ‘to help students — and society writ large — better understand these forces so we can continue to fight them.’

There are a few things to note about all such communications. One is how similar they are to one another. It’s as if all those college presidents and CEOs of woke companies are working from the same list of bullet points distributed some semi-literate affiliate of antifa or Black Lives Matter. You’ll see the same clichéd phrases dusted off and crammed together in drearily conformist globules of thought-free emotive sentimentality. Claudius disingenuously said that Denmark was contracted in ‘one brow of woe’ because of the elder Hamlet’s death. Something similar can be said about the incontinent displays of pseudo-anguish by our elites.

A second, and related, thing to notice about such communications is how inexpensively purchased is their distress. ‘Disgusted, saddened, and angered,’ indeed. Do you believe it? Or do you think the outrage is 99 percent manufactured, off-the-rack posturing?

I cannot vouch for authenticity but it is a good scolding….rsk

This letter is a response from Oxford to Black Students attending as Rhodes Scholars to remove the statue of Oxford Benefactor, Cecil Rhodes.

“Dear Scrotty Students,

Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford students – a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.

This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs. If you don’t understand what this means – and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the
case – then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?”

Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilisation, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment  and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Samuel Johnson, Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison,
Cardinal Newman, Julie Cocks. We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater – their dear mother – and they respect and revere her accordingly.

And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short lived Southern African civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilisation has been as
near as damn it to zilch.

https://spectator.us/defund-colleges-not-cops/#

‘Defund the police!’ That’s the spray-painted, placarded, pixeled demand of the moment. The American left, from Black Lives Matterers to their knee-taking social-justice allies in their hydrangea-colored masks, has decided now is the moment to drain public resources from the custodians of public order.

I have an alternative. Now is the moment to defund the colleges. We should defund them because they are the root of the virulent anti-Americanism that feeds the riots, the looting and the learned helplessness that afflict the country. And they have been feeding the protest culture for generations. The chief lesson taught by our nation’s colleges and universities is soft disdain for our country and its forms of self-government. And the soft disdain ripens to outright antipathy for about a quarter of the graduates.

Defunding the police is a supposed cure for endemic racism and white supremacy. But America is not a racist country. To denounce America as racist is to accept a falsification of history and a wild distortion of the everyday reality experienced by Americans of every race. That some Americans of every race are racists doesn’t mean the country is racist. Racism is a feeble and fugitive feature of American life.

Why are so many Americans at the moment willing to endorse such a manifestly false claim? Because so many Americans have been to colleges that marinate them in the brine of Howard Zinn-style Marxist polemics against America, feminist screeds against patriarchy, black victimization narratives and the whole gamut of identitarian, teeth-gnashing nonsense. The graduates then walk these messages across the street to jobs in media, entertainment and technology where the visceral hatred of American values has become the elevator key to the executive suite. America has a real problem not with racism but with miseducation. We can start fixing that problem by defunding the colleges.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/in_a_world_of_sheeplike_conformity_hillsdale_college_takes_a_stand.html

Free Will Baptists founded Hillsdale College in 1844 under the name Michigan Central College. Despite the founders’ religious beliefs, the college has always been nonsectarian, although its teachings are informed by Christianity’s moral teachings. The college assumed its present name in 1853 when it relocated to Hillsdale, Michigan.

The Free Will Baptists who founded Hillsdale were abolitionists and true feminists, so the college immediately began admitting blacks and women. E.B. Fairfield, who was Hillsdale’s president from 1848 to 1869, was one of the founders of the Republican Party, a political party dedicated to abolishing slavery in the United States.

Because of Hillsdale’s abolitionist reputation, Frederick Douglass spoke there, as did Edward Everett, who shared the stage with Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. When the Civil War began, Hillsdale sent a higher percentage of students to the Union Army than any other college in Michigan. Sixty students gave their lives in the fight against slavery.

In the 20th century, as myriad colleges gave up their intellectual independence chasing after state and federal money (and, it seems, Chinese money), Hillsdale refused to do so. As it has since its founding, it depends entirely on private donations and tuition to meet its needs. Hillsdale is also one of the few colleges in America that continues the classic inquiring tradition of a liberal education, rather than falling in line with academic leftism and mindless obedience.

In sum, Hillsdale is a bastion of intellectual liberty, founded on a moral and historic bedrock dedicated to the equal rights of all people, regardless of race or sex. So, of course, people began insisting that it issue a statement supporting Black Lives Matter.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/cutting_off_donations_to_my_alma_mater.html

“What to do when your college apologizes for begging for money  “in the midst of this necessary national reckoning on systemic racism and police brutality.”

Henry Wickham, Kenyon College class of 1972, has agreed to share with readers a letter he wrote to our mutual alma mater, which we both have watched get captured by the left.  We both decided to stop donating to the college after being appalled upon receiving a recent fundraising appeal that contained the following disclaimer:

We know that fundraising for Kenyon likely isn’t your primary focus right now, in the midst of this necessary national reckoning on systemic racism and police brutality. 

For those who are unfamiliar with Kenyon, it used to be a rigirous classical liberal arts college, blessed with one on the most beautiful campuses in the world, and at the time we attended it, dedicated to teaching the foundations of the liberal arts and sciences.

 Here is how Henry responded. I think that this situation describes many schools, especially but not limited to the more highly selective and higher prestige campuses.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/charter-schools-enemies-block-black-success-11592520626?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

For decades, there has been widespread anxiety over how, when or whether the educational test score gap between white and non-white youngsters could be closed. But that gap has already been closed by the Success Academy charter school network in New York City.

Their predominantly black and Hispanic students already pass tests in mathematics and English at a higher rate than any school district in the entire state. That includes predominantly white and Asian school districts where parental income is some multiple of what it is among Success Academy students.

New York’s charter school students are predominantly black and Hispanic, and live in low-income neighborhoods. In 2019, most students in the city’s public schools failed to pass the statewide tests in mathematics and English. But most of the city’s charter school students passed in both subjects.

Such charter school results undermine theories of genetic determinism, claims of cultural bias in the tests and assertions that racial “integration” is necessary for blacks to reach educational parity with whites.

Back In 2013, a higher percentage of the fifth-graders in a Harlem charter school passed the mathematics test than any other public school fifth-graders in the entire state of New York.

The success of New York City’s charter schools is not only a threat to educational dogmas. Competition from charter schools is an existential threat to traditional public schools in low-income minority communities, which tend to have even lower educational outcomes than traditional public schools as a whole.