RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/let-re-education-begin-student-fascists-demand-richard-l-cravatts/

As campuses across the country are roiled in paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over race, some black students, enraged and emboldened by the murder of George Floyd under the knee of an abusive white police officer, have formed coalitions and presented elaborate, and breathtakingly audacious, lists of demands which they have nailed to the doors of their respective university administrations.

“The power to be found in victimization, like any power,” wrote Shelby Steele in The Content of Our Character, “is intoxicating and can lend itself to the creation of a new class of super-victims who can feel the pea of victimization under twenty mattresses.” Apparently, the new victims in the current culture of aggrievement on campus have been irritated by the ‘hard pea’ of racism and want everyone else to know and feel their pain, as well, since the lists of demands from the campus crybullies invariably includes one well-intentioned, but intellectually pernicious, item; namely, mandatory sensitivity training for all students, faculty, and staff on the topics of diversity, oppression, racism, and other maladies purportedly afflicting black students on today’s campuses.

In early June, for example, black student leaders at the University of Miami sent the administration a list of 11 recommendations, including their important goal of implementing a “mandatory university-wide diversity, social justice and cultural sensitivity training program.”

At the University of Pittsburgh, black students there, “Black Pitt,”  apparently “are exhausted mentally, physically, as well as emotionally[and] [each] day we find ourselves overcompensating to make up for the University’s failures at combating racism on campus, in the classroom, and amongst students.” In order to change the racist character of the Pitt campus, the audacious students seem to desire to upend the entire academic structure of the institution and to “Transform the mission of the focus of our academic curriculum to be inclusive and comprehensive regarding the plight and triumphs of Black people.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/california-school-boards-support-anti-semitic-robert-spencer/

A Leftist protester in Portland recently announced that the goal of the riots that have recently swept the nation is the “abolition of the United States as we know it,” to the applause of her audience (which included not just miseducated children, but a middle-aged priest who should have known better). Rioters around the country, who are overwhelmingly young, middle-class Americans, have made abundantly clear their incandescent hatred for the United States. In the midst of all this, the California Department of Education has given us a vivid illustration of how we got here. It has developed an “Ethnic Studies” curriculum that would make Josef Goebbels proud.

The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) reported Thursday that “more than a dozen California school boards have adopted resolutions in support of the state’s proposed ethnic-studies model curriculum, despite it have come under fire for containing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel content, and not addressing issues of anti-Semitism or including Jewish Americans.”

It’s all happening under the cover of darkness, deception, and coronavirus distraction, thanks to a group called “Save CA Ethnic Studies.” A letter to the California Department of Education (CDE) protesting the curriculum states: “School board members asked to vote on the resolution are not shown the original draft curriculum, and not informed about the enormous outpouring of criticism it engendered or that a CDE process is well underway for the curriculum’s redesign.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/17/the-science-is-very-clear-schools-should-reopen-in-fall/

Progressives like to brag that they prize science over politics. Indeed, it’s a major talking point in their effort to “transform” America from the greatest nation on Earth to, well, something else. But one look at the debate over reopening schools this fall shows just how absurd that assertion really is.

Los Angeles, home to the nation’s second-largest school district, is a case in point. The city has long been governed by far-left Democrats, to its detriment. But the local teachers’ union really takes the cake when it comes to extremist positions on COVID-19 and school closures.

The 35,000-strong union put out a staff “research paper” — it was in fact merely regurgitated leftist talking points and propaganda — telling local politicians they would refuse opening unless, among other things, there was a “moratorium” on charter schools and the police were defunded.

Among the “other things” in the union demands were a national Medicare-for-All program, new taxes on the wealthy, and, of course, a federally funded infusion of cash for the near-bankrupt Los Angeles school district.

The proposal would place so many restrictions on students and their interaction with teachers that it would make the educational experience nearly meaningless. But the document went way beyond just talking about education. Here’s a taste:

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States underscores the deep equity and justice challenges arising from our profoundly racist, intensely unequal society. Unlike other countries that recognize protecting lives is the key to protecting livelihoods, the United States has chosen to prioritize profits over people. The Trump administration’s attempt to force people to return to work on a large scale depends on restarting physical schools so parents have child care.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/bias-and-bigotry-on-the-syracuse-university-campus/

The message for Jewish students is clear: Shed your identity or get canceled. Justine Murray

What appeared to be a noble effort to discuss bias at Syracuse University ironically turned into a vicious exercise in bias and bigotry as the conversations turned into an anti-Semitic witch hunt. A few students recently created multiple Instagram pages, inviting fellow students and faculty to post stories about incidents of bias on campus. Those who share their stories are permitted to remain anonymous, but the students and professors accused of perpetrating bias are freely and fully identified—and targeted.

One of the pages has warned their viewers to look out for “openly Zionist” professors on campus, naming one professor in particular and attacking students who support the faculty member.

Miriam F. Elman, who teaches about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, isn’t the only Jewish professor who works at Syracuse, but she is openly Zionist and isn’t afraid to say so. Despite being on leave for the past year, she is being singled out by a malicious and libelous smear campaign on one Instagram page that is demanding that she be fired because of her Zionism and former service in the Israeli Defense Forces.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/15/despicable-behavior-of-todays-academic-intellectuals/

The Michigan State University administration pressured professor Stephen Hsu to resign from his position as vice president of research and innovation because he touted research that found police are not more likely to shoot black Americans.

The study found: “The race of a police officer did not predict the race of the citizen shot. In other words, black officers were just as likely to shoot black citizens as white officers were.”

For political reasons, the authors of the study sought its retraction.

The U.S. Department of Education warned UCLA that it may impose fines for improperly and abusively targeting white professor Lt. Col. W. Ajax Peris for disciplinary action over his use of the n-word while reading to his class the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that contained the expressions “when your first name becomes ‘n—-r,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are).”

Two regimes are fighting an ideological war in America today. But what side are you on? And how can you sharpen up on how to defend your position? Learn more now >>

Referring to white civil rights activists, King wrote, “They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as ‘dirty n—-r-lovers.’”

Boston University is considering changing the name of its mascot Rhett because of his link to “Gone with the Wind.”