RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/yale-discrimination.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20200813&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=headline&regi_id=2636639&segment_id=36042&user_id=2dfc89bd6c52e6103e5ac62f916a8f0d

The Trump administration said the university discriminated against Asian-American and white applicants. Yale defended its practices and vowed to maintain them.

The Justice Department on Thursday accused Yale University of violating federal civil rights law by discriminating against Asian-American and white applicants, an escalation of the Trump administration’s moves against race-based admissions policies at elite universities.

The charge, coming after a two-year investigation, is the administration’s second confrontation with an Ivy League school; two years ago, it publicly backed Asian-American students who accused Harvard in a lawsuit of systematically discriminating against them.

The department’s finding could have far-reaching consequences for the ongoing legal challenges to affirmative action, which are expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court. Some conservative groups have long opposed affirmative action, a tool born in the civil rights era, and a handful of states have banned such policies at public universities.

“There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination,” Eric S. Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, said in a statement announcing the Justice Department’s move against Yale. “Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocs fosters stereotypes, bitterness and division.”

The Justice Department said that Yale had violated Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action by using race not as one of many factors in deciding which applicants to invite to the freshman class, but as a predominant or determining factor in admissions — an effect that was multiplied for competitive applicants.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/faculty-demand-racism-star-chamber-princeton-richard-l-cravatts/

The death of a black man under the knee of a brutal policeman in Minneapolis sent shock waves of racial guilt throughout America, where protestors, led principally by Black Lives Matter, took to the streets to malign America’s troubled history with race and reignite the conversation about how to atone and pay for the country’s original sin of slavery and racial oppression. Not surprisingly, that same paroxysm of indignation immediately appeared on university campuses, which for decades had already been obsessing about and condemning what they perceive to be structural racism, a lack of sufficient inclusion and diversity, and both subtle and overt instances of racism that triggered minority students and supposedly hindered their attaining equity.   

Even though a university campus is the least likely place where students or faculty confront actual racism, from the moment they step foot on campus, students are tutored on how, even at some of the most elite educational institutions in the world, they are oppressed, intimidated by bigotry, hindered by systematic and structural racism, and even subject to unconscious, invisible, and latent racism. As if to confirm that universities remain petri dishes of racism, virtually every university has set up fiefdoms of administrative offices of inclusion, diversity, and equity dedicated solely to ferreting out any incidence of racism, bigotry, or bias and helping minority students to see themselves as perpetual victims of both real and imagined racism.

Leading the way in this relentless pursuit for this ever-present racism, Princeton’s Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity leads a bloated and costly fiefdom of oppression which includes a Senior Associate Director for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, an Assistant Director for Equity Compliance, an Equity and Diversity Specialist, a Director for Institutional Equity and EEO, an Equity and Diversity Specialist, not to mention three University Investigators mandated, one would assume, to ferret out bigotry and oppression.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/10/cotton-to-higher-ed-loosen-up-or-lose-your-money/

This is how bad higher education has gotten: Republican Senators who worry about federal overreach and don’t wish to harm large institutions in their own states have decided that colleges and universities have fully abandoned their Ivory Tower mission and can only be repaired from the outside. The remedy is called the “Campus Free Speech Restoration Act,” which was introduced by Tom Cotton. Stanley Kurtz explains the salient elements of the Act here. 

The proposal is simple. “Under CAFSRA,” Kurtz writes, “public colleges and universities that promulgate restrictive speech codes, so-called free-speech zones, and other unconstitutional speech policies will lose their eligibility to receive federal student loans and grants through the Higher Education Act.” Private universities will face lesser scrutiny, required only to disclose their rules for free speech and adhere to them or else face lawsuits.

That’s it: Protect free speech or the federal faucet is shut off. College leaders will have a decision to make. They can maintain illiberal practices such as the sequestered free speech zones (which cabin free speech to postage-stamp areas of campus and have even led the ACLU to protest them) and thereby see federal dollars disappear, or they can dismantle those practices and keep the money coming. They can revise their speech codes to fit the First Amendment and lose no funding, or they can maintain those codes and suffer at the bottom line.

The law has several provisions that Kurtz enumerates regarding complaint procedures and review processes, the role of the U.S. Department of Education, etc. that might slow down its passage. A few Republican legislators may claim discomfort with federal intrusion into state and private entities, although massive federal subsidies to higher education happen all the time and, currently, support these unconstitutional practices. Democrats likely will oppose it for the obvious reason that higher education has become a liberal stronghold and pipeline. The censorious campus has worked very well for the Left. Democrats won’t want to change it.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/07/kick-the-1619-project-out-of-schools/

America needs to get the “1619 Project” curriculum out of its schools. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has introduced a new bill that would go a long way toward that goal—the Saving American History Act of 2020 (SAHA 2020).

The New York Times introduced The “1619 Project” last August. The “1619 Project” mainstreamed the anti-American ideology of a new generation of woke activists, who have graduated from college radicalism to careers in progressive institutions such as the Times. The “1619 Project” seeks to rewrite American history with the claim that it is based on slavery and oppression, rather than on liberty and democracy, in order to delegitimize the American republic. 

The “1619 Project” claims to be “revisionist” history—but many of the best scholars of American history swiftly demonstrated that it was nothing more than a shabby, fact-free polemic. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning mastermind of the “1619 Project,” recently admitted that the effort never had a historical basis—and never even intended to be history. 

“I’ve always said that the ‘1619 Project’ is not a history,” Hannah-Jones said in a series of tweets. “It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.”

Nevertheless, the “1619 Project” has had a profound impact on America’s schools. 

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/woke-colleges-are-assembly-lines-conformity

Don’t be fooled by universities’ incessant chatter about “diversity.” Most are poster children for ideological conformity and proud of it. The faculty, students, and administrators know it. Indeed, many welcome it since their views are so obviously right and other views so obviously wrong. They believe discordant views are so objectionable that no one should express them publicly.

What views are now considered beyond the pale? They almost always involve ordinary political differences. We are not talking here about direct physical threats. Those are already illegal, and universities rightly deal with them. They don’t have to face neo-Nazi marches. Nor is anyone advocating such noxious ideas as genocide, slavery, or child molestation. Speech about those subjects might be legal, but virtually nobody is making the case for them. That is not what the fight for freedom of speech on campus is about. It is about the freedom to voice—or even hear—unpopular views on topics such as merit-based admissions, affirmative action, transgender competition in women’s sports, abortion, and support for Israel.

These are perfectly legitimate topics, and students ought to be free to hear different ideas about them. They are hotly contested topics in America’s body politic. That’s how democracies work. Not so on college campuses, where the “wrong views” are not just minority opinions. They are verboten, and so are the people who dare express them. Challenging this repressive conformity invites condemnation, severs friendships, and threatens careers. It is hardly surprising that few rise to challenge it.

Worse yet, university leaders seldom do. They have a fundamental responsibility to defend open discourse, and they have largely abdicated it. Shame on them. Instead of defending the free expression of unpopular views, they condemn them and flaunt their own virtue. That’s what Princeton’s president Christopher Eisgruber did when he attacked classics professor Joshua Katz, saying Katz had not exercised free speech “responsibly” when he allegedly gave a “false description” of a Black student group. Katz’s own department condemned him, too, though the university finally decided the professor would not be formally punished. They will save the ducking chair for another day.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/defunding_school_police.

Craziness now exits on an industrial scale but among all foolish ideas, none is stupider than trying to defund police departments, particularly where poor people, disproportionately African Americans, depend on policing. Yet, just when it seems that this insanity cannot get worse, it does, and the latest madness concerns extending defunding demands to include school police. The Klan’s Imperial Wizard must be thrilled by a policy that will further undermine the education of African Americans. Do anti-cop crusaders honestly embrace the Rousseauian fantasy that children naturally soak up knowledge if only left on their own? 

This defunding effort is not as preposterous as it might initially appear. Milwaukee schools have already terminated their relationships with the city’s police department while Portland. OR schools removed armed police officers from schools. Denver, Co has likewise banned police from its schools, a policy also enacted by Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN.  The LA school district cut $25 million in policing funds from its budget while in Berkeley the cut was 50%.  Declining municipal budgets may encourage yet more reductions especially if justified by “racial justice.”  

To understand this crusade, consider an article in Colorlines, a radical black magazine. “Black and Brown Students Are Organizing to Remove Police From Their Schools” outlines the campaign and notes this to be an ongoing quest. To quote:  

Law enforcement has had a brief yet abusive relationship with American public schools, spurring the terrorization of Black and Brown students and increased interaction with law enforcement at a young age. The rationale behind police in schools has always been for the “safety” of children. Yet, since police have shown up, the school to prison pipeline has strengthened, putting young children into the legal system and criminalizing their oftentimes normal behavior. (Italics added)

In resistance, youth and student organizers have taken to school board meetings and the streets to fight for the removal of police from schools in line with the national call to defund the police,,,

In other words, no rational reason exists for this policing since, allegedly, African Americans behave themselves, so policing just unfairly criminalizes innocent people of color, an argument identical to what Black Lives Matter activists insist — inherently racist cops routinely murder blameless blacks.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/margate-mosque-youth-bigotry-and-terror-joe-kaufman/

Izhar Khan is the imam of Masjid Jamaat Al’Mu-mineen (MJAM), the South Florida mosque associated with the ever-expanding Islamic Center of Margate. Khan, in the recent past, was charged by the FBI with helping to finance the Taliban, and MJAM currently promotes violence and bigotry against Jews, Christians, homosexuals, women and others. So how is it that parents would allow their children to be taught classes by Imam Khan and to use the MJAM facilities, as they have, unless these parents’ attitudes toward terror and bigotry are the same?

On June 22nd, the South Florida Muslim Federation (SoFlo Muslims), an umbrella group for South Florida’s many radical Muslim organizations, advertised on its Facebook page Wednesday ‘Seerah’ classes being taught by Imam Khan and MJAM – seerah, meaning biography or traditions of Prophet Muhammad. The classes were/are being taught to members of the South Florida Muslim Young Professionals (SoFloMoPros), a partner group to the Muslim Federation that claims to include “over 500 Muslim young professionals and graduate students.”

Having so many young and impressionable people being exposed to the teachings/indoctrination of Khan and MJAM is certainly a concern, but what is of much more concern is the fact that small children are also taking classes from Khan and the mosque.

On the homepage of MJAM’s website, one finds a photo depicting Khan handing out certificates to young boys donning MJAM t-shirts, as their smiling parents and siblings look on. According to the site, classes (‘Daily Youth Madrassahs’) for children led by Khan take place five days a week. The mosque claims to provide them with a “quality Islamic Education.” Given Khan’s terror-related history and MJAM’s present propagation of hate, one has to wonder what this quality education entails.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/soft-bigotry-low-expectations-rutgers-richard-l-cravatts/

A stunning letter written by Rebecca L. Walkowitz, the chair of Rutgers’ English Department, “Department actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter,” affirms how deeply academia is now in the thrall of racism hysteria, and particularly after the death of George Floyd under the knee of a brutal police officer in Minneapolis. The letter is steeped in the language of social justice, racial equity, white supremacy, and racial oppression, leading one to wonder why an English department—whose function is, nominally, the study of literature and the teaching of techniques of writing and composition—would craft its entire mission and curriculum around an slavish affection with an anti-racist, Black Lives Matter-inspired ideology.

When did it become the role or purpose of an English department—and especially in a public university—to make as a central feature of its teaching social issues which are only tangentially related to the subject matter? This is not a social justice department, or black studies department, or an institute or program that focuses on race, social issues, and activism. So the letter’s stated intention that the English Department will “stand with and respond to the Black Lives Matter movement . . . create and promote an anti-racist environment . . . and . . . contribute to the eradication of the violence and systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color members of our community,” seems wildly inconsistent with what is, and should be, the role of an English department.

Not content with making a course in African-American literature a requirement in the English curriculum, every aspect of the pedagogy and instruction is suffused with layers of obsessive victimology and racism, including sponsorship of workshops that seek to “cultivate critical conversations for Writing Program instructors around the disproportionate impacts of covid-19; state power; racism; violence; white supremacy; protest and resistance; and justice.” 

What is the theory here? That familiarity with and concern for racial justice is the single topic on which students should focus their writing. That knowledge of these highly-charged, political issues is necessary for clear and cogent writing? What if students who enroll in courses taught by these indoctrinated professors have alternate views about race, or Black Lives Matter, or the existence of white supremacy, or the legitimacy of protests, violent or otherwise? Are they allowed to express those views? Can they vocalize and write about a different view of race? Clearly not.

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.