RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/campus-culture-seizes-the-streets-11593973851?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

How did radical ideas like abolishing or defunding the police move from the fringes to official policy seemingly overnight in cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York? And after George Floyd’s killing by police touched off protests, why did so many prominent journalists and intellectuals rationalize looting and violence? For an answer, look to the nation’s politicized college campuses.

A well-known professional standard for college professors warns against “taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own.” That statement, from the American Association of University Professors, dates from 1915 but is still in force.

Most campuses have similar rules of their own. Yet across the country, these categorical prohibitions are now ignored. Academia has become politicized from top to bottom.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/_the_devils_pitchfork_seeking_the_origin_of_our_present_troubles.html

The progressivist campaign to destroy America is three-pronged, the tines of the devil’s pitchfork, namely: de-individuation, de-historicizing, and what I’m tempted to call pre-eminent domain (the power of the state to take more than one’s physical property). In other words, it is a war against three intimately related phenomena: self-governing personhood, historical memory, and the possession of property, whether intellectual or private property as understood by John Locke.1 Thus our ideas are no longer our own but state-injected bromides, history has been co-opted in the service of a political fantasy, and ownership is the prerogative of the state.

It is clear that the entire sensibility of the age, and certainly of the coming era, has changed dramatically, not only as the result of the onslaught of lethal political and cultural viruses like democratic socialism, “social justice,” postmodern relativism and radical feminism, but of the “Information Revolution” and its carrier, the Internet, in particular the social media platforms run by a cabal of corporate oligarchs. The ideological trifecta appears to be irresistible:

The contours of the reflective and stable self, as mediated in the family and local communities, are disintegrating by the day. As I’ve written previously, the individual, in the classic sense of a coherent center of cognitive awareness and moral responsibility, actuated by the conviction of individual responsibility for self, family, and nation, has become the relic of a vanishing tradition. The inclination is to identify with presumably benevolent but actually savage abstractions. In today’s ‘enlightened’ world, the pastoral fantasy — aka socialism — a dead idea embalmed with the illusion of vitality, has once again assumed massive and destructive proportions. The thinking, self-aware, common-sense individual is its prey, persuaded or coerced to surrender his autonomy to the false comfort of an all-embracing collectivism that spares him the anxiety of choice and risk.
Genuine scholarship is almost extinct and historical memory seems to malinger in a condition of permanent lockdown. There are many ways to abolish history: toppling and defacing cultural monuments (as we see happening today); re-writing the historical record (Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States2 or the New York Times’ 1619 Project, for example); and replacing the faculty of intellectual curiosity regarding origins — the historical imagination — with rote-learned slogans and dogmatic teachings, the program of modern education from kindergarten to graduate school. What we are observing is a chronosectomy in progress.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence/

The media blitz during these last several weeks revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and defaced a monument to African-American veterans of the Civil War, many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or college.

Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name “Gettysburg”? Could they even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?

Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident, loud, and self-righteous. But the media blitz during these last several weeks of protests, riots, and looting also revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

Many of the young people on the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s. But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their grandparents — survivors of the Great Depression and World War II.

How can so many so sheltered and prolonged adolescents claim to be all-knowing?

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2020/06/30/universities-commit-to-racism-n587609

One of the famed universities in the world, Cambridge University, knows which side it is on. When one of its lecturers tweeted, “White lives don’t matter,” and then “Abolish whiteness,” the university defended her, and then promoted her to the rank of professor. When another instructor tweeted “White lives matter,” his contract was terminated. The anti-white lecturer was a female of color, while the instructor who thinks white lives matter was a white male. White males, as woke “social justice” activists tell us, are wrong, they are oppressors, and inherently toxic racists. Females, especially females of color, are deemed to be victims of white male oppression, and are always right. 

Is there a word for thinking about people of different races differently? Ratism, raverism, ragusism? What about for treating people of different races differently? Discresionism, depressionism, deterentism? Whatever you want to call them, Cambridge University has them down pat, and so does every other university in North America and Western Europe. Racism has become official policy in every university, policed by the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” commissars who command thought and re-educate or exile dissidents, and by the woke politicians who give them their marching orders. And discrimination in favor of preferred categories of people is the new standard of “justice.”

Professors and administrators who speak out against woke orthodoxy are attacked and hounded out of their jobs by “social justice” warriors. The Michigan State University Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation was summarily fired for daring to question the benefits of diversity and the costs of canceling merit in science. Anyone today daring to recommend “colorblind” admissions and hiring, or saying “all lives matter,” is immediately labeled a RACIST! and fired. Only “correct” speech is acceptable to woke academics and cowardly administrators. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-reverses-ban-on-single-sex-student-organizations-following-bostock-ruling/

Harvard has announced it will lift a blacklist on unrecognized single-sex student organizations, including fraternities and sororities, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County.

That ruling decided that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay or transgender employees from discrimination due to their sexual orientation. Harvard in 2016 instituted a blacklist of some single-sex student organizations by denying scholarships and other opportunities to members of those organizations.

The blacklist “was adopted for the purpose of counteracting overt discrimination on the basis of sex—specifically, the exclusion of Harvard College students from social organizations because of their gender,” Bacow wrote in a statement on Monday. However, fraternities and sororities subsequently brought a lawsuit against the university in the U.S. District Court in Boston.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/06/315-college-deans-tell-applicants-academics-daniel-greenfield/

If you thought that the modern campus was a warren of safe spaces, radical politics, and neutered learning, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Here’s a statement by 315 college deans hot and fresh off the Harvard site about their priorities for incoming students.

This statement was developed in collaboration with admissions leaders and has been endorsed by leaders at more than 315 institutions across the United States. It describes what college admissions offices value and expect—and don’t expect—from students during the pandemic.

I’ll just give you the bullet points to show off the new normal.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/29/princeton-students-beg-university-to-buck-the-mob-and-defend-free-speech/

Eva Duffy is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at the University of Chicago where she studies American history.

After the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs published a list of demands for “anti-racist” policies, the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, a bipartisan student group dedicated to the “robust protection of important values such as free speech, free thought, and bold and fearless truth-seeking” issued a rebuttal letter. 

The School of Public and International Affairs’ demands included purging the university of any references to President Woodrow Wilson, hiring more black faculty, requiring antiracist training once per semester for all faculty, staff, preceptors, and administrators, and divesting from the “prison-industrial complex.”

Princeton University has already capitulated to one of the demands, purging Wilson’s name from its public policy school, saying it was “an inappropriate name sake.”

In a Fox News interview with Akhil Rajasekar, a member of the Open Campus Coalition, Rajasekar expressed deep concern for the name removal, explaining that Wilson transformed Princeton into a world-class university. He suggested that the university honor Wilson’s good deeds. He explained that in 2016, Princeton trustees voted to keep Wilson’s name on the school, but in 2020, Princeton has “buckled under the pressure.”   

The Open Campus Coalition letter to Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber states: “[T]he vast majority of claims and demands made by these students amounts to a concerted siege of free thought at Princeton, which they seek to effect by hijacking the University bureaucracy to create a monopoly for their beliefs on deeply controversial and contentious issues.” 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/29/three_ideas_to_end_the_rot_on_college_campuses_143564.htm

In the early 1950s, at the nadir of McCarthyism, the Cincinnati Reds baseball team was so fearful of anti-communist crusaders that it actually changed the team’s name. Overnight, they reverted to their original name, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, and then for several years became the Redlegs. The anti-communism was justified; the mob mentality was not. Today, we are all Redlegs. This time, the repression is coming from the left.

It’s not just that a careless word can cost your job, it’s that people tremble in fear that they might say the wrong word. Today, as in the past, the loudest, most extreme voices claim the right to control speech and judge whether it is worthy of being heard at all. The giants of technology and media have either bowed to these demands or embraced them enthusiastically. The result, as in the early 1950s, is a shriveled, impoverished public square. Genuine debate is suppressed, even in classrooms, which should nurture informed discussion with multiple viewpoints. All too often they have become pipelines for indoctrination.

What’s wrong with this rigid groupthink? First, it takes real problems, such as police misconduct or Confederate statues, and inflates them for political purposes. It vastly exaggerates their extent and gravity, mistakenly generalizes them (Ulysses Grant is not Stonewall Jackson), ignores significant progress in correcting old errors, calls any disagreement “racist,” and relies on intimidation and sometimes violence, not democratic procedures, to get their way. The loudest voices say America and its history are fundamentally evil, that its institutions need to be smashed so they can be reestablished on “socially just” foundations. The mob and their fellow travelers will determine what is just. Who gives them that right? This arrogation of power and attack on public order will not end well.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/insults-black-history-walter-williams/

“Government should do its job of protecting constitutional rights. After that, black people should be simply left alone as opposed to being smothered by the paternalism inspired by white guilt. On that note, I just cannot resist the temptation to refer readers to my “Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon,” which grants Americans of European ancestry amnesty and pardon for their own grievances and those of their forebears against my people so that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like fools in their relationship with Americans of African ancestry.”

Many whites are ashamed, saddened and feel guilty about our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. Many black people remain angry over the injustices of the past and what they see as injustices of the present. Both blacks and whites can benefit from a better appreciation of black history.

Often overlooked or ignored is the fact that, as a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles, and in a shorter span of time than any other racial group in history.

For example, if one totaled up the earnings and spending of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank well within the top 20 richest nations. A black American, Gen. Colin Powell, once headed the world’s mightiest military. Black Americans are among the world’s most famous personalities, and a few black Americans are among the world’s richest people such as investor Robert F. Smith, IT service provider David Steward, Oprah Winfrey, and basketball star Michael Jordan. Plus, there was a black U.S. president.

The significance of these achievements cannot be overstated. When the Civil War ended, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed such progress would be possible in less than a century and a half — if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as important, it speaks to the greatness of a nation in which such gains were possible. Nowhere else on earth could such progress have been achieved except in the United States of America.