RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/08/oh-say-can-uc/

The University of California, now with 10 campuses, long has been hailed as one of the world’s greatest research universities. Students, parents, and in particular distinguished UC alumni, might check out what is going now, as UC bosses “relax” admission requirements for fall 2020 “and future years as applicable,” as the office of the UC President recently announced.

“The COVID-19 outbreak is a disaster of historic proportions disrupting every aspect of our lives, including education for high school students, among others,” said University of California President Janet Napolitano.” Quick to copy was UC Board of Regents Chairman John Pérez.

“We want to help alleviate the tremendous disruption and anxiety that is already overwhelming prospective students due to COVID-19,” said Pérez. “By removing artificial barriers and decreasing stressors—including suspending the use of the SAT—for this unprecedented moment in time, we hope there will be less worry for our future students.”

The University of California serves the top tier of California’s high-school graduates. Many who scored well on the SAT, achieved a high GPA, and went on to professional careers might wonder how the SAT suddenly became an “artificial barrier.” To issue a proclamation like that, aspiring scholars might think, this regent chairman must be incredibly wise and highly qualified.

Notables from former U.S. labor secretary Hilda Solis and Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan to California Governor Gray Davis have hailed Pérez. He is, after all, a graduate of UC Berkeley, the most coveted campus in the UC system.

Except that turns out to be false.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/06/rethinking-university-dependence-on-foreign-students/

Once the coronavirus pandemic subsides, might it not be better if we tried to attract American students and their tuition dollars by competing to provide a rigorous, remunerative education?

Were all of the foreign students returning to America’s campuses in January vectors of infection for coronavirus? Especially the students from China? There’s no evidence yet to prove the point, although the odds are that at least some coronavirus infection came to the United States from foreign students.

If we’ve been spared a campus plague, it’s owing to the grace of God, and not to any actions by our colleges and universities.

To my knowledge, before the decision was taken out of their hands by the general lockdowns, no American college or university barred foreign students from returning to campus. No academic administration even suggested that foreign students should self-quarantine for two weeks before interacting with other students or professors.

The most active were institutions such as Princeton, which followed “a recommendation by the New Jersey Department of Health that students and faculty at K-12 schools and colleges who have recently returned from China ‘self-quarantine’ for two weeks if they’re at moderate or high risk of potentially contracting the illness.” Colleges and universities did nothing better than grudgingly acquiesce to ineffective directives from state health departments.

https://babylonbee.com/news/teachers-warn-parents-arent-properly-equipped-to-indoctrinate-children

U.S.—Teachers at government schools have raised their concerns that the recent closure of their institutions will have a damaging effect on students. In particular, the nation’s educators are worried that the longer the schools are closed, the more likely it is that students will begin thinking for themselves, learn life skills away from the government school system, and realize how much more they learn at home.

“We must reopen as soon as possible — before they regain their ability to have independent thoughts,” said New York 4th-grade teacher Ms. Jenny Mudd. “This is an urgent crisis. We realize we have to do our part to prevent the spread of the virus, but we must also prevent the spread of unapproved ideas. There’s a balance there.”

“Reopen the schools before it is too late.”

Sure enough, studies have already shown a strong correlation between everyone being homeschooled and a concerning spike in independent thought. Students who have been away from the government school system for even a week stop feeling depressed and anxious all the time and even show a shocking increase in the ability to form thoughts and ideas not approved by the government.

Teachers have further pointed out that parents aren’t properly equipped to indoctrinate their children with government propaganda. “I went to school for eight years to be able to do this,” said Portland kindergarten teacher Ms. Pinkerton. “Parents just don’t have the experience of stuffing kids’ heads full of a statist worldview seven hours a day like I do.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/reviving-racial-preferences-golden-state-lloyd-billingsley/

The University of California will relax undergraduate admissions requirements for students looking to enroll at UC for fall 2020 “and future years as applicable,” the office of the UC President announced this week.

“The COVID-19 outbreak is a disaster of historic proportions disrupting every aspect of our lives, including education for high school students, among others,” said University of California President Janet Napolitano.” UC Board of Regents chairman John Pérez expanded on that theme.

“We want to help alleviate the tremendous disruption and anxiety that is already overwhelming prospective students due to COVID-19,” said Pérez. “By removing artificial barriers and decreasing stressors – including suspending the use of the SAT – for this unprecedented moment in time, we hope there will be less worry for our future students.”

Description of the Scholastic Aptitude Test as an “artificial barrier,” would surprise the College Board, which administers the SAT, a proven objective measure of student achievement. For that reason, politically correct UC bosses have been seeking to junk it. As Saul Geiser of UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education said last year,  “If UC cannot legally consider the effect or race and segregation on test performance, neither should it consider SAT or ACT scores.” So the push to dump the SAT is all about race.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/01/warning-from-a-cancel-culture-cassandra/

Modern traditional and social media, in all of their multiplying and increasingly malevolent forms, provide replete evidence of our collective failure in recent decades to raise children properly. The end of scoring and the efflorescence of “everybody’s awesome” trophies that praise mere participation in order to boost self-esteem have created a generation (and more) of young people who, though demonstrating few actual skills, think themselves excellent at everything. Helicopter parenting and the swaddling of the young straight up through college and beyond has left these same young people without sufficient coping strategies or knowledge of the world. 

The abandonment of college curricula and speakers’ lists to the strident demands of the most mulish among them has denied them the true value of education. Such education can only really proceed if all parties understand that the primary flow of knowledge must pass from the teachers and to the young people; too many students today make demands about what they will study, when they should instead shut up and gratefully learn the things that people with more wisdom and experience than they yet have think they should know.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-chapel-hill-chancellors-moment-of-opportunity/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

Carol Folt abruptly resigned as UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor last year after the turmoil over the statue of a Confederate soldier. She took the side of the students who sought its removal, and left voluntarily.

Folt has been replaced by Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, formerly the dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences. He was recently interviewed by the Martin Center’s Shannon Watkins. It sounds like he could do some good.

Most important, he apparently understands that the university has a problem with intolerance for viewpoints that don’t align with leftist ideas. To that end, Chapel Hill has begun the Program for Public Discourse. Guskiewicz says that it is “focused on our students gaining an appreciation of viewpoint diversity, intellectual diversity, [and] bringing speakers in who sit at certain places along the ideological spectrum.” That’s a step in the right direction. But the acid test will come if far-left students decide to prevent a speaker they dislike from speaking. If Chapel Hill has an incident like that at Middlebury College, will the guilty students get off with just a slight reprimand?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/another_pandemic_known_as_social_justice.html

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has produced a report titled “Social Justice Education in America.”  Written by David Randall, it defines, describes, and delineates many of the destructive and deceptive ideas behind the innocent-sounding social justice programs that have mushroomed in American institutions of higher learning.

According to this December 2019 report, “in the last twenty years, a generation of academics and administrators has transformed higher education into an engine of progressive political advocacy.”  Identity politics plays a major role in how social justice will be administered.  Social justice activists work to increase the “state’s coercive power” to decide who will get their fair share concerning employment, housing, income, health care, leisure, political power, property, social recognition, and wealth. 

Consequently, social justice buzz words such as food justice, educational poverty, and health equity aim to increase state power “to tax the citizenry to fund progressive spending priorities.” If social justice warriors deem it, then any alleged privilege must be eliminated so that “identity groups defined by categories such as class, race, and gender” will not be oppressed. 

To achieve their aims, universities are watering down requirements in order to attract more women and minorities. This portends “disastrous [repercussions] for scientific innovation and American competitiveness” not to mention the care of sick people.