RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/cancel_yale.html

The combined endowment of the Ivy Leagues totaled $135 billion at the end 2018, a figure that will be considerably higher in 2019. Hence the sharp observation that they are hedge funds masquerading as universities. If only they were so benign. 

As these institutions never tire of reminding us or themselves, they educate the leaders of tomorrow, are led by renowned professors, make use of research, grants and publications to shape the contours of modern debate, and spread their influence  through vast alumni networks.

I write with particular interest in my alma mater, Yale, where I graduated many years ago summa cum laude from Yale College, Yale School of Management and Yale Law School. 

I take this opportunity to renounce myself as an alumnus in good standing. And I encourage as many alumni as possible to join in the movement to Cancel Yale, or your respective educational institution. 

Why?

The final straw for me is a random one, the decision to eliminate the introductory History of Art class as too white, too male and too Western, in favor of art history courses that explore race, gender and class, with special attention to climate change!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/make-western-civilization-great-again-mark-tapson/

Universities have been ceding ground to anti-Western activists for decades now (remember Jesse Jackson leading chants of “Hey ho, hey ho, Western civ has got to go” at Stanford back in the ‘80s?). So it should come as no surprise that Yale recently announced it would grant yet another concession to multiculturalist students who demand that diversity of skin color replace the oppressiveness and irrelevance of Dead White Males: this spring will see the end of one of the school’s previously most popular classes, a survey course called “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present.”

According to the Yale Daily News blog, in its final iteration the course will shift from transmitting to students a greater appreciation of their cultural heritage, to a more “woke” focus on subverting the canon of Western art itself. The course’s instructor, art history department chair Tim Barringer, has stated that the class will still cover Western art chronologically from 1300 to the present, but he intends to emphasize that other regions, genres and traditions are as “equally deserving of study” as Western art, because according it any special reverence is “problematic.”

As we are all reminded daily now in every cultural arena from academia to Hollywood, anything Western is “problematic” (to put it politely) because multiculturalist doctrine deems that all cultures must be revered equally – except for Western culture which, because of its association with the toxic privilege of “whiteness,” must be denigrated, deconstructed, and dismantled to heal the nonwhite victims of its oppression and exploitation. Thus, we must be careful not to elevate the great works of the greatest artists in world history over other, “equally deserving” genres and traditions.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/1619-project-omits-significant-detail-new-world-jason-d-hill/

The 1619 Project on slavery is a program organized by The New York Times in 2019 under the auspices of one of its chief staff writers, Nikole Hanna-Jones, with the goal of re-examining the legacy of slavery in the United States — and timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival in America of the first enslaved people from West Africa. The goal of the project is to reframe the country’s history, and to establish 1619 as true a founding of America as was the formal 1776 creation of the United States of America. The essays range in scope from attempting to prove how modern American capitalism is indelibly tied to slavery, to the alleged massive contributions the backward agrarian Southern institution of slavery actually made to the financial magnificence of the United States.

What I hope to establish in this article is not an attack against the 1619 Project — which has many well-documented nefarious components. I’d like to offer something different: a philosophical-anthropological account of why I believe chattel slavery was the inevitable outcome of a clash between the presence of a manifest destiny of European man, and the absence of one in African and, generally speaking—Indigenous Man.   

When European Man and African Man first encountered each other it must have been a shock to the sensibilities of both. Having established a particular relationship to the earth that differed greatly from that of African man, European man saw himself as more than custodian of the earth—he was its earthly owner who exercised Divine dominion over it. He had done this by creating an abstract personality that had devised a method of exploiting and conquering nature to adapt it to suit his needs. He had, in effect, divorced himself from his animality, transcended it, and placed nature in a subordinate position which he dominated and controlled with weapons, tools and reason. Objects he encountered, including soil, trees, animals, minerals and figures resembling human-beings outside the historical process who presented themselves as part of nature—were treated as nature; that is, they were simply appropriated, controlled, taken out of the state of nature and commodified into socially useful artifacts for human consumption.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/01/13/vandana-shiva-is-a-shameful-choice-for-university-lecturer/

The “Social Justice Warrior Handbook,” which satirizes people who promote liberal, multicultural, anti-capitalist, anti-globalization, and politically correct views, could have had Indian activist and mountebank Vandana Shiva on the cover. She opposes the tools and practices of modern agriculture and science — and well, modernity in general — and advocates regressive policies that cause widespread malnourishment, famine, and death to the very people she claims to champion. And she’s no friend of the environment, either.

It’s particularly ironic, then, that at the end of this month, two esteemed California universities — Stanford and the University of California, Santa Cruz — have invited Shiva to present prestigious lectures. That’s hardly surprising, given the extremist, “progressive” leanings of those institutions, but it is disturbing, nevertheless. Although she gets good press from left-wing and radical environmental publications, and naïve undergraduates dote on her, Shiva is widely considered by the scientific community to be unbalanced (in both senses of the word) for advocating unsound, harmful policies and promulgating disproven theories about agriculture.     

As science writer Jon Entine and Monsanto science communicator Dr. Cami Ryan discussed, many of Shiva’s hobby horses have proven to be exceedingly lame. Some prominent examples:

The “Green Revolution.” The new varieties and practices of the Green Revolution provided greater food security to hundreds of millions of people in developing countries on much of the planet; it made available high-yielding varieties of wheat and also new agronomic and management practices that transformed the ability of Mexico, India, Pakistan, China, and parts of South America to feed their populations. From 1950 to 1992, the world’s grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.7 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland — an extraordinary increase in yield per acre of more than 150%.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/parents_on_both_the_left_and_the_right_are_battling_public_schools.html

America is awash in kind, caring teachers, who want their students to acquire real skills and knowledge. Collectively, though, public schools too often are rigid bureaucracies that ignore individual children. Conservative parents would add that public schools push a hard Left agenda on students captive in their classrooms.

Some parents are starting to fight back. One set of parents, frustrated by public schools’ inflexibility when dealing with handicapped students, is fighting fire with fire by forming a union:

Keri Rodrigues and Alma Marquez said they were so appalled by the low standards of America’s public school teachers unions, they formed the National Parents Union (NPU), so families could have a greater say in their children’s education.

Rodrigues, a mother of three from Boston, and Marquez, a mother of one from Los Angeles, are no strangers to public-sector unions. Rodrigues worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), while Marquez grew up in a union household and worked for Green Dot Public Schools — a public charter organization.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/academias_leftism_becomes_more_aggressive_and_more_stupid.html

Conservatives have long been concerned about the stranglehold Leftists have had on academia in North America.  Recent news from academia should give them more reason than usual to be worried about what’s happen to students trapped in these institutions.

The most recent outrage — and it is outrageous — came on Tuesday from the University of Calgary, in Canada.  Professor Ted McCoy, the coordinator of the Law and Society Program in the university’s sociology department, sent out a tweet clarifying rumors about his classroom polices: “I heard it rumoured students will fail my class if they cite Jordan Peterson and I’d like to clarify that this is absolutely correct,” he tweeted.

https://spectator.org/the-zinn-education-project-teaching-trump-hate-and-other-dogma/

In December, the Zinn Education Project (ZEP), a non-profit co-founded in 2007 by William Holtzman, one of Howard Zinn’s Boston University students (class of 1974), to spread the lessons of Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States, excitedly announced in a fundraising appeal that his goal of signing up 100,000 teachers had been reached.

The effort to appear to be a legitimate educational organization supported by small donors was enhanced by Holtzman’s pledge of up to $15,000 in matching donations. Later, Dave Colapinto (class of 1982) promised to do as he had done in 2018, pledging $10,000. But the latest tax records on file show that for fiscal year 2016/2017 over $117,000 came from Holtzman and $100,000 came from the New Venture Fund, which hides donors like George Soros.

Nor is the organization educational in any meaningful sense, as evidenced by the solicitation’s claim that “Many of the students in high school today will be voting in 2020.” ZEP’s lessons are as un-political as Zinn’s tract, which for forty years has been spreading communist disinformation through wildly distorted quotations of sources, omission of critical evidence, and plagiarism, as I discovered in writing Debunking Howard Zinn. While Zinn lazily cut and pasted paragraphs from the historically suspect works of fellow radicals, he praised the Viet Cong by twisting the words of foreign service officer Douglas Pike to mean their opposite. In his book, Pike described the Viet Cong’s strategies as “agitprop” and accused them of “genocide.” Zinn said Pike claimed the Viet Cong were community builders helpfully teaching “communication” skills. My search through contemporaneous newspaper and magazine articles revealed that Zinn’s claims that the U.S. kept secret the World War II Japanese-American internment camps and that Vietnam War protestor Mary Moylan “was never found” after she refused “to surrender to the FBI” were patently false. It’s just a sampling of what I found.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/1619-project-top-historians-criticize-new-york-times-slavery-feature/

The dissenting historians are performing an important public service by making the dishonesty of The New York Times Magazine’s feature a matter of record.

The reviews of the 1619 Project are in.

It is “a very unbalanced, one-sided account.” It is “wrong in so many ways.” It is “not only ahistorical,” but “actually anti-historical.” It is “a tendentious and partial reading of American history.”

This is what top historians have said of the splashy New York Times feature on slavery in the U.S. that aspires to fundamentally reorient our understanding of American history and change what students are taught in the schools.

Given that the Times can’t necessarily be trusted to give a straight account in its news pages of Mitch McConnell’s latest tactical maneuver, it wouldn’t seem a natural source for objective truth on sensitive historical matters, and sure enough, the 1619 Project is shot through with an ideological radicalism that leads to rank distortions and laughable overreach.

The project has been controversial since it was first published in The New York Times Magazine last year, but its architects sneered at the critics as troglodyte conservatives (or “white historians”) unwilling to grapple with the country’s racial sins. Then the World Socialist Web Site — of all things — begin publishing interviews with eminent historians slamming the project.