RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-college-testing-mistake-11590189601?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Thursday’s decision by the University of California regents to eliminate the SAT and ACT in admissions is a historic blow to excellence in higher education. Applicants to the largest university system in the U.S. will now be judged entirely on how well they can flatter admissions bureaucracies with coached personal statements, as well as high school grade-point averages whose meanings are obscured by grade inflation.

The UC started using the SAT in the 1960s to find talented students from modest backgrounds. As an exhaustive faculty senate report—ignored by university leadership—put it this year, “This original intent is clearly being realized at UC.” Yet diversity bean-counting has displaced the philosophy of merit and excellence that made the UC the envy of the world in the last century. The claim that math and reading tests discriminate against minorities (except Asians) easily won the day, never mind the evidence.

California’s political class is desperate to create a different racial makeup at the UC, and it sees testing as an obstacle. The SAT shines a light on failures and inequalities in California’s public K-12 school system. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend low-quality schools which because of unions are nearly impossible to reform. For California’s political class the convenient solution is to ban tests—concealing the achievement gap while congratulating themselves on a commitment to equity and inclusion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-colleges-have-accepted-6-billion-in-undisclosed-donations-from-foreign-governments-doe-probe-finds/

The Department of Education has discovered at least $6 billion in unreported donations to American universities from adversarial foreign nations, Townhall reported on Friday.

The DoE revealed its updates in a May 19 letter to Congress and a subsequent briefing to several ranking House Republicans who are conducting an investigation into the foreign funding of U.S. educational institutions.

The investigation was spurred by increasing reports of Chinese funding at U.S. educational institutions, including the prevalence of Confucius institutes on U.S. campuses. Confucius institutes are Chinese-government funded centers which ostensibly promote Chinese language and culture, but which U.S. agencies have warned spread propaganda for China’s government.

“Some [Institutions of Higher Education] leaders are starting to acknowledge the threat of foreign academic espionage and have been working with federal law enforcement to address gaps in reporting and transparency,” the letter from the DoE’s Office of the General Counsel reads. “However, the evidence suggests massive investments of foreign money have bred dependency and distorted the decision-making, mission, and values of too many institutions.”

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/21/multiple-universities-refuse-to-cooperate-with-federal-investigations-into-ties-to-china/

Several universities around the nation are currently under investigation by the Department of Education over their alleged financial ties to the Chinese government. A report published this week suggests that many universities are refusing to comply with a standard request to produce internal documents.

According to a report by the College Fix, several universities and colleges that are under investigation by the Department of Education are refusing to release internal documents that may contain evidence of undisclosed financial grants from the Chinese government.
The report claims that lawyers for several universities refused to comply with a request to produce documents, arguing that they were entitled to privacy under “Freedom of Information Act exemptions and legal privileges.” A letter from the Department of Education did not name the universities and colleges that have refused to comply with the request for documents.

Department of Education General Counsel Reed Rubinstein believes that many American universities and colleges have been compromised by foreign governments, China being one of the primary governments in question.  “However, the evidence suggests massive investments of foreign money have bred dependency and distorted the decision making, mission, and values of too many institutions,” Rubinstein said.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/15/the-coming-upheaval-in-education/

There is no way to sugarcoat it. The economic impact of COVID-19 will take its toll on education funding. The National Education Association is in full freak-out mode, “calling for an additional $175 billion to stabilize education funding—the $30.7 billion authorized thus far is not nearly enough.” The California Teachers Association echoes the $175 billion figure and adds that it should be part of a $1 trillion pay-out in the next CARES Act.

Referring to the 2008 recession when class sizes increased and teachers were laid off, United Teachers of Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl insists, “We cannot go back to that.”

We are currently the second-highest spending nation in the world, pouring more than $700 billion a year into education. Where do the unions think the additional billions of dollars are supposed to come from? Capital gains, withholding, corporate, and sales tax revenues are going to take a huge hit, and you can only print so much money before it becomes worthless. 

As such, education is going to have to make do with less. The question then becomes, how best to manage the cuts?

https://pjmedia.com/columns/mark-ellis/2020/05/15/the-lost-schoolchildren-of-covid-3-n394488

They dart out from places where you least expect to see them. Where you’d only expect to see them over the summer months. By the time the summer vacation period begins next month, they will have already had an equivalent amount of time off from school. Some are saying that school may not even start up in the fall.

If Portland schools open in September, an opening not yet scheduled, the children will have been out of school for six months, give or take. If school doesn’t resume in September, the kids will have fallen into a deep chasm of unschooling.

They are the lost schoolchildren of COVID. Yesterday, I saw one up in a tree.

While their parents responsibly socially-distance at home, or go to work in essential jobs, these children are living a life they have never experienced, a spring season without school.

Noon on a Tuesday, you hear them on the streets, in the yards. It’s homeschool recess, while their mothers prepare lunch. At seven o’clock each evening, when the neighborhood comes out of shutdown to bang drums and shake tambourines in tribute to first responders (and remind each other that “life” goes on), the kids dutifully appear, gawk at the spectacle, then disappear back into the hedges like Children of the Corn.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-therapeutic-campus

Before the coronavirus pandemic, before shelter-in-place orders, there was the campus safe space. Students claimed that they needed protection from perceived threats to their emotional well-being. College administrators were only too happy to comply, building up a vast edifice of services to respond to students’ alleged emotional trauma. Last year, Yale University created a safe space that will set the industry standard for years to come. Call it the college woke spa, though its official title is the Good Life Center. Featuring a sandbox, essential oils, massage, and mental-health workshops, the center unites the most powerful forces in higher education today: the feminization of the university, therapeutic culture, identity politics, and the vast student-services bureaucracy. While other colleges may not yet have created as richly endowed a therapeutic space as the Good Life Center, they’re all being transformed by the currents that gave it birth, currents visible even in the reaction to the coronavirus outbreak.

“I don’t know anyone [at Yale] who hasn’t had therapy. It’s a big culture on campus,” says a rosy-cheeked undergraduate in a pink sweatshirt. She is nestled in a couch in the subsidized coffee shop adjacent to Yale’s Good Life Center, where students can sip sustainably sourced espresso and $3 tea lattes. “Ninety percent of the people I know have at least tried.” For every 20 of her friends, this sophomore estimates, four have bipolar disorder—as does she, she says.

Another young woman scanning her computer at a sunlit table in the café says that all her friends “struggle with mental health here. We talk a lot about therapy approaches to improve our mental health versus how much is out of your control, like hormonal imbalances.” Yale’s dorm counselors readily refer freshmen to treatment, she says, because most have been in treatment themselves. Indeed, they are selected because they have had an “adversity experience” at Yale, she asserts.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/12/former-professor-at-emory-university-admits-to-covering-up-chinese-donations/

A former professor at Emory University pled guilty on Monday to filing false tax returns after he failed to report over $500,000 in donations from the Chinese government, as reported by the Daily Caller.

Professor Xiao-Jiang Li received at least half a million dollars from the Chinese government over a six-year period from 2012 to 2018, which he allegedly received as income while working at two Chinese universities, according to the Department of Justice. He was paid as a result of the Chinese government’s “Thousand Talents Program,” a recruitment program that preys on some Americans and often violates American financial law.

After pleading guilty to the felony charges, Li was sentenced by a U.S. District Judge to a year of probation and a fine to the IRS of just over $35,000.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jeff-reynolds/2020/05/11/beijings-outposts-chinese-propaganda-centers-alive-and-well-at-american-universities-n389834

As the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic continues to cause misery across the globe, it’s important to know how China spreads its propaganda. American universities have continued to ignore warnings by U.S. intelligence officials about Confucius Institutes. These centers, funded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), continue to operate on dozens of campuses across the United States, despite Congressional actions to block domestic funding to them. Intelligence officials say they are little more than propaganda centers operating to produce positive news about the CCP.

Campus Reform published a report and interactive map showing where the Confucius Institutes still operate:

CIA reports obtained by The Washington Free Beacon further revealed, “The [Chinese Communist Party] provides ‘strings-attached’ funding to academic institutions and think tanks to deter research that casts it in a negative light. It has used this tactic to reward pro-China viewpoints and coerce Western academic publications and conferences to self-censor. The CCP often denies visas to academics who criticize the regime, encouraging many China scholars to preemptively self-censor so they can maintain access to the country on which their research depends.”

While legislation signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018 resulted in about a dozen U.S. colleges shuttering Confucius Institutes on campus, those closures were largely the result of their loss of funding, rather than concerns for the country’s national security.

And now, nearly two years after that legislation became law, more than 75 Confucius Institutes are still in operation in the U.S., most of them on college campuses. From Maine to Florida to Kansas to California, these centers claim to educate American students about Chinese language and culture, and administrators who run the campuses on which they operate appear to believe the same country that claims to have fewer coronavirus deaths than the U.S, despite its population being more than three times the size of the U.S. population.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/freedom-center-shillman-fellow-sues-censorship-joseph-klein/

Dr. Jason Hill, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, filed a lawsuit on April 20, 2020 against DePaul University for its outrageous attempt to silence him with defamatory accusations, demonization and intimidation. The lawsuit, filed in the Circuit Court in Cook County, Illinois, arises from a Faculty Council resolution passed last year condemning Professor Hill for his writing of a strong pro-Israel op-ed published in The Federalist. Dr. Hill’s op-ed article is entitled “The Moral Case For Israel Annexing The West Bank—And Beyond.” The lawsuit also names interim provost Salma Ghanem and Scott Paeth, a professor of religious studies who led the campaign for the passage of the resolution when he was serving as the president of the DePaul Faculty Council.

Dr. Hill, a tenured professor, was not fired – this time. But his persecutors denied him due process, trashed his reputation, harassed him, and attempted to chill his future expression of opinion on topics considered too controversial for the snowflakes on the DePaul University campus. Dr. Hill’s complaint seeks an award of damages to vindicate his contractual and due process rights, clear his name, and compensate him for the pain, humiliation, and mental distress that the defendants inflicted upon him with their censure resolution and other actions.

Dr. Hill’s complaint alleges that the defendants “have subjected Dr. Hill to unlawful racial discrimination in that as an African-American they expect him to adhere to the opinion that African-Americans whose ancestors were slaves must view the Palestinians as an enslaved race and the Israeli government as a slave regime.” He was singled out, the complaint says, as “the only member of DePaul’s faculty ever to have been subject of a Faculty Council resolution for publicly expressing opinions of any sort, much less regarding actions of the Israeli government concerning Palestinian residents of the territories in the West Bank and Gaza.” According to the complaint, Dr. Hill suffered a loss in the number  of classes he was assigned to teach and in the number of students enrolled as “the intended result of the unfair campaign of harassment against him.” He also received “anonymous threats of physical violence that DePaul has refused to punish or meaningfully investigate.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/common_sense_and_selfevident_truth_in_a_posttruth_world.html

Convincing Americans that there is no such thing as truth defeats the very foundation of the American idea.

Many Americans today go far beyond simply rejecting the ideas of the American founders, the claims of the Declaration, and the Constitution.  They reject the very idea of truth.  These Americans were taught in American universities that there is no such thing as truth, that truth is an outmoded concept, that we now live in a post-truth reality.  The belief that the concept of truth is outmoded is no longer confined to academia.  It has invaded the world outside academia and won a great victory there; the Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as the Word of the Year for 2016.

And a great victory it is.  Convincing Americans that there is no such thing as truth defeats the very foundation of the American idea.  The Founders, famously, founded America on certain truths, truths they declared to the world were not only true, but self-evidently true: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”  Self-evident truth occupies the first place and also the highest position among the declarations of the Declaration of Independence.  “Created equal” and “unalienable rights” and all the rest follow along after that bold opening claim.

The Founders certainly believed they built on the rock of self-evident truth.  But if there is no such thing as truth, then there can be no such thing as a self-evident truth, and everything the Founders declared and established can simply be dismissed.  There is no need to try to understand the thinking of the Founders — not even by professors of constitutional law.