RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-universitys-new-loyalty-oath-11576799749?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Seventy years ago the University of California introduced a loyalty oath, requiring employees to swear they were “not a member of the Communist Party.” After a contentious period in which 31 faculty were fired for refusing to sign, the requirement was reconsidered. An eventual consequence was the current Standing Order of the Regents 101.1(d): “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee.” This is a statement of principle. No one will be denied a position at the University of California based on political beliefs. No communist, no conservative, no progressive, no liberal.

Now the university appears to be abandoning this principle. In the past few years “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” statements, in which applicants for faculty positions profess their commitment to these social goals, have become required on eight UC campuses and at colleges across the country. These requirements are promoted as fulfilling worthy goals: to help redress the historic exclusion of underrepresented groups, to ensure that candidates from all backgrounds apply for and are given fair consideration for faculty jobs, and to make sure faculty respect and support all students in their teaching and mentoring.

There are many constructive ways to pursue these admirable aims. For example, professors can reach out to underrepresented communities at every level. We can enact family-friendly policies that help young faculty balance family life with jobs. We can encourage students from all backgrounds to explore and succeed in academic careers.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15286/academia-radical

It apparently did not occur to any of the academics that the FBI’s surveillance is also geared towards protecting the Muslim community from terrorists in its midst.

Notably, the suggestion that Muslims are not a homogeneous group, but rather individuals who do not all share the same political or religious ideology, elicited a harsh response on the part of the panelists, who silenced the discussion.

One of the [NCA] executives, Trevor Parry-Giles, joined the attack, berating Tsukerman for her “racist” writing and “suspicious” political views. This was after Tsukerman had presented a research paper explaining that Islamists, in cooperation with their Western allies, especially the media, are distorting the image of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a progressive modernist.

Tsukerman and another professor in attendance were then expelled from the conference.

A recent gathering in Baltimore, Maryland sheds light on the way in which left-wing ideology has come to dominate American academia. Ironically, this particular event – a conference titled “Communication for Survival” — was an example of stifling free speech, rather than conveying ideas other than those accepted as “politically correct” by the professors and graduate students in attendance.

Perhaps this was to be expected, given the topics under discussion at the 105th annual convention of the National Communication Association (NCA). These topics included:

“Race Relations in Charm City: Communicating Social Justice.”
“Communication and Surviving in the Anthropocene: Keywords,” which focused on “what the discipline of Communication may offer to consider how we entered this era of consequential anthropogenic climate change, the barriers we face to transform our culture, and which voices might help us bring about a more just and sustainable future.”
“Communication, Disability Justice, and Surviving Ableism,” which examined the “centrality of communication practices to the pursuit of disability justice through anti-abelist scholarship and activism.”
“Communicating Survival in Violent Times: A Dialogue on the Intersections of Violence in Gendered, Sexual, Racial/Ethnic, and Class Contexts.”
“Communication and Surviving Environmental Racism.”
“Communication and #_______ing While Black or Brown,” which addressed “experiences of hashtag activism but focuses specifically on the role of communication and that of our discipline as a means of constructing narratives around #____ing while black or brown.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-gets-schooled-11576540494?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

‘So wrong in so many ways” is how Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the American Revolution, characterized the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” James McPherson, dean of Civil War historians and another Pulitzer winner, said the Times presented an “unbalanced, one-sided account” that “left most of the history out.” Even more surprising than the criticism from these generally liberal historians was where the interviews appeared: on the World Socialist Web Site, run by the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party.

The “1619 Project” was launched in August with a 100-page spread in the Times’s Sunday magazine. It intends to “reframe the country’s history” by crossing out 1776 as America’s founding date and substituting 1619, the year 20 or so African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Va. The project has been celebrated up and down the liberal establishment, praised by Sen. Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

A September essay for the World Socialist Web Site called the project a “racialist falsification” of history. That didn’t get much attention, but in November the interviews with the historians went viral. “I wish my books would have this kind of reaction,” Mr. Wood says in an email. “It still strikes me as amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support.” He adds that fellow historians have privately expressed their agreement. Mr. McPherson coolly describes the project’s “implicit position that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”

The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it “decenters whiteness” and disdains its critics as “old, white male historians.” She tweeted of Mr. McPherson: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” Her own qualifications are an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master’s in journalism. She says the project goes beyond Mr. McPherson’s expertise, the Civil War. “For the most part,” she writes in its lead essay, “black Americans fought back alone” against racism. No wonder she’d rather not talk about the Civil War.

To the Trotskyists, Ms. Hannah-Jones writes: “You all have truly revealed yourselves for the anti-black folks you really are.” She calls them “white men claiming to be socialists.” Perhaps they’re guilty of being white men, but they’re definitely socialists. Their faction, called the Workers League until 1995, was “one of the most strident and rigid Marxist groups in America” during the Cold War, says Harvey Klehr, a leading historian of American communism. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/15/the-inclusion-delusion/

California’s public universities already apply variable standards to their undergraduate admissions programs to fulfill de facto racial quotas. Now they’re requiring their faculty applicants to submit “diversity statements.”

Both of these practices distract from more important questions: Are student applicants academically competitive? Are faculty applicants experts in their fields? In reality, California’s public universities have moved far away from these fundamentals. And as goes California, so goes the nation.

Prioritizing race and gender diversity over academic excellence has consequences, not the least of which is how those who object to these priorities are intimidated. Abigail Thompson, professor and chairwoman of the Department of Mathematics at UC Davis, is one of the most recent victims.

In a letter published by the American Mathematical Society, Thompson objected to the “diversity statements” that are now required of all faculty applicants, and which she claims have become “central to the hiring process.” Thompson compared these diversity statements to the “loyalty oaths” that were required of University of California faculty members during the 1950s.

https://www.city-journal.org/social-justice-ideology

Social-justice ideology is turning higher education into an engine of progressive political advocacy, according to a new report by the National Association of Scholars. Left-wing activists, masquerading as professors, are infiltrating traditional academic departments or creating new ones—departments such as “Solidarity and Social Justice”—to advance their cause. They are entering the highest rung of college administration, from which perch they require students to take social-justice courses, such as “Native Sexualities and Queer Discourse” or “Hip-hop Workshop,” and attend social-justice events—such as a Reparations, Repatriation, and Redress Symposium or a Power and Privilege Symposium—in order to graduate.

But social-justice education is merely a symptom of an even deeper perversion of academic values: the cult of race and gender victimology, otherwise known as “diversity.” The diversity cult is destroying the very foundations of our civilization. It is worth first exploring, however, why social-justice education is an oxymoron.

Why shouldn’t an academic aspire to correcting perceived social ills? The nineteenth-century American land-grant universities and the European research universities were founded, after all, on the premise that knowledge helps society progress. But social justice is a different beast entirely. When a university pursues social justice, it puts aside its traditional claim to authority: the disinterested search for knowledge. We accord universities enormous privileges. Their denizens are sheltered from the hurly-burly of the marketplace on the assumption that they will pursue truth wherever it will take them, unaffected by political or economic pressures. The definition of social justice, however, is deeply political, entailing a large number of contestable claims about the causes of socioeconomic inequality. Social-justice proponents believe that those claims are settled, and woe to anyone who challenges them on a college campus. There are, however, alternative explanations—besides oppression and illegitimate power—for ongoing inequalities, taboo though they may be in academia.

READ THE REPORT HERE;

https://nas.org/reports/social-justice-education-in-america?utm_source=National+Association+of+Scholars+General&utm_campaign=a1dcc4545a-

On December 6th at a launch event co-hosted with the James G. Martin Center, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) released Social Justice Education in America, a report analyzing the influence of social justice advocates at 60 colleges and universities nationwide. The report finds that these advocates have insinuated themselves into the university system to propagandize students, politicize the most basic college courses, create administrative and teaching positions for like-minded advocates, and transform universities into training camps for progressive activism.
 
David Randall, the report’s author said, “NAS has watched this growing trend with concern for many years. Social justice advocates and their allies have dramatically changed the way in which our universities train tomorrow’s leaders. Social justice education subordinates every discipline from accounting to zoology to the pursuit of progressive political activism.”
 
The report documents the means that social justice advocates have used to establish themselves: altering university mission statements, seizing internal graduation requirements, capturing existing disciplines and creating pseudo-disciplines, and ultimately capturing the university administrations. Social Justice Education in America provides detailed charts and a wealth of examples of classes, departments, events, jobs, journals, and administrative offices that teach social justice to unsuspecting students and secure jobs in higher education for social justice advocates.