RUTHFULLY YOURS

Amy L. Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

These schools serve only a fraction of Americans, but they raise $44B a year through endowments and guzzle mightily from the federal trough.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-donors-must-abandon-their-ivy-league-alma-maters/?utm_source=ntnlreview&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=amconswap

Academia ought to be in crisis right now, as Americans increasingly doubt the value of a college education.

Pollsters at Gallup found that the percentage of persons regarding a college degree as “very important” has dropped from 71 percent in 2013 to 50 percent today. The National Association of Scholars issued a recent, damning report that presents universities as dominated by a progressive social justice agenda which distorts teaching and research and presents a one-sided picture of our national problems.

Critics have also faulted the academy for a dramatic increase in elaborate bureaucracies, expensive new buildings, and unproven programs. These developments have driven up costs, which in turn has burdened many students with heavy loans that contribute to economic distress and inequality. Yet universities continue to command generous public and private support. State and federal governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on university programs, infrastructure, and subsidized student loans and grants. This money is not evenly distributed. In 2016, out of over 3,000 universities offering four-year degrees and about half as many two-year colleges nationwide, 20 institutions accounted for over 30 percent of federal spending, with 100 universities garnering 80 percent of the total. Various proposals have been floated to reduce the degree of public support for colleges and universities and thereby force higher education to be more accountable, responsive, and thrifty. These austerity arguments have so far had little effect.

Money from non-governmental sources is also a vital revenue stream. Selective colleges and universities (defined as those that turn away most of their applicants) are especially dependent on generous contributions from alumni and big donors to fund elaborate infrastructure, extensive programs, and lavish amenities. These features are in turn used to attract top student and faculty talent to their ranks. Universities, and especially elite ones, regularly receive large gifts and generous grants from alumni, foundations, and wealthy individuals.

Such support has increased steadily in recent years. In the fiscal year ending in June 2017, four-year colleges and universities raised $43.6 billion from personal, individual, and voluntary gifts, marking a 6.3 percent increase from the year before. Highly ranked and already well-endowed institutions take in the largest sums, with schools like California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and Harvard University each receiving hundreds of millions annually. Wealthy individuals give the most. The top 10 percent of donors account for over 90 percent of the dollars raised, with the size of the average gift growing steadily since the 1980s.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/01/the-1619-project-and-its-critics/

Peter W. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars.

Nikole Hannah-Jones ought to step up, be courageous, and debate the historians with whom she disagrees. They’re waiting. All historical claims, particularly those with as wide-reaching and radical ramifications as these, must be discussed and scrutinized by trained scholars.

The 1619 Project—the New York Times campaign launched in August 2019 to transform American history into a tale of racial oppression and nothing but for the last 400 years—has attracted a great deal of critical attention. Much of this attention has come from professional historians who are nonplussed by the numerous misstatements of fact, the disappearance of key historical events, and the forced march of polemical interpretation that the Times attempted to hang on American history.

The dissenting historians themselves have found various outlets to express their views. Among the most intriguing of these platforms has been the World Socialist Website, which has featured interviews with such luminaries as Gordon Wood, university professor at Brown University, and James McPherson, professor emeritus of U.S. history at Princeton University.

The socialists, upset with the Times for preferring racial grievance to class grievance, rounded up other prominent historians, including Victoria Bynum, James Oakes, Dolores Janiewski, Richard Carwardine, and Clayborne Carson, to express their critiques of the Times’ fanciful attempt to rewrite history.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/manic_reforms_depressed_scores.html

Our public education system is bipolar.  Its reformers are manic, but the test scores are depressed.

Bipolar disorder is a serious condition afflicting nearly six million Americans.  Unfortunately, it’s also a metaphor for our public schools. Symptoms of mania include rapid speech, grandiose ideas, and wild spending sprees.  Education “reformers” exhibit all three.

The so-called reformers of education have been rapidly and frenetically speaking seemingly forever. TED Talks and TEDx Talks and podcasts and workshops and panels and keynotes and in-service sessions and slide shows. Many, many slide shows.  It’s a lot of talking.  

Reformers have been writing rapidly and frenetically too.  As of this writing, an Amazon book search for “education reform” reveals over 20,000 titles. Google provides 272 billion results.  “Scholarly articles” for education reform yields 3.1 million sources. 

Seemingly everybody’s been published on the subject, many people with little or no experience teaching children.

When I began teaching, some of the grandest of grandiose ideas were playing out, like open space classrooms. Teachers were finally driven to distraction and erected bookshelves and crates, anything to block out other classes.  Dividers went up, and soon rooms were evident.  

Whole language was being phased out as the preferred method of teaching reading, but it left me facing a string of high-school students over a span of several years who could not spell.  Millions of students across the country were victims of the “reading wars.”

https://www.bookwormroom.com/2020/02/27/its-unsurprising-that-ivy-league-colleges-churn-out-dangerous-leftists/

“…….

Ivy will also insinuate itself into your doors and windows, your vents, and your shutters. It will climb your walls, destroy your grout, pull down your bricks and siding, tear down your gutters, and generally wreak havoc everywhere it can go. All the while, the leaves continue to have that pretty, decorative ivy look. Even as it’s destroying everything it touches, it manages to look attractive.

In addition, every tendril has a gazillion roots and the vines have a habit of breaking off just as you think you’re about to pull a whole root system out successfully. Thus, no matter how much you manage to destroy above ground, you know you’ve left more vines and roots underground where they are unreachable. This means that it’s virtually impossible ever to rid yourself of ivy. All that you can do is maintain vigilance and attack it when even a single leaf appears anywhere.

It occurred to me today as I was struggling with the ivy destroying my planting beds, trying to tear down my bricks and gutters, strangling my other plants, and resisting my best efforts to track down every root and tendril that there is no difference between ivy and American socialism.

If socialists are confined to urban cocktail parties and a few university faculty lounges, they can be innocuous and even decorative and interesting. However, once you set them free, they destroy everything they touch.

On the surface, they might be grandmotherly figures like Elizabeth Warren (if you like nagging, pushy grandmothers), or perky little boys like Pete Buttigieg, or funny, crazy uncles like Bernie, but underneath they’re putting out tendrils that swamp and destroy everything. They entangle themselves in America’s institutions and eventually destroy them.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/02/panel-at-u-michigan-blames-western-colonialism-for-gender-violence-among-immigrants/

“Gender Violence, Immigrant Vulnerability and the State: A Symposium”

Do you ever just sit back and marvel at the left’s ability to come up with things like this?

The College Fix reports:

In the latest example of higher education victimology, a panel at the University of Michigan discussed on Monday how Western colonialism is culpable for gender violence in the immigrant community.

According to The Michigan Daily, UM women’s studies professor Debotri Dhar, organizer of the “Gender Violence, Immigrant Vulnerability and the State: A Symposium” event, claimed that “residual ideals from the colonial era have resulted in immigrants of color being framed as burdens on the state” which contribute to “immigrant vulnerability and gender violence.”

Dhar added that in our current “very politically divisive” atmosphere, the situation surrounding immigrants, “our most vulnerable individuals,” can be overlooked.

https://www.hudson.org/research/15764-oxford-should-keep-homer-and-virgil-on-the-syllabus

The Oxford Student, the largest student newspaper of the nearly thousand-year-old teaching institution, reported in mid-February that the classics faculty has recommended that Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid be removed from the literae humaniores, an undergraduate program in ancient literature, history, and philosophy. The program has been criticized because of the difference in scores between male and female students, as well as because of differences in how much previous training its students have had in classical languages. This is an absurd standard. What will be taught if equality of grades between the sexes becomes the standard of choosing course material? The classics faculty would solve the grade-difference issue by shedding two of Western civilization’s core works.

A student studying classics at Oxford opposes removal of the two epic poems and is gathering signatures for a petition to end debate on their future at Oxford. Note that cutting off debate on difficult issues is not restricted to American universities.

The Oxford Student quotes the student’s objection to Homer-exit. It means, he says, that “Oxford would be producing Classicists who have never read Homer and never read Virgil, who are the central authors of the Classical tradition and most of Classical literature, in one way or another, looks back to Homer and interacts with the Iliad.”

It’s worse than that. Homer and Virgil are fundamental not only to classics majors or students who will eventually teach classics to other students. Homer, by himself, is the keystone of Western literature.

The Iliad is a story about human passions: anger, pity, remorse, compassion, revenge; men’s relations to forces greater than themselves; war and its horrors (and it is very horrible in Homer’s supremely elegant lines); and the beauty of art and nature. It is a complex and deeply insightful exploration of the soul, human fate, and immortality. 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/associate-professor-at-us-university-arrested-for-allegedly-lying-about-china-links_3253589.html

Federal authorities on Feb. 27 arrested an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, (UTK) on charges relating to allegedly lying about links to a Chinese university while receiving funding from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Anming Hu, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering at UTK, was indicted by a grand jury on Feb. 25 and charged with three counts of wire fraud and three counts of making false statements, the justice department (DOJ) said in a press release.

Prosecutors allege that Hu in 2016 managed to obtain funding from NASA for a research project by hiding his affiliation with Beijing University of Technology (BJUT) where he was a professor in its Institute of Laser Engineering.

Federal law prohibits NASA from funding any projects done in collaboration with China or Chinese universities, the DOJ said.

Hu’s arrest is the second arrest in a month of a U.S. academic over an alleged failure to disclose ties to Chinese universities. In late January, Charles Lieber, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, was arrested for allegedly lying about funding he received from a Chinese state-sponsored recruitment program.

“This is just the latest case involving professors or researchers concealing their affiliations with China from their American employers and the U.S. government,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said in the statement.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/27/jewish-student-says-she-left-city-university-of-new-york-law-school-after-being-targeted-by-antisemitic-harassment-for-supporting-israel/

A Jewish former law student at City University of New York told The Algemeinerthis week about what she described as antisemitic and anti-Zionist harassment she faced due to her pro-Israel activism, which caused her to ultimately leave the school, saying that “no one helped me, no one came to my defense.”

Rafaella Gunz — a journalist focusing on LGBT and feminist issues — was studying at the CUNY School of Law when she became a target of pro-Palestinian groups, particularly Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), as a result of her criticism of their attitudes toward Jews and Israel.

Last month, she published an article in The Jewish Journal, titled “Campus Antisemitism Made Me a Zionist,” that detailed her struggle, saying that her Jewish identity had been strengthened as a consequence.

“This experience compelled me to purchase a small, rose-gold Star of David necklace. … I am no longer ashamed to let the world know I am a Jew,” she wrote.

But Gunz has now decided to leave the school as a result of what she called a campaign of harassment.

“There were reactions to my article, if you look at the comments on there, basically calling me Islamophobic, calling me racist, a liar, just all these horrible things by my classmates, telling people that are supporting me to shut the f**k up, all these types of things,” she told The Algemeiner in an interview.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/leftists-riot-against-kaitlin-bennett-ohio-frontpagemagcom/

Visit AmericanPeopleDaily.com.

Kaitlin Bennett is the girl that become known as the “Kent State gun girl.” Her activism and support of the Second Amendment right to bear arms have become a point of contention to the liberals and gun-phobic students on the campus. Her premise is that students and teachers should be allowed to carry weapons for the sole purpose of protecting themselves. Upon her graduation, Kaitlin Bennett posed for a picture that is fueling the debate for gun liberty.

As a student Bennett respected the rules of the school. But her views of guns and petitions for freedom to carry were legendary with everyone. But now that she has graduated, she is making even bigger ripples on the campus than ever before. Her stance on guns has brought violence and threats from liberals. But she continues to uphold the freedom to bear arms for all people.

In one instance, she mentioned in the video that her cameraman was assaulted by an angry crowd of liberals. She stated that had she been carrying a gun to protect herself, then the assault would never have taken place. But the loony left does not want people carrying guns because that means that they cannot inflict harm on them when they choose to do so.

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/justice-department-45-of-blacks-at-harvard-admitted-through-illegal-race-preferences/

Almost half of all blacks and Hispanics who attend Harvard were admitted because of illegal racial preferences in admissions according to a brief just filed by the Department of Justice.

The Department of Justice filed the brief in a federal lawsuit filed by Students For Fair Admissions. It says Harvard’s race-based admissions process violates federal law. This filing marks an extreme departure from the Obama Civil Rights Division that spent significant time and resources seeking to expand the use of race in decision making.

The brief says Harvard “considers applicants’ race at virtually every step, from rating applicants to winnowing the field of applicants when attempting to avoid an oversubscribed class.” It notes that forty-five percent of African-Americans and Hispanics at Harvard are there because of racial preferences given to them during the admissions process.