RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/01/31/complaints-on-antisemitism-executive-order-highlight-climate-on-campus/

The new Executive Order extending protections to Jewish students under the 1964 Civil Rights Act has generated a number of complaints to the Department of Education. At Columbia University, a complaint alleges “pervasive and ongoing” discrimination against Jewish students, and “a targeted harassment and discrimination campaign” by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and other BDS groups.

At UCLA, a complaint alleges that a speaker described Israel as a racist entity, denied its right to exist, and stated that its supporters were white supremacists. A complaint filed on behalf of Hillel of Georgia alleges that Georgia Tech permitted discrimination against an individual who was denied entry to a Young Democratic Socialists of America event because of her identity.

Central to the growing number of complaints are allegations that denials of Israel’s right to exist are de facto antisemitic, by reference to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is referred to in the recent Executive Order. Another issue is harassment and disruption of public events held by Jewish and other students.

The complaints come as still more evidence has appeared regarding the politicization of classrooms at all levels by BDS supporters. A new report by the AMCHA Initiative analyzed syllabi from 50 university courses on the Arab-Israeli conflict. On average, instructors who support BDS assigned an average of 78% of readings by fellow BDS supporters, in contrast to only 17% from non-BDS supporting instructors. The qualitative and quantitative contrasts demonstrate decisively that college courses are being deliberately politicized.

The problem of BDS supporters in the classroom is not restricted to higher education. Support for BDS and antisemitism in the Newton, Massachusetts, public schools has been long documented. A new incident at the private Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Riverdale, New York, saw a BDS-supporting teacher host a speaker who alleged that Israelis, who were “the victims of the Holocaust and violence have become perpetrators of violence against Palestinians.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/more-selective-editing-of-american-history/

Today, the president of the University of California, Janet Napolitano, decided to remove the name of John Boalt from the law school building at the University of California at Berkeley. Boalt undeniably made racist remarks opposing Chinese immigration to California in the late 19th century which added to the forces that results in the passage of the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act.

I have taught at Berkeley Law (as we are supposed to call it, rather than Boalt Hall, as it was known for decades) for 27 years (unbelievably to both conservatives and liberals). I think that Boalt was flat wrong in his views and that the nation erred in its policies on immigration during this time. If I had my way, we would increase legal immigration even now by a factor of 2x and 3x, rather than considering its restriction.

But I am saddened to see my great university following the herd of other colleges that are selectively editing American history. The answer to the sad moments of the past is not to remove people and events from our collective memory, but to remember them and learn from them. Shall we next re-sculpt Mount Rushmore because Washington and Jefferson owned slaves and Roosevelt liked war, and remove the Washington and Jefferson monuments from the National Mall? Closer to home, shall we end the Jefferson lectures at Berkeley for the same reasons? Shall we edit out the names of chancellors and university leaders who worked on the nuclear bomb because the politically sensitive on campuses today reject that WWII ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hecklers-veto-at-georgetown-law-11580343235?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Georgetown Law students shamed the university last semester when they exercised a heckler’s veto against a Trump Administration official. Now they’re claiming that disciplining those who disrupted the event “would have a chilling effect on free speech and expression across campus.”

The controversy began last fall when Georgetown Law invited Kevin McAleenan, then the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to speak on immigration law and policy. Hundreds of law students signed a petition accusing Mr. McAleenan of implementing a “white nationalist-inspired” agenda and demanding his disinvitation. When the event proceeded anyway, student protesters prevented Mr. McAleenan from speaking.

Georgetown’s speech and expression policy states that students can face discipline for “disrupting events to prohibit other students from hearing the views of an invited speaker,” but the law school won’t say whether the hecklers were punished.

Instead the law school has convened an advisory committee to consider, among other things, the “response to disruptive protests during an event, and follow-up disciplinary or other administrative actions,” the school said in a statement. Georgetown University Law Center Dean William Treanor also asked the committee to consider whether there should be “any constraints on which outside speakers may be invited to speak on the Law Center campus,” the co-chairs wrote in an email to students.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/civilization-is-history-at-yale-11580342259?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Yale announced last week that it will stop teaching its famous survey course, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present.” Taught for decades by Vincent Scully, one of Yale’s most celebrated professors, the course was a riveting introduction to pulse of humanism.

It is being cashiered for all the usual reasons. Its focus is too white, too European, too male, too “problematic,” as Tim Barringer, chairman of the art history department, puts it. Mr. Barringer will substitute a course that challenges such Eurocentrism and promises to be very up-to-date. Mr. Barrginer says he’ll introduce a “global” perspective. Naturally, he writes, the course will consider art in relation to “questions of gender, class and ‘race.’ ” (Why the scare quotes around “race”? Is today one of those days when race is only a social construct?) It will also ponder art’s “involvement with Western capitalism.”

Globalism, gender, class, race, capitalism. Has Mr. Barringer neglected any trendy concern? How about the Greta Thunberg gambit? On it! Art’s “relationship with climate change will be a ‘key theme,’ ” the Yale Daily News reports.

The Daily News adds that the removal of “Introduction to Art History” is “the latest response to student uneasiness over an idealized Western ‘canon’—a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.”

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

In the latest chapter of the Left’s ongoing culture war against the West, Yale University has announced that it is eliminating its popular introductory art history course because of the “overwhelming” whiteness, maleness, and straightness of the artists who comprise the Western canon. 

This spring, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present,” will be taught for the last time. The final installment of the course, “will seek to question the idea of Western art itself — a marked difference from the course’s focus at its inception.” According to the syllabus, the course will consider art in relation to “questions of gender, class and race” and will discuss its involvement with Western capitalism. Its relationship with climate change will also be a “key theme.” 

Commenting on Yale’s decision, Robby Soave, senior editor at Reason, noted that, “Art students who wish to master the Western canon will still find plenty of other courses that satisfy their interests. But the removal of the introductory course makes it difficult for non-majors with a casual interest in the subject to study it.”

That would appear to be the goal.

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%.