RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/education-department-orders-university-of-north-carolina-to-tighten-policies-after-anti-semitism-complaint/

The Education Department has directed the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to tighten its discrimination policies after an anti-Semitism complaint stemming from a rapper’s March performance.

The school has pledged to enhance its anti-bias training and specifically bar anti-Semitic language, committing to making the campus “free from anti-Semitism and all forms of discrimination” in accordance with an agreement with the Education Department.

“I reaffirm the university’s commitment to creating a place where every member of our community feels safe and respected and can thrive in an environment free from anti-Semitism and all forms of discrimination and harassment,” Interim Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said in a campus-wide letter Monday that exhorted students and teachers to report discrimination issues.

The agreement ends an Education Department civil rights investigation into potential illegal discrimination on the part of the university without an admission of guilt or official finding by the department. For the next two years, the university is required to hold at least one meeting to address any concerns about anti-Semitism on campus.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/theres-no-safe-space-for-ideas-on-campus-animal-farms-11574726733?mod=opinion_major_pos5

Most Americans know that higher education has for several decades been in the grip of a deeply intolerant, fanatical and uncompromising strain of progressive activism. Students and sometimes even faculty members regularly chase heterodox speakers off campus, demand complete fealty from terrified campus bureaucracies, and denounce and destroy each other over the slightest and most inconsequential ideological deviations. The environment isn’t unlike George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” a place where “no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”

Yet an even more intolerant brand of campus activism is taking shape. This rising political philosophy isn’t merely allergic to dissenting ideas but is opposed even to ideas about dissenting ideas. It’s a bit like the concept of metacognition in reverse: These activists, gripped by zealotry and inflexible dogmatism, are taking pains to avoid even thinking about thoughts with which they disagree.

Consider a recent controversy at Washington College in Maryland. Students there successfully lobbied to shut down a campus production of a play just one day before it was set to open.

The aggrieved students were upset that the play, Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner,” depicts the evil antics of the Ku Klux Klan. But the play doesn’t show Klan members in a sympathetic light—on the contrary, they’re the villains of the piece, and they get their comeuppance in the end. Yet students were deeply upset by the Klan costumes the actors would wear, so the play had to go. (The theater department was “unable to find a satisfactory compromise” with the student activists, a campus official dryly noted.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/down-with-the-western-canon-not-so-fast-11574812136?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Editor’s note: This Future View is about teaching the “dead white males” of the Western canon. Next week, in light of the protest at the Harvard-Yale football game, we’ll ask, “Is it good for university endowments to become politicized?” Students should click here to submit opinions of fewer than 250 words before Dec. 10. The best responses will be published that night.

Who’s Afraid of the Western Canon?

If you wish to understand your world, you must read the books written by the men who shaped it. History is path-dependent. The ideas and decisions of the influential thinkers of the Western tradition directly influence the breadth of possibilities available to everyone born in the West today. Our government, culture, religion and philosophy all either arose from or in response to the ideas they put forward.

The same concept applies to literature. It isn’t independent of culture; rather, it reflects the culture of its period and builds on it. We are only the most recent link in a complex but unbroken chain.

The West is a product of a cultural conversation among the Greek philosophers, Church Fathers, Shakespeare, Enlightenment thinkers and Dostoevsky, to name only a few. To deny their importance betrays little understanding of history, and to deny it because they were white (leaving aside the anachronism, in some cases) assumes that race, or some conception of “social virtue,” is more important than truth. But even to argue the subjectivity of truth, or to subordinate it to some other value, one must engage with Plato, Aquinas and Dostoevsky—all dead, all white, all males.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-are-college-students-so-afraid-of-me-11574812050?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Few things upset American college students more than being told they aren’t oppressed. I recently spoke at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. I argued that American undergraduates are among the most privileged individuals in history by virtue of their unfettered access to knowledge. Far from being discriminated against, students are surrounded by well-meaning faculty who want all of them to succeed.

About 15 minutes into my talk, as I was discussing Renaissance humanism, a majority of the audience in the packed auditorium stood up and started chanting: “My oppression is not a delusion!” The chanters then declared that my sexism, racism and homophobia weren’t welcome on campus. “You are not welcome,” they added, as if I didn’t know.

The protesters drowned out my response before filing slowly out of the room, still loudly announcing their victimhood and leaving dozens of seats empty that could have been filled by students who had been turned away for lack of space. (The protesters had hoped to occupy the entire auditorium before vacating it, so no one else could hear me speak.)

In a subsequent open letter, a senior claimed that I came to Holy Cross to “discredit, humiliate, and deny the existence of minority students.” In fact, I came to urge the entire student body to seize their boundless opportunities for learning with joy and gratitude.

The maudlin self-pity on display at Holy Cross doesn’t arise spontaneously. It is actively cultivated by adults on campus. A few days before the Holy Cross protest, faculty and administrators at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., convened a therapeutic “scholars” panel to take place during another talk of mine. The goal was to inoculate the university against the violence that I allegedly represented.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/bds-and-antifa-bigots-shout-back-ovens-torontos-daniel-greenfield/

“Go back to the ovens, go back to Europe!”

That was what Jewish students, pro-Israel activists, and Jewish community members heard in Vari Hall.

It was a Wednesday evening at York University. Students and community members had come out to a modernistic building on York U’s Keele Campus in Toronto to hear the stories of former Israeli soldiers. The volunteers with Reservists on Duty, two women and five men, six Jews and one Arab Christian, were there to conduct a dialogue and answer questions about their experiences in Israel’s battle against terrorism.

Shar Leyb had grown up in Canada before making the decision to move to Israel and serve in the Israel Defense Forces. The ugly scenes that met him at York University was a Canada he did not recognize.

“It’s extremely sad,” he told Front Page Magazine. “In Canada, my home country, people filled with hate and violence were calling for the death of all Jews.”

York U’s Vari Hall had been the scene of some ugly confrontations in the past, but no one had expected 500 BDS and Antifa bigots to show up screaming hatred and attacking Jewish students on campus.

“Before the event, we were setting up and a deaf person could hear the chants,” Shar said. “We went to see and there were a couple of hundred people. Reservists on Duty is all about dialogue, talking to the other side, understanding their concerns and finding common ground. But they didn’t want to speak.

What happened can be seen in dozens of viral videos that quickly spread across the internet.

Amit Deri, the CEO of Reservists on Duty, had expressed concerns about the potential danger at York University even before the event. Posters depicting murderous Israeli soldiers had gone up calling for angry protests. “All out! No Israeli soldiers on our campus!” they had demanded. Another poster had urged protesters to wear black. That’s the color associated with antifa and violent anarchists.

https://nypost.com/2019/11/24/quit-the-racial-demagoguery-and-start-working-for-better-schools/

Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, keep playing their race-baiting games with our schools. Yet somehow they’re surprised when racist discourse spills out of their administration.

Last week, de Blasio issued the blandest possible statement about offensive comments made by Jackie Cody, a member of a city schools advisory board. Cody had referred to Asians as “yellow folks” in a group e-mail.

“It sounds very insensitive to me,” Hizzoner said. “It’s not something I think anyone should say.” He then added: “I think if the chancellor hears about it, knowing the chancellor, immediately the chancellor would say that’s inappropriate and wrong, and that individual should apologize.”

Except — whoops! — Cody had made the comments back in September, and the chancellor didn’t do any of that. At the time Department of Education spokesman Will Mantell shot back: “This was an unacceptable comment made by one parent on a message board, and it has nothing to do with the chancellor.”

Sorry. It has ­everything to do with the chancellor — and also the mayor.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/abolish-the-ivy-league-already/

I attended two Ivy League schools (Dartmouth and Yale) some time ago, roughly the Early Paleolithic Age, and, best as I can remember, sort of liked them. But lately I’m beginning to think the whole elite school thing has turned into one big shuck, maybe it even was then—and not just because of the revelations of all the cheating surrounding admissions or that the institutions apparently discriminate against Asians as they did against Jews back in the day.

No, it’s more basic than that. These formerly august institutions have morphed into kindergartens for jejune, virtue-signaling wannabe Trotskys and Rosa Luxemburgs (a.k.a. social justice warriors) who can’t even let us watch a farshtunkene football game in peace.

In the middle of this year’s Harvard-Yale game, the great activistes spewed out onto the field to demand, what else, action on climate change—delaying the game for over an hour.

But all these Ivy League smarty-pants couldn’t come up with a slogan more original than “Hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go.”

Who’d they learn that from, their grandparents?  Decades ago, during Vietnam, it was “Hey hey, ho ho, LBJ has got to go.”

And he did. Of course, if fossil fuels went, we’d all freeze to death, but never mind. It’s the thought that counts—assuming there really is some thought involved in these climate protests, which I doubt, even and especially those held by Harvard and Yale students and alumni at sporting events.

It’s all rote, a pseudo-religion—and maybe a good way to meet a partner of the opposite or same sex, depending on your preference. That’s the way it was during Vietnam too. (Mea very culpa!)

(It would be interesting to know how much litter was left on the field by these environmentalists. The Women’s March immediately after Trump’s election was notorious for leaving a giant mess.)