RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/01/how-americas-students-need-to-get-woke/

The progressive campus project is a mere veneer. It is a scab of sorts, overlaying a wound beneath of progressive exploitation and class privileges and hierarchies.

Today’s university students want to “wake” the nation to problems that they and their professors have identified as threatening our very existence. And they issue these periodic alarms in hyperbolic terms: we have just 10, 20—fill in the blanks—years to end fossil fuel use or else die from global warming.

They warn us that there is a veritable war waged on American women who have been limited to a mere 800,000 abortions on average per year. Sexism must explain why only 56 percent of college students are women.

The woke university lectures us that ubiquitous racism, white privilege, sexism, homophobia, transgender hatred, Islamophobia, nativism, and xenophobia supposedly make life deadly for people of color, gays, immigrants, the transgendered, and women. Apparently, such endemic hatred explains why the United States is the most tolerant, freest, most leisurely and affluent country in history for racial, religious, and gender minorities.

To address these supposedly existential concerns and agendas, the university has radically reinvented itself over the last 30 years. The relative and absolute number of tenured and tenure-track professors on campus has nosedived. In their places, the legions of noninstructional  employees and part-time lecturers have soared. The former are mostly highly paid race, class, and gender diversity and inclusion provosts, deans, and czars. The latter are low-paid and largely exploited temporary teachers.

Student aid packages have been front loaded with federally-guaranteed debt, as tuition in response has naturally soared over the last few decades above the rate of inflation. All sorts of “studies” majors have blossomed—ethnic studies, peace studies, environmental studies, black studies, Latino studies, Asian studies, feminist studies. The curricula now expand into popular culture, as if comic books, Hollywood movies, hip-hop music, and cartoons need academic study, professional scholarship, and professorial guidance.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/01/mcgill-university-student-government-seeks-to-oust-representative-for-accepting-hillel-sponsored-israel-trip/

The Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) in Montreal, Canada has attempted to remove a Jewish student from her position on the Legislative Council over her decision to partake in a sponsored trip to Israel and the West Bank.

Second-year science student Jordyn Wright accepted an offer by the Jewish campus organization Hillel to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories, and meet with politicians, journalists and locals offering multiple perspectives. According to Wright, she was hoping to “better understand a very nuanced geopolitical conflict.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/how-universities-enable-hijacking-campus-free-richard-l-cravatts/

In a country where multiculturalism has a reverent following and criticism of protected minorities has essentially been criminalized as “hate speech,” it is more than ironic that on some Canadian campuses radical students have taken it upon themselves to target one group, Jewish students, with a hatred that is nominally forbidden for any others. And with a recent incident that took place on November 20th, York University, in particular, has now revealed a troubling pattern of tolerating physical and emotional assaults by pro-Palestinian radicals against Jewish students and others who dare to demonstrate any support for Israel or question the tactics of Islamists in their efforts to destroy the Jewish state.

Herut Canada, “a Zionist movement dedicated to social justice, the unity of the Jewish people, and the territorial integrity of the Land of Israel,” was sponsoring an on-campus event featuring Reservists on Duty, former IDF soldiers who would be discussing BDS and the particular challenges facing the IDF in its interaction with terrorism. But York’s perennially-radical group, Students Against Israeli Apartheid at York University (SAIA York), was having no part of the visit and, joined by off-campus members of the equally radical Antifa organization, disrupted the event with some 600 activists heckling, chanting through bull horns, and even physical assaulting other students—all aimed at shutting down the event and preventing attendees from hearing what the guests from the IDF had to say about negotiating for peace.

What was particularly revealing, and chilling, about the hate-filled protest (or riot, more accurately) was the virulence of the chants and messages on the placards, much of it seeming to suggest that more sinister hatreds and feelings—over and above concern for Israeli military operations—were simmering slightly below the surface. Many of the furious protestors, for instance, shrieked out, “Viva, Viva Intifada” and “Long live the Intifada,” a grotesque and murderous reference to the Second Intifada, during which Arab terrorists murdered some 1000 Israelis and wounded more than 14,000 others.

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.