RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bias-teams-welcome-the-class-of-1984-11565045215

Hundreds of American colleges have “bias-response teams” or similar mechanism for students or faculty to report bias incidents. These systems enforce political correctness and turn campuses into miniature surveillance states.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, I recently obtained and reviewed nearly 300 alleged bias incidents at 11 major public universities. The reports, which we asked to be scrubbed of identifying information for both the accusers and accused, reveal students who are perpetually offended and on the lookout for ideological heresy. Actual crimes such as vandalism or threats of physical violence are typically handled by campus police. In most bias reports, campus community members simply heard or saw something that made them mildly uncomfortable.

At the University of Utah, a male student was joking around with his friends in the library and complained that his computer battery was dying. His friend gave him a power cord, and, when it turned out to be incompatible with his computer, told the student to jam the cord into the power socket anyway. “That’s rape,” the accused student whispered loudly. “I’m not raping my computer.” A female student overheard and filed a complaint.

Supporters of bias-response teams argue they are harmless, since they typically cannot formally discipline anyone. “They do not shut down free speech or charge into classrooms to stop offensive statements from faculty members or students,” two professors, two administrators and a doctoral candidate argued in a June article for Inside Higher Education.

Yet schools often investigate the complaints, and the teams themselves can call the accused in to demand an explanation in front an administrator or a panel of “diversity” specialists. At the University of Illinois, law-enforcement officers sit on the bias-response board—making the body a literal speech police. Complaints go down in permanent, often public, records, which can effect future employment prospects. Most bias-response systems don’t offer any process by which the accused can clear their names.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/08/05/proposed-anti-israel-ethnic-studies-curriculum-in-california-has-jewish-community-on-alert/

Hostility towards Israel and its supporters across college campuses throughout the United States and beyond—well-documented for years—has been the focus of pro-Israel groups. Now the anti-Israel movement may be officially trickling down into the high school system of the largest state in America.

A new ethnic-studies curriculum under proposal by the California Department of Education is being widely condemned by pro-Israel and Jewish groups, California lawmakers and activists for its “blatant bias against Israel.”

“The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum is deeply troubling—not only for its shocking omission of any mention of Jewish Americans or antisemitism or its blatant anti-Israel bias and praise of BDS, but for its clear attempt to politically indoctrinate students to adopt the view that Israel and its Jewish supporters are part of ‘interlocking systems of oppression and privilege’ that must be fought with ‘direct action’ and ‘resistance,’” Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder and director of the California-based AMCHA Initiative, told JNS.

California lawmakers have begun to raise alarms over the proposed curriculum, the result of a 2016 law calling for the creation of a model ethnic-studies curriculum by the state’s board of education.

The proposed curriculum is currently going through public comment and is expected to go through revisions, followed by being approved next year by the board.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/senator-josh-hawley-reveals-the-nasty-truth-behind-confucius-institutes/

They function as organs for dissemination of Chinese Communist propaganda.

Chinese-government-sponsored Confucius Institutes are “a tool for China to spread influence and exercise soft power,” “a known threat to academic freedom,” and “a danger to our national defense and security,” says Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) in a letter sent last week to the University of Missouri and Webster University. Both institutions host Confucius Institutes, campus centers that teach Chinese language and culture and are funded and partly staffed and overseen by the Chinese government. Hawley urges the universities to “reconsider” those relationships.

Hawley’s conclusions aren’t just his own personal notions. He cites FBI director Christopher Wray, who for the last year and a half has publicly warned colleges about Confucius Institutes. Just last week Wray testified, in response to questioning from Hawley, that Confucius Institutes are “part of China’s soft power strategy and influence” because they “offer a platform to disseminate Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to encourage censorship, to restrict academic freedom.”

Hawley cites Li Changchun, a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party, who famously declared Confucius Institutes “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” He cites North Carolina State University, which canceled an event with the Dalai Lama under pressure from its Confucius Institute. And he cites the fact that ever-increasing numbers of American colleges and universities — now 24 of them — have cut ties with their Confucius Institutes. (Hawley also cites an article I wrote, based on my 2017 report Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education.)

Hawley’s concerns, well grounded and substantial, are nothing surprising. What is surprising are the reactions of Mizzou and Webster. After several years of growing evidence that Confucius Institutes are all-round a bad deal for colleges, they are doubling down in defense of their Confucius Institutes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/computerbased_teaching_of_remedial_english_skills_just_doesnt_work.html

College administrators and pedagogues, confronted with the incontrovertible signs of intellectual miasma among their students and perhaps unconsciously aware that they have raised a generation of toffee-nosed misfits and incompetents, have responded by installing a plethora of writing and language courses, mainly of the digital variety. They believe that computer instruction in grammar and syntax will redress the balance by teaching students how to write and think.

The evidence shows otherwise. Nonetheless, many teachers continue to support the online language project as a boon to students who need to amend their so-called “writing skills.” These teachers, many of whom are former colleagues, claim that student reading practices and writing abilities actually improve thanks to three-hour classes in which postulants stare into computer screens, interminably scrolling away, nimbly surfing the Net and sending email messages to one another.

The claim is disingenuous and needs to be put in context. Though some instructors deal with second-language students for whom Web-based drills are pro forma, native-born students have also been subjected to the same laboratory practices with little or nothing to show for them. Many write and speak as if they were indeed of foreign extraction — this is no hyperbole — and their academic work, in tandem with the expression of their ideas, is often, like, you know, embarrassing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274412/muslim-evangelism-goes-public-minnesota-lloyd-billingsley

“After a petition was sent around by activists, asking the school district to reduce ‘racism,’” William Krumholz reports in Alphanews, “the district brought in a group run by Dr. Muhammad Khalifa to conduct an ‘equity survey.’”  This took place in the Eastern Carver County School District in the city of Chaska, Minnesota, with a population of approximately 25,000. 

Dr. Muhammad Khalifa is Associate Professor of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota. He earned his Ph.D. in “educational administration” at Michigan State University. Khalifa’s group, Adjusted Equity Solutions, and the affiliated Culturally Responsive School Leadership Institute, Krumholz wrote, “sells its services, which focus on bias recognition education and training, to schools.” The Eastern Carver district and superintendent Clint Christopher, “awarded Khalifa’s AES $52,250 over a two-year period to conduct the equity survey and provide certain follow-up services.”

Dr. Khalifa’s “Islamophobia and Christian Privilege,” materials urge the district to “recognize that Islamophobia is one of the most widespread, rapidly growing, and tolerated types of oppression in school and society today.” This requires the school to “identify discourses and practices of Christian privilege and White privilege” and Christian privilege “is not only having major Christian holidays and Sundays off, and Christian trappings in school.”

The materials urge the district to “discuss with your staff how you have been implicit – directly or indirectly – in Islamophobic practices,” and “complete annual equity audits.” Dr. Khalifa  wants “speak outs” for Muslim students, and the protection of “Muslim female dress.” The district is also to “celebrate contemporary Muslim accomplishments and personalities, Kunta Kinte, Muhammad Ali, Keith Ellison, Yusef Lateef, John Coltrane, Malcolm X, Mahershali Ali, etc.”

As Dr. Khalifa’s materials explain, “Islam is not a religion in the sense that Western Europeans separated faith from other aspects of life.” Dr. Muhamad wants the district to “support causes connected to the Muslim community,” and “use staff, school space, student activities, and even financial resources – to advocate for causes important to student inclusion and belongingness.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274281/nyu-brademas-center-panel-claims-islamophobia-andrew-harrod

“Take a deep breath…This topic is heavy,” stated Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC) cofounder Namira Islam on June 26 at New York University’s (NYU) Washington, DC, center. Speaking on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s upholding of President Donald Trump’s temporary travel restriction, Islam’s panel presented “Islamophobia” as exemplary of an nonredeemable, bigoted America.

Alongside Vanessa Taylor, whose views I have previously discussed, Namira Islam, during the event “Beyond the Ban: Resisting Structural Islamophobia,” claimed that the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision “reflected a longer history of structural systems of oppression.” Considering “immoral policies” such as Trump’s falsely described “Muslim ban” prompted her to call upon the auditorium audience of about 40 to perform deep breathing relaxation exercises. These listeners included like-minded leftists including Institute for Policy Studies Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow Khury Petersen-Smith and National Religious Campaign against Torture Executive Director Ron Stief.

Islam’s jargon references to “undocumented [i.e. illegal alien] Muslims” and how in America “certain communities become white over time” reflected both the panel’s and MuslimARC’s sectarian ideologies. MuslimARC’s “Anti-Racism Guide for White Muslims” screams strident racial shibboleths with statements concerning how Americans “live in a society where all people are racialized from the time we are born.” White Americans “have been socialized as white people, with messages from our families, teachers, media and society about whiteness under an umbrella of white supremacy, both subtle and overt.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/free_tuition_and_forgiving_student_debt_will_not_save_radical_college_faculty.html

Americans are keen supporters of higher education and Washington has traditionally generously concurred. But, in the 2020 presidential Democratic primary, several prominent potential nominees have endorsed once-unimaginable levels of government aid for college students. Elizabeth Warren, for example, recently announced that if elected she would spend $1.5 trillion (raised by higher taxes on the very rich) to eliminate up to $50,000 in student loan debt for those in household with incomes below $100,000 with smaller cancellations for households earning less than $250,000.  Her plan would also abolish tuition at all public colleges while offering government grants for non-tuition expenses. Meanwhile, a $50 billion fund would help financially struggling historically black colleges and universities (HBCU).

Some 42 million Americans would benefit, especially 75% of those with federal government-funded college debt. Washington would also encourage non-government debtholders to further eliminate student debt. What’s more, her plan would require an “annual equity audit” to ensure that low-income and students of color were proportionately represented in both admission and graduation. 

Warren’s plan ostensibly helps poorer students and minorities climb up the economic ladder into well-paying middle-class jobs, but left unsaid is that college professors and administrators would appear to be even greater beneficiaries. After all, cancelling student debt and free tuition at public colleges may help millions of American youngsters obtain diplomas and be debt-free, but the parchment hardly guarantees a good job. By contrast, opening the floodgates to BA seekers via government subsidies will, it would seem, create yet more academic jobs.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/22/your-tax-dollars-at-work-colleges-hire-army-of-high-paid-ineffective-diversity-officers/

A new study finds that diversity among college faculty didn’t budge from 2013 to 2017. But what the study really exposes is a much deeper problem: rampant waste at massively taxpayer-subsidized colleges and universities.

“Colleges and universities have not realized much progress toward ethnoracial and gender faculty diversity in recent years — the exception being a modest increase (between 1-2%) in tenured Asians across institutional types,” the study, published by the Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy, found.

Why does this matter? Because these institutions of higher learning have been dumping truckloads of money to build increasingly bloated diversity offices.     

Economist Mark Perry recently discovered that the University of Michigan has nearly 100 administrative positions devoted to diversity. More than two dozen of them make six-figure salaries. The Chief Diversity Officer makes almost $400,000. The total cost to the school: more than $11 million. That’s enough money, Perry calculates, to give more than 750 in-state students free rides.

The University of Texas at Austin has eight vice presidents in its Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, at an annual cost of $9.5 million. UC Berkeley has 175 diversity bureaucrats.

This year, Georgetown University created a new vice president position to oversee diversity at a school that already has: has an Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Affirmative Action, an Office of Affirmative Action and University Human Resources, a Diversity Advisory Board, a Center for Multicultural Equity and Access, a Working Group on Reporting Incidents of Intolerance, an Initiative on Diversity and Inclusiveness, a School of Medicine Office of Diversity and Inclusion, a School of Medicine Subcommittee on Faculty Diversity and Inclusion, a Law Center Office of Equity and Inclusion, a Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service, and others.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274299/celebrity-school-purges-conservative-teacher-and-daniel-greenfield

On the 5th of May, the American Freedom Alliance convened a conference on leftist radicalism. Before David Horowitz stepped up to the podium to discuss the threat of leftist extremism, Dr. Karen Siegemund, the president of the AFA, welcomed the attendees by speaking to our common values.

“Each of us here believes in the unparalleled force for good that is Western Civilization, that is our heritage, whether we were born here or not,” she said.

After Dr. Siegemund and Horowitz’s remarks, a panel discussed radicalism in the school system.

The day after this event, Dr. Siegemund was informed by Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles, the school where she had taught mathematics for four years and where she had studied as a child, that her contract would not be renewed because she had praised western civilization.

The conference, which had addressed leftist radicalism in educational institutions, had struck home.

“On Monday, I was informed that my teaching contract won’t be renewed because of my ‘widely publicized views,’” Dr. Siegemund said. “You know, I’d always known I was vulnerable – of course.  We on the right all know how vulnerable we are. But when it happens – when you actually become a victim, a casualty of this Long March, of the Left’s silencing tactics, it’s truly breathtaking.”

The French and English school set up and run by the Kabbaz family took as its motto, Cogito ergo sum or I think, therefore I am. These days, the radicalized institution has become hostile to the independent thinking that it claims to inculcate in its students. And to the cultural heritage of its origins.