RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/6/coddling-campuses-and-crippled-culture/

Summer is over. School has started. Students from coast to coast have returned to their college campuses, and the nation waits with bated breath as to what will happen next. 

Will the self-absorbed snowflake insanity persist? Will you continue to hear cries of “you offended me” and “trigger warnings” in the halls of the academy? Will the demands for “safe spaces” continue to trump the study of science? Will the fixation on “micro-aggressions” continue to be more important than teaching morality? Will victimization continue to trump virtue?  

In the days ahead, what will the news from the ivory tower be? If the old axiom that the best predictor of future behavior is always past behavior is true, here is just a shortlist of what you can expect in the coming weeks and months.

Students at Emory University will renew their cry for counseling because someone used chalk to write the name of an unpopular politician on a campus sidewalk. 

Young intellectuals at Yale will continue to demand the termination of professors because of their “hurtful” views on such critical issues as Halloween costumes.

Southern Illinois University will double down on its brilliant plan to host campus “naps” in its library so students can snuggle up together in sleeping bags as they seek to solve our nation’s ills. 

In the coming academic year, millennials from campuses across the land will persist in their juvenile fits of rage. 

At American University, the University of Wyoming and the University of California-San Diego, burgeoning scholars will, once again, receive coloring books to help them cope with their stress and anxiety.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274878/video-students-justice-palestine-targets-dr-jason-frontpagemagcom

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features Dr. Jason D. Hill, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of several books, including We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People. Follow him on Twitter: @JasonDhill6.

Dr. Hill shares how he has been targeted by ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’ at Depaul, unveiling how he is paying the high price for his thought crimes about Israel.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/the_stepford_students.html

In 1972 Ira Levin wrote The Stepford Wives, a satirical novel about young wives in a fictional Connecticut suburb who are so submissive that they resemble robots and zombies. Even independent women who move to the town turn into mindless adherents of a cult-like docility.

Never mind the book or movie. The term “Stepford wife” entered common use to describe a wife who conforms blindly to a stereotype.

Which brings me to the “Stepford” students of American academia.

Midge Decter wrote a book in 1975 Liberal Parents-Radical Children detailing the generational gap brought about by the turmoil of the anti-war movement. Standard liberals still harbored patriotism, a belief in merit, a fear of quotas, and a general optimism about American culture and destiny and the law. Many of their children became destructive and violent and criminal dissidents who defied all authority and law. Today, many are the professors and journalists who promote the Marxist ideology that permeates the media and academia.

Millennial liberal parents spawn “progressive” Stepford children who cannot be described as real radicals or revolutionaries. In fact, while they support the more violent expressions of perceived group grievances, they mostly sulk in safe spaces after the agonies of seeing a red hat or a picture of Vice President Pence, or being called by a proper gender pronoun.

Like a programmed choir, the Stepfords detest capitalism; see moral equivalence between victims and perpetrators of terror; are alarmed by spurious climate change data; are convinced that racism and oppression are systemic in America; believe that open borders and sanctuary for illegal immigrants are the only moral choices; and all those who challenge or debate these issues are deplorable. Only group identity matters.

When a more conservative professor challenges their assumptions or invites another conservative to the campus, the Stepfords revolt, and, obtunded by their hypocrisy deny the basic freedoms of speech and assembly to anyone outside Stepford groupthink. continue reading…..

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-substantially-equivalent-provision

Last April, in a downtown Albany courthouse, three sets of lawyers for private kindergarten through grade 12 schools found themselves defending, before a state trial-court judge, private and religious schools’ right to operate. One might think that Americans’ right to educate their children in private schools was settled long ago—in 1925, when the Supreme Court, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, struck down an Oregon statute that required parents to enroll their children in public schools. But the lawyers in Albany, representing Jewish, Catholic, and nonsectarian independent schools, were challenging sweeping new Education Department edicts that would effectively force private schools to perform as de facto public schools. The Education Department is redefining an 1894 state law requiring that private schools offer “substantially equivalent” instruction to students as that provided in public schools—henceforth imposing on private schools the curriculum, scheduling, lesson plans, hiring standards, and reporting requirements that public schools must follow.

Even more alarmingly, the department’s new mandate would require local school district boards of education to oversee and inspect most private and parochial schools within their respective district boundaries, using undefined “objective criteria” to determine compliance with the redefined substantially equivalent standard. Lack of compliance could mean closure. Public school districts, then, would become the arbiters of whether their competitors—private and religious schools—can remain open, a blatant conflict of interest.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/school-integration-draws-scrutiny-from-left/

Long considered a signature achievement of the civil-rights movement, the integration of schools is coming under scrutiny in odd places.

EXCERPT:

More than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Left has yet to make up its mind on the question of integration. Voices ranging from New York mayor Bill de Blasio to The Atlantic writer Jemele Hill have proposed radical changes to the way we approach the integration of our educational institutions, long considered to be a signature achievement of the civil-rights movement.

Bill de Blasio is weighing a proposal to halt most admissions to the city’s various “gifted and talented” programs, from specialized high schools such as Stuyvesant to special educational opportunities in ordinary public schools. A disproportionate number of Asian and white students are enrolled in gifted programs — the two groups accounted for 75 percent of enrollees last year — which, some say, creates a regime of de facto segregation in public schools. Maintaining strict racial quotas in public education is of such importance to the de Blasio administration that the mayor is earnestly considering removing race-blind programs that, at their best, are avenues to upward mobility for some of the poorest students in the state.

This is in stark contrast to Jemele Hill, who — though focusing on collegiate rather than elementary or secondary education — encourages black student-athletes to voluntarily segregate themselves at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Her latest piece in The Atlantic, “It’s Time for Black Athletes to Leave White Colleges,” decries “the flight of black athletes to majority-white colleges,” a process that she insists “has been devastating to HBCUs.”

Hill relates how, in some cases, “black students feel safer, both physically and emotionally, on an HBCU campus,” and insists that, as currently constructed, “Black athletes have attracted money and attention to the predominantly white universities that showcase them.” What if a movement began to, in effect, embrace de facto re-segregation?”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274835/immorality-free-and-public-education-jason-d-hill

As I travel across the United States to give talks and seminars on my books and political and moral philosophy, I am increasingly struck by the degree to which today’s college students believe that they are morally entitled to a free education. They think that this entitlement starts from the time they were born right up until the time that they graduate from college.

Since I never politicize my classroom and generally, as a rule, do not insert my political viewpoints into that space which I believe is a sacred domain where rigorous exploration and examination of great canonical figures from the Western philosophical tradition should take place, these campus visits give me ample opportunities to explore the philosophical and moral assumptions behind the idea that “free public education,” is the birthright and human right of all human beings. In a gentle but rigorous manner, I usually begin by asking students who press the issue privately with me on such visits, a few basis basic and fundamental questions. And they are:

Are the procreative choices that your parents made the moral and financial responsibility of other individuals? Or, do they not belong to your parents? When you become a legal adult at the age of eighteen are you not responsible for your own life and existence? Do we have a constitutional right to have children we cannot afford to maintain? Is it a form of child neglect to bring more children into the world than one can afford to support? When one has children, is it fair to expect one’s neighbors or compatriots to bear in the financial responsibility of raising them when they may have decided not to have any, or to have just one, or two, or just the exact number their budget can afford over the course of a lifetime?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/04/left-pushes-erase-high-achievers-university-halls-simply-theyre-white-male/

Perched in the old city of Akko, Israel, is an enormous citadel, one that has been built, leveled, and rebuilt again by various powers. When I visited the citadel, I recall mentally organizing the history, asking my friend to translate from Hebrew the timeline of the citadel’s ever-fraught ownership. From the Crusaders to the Ottomans to the British, the walls of Akko tell a story, one that locals are eager to both preserve and tell through intensive restoration projects.

I was reminded of this mantra­—walls tell stories—when I heard of a recent push within academia to remove pictures of scientists, Nobel Prize winners, deans, and various other accolade recipients from the walls of university halls under the auspices of their insufficient racial and sex differences. Most of the suspect portraits are of older white men.

In many instances, such as in the case of the Molecular & Integrative Physiology Department at the University of Michigan, the “dude wall” (as coined by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC) has simply been moved to a less-prominent location. But the relocation hasn’t always been received warmly. For example, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School, speakers presenting at Bornstein Auditorium now orate within the confines of bare walls, a situation in which former Dean of Harvard Medical School Dr. Jeffrey Flier has expressed public disappointment.

amgreatness.com/2019/09/01/from-icon-to-just-a-con/

Most of us who came of age in the 1970s revered the university—even as it was still reeling from 1960s protests and beginning a process that resulted in its present chaos and disrepute.

Americans of the G.I. Bill-era first enshrined the idea of upward mobility through the bachelor’s degree—the assumed gateway to career security—and the positive role of expanding colleges to grow the new suburban middle classes.

Despite student radicalism and demands for reform, professors had been trained in the postwar era by an older breed of prewar scholars and teachers. As stewards they passed on their sense of professionalism about training future scholars and teachers—and just broadly educated citizens. In classics, I remember courses from scholars like British subjects like H.D. Kitto and Michael Grant, who lectured on Sophoclean tragedies or the late Roman emperors as the common inheritance of undergraduates.

Overwhelmingly liberal and often hippish in appearance, American faculty of the early 1970s still only rarely indoctrinated students, or bullied them to mimic their own progressivism. Rather, in both the humanities and sciences, students were taught the inductive method of evaluating evidence in hopes of finding some common explanation of natural and human phenomena.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-feminist-capitalist-professor-under-fire-11567201511

When Camille Paglia was an “obnoxious adolescent” of 15, she had what she describes as “this huge fight with a nun” in upstate New York. Ms. Paglia, 72, remembers the incident with a clarity that suggests a lifetime of unresolved umbrage.

“We were released from school for religious instruction on Thursday afternoons,” and teen Camille posed a question: “If God is infinitely forgiving, I asked the nun, is it possible that at some point in the future he’ll forgive Satan?” The nun—a doctrinaire Irish Catholic without any of the “pagan residue” of Ms. Paglia’s Italian culture—“turned beet red. She was so enraged that she condemned me in front of everybody for even asking that question.”

That was the day Ms. Paglia left the Catholic Church. It was not the last time she asked an awkward, even incendiary, question. Such provocations are the stock-in-trade of this most free-spirited of America’s public intellectuals.

Ms. Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has been a tenured—and occasionally embattled—faculty member since 1984. This April, mutinous students demanded her firing over public comments she’d made that were not wholly sympathetic to the #MeToo movement, as well as for an interview with the Weekly Standard that they called “transphobic.” That denunciation, with its indignant dogmatism, is particularly slapstick, since Ms. Paglia describes herself as “transgender.”