RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/campus-hate-crime-hoaxes

This month, an Ohio jury awarded the owners of Gibson’s Food Mart and Bakery in Oberlin $44 million in combined punitive and compensatory damages in its defamation action against Oberlin College and a top university administrator. The incident at the heart of the lawsuit stems from a 2016 hate-crime hoax involving three black students, occurring the day after Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Gibson’s, owned and operated by the same family for over a century, has been a popular spot for Oberlin College students looking to buy groceries within walking distance of campus. Gibson’s also supplied the college dining hall with baked goods.

On November 9, 2016, Oberlin students Jonathan Aladin, Endia Lawrence, and Cecelia Whettstone fought with Allyn Gibson, the owner’s grandson, after he tried to apprehend Aladin for stealing alcohol. The students claimed that they had been racially profiled. Students, professors, and even some in the Oberlin administration launched a boycott of the bakery, including protests and pickets. The school cancelled its contracts with Gibson’s. But the allegations proved baseless: the students had in fact been caught stealing from the store, and they admitted as much when they pled guilty the following August.

Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center make headlines by claiming that hate crimes have surged since Trump’s election, but the real surge is in hate-crime hoaxes, especially among university students. The day after the 2016 election, Eleesha Long, a student at Bowling Green State University—about 90 miles west of Oberlin—said that she was attacked by white Trump supporters, who threw rocks at her. Police concluded that she had fabricated the story. That same day, Kathy Mirah Tu, a University of Minnesota student, claimed in a viral social-media post that she was detained by police after fighting a racist man who had attacked her. Campus and local police said that they had had no contact with her. And again that day, a Muslim student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette made up a story about being attacked and robbed by Trump supporters, who supposedly ripped off her hijab. For weeks after Trump’s election, America was fed a series of outrageous stories of campus race hatred that fell apart upon examination.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-campus-welcomes-conservatives-11561415989

While researching what would become their 2009 book, “Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives,” sociologists Amy Binder and Kate Wood conducted extensive student interviews at two schools: Harvard and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Although the faculty members they encountered were overwhelmingly liberal, Ms. Binder and Ms. Wood found that students at Boulder “were far likelier [than Harvard students] to contend that their professors bring those personal politics into the classroom.” This stifling ideological conformity, they concluded, caused conservative students to adopt “the provocative style” as their favored tactic to fight back.

The authors’ visit to Boulder coincided with the arrival of Bruce Benson as president of the University of Colorado system. If they returned now, on the eve of Mr. Benson’s retirement this month after 11 years at the helm, they would find a decidedly different campus climate. The reason is Mr. Benson’s determination to bring vibrant and serious ideological diversity to the “Berkeley of the Rockies.”

Mr. Benson became president amid a sea of troubles after the 2007 financial collapse. The ensuing recession led the state to cut funding for the university system by about 35%. A successful businessman and one time head of the Colorado GOP, Mr. Benson didn’t limit himself to the traditional fundraising role of university presidents. He also made achieving viewpoint diversity a priority.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/parkland-shooting-survivor-has-harvard-admission-rescinded-over-old-comments/

This morning, Kyle Kashuv — a high-school graduate who survived the mass shooting last February in Parkland, Fla. — announced that Harvard University has withdrawn his offer of admission after his past racist comments came to light.

The comments in question appeared in a Google document that Kashuv had with friends in high school and that he wrote when he was 16 years old. Since the remarks were publicized, Kashuv issued a lengthy apology and cooperated with Harvard’s requests for further information. According to Kashuv, some of his political opponents then began to repeatedly contact Harvard and urge the university to rescind his admission.

After being notified of Harvard’s decision, Kashuv requested an in-person meeting with administration officials to discuss the situation, but the university declined. Here’s some of what Kashuv said this morning about his offer being rescinded:

Kyle Kashuv

✔ @KyleKashuv
 · 20h

Replying to @KyleKashuv

10/ Harvard deciding that someone can’t grow, especially after a life-altering event like the shooting, is deeply concerning. If any institution should understand growth, it’s Harvard, which is looked to as the pinnacle of higher education despite its checkered past.

Kyle Kashuv

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274033/dep-ed-investigates-foreign-cash-influence-over-daniel-greenfield

Shortly, the media will discover the foreign collusion that it doesn’t want to see investigated.

The U.S. Education Department has opened investigations into foreign funding at Georgetown University and Texas A&M University as part of a broader push to monitor international money flowing to American colleges:

“The inquiries are part of a broader campaign to scrutinize foreign funding going to universities and to improve reporting by schools, according to a Trump administration official familiar with the effort.

More schools probably will face questioning as federal officials focus on an issue they see as crucial to transparency and national security, according to the official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the investigations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Federal law requires U.S. colleges to report contracts and donations from foreign sources totaling $250,000 or more, but past filings from Georgetown and Texas A&M “may not fully capture” that information, according to the letters.

As an example, department officials wrote, both schools should have reported funding related to branch campuses they operate in Qatar, an oil-rich nation in the Mideast that hosts the outposts of several U.S. colleges.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-deserves-to-go-to-harvard-11560464201

It’s college graduation season, when high-profile commencement speakers are scrutinized as barometers of academia’s ideological leanings. A speech by Harvard College’s dean this year suggests you learn more when a school bureaucrat articulates the worldview that shapes campus culture than when a celebrity jets in, collects an honorarium and leaves.

Rakesh Khurana opened his Class Day speech to graduating seniors with a summary of the changes at Harvard over the previous four years. He omitted two in which he played a central role: the removal of law professor Ronald Sullivan from oversight of an undergraduate dorm and the effort to banish single-sex social clubs. Mr. Sullivan’s legal representation of rape defendant Harvey Weinstein had put the “well-being” of Harvard’s students at risk, Mr. Khurana announced earlier this year, and the single-sex clubs perpetuated “spaces that are rife with power imbalances.”

Power imbalances were a big theme of Mr. Khurana’s remarks. He proposed to “interrogate” what it means to deserve something, whether being at Harvard or being successful in life. The “capitalist ethos,” according to Mr. Khurana, tells us that “we deserve to win because of our skill, our hard work, and our contributions.” Mr. Khurana—who is also a professor of business and of sociology—claimed to be mystified by that belief. In Monopoly, the board game Mr. Khurana called synonymous with the capitalist system, it’s the roll of the dice that determines “whether we land on Park Place or land in jail.” Monopoly is like real life, he concluded, which is often determined by factors beyond our control—above all by “those privileges sociologists call ‘structural inequities.’ ”

In Mr. Khurana’s view, it’s time to stop using words like “deserve” and “deserving,” because they don’t account for the “systemic inequities” that play such large roles in our accomplishments. Harvard, he announced, has made progress in “acknowledging and naming the privilege” that makes the language of “deserving” so “insidious.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/11/oberlins-comeuppance/

As I write these words, a jury in Ohio is about to decide whether an $11 million verdict against Oberlin College, for libel and tortious practices against a local family-run bakery, should be tripled for punitive damages. If it could be tripled and tripled again, it would still be only just.

Many readers will have heard the details of the events, which in quick summary are these: On the day after the election in 2016, an Oberlin College student tried to abscond from Gibson’s Bakery with two bottles of wine. One of the workers at the bakery confronted him, and a scuffle ensued both inside and outside the store, with the worker as the victim on the ground, pummeled by the perpetrator and a male friend of his, and kicked by two women, as some members of the fair sex are wont to do when their persons are not at risk.

Oberlin College then moved into action to squash the business like a bug. The dean of students passed around a flyer charging Gibson’s with a long history of “racial profiling.” She led a massive protest against the bakery, a protest that was cast entirely in the light of the recent election. The school ordered its food supplier to cancel all contracts with them. Gibson’s, which has been a fixture in town for more than 130 years, lost business which they never recovered. Finally, the owners decided to sue the college, when Oberlin refused to retract the charge of racism, and when the school demanded as a kind of blackmail that Gibson’s report all shoplifters first to the school and not to the police. The school would then give the perpetrator a warning, but no suspension. Naughty, naughty!

Have I mentioned that African-Americans who live in town, including one long-time employee, have treated as absurd and offensive any charge of racism against the Gibson family or the business? Should I have had to mention it?

https://pjmedia.com/parenting/church-hosts-summer-camp-to-train-grade-school-kids-to-be-antifa-activists/

I’m so old I can remember when disseminating communist propaganda in public schools was frowned upon.

Last Friday afternoon, I was sitting at my computer when I received an email from Peachjar. This is a service used by several school districts near me in the Portland area that sends home digital fliers to parents in lieu of paper fliers to advertise extracurricular activities sponsored by various groups in the community. My son’s middle school uses this service, and I receive a few emails a month from them. I’ve used the service myself to send advertisements for recruiting events for Scouts, and I’ve received other fliers such as music lessons, sports teams, and the like.

This one, however, was quite different.

There’s so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to start.

The first thing that struck me, before anything else, was the mask-clad, fist-raising elementary school kids in the illustration. Teaching incoming 4th-8th-graders how to riot, become members of antifa, and join a communist revolution seems a bit much—even for Portland, Oregon. Notice the star on the mask and the raised fist. Classic imagery from the USSR, China, and other violent Marxist revolutions in the 20th century.