RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/

In our June edition, David Furse-Roberts writes of Sir Robert Menzies’ approach to education, observing the goal of our longest-serving prime minister was to see our universities produce “erudite, cultured and well-rounded graduates, with a humane understanding of their obligations.” Oberlin College in the US began with something similar in mind but, like our own institutions of higher learning, has strayed more than somewhat from the vision of liberal education that, in 1835, saw it become the first US college to admit negroes to its Ohio campus.

Recently, as an indication of how far Oberlin has drifted from the principles on which it was founded, a jury ruled the university liable to the tune of $11 million for the vendetta launched by a plague of woke students against a local bakery that had the temerity to charge three black undergrads with shoplifting. Apparently, according to SJW logic, that made the bakery owner a racist, the fact that the light-fingered trio pleaded guilty to theft not being allowed to enter into it. As Law Professor William A. Jacobson puts it at his blog, Legal Insurrection:

The verdict sends a strong message that colleges and universities cannot simply wind up and set loose student social justice warriors and then wash their hands of the consequences. In this case, a wholly innocent 5th-generation bakery was falsely accused of being racist and having a history of racial profiling after stopping three black Oberlin College students from shoplifting. The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners. The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/10/hey-hey-ho-ho-western-civ-has-got-to-go/

On January 15, 1987, Jesse Jackson and around 500 protesters marched down Palm Drive, Stanford University’s grand main entrance, chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

They were protesting Stanford University’s introductory humanities program known as “Western Culture.” For Jackson and the protesters, the problem was its lack of “diversity.” The faculty and administration raced to appease the protesters, and “Western Culture” was formally replaced with “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.”

The new program included works on race, class, and gender and works by ethnic minority and women authors. Western culture gave way to multi-culture. The study of Western civilization succumbed to the Left’s new dogma, multiculturalism.

When I attended college in the 1960s, taking and passing the year-long course in the history of Western civilization was required for graduation. The point of the requirement was perfectly clear. Students were expected to be proficient with the major works of their civilization if they were to be awarded a degree. It was the mark of an educated person to know these things.

Because it was a required course, it was taught by a senior professor in a large lecture hall with hundreds of students. The course was no walk in the park. When I took the course, only one student got an A grade for the first semester. Students went down in wave after wave. Many dropped out of the course, planning to try again later. Others dropped out of school or transferred to another college or university.

Student protests were all the rage on campus in those days, too. But nobody protested the Western Civ course, its contents, the difficulty involved, or the fact that it was required. Students evidently accepted the idea that studying the story of how we got here and who shaped that story was essential to becoming an educated person.

It is also not at all clear that the faculty in those days would have raced to appease student protesters chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273952/ucla-daily-bruin-censors-facts-about-student-links-david-horowitz

The UCLA Daily Bruin and its editorial staff have made a mockery of the concept of a free press, opening their pages to terrorist political organizations and closing them to the opponents of terrorist propaganda and Jew hatred. The Bruin’s allegiance to the destroy-Israel left and failure to observe the core principles of journalism in a democracy was glaringly obvious in its coverage of a recent student government ruling.

The resolution passed on Tuesday, May 21, by the UCLA Undergraduate Students Association asserted that—contrary to all evidence and a long history of spreading the genocidal lies of Hamas terrorists, and harassing Jewish students and their invited speakers— the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is not anti-Semitic. The student council further condemned the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s newest report, “An Epidemic of Jew Hatred on Campus: the Top Ten Neo-Nazi Incidents” which was distributed in newspaper form on the UCLA campus, claiming that it made “racist and demonizing accusations of campus activism [against Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)] being directly continuous with terrorism.” 

Since the Bruin failed to interview the targets of these slanders, David Horowitz immediately reached out to UCLA Daily Bruin Editor-in-Chief Jacob Preal to ask for an opportunity to respond to the resolution’s false and defamatory claims about the Freedom Center and its report.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273923/colleges-committed-ideological-diversity-walter-williams

EXCERPTS

The University of Chicago has set the gold standard on free speech and open inquiry. In 2014, it created its “Statement on Principles of Free Expression” (aka the Chicago Principles). Those principles provide the framework for thinking about the importance of dissent as well as the role of the university for establishing the platform for debate. University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer says, “We have an obligation to see that the greatest variety of perspectives is brought to bear on issues before us as scholars and citizens.” The Chicago Principles, or substantially similar ones, have been adopted by 55 schools across the nation. In June 2018, the University of Chicago received Heterodox Academy’s Institutional Excellence Award in recognition of its stellar culture and support for open inquiry.

Other colleges listed in the Mashek and Haidt article, where students won’t have to walk on eggshells include Arizona State University, Claremont McKenna College, Kansas State University, Kenyon College, Linn-Benton Community College, St. John’s College, University of Richmond and Purdue University. It’s worth noting that Mitch Daniels is president of Purdue University and former two-term governor of the state of Indiana. Daniels and his interim provost Jay Akridge wrote this message to the Purdue community: “At Purdue, we protect and promote the right to free and open inquiry in all matters and guarantee all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen challenge and learn.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/triggering_the_academic_lynch_mob_.html

In his indispensable volume of essays The Captive Mind, Polish-American poet and intellectual Czeslaw Milosz developed the concept of “ketman,” borrowed from Arthur de Gobineau, which he defined as the false stance adopted by a person “in order to find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone,” to experience “a feeling of belonging.” Ketman “brings comfort, fostering dreams of what might be, and even the enclosing fence affords the solace of reverie.” Milosz elaborated a related idea named the Pill of Murti-Bing, which people may swallow to relieve themselves of anxiety

The characteristic feature of the unctuous academic, sycophantic intellectual or administrative toady is precisely ketman, “his fear of thinking for himself.” Thus he surrenders to the tawdriness of hive comfort and herd security. Such apple-polishers are legion. “They do not know what one buys, and at what price,” Milosz continues, for what one buys is moral ignominy and what one pays is counted in the coin of cognitive servitude.

One of the classic ways to establish ketman is to isolate a common enemy Alinsky style and to denounce, reject or pursue him or her until the person is professionally destroyed. This is standard academic practice today. Thus, like a swarm of Murti-Bingers in an orgy of collective enthusiasm, the university scavengers have zeroed in on their latest bête noir, Canadian professor Ricardo Duchesne of the University of New Brunswick. Duchesne is, in my estimation, one of the important scholars and thinkers of our day, a defender of the moral and intellectual tradition of Western civilization. As Duchesne told CTV News, “I believe that Canada and all western nations have been set for full diversification through mass immigration… Who came up with this idea that all white nations must become racially diverse, whereas that’s not happening in Japan, Korea, China, Mexico — only in white nations?”

https://www.bradleyfdn.org/prizes/

New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, has been named a co-recipient of the 2019 Bradley Prize .

In accepting the award he lamented how “many things have mutated into their opposites”.

“Consider, to take just one example, the fate of our colleges and universities. Once upon a time — and it was not so long ago, they were institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilisation. Today most are devoted to the repudiation of truth and the subversion of those values. In short they are laboratories for the cultivation of wokeness…”

Roger is only getting started. The full address is above. Only 10 minutes, every second is gold.

https://quillette.com/2019/05/31/the-bitter

Last month, Congresswoman Kathleen Clark (D-MA) called on Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to resign because the Federal School Safety Commission’s report contained a citation to a study, the findings of which Clark did not like. The Congresswoman did not allege that the study was methodologically flawed. Rather, she simply called the study “racist” because it found that differences in behavior explained the racial disparity in school discipline.

This could have been a teachable moment in the bitter national debate over school discipline. Unfortunately, rather than take this conflagration as an opportunity to review the research literature, journalists seemed more interested in reinforcing Clark’s accusation by innuendo, noting that the study’s author describes himself on Twitter as a “stoic, masculine, conservative.” But for America’s students, the truth matters a great deal more than partisan posturing. Policies predicated on falsehood rarely yield positive results.

If Congresswoman Clark’s contention that the racial discipline gap is not a product of student behavior but rather of “institutional racism” then the Obama administration’s policy of pressuring school districts to decrease discipline disparities by implementing “restorative justice” would have made a great deal of sense. But if, as the study that Clark condemned suggests, the disciplinary disparity is largely a product of behavior, then pressuring school districts toward statistical parity would likely do more harm than good, and Secretary DeVos’s decision to discontinue federal pressure would have been well-founded.

https://www.city-journal.org/richard-carranza-implicit-bias

Three former high-ranking administrators have sued New York City Department of Education and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, claiming that they were demoted because they’re white. It’s an explosive charge, and one that must be proved—but the allegations reflect, at minimum, the intensifying racial tensions since Carranza took charge of the nation’s largest, most complex public school system 13 months ago.

The chancellor threw down the race gauntlet virtually on Day One. He picked fights with white parents on the Upper West Side and in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, promised to achieve racial balance in the city’s famous selective-admissions high schools by essentially “reforming” them out of existence, and commissioned a $23 million “implicit-bias” social-conditioning regimen that lies at the heart of the former administrators’ $80 million lawsuit.

The program, first reported by the New York Post, assumes that New York City’s majority-minority public school students struggle because the system’s white-majority teachers and staff, consciously or otherwise, bring racist attitudes to work with them—and that this, rather than substandard teaching, administrative inertia, and non-classroom-related social issues, is the primary cause of classroom underperformance. Carranza’s reeducation program is the purported remedy, complete with racialist rhetoric, threats, and—if the suit is to be believed—race-based transfers and demotions. Eventually, all of the DoE’s 130,000-plus teachers and administrators will be subjected to such social conditioning.

https://nypost.com/2019/05/31/pc-insanity-may-mean-the-end-of-american-universities/

People used to talk about the ends of the university and how the academic establishment was failing its students. Today, more and more people are talking about the end of the university, the idea being that it is time to think about closing them rather than reforming them.

Last month at a conference in London, the distinguished British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton added his voice to this chorus when responding to a questioner who complained of the physical ­violence meted out to conservative students at Birkbeck University.

There were two possible responses to this situation, Sir Roger said. One was to start competing institutions, outside the academic establishment, that welcomed conservative voices.

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Sir Roger went on to qualify his recommendation, noting that a modern society required institutions to pursue science and engineering. But the humanities, which at most colleges and universities have devolved into cesspools of identity politics and grievance studies, should be starved of funding and ultimately shut down.

It’s an idea that is getting more and more traction.