https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274193/prager-u-video-students-celebrate-marxist-che-prager-university
Prager U’s Will Witt went to the Che Cafe, named after communist revolutionary Che Guevara, at UC San Diego and asked what students think about it. Check out the short new video from Prager U below:
https://nypost.com/2019/06/28/changing-gender-is-easier-than-ever-in-nyc-schools/
Changing gender is easier than ever in NYC schools
By Selim Algar
The city public schools have to deal with violence, low national ranking in language and math skills and this is the drivel that occupies the Dept. of Education…..rsk
City kids can now change their gender status on school records without any legal documentation — and play for the sports teams of their preference, the Department of Education announced Friday.
With parental permission, students can alter their genders, change their names and join sports teams regardless of what appears on their birth certificate, officials said.
“Schools are safe havens for students to develop their passions and discover their true identities, and these new guidelines celebrate and affirm all students,” said Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza in a statement.
“This Pride Month, I’m thrilled to send a clear message to our students — we celebrate you, we respect you, and we support you.”
After submitting a newly created “name and gender change request form,” all school-related documents and data — including report cards, diplomas, and enrollment numbers — will reflect the requested designations.
“With this updated policy, which allows students to change their name and gender on school records without legal documentation, we are signaling our support for all students regardless of gender identity,” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said in a statement celebrating the changes.
Kids and their families will also be able to self-report names and genders when enrolling in a DOE school.
The regulations will permanently modify how schools calculate their demographics. Instead of tabulating gender numbers through birth certificates, administrators will now rely on self-reported information.
The rule is part of a larger set of new DOE initiatives aimed at minimizing gender-specific practices inside city classrooms.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274152/history-class-presentation-exalts-liberal-traits-sara-dogan
A teacher at Rock Hill High School in South Carolina has been accused of indoctrination after showing her class a slide presentation which included universally positive definitions of the term “liberal” and disparaging ones of the term “conservative.”
The slide was part of a presentation on the history of America’s political parties. Described as a “meme,” the slide listed synonyms for the term “Liberal” which include “tolerant, generous, enlightened, broadminded, lavish, charitable.” It goes on to state that the antonym of “Liberal” is “Conservative” which is defined as “stingy, miserly, regressive, narrow-minded, reactionary, bigoted, prejudiced, biased.”
The slide claims that the definitions were taken from Roget’s Thesaurus. While these may be true dictionary definitions of these terms in various contexts, the slide in question contains the image of three American flags, making clear that in this instance the definitions are being applied to the political realm.
Unsurprisingly, many parents and others in the district were outraged by this negative characterization of conservative views.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/angela-davis-east-germany-and-fullerton-11561676857
An exhibit here at California State University’s library warns against the evils of communism. Less than 40 feet away, another exhibit commemorates an adherent.
In the Atrium Gallery, the Regimes Museum displays uniforms, flags, posters and other paraphernalia from East Germany. Not only soldiers, sailors and police wore military-style uniforms. So did postmen, bus and streetcar operators, volunteer firefighters and members of the Red Cross. Children and teenagers wore less-formal uniforms from the Young Pioneers and Free German Youth, the state-run youth organizations.
A pinstriped shirt for prisoners, a blazer from the Ministry of State Security (or Stasi), and a card showing border police how to search a van for escapees represent East German tyranny. Other items depict the rebellion against communism: scenes of protesters demanding freedom and of a nascent punk movement, an East German flag with the coat of arms cut out, a drab green civil-defense tunic with a pink butterfly carefully painted on the back.
Across the hall, a glass cabinet in front of the Academic Senate showcases left-wing activist Angela Davis, who delivered a speech on campus in 1972 and was the Communist Party USA’s vice-presidential candidate in 1980 and 1984.
A student assistant created the exhibit for Black History Month after watching a library video of Ms. Davis’s speech, said special collections librarian Patrisia Prestinary. “It’s to draw attention to the collections that we have,” Ms. Prestinary said. “I try to encourage my students to be creative when it strikes them, when there’s an issue they want to write about.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274140/university-cheech-and-chong-lloyd-billingsley
On June 19, Adel Ramos, a thug with a history of violence, gunned down Sacramento police officer Tara O’Sullivan, 26, who was helping a woman move out of her home after a domestic dispute. The city paid tribute to O’Sullivan, a graduate of Sacramento State University, but over at UC Davis things were rather quiet.
In January, convicted criminal Kevin Limbaugh gunned down Davis police officer Natalie Corona, 22. Police came from across the nation to pay tribute to Corona, by all accounts a rising star in the department. The UC Davis Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission issued a Facebook post complaining that the “thin blue line” flag Corona was shown carrying “represents an attempt by law enforcement to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Then in February, The California Aggie journalist Nick Ervin unearthed posts from UC Davis English professor Joshua Clover that cops “need to be killed,” shot in the back, and so forth. Clover specializes in “critical theory, Marxism, political theory,” and other subjects including “crisis theory and the end of capitalism.”
Clover was unapologetic and crime victims thought it strange that such a person should be on the payroll of a public university. UC Davis issued a statement condemning Clover and finding it “unconscionable that anyone would condone much less appear to advocate murder.” Even so, they duly kept Clover on the job. That is a tough act to follow, but UC Davis bosses are up to the task.
On June 21, 25 years after his death, the Sacramento Bee reported, Oscar Gomez Jr. “was finally awarded a posthumous degree in Chicana/o Studies and Community Development at the Chicanx and Latinx Graduation Celebration of 2019. (Chicanx and Latinx are gender-neutral alternatives to Chicano and Latino.)”
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://quillette.com/2019/06/25/the-fog-of-youth-the-cornell-student-takeover-50-years-on/
On April 20, 1969, an era of student rebellions that had rocked American campuses at Berkeley, Columbia, San Francisco State, and Harvard reached a culmination of sorts with the triumphant exit of armed black students from Cornell’s Willard Straight student union building after a two-day occupation. The students had just won sweeping concessions from the university’s administration, including a pledge to urge faculty governing bodies to nullify reprimands of several members of the Afro-American Society (AAS) for previous campus disruptions on behalf of starting up a black studies program, judicial actions that had prompted the takeover. White student supporters cheered the outcome. And when the faculty, at an emergency meeting attended by 1,200 professors, initially balked at the administration’s request to overturn the reprimands, the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led a body that grew to six thousand students in a three-day possession of the university’s Barton gymnasium. Amid threats of violence by and against the student activists, the faculty, in a series of tumultuous meetings, voted to reverse themselves, allowing the crisis to end. Student protestors claimed victory for a blow successfully dealt to what they held to be a racist institution.
This positive interpretation of the meaning of the Cornell events has surprisingly remained mostly in place among the left-leaning participants (all within the SDS orbit) with whom I have kept in touch over the past 50 years. Most other former New Leftists whom I have spoken with or who have written about the crisis see it roughly the same way. One might have thought that decades of personal maturation would have produced profound doubts about the wisdom of such extreme actions taken when we were still in, or just past, our teenage years.
The continuity in interpretation by former SDSers is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the nation at large took a distinctly critical view of the same events right from the start. Most Americans immediately recoiled at the sight of the widely reproduced image, captured in a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph, of the bandolier-wearing student leading the Willard Straight Hall activists, rifles at their side, out of the building. Headlines describing Cornell’s “capitulation” and “disgrace” typified national news coverage. Among 4,000 letters written to Cornell’s top administrators after the crisis, under five percent viewed the administrators’ actions favorably, and the student rebellion no doubt helped reinforce the country’s shift toward conservative dominance that had begun the previous November with the election of Richard Nixon. Yet through this immediate aftermath and on into the future, most of the aging participants have shown little evidence of rethinking.
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://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-gender-politics-has-no-place-in-the-classroom
Back in September of 2016, I released three videos, expressing my concern about Bill C-16, which was then under consideration by the federal government, following the passage of similar legislation in a number of provinces. C-16 purported to merely add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. However, it was embedded in a web of policy, much of it created by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which indicated that the bill comprised the tip of a very large iceberg. I was particularly upset with the insistence that failure to use the “preferred pronouns” chosen by individuals whose gender-related identity did not fit neatly, according to their personal judgement, into the standard categories of boy and girl or man and woman would now become an offence punishable by law.
Worse is the insistence characteristic of the bill, the policies associated with it, and the tenth-rate academic dogmas driving the entire charade, that “identity” is something solely determined by the individual in question (whatever that identity might be). Even sociologists (neither the older, classical, occasionally useful type, nor the modern, appalling, and positively counterproductive type) don’t believe this. They understand that identity is a social role, which means that it is by necessity socially negotiated. And there’s a reason for this. An identity — a role — is not merely what you think you are, moment to moment, or year by year, but, as the Encyclopedia Britannica has it (specifically within its sociology section), “a comprehensive pattern of behavior that is socially recognized, providing a means of identifying and placing an individual in society,” also serving “as a strategy for coping with recurrent situations and dealing with the roles of others (e.g., parent-child roles).”
Your identity is not the clothes you wear, or the fashionable sexual preference or behaviour you adopt and flaunt, or the causes driving your activism, or your moral outrage at ideas that differ from yours: properly understood, it’s a set of complex compromises between the individual and society as to how the former and the latter might mutually support one another in a sustainable, long-term manner. It’s nothing to alter lightly, as such compromise is very difficult to attain, constituting as it does the essence of civilization itself, which took eons to establish, and understanding, as we should, that the alternative to the adoption of socially-acceptable roles is conflict — plain, simple and continual, as well as simultaneously psychological and social.
To the degree that identity is not biological (and much, but not all of it is), then it’s a drama enacted in the world of other people. An identity provides rules for social interactions that everyone understands; it provides generic but vitally necessary direction and purpose in life. If you’re a child, and you’re playing a pretend game with your friends, you negotiate your identity, so the game can be properly played. You do the same in the real world, whether you are a child, an adolescent, or an adult. To refuse to engage in the social aspect of identity negotiation — to insist that what you say you are is what everyone must accept — is simply to confuse yourself and everyone else (as no one at all understands the rules of your game, not least because they have not yet been formulated).
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
Top Stories @ Fox News