RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-education-horror-show-11562532467

The National Education Association held its annual convention this past weekend, and the Democratic presidential candidates made their pilgrimage to promise the teachers union more money—and even more money. One word we didn’t hear on stage was “Providence,” as in the Rhode Island capital city whose public schools were recently exposed as a horror show of government and union neglect.

Peeling lead paint, brown water, leaking sewage pipes, broken asbestos tiles, rodents, frigid and chaotic classrooms, and student failure were all documented in a 93-page review by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. The review was conducted in May at the request of the Rhode Island education commissioner, and it deserves attention nationwide as an example of government failure.

“Very little visible student learning was going on in the majority of classrooms and schools we visited—most especially in the middle and high schools,” the report says. “Our review teams encountered many teachers and students who do not feel safe in school. There is widespread agreement that bullying, demeaning, and even physical violence are occurring within the school walls at very high levels.”

No surprise, then, that only 5% of Providence eighth graders on average scored proficient in math in the 2015 through 2017 school years. That compares to 21.3% in Newark, N.J., where students have similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Low-income students in Worcester, Mass., not far away, were twice as proficient as those in Providence.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/05/a_delusive_assurance_that_all_is_well_on_campus_140713.html

For many decades, defenders of liberal education — not only conservatives — have been warning the public about colleges’ and universities’ hostility to free speech. If the warnings are unsound, why has controversy persisted? If they are sound, why hasn’t the problem been corrected?

One tranquilizing possibility explains away the problem: Malcontents there will always be. The boundaries of free speech are inherently uncertain and always fluctuating. Free speech, and debate about free speech’s limits, are welcome on campus. Controversy only persists because of outside agitators ignorant of university culture and determined to extract partisan advantage by misrepresenting campus life to a polarized public.

But the persistence of the criticism is also consistent with an alarming possibility: Universities’ determination to regulate speech and curtail dissent is entrenched on campus; unfree speech is entwined with the structure of university governance; and censorship, both open and covert, serves the interests of the huge and self-reproducing progressive majorities that dominate university administration and the professoriate. Consequently, higher education is exceedingly resistant to reform.

The question is of special concern because all of our other freedoms are bound up with free speech, which enables us to contribute to and learn from public debate, hold officials accountable, and associate with others to advance our private interests and the public good. The security and vigor of free speech depends in turn on the lessons about liberty of thought and discussion taught — both in the classroom and through the norms and rules that constitute the educational enterprise — by our schools, not least institutions of higher education.

The president of Columbia University says not to worry, all is well. In last month’s Atlantic, in an article headlined “Free Speech on Campus Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You,” Lee Bollinger asserts that First Amendment norms are evolving as they have throughout American history. And he offers his assurance, as a free speech scholar as well as a university president, that higher education is standing fast in its commitment to present both sides of the argument. “At Columbia and at thousands of other schools across the United States,” he writes, “controversial ideas are routinely expressed by speakers on both the left and the right, and have been for decades.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/intellectual-dark-web-quiet-revolution/

A group of mostly young writers challenge the Left’s excesses.

The dominant assumption in conservative circles is that college campuses are left-wing echo chambers with little room for dissenting opinion. But this assumption misses a host of previously apolitical or liberal college students who are voluntarily seeking out conservative thought as an alternative to the contemporary liberal-arts curriculum.

The leading figures of this movement, known colloquially as the Intellectual Dark Web, are a loose assortment of young intellectuals who have gained notoriety for articulating opposition to some aspect of what they see as the porous narratives of identity politics, The IDW has become an industry of sorts — Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan are wildly popular — and it is leading something of a quiet grassroots insurgency against campus intelligentsia throughout America. As a collective, the IDW provides college students with an alternative to the intersectional narrative that is the foundation of the contemporary progressive belief system. Identity politics is not gospel, they say, and it is not mandatory to accept its premises as unquestionable truth. To be sure, so far there is no readily available evidence that demonstrates the ubiquity of this movement, but the explosive popularity of many IDW members — particularly among young people — makes it difficult to conclude that their influence is not significant.

At first glance, it may be difficult to identify any uniform ideological trait they all share. The IDW contains religious conservatives and liberal atheists alike; its diverse cohort includes traditionalists, rationalist liberals, gay comedians, libertarian potheads, and others. Jonah Goldberg wrote last year that members of the IDW are unified only by their objection to the corrosive dogmas of trendy discourse and by the fact that they have all provoked the ire of those who espouse them.

Yet this new class of intellectuals serves for many as the new gatekeeper to the Right. Through them, many college students — myself included — have found their way to Edmund Burke. And to the convert whose access to the conservative tradition came through this cohort of thinkers, it is no coincidence that, despite the variety of political beliefs espoused by individual members of the IDW, they often lead many of their followers to a more traditionalist conservatism.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/05/georgetown-professor-equates-american-flag-nazi-swastikas/

On MSNBC Wednesday, Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson equated the American flag to Nazi swastikas and Klu Klux Klan cross-burning.

“Those symbols are symbols of hate,” Dyson said.

MSNBC host Hallie Jackson interviewed Dyson in light of the controversy ignited by Nike’s terminated shoe design featuring the American Betsy Ross flag in response to protests by former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Addressing the argument that Nike’s decision was “PC [political correctness] culture run amok,” Jackson asked Dyson to articulate why the American flag is so offensive to some.

“Why don’t we wear a swastika for July 4th?” Dyson said. “Because, I don’t know, it makes a difference. The cross burning on somebody’s lawn. Why don’t we just have a Nike celebration of the cross, those symbols are symbols of hate. So we can take PC culture back.”

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://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.