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EDUCATION

VIDEO: UNHINGED COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER’S ANTI- SEMITIC RANT! PAM GELLER

https://gellerreport.com/2019/05/nyu.html/

I had the misfortune to witness the undergrad NYU ceremony yesterday at Radio City Music HalL.. This was not my first time at the rodeo so I knew what to expect. But this was a whole other level. There was no ‘education’ component to it. It was all propaganda for the most subversive, radical movements in American society. It was, from the first, an orgy of hard left poison. Colonialism! LGBT! Welfare! Socialism! Climate!  Refugees! Climate! Islamic! Native American!  Manhattan is actually Native American land – don’t ya know? The valedictorian from the graduation and post-grad ceremonies both were students at the  NYU Dept.of Social and Cultural Analysis the notorious school that recently ended its official relation with the Tel Aviv campus.

This is the best, the most brilliant of NYU? It is a stunning indictment of the left-wing take-ever of the education system in this country. And our taxpayer dollars is funding this civilizational suicide.

Harvard’s Insatiable Identity-Politics Cannibals Appeasing unhinged rabble-rousing mobs. Michelle Malkin

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273835/harvards-insatiable-identity-politics-cannibals-michelle-malkin

I have no love for left-wing, Hillary-promoting Hollywood producer and accused #MeToo villain Harvey Weinstein. Nor am I a fan of those who perpetrated the cop-bashing “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” fiction involving social justice martyr Michael Brown. But I do strongly believe that a grave injustice has been committed by Harvard’s witch-hunt mobsters against a law professor who joined Weinstein’s legal team and had represented Brown’s family in a civil suit against Ferguson, Missouri.

Too bad Ivy League elitist bubbles have purged themselves of people with the backbone, integrity, and courage to end the madness.

Ronald Sullivan, faculty dean of the undergraduate dorm Winthrop House, was terminated from the honored position after hysterical student protesters condemned his decision to take on Weinstein’s case as “trauma-inducing.” Protests, sit-ins, temper tantrums, an online Change.org petition and even litigation by offended female students created pressure on the university for months. The administration sought to appease the mob with a “climate review,” no doubt hoping to quell the rebellion against Sullivan as the school year came to a close. No dice. Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana announced over the weekend that both Sullivan and his wife, Stephanie Robinson, co-faculty dean at Winthrop House, will be removed on June 30.

A Typical High School Tells a Larger Story: Schools Are Now Dominated by the Feminist Agenda By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/a-typical-high-school-tells-a-larger-story-schools-are-now-dominated-by-the-feminist-agenda/

Recently, my wife Janice posted a video in her Fiamengo File series about an Ottawa school, Brookfield High, that had launched a ManUp campaign, complete with posters targeting males as prone to evil and females as innocent victims. “Judging from the displays,” she states, “Brookfield High goes out of its way to make girls feel welcome through positive messaging; boys, in contrast, are set apart to be lectured and shamed about male evil.”

The poster reads When you stand back and watch evil, you’re standing by it, “strongly reinforces the grim mood…The clear implication is that this boy…WILL encounter ‘evil’ at his school—not amidst the slutty girls who tempt him…but amidst the other boys who will supposedly do bad things to girls and condone violence.” The only way to be good, she summarizes, is for boys and men “to deny their own needs and to accept that their sex is uniquely responsible for evil. What a warped message for this school—and many others like it.”

How alumni are revolutionizing the Israel debate on campus Alumni can become the missing piece in countering bigotry, bringing years of practical and professional experience to the table. by Avi D. Gordon

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/how-alumni-are-revolutionizing-the-israel-debate-on-campus/

College might be the place where you found your career, met your significant other or forged friendships that would last a lifetime. One way or another, your alma mater likely played a significant role in making you the person you’ve become today.

Now, imagine that your alma mater’s faculty sought to end the school’s study-abroad program with an Israeli university. Suddenly, the institution you felt embodied your values has instead gone down the path of exclusion and discrimination.

That exact scenario played out this semester when the Pitzer College Council voted to suspend the school’s study-abroad exchange with the University of Haifa. If you were a Pitzer alumnus how would you react?

The marginalization of Jewish students and the de-legitimization of Israel on campuses nationwide have alumni searching for answers on how to counter the surge of bigotry at their alma maters. Some of the most recent incidents include anti-Semitic flyers and posters at University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of North Carolina; New York University honoring Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with a long history of anti-Semitism; and Jewish students at Emory University waking up to eviction notices on their doors.

This is why Alums for Campus Fairness (ACF) is galvanizing alumni like never before to tackle the unprecedented challenges facing Jewish and Zionist students and faculty. Until now, no organization has harnessed the untapped power of alumni to defend campus communities from discrimination. We are taking alumni off the sidelines, mobilizing them across the country to speak out against anti-Semitism at their alma maters.

Grievance Proxies The College Board plans to introduce a new “adversity score” as a backdoor to racial quotas in college admissions. Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/college-boards-sat-adversity-score

For decades, the College Board defended the SAT, which it writes and administers, against charges that the test gives an unfair advantage to middle-class white students. No longer. Under relentless pressure from the racial-preferences lobby, the Board has now caved to the anti-meritocratic ideology of “diversity.” The Board will calculate for each SAT-taker an “adversity score” that purports to measure a student’s socioeconomic position, according to the Wall Street Journal. Colleges can use this adversity index to boost the admissions ranking of allegedly disadvantaged students who otherwise would score too poorly to be considered for admission.

Advocates of this change claim that it is not about race. That is a fiction. In fact, the SAT adversity score is simply the latest response on the part of mainstream institutions to the seeming intractability of the racial academic-achievement gap. If that gap did not exist, the entire discourse about “diversity” would evaporate overnight. The average white score on the SAT (1,123 out of a possible 1,600) is 177 points higher than the average black score (946), approximately a standard deviation of difference. This gap has persisted for decades. It is not explained by socioeconomic disparities. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 1998 that white students from households with incomes of $10,000 or less score better on the SAT than black students from households with incomes of $80,000 to $100,000. In 2015, students with family incomes of $20,000 or less (a category that includes all racial groups) scored higher on average on the math SAT than the average math score of black students from all income levels. The University of California has calculated that race predicts SAT scores better than class.

Reporters Should Press Presidential Candidate Bill De Blasio On ‘Toxic Whiteness’ New York City is being sued for discriminating against white educators under Bill de Blasio’s watch. Will the white mayor defend this discrimination? by David Marcus

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/19/reporters-press-presidential-candidate-bill-de-blasio-toxic-whiteness/

According to The New York Post, four white women who work as administrators in the New York City school system are preparing a discrimination lawsuit against the city. They allege that under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s handpicked school chancellor, Richard Carranza, they have been demoted and marginalized solely on the basis of their race, and that the idea of whiteness has become “toxic” in the Department of Education.

“These decisions are being made because DOE leadership believes that skin color plays a role in how to get equity – that white people can’t convey the message,” one source told the Post. The Department has given a $775,000 contract to Pacific Education Group, Inc., a consulting firm that claims to help institutions fight racism but has some rather racist ideas about how to achieve that goal.

According to Pacific’s materials, racism is “any act that even unwittingly tolerates, accepts, or reinforces racially unequal opportunities or outcomes for children to learn and thrive.” “Outcomes” is the key word here. Apparently if there are any aggregate differences in grades or academic achievement between racial groups, it is simply a result of racism. As if, with no evidence to support it, we should believe that without racism, everyone would get exactly the same grades.

Pacific goes on to define “whiteness” as “The component of each and every one of ourselves that expects assimilation to the dominant culture.” According to sources that have been through this DOE racial training course, whiteness, or white supremacy, because, of course, are described as “characterized by perfectionism, a belief in meritocracy, and the Protestant work ethic.”

Against “Practical” Knowledge The value of a Classical Liberal Arts Education. Jack Kerwick

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273760/against-practical-knowledge-jack-kerwick

Given the mess that is today’s politicized college campus, students have even more reason to wonder, as they so often have wondered, why it is that they are being made to enroll in courses that at least appear to be devoid of all “practical” value. Why should a mathematics major have to spend a semester enrolled in courses studying philosophers and poets?

This is not an unreasonable question. Nor should we expect for students to think otherwise given our culture’s emphatic, indeed, dogmatic, insistence that the only type of knowledge worth having is “practical” knowledge, i.e. knowledge that regularly lends itself to uses from which one can expect substantive (typically monetary) dividends.

Nevertheless, just a moment’s reflection on daily life readily puts the lie to the conventional wisdom that “useless” knowledge isn’t worth possessing, for such awareness reveals that it is wholly inaccurate to describe much of what human beings value, and what they value most, as “practical.”

Whether it is love, compassion, honor, or honesty, it would be a gross injustice to characterize the worth of these virtues in terms of their “practical” value. The relationship between friends, say, is not a mutually advantageous transaction, a “practical” arrangement that serves the interests of both parties. And millions of human beings don’t spend endless hours on social media perusing the posts of “friends,” followers, and strangers alike because they think that the knowledge that they’re deriving from doing so is going to serve a “practical” purpose.

One resolutely non-practical, “useless” activity in which people tend to relish (even if they aren’t always so good at it) is that of conversation. This undeniable fact about the human situation supplies faculty with an answer to this common inquiry among students: A classical liberal arts education is necessary because in being exposed to a variety of disciplines, students are becoming conversant with the several voices that compose the civilization to which they belong.

John Stossel Video: Academic Hoax Fake papers on ridiculous subjects submitted to prominent academic journals.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273779/stossel-video-academic-hoax-frontpagemagcom

In his new video, John Stossel focuses on Academic Hoax, unveiling how three people conducted what they call a ‘grievance studies’ experiment. They wrote fake papers on ridiculous subjects and submitted them to prominent academic journals in fields that study gender, race, and sexuality. Don’t miss it!

Harvard is failing its students by allowing them to live in a fantasy world By Kyle Smith

https://nypost.com/2019/05/18/harvard-is-failing-its-students-by-allowing-them-to-live-in-a-fantasy-world/

There is a reason you don’t let inmates run your asylum, allow your toddler to eat candy for dinner or tell the Labrador retriever sitting behind the wheel of your car, “OK, Duke, I guess you drive.” Those who are, mentally speaking, a few slices short of a loaf don’t get to make grown-up-people decisions. This brings me to Harvard undergraduates.

In the softest and most spoiled generation of humanity ever to exist (they feel threatened by Halloween costumes and the existence of Ben Shapiro; their forebears endured World War II and Vietnam and even riding bikes without helmets), the softest and most spoiled corner must be the Harvard student body, those little princelings and princesslings who have more expectations about how the world should accommodate their whims than Louis XIV. Last week, a handful of these toddler-brained undergrads got a distinguished Harvard dean fired for doing his job.

That dean, Ronald Sullivan, holds an outside job. He is something called a “lawyer.” Lawyers, as everyone but screaming Harvard kids knows, are a vital element of the justice system. In Professor Sullivan’s case, he is a defense lawyer, meaning he defends people who will sometimes turn out to be guilty. Sullivan’s past clients include the family of Michael Brown, on whose behalf he brought suit against Ferguson, Mo.; and Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end who committed suicide in 2017 while serving a life sentence for murder.

Jonathan S. Tobin Can academia make room for honest scholarship on Israel?

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/can-academia-make-room-for-hone

The smearing of scholars for publishing a journal that examined misleading attacks on the Jewish state exposes the intellectual dishonesty of academic Israel-bashers.

The old joke about academia is that the arguments in the faculty lounges are so nasty because the stakes involved are so small. That’s often true about most things that go on in the narrow world of intellectual specialists, who guard their university department fiefdoms with jealous ferocity. They conduct their scholarly wars with publications that are written in academic jargon that is virtually indecipherable to the general reader. Their feuds are epic in their bitterness, but happily of little concern to the rest of society, which can easily ignore the doings of this tribe of underpaid and generally disgruntled people who have earned the right to have the letters Ph.D. after their names.

But there are some academic arguments about which the rest of us would do well to pay attention. One such is the brawl that has started among the members of the Association for Israel Studies, in which a number of members are outraged that some AIS scholars have published a journal devoted to the topic of how language is used to delegitimize Zionism and the State of Israel. The special issue of the Summer 2019 edition of Israel Studies was titled “Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict.”