RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/diversity-bureauracies-georgetown-univ

A billionaire tech investor made headlines last week with his pledge to pay off the student loans held by Morehouse College’s graduating Class of 2019. Unfortunately, Robert Smith’s multimillion-dollar gift, however admirable philanthropically, is as irrelevant to the problem of student debt as the recent policy proposals from the Democratic presidential field. Whether it’s Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan to use taxpayer dollars to cancel most outstanding student loans for the majority of borrowers, or Senator Bernie Sanders’s promise of “free” (i.e., fully taxpayer-subsidized) tuition for public universities, all such proposals treat ballooning college costs as a naturally occurring phenomenon, outside the reach of human action. The discourse around student debt—which now stands at $1.5 trillion—holds colleges harmless in causing that debt. The sole focus of discussion is instead how best to underwrite rising tuitions with public or private money.

But college tuition is not an act of God, beyond human control. It is a result of decisions taken by colleges themselves—above all, decisions to bulk up their bureaucracies. Bureaucratic outlays rose at nearly twice the rate as teaching outlays from 1993 to 2007, according to the Goldwater Institute. From 1997 to 2012, colleges hired new administrators at twice the rate of any student-body increase, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting found. Colleges inevitably claim that government mandates force this administrative bloat upon them. But the vast majority of administrative hires are voluntary: for every dollar in mandated bureaucratic spending from 1987 to 2011, public universities added an additional $2 in discretionary bureaucracy, and private universities added $3, according to economists Robert Martin and Carter Hill. Fiefdoms focused on diversity and student services grew at the fastest clip, in the name of fighting the campus oppression to which minority and female students are allegedly subjected.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/30/federally-funded-study-common-core-sunk-u-s-kids-test-scores/

Researchers the Obama administration funded to assist Common Core’s rollout recently found, to their surprise, that under Common Core U.S. student achievement has sunk (h/t Lance Izumi).

“Contrary to our expectation, we found that [Common Core] had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores,” the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction and Learning (C-SAIL) preliminary study said. “The size of these negative effects, however, was generally small.”

The study found not only lower student achievement since Common Core, but also performed data analysis suggesting students would have done better if Common Core had never existed. The achievement declines also grew worse over time, study coauthor Mengli Song told Chalkbeat, an education news website: “That’s a little troubling.”

Common Core is 640 pages of K-12 curriculum and testing mandates that nearly every state switched to between 2010 and 2013 under heavy federal pressure. President Obama, his education secretary Arne Duncan, and private financier Bill Gates promised the nation that overhauling what students learn and how it is measured would lead to student achievement gains.

It’s not that teachers didn’t work really hard to make Common Core succeed, either. C-SAIL’s report says “More than three quarters (76%) of teachers surveyed, for example, reported having changed at least half of their classroom instruction as a result of the CCSS, and about four out of five mathematics teachers (82%) and three out of four English teachers (72%) reported having changed more than half of their instructional materials in response to the CCSS.” Between two-thirds and three-quarters of teachers also said in surveys that they thought Common Core benefited their students, so while their perception may not match reality it doesn’t appear negative teacher attitudes obstructed Common Core either.

https://www.city-journal.org/admissions-nyc-specialized-schools

At a state senate forum earlier this month on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to end the admissions test for New York City’s top high schools, an African-American woman went on a harangue about how Asian-Americans come from “a culture that has no problem with cheating.” Waving a sheaf of “documentation,” McCarthy-style, she railed against “some of the newer immigrants who have come here . . . with that cultural milieu of cheating.” She was not interrupted or challenged by any of the legislators.

But when a 12-year-old, Asian-American middle school girl spoke in favor of retaining the test—asking “If I work hard, shouldn’t I have a higher advantage than those who . . . are just being lazy”—the senators were alert to potentially racially insensitive language. “Be very careful how you prepare them for this argument,” Senator Velmanette Mont­gomery of Brooklyn admonished Asian parents in the audience after the girl testified—taking the word “lazy” as a reference to blacks, though the girl had said nothing about race. “It is your responsibility and . . . obligation that . . . those children do not internalize those racist atti­tudes.”

These anecdotes tell you a lot about the progressive war on New York’s selective “specialized high schools” (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, and five others), now dominated by Asian-American students from largely poor and working-class immigrant backgrounds. It’s a war being fought on two fronts, and both involve attacks on Asian-Americans that would be unim­aginable against any other minority group.

The main action is in the state legislature, where the Democratic takeover of the senate last fall gives the Left its best chance to get rid of the 48-year-old state law that requires a competitive exam as the sole criterion for admission to the selective high schools. De Blasio and his schools chancellor Richard Carranza are pushing an alternative scheme that would cut Asian enrollment in half.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/what_an_honest_commencement_speech_would_sound_like.html

…..”Good morning and congratulations!  I sincerely believe that most of you came to college with a desire to learn and be prepared for your future. But many of your teachers have skills and ideas that are proscribed by coercive politically correct bureaucrats.

However, you are all victims of a colossal scam for which your parents have anted up colossal sums of money.

You have been ensconced in an academic gulag where you have been programmed and robbed of the intellectual dexterity it takes to listen to, consider and debate opinions that are contrary to those into which you are being indoctrinated.

You abjure capitalism without understanding that everything you own, buy, wear, ride and text on — and that includes your Che Guevara t-shirts — are available to you because capitalism provides the funds for research, development and production.

Even the organic vegetables you consume so virtuously, not to mention those windmills and solar panels, depend on capital investment.

 You mock religious Creationists, but many of you are worshippers in the cult of global warming without even being aware of the vast scientific research that debunks it.

Many of you call yourselves “woke” and “alert to injustice in society, especially racism” but sanction the racist hypocrisy of organizations that promote libel, boycott and divestment from a freewheeling democracy like Israel, while giving Ilhan Omar and Tlaib a ” freedom of speech” pass.

You raise your fists in solidarity with “Black Lives Matter” but have no interest in the genocides and famines that are perpetrated on hapless millions of black people in Africa.

There is no calamity, no atrocity, no failure of a system, no tyranny that you have not been taught to trace to a “root cause” in American greed or complicity. Patriotism and nationalism are evil, but you give socialism a wide berth ignoring its documented failures.

Almost everything you learn to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree is indexed to gender and race. Oh, and by the way, “Bachelor” is a male noun. Will that word also be scrubbed from your diplomas?

You wish to make simple pronouns “gender fluid” while ignoring the barbarism inflicted on millions of women by Shariah laws. Will it really ameliorate their suffering if you call them “hirs?”

You have lost the fun of flirting without p.c. opprobrium and ridiculous accusations that trivialize real abuse. And, you reduce all expressions of gratitude, admiration or even condolence to illiterate texts.

 You are coddled and babied in the most cynical and self-indulgent way with “safe spaces” to avoid any words, images, or persons that “trigger” your vapors.

In conclusion, my advice to you is simple.  The word commencement means a start. Go forth and free your mind from the cant to which it has been hostage for four years. And grow up!

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-death-of-merit-and-the-race-to-mediocrity-in-our-increasingly-marxist-universities/

“Our school teachers and university professors have been doing their best to discredit and destroy liberal individualism, freedom, merit, the search for objective truth, Western civilization, American and Canadian culture, and capitalism, all contrary to the views of the American and Canadian public. This is an ambitious agenda, but through the magic of “social justice,” they have made great progress in shaping the minds of pupils and students, and our future doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, and legislators, if at the expense of objectivity, science, and truth. In a competitive and dangerous world, they lead us to ever increasing mediocrity and vulnerability.”

The television series “The Enemy Within” begins by informing the viewer that there are 100,000 foreign spies in the United States working to undermine and destabilize America. China has sent hundreds of thousands of students to America to gain maximum access to the West’s advanced knowledge and technology, some through education alone, some through espionage.

While the foreign threat is real and serious, it pales beside the internal threat represented by the North American education complex. There are 756,900 teachers and professors in Canada, and 5.2 million in the U.S. Almost all of these professors and teachers are daily resolutely and relentlessly attacking Western culture, rejecting American culture, and advocating cultural Marxism.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/america-has-become-a-place-where-spoiled-children-paying-60000-tuition-consider-themselves-victims/

“I don’t feel safe,” says a Harvard student in a video.

What threatens her? The dean of her Harvard dormitory, law professor Ronald Sullivan, agreed to be part of accused sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team.

Sullivan and his wife were deans of the dormitory for years, but no matter. Now the professor is apparently an evil threat.

A group calling itself “Our Harvard Can Do Better” demanded Sullivan be removed from his dean job.

Sullivan is black, but black activists joined the protest, too. On the videotape, one says, “Dean Sullivan told me to my face that I should view his representation of Harvey Weinstein as a good thing because that representation will trickle down to black men like me who constantly face an unjust justice system.”

Seems reasonable to me. But the privileged Harvard students laugh and clap when the protester goes on to say, “F— that!”

Colleges don’t show much courage when pushed by student activists. Harvard administrators removed Sullivan and his wife from the residence hall.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/a-professor-who-argues-against-multicultural-ideology-and-for-western-exceptionalism-now-fears-for-his-job/

I have met University of New Brunswick sociologist and co-founder of the blog Council of European Canadians Ricardo Duchesne only once and found him reserved, thoughtful and modest. A brilliant writer and genuine scholar, he has authored two impeccably-researched volumes on the history of Western civilization and the settler domestication of pre-industrial lands.

In an earlier article for PJ Media, I had occasion to mention Duchesne, who writes in Canada in Decay — one of the most important books in our national literature explaining the emergence of the ideology of immigrant multiculturalism — that Canada is an extreme, though not unique, example of impending ethnocide, “promoting its own replacement by foreigners from other races, religions and cultures.” As Duchesne points out in The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, the same form of national self-deprecation we note in Canada is at work in most Western nations today.

Before multiculturalism took root, Duchesne argues, Canada was not an immigrant nation, as the cliché has it, but a European nation built by settlers and pioneers. The same formulation applies to the U.S. and Australia. He notes a critical difference between categories of newcomers: pioneers create, immigrants contribute (at their best). Multiculturalism, however, which radically changes the identity of a country, is neither a creation nor a contribution; it is “an experiment imposed from above.” Tensions inevitably arise between the rapidly shrinking European majority and the multi-ethnic, culturally alien brew that is displacing it.

Duschesne lays out his agenda in The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. His central contention, he writes, “will be that the West has always existed in a state of variance from the rest of the world’s cultures,” divergences that include, among a plethora of others, “the ‘Greek miracle’, the Roman invention of the legal persona, the Papal revolution, the invention of mechanical clocks, the Portuguese voyages of discovery, the Gutenberg revolution, the Cartographic revolution, the Protestant Reformation, the ‘rational’ mercantilist state and the ‘industrial enlightenment.’” He has no doubt that the “ideals of freedom and the reasoned pursuit of truth were cultivated and realized in the course of Western time.”

https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/teachers-allegedly-told-to-treat-black-students-as-victims-punish-whites/

In controversial “implicit bias” training, New York City’s public-school educators have been told to focus on black children over white ones — and one Jewish superintendent who described her family’s Holocaust tragedies was scolded and humiliated, according to firsthand accounts.

A consultant hired by the city Department of Education told administrators at a workshop that “racial equity” means favoring black children regardless of their socio-economic status, sources said.

“If I had a poor white male student and I had a middle-class black boy, I would actually put my equitable strategies and interventions into that middle class black boy because over the course of his lifetime he will have less access and less opportunities than that poor white boy,” the consultant, Darnisa Amante, is quoted as saying by those in the room.

“That’s what racial equity is,” Amante explained.

Mona Davids, president of the NYC Parents Union, was appalled.

“It’s completely absurd — they want to treat black students as victims and punish white students. That defeats the purpose of what bias awareness training should be,” said Davids, who is black.