RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/12/learned-enrolled-race-gender-oppression-studies-class/

Anyone who has spent time on a college campus has likely run into victimhood ideology. Yet while many campus conservatives are put off by the identity politics and liberalism-run-amok that have transformed many academic departments into adult daycares, they often don’t try to understand the ideology corrupting the modern academy.

So I did exactly that. During my final semester in college, I intentionally took a course focused on race, gender, and the history of oppression in the United States. Of course, this featured ample study of buzzwords like racism, privilege, and identity. The most jarring realization: liberal academics define “oppression” so loosely that their victimhood narrative can never end.

Many works of academic literature throughout political science, gender studies, sociology, and the like draw on a famous paper entitled the “Five Faces of Oppression,” which lays out a definition of oppression that has now become the gold-standard in grievance studies. The author, the late feminist professor Iris Marion Young, has been cited thousands of times by other academics and her work is taught in courses across the country.

This wouldn’t be so significant, if it weren’t for the fact that the definition of oppression Marion Young establishes is intellectually bankrupt. It provides a framework that could fool young people with ample opportunity in life into thinking that they are victims.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/georgetown-students-vote-to-pay-reparation-to-descendants-of-schools-slaves/

Georgetown University student government passed a referendum Thursday night that, if approved by the administration, would create a reparations fund to compensate the descendants of slaves who were sold to keep the university open.

A campus group called the GU272 Advocacy Team (in a nod to the 272 slaves the school sold in 1838 to pay off its outstanding debts) created the referendum, which calls for the implementation of a $27.70 per-semester fee to create a reconciliation fund that would be overseen by a board comprised of students and slave descendants.

The group estimates the fund would raise more than $400,000 annually to “be allocated for charitable purposes directly benefiting the descendants of the GU272 and other persons once enslaved by the Maryland Jesuits,” according to the bill, which was obtained by CNN.

“The vestiges of slavery are still so evident, and so many of the African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved are still so disenfranchised,” GU272 member Eliza Dunni Phillips told CNN. “It’s not enough to say sorry. Georgetown has to put their money where their mouth is and invest into the descendant community.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/11/dont-assume-good-intentions-from-campus-p-c-pushers/

No matter how much the general public abhors political correctness is higher education, the monitors of the Left continue to find methods of surveillance. Two Villanova professors described the latest development last week in the Wall Street Journal.

It’s a revision to the course evaluation form that professors distribute to students at the end of the semester. Typical questions address workload, assignments, classroom management, grading, and the availability of the professor. But we now have an extra query. I’ve heard it floated before, but this is the first concrete implementation of which I am aware. As political scientist Colleen Sheehan and humanities professor James Matthew Wilson describe it:

. . . students are now being asked heavily politicized questions such as whether the instructor has demonstrated “cultural awareness” or created an “environment free of bias based on individual differences or social identities.

You know what this means. Has the professor implied anything suggesting praise for Western civilization, a biblical conception of marriage and sexuality, American exceptionalism, or economic nationalism? Report him! Did he assign Huckleberry Finn (it has the n-word) or The Scarlet Letter (a woman has a child out of wedlock and is shamed and punished)? Write him up!

Watch your step, professor. Outside of class, students hear a nonstop mantra of diversity, tolerance, and inclusion, along with catechisms against -isms and -phobias. It has primed them to sniff out discrimination in its subtlest forms whenever it is aimed at historically disadvantaged identities. Now, with the sensitivity questions added to the evaluation form, the classroom is another setting of scrutiny, with the professor in the dock.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273389/campus-radicalism-spirals-out-control-jack-kerwick

Just when the unprejudiced observer thought that it was impossible, the world of “Higher Education,” or what I not so affectionately refer to as “the Academic-Industrial-Complex,” continues to move ever-further leftward.

At George Mason University, the institution at which Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh holds a post as a Visiting Law Professor, students are up in arms.

The newly confirmed Justice had just signed a three-year contract with GMU’s Antonin Scalia Law School. Kavanaugh is scheduled to co-teach this summer with Jennifer Mascot, his former clerk, a class in England. Yet some students—approximately 2,000 who signed a petition that they have labeled, “Mason 4 Survivors”—are having none of it, demanding that GMU administrators promptly terminate Kavanaugh’s employment and “void ALL contracts and affiliation” with him.

Unsurprisingly, this recently formed student group has made other demands, including demands for the creation of the position of a round-the-clock, on-campus “Sexual Assault Coordinator” and a formal apology issued by GMU administrators for hiring Kavanaugh in the first place.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/amherst-colleges-glossary-of-wokeness/

Campus politics are increasingly deranged, and college administrators have a lot to answer for.

When Samuel Abrams, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, surveyed national data on the political views of college administrators, he revealed that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts at a ratio of twelve-to-one, and suggested (oh so gently) in a New York Times op-ed that this kind of imbalance might be a problem for “the free and open exchange of ideas.”

As detailed here by yours truly and here by National Review’s David French, Abrams was then treated appallingly by Sarah Lawrence College’s students and staff.

Abrams’s basic point – that students arrive on campus fairly liberal and are taught by very liberal professors and socialized by extremely liberal administrators – should concern anyone who cares about the integrity of higher education.

Last month a document produced by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Resource Center Team at Amherst College in Massachusetts, titled “Common Language Guide,” surfaced. The document was described by its authors as a “list of carefully researched and thoughtfully discussed definitions for key diversity and inclusion terms.”

And what did they come up with? A slew of rather obscure definitions of oppressive behaviors and structures such as “eurocentrism,” “heterosexism,” “ethnosexism,” “cissexism,” as well as more heard-of terms such as “ageism,” “classism,” and “racism.”

“Microaggressions,” the document explained, are “rooted in institutional oppression” and involve “verbal and nonverbal indignities and denigrating messages targeting people of historically and presently marginalized backgrounds.” This translates as insults, both accidental and deliberate. (Insults and slights are unpleasant, but are they really so ideologically loaded? Might this be encouraging people to be overly sensitive?)

https://quillette.com/2019/04/05/what-they-dont-

“Another interesting and lengthy feature in STEP are “Theatre of the Oppressed” workshops. These mandatory theatre performances stretch on for weeks, and in them white male students are asked to act out scenes in which they are cast as racist, homophobic, or misogynistic characters. Students and instructors then parse the performances and discuss the dynamics of identity that play out in each scene.”

Having decided to become a high school teacher, I was excited to be accepted to the University of Washington’s Secondary Teacher Education Program (STEP), which awards a masters degree in teaching and bills itself as a 12-month combination of theory and practice. Cognizant that in just over a year I would be responsible for teaching students on my own, and because of the university’s laudable reputation, I expected the program to be grounded in challenging practical work and research, both in terms of how to develop academic skills in young people, and also in the crucial role public education has in overcoming some of the most grave and intransigent problems in society.

I am not interested in politics or controversy, and I derive no pleasure in creating difficulties for the UW out of personal resentment. But whenever family and friends ask me about graduate school, I have to explain that rather than an academic program centered around pedagogy and public policy, STEP is a 12-month immersion in doctrinaire social justice activism. This program is a bizarre political experiment, light on academic rigor, in which the faculty quite consciously whips up emotions in order to punch home its ideological message. As a consequence, the key components of teaching as a vocation—pedagogy and how best to disseminate knowledge—are fundamentally neglected. With little practical training or preparation, graduates of the program begin their teaching careers woefully unprepared. Even for the most ardent social justice activist, STEP’s lack of practical content is a serious shortcoming. I found the program so troubling that I have decided to write this first-hand account with specific examples of the daily experience to illustrate how social justice activism in the academy has a high opportunity cost.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/texas-tech-eliminates-racial-preference-in-admissions/

As a result of a complaint that the Center for Equal Opportunity filed in 2004 against Texas Tech, the medical school there recently signed a Resolution Agreement (RA) with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, ending its use of racial preferences in admissions. As of March 1, “an applicant’s race and/or national origin are no longer to be considered.”

Kudos to Texas Tech: This is even more impressive than its run to the Final Four!

Our complaint was filed when, after the Supreme Court had issued its 2003 decisions narrowly upholding the use of racial-admission preferences in some circumstances, Texas Tech announced that it would begin considering race, notwithstanding the fact that it had not been doing so and had achieved plenty of racial and ethnic diversity nonetheless. In our view, since the Court made clear that race was not to be used except as a last resort, Texas Tech’s announced new policy was unjustifiable.

In the course of the 15-year investigation that followed, the university clarified or backed away from its 2005 pronouncement until, by last November, only the investigation of the five health-science schools remained. They, too, then clarified or backed away, so that by early this year the medical school was the only outlier. And on February 20 it came around, too. The relevant documents are posted on our website, here.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/harvard-uprising-protests-1969-radicalism/

That takeover and bust culminated my political education.

Today marks 50 years of my political education. The events of April 9, 1969, helped make me who I am today and the university what it is.

I was a sophomore in college when my fellow students at Harvard University decided that politics, especially the war in Vietnam and the presence of a military-training program on campus, compelled them to take over the main administrative building, called University Hall.

Although opposed to this action, I joined the Communists of Students for a Democratic Society in University Hall to witness the uprising firsthand and take pictures. My photographs reveal about 250 students packed into the august President’s and Fellows’ Room, harangued as they disrespectfully stood and sat among its statues and under its portraits reaching high to the ceiling. The mood was triumphalist: Finally, students had taken matters into their own hands and showed those deans that they meant business! Flexing their muscles, the students escorted establishment lackeys out of the building, rifled through their files, and announced to humanity the dawning of a revolution.

Only, the revolution did not dawn. About 400 policemen entered University Hall at 3 a.m. and reminded the 500 students inside who the real boss was; that would be Harvard’s president. Letting off some righteous proletarian anger at the expense of pampered student radicals, the “pigs,” as they were then infelicitously dubbed, ignominiously beat and carted off the play-revolutionaries to jail.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/09/will-never-fix-campus-indoctrination-cut-college-subsidies/

Last month, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities.” Some hailed the order as a much-needed response to rising illiberalism on college campuses, while others called it a solution in search of a problem.

Like many, when I first heard about the order, I focused on the goal. The first question that came to my head was: “Do we really want the government to be in the business of legislating ‘free inquiry?’”

That’s an interesting political philosophy question, but it avoids the fundamental problem of universities these days: debt-financing enables the administrative and academic departments targeting free speech on campus and silencing conservatives.
People Think College Is About Education, But It’s Often Not

Higher education is riding on its reputation as a gateway to a bright future. As of 2018, 82 percent of Americans believed a four-year degree was either “very” or “somewhat” good preparation for attaining a well-paying job. However, recent events have eroded that reputation, especially amongst conservatives.

https://www.openthebooks.com/

Last year, the Department of Education doled out nearly $925 million to the 50 worst performing community and junior colleges in the nation.

Among these under-performing schools, the 10 top funding recipients have an average graduation rate of 12 percent.

That’s right.

Just one out of every 8 students at these community and junior colleges actually graduate.

It’s clear these schools have internal issues that no amount of federal funding can fix.

It’s time to stop this dangerous cycle and demand greater levels of fiscal responsibility and transparency.