RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/04/01/free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee/

Many people who genuinely believe that they support freedom of speech exhibit a double standard: One person’s “hate speech” is another person’s belief, opinion or even (as they see it) fact. And opinions about whether there’s a “free speech crisis” on university campuses tend to vary according to these subjective determinations.

While I’m not a fan of such “crisis” language, there’s definitely a real decline in support for freedom of expression among young people. In a 2016 Knight Foundation survey, 91% of high school respondents said they supported the “freedom to express unpopular opinions.” But when pressed, only 45% said that people should have the right to publicly express ideas that others find “offensive.”

The Knight Foundation’s numbers on college students’ attitudes are similar. In 2016, 78% of college respondents agreed that colleges should expose students to all types of speech and viewpoints. Yet, more than two-thirds said that colleges should be able to enact policies against language that is “intentionally offensive to certain groups,” and more than a quarter said that colleges should even be able to restrict the expression of potentially offensive political views. (More than half reported that the climate on campus “prevents some people from saying what they believe because others might find it offensive.” A year later, that number rose to 61%.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-mole-hunt-for-diversity-bias-at-villanova-11553898400?

Like many colleges in the U.S., Villanova University has launched an effort to monitor its faculty for signs of “bias” in the classroom. As Villanova professors, we believe this mole hunt for bias undercuts our ability to provide students with a liberal education.

Last fall we were notified by the Villanova administration that new “diversity and inclusion” questions would be added to the course and teaching evaluations that students fill out each semester. In addition to the standard questions about the intellectual worth of the course and the quality of instruction, 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.”

In short, students are being asked to rate professors according to their perceived agreement with progressive political opinion on bias and identity. Students are also invited to “comment on the instructor’s sensitivity to the diversity of the students in the class.” Professors are rated on their “sensitivity” to a student’s “biological sex, disability, gender identity, national origin, political viewpoint, race/ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, etc.” The “etc.” in particular seems like an ominous catchall, as if the sole principle of sound teaching has become “that no student shall be offended.”

https://www.city-journal.org/college-admissions-scandal-meritocracy

If, like me, you’re an avid observer of human affairs at their most vain and status-crazed, you have been studying the College Cheating Scandal, or what investigators called Operation Varsity Blues, with all the intensity of a rabbinical scholar poring over Leviticus. Each reading yields delicious new details of greed, ambition, hypocrisy, and decadence. “Ah! Vanitas, Vanitatum!” as the author of the classic nineteenth-century novel Vanity Fair sighed. But eventually the mordant fun gives way to the recognition that what we have here is evidence of a serious sickness in the American meritocracy.

The story is well known by now, but before it disappears into the overflowing landfill of tawdry contemporary Americana, some of its more obscure gems deserve a farewell salute. Let’s begin with the master of ceremonies, William “Rick” Singer, owner of a Newport Beach, California college-consulting company. Singer bribed college coaches and staged mockups of his clients’ slacker children at athletic events, sometimes photoshopping their faces onto a picture of actual soccer players or rowers, or, weirdly, pole-vaulters. A 36-year-old Harvard grad, Mark Riddell, could take a standardized test and get an agreed-upon, specific score with the precision of an expert archer. Singer hired him to take or to correct tests for clients whose preliminary scores would put them on the reject pile: Riddell is now Cooperating Witness #2. My favorite bit of chicanery was Singer’s money-laundering operation. To hide the eye-catching sums that he was earning for his ploys—and to give his clients the extra perk of a (legal) tax deduction for their (illegal) contributions—Singer set up the Key Worldwide Foundation, which he advertised as “provid[ing] guidance, encouragement and opportunity to disadvantaged students around the world.” The IRS estimates that Singer earned $25 million for his good works.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/an-american-dilemma-stuyvesant-high-school/

This article in the New York Times is getting attention, understandably. It highlights an old, painful issue, involving “merit,” race, and ethnicity. The headline over the article is “Only 7 Black Students Got Into N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.”

That high school is Stuyvesant. As the Times reports, students get into such schools “by acing a single high-stakes exam that tests their mastery of math and English.” This leads to racial and ethnic outcomes that are deemed undesirable. At Stuyvesant, 74 percent of freshmen next year — call it three-quarters — will be Asian.

New York mayor Bill de Blasio, among others, has called for the scrapping of the entrance exam and the overhaul of the admissions process. I have a memory, from 2001. Indeed, via the power of Google, I will quote the Times:

Contending that standardized college tests have distorted the way young people learn and worsened educational inequities, the president of the University of California is proposing an end to the use of SAT’s as a requirement for admission to the state university system he oversees, one of the largest and most prestigious.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/elite-universities-ignore-merit-advance-progressive-agenda/

Higher-ed institutions have long ignored merit and squelched freedom, all while failing to educate.

A number of liberal bastions are daily being hammered — especially the elite university and Silicon Valley.

A Yale and a Stanford, or Facebook and Google, assume — for the most part rightly — that each is so loudly progressive that the public, federal and state regulators, and politicians would of course turn a blind eye to anything questionable that these social-justice institutions did.

And they have done a lot of quite questionable things — cynically (and in medieval fashion) using their progressive veneer to exempt themselves from the consequences of their actions, so that they may do what otherwise would earn scrutiny and worse for most other American institutions.

Our nation’s marquee universities, such as Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown — with dozens more no doubt to be named — recently got caught selling admittances. Or rather a few of their employees somehow freelanced under administration noses and sold entrances for cash. That is apparently our modern version of crooked 14th-century clerics putting out to bid penances to thieves and fornicators who wished to buy their way into heaven.

At some of our “best” universities, renegade coaches in minor sports took bribes in exchange for lies claiming that otherwise likely unqualified students were actually “athletes” and thereby could be greased into their colleges by middlemen who helped doctor résumés and test scores.

The irony is rich. The offenders were not the children in Dayton or Great Falls of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” or of the late John McCain’s “crazies,” or of Barack Obama’s “clingers” — it was not they who were using their “white privilege” to break the law as they virtue-signaled their racialist disdain of the working classes (who were without white privilege). What a strange psychological mechanism: Wealthy white liberals apparently squared the circle of their own private and insider privilege by fobbing “white privilege” off on those who don’t have it — as they used their privilege cynically for their own children.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/triggered-by-weinsteins-harvard-lawyer-11552950103

Harvard has opened an investigation into law professor Ronald Sullivan, who earlier this year joined Harvey Weinstein’s criminal-defense team. Some undergraduates complained that Mr. Sullivan’s decision to represent Mr. Weinstein, who is charged with rape in New York, puts them at risk. By taking the complaint seriously, Harvard puts its commitment to identity politics above the core tenets of due process.

Student backlash was immediate when the New York Post reported in late January that Mr. Sullivan would be representing Mr. Weinstein. A visual and environmental studies major started an online petition to remove Mr. Sullivan from his position as faculty dean of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s 12 undergraduate residential houses. Mr. Sullivan’s choice of client was “deeply trauma-inducing,” and shows that Mr. Sullivan doesn’t “value the safety of students,” the petition announced. Would Winthrop residents “really want to one day accept [a] Diploma,” the petition asked, from someone who “believes it is okay to defend” Mr. Weinstein?

Six Harvard dorms held “listening sessions” attended by emissaries from the university’s Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, whose website urged traumatized students to seek mental-health services and other help from Harvard’s massive Title IX bureaucracy. Harvard’s dean of students and its lead Title IX coordinator attended a student protest outside the main administration building, where the ubiquitous Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response doled out hot chocolate.

Still-unidentified vandals spray-painted #MeToo slogans such as “your silence is violence” on Winthrop House. The record reveals no condemnation from Harvard officials and requests for comment were not returned at press time. The Association of Black Harvard Women complained that Mr. Sullivan (who is black) had “failed” female African-Americans at Harvard and had compromised his ability to support “survivors . . . as they deal with their trauma.”

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/19/houston-library-features-convicted-child-molester-reading-trans-books-children/

This article contains information and images not fit for children.

The Houston Public Library has apologized for featuring a convicted child molester last fall during its “Drag Queen Storytime” series. It has not, however, announced it will end the program that featured the male sex offender dressed up as a woman reading LGBT books to children as young as babies.

“A media spokesperson for the library confirmed one of the program’s drag queens, Tatiana Mala Nina, is Alberto Garza, a 32-year-old child sex offender,” reports local TV station KHOU. “In 2008, he was convicted of assaulting an 8-year-old boy.”

State records say the 200-pound, 5-foot-11 man was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child, is at a “moderate” risk for reoffending, and must report his whereabouts to police annually for the rest of his life. Garza’s YouTube channel showed he was in the process of transgendering himself, according to Rod Dreher (videos since removed; screenshot of Garza in drag captured here).

Drag Queen Storytime is spreading to libraries across the country, mostly but not exclusively in deeply Democratic locales. It even has a national PR webpage featuring an image of a scared toddler staring at a man dressed up in drag while the child’s mother encourages the child to get over the apprehension.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/18/va-public-school-indoctrinates-5-year-olds-transgenderism-without-telling-parents/

In Arlington County, Virginia, not even kindergarteners are exempt from pro-transgender messaging. So reports The Washington Post, which, earlier this month, featured an article about Ashlawn Elementary School, which honored National “Read Across America Day” by hosting a transgender spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The spokesperson read a story about a transgender child for a room full of kindergarten children.

Prominent media outlets claimed parents were notified beforehand and allowed opt their children out of the event. But those outlets got the story wrong. The letter, written solely in English despite the school’s sizable non-English-fluent population, nowhere mentions “opting out.”
Media, District Lie About Pro-Transgender Event

“Dozens of kindergarten students” sat cross-legged in openly homosexual teacher Jaim Foster’s classroom at Ashlawn Elementary School on February 28 while HRC representative and ‘“transgender rights advocate” Sarah McBride read them a picture book about a transgender girl. The book was “I Am Jazz” by Jazz Jennings, who talked about being a transgender teen on a TLC show.

Also in attendance was Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association (NEA), an organization that welcomed LGBT groups to serve as official sponsors of this year’s national reading event.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2019/03/18/college_admissions_how_to_jump_to_the_head_of_the_line_469259.html

To understand how this whole college admissions scam worked, I asked a friend who knew about it first-hand. Here is what Dee Seaver told me:

Sure, I wanted to go to Southern Cal. But would USC be impressed by climbing Mount Everest barefooted or herding unicorns with Peruvian peasants? Those items on my application might not be enough. That’s why Dad turned to Rick Singer as a “college adviser.” What a guy! He suggested I highlight my summer charity work building carbon-neutral air conditioning for every Nigerian. Dad’s friends in the hedge fund industry also put in the good word for me. Even better, they donated funds for the school’s new Pilates Studio and Sauna. I got in!

I knew there was zero chance of flunking out. That’s a secret most folks don’t know about elite colleges. All I had to do was pick the right major, regurgitate the teacher’s crazed ideology, and avoid any courses in math and science. My plan: stick to writing papers about gender fluidity in Jane Austen. If you show up occasionally for class and take the exams, then B-minus is the closest you’ll come to a failing grade. Just don’t major in astrophysics, my friend, and you’ll sail through.

With this sweet setup, I can focus on my primary interests: social inequality and the evils of capitalism. Fortunately, there is still plenty of time for drinking, partying, and getting horizontal. People who say “College is just not worth it” are completely clueless. I f*#kin’ love it.