RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/harvards-president-publishes-politicized-phony-jeff-ludwig/

On September 3 of this year, Lawrence Bacow, President of Harvard University, sent a welcome letter to everyone in that community. It was a letter filled as one might expect with expansive platitudes about “traditions” being affirmed and our living in turbulent times. It is a letter that could have been delivered at a commencement address or a general convocation on “How To Make A Better World That Is Acceptable To The Ivy League.”

But the focus of the letter – delivered by a man leading a massive research institution, an institution with outstanding scholars in every branch of knowledge – was President Trump’s immigration policy. In July of this year, he had written of his concerns about delays, disruptions, and cancellations of various student visas to Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan. And, also in July, had visited lawmakers in Washington, DC about the same issues, and also about new taxes on institutions of higher education. Obviously, he was not satisfied with those meetings as he now felt the need to vent his concerns to the entire Harvard community, including alumni.

In his letter he alludes to students and/or researchers from certain countries being disrupted in their plans to come to Harvard, but does not name the countries. And he is frustrated because our government is citing national security concerns which he obviously thinks are exaggerated or even unnecessary. Since self-control is a virtue in the Harvard community and among all highly-educated, civilized persons, even though he is clearly pissed off, he does not say so directly.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/09/the-oberlin-college-lawsu

The successful lawsuit recently brought by a small local bakery against Oberlin College in Ohio has generated worldwide interest. What occurred is instructive and a shocking commentary on the current state of academic life in the United States. It has obvious implications for academic life here, and indicates the depths to which the academic Left has sunk in recent years.

Oberlin College is a well-known tertiary institution in a small town about 100 kilometres from Cleveland. It is a college, to use the American terminology, not a university, meaning that it has no postgraduate or professional schools attached to it, although it does have a well-known musical conservatory. There are really no Australian tertiary institutions similar to these American colleges, only very large universities which offer postgraduate degrees. In America, however, there are many distinguished undergraduate-only colleges, such as Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Vassar. Oberlin is an entirely private body, not a public institution chartered by the state—again, this has few parallels here—and, like all private colleges in America, is phenomenally expensive, costing $60,000 or more per year for four (not three) years. Although scholarship aid is widely available, most students amass enormous debts by the time they receive their diplomas. Most scholarship aid to students comes from the institution’s endowment, the amount of money, often incredibly vast, which it has in the bank, the product of gifts and legacies from alumni. Harvard has an endowment of $38 billion, while Oberlin is far down the list with an endowment of only $900 million or so.

Throughout its history, Oberlin has had a reputation for political radicalism. Black students graduated from Oberlin as early as 1844, and the college functioned as a stop on the “underground railway” of runaway slaves seeking freedom. It was also the first coeducational college in America, admitting women in 1837, four years after it was founded. During the Vietnam War, Oberlin was a centre of student radicalism. Owing to this reputation, many already radicalised students apply there for admission, and few conservatives. In recent years it has moved even further to the left, with—as will be seen—even its administration associated with radical causes. In terms of its academic reputation, Oberlin is very good, but not quite at the top. For instance, only 5 to 15 per cent of high school seniors who apply to super-elite universities like Harvard or Princeton are admitted to them, while for Oberlin the figure is 28 per cent.

Drag Queen Story Hour returning to the Upstate Sept. 22

Matthew Ablon

SPARTANBURG, SC (FOX Carolina) – A local group that brought the first Drag Queen Story Hour to the Upstate in Fe…

https://www.foxcarolina.com/news/drag-queen-story-hour-returning-to-the-upstate-

Public Library Deletes Pictures Of Drag Queens Fondling Children

Parents complained about the event, showing the photos of children lounging atop of the costumed drag queens on …https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/22/public-library-deletes-pictures-drag-queens-fondling-children-story-hour/

From a local library in NYC…

Drag Queen Story Hour offers a different kind of page-turner

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/drag-queen-story-hour-offers-a-different-kind-

Drag Queen Story Hour offers a different kind of page-turner

Children’s story hours are intended to instill a love of reading in young kids. But one reading program also see…

PBS (What would Mr. Rogers say?)  It is the first segment on the video that is included with the link.  How warm and cuddly can it get?

Hate group targets American Library Association over Drag Queen Story Hour
“Drag Queen Story Hour [exists] solely to indoctrinate children into transgenderism and homosexuality.”
By Daniel Villarreal 
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2019/08/hate-group-targets-american-library-association

https://www.city-journal.org/black-lives-matter-in-the-classroom

Black Lives Matter, though less prominent in the headlines of late, continues to be quite a growth story. What began in 2013 as a hashtag propagated by a few activists and academics rapidly grew into a nationwide protest movement and then into an institutional establishment, with local chapters around the U.S. and even a few abroad. With lavish funding and generally supportive media attention, the BLM network has become the progressive Left’s primary organ of antiracism activism. Now it seeks to sustain and expand upon that success. In its most ambitious venture yet, the group has moved beyond the streets and into the nation’s public schools.

No one should be surprised. As BLM statements repeatedly make clear, the movement has always linked the charges of police misconduct that brought it into existence with a comprehensive critique of the American polity. “State violence” against blacks “takes many forms,” the BLM network’s “About us” statement declares. The first plank of a widely publicized platform issued in 2016 demands “an immediate end to the criminalization and dehumanization of Black youth,” including “an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services.” BLM founder Opal Tometi heads the list of signatories of a 2018 letter urging teachers to support a “new uprising for racial justice” in the nation’s schools.

Neither Tometi nor BLM’s other two founders, however, initiated the latest campaign. In keeping with activists’ pride in their network’s decentralization—a self-conscious departure from the top-down organizational model that they ascribe to the civil rights movement—the present venture is akin to a franchising operation, with local cells of teachers’ union activists as the operators. K–12 educators sympathetic with the movement have successfully promoted the “Black Lives Matter at School” program, bringing its activist spirit and ideology into a growing number of secondary and even elementary classrooms.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/

To be a parent is to be compromised. You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

Rather coolly, the admissions officer asked him what it was. “The moon,” he said. He had picked this moment to render his very first representational drawing, and our hopes rose. But her jaw was locked in an icy and inscrutable smile.

Later, at a crowded open house for prospective families, a hedge-fund manager from a former Soviet republic told me about a good public school in the area that accepted a high percentage of children with disabilities. As insurance against private school, he was planning to grab a spot at this public school by gaming the special-needs system—which, he added, wasn’t hard to do.

Wanting to distance myself from this scheme, I waved my hand at the roomful of parents desperate to cough up $30,000 for preschool and said, “It’s all a scam.” I meant the whole business of basing admissions on interviews with 2-year-olds. The hedge-fund manager pointed out that if he reported my words to the admissions officer, he’d have one less competitor to worry about.

https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2019/09/09/teaching-that-america-is-hopelessly-racist/

Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and author of “Diversity: the Invention of a Concept.”

Many more college students have read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ anti-white screed Between the World and Me (2015) than have read, say, works by the Nobel economist Robert Fogel, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery (1974) or Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989). I can say that with some confidence. The Open Syllabus Project finds Coates’ book assigned in 783 courses. Fogel’s Time on the Cross is assigned in 22 courses and his Without Consent or Contract in 156 courses. Moreover, Coates’ book is now the second most-assigned book in the country in college summer reading programs.

Coates treats slavery as an institution that was never truly abolished. It continues as the pervasive racism of American society. This rhetorical flourish sells a lot of books today. Fogel, the economic historian, takes on slavery as an appallingly real institution and brings intellectual heft to the task of explaining it.

That contrast is all the more important in light of The New York Times’ plunge into re-educating all Americans about our history through the lens of African American slavery. The Times launched its 1619 Project on August 18 to a great deal of fanfare. 1619 is the year that the first black African slaves landed at Jamestown. It is a noteworthy date, but not quite what the beginning of slavery in the New World or in what would become the United States. The Spanish had brought African slaves long before. And we have at least one account by an early Spanish soldier, Cabeza de Vaca, who was captured and enslaved by Native Americans in the South in the 1520s. Slavery was an indigenous American institution long before Europeans got here.

Be that as it may, the Times wants to reimagine the European version of America as founded on slavery and stained in every possible way by the continuing effects of slavery. This is a political project more than a historical one. Its unacknowledged goal is to taint all opposition to progressive political goals as rooted in the perpetuation of oppression, and perhaps to delegitimize America itself.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/school-choice-offers-more-freedom-and-better-education-at-a-lower-cost/

With most services, you get to shop around, but rarely can you do that with government-run schools.

Philadelphia mom Elaine Wells was upset to learn that there were fights every day in the school her son attended. So she walked him over to another school.

“We went to go enroll and we were told, ‘He can’t go here!’ That was my wake up call,” Wells tells me in my latest video.

She entered her sons in a charter school lottery, hoping to get them into a charter school.

“You’re on pins and needles, hoping and praying,” she said. But politicians stack the odds against kids who want to escape government-run schools. Philly rejected 75% of the applicants.

Wells’ kids did eventually manage to get into a charter called Boys’ Latin. I’m happy for them. I wish government bureaucrats would let all kids have similar chances.

Wells was so eager for her sons to attend that she arranged to have one repeat the sixth grade.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/09/bucknell-university-to-host-antifa-leader-who-promotes-political-violence/

On the American college campus, the constant advance of extremist ideas goes on. Sometimes, those ideas are put into direct action in the form of violence, such as when radicals attack speakers and physically prevent audiences from gathering to hear them. But the more insidious aspect of the advance takes the form of invitations to propagandists in the garb of scholars who defend and encourage violence while attempting to mask their deeply totalitarian motivations in a superficial and mendacious veneer of moral self-righteousness and academic respectability.

At the campus where I teach, this week we are seeing an example of this insidious creep toward the left’s open embrace of violence against those who advocate for conservative ideas. The Humanities Center at Bucknell University has invited Mark Bray to speak on September 10, 2019, the day before the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.  It is the inaugural event in a year-long series the Humanities Center has put together on the theme “Confronting Fascism.”

Bray is an advocate for and participant in Antifa, an amorphous group of communists and anarchists who engage in thuggish street violence, attacking property and individuals they label “fascists” or “white supremacists,” designations they use sufficiently liberally as to include just about anyone they feel like vilifying and attacking. In his book, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” Bray carefully adheres to this crude and toxic system of definition, calling all those who support the current president of the United States “everyday fascists” and wrapping up with a concluding chapter with the astounding title “Whiteness is indefensible.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/6/coddling-campuses-and-crippled-culture/

Summer is over. School has started. Students from coast to coast have returned to their college campuses, and the nation waits with bated breath as to what will happen next. 

Will the self-absorbed snowflake insanity persist? Will you continue to hear cries of “you offended me” and “trigger warnings” in the halls of the academy? Will the demands for “safe spaces” continue to trump the study of science? Will the fixation on “micro-aggressions” continue to be more important than teaching morality? Will victimization continue to trump virtue?  

In the days ahead, what will the news from the ivory tower be? If the old axiom that the best predictor of future behavior is always past behavior is true, here is just a shortlist of what you can expect in the coming weeks and months.

Students at Emory University will renew their cry for counseling because someone used chalk to write the name of an unpopular politician on a campus sidewalk. 

Young intellectuals at Yale will continue to demand the termination of professors because of their “hurtful” views on such critical issues as Halloween costumes.

Southern Illinois University will double down on its brilliant plan to host campus “naps” in its library so students can snuggle up together in sleeping bags as they seek to solve our nation’s ills. 

In the coming academic year, millennials from campuses across the land will persist in their juvenile fits of rage. 

At American University, the University of Wyoming and the University of California-San Diego, burgeoning scholars will, once again, receive coloring books to help them cope with their stress and anxiety.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274878/video-students-justice-palestine-targets-dr-jason-frontpagemagcom

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features Dr. Jason D. Hill, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of several books, including We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People. Follow him on Twitter: @JasonDhill6.

Dr. Hill shares how he has been targeted by ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’ at Depaul, unveiling how he is paying the high price for his thought crimes about Israel.

Don’t miss it!