RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-get-fired-at-duke-11556133633

Zion Williamson isn’t the only star leaving Duke University after this academic year. But at least the basketball phenom is allowed to leave voluntarily to pursue an NBA career. A popular professor is being driven off campus for reasons that are not entirely clear.

After teaching for nearly two decades at Duke, Evan Charney was told last year by the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy that his contract would not be renewed after this academic year. He reports that he had not been warned about any problems with his teaching and was not told why he was being dismissed.

This week, as he prepares to depart, he describes what happened after he filed a complaint with Duke’s Faculty Hearing Committee. Unlike his Sanford colleagues, this outfit at least gave him some vague sense of why he was getting sacked:

Professor Charney’s tendency to provoke negative reactions, and perhaps harm, among some students in the classroom due to his confrontational teaching style—a style that had a tendency to be polarizing among students, particularly in a required Sanford course in which not all students could choose to have Professor Charney as an instructor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/professor-samuel-abrams-spoke-the-truth-he-still-pays-the-price/

Dissenters from campus orthodoxy often need a rare kind of personal fortitude.

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias — in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things — a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. “Liberal staff members,” he wrote, “outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most left-leaning group on campus.”

At the conclusion of his piece, Abrams made an argument that rang true to my more than 20 years of litigation experience — “ideological imbalance, coupled with [administrators’] agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas.”

This is exactly right. Administrators draft and enforce speech codes. Administrators are responsible for creating campus kangaroo courts. Administrators kick Christian student groups off campus, and administrators often take the lead in designing campus programming that features overwhelmingly progressive voices. While conservative media often focus their ire on random radical professors, administrators are busy engaging in the overwhelming majority of campus censorship.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/24/choosing-real-diversity/

“Schools and universities desperately need diversity – but diversity of thought and opinion, not a contrived structure that conditions, divides, and ultimately shuts down exposure to views that don’t line up with the current narrative.”

This nation’s most influential opinion-shapers tell us diversity is an unalloyed good, so self-evidently virtuous that it cannot be questioned. It’s simply a given that every decent person has to support diversity and even the slightest departure from the orthodoxy is heretical.

Universities have become the temples of diversity. They are so committed to the idea that they hand out millions in salaries every year to administrators charged with promoting inclusivity, equity, academic access, and a “welcoming environment” on school grounds. At the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, the 2017 payroll for its five diversity offices was $3.2 million, according to Campus Reform. Diversity administrators at the University of California, Berkeley, were paid $2.3 million that same year. The diversity-focused employees at the University of California, San Francisco, make more than $2 million a year.

Meanwhile, several schools in the University of California system are requiring math professor candidates to include a “diversity statement” in their applications, listing “past and/or potential contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

To wonder in 2019 why so much effort is being expended on programs that have zero academic value is to be a subversive. Still, it’s a fair question.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-yale-diversity-means-more-of-the-same-11556058975

Yale President Peter Salovey announced a major expansion of the school’s diversity bureaucracy this month, providing a case study in how not to lead a respected institution of higher education.

The pretext for this latest accretion of bureaucratic bloat was a May 2018 incident in a graduate student dorm. Sarah Braasch, a 43-year-old doctoral candidate in philosophy, called campus police at 1:40 a.m. to report someone sleeping in a common room, which she believed was against dorm rules. Yale administrators knew Ms. Braasch had psychological problems and that she had a history of bad blood with the sleeping student, Lolade Siyonbola, a 35-year-old doctoral candidate in African studies. But because Ms. Braasch is white and Ms. Siyonbola is black, the administration chose to turn the incident into a symbol of what Mr. Salovey called the university’s “discrimination and racism.”

Yale leaders immediately announced a slew of new initiatives: “implicit bias” training for graduate students, grad-school staff and campus police; instruction in how to run “inclusive classrooms”; “community building” sessions; a student retreat to develop the next phase of equity and inclusion programming. Despite this flurry of corrective measures, Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, Yale’s secretary and vice president for student life, ominously declared there was still “much more to do.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/04/22/persistence_and_political_correctness_at_amherst.html

Sometimes in the culture wars, the identity-politics camp leans so far to a politically correct extreme that liberals and conservatives alike reject it. Or so it would seem. A recent episode at Amherst College is worth examining less as a defeat for political correctness than a tactical retreat illustrating that the cult of identity politics on campus shows little sign of weakening.
Withdrawn from circulation, but why?
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What happened is this: Last month Amherst’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion sent all 1,850 or so students at the elite western Massachusetts school an attractively produced 36-page brochure called the Amherst Common Language Guide, with definitions of “key diversity and inclusion terms.” Its clear emphasis: “Marginalized groups” were being oppressed by what the document called the “cisheteropatriarchy” — a system of domination by straight white men – through racism, sexism, oppression, hegemony, and exploitation.

Within hours of the guide’s release, a member of the Amherst College Republicans leaked the brochure to the conservative Daily Wire website, which pronounced it “something out of ‘1984.’ ” A crescendo of ridicule from conservative websites and blogs followed.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273539/federal-grant-financed-anti-semitic-song-u-no-daniel-greenfield

“This is my anti-Semitic song,” Tamer Nafar declared.

The setting was the UNC-Chapel Hill. And this was the moment that, “Conflict over Gaza: People, Politics, and Possibilities”, a conference of UNC and Duke University’s notoriously pro-terrorist Middle East departments went, beyond its expected implicit anti-Semitism to explicit anti-Semitism.

The Gaza conference, with a roster of speakers from anti-Israel groups, at least one of which has been accused of funneling money to Hamas institutions, was true to form. The BDS speaker disagreed only over how much to boycott Israel. The conference was full of posters glamorizing violence. And the books on sale were even more explicit in their defense of anti-Semitic Islamic terrorism against Jews.

A journalist for The Tower picked up a copy of “Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide” and read its claim that, “Intrinsically and religiously Hamas could not be anti-Jewish.”

But Nafar’s “anti-Semitic song” was the moment that put the Gaza conference on the map of hate.

UNC Chapel Hill and Duke’s Middle East Studies departments were already notoriously hives of hatred. In February, UNC’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies brought in Linda Sarsour, who has frequently clashed with the Jewish community and is a supporter of the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader, to speak. In April, Duke’s Israel Apartheid Week had featured support for the PFLP, an anti-Semitic terrorist group responsible for the murders of Jews, and calls for the destruction of Israel.

And Steven Salaita, who had declared that, Zionism was “transforming anti-Semitism from something horrible into something honorable”, had spoken at UNC Chapel Hill.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273527/academia-and-false-advertising-jack-kerwick

When famous and affluent Hollywood celebrities were exposed recently for bribing their children’s way into some of America’s most prestigious academic institutions, far too many observers seemed to have missed the fact that this episode is but a symptom of a cancer that has metastasized throughout the entire academic world.

To put it in its simplest terms, “the College Admissions Scandal” revealed that colleges and universities are guilty of false advertising insofar as they would have Americans believe that applicants are admitted as students on the basis of their qualifications—not the size of their parents’ bank accounts.

But these same colleges and universities have been engaged in false advertising for decades insofar as they have been deceiving the American public into thinking that they are educational institutions that, as such, provide an open market place of ideas.

They are no such thing, sadly.

A recent illustration from my home state of New Jersey is representative of both the ideological fervor and historical illiteracy that pervades the academy. Brittany Cooper, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, has discovered a new villain in her campaign against “racism.” This academic who once characterized Jesus as “potentially queer,” blasted black politicians with whom she had disagreements as “white supremacists in Blackface,” and launched a profanity-ridden tirade after the Supreme Court recognized religious-based exemptions to the Obamacare mandate, now declares as racist none other than…time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fix-free-speech-or-no-higher-ed-act-reauthorization/

Today, the National Association of Scholars released a statement signed by over 100 prominent educators and public figures concerned with higher education. That statement calls on Congress to include protections for campus free speech in the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Only by doing so, says the statement, can Congress “cease subsidizing unlawful behavior by public colleges and universities.” In other words, Congress needs to stop funneling money to colleges and universities that promulgate unconstitutional speech codes and so-called free-speech zones.

The Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 must periodically be reauthorized and updated by Congress. This is important because Title IV of the Act sets the ground-rules by which institutions become eligible for federal student loans and grants. You can’t get a Pell Grant or a federal student loan unless you attend a Title IV eligible school. Today, many or most Title IV eligible schools fail to protect, and even flagrantly violate, the free-speech rights of their students. HEA must not be reauthorized without fixing this. Public universities that stifle free speech should lose their eligibility for federal financial assistance, while private colleges must at minimum make their free-speech policies clear and open (with the implication that they will thereby become contractually obligated to stick by them).

The NAS statement calling on Congress to include free-speech protections in its coming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act has been signed by prominent educators and writers such as Emory’s Mark Bauerlein, the University of Chicago’s Rachel Fulton Brown, George Mason’s F. H. Buckley, Chapman Law School’s John Eastman, Claremont McKenna’s Charles Kesler, UT Austin’s Robert Koons, the University of Oklahoma’s Wilfred McClay, Hillsdale’s Paul Rahe, and Ohio University’s Richard Vedder. Figures such as president of the Leadership Institute Morton Blackwell, president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Charlie Copeland, president of the Independent Women’s Voice Heather Higgens, and president of the Independent Women’s Forum Carrie Lukas have signed as well. Think-tankers with education expertise such as the Hudson Institute’s John Fonte and the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Tom Lindsay have also signed on. (I was a signatory as well. And note that organizational affiliations are included for identification purposes only.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/henry-kissinger-shouted-down-at-nyu-addresses-yales-wfb-society/

There’s one encouraging point to emerge from the frenzy on the nation’s campuses.

Every year, the William F. Buckley Jr. Society at Yale, founded by Lauren Noble, honors a public figure who was “disinvited” from a college campus. The speaker might have been shouted down at the podium, or his invitation might have been rescinded before carnage could ensue.

Past honorees include George Will, Charles Murray, Raymond Kelly, and Peter Thiel, each of whom has been kicked off at least one campus. Will had suggested in a column that colleges were making their students hypersensitive and inclined to feel like victims. (What could have given him that idea?) Murray had written in a book that racial differences in intelligence might to some extent be hereditary. Former NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly supported the “racist” stop-and-frisk policy. And Peter Thiel was forced to leave a 2014 speech at UC Berkeley by students shouting “No police state!” and “Black lives matter!” But it’s not clear what the students thought Mr. Thiel had to do with any of that.

This year, the honoree was Henry Kissinger, shouted down at NYU by students who called him a war criminal and a Nazi. Which is ironic, considering that in the days of the actual Nazis, Kissinger was serving in the 84th Infantry Division and receiving the Bronze Star for tracking down Gestapo officers. Ho hum.

And while there is something predictable in students’ childish glee at expunging popular conservative writers from their campi, an attack on the 95-year-old Kissinger seems like an attack on learning history — they might as well throw their textbooks out the window.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/19/cowardice-at-columbia/

On Thursday 11 April, shortly after 11pm, a black Columbia student named Alexander McNab walked through the gates of Barnard college—the undergraduate all-women’s school at Columbia University—after ignoring a security guard’s request to show his student ID. In search of a midnight snack, McNab got all the way to the library canteen before a public safety officer confronted him and asked for his ID a second time, a request McNab once again refused.

Several more officers had arrived on the scene and were continuing to request ID when McNab began yelling. What happened next, depicted in the video below, has become the subject of a national scandal: two officers pushed McNab’s upper body onto the countertop, at which point McNab finally handed over his ID. Public safety proceeded to verify that he was indeed an active Columbia student, at which point they left him alone.

Administrators reacted to the incident by placing the six public safety officers involved on paid leave until outside investigators reach a conclusion about their conduct. In the meantime, administrators have already reached theirs: racism. College deans sent an email to the student body—with the subject line “Addressing Racism on Our Campus”—in which they noted the “continued legacy of anti-black racism” and lamented that “such incidents continue to occur so close to home.”

On the contrary, the McNab affair involved neither police nor brutality. Public safety officers (who don’t carry guns) used the minimum amount of force necessary to get McNab to comply with their request that he identify himself. They pushed him against a countertop for 20 seconds before letting him go. I challenge those who believe this was excessive to name an alternate course of action which would have compelled an unknown man to produce identification.