RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/how-professional-merit-and-scientific-objectivity-became-casualties-of-social-justice-insanity/

The idea of merit has fallen on evil times, as has its corollary concept, objectivity. These principles have now been breached by a consortium of the ideologically minded, who resemble a gang of robbers tunneling under a bank vault. The masterminds planning and executing this operation are a class of “treasonous” intellectuals as Julien Benda defined them, primarily academics, along with members of the political left.

In the interests of creating a society based on the axioms of “social justice”—which is really socialist justice—the principles of professional merit and scientific objectivity are dismissed by our mandarin class as forms of bigotry. As the professions, the educational institution, the political arena, and the scientific establishment engage in a process of diversification, accommodating claimants who trade on race and gender rather than ability and native endowment, merit is in the process of being replaced by outright mediocrity.

In the university, for example, no department is safe from the “inclusion and diversity” mania that is bringing higher education into the slough of disrepute—not law, not medicine, not business, not even the STEM subjects. As is, or should be, common knowledge, literature and the social sciences have long succumbed to the social justice, disparate impact, and feminist miasma that has clouded the atmosphere of thought, paving the way for pervasive academic decadence.

https://www.openthebooks.com

The 25 colleges and universities with the largest endowments in the nation hold a quarter-trillion in existing assets. So, why do these schools reap billions from the Department of Education each year?

Collectively, the eight schools of the Ivy League have a $119 billion endowment fund.

Let’s put this into perspective: With this amount, the Ivy League could provide full-ride scholarships to its entire undergraduate student body for the next 51 years without any new gifts.

With continued gifts at the present rate, this could go on forever.

The Ivy League schools can’t argue they need taxpayer assistance… And yet, the Ivies reaped $26 billion in federal funding over a six-year period.

We published a full editorial at the Washington Times, co-authored with economist Stephen Moore, on this fiscal phenomenon. Read the editorial here.

Remember, this is just one example of the wasteful spending we uncovered in our investigation into the U.S. Department of Education.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273374/texas-teacher-assigns-anti-trump-essay-class-sara-dogan

A middle school teacher in the public Goose Creek Consolidated Independent School District near Houston assigned 12 and 13 year old seventh grade students to read and answer questions on an essay blasting President Donald Trump as “racist,” “insensitive,” and counter to American values as part of a lesson on inferring information from written text.

Even for seventh grade students who are not overly familiar with politics, it is easy to parse the message of the piece which essentially translates as ‘Dump Trump.’ Titled, “Trump Against American Values,” the essay begins, “Throughout Donald Trump’s time in the American spotlight, we have come to see his true colors. From the beginning of his presidency, we have witnessed insensitive remarks toward other racial and cultural groups.”

The assignment goes on to say that “Some of Trump’s policies have gone against what Americans value most, like the freedom of opportunity” and labels the president as “insensitive” for his focus on building a wall on the border with Mexico.

The piece concludes with remarks that could well have been lifted from a campaign commercial for one of Trump’s 2020 Democratic challengers:

“With all of these racist remarks by our president, I think that we as a people need to take a stand and show that we will not accept this kind of leadership in our country.”