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EDUCATION

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Harvard law students disinvite eminent legal scholar because his views on ‘genocide’ are wrong Greg Piper

By on March 6th, 2019

https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-

In order to speak at the Harvard Law School Forum, you must pass a political litmus test.

That’s what constitutional law scholar Bruce Fein learned after the nonpartisan student organization invited him and then quickly disinvited him when he gave the wrong answer on a polarizing legal question.

“[T]he censorship craze infecting higher education has spread from the area of gender combat into the more esoteric arena of international politics and historical interpretation,” according to Harvey Silverglate, former Harvard Law lecturer and co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The civil-liberties lawyer writes for Boston’s WGBH that the Forum’s move is particularly concerning because it’s the “premier free speech organization” at Harvard Law, and Fein was planning to lecture on “the beleaguered rule of law in the age of Trump.”

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Forget About Decolonizing the Curriculum. We Need to Restore the West’s Telos Before it’s Too Late written by Doug Stokes

By on March 5th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/03/03/forget-about

The campaign by left-wing student protestors and some faculty to force Western universities to “decolonize the curriculum” has been surprisingly successful. A movement that started at the University of Cape Town in 2015, with the demand that the city’s university remove its statue of Cecil Rhodes—“Rhodes Must Fall”—quickly made its way to the U.K., with student activists calling for his statue at Oriel College, Oxford to be taken down. At its heart, the movement seeks to challenge what it characterizes as the dominance of the Western canon in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the under-representation of women and minorities in academia. It also, like many movements inspired by critical theory, maintains that a person’s beliefs and worldview are largely determined by their skin color, sexual orientation and gender.

In a bizarre turn of events, this movement now enjoys the endorsement of the British Royal Family. In February 2019, on a visit to a London University, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, lent her weight to the movement, having had her eyes opened by a presentation about the relatively small number of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff within the U.K. higher education sector. According to the Times, the Duchess visited City University in London in her capacity as the patron of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) and responded to the presentation by announcing that Britain’s universities need to “open up that conversation so we are talking about it as opposed to continuing with that daily rote . . . sometimes that approach can be really antiquated and needs an update.” When presented with evidence about the lack of black and female professors in British universities she reportedly exclaimed, “Oh my God!” One of the organizers, Meera Sabaratnam, said it was “wonderful to see the Duchess standing up for female equality” as many “of the issues around racial equality are similar and it is great to see her embrace this. Change is long overdue.” The Duchess’s call for British universities to “decolonize the curriculum” may well become the policy of the British Labour Party, and potentially the U.K.’s next government. Angela Rayner, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, recently made a similar observation to the Duchess: “Like much of our establishment, our universities are too male, pale and stale and do not represent the communities that they serve or modern Britain,” she told the University and College Union conference earlier this month. If Labour comes to power, she said she would use the powers of the newly-established Office for Students to address this shortcoming. For Rayner, U.K. universities must “do much more, and under Labour they will be held to account.”

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LEFTIST INDOCTRINATION IN MAINE CLASSROOMS GETS GREEN LIGHT FROM GOP LEGISLATORS What could happen if our side played offense for a change? Lawrence Lockman

By on March 5th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273053/leftist-indoctrination-maine-classrooms-gets-green-lawrence-lockman

Editors’ note: The following opinion piece is by Lawrence Lockman, a Republican currently serving his 4th term in the Maine House of Representatives. He is co-founder and President of the conservative nonprofit Maine First Project.

Should teachers in Maine’s public schools be allowed to push partisan politics and ideology in the classroom?

I don’t think so, and neither do many parents who have contacted me. That’s why I sponsored LD 589, proposed legislation directing the state board of education to draft a Code of Ethics for K-12 teachers.

Simply put, the Code of Ethics would forbid teachers from endorsing candidates as part of their classroom instruction, from introducing controversial material not germane to the subject being taught, and generally from using their classrooms as bully pulpits for political, social or religious advocacy. The bill I sponsored is based on model legislation drafted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

There’s abundant evidence that students in Maine’s K-12 government schools are being subjected to Leftist indoctrination in the classroom. “Progressive” teachers, administrators, and textbook publishers have been working overtime to ensure that students practice “correct thinking” on subjects such as racial guilt, gender identity, illegal immigration, and other controversial issues.

As soon as the Code of Ethics bill was referred to the Education committee for a public hearing in late February, all the usual suspects announced their opposition. The head of the statewide teachers’ union insisted that teachers never engage in political advocacy in the classroom, while the far-Left ACLU defended the right of teachers to do exactly that.

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EDUCATION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Decline and Fall: Classics Edition By Roger Kimball On identity politics in classical studies.

By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/3/decline-fall-classics-edition

For the study of classics, it is (if we may adapt Dickens) the best of times and the worst of times. It is the best of times because there are multiple popular initiatives, mostly outside the academy, introducing people young and old to the riches of Greek and Latin. There are even a few bright spots inside the academy, for example Princeton University’s new Latin 110, a course taught entirely in Latin: the students and teacher do not speak in English about Latin but instead conduct the entire class in the ancient but still-living language. Impressive.

But such bright spots are few and far between. Indeed, even that class at Princeton has been castigated on Twitter for catering to students who are too “fit,” too male, and probably too heterosexual. More and more, it seems, the study of classics—like the study of the humanities generally—has fallen under the spell of grievance warriors who have injected an obsession with race and sexual exoticism into a discipline that, until recently, was mostly innocent of such politicized deformations—largely, we suspect, because of the inherent difficulty of mastering the subject. (In this sense, classics is different from pseudo-disciplines like women’s studies, black studies, lgbtq studies, and the like, because classics can never be entirely reduced to political posturing. You actually have to know something.)

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An Executive Order on Campus Free Speech By Adam Kissel

By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/donald-trumps-executive-order-on-campus-free-speech/

Thinking through how such an effort should work

President Donald Trump told a CPAC audience on Saturday that very soon he will unleash an executive order “requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars.” If we concede that federal grants should exist and that the agencies themselves should exist (though they should not), what could the order do, and what should it do? It seems valuable to build these ideas from a theory perspective rather than merely react to the language of the order when it comes out.

Should the order apply to all institutions, including private religious colleges? What conditions should the order include? How could it be enforced, and how can alleged violations trigger enforcement? Having served in the U.S. Department of Education in 2017 and 2018, and having worked at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for five years, I can provide a basic guide to the legal boundaries and tradeoffs involved.

First, to which institutions should the order apply? Consider that federal research grants are for public benefit. The results of publicly funded research, from this perspective, do not even belong to the researcher or the college. Therefore, the government may put restrictions on the research dollars, even at private colleges and universities. (This logic also implies that the data and published papers that result from federal dollars should be free to the public and not fenced by subscription journals. Frederick Hess and Grant Addison of the American Enterprise Institute made a similar argument in 2017.)

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Trump Has Saved the Free Speech Movement By Troy Worden

By on March 4th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/03/trump-has

He took a hard punch in the face for all of us.”

With these words, President Donald Trump transformed Hayden Williams, the young conservative campus activist who was viciously punched in the face at UC Berkeley last month, from a victim to conservative folk hero.

Trump went further. With Williams looking on in starstruck awe, the president announced at the Conservative Political Action Convention on Saturday that he would sign an executive order that would oblige American universities to comply with the First Amendment’s free-speech protections or risk losing federal funding.

For President Trump, it was an old refrain: his words echoed sentiments he expressed exactly two years and one month ago on Twitter, the day after the city of Berkeley was set ablaze in a riot over conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos’s planned speaking engagement on campus.

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Trump Promises Executive Order Denying Funds to Anti-Free Speech Universities Students must be free to challenge “ridiculous and dangerous ideas,” Trump tells CPAC. Matthew Vadum

By on March 4th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273041/trump-promises-executive-order-denying-funds-anti-matthew-vadum

President Trump vowed to issue an executive order protecting free speech at America’s universities Saturday as he invited Hayden Williams, a conservative victim of leftist violence on campus, to share the stage with him at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

“We reject oppressive speech codes, censorship, political correctness and every other attempt by the hard left to stop people from challenging ridiculous and dangerous ideas. These ideas are dangerous,” Trump said March 2 in a speech that was interrupted by chants of “USA! USA! USA!” “Instead we believe in free speech, including online and including on campus.”

“Today I’m proud to announce that I will be very soon signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research grants.”

“If they want our dollars, and we give it to them by the billions, they’ve got to allow people like Hayden and many other great young people and old people to speak. Free speech. If they don’t, it will be very costly,” he said. “Every day we’re restoring common sense and the timeless values that unite us all. We believe in the Constitution and the rule of law.”

The president did not provide details about the upcoming executive order. Robby Soave of Reason reports that “an official with knowledge of the executive order confirmed … that a draft exists. Indeed, the plan is to penalize universities that do not protect free speech by taking away their federal grants.”

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Cornell University President Shares ‘Strong Opposition to BDS’ for ‘Unfairly’ Singling Out Israel, Questioning Jewish State’s Right to Exist avatar by Shiri Moshe

By on March 3rd, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/03

“In her response to SJP’s letter, shared online by the Jewish campus group Cornell Hillel, Pollack expressed a “strong opposition to BDS,” and rejected the idea of using the school’s endowment as a tool of “political or social power.”“BDS unfairly singles out one country in the world for sanction when there are many countries around the world whose governments’ policies may be viewed as controversial,” Pollack wrote. “Moreover, it places all of the responsibility for an extraordinarily complex geopolitical situation on just one country and frequently conflates the policies of the Israeli government with the very right of Israel to exist as a nation, which I find particularly troublesome.”

The head of Cornell University in New York has responded to demands by anti-Zionist student activists that she embrace the Palestinian-led boycott of Israel, saying the campaign was antithetical to academic freedom and unduly targeted Israel for sanction while ignoring other countries.

President Martha Pollack’s comments came in response to a letter delivered to her on February 18 by members of the Cornell chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which urged the university to divest its endowment from companies “complicit in the morally reprehensible human rights violations in Palestine.” The letter also accused Israel of sharing a “common history” with the United States as a “settler-colonial project rooted in genocide,” and claimed that the BDS campaign was working to isolate Israel “until it meets its obligations under international law.”

Critics of the effort — including major Jewish groups in the US and globally — say it fails to recognize Arab and Palestinian culpability in the conflict with Israel, aims to undermine the Jewish state’s very existence, and rejects the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination.

SJP also plans to bring forward a Student Assembly resolution in support of BDS, which has already been endorsed by more than 20 student groups, including the Queer Political Action Committee, Black Students United, Climate Justice Cornell, South Asian Council, Islamic Alliance for Justice, and Cornell Young Democratic Socialists.

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EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Senate Democrats Introduce Bill to Push Radical ‘Climate Change’ Agenda in K-12 Schools Transforming America’s schoolchildren into climate warriors. Sara Dogan

By on February 28th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273001/senate-democrats-introduce-bill-push-radical-sara-dogan

Senate Democrats are seeking to enact legislation that would provide federal funding to indoctrinate K-12 schoolchildren in a radical unscientific agenda on the purported risks of “climate change.”

Titled the “Climate Change Education Act,” the bill was first proposed last April by Senator Edward Markey (D-MA). It would authorize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to establish a “Climate Change Education Program” and provide grants to develop teacher education programs, create “model State climate change curricula” for K-12 students, and “ensure that students graduate from high school with high climate literacy.”

Of course, these proposals are merely doublespeak for an attempt to use federal dollars and scare tactics to shape the next generation of Americans into radical environmental activists and proponents of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.

The proof is in the bill itself. Rather than acknowledging that manmade climate change is a disputed scientific theory, the Democrats’ legislation states outright that “The evidence for human-induced climate change is overwhelming and undeniable.”

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UC Davis Communist Poet Joshua Clover Wants Dead Cops “They need to be killed.” Lloyd Billingsley

By on February 28th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272994/uc-davis-communist-poet-joshua-clover-wants-dead-lloyd-billingsley

On January 10, convicted criminal Kevin Limbaugh gunned down Natalie Corona, 22, a rising star in the police department of Davis, California. The community hailed Corona as a hero who had dedicated herself to law enforcement and paid the ultimate price. Thousands of people, including police officers from across the country, attended a memorial service for the slain officer. On the other hand, not everybody at UC Davis was happy about all the praise for the officer.

After a photo of Corona, clad in an elegant blue dress and holding the “thin blue line” flag, went viral on social media, the campus Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission proclaimed, “this flag represents an attempt by law enforcement to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement.” And Blue Lives Matter was “an effort to evade accountability and critical awareness of police treatment of communities of color.” Now it emerges that a UC Davis professor actually supports the killing of police officers.

“I first heard about a UC Davis professor who thinks cops should be killed late in Fall Quarter,” wrote Nick Irvin, a columnist for The Aggie, a UC Davis newspaper. Irvin thought it was hearsay but then began poking around on Twitter and found this: “I am thankful that every living cop will one day be dead, some by their own hand, some by others, too many of old age,” from November 27, 2014. And this, “I mean, it’s easier to shoot cops when their backs are turned, no?” from December 27, 2014. And when he jumped ahead to Jan. 31, 2016, he found “People think that cops need to be reformed. They need to be killed.”

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