RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i-was-kicked

I am a Classics Ph.D. who recently attended the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS—formerly the American Philological Association), a yearly conference that provides papers on classical subjects and interviews for academic positions. I now regret doing so since some remarks I made at the conference led to me being branded a “racist” and the loss of my editing job with the Association of Ancient Historians.

I don’t usually attend because of the expense—I’m an independent scholar and cannot rely on universities for reimbursement. But it seemed like a good idea to go since the weather is always nice in San Diego. A bonus was the USS Midway, now a floating museum. The Midway, a World War II-era aircraft carrier that served as the command center for the bombing of Bagdad during the Gulf War, is well worth visiting.

On January 5 I decided to attend panel #45, a “Sesquicentennial Workshop”—it was the 150th anniversary of the SCS—titled “The Future of Classics.” It was described in the meeting program as “an open and free-form large-room discussion of what we think the trajectories of our field, broadly defined, will and/or should be, not just in the immediate future but for the next 150 years.” Based on the description (“discussion” is mentioned three times), the panel seemed like an opportunity to raise some questions and obtain some answers about what was happening in the field.

https://spectator.us/viewpoint-diversity-higher-education/

America’s colleges are deeply embedded in and influenced by the local communities where they are geographically situated.

While so much of higher-education in the United States is dominated by politically active and overwhelmingly liberal college administrators – the ever growing professional class of administrators who call the shots outside the classroom – it turns out that that not every college looks like those in New England which has a 25:1 ratio of liberal to conservative administrators.

As warnings about the diminution of viewpoint diversity become louder, understanding where and why there are some schools that are not completely progressive in orientation should be better understood and one explanation for this is geography: America’s institutions of higher education are deeply embedded in and influenced by the local communities where they are spatially situated. Thus, college administrators are not as uniformly left-wing in those areas that have surrounding Republican majorities.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/25/the-university-of-diversity

America’s educational system is breaking, and the primary culprits are the diversity bureaucracy, now an industrial strength special-interest group that grows more powerful and more expansive every year. For years they have dominated America’s social sciences and humanities, and now they’re launching an assault on the hard sciences. If they are not stopped, they eventually will destroy America as a first-world democracy.They’re well on their way. But it isn’t “racism”—the currency of the diversocrats—that is denying opportunities to “people of color.” It is failures in the social culture of the inner cities, even more than aggregate economic disadvantages, or the lousy, unionized public schools, that result in the chronic academic underachievement of their children.

There’s no money to be made, or votes to be had, however, in telling this tough truth, even though it might do a lot of good if enough people said it or heard it. The commitment to “diversity” in American university enrollment is absolute and all-powerful, despite the incessant barrage of lavishly funded charges to the contrary emanating from the grievance industry. To achieve diversity, university admissions offices strive to achieve proportional representation by race, and to do that, they downgrade the significance of the single most predictive indicator of academic potential, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/02/radically

If somebody wanted to fundamentally transform a society to its roots, where would he or she start?

The most logical starting point would be education. And if there were one part of the educational system that would produce this transformation most broadly, effectively, and efficiently, it would most likely be at our schools of education that train teachers for the K-12 classroom. That’s where ideas from the rest of academia are inserted into the curriculum for elementary and high school students, and where politically unsophisticated young people are turned into classroom teachers. Control the schools of education, and the education system will eventually be yours to forward your political agenda.

Remarkably, that is just what has happened in this country. Over 100 years ago, when our education schools were just starting up or growing from two-year normal schools to university status, Progressive educators set out to transform the nation into one that was based on social science theories, collectivism, and central planning.

How successful were they? Several years ago, I started an investigation into how politicized education schools have become. Today, the Martin Center is releasing the results of that investigation in a new report, titled “The Politicization of University Schools of Education.”

The report’s main conclusion? That schools of education may very well be radicalized beyond anything imagined by the early Progressives.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/our-woefully-politicized-education-schools/

A book that happened to catch my attention long before I was working in the field of higher-ed policy was Rita Kramer’s 1991 Ed School Follies. In it, she showed how many of America’s schools of education — the training grounds for future teachers — had been overrun with leftist ideology. And how do things stand 28 years later?

No better and probably worse is the answer.

The Martin Center’s Jay Schalin has just written a study on the politicization of ed schools and he discusses it in today’s article.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/20/12-craziest-college-classes-america-subsidized-tax-dollars/

It’s a common understanding that America’s colleges and universities are thick with leftist professors, administrators, and young progressives-in-training who pay through the nose for a “higher” education. But what exactly makes up an education today? As someone who’s been on dozens of embattled liberal campuses in the last two years, I’m still surprised by the absurd courses offered at the institutions people around the world consider to be elite.

Yes, the situation on campus is worse than most people think: Classes teach students about “Unsettling Whiteness” and “Latinx Sexual Dissidence.” Karl Marx and his failed ideas are propped up by aging academics who believe their socialist hell should be imposed on us all. The free market is written off as the flawed experiment of cisgendered white men.

It’s no wonder figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rocketed straight out of liberal institutions and onto the national stage with proposals like the Green New Deal—they’re doing exactly as they were taught. The courses listed in “Comedy & Tragedy,” a report we compile annually at Young America’s Foundation, provide a lens through which recent campus controversies may be better understood.

Deplatforming conservatives, student riots in response to guest speakers, safe spaces, and therapy alpacas are all inspired by the intersectional, victim-obsessed curriculum taught to the rising generation. A list of the 12 most bizarre and politically correct courses, presented with their original descriptions, is below. The full report is available here.