RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/classics-departments-threatened-race-gender-politics/

A professional association rebukes a scholar for suggesting that a colleague got his job because of his merit, not his race.

What would Livy think? The ancient historian had a high regard for facts. The field in which Livy now lives, however — classics — is finding facts more and more of a nuisance.

In January, a classicist named Mary Frances Williams stood up at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies and asked about the strange views that several panelists had promulgated on “the future of Classics.” One of the panelists, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an assistant professor at Princeton’s classics departments, inveighed that the whole discipline was guilty of “the systemic marginalization of people of color in the credentialed and accredited knowledge production of the discipline.” Professor Padilla said much more in this patois of “critical race theory” all to the effect that white people should shut up and get out of the way.

Williams, an independent scholar with a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, decided to speak up for the merit of teaching students works by the great authors of the past. Thrown off stride by one of the panelists, Williams responded, pointing to Padilla, “You may have got your job because you’re black, but I’d prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”

It was a maladroit sentence, though perhaps not a great deal more maladroit than Padilla’s response, “I hope the field dies, that you’ve outlined [sic], dies, and that it dies as swiftly as possible!”

The outcome of this exchange is that Williams was ejected from the meeting and the Association of Ancient Historians fired her as an editor of its newsletter. Padilla, by contrast, received a public “affirmation of his value to our department and the future of classics” from the chairman of the Princeton department.

https://reason.com/archives/2019/03/06/political-correctness-is-ruining-academi

If you are an American college professor, the way you get a raise or tenure is by getting papers published in “academic journals.”

The stupidity of these journals says a lot about what’s taught at colleges today.

Recently, three people sent in intentionally ridiculous “research” to prominent journals of women studies, gender studies, race studies, sexuality studies, obesity studies, and queer studies.

“The scholarship in these disciplines is utterly corrupted,” says Dr. Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. “They have placed an agenda before the truth.”

To show that, hoaxer and mathematician James Lindsay says, “We rewrote a section of Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism” and got it published in Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work.

For another paper, they claimed to have “closely” examined genitals of 10,000 dogs in dog parks to learn about “rape culture and queer performativity.”

Boghossian had assumed, “There’s no way they’re gonna believe that we did this!”

But the journal Gender, Place & Culture did, calling the paper “excellent scholarship.”

Seven journals accepted the absurd papers, as I show in my latest video.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273091/battle-against-leftist-indoctrination-public-matthew-vadum

Maine state representative Lawrence Lockman isn’t backing down after a committee in the state legislature killed his proposed bill that would have forbidden political and ideological indoctrination in the public schools of the Pine Tree State.

Leftist indoctrination in the classroom “is a violation of the civil rights of the students,” Lockman told FrontPage. Politically correct identity-group politics is now the norm in Maine’s classrooms, he said. (FrontPage published an op-ed by Lockman on March 5.)

“Realtors, architects, dental hygienists, have a code of ethics,” he said. “Why not teachers?”

Teachers were wrong to get involved in and bring students to a previous demonstration to lobby for the passage of legislation restricting firearms, Lockman said.

“It’s outrageous that teachers are taking sides on a legislative issue.”

“The kids were used,” he said. “They were pawns. They were dupes.”

“If the gun owners of Maine were having a demonstration or a rally to press for pro-firearms legislation I would just as strongly have opposed teachers getting involved in that.”

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

During a guest lecture at Boston University on Monday, University of Washington Professor Robin DiAngelo told the audience a “dangerous white person” sees people as individuals rather than by skin color.

DiAngelo, whose main field of work is “whiteness studies,” added that those who say they were taught to treat everyone the same deny black people of their reality, she said.

In making the claim, DiAngelo said she was lifting the terminology from her frequent co-facilitator at speaking engagements, black scholar Erin Trent Johnson.

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.”

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.

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.)