RUTHFULLY YOURS

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://www.nationalreview.com/corner/donald-trumps-campus-free-speech-order-and-our-cold-civil-war/

In principle, I strongly support President Trump’s plan to issue an executive order to protect freedom of speech on campus. Yes, there are many potential problems with federal intervention, but there is really no good alternative.

I don’t know what will become of our ever more bitterly divided nation, but I do know there’ll be no peaceful coexistence for our warring camps without a cooling of the campus free-speech crisis. It’s no use looking to universities for a resolution. They are caught in a quicksand of their own creation and are well past the point of self-extraction. This isn’t just a university problem either. The extremism of our politics; its historical naïveté; the bitter mutual recriminations that dog our every debate; the country’s rising divisions along lines of religion, ethnicity, sex, and race; and the endangered liberties even of Americans well past college age; are all outcomes of the noxious spirits the academy has been injecting into the body politic for nearly six decades.

There are certainly good reasons to be wary of federal intervention in matters of local concern. We would much prefer our campuses to heal themselves. Yet it is foolish and blinkered at this point to believe that they will. That does not remove the dangers of ham-handed, biased, or counter-productive federal action. Yet it is equally mistaken to treat campus free speech as just another case in which unfettered markets will flourish in the absence of outside interference. The campus is the opposite of a free market. It’s protected from market forces by tenure, and further insulated from public dismay — and bursting economic bubbles — by hundreds of billions of dollars in annual government subsidies.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/10/a-million-dollar-punch/

President Trump on March 2 announced he would issue an executive order addressing free speech on college and university campuses. The order itself hasn’t been issued, and so far there has been little indication of what it might say. That hasn’t stopped a torrent of criticism aimed at what Trump might do. The higher education establishment is worried. The president’s words suggest that significant funding could be at stake.

This is what President Trump actually said about the executive order during his two-hour speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual convention. First, he made some general comments: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. Instead we believe in free speech, including online and including on campus.Then, after introducing Hayden Williams, the young man who had been punched while distributing conservative pamphlets at UC Berkeley, Trump continued:Today I am proud to announce that I will very soon be signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars.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. And if they don’t, it will be costly. That will be signed soon.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/yet_another_the_crime_hoax_at_yet_another_expensive_college.html

Another hate crime hoax has convulsed an expensive private college and yielded a mass demonstration by “more than 100” black students (out of a student body of 1,450), and the predictable list of seven demands, including race-based hiring favoring blacks and brainwashing (AKA mandatory “cultural competency” training).

So far as I can tell, no national media have picked up the story of the arrest of Ajani Arthur, a black student at Goucher College (tuition: $43,440) who allegedly created graffiti that “depicted swastikas, the letters ‘KKK’ and appeared to include the last names of four black students, including Arthur.” A previous incident last November, one floor below where the current graffiti were found and attributed to Arthur, said, “all ‘n——‘ on campus would be killed.”

The U.K. Daily Mail is doing the job that the American national media refuse to do, with the most extensive coverage of the fraud (though local media, including the Baltimore Sun, Washington Times, and the alleged perp’s hometown paper, along with the College Fix, managed to take notice). A Google search for Goucher College yields no note of the incident at all:

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.”