RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/university-harassment-policy-bans-offensive-jokes-posters-cartoons/

To make students subject to punishment over something that is so unclear is, quite frankly, unfair.

The “discrimination and harassment policy” of Southeastern Louisiana University lists “offensive jokes,” “posters,” “cartoons,” and “drawings” as “prohibited conduct” that can be considered “harassment.”

“This conduct need not have intent to harm; if severe enough, it does not have to
consist of repeated incidents; and it need not be directed against a specific individual/group of
Individuals,” the school’s policy states.

As The College Fix notes, the university has received a “Red Light” rating from the pro-free-speech group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — a rating reserved for schools that have “at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.” FIRE’s senior program officer Laura Beltz told The Fix that, although she did not know of any students who had recently been disciplined under the policy, that doesn’t mean that the existence of such a restrictive policy was harmless.

“It’s important to remember that, even when not enforced, policies that restrict constitutionally protected expression have an impermissible chilling effect on speech,” Beltz told The Fix. “To use two policies at Southeastern Louisiana as an example, students may be discouraged from expressing themselves if they read a policy that requires registration of expressive activities a full seven days in advance, or one that calls things like ‘offensive jokes’ punishable harassment.”

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/21/black-panthers-murderous-thugs-dont-deserve-public-accolades/

When I walked into the library of my university mid-semester and spotted a massive Black Panther Party tribute exhibit, it felt like a line had been crossed.

When my generation thinks of the 1960s, we think of milkshakes and poodle skirts. The civil rights movement, the war on crime, and World War II are reserved for pages in a textbook. The only thing that was truly passed down from my elders in that time period to me was a feeling of fear at two names: the Klu Klux Klan and the Black Panthers. They were radical organizations made up of thugs who sowed violence and inspired terror. Both managed to survive at least two generations.

Apparently, the Black Panthers’ reputation has been rehabilitated. The exhibit took up an entire room in the front entrance of the university library, and had a pristine, museum-grade quality rarely seen in the type of place that makes you pay for your own printer paper. It was made up of black and white photos of elders whose only significant action was to smile harmlessly at the camera.

Hosted, rather ironically, by the school’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, the photos, according to the front board, “reveal the humanity of the groups’ members rather than their invented personae.” Black Panther members “are real people, with real stories, who are your next door neighbors. They don’t fit the profile of rabid, anti-white, cop-hating terrorists…”

Ericka Huggins is one of the smiling old ladies in the exhibit. She helped torture young Alex Rackley with other Black Panther members, boiling the water they used to pour over his chest and commanding him to be quiet when he pleaded for mercy. Now she’s a lecturing professor. Rackley is dead. After falsely admitting he was an informant in hopes of stopping the hours of torture, Black Panthers killed him and dumped his body in a river.

https://collegeconservativesoapbox.wordpress.com/2018/12/21/notes-on-

Cole Levine is a sophomore studying politics at Hillsdale College. He also writes for The College Fix: https://www.thecollegefix.com/author/cole-levine-hillsdale-college/

Hamilton:

A “firm union,” one that balances power between a federal government and states represented in a Senate, is necessary to prevent the grievous damages caused by “domestic faction and insurrection,” while also protecting the ability of states to self-govern. The “petty republics” of history, or those that had a democratic nature and lacked unified authority, constantly underwent chaotic revolutions, as their societies shifted “between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.” They failed to protect their citizenries from foreign invasions, since their militaries swore allegiance to rivaling confederacies within the nation-states, seldom forming alliances at the outbreak of war. Thus, Hamilton rejected the positions of the anti-Federalists, or those who opposed the Constitution’s establishment of a strong federal government in favor of a republic dominated by confederacies.

The anti-Federalists misinterpreted Montesquieu’s advocation of a “small extent for republics,” by assuming he advocated for a nation-state divided by independent confederacies. The profound Liberal philosopher, although not an especially important champion of federalist republics, argued for “dimensions far short of the limits of almost every one of these [American] states,” thus taken literally and applied to the American states, would lead Americans to “take refuge at once in the arms of monarchy, or of split ourselves into an infinity of little, jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths…” While Montesquieu advocated for confederacies, he pointed out the necessity for a union wherein, “several smaller states agree to become members of a larger one, which they intend to form…” He argued this sort of republic would prevent “internal corruptions” yet enjoy “all the advantages of large monarchies,” as this union would exercise strong authority while also balancing powers and protecting liberty. Thus, the anti-Federalists lacked legitimate claims of adherence to Montesquieu’s philosophies. Most of the other ideas he championed required recognition and protection from a union.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/medical-schools-

Harvard Medical is Ground Zero

Those of us who are concerned about the rise and spread of transgender ideology should be very alarmed by the news coming out of Harvard University: There, activists and benefactors are gearing up to rewrite the medical school’s curriculum in order to reflect the prevailing progressive belief about gender ideology. The proposed revisions seek to eliminate “assumptions or errors about sex and gender,” such as “conflating sexual orientation with gender identity, presuming gender is immutable or treating heterosexuality as a default.”

Well. A generation of doctors assuming that “gender” (they mean “sex”) isn’t immutable is something rather terrifying to contemplate. A doctor who believes that a man can be or become a woman, or a woman a man, does not exactly inspire a vote of medical confidence; the distinction between the two sexes is one of the obvious bright lines in the medical literature, it has been for millennia, and no amount of wishing will be able to change it. As for the idea that heterosexuality is not a “default:” Consistent polls indicate that upwards of 97% of individuals are heterosexual, possibly more. If that’s not a “default,” what is?

Working to make a medical program more comprehensive and inclusive is a good thing. Working to make it into a bizarre social experiment based on incoherent ideology is a very bad thing. This is the next front in the transgender wars: Having successfully convinced much of the culture of the merits of gender ideology, activists will now attempt to redesign the very foundations of modern medicine to reflect it. This should be deeply concerning to anyone who cares about facts, truth and good medicine, all of which are threatened by such efforts.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ben-shapiro-campus-event-goes-on-despite-threats/

Flyers with a threatening message that were distributed around the campus of George Washington University failed to discourage a conservative youth organization from hosting speaker Ben Shapiro on Thursday.

On the morning of the event, students spotted flyers around GW’s campus with a red “X” through a photo of Shapiro. The posters warned the university branch of the Young America’s Foundation, which hosted the lecture, to “get security.”

“Sadly, yet unsurprisingly, liberal authorities at GW dismissed the threat and refused to investigate,” YAF said in a press release. But the event went on as planned, and drew a standing-room-only crowd, according to the group.

“Nice try, leftists—Ben is still coming to campus,” GW’s YAF chapter wrote on Twitter.“We need to be bold when we have speakers and events on campus,” said George Washington University YAF co-president Aimee Triana. “I’ve been told by some of my peers that I’m the first conservative they’ve ever met.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272591/islamic-activist-advocates-using-public-schools-sara-dogan

In a video clip that has recently gone viral, Islamic activist Sharifa Alkhateeb talks extensively about using U.S. public schools to proselytize Islam and convert America to an Islamic nation.

“We are in the process of developing Islamic education for our children. And yes, all of us have the hope and dream…of creating not only Islamic schools that cooperate with each other but Islamic schools systems that would span the country, that’s what our further objective is,” Alkhateeb explains. “So as we approach the public school system, we have to approach it with that credo, that we see ourselves as worshipping Allah in being involved with them in any way.”

“If we are Islamic individuals and we come to our relationship and our connection with the public school system as Islamic individuals then we will not be part of the great, what they call, American melting pot,” she asserts. “We do not want to melt into American society and disappear. We want to go into American society with Islamic ideals and revamp their thinking. We want to revamp them. We want to turn them into Muslim individuals.”

The recording is in fact not new, but was made during the “Muslim Americans Political Awareness Conference” in 1989. Alkahateeb, now deceased, was the managing editor of the International Institute for Islamic Thought’s American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences. She was a prominent member of the Muslim Students Association, an organization tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, and also served as president of the Hamas-linked North American Council for Muslim Women. She was also employed as a diversity consultant with the Fairfax County Public Schools in Fairfax, Virginia.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272600/blue-black-and-uc-davis-lloyd-billingsley

Convicted criminal Kevin Limbaugh, 48, known for violence toward co-workers, thought the Davis, California, police department was attacking him with “ultrasonic waves.” On Thursday January 10, the unhinged criminal gunned down Davis police officer Natalie Corona, 22, a rising star in the Davis police department. The community hailed Corona as a hero who had dedicated herself to law enforcement and paid the ultimate price. The Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission (ECAC) at UC Davis didn’t see it that way.

A photo of Corona, clad in an elegant blue dress and holding the “thin blue line” flag, went viral on social media. The Commission’s Facebook post, now deleted, said, “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.”

The Commission’s post drew criticism from UC Davis student body president Michael Gofman, the economics and political science major who last year drew attention to anti-Semitic fliers on campus. Students for Justice in Palestine opposed a campus seminar on anti-Semitism to be held by the Anti-Defamation League.

Last year, Gofman also opposed a mandate to remove the American flag from meetings of the school senate. After the flag flap over Natalie Corona, Gofman said in a post, “I am ashamed that some of these same people, protected by the very officers that they are condemning, have the audacity to politicize the loss of a young officer. Her only crime was being a police officer.” Gofman urged the Ethnic and Cultural Affairs to take down their “disgusting post,” and issue an apology.

The Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission is “responsible for investigating and recommending policies and programs concerning under-represented communities at UC Davis.” The student group’s goal is “to represent historically marginalized groups who face barriers in terms of institutionalized, internalized, and systemic oppression. We are here to propose legislation and support events that honor different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds.” And the Commission seeks to “empower cross-cultural interaction in order to represent and bring awareness within our communities, student body, and the University of California, Davis.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/lawsuit-sorority-guilty-of-hazing-for-requiring-members-to-study-25-hours-per-week/Academic learning is supposed to be the entire purpose of college.

A predominantly Latina sorority is suing the University of Virginia on the grounds that it was wrongfully punished for hazing.

According to an article in The Daily Progress, Sigma Lambda Upsilon — also known as Senoritas Latinas Unidas — was punished for “hazing” because of a policy that required its members to study 25 hours per week. The sorority was suspended last March and filed the lawsuit in September, but the situation made news only when The Progress reported on it earlier this month.

According to the news source, the sorority got in trouble when one of its recruits went to a professor to complain about the requirement. The professor then contacted the student affairs office and the police. (Yes — the police.) UVa conducted an investigation and found that the forced studying did in fact violate the school’s anti-hazing policy.

The sorority argues that this determination was unfair because other classes and athletic programs on campus require a similar amount of studying, and claims that the school’s ruling amounts to discrimination.

UVa defines “hazing” as any situation that occurs either on campus property or during a campus event “that is designed to or produces mental or physical harassment, discomfort, or ridicule.”

“Such activities and situations include, but are not limited to, creation of excessive physical or psychological shock, fatigue, stress, injury, or harm,” the hazing policy states.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/higher-education-decline-propaganda-intolerance/

Universities are expensive engines of propaganda and intolerance, and many non-academics are offering scholarly material free online.

America is schizophrenic about its major universities and, to a lesser extent, its undergraduate colleges.

On the one hand, higher education’s professional schools in medicine and business, as well as graduate and undergraduate programs in math, science, and engineering, are the world’s best. America dominates the lists of the top universities compiled in global surveys conducted from the United Kingdom to Japan.

On the other hand, the liberal arts and social sciences have long ago mostly lost their reputations. Go online to Amazon or to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore, and the books on literature, art, and history are often not the products of university professors and presses.

Few believe any more that current liberal-arts programs have prepared graduates to write persuasively and elegantly, to read critically and to think inductively while drawing on a wide body of literary, linguistic, historical, artistic, and philosophical knowledge. In fairness, that is no longer the aim of higher education. When students at tony colleges present petitions objecting to free speech or the right of guests to give lectures, they are usually full of grammatical errors and often incoherent.

Colleges, with some major exceptions (Hillsdale most preeminently), simply do not ensure the teaching of such skills any more. Of course, there remain wonderful classes, courageous deans who buck trends, and hardworking faculty who teach splendidly and have received modest compensation and little credit for their yeoman work. But they are a minority and a shrinking one at that.

By and large, the bachelor’s degree, even in a liberal-arts major, no longer certifies that a graduate will be able to read, reason, compute, or draw on a body of knowledge far more effectively than those without an undergraduate degree. The decline of the university has been an ongoing tragedy since the 1960s, but the erosion has accelerated because of ideological bias and its twin, incompetence. Here are five major recent and additional catalysts.