RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/devos-title-ix-regulations

The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings gave the public a crash course in campus-rape ideology. It is about to get another. Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released a proposed federal rule that corrects the worst procedural abuses of campus-rape tribunals. It hews closely to judicial precedent and is fair to all parties, yet the feminist establishment has reacted with hysteria, characterizing the draft regulation as an assault on sexual-assault “survivors.” Maintenance of the campus-rape myth, it turns out, is incompatible with due process. Whether feminism itself is compatible with Enlightenment values appears increasingly doubtful.

Opposition to the Kavanaugh nomination was based on the principle that self-professed “survivors” must be believed and that accused males must be condemned, regardless of the paucity of evidence against them. That principle, already ubiquitous on college campuses, got an assist from the federal government in 2011, when the Obama administration released a so-called guidance (an informal federal directive of murky legal status) on college rape proceedings. The guidance strongly discouraged cross-examination of the accuser and required schools to use the lowest possible standard of proof for finding a defendant guilty of sexual assault. It promulgated a broad definition of actionable sexual harassment—“unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”—that ignored relevant Supreme Court precedent and that would extend to an unwanted request for a date. Since 2011, due-process deficiencies in campus-rape proceedings have become ever more widespread. Colleges routinely deny defendants the opportunity to review all the evidence, fail to provide an impartial decision-maker, and ignore the presumption of innocence. The accused is regularly forbidden the assistance of counsel. In 2014, a Title IX officer at Washington and Lee University issued a lugubrious warning to a male student—“a lawyer can’t help you here”—before expelling him for sexual assault.

The proposed Education Department regulation tries to end these abuses. Ironically, in an administration regularly charged with ignoring the law, the DOE has carefully followed the legal framework for promulgating new federal rules. The 2011 Obama guidance was issued as a fait accompli; Donald Trump’s DOE, by contrast, is giving the public the opportunity to comment on the proposed rule before it becomes final.

https://quillette.com/2018/11/23/jews-revolutionized-the

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for student admission, a blind test that favored intelligent applicants even if they lacked poise or polish. By 1908, Jews—most the children of immigrants—constituted 7% of the school’s student population—double the percentage of Jews in the U.S. general population. By 1916, Jewish enrolment was 15%, and by 1922 it was more than 21%.

Harvard’s president, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, became alarmed by what he perceived as a serious problem. This was not because (or not only because ) Lowell harbored anti-Semitic views. As he wrote to a colleague in 1922, “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles.” (His observation was not incorrect—although he was wrong to assume that Jews in universities would have the same off-putting effect as in hotels.)

Today, we are watching what may well be a reprise of this scenario, with Asian-Americans as the targeted group: Harvard stands accused of “racial balancing” by keeping Asian-American admissions at or under a 20% threshold, and of using a bogus “personal rating” as a back-door method of keeping out Asian applicants who are stereotyped as bland workaholics.

For its part, Harvard does not deny that it weighs its entrance scales to favor groups it considers more disadvantaged than whites or Asian-Americans—namely blacks and Hispanics—but defends such measures on the grounds that “colleges and universities must have the freedom and flexibility to create the diverse communities that are vital to the learning experience of every student.”

The historical parallel between Jews and Asians is striking for a number of reasons—including the fact that both cases involve an explicit rejection of the idea that academic merit alone could be a tenable basis for admission. Like today’s affirmative-action supporters at Harvard, the gentiles of a century ago also started poking into applicants’ personal lives to discover what their “character” might be. And what a weasel word that turned out to be.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/16/fight-the-denigration

American history is everywhere under attack. The recent skirmishes started with the campaign to remove Confederate statues, but it surely won’t end there. As our betters in America’s universities want us to know, the whole of American history is suspect. In our media, in the popular culture, and in our schools, we’re subject to an unending drumbeat of how America was founded to promote imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and genocide—unimpeachable facts, we’re told, for which all Americans must forever share the burden of collective guilt and shame.

For America to atone for her sins, her history must be denounced and then purged.

This assault on America’s past is hardly news to the Right; the Left has been waging war against American history for well over a half a century. But given this ongoing and unceasing hostility, the response of so many conservatives to recent events is terribly disturbing. While it is perhaps it is to be expected given our predilection to fight amongst ourselves (e.g., the Trump debate on the Right), it is extremely ill-advised and destructive to the things we still share in common.

One thing we should have learned is that the Left never stops; there is no end to their relentless pursuit of destructive hate. There is no room for reasonable adjudication of their claims. We are hopelessly naïve if we believe that once the Robert E. Lee statues come down, the Left will be satisfied. We all know what will follow; indeed it has already started.

The nation was founded, in large part, by slaveholders, from the author of the Declaration of Independence, to the Father of our Country, to the prime author of our Constitution. Jefferson, Washington and Madison were slave owners and the list goes on. They will need to be removed just as swiftly and lustily as the statues of General Lee.

There was a time when conservatives defended the remembrances of our past. What happened? In just the past few years we have watched as conservatives—attempting, one assumes, to act in good faith and build good will—have gone along with (or at least not objected to) utterances such as John C. Calhoun was a precursor to Adolf Hitler and that the removal of statues of Confederate icons such as Robert E. Lee, and certainly Nathan Bedford Forrest, is necessary or at least, understandable. These fought for slavery and against the Union, after all. Beyond Lee and his lieutenants, the other true American hero that has come under attack from so many on the right is Andrew Jackson. Again, we hear the ridiculous comparisons to Hitler and Nazi Germany. This isn’t just sloppy history, it is disgraceful to the memory of the man who, whatever his flaws, did so much to solidify this nation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271974/top-ten-university-leaders-who-are-supporters-sara-dogan

Editor’s note: In a report released today, the David Horowitz Freedom Center named university leaders from prestigious American campuses including UCLA, Columbia University, Kent State University, Tufts University, and the University of Chicago to the list of the “Top Ten University Leaders Who Are Supporters of Terror.”

These university leaders provide organizational and monetary support to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a campus organization which functions as an arm of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and which has repeatedly acted to terrorize Jewish students on campus. They also imbue SJP with a false veneer of legitimacy by permitting it to benefit from its association with the university’s academic prestige. Even when SJP chapters repeatedly violate campus rules prohibiting the disruption of campus events (usually pro-Israel events) or when its members chant genocidal slogans, use hateful slurs, and commit violence against Jewish students on campus, university presidents and administrations repeatedly ignore or forgive these hostile, discriminatory, and unlawful acts.

This report exposes ten presidents and chancellors of prominent American universities who have renounced their duty to protect the welfare of all students on their campus by allowing the hateful, pro-terrorist rhetoric and actions of Students for Justice in Palestine to proceed unchecked.

Read the full report below.

The Top Ten University Leaders Who Are Supporters of Terror

Introduction:

For nearly two decades, the campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has established a beachhead of support for anti-Israel terrorists on American campuses, resulting in a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incidents and the harassment of Jewish students. After many years of denial, the American and Jewish press have finally begun to take notice of this epidemic of hostility towards Jews and supporters of Israel, but the true depravity of SJP still escapes their notice. While most of the press coverage debates whether SJP’s anti-Zionism has crossed the line into anti-Semitism, this discussion misses the larger and far more sinister truth that SJP is not just the leading promoter of Jew hatred on American college campuses, nor does it content itself to spread anti-Semitic lies and propaganda defaming Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East as an “apartheid state”—though assuredly it does these things. The media posturing misses the truth that SJP is a full-fledged arm of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas, which is using American campuses as a launching pad to gain more widespread support for its goal of eliminating the Jewish state.

SJP receives substantial funding and organizational support from Hamas, through a network of Islamic “charities” and front groups. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestrated and funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian—a cofounder of SJP and a professor at the University of California-Berkeley—and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and other Islamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. Hamas is a State Department-designated terrorist organization whose explicit goals, as stated in its charter, are the destruction of the Jewish state, and the extermination of its Jews.

In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jonathan Schanzer, an expert who previously worked as a terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury, described how Hamas funnels large sums of money and provides material assistance to Students for Justice in Palestine through AMP for the purpose of promoting BDS campaigns and disseminating Hamas propaganda on American campuses.

Schanzer explained, “At its 2014 annual conference, AMP invited participants to ‘come and navigate the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.’” He proceeded to describe AMP as “arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is the most visible arm of the BDS campaign on campuses in the United States.” He revealed that AMP “provides speakers, training, printed materials, a so-called ‘Apartheid Wall,’ and grants to SJP activists” and “even has a campus coordinator on staff whose job is to work directly with SJP and other pro-BDS campus groups across the country.” Furthermore, “according to an email it sent to subscribers, AMP spent $100,000 on campus activities in 2014 alone.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dartmouth-lawsuit-says-school-allowed-animal-house-culture-among-professors-students-1542311799?cx_testId=0&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

Seven current and former Dartmouth College students filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Ivy League school on Thursday, alleging it ignored an “Animal House” atmosphere created by three professors in the school’s department of psychology and brain sciences.

The lawsuit, which seeks $70 million in damages, claims the professors “leered at, groped, sexted, intoxicated and raped female students.” It alleges the professors conducted meetings at bars, invited students to late-night hot tub parties in their homes and invited undergraduate students to use cocaine during class.

The professors involved resigned from the Hanover, N.H., school last summer at Dartmouth’s request. The New Hampshire Attorney General is conducting a separate investigation.

In a press release, Dartmouth said it applauded the women’s courage for coming forward but disagreed with the characterizations of the school’s actions and will respond through court filings.

Due to the misconduct it found earlier this year by the three faculty members, the school said Thursday it took “unprecedented steps toward revoking their tenure and terminating their employment.” The professors “are no longer at Dartmouth and remain banned from our campus and from attending all Dartmouth-sponsored events, no matter where the events are held.”

The suit alleges the behavior started as far back as 2002 and the school “did nothing and ignored” students’ complaints. In April of 2017, a group of female graduate students contacted Dartmouth’s Title IX office and reported in detail the behavior of the professors. The suit alleges the school again did nothing and the sexual harassment continued. Over the next several months, at least 27 complainants came forward, the suit says.

“This lawsuit is the only means these women have to remedy the College’s past wrongs and ensure the institution implements meaningful reforms,” said Deborah Marcuse, an attorney representing the women.