RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2018/12/26/refighting
On November 21, two educators published an article that lamented the declining quality of written work produced by American adolescents. Early in the piece, Temple University professors Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Laurence Steinberg cite a 2011 study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics that yielded this disturbing claim: “Only one in four [high school seniors] can construct an essay that is coherent and well structured, with ideas presented clearly and logically.” To bolster their case, Hirsch-Pasek and Steinberg present anecdotal evidence from other university professors privy to what this deficit looks like (literally on paper) at the next level. One, from “a high-ranking state university,” resorted to altering “her syllabus to take two full days to review the idea of a topic sentence.” Illustrating the ubiquity of this trend, another professor, this time from “a highly ranked private college, wrote in a recent Facebook post that he took time out of class to explain how to write, noting that students had no idea what they didn’t know.”

Does this sound alarmist? Well, it shouldn’t, because we’ve been hearing about the problem for years now. If you’re a parent, you might be wondering how something this counterintuitive could occur. Don’t high schoolers need to write admissions essays to earn spots at elite universities? Wouldn’t those essays need to be both clear and logical? Are admissions officers unaware of these foreboding nationwide studies?

I shall spare you my answers to those rhetorical questions, and share instead a potential cause of this apparent epidemic that’s too often overlooked. It sounds hyperbolic, but according to a 2001 essay by David Foster Wallace entitled “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” it’s been undeniable since the early 1980s: “In neither K-12 nor college English are systematic [Standard Written English] grammar and usage much taught anymore.” Again, this doesn’t sound plausible. How could teachers instruct students to write well without giving them any rules or basic conventions? No reasonable answer exists, but thanks to Wallace’s observations, I can assure you that our current condition was inevitable.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/272354/progressive-campus-caucus-targets-religious-jewish-daniel-greenfield

It’s true in America. It’s true in New York, as this Armin Rosen investigation at The Tablet.

Michael Goldstein is a midlevel administrator and adjunct professor in the business department of Kingsborough Community College. For the past 10 months, he has been the target of a sustained campaign calling for his termination. In late May, as many as 1,500 flyers were distributed on the 16,000-student campus on the southern edge of Brooklyn calling for Goldstein, who is the son of the college’s late president, Leon Goldstein, to be fired. The notices featured examples of the “extreme racist, sexist, anti-Muslim Facebook screen shots of Michael Goldstein,” one of which happened to include an image of his 13-year-old daughter…

Between June 15 and Nov. 10, four articles on the website of the self-described communist Progressive Labor Party have referred to an organized campaign to have Goldstein dismissed from the college. “KCC Students and Workers Fight Racist Goldstein” the first article was headlined; one article, from August, claimed that the as-yet unfired Goldstein was “protected by a network of Zionists among the faculty.”

Months earlier, on Feb. 22, the words “fuck Trump Goldstein” and “kill Zionist entity” were scrawled on a photo of Goldstein’s late father that hung near his office. On Oct. 4, the same day as a college council meeting in which rising intrafaculty tensions on campus were discussed, nails were inserted into the tires of cars belonging to Jeffrey Lax, the head of the college’s business department, in which Goldstein teaches.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/23/american-universities-

According to a report released last month by a group of distinguished China scholars, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses vague threats to induce US professors and students to avoid topics that might offend Chinese government sensitivities—research or discussions on Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, human rights, and Chinese politics, for example. It denies visas to scholars who criticize the regime, uses Chinese students in the US to inform on one another, and punishes universities for hosting controversial speakers. After a university hosted the Dalai Lama, Beijing retaliated by banning Chinese students and scholars with funding from the Chinese government from attending the university. When the institutions we entrust to pursue the truth start avoiding the truth—particularly academic research that few of us can do on our own—we all suffer.

The importance of universities’ truth-seeking role cannot be overstated. Medical researchers produce data on effective and ineffective therapies. Economists measure the impacts of different policy options. Sociologists study how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. Political scientists analyze governments. The integrity of American universities has rarely been questioned because it was assumed scholars enjoy academic freedom.

In contrast, Chinese scholars inhabit a very different world. When I worked in Beijing 10 years ago, I frequently met scholars who had to be careful about what they said. In 2010, I co-hosted a program with a well-respected professor at Peking University—China’s finest. He became agitated and angry when one of the speakers just mentioned the name of a critic of the regime, Liu Xiaobo. The professor feared he would be demoted or have his salary cut. The incident gave me renewed gratitude for the freedom on US campuses.

Ten years later, fear of offending the Communist regime has spread to American campuses Some of the blame belongs with China, but much of it belongs with the US universities themselves. By becoming ever more reliant on Chinese money they have placed themselves in a profound conflict of interest: adhere to academic freedom or please Beijing. Economic reliance on China has increased vastly in the last decade. Universities recruited Chinese students in record numbers. Enrollments soared by 400 percent. Chinese pay tuition worth an estimated $12 billion per year, according to the US Department of Commerce.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272306/campaign-halt-classroom-indoctrination-gets-boost-sara-dogan

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has completed a comprehensive update and reorganization of StopK12Indoctrination.org, a website devoted to halting indoctrination in America’s public schools. The site exposes instances of classroom and curricular indoctrination across the United States and seeks to work with parents and legislators to enact a Code of Ethics for K-12 Public School Teachers in their states.

Our public schools have traditionally been the cornerstone of our country’s democratic values, but no longer. As recent events documented on StopK12Indoctrination.org reveal, no age group and no corner of our K-12 classrooms are immune from the left’s ideological aggression.

• At the Edina School District in Edina, Minnesota, all employees, even bus drivers, must take “Equity and Racial Justice Training” instructing them that “dismantling white privilege” is at the core of the district’s mission. They must acknowledge their racial guilt, and embrace the district’s “equity” ideology.

• To enhance “cultural diversity,” students at Maryland’s La Plata High School were ordered to copy the Islamic creed “Shahada” which states in part, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” One worksheet distributed by the school stated, “Most Muslims’ faith is stronger than the average Christian.”

• An Ohio middle school teacher assigned his students to rank 12 individuals, described by race, profession, gender, religion and sexuality, by who is most deserving to survive an apocalypse on Earth. The potential survivors included “a racist armed police officer who is accused of using excessive force”; “a militant African-American medical student”; “a 21-year-old female Muslim international student”; and “a homosexual male professional athlete.”

• Public high schools in Newton, Massachusetts were sued by a coalition of parents after they discovered that their children had been given lessons from the Arab World Studies Notebook, a textbook which is funded by a Saudi Arabian oil company which also funds the terrorist groups Hamas and Al-Qaeda. This textbook falsely claims that there is a “Hollywood Jewish conspiracy” to portray Arabs negatively in film and that Jerusalem is “Palestine’s capital.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/liberal-arts-education-politicized-humanities/

The University’s Scylla and Charybdis

The great culture wars on the campuses of the 1980s were largely lost by traditionalists. And the question then became not if but when the liberal arts would die off as a result. What is strange nearly 40 years later is that the apparent outrage over what was clearly foreordained is now becoming fact. What did academia expect, given its years of academic specialization and politicized indoctrination?

Recently the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point announced plans to drop liberal-arts majors in geography, geology, French, German, two- and three-dimensional art — and history. The Atlantic ran a well-meaning essay by Adam Harris on the controversial move, “The Liberal Arts May Not Survive the 21st Century” — again, a topic much in the news recently. The article’s chief thrust is that insidious efforts to promote STEM vocationalism — the need to prepare young people for careers requiring extensive math and science skill sets — has driven out the need for more in-depth focus on the liberal arts, in a climate in which crass Republican state legislators, in allegedly vindictive and short-sighted fashion, demanded catastrophic cuts in state public higher-education budgets.

The Stevens Point campus highlighted a popular perception that emphases in literature, history, or languages lead nowhere for cash-strapped graduates but to more debt and fewer jobs. Yet what the article on official university policy misses is why students do not concentrate in the liberal arts in the fashion of the past.

After all, only that fact of declining enrollments allows the university to institutionalize the unspoken reality of eroding student interest. In other words, the university is simply burying liberal-arts majors that were already killed off not by bottom-line-minded state legislators but by the choices of either students or faculty or by university policies, or by combinations of all three.

If higher education’s increasing fixation on job training is the whirlpool that swallows history majors, the monster across the narrow straits of liberal-arts education is a many-headed politicized orthodoxy, a Scylla that consumes the flesh of the liberal arts and leave the bones as dreary reminders of boilerplate race, class, gender, and culture agendas.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/university-policy-allows-expulsion-for-mean-expressions/

Nobody likes a mean person, and it’s better to be nice. But there is nothing nice about restricting students’ speech.

The University of Montana Western has a policy that allows for punishing students for “mean” words or “facial expressions” — and that punishment could technically be as severe as expulsion.

“While discussions may become heated and passionate, they should never become mean, nasty or vindictive in spoken or printed or emailed words, facial expressions, or gestures,” states the Student Code of Conduct.

Another area of the code states that “committing any act prohibited by this Code of Conduct may result in expulsion or suspension from the University unless specific and mitigating factors are present.”

“Factors to be considered in mitigation may include the present attitude and past disciplinary record of the offender, as well as the nature of the offense and the severity of any damage, injury, or harm resulting from it,” the code continues.

Unsurprisingly, the pro-free-speech group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has expressed some concerns over this policy — especially considering the fact that the University of Montana Western is a public (read: taxpayer-funded) university.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/10/massachusetts-public-school-continues-allow-bullying-harassment-jewish-students/

In response to several anti-Semitic incidents, Americans for Peace and Tolerance (where I work) launched an extensive investigation into anti-Semitic bullying and harassment of Jewish, pro-Israel students by radical left-wing history teachers at Newton North High School in Massachusetts. The investigation is ongoing, with thousands of internal emails and other documents already obtained and examined under the Massachusetts Public Records Law. Thousands more are on their way.

We have previously published reports about misconduct within the Newton North history department. We’ve reported about how twelfth-graders at Newton North are taught lies about Israel in a class conducted by history teacher David Bedar. We also reported on an anti-Semitic hatefest at Newton North organized by some of those twelfth-graders during the school’s annual Middle East Day, which featured Palestinian propaganda films screened by Ali Abunimah’s Boston Palestine Film Festival.

Recently, we reported about an organized protest staged by Newton North history teachers against people and organizations in Newton’s Jewish community who question the school’s anti-Israel “lessons.” In a widely read report in The Federalist, we also revealed how Newton North history teachers have coordinated to “call out” conservative students’ opinions in their classrooms after the unexpected results of the 2016 elections.

History teacher David Bedar noted that he found it “really difficult in the current climate to teach kids to appreciate other perspectives.” Another teacher vowed to feed her students “a constant drip of information that counters the Trump story of America.” In a stunning statement, one history teacher rejected the need to teach objective facts altogether, writing that objectivity might be “the most effective destructive weapon against social justice.”

Now, new information is emerging from internal communications we obtained under the Massachusetts Public Records Law, which points to a troubling and unreported pattern of harassment and discrimination against Jewish students by Newton North teachers. Here are four examples.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/07/academics-mobbing-of-a-

The latest victim of an academic mobbing is 28-year-old social scientist Noah Carl who has been awarded a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship at St Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge.

Rarely has the power asymmetry between the academic mob and its victim been so stark. Dr Carl is a young researcher, just starting out in his career, who is being mobbed for being awarded a prestigious research scholarship on the basis of his peer-reviewed research.

While getting a position like this is normally a time for celebration for junior academics, Dr Carl has gone to ground, unable to defend his reputation from libellous attacks, as he has been instructed not to talk to the media.

Three hundred academics from around the world, many of them professors, have signed an open letter denouncing Dr Carl and demanding that the University of Cambridge “immediately conduct an investigation into the appointment process” on the grounds that his work is “ethically suspect” and “methodologically flawed.” The letter states: “we are shocked that a body of work that includes vital errors in data analysis and interpretation appears to have been taken seriously.” Yet the letter contains no evidence of any academic misconduct. It does not include a single reference to any of Dr Carl’s papers, let alone any papers that are “ethically suspect” or “methodologically flawed.”

Drawing on disparate fields of research in psychology, psychometrics and sociology, Dr Carl’s papers have been peer reviewed and published in journals such as Intelligence, Personality & Individual Differences, The American Sociologist, Comparative Sociology, European Union Politics, and The British Journal of Sociology. His papers have been cited 235 times since 2013.

Much of Dr Carl’s research focuses on how intelligence and other psychological characteristics affect beliefs and attitudes. Papers include: Leave and Remain voters’ knowledge of the EU after the referendum of 2016, Cognitive Ability and Political Beliefs in the United States, and his most cited paper, published in Intelligence in 2014, Verbal Intelligence is correlated with socially and economically liberal beliefs.

Which of these, or any of Dr Carl’s other papers, contain “vital errors in data-analysis”? We’re not told. Nevertheless, on the strength of these allegations alone, with no supporting evidence provided, the letter’s authors have invited people to sign the petition—and hundreds have.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/virginia-teacher-fired-after-refusing-to-call-trans-student-by-preferred-pronoun/

A Virginia high-school teacher was fired on Thursday after refusing to address a transgender student by the student’s preferred pronoun.

The school board of the West Point Consolidated School District unanimously approved the district superintendent’s recommendation to let French teacher Peter Vlaming go from West Point High School. He had previously been suspended with pay since October 31.

“The School Board has policies that prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity,” said Superintendent Laura Abel. “As detailed during the course of the public hearing, Mr. Vlaming was recommended for termination due to his insubordination and repeated refusal to comply with directives made to him by multiple WPPS administrators. As superintendent, it is my responsibility to enforce board policy, and due to Mr. Vlaming’s non-compliance I therefore recommended termination.”

“My religious faith dictates that I am to love and respect everyone, whether I agree with them or not. Because we are all made in God’s image,” Vlaming said during Thursday’s public hearing. “I am also aware of, and agree with, speech limits that are placed on public-school teachers concerning matters of religious faith. I represent the state in my role as a public-school teacher and therefore speak with a certain authority. That authority is not to be used to promote any one specific worldview, and I don’t. However, we are here today because a specific worldview is being imposed upon me.”

Other students said the student in question was born female and now identifies as male.

“I won’t use male pronouns with a female student that now identifies as a male though I did agree to use the new masculine name but avoid female pronouns,” an online petition supporting Vlaming quotes him as saying. “Administration is requiring that I use masculine pronouns in any and every context at school.”