RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/extremely_nondisruptive_middlebury_college_students_disrupt_freespeech_speaker_.html

Ironically, the speaker they shut down really did risk his life in a communist country in the name of free speech.

On March 2, 2017, Vermont’s elite Middlebury College made national news when some of its students barred writer Charles Murray from speaking, because of a book (The Bell Curve) he’d written 23 years earlier. It was bad for public relations, and in response, the college initiated a new program in its political science department, “The Alexander Hamilton Forum” intended “to engage scholars and thinkers with diverse points of view, including points of view that are uncommon at elite colleges.”

On April 17, 2019, Middlebury College was compelled to cancel one of The Alexander Hamilton Forum’s premier events. This time, leftist opposition was directed at Polish author and politician Ryszard Legutko, and focused on his alleged “homophobic” comments from 2011 (though Legutko had been invited to address intolerance by the Left in liberal democracies, not homosexuality).

On the Middlebury protesters’ Facebook events page, remarks such as this were postedL “Ryszard Legutko is a f*cking homophobe (and racist and sexist),” the protest is advertised as “EXTREMELY NON-DISRUPTIVE.” Yet within minutes of the cancellation, those who silenced Legutko disingenuously posted: “We are reiterating that it was never our intention to shut this event down, nor prevent the speaker from speaking.” In an interview with local media, “Jason Duquette-Hoffman, assistant director of the Center for Community Engagement at Middlebury College, agreed. “I think [protesters] were very clear that that was not their intent….’ ”

https://quillette.com/2019/04/16/a-college-president-makes-a-stand-for-academic-freedom/

At Quillette we hope David Yager’s moral leadership becomes a turning point in the defence of free thought. We raise our glasses to him and to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.

What happens when university students call on authority figures to censor students or staff at institutions of higher education? At Yale such students have been awarded prizes, at the University of Missouri they’ve been successful in forcing administrators to resign, at Claremont they were able to force their president to implement a long list of demands, and at Evergreen State College a throng of students were allowed to take control of the campus while harassed faculty sought refuge off-campus. At other colleges around America, and even on campuses in the U.K., Canada and Australia, university administrators have met illiberal student mobs with a parade of mealy-mouthed platitudes and prostrations. This pattern of weakness has been dismaying for all people who value academic freedom and open inquiry. This week, however, a line has been drawn by David Yager, President of Philadelphia’s University of Arts (UArts). In response to students calling for the censorship of Camille Paglia—one of the most admired humanities scholars in the world—he articulated a full-throated defence of intellectual freedom, showing administrators of supposedly superior universities what real leadership looks like.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/16/why-are-women-under-represented-in-physics/

Six months ago CERN hosted a workshop on “High Energy Theory and Gender.” Nearly all the contributors to this and previous workshops on the same topic endorsed the view that gender imbalances in physics, particularly in the higher echelons, are predominantly due to sexual discrimination. The following phrases appeared in the presentations: “men mobilize their masculinity supporting…men in ways that advance careers,” “evaluators tend to favor men,” “scientific quality is a gender social construction,” “practically all women share the same kind of sad and unfair experiences since the beginning of their scientific career,” and physics is an “oppressive ambient.” One attendee claimed that only the military has a higher rate of sexual harassment, although she didn’t say which country’s armed forces she was thinking of.

In an attempt to go beyond mere anecdotes and measure the amount of discrimination, I did a bibliometric analysis using a public database of publications, references, authors and hiring decisions in fundamental physics world-wide over the past 50 years. CERN maintains this database, but nobody had used it for this purpose before. Certainly, none of the hosts of the “High Energy Theory and Gender” workshop had used it to test their claims.

The results that came out of this study did not fit the discrimination narrative.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/campus-free-speech-turning-point-university-of-arizona/

Amid the weekly cavalcade of campus horrors, it’s easy to miss a story that will mark a major turning point in the campus free-speech crisis, whether for good or ill. The growing confrontation at the University of Arizona over students who disrupted a Career Day presentation by Border Patrol agents is not your run-of-the-mill campus outrage. Instead it’s that rare case where student disruptors are facing real consequences for their actions. This is in significant part because of a new Arizona law strengthening discipline for such disruptions. If the university holds fast and the disruptors pay a price for silencing others, the move will carry national implications. Yet if the growing rebellion by anti-free-speech students and faculty at UA gets its way, the university will back down, the border patrol will be permanently barred from campus, and the university president could lose his job. That would be a disaster for free speech, and would mark a new and dangerous turn in America’s campus crisis.

Before taking the measure of the stakes in this battle, we’ve got to review the precipitating incident.

On March 19, a UA student named Denisse Moreno Melchor noticed a pair of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the school. “I was like, ‘Get out,’ and started chanting and disrupting that space until they left,” she told the school paper the next day. The March 19 event that Melchor had — in her own words — disrupted, was a Career Day presentation being given by two border-patrol agents to the school’s Criminal Justice Association. You can see from videos originally taken by Melchor and reposted here that a she is hurling insults at the officers through a door, continuously calling them “murderers,” the “murder patrol,” and an “extension of the KKK.” As the officers are distracted by the chanting, some of the students in attendance move toward the door to help secure the scene.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/our_expensive_manipulated_public_high_schools.html

The idea of spending one’s way out of educational problems did not begin with New York’s recently appointed chancellor, Richard Carranza. It can be traced to Jonathan Kozol, whose first bestseller on education came out in the 1960s. Kozol was an educational reformer who emerged as a critic of education after he spent less than a painful year teaching 4th grade in the Boston public schools. As Kozol matured as an educational reformer, he shifted away from harping on the racism of the white teachers, as he did in his first book, Death at an Early Age.

A later book, Savage Inequalities, advanced a different view. Under this view, the new reformers propose to make teachers and principals accountable by ending tenure (tenure has been weakened but is still in place in New York City) and inspired reforms such as implementing new ways of rating teachers (Danielson rating system) and implementing the small high school movement. The last initiative was undertaken by Deborah Meier and then driven by the Coalition for Essential Schools and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Teacher unions got on board with the idea that inner-city schools fail not because of the racism of the teachers, the premise of Kozol’s first book, but because they have less money to spend than more successful suburban schools.

Students at New York’s Barnard College and Columbia University play-acted last week as residents of Ferguson, Mo., chanting about police racism and brutality. I hope they had fun: They got six Barnard security officers, who did nothing wrong, placed on administrative leave pending investigation.

Columbia senior Alexander McNab, who is black, entered Barnard late Thursday night, according to a report in the Columbia Daily Spectator. Barnard is a women’s college affiliated with Columbia, whose students are required to show ID to enter the closed campus after 11 p.m. Mr. McNab refused. He strode past security and ignored them on the winding path to the university’s crowded Milstein Center, where five officers cornered him as other students recorded soon-to-be-viral videos. At first, the videos showed, officers held Mr. McNab by the arms. After he protested loudly, two of them lightly pinned him to a cafe counter. He screamed: “Take your hands off me!” The officers released Mr. McNab after 20 seconds, at which point he finally showed his student ID. An officer verified it, and the confrontation ended.

The officers were white and the student was black—and that was enough to cue the Ferguson script. On Friday the Barnard student-government executive board issued a statement: “This incident reflects systemic racism and police brutality against Black people throughout our nation.” Protesters took to campus to chant: “No justice, no peace / F— these racist police!”

https://quillette.com/2019/04/14/the-problems-with-americas-best-teacher

A question central to Plato’s Republic is “What should we teach our children?” Judging from the parents I’ve talked to, this question is not getting the consideration it deserves. Parroting a common conservative refrain regarding what some believe schools teach, a colleague referred to them as “liberal-producing factories.” Thankfully, that’s not quite the case. While the teaching profession as a whole leans left, most educators are aware of their bias and, with varying degrees of success, try to push against it. Unfortunately, this is not true of the programs that train the nation’s school staff.

I received a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the premier schools of education in the country, occasionally nudging out Columbia and Harvard for the top spot in U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of education programs. In reality, it was a series of graduate courses that featured various arts and crafts projects.

To their credit, the faculty seek to ameliorate legitimate and pressing concerns that our schools face: racial disparities, stagnant scores that are falling behind other countries, defective spending structures, high teacher turnover, and a host of other problems. However, they promote a philosophy of education that is effective at exposing these problems but impotent to solve them. The root issue is that the three elements of a progressive worldview I discuss here—restorative justice, contemporary literary theory, and an antipathy to intellectual diversity—result in an education that questions all systems but fails to offer students a coherent alternative.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/13/u-need-a-shine/

In the 1940s, a wave of automation threatened an industry that employed large numbers of low-skilled workers. The rise of the electric shoe-shine machines turned the once ubiquitous street corner shoeshine boy and the higher-end hotel lobby shoe-shine stand into rarities.

At the bristly heart of the corporate takeover, the shinification of American footwear, was the Uneeda Shine Machine Company, of 552 West 53rd Street, in Manhattan.

The mechanics, of course, were simple: a few spinning brushes running off a motor. The genius was in the packaging. The standard Uneeda Shine Machine was the Shine-O-Mat, a sturdy gun-metal box that stood a little taller than a desk and offered amenities such a choice of black or brown brushes, a foot stand for applying polish, and handles in the event that the vroom of the brushes might send the patron careening across the room.

I speak from experience. About 15 years ago I salvaged a Shine-O-Mat from scrap metal oblivion. It is in perfect working order and has traveled with the various chapters of my curriculum vitae ever since. It travels with the same joy of movement that Mount Rushmore might have if it were forced to relocate to Hackensack. The thing was built to stay put—probably to deter thieves and former shoeshine-boys-turned-anarchist-luddites. Or perhaps to ensure that the momentum of the brushes didn’t drive it across the floor.

Silber Shines
I salvaged my Shine-O-Mat not out of an obsessive desire to see my reflection in a pair of Oxfords, nor out of nostalgia for a bygone era of auto-matting. Rather, I was seeking to preserve a relic of a great epoch in academic history. Herein hangs a tale.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/14/the-downward-spiral-of-post-secondary-education/

Something is seriously rotten in our education establishment, especially in colleges and universities. The culprits are the evolution of the educational agenda, the cult of progressivism on campus, and the debt that students accumulate for an increasingly disappointing outcome.

Total student debt as of 2018 stood at approximately $1.56 trillion, and the average student who graduated in 2018 faced a debt of about $30,000. Lending Tree offers a breakdown of the depressing statistics. The average graduate of a private institution owes nearly $40,000, and some 88 percent of graduates are indebted at some level. Students who attend elite colleges without winning scholarships and those who go on to graduate school will almost surely enter the workforce owing $100,000 or more. And these are debts that bankruptcy cannot erase.

Those who enter “professions” such as law, medicine, and business administration can hope to earn enough income to repay the debt. For the rest, the picture is much more bleak. Almost half of those who attended private colleges default within 12 years. Public schools, at least, saddle their graduates with a more manageable burden, so the default rate is more like 1 in 7. But that still represents many people who are experiencing severe emotional strain.