RUTHFULLY YOURS

Harvard President Lawrence Bacow just sent out a letter to Harvard’s alumni and donors to reassure them that there’s no merit to Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. Students for Fair Admissions argues that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants. Bacow, however, is confident that “The College’s admissions process does not discriminate against anybody.” After all, “The Supreme Court has twice ruled on this issue and has held up our admissions process as an exemplar of how, in seeking to achieve a diverse student body, race may enter the process as one factor among many in consideration.”

What Bacow means is that the Supreme Court licenses racial discrimination so long as it isn’t too obvious, and that Harvard has been sufficiently discreet. In any case, Harvard has never before had to defend its admission policies in Federal court. It received honorable mention in Justice Lewis Powell’s eccentric 1978 opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, but no other justice concurred with Powell’s view on the subject. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her 2003 opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger endorsed Powell’s view. That’s the foundation of Bacow’s claim—which seems awfully close to wishful thinking.

How wishful? Harvard uses ugly tactics to get the “diversity” it wants—where “diversity” looks remarkably like the “race quotas” that the Supreme Court said are illegal. Harvard uses “personality” evaluations to help it decide which students to admit, but it appears that “Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being ‘widely respected.’” Harvard admissions officers didn’t even have to see the Asian-American applicants to know they weren’t likable enough.

A 2013 internal review by Harvard concluded that just accounting for extracurricular and personal ratings reduced the Asian-American share of the Harvard class by one sixth, from 31% to 26%. “Demographic” imperatives, which increased the number of admitted African Americans and Hispanics, reduced the number of Asian Americans by another third, down to 18% of the Harvard class.

18%. Which is a remarkably familiar number. Asian enrollment at elite universities has stabilized at around 18% for a generation, even as the proportion of Asian Americans in the population has risen substantially. Harvard’s Rube Goldberg admission procedures just happen to achieve the same result that you would have gotten by a simple racial quota—of the sort that once kept down the number of Rube Goldbergs at Harvard.

It’s no wonder that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has come out in support of the plaintiffs against Harvard. “Harvard has failed to carry its demanding burden to show that its use of race does not inflict unlawful racial discrimination on Asian-Americans,” said the Justice Department. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271654/trumpaganda-jack-kerwick

All of the Democrat talking heads in the media—i.e. 95% or so of the American media—lost what was little left of their brains this past week when Kanye West joined and applauded President Trump in the White House.

Popular culture celebrities, like “journalists” and pundits, are overwhelmingly left-of-center. But one particularly famous among these, celebrates a Republican president—and Donald Trump, of all people!—and it is one celebrity too many for Democrats.

Though no reader of this column needs any reminding of it, the fact is that academia, too, is a bastion of Democratic Party politics. Fortunately, there are some excellent campus watchdog organizations that regularly expose the ideological fanaticism that pervades today’s colleges and universities.

The University of Illinois-Champaign supplies us with an especially revealing illustration of the politicization of education. Beginning on October 22, the school will roll out its new journalism course:

“Trumpaganda: The War on Facts, Press, and Democracy.”

The course description is rich. It purports to explore “the Trump administration’s disinformation campaign” and “its ‘running war’ with the mainstream news media,” as well as “their implications for American democracy and a free press.”

The course description also asserts that when Trump was a presidential candidate, he “employed the most common propaganda device, name-calling, to define, degrade, discredit and destroy his primary opponents as well as the ‘fake’ news media.” Two years into his presidency, the President’s “rhetorical attacks on mainstream media continue” as he labels them “‘the enemy of the people.’”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-admissions-dean-largely-ignored-report-on-factors-affecting-asian-american-applicants-153980665
A federal trial in Boston is putting Harvard’s admissions process to the test.

BOSTON—Were admission to Harvard based solely on academic merit, Asian-Americans would comprise 43% of the freshman class, while African-Americans would make up less than 1%, according to an internal Harvard report discussed at a trial here Wednesday.

Lawyers representing a nonprofit that has sued the school alleging intentional discrimination against Asian-American applicants dug deep into the internal 2013 study in court. In the process, they highlighted whether some criteria Harvard uses to assess candidates put Asian-American candidates at a disadvantage and how little the admissions dean did with the data when he received the report five years ago.

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs will decide after the three-week trial whether Harvard’s admissions practices violate federal civil-rights law.
Crafting a ClassPercentage of admitted students by race/ethnicity, based on Harvard’s internal simulations in 2013Source: Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research report, shown by Students for Fair Admissions at trialNote: Simulation includes numbers from 2007-16 class years.
WhiteAsianBlackHispanicNative AmericanInternationalUnknownAcademics onlyAcademics, athletes/legacyAcademics, athletes/legacy andpersonal/extracurricularActual0%20406080100

The internal study, conducted by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research and labeled as preliminary, simulated what the admitted class would look like depending on which factors Harvard’s admissions office considered. The upshot: Asian-Americans fared best when the class was crafted based on academics alone. The share of Asian-Americans shrinks to 31.4% when recruited athletes and the children of Harvard graduates are factored in. When extracurricular and personal ratings also come into play, the share of Asian-Americans drops to 26%.

Asian-Americans were the only racial or ethnic group to see a decrease in their projected class representation with the inclusion of extra-curriculars and personal ratings.

Most elite schools consider a range of factors when determining admissions, in part because most applicants have stellar grades and test scores and are relatively indistinguishable on academics alone. The schools say they look at candidates in a holistic manner to ensure they have a good mix of students from different backgrounds, who can then learn from one another inside and outside the classroom.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271530/georgetown-professors-castrating-rage-john-perazzo

Taking her place among the gaggle of leftists who have felt compelled to broadcast their opinions regarding the sexual-abuse allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, Georgetown University Associate Professor Carol Christine Fair has weighed in on the matter numerous times in recent days. By any measure, Fair ranks as one of the more overtly angry and unrestrained of Kavanaugh’s critics.

Professor Fair’s reflexive rage may stem, in part, from the tragic fact that in her youth, as she has previously disclosed, she was repeatedly molested by an uncle for about a decade. When Christine Blasey Ford went public with her unsubstantiated, uncorroborated allegation about an event from 36 years ago, Fair promptly used her Twitter and Tumblr accounts to characterize Judge Kavanaugh as a “rapist” and “perjurer,” and to depict Republicans generally as “a fu**ing death cult” of “filthy swine” who are “pro-rape, pro-pederasty, pro-perjury, pro-corruption, pro-Russian hacking, pro-child trafficking, pro-white male supremacy, pro-VERY-late-term abortion of children with AR-15’s.” She also characterized Trump voters as “Trumpanzees,” and she described their pro-Trump “MAGA” hats as “socially-acceptable Klan hoods.”

After watching Republican senators defend Kavanaugh in the televised hearing last week, Fair tweeted: “Look at [this] chorus of entitled white men. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

Fair later told the website Heavy.com: “This [Trump] regime is hell-bent upon disenfranchising women, POC [people of color], non-Christians, LGBTQI and empowering a larger role for corruption in our governance…. This is only the beginning of fascism in America.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/03/new-paper-lets-drop-common-core-let-families-choose-schools/

For years after Common Core was adopted into the Oklahoma state law books, a group of us saw the writing on the wall and tried to derail the process. It was clear to us after much study that most arguments for Common Core were not grounded in reality, but more a cotton candy confection of wishes that would eventually disintegrate and send the whole notion, like so many previous education trends, into the dustbin of history.

Although Common Core was repealed from state law in 2014, the new “Oklahoma” math standards adopted in 2015 are surprisingly Common Core-like. Unsurprisingly, like many Common Core states in the nation, national math scores for both Oklahoma fourth and eighth graders fell again for 2017.

For years we’ve been warned by various education policy experts that Common Core would not produce the results its acolytes promised, yet Common Core converts have persisted, outlasting many weary parents who have finally thrown up their hands in exhaustion.

“Common Core, School Choice and Rethinking Standards-Based Reform,” a new, thorough Pioneer Institute paper, did a great job explaining the failures of Common Core math and Common Core in general. I sought out the co-authors, Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and Theodor Rebarber, CEO of AccountabilityWorks, to help explain their work.
What Does Common Core Actually Do?

The authors don’t lay the fault of falling test scores solely at the feet of Common Core, but they do immediately point out several important contradictions in CC math that could lead anyone to wonder at its effectiveness, including:

Although proponents promised Common Core would make U.S. students more internationally competitive by “benchmarking” the standards to those of higher-performing countries, CC actually delays mastery of several mathematical procedures—like multiplication and long division—for years after students from leading countries like Singapore have mastered them.
Consistent with progressive teaching beliefs, CC doesn’t so much teach kids how to solve problems as to think about how to solve them. The authors report that higher-performing countries such as Singapore, Finland, and Japan instead devote approximately 75 percent of their math standards to having students work math problems, while CC devotes only 38 percent to practice, and the rest having kids explain how to work the problem.
Although constantly told CC is just a set of standards that do not “drive” instruction, CC-aligned tests give higher points for explaining how best to perform the math problem and fewer points for solving the problem correctly, essentially causing teachers to teach the method gaining the most points. This has another side effect of converting math tests into English tests.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/03/foreign-terrorist-funders-get-u-s-public-schools-teach-anti-jew-propaganda/

The ruling dynasty of Qatar, the house of Al Thani, invests its massive fossil fuel profits to promote its political and theological agenda around the world. It invests in major Western properties, Hollywood studios like Miramax, global news broadcasters like Al Jazeera, terror organizations like ISIS and Hamas, and, most curiously, in American K-12 education.

The Qataris, according to the Wall Street Journal, are spending millions to influence what American educators teach in their classrooms; and it has recently emerged that one of their investments is behind a roiling controversy in the Boston suburb of Newton.

For more than six years, parents and citizens in Newton have been complaining that their city’s high school world history curriculum is biased against Israel to the point of being anti-Semitic. Newton Superintendent of Schools David Fleishman promised the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of New England last year that he would remove and replace the bigoted curriculum with vetted scholarly materials, but public records requests revealed that biased, anti-Semitic, and false materials continued to be taught.

Since Fleishman’s broken promise, the biased teaching at Newton schools has gotten worse. In August, The Federalist broke the story of how a Newton history teacher, David Bedar, plotted with fellow teachers over email to harass, bully, and “call out” conservative students in the classroom, admitting to acting as a “liberal propagandist” in the classroom. Further public records requests show that Bedar is also quite literally a trained propagandist for Qatar. He is working on behalf of a foreign petro-theocracy to teach anti-Semitic lies to American children.
A Qatari-Funded U.S. Teacher Influence Fund

Last year, Bedar attended a five-day summer teacher training course on how to teach about “the dynamics of the Middle East,” provided by a Massachusetts-based organization called Primary Source. Primary Source claims to work “to advance global and cultural learning in schools,” and has partnerships with more than 50 schools and school districts in New England.

It is funded by four foundations. Two are Massachusetts government agencies, the Mass Cultural Council and Mass Humanities. The third, the Cummings Foundation, is one of the largest private foundations in New England. The fourth is Qatar Foundation International (QFI), an arm of the Qatari ruling family’s Qatar Foundation. Through QFI since 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal, Qatar’s Al Thanis have given more than $30 million directly to American K-12 public schools, and an untold amount to teacher training outfits like Primary Source.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/georgetown-professor-white-male-gop-senators-deserve-miserable-deaths-castration/

A professor at Georgetown University has stated that the “entitled white” Republican senators who are defending Judge Kavanaugh deserve to die “miserable deaths” and be castrated.

On Saturday, Christine Fair — an associate professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service — tweeted:

Look at thus chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement.

All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.

The tweet appears to have since been deleted, but not before it received coverage from outlets including Fox News and The College Fix.

This is far from Fair’s first brush with controversy. As The Fix notes, Fair has previously called German police officers Nazis and harassed a Trump-supporting colleague. What’s more, Fox News reports that she had also referred to the GOP as “filthy swine” and a “f***ing death cult” in a tweetstorm the week prior.

A university spokesperson told Fox News that Fair’s comments are within the bounds of the school’s speech policy.

“Our policy does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable,” the spokesperson stated. “While faculty members may exercise freedom of speech, we expect that their classrooms and interaction with students be free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271493/uci-preparing-refer-anti-israel-disrupters-edwin-black

Campus police at University of California, Irvine will in the near future refer anti-Israeli event disruptors of a May 3, 2018 pro-Israel event to Orange County prosecutors, according to a UCI spokesperson. Referral will occur, says the spokesperson, as soon as the campus police investigation concludes.

If so, UCI will be the second UC campus, after UCLA, to refer loud and raucous anti-Israel disruptors to prosecutors for violation of California’s statutes prohibiting disruption of public meetings, disturbing the peace, and conspiracy to do either.

After the police referral, it will be up to District Attorney Tony Rackauckas to decide whether actual prosecution should ensue. Rackauckas previously made history with the 2011 prosecution and conviction of the famous “Irvine 11,” who disrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in 2010 when he spoke at UCI. Rackauckas is considered one the state’s most seasoned, no-nonsense DAs.

The new UCI case arises from a May 3, 2018 effort by UCI’s College Republicans to host a panel with Israeli Reservists on Duty. After about 40 minutes, a parade of anti-Israel agitators filed in to stage a well-orchestrated and unruly disruption, using a bullhorn and shouting derogatory chants. The disruption was documented by at least two dozen videos. reviewed by this writer, including this long video at minute 42:00. After the disruptors were ushered out, the boisterous disorder continued to disrupt from the corridor under police protection, according to the videos.

Three statutes pertain. Title 11, Sec. 403 concerns meeting disruption. “Every person who … willfully disturbs or breaks up any assembly or meeting … is guilty of a misdemeanor.” This was the very statute Rackauckas used to successfully prosecute and convict the “Irvine 11.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fake-news-comes-to-academia-1538520950

The existence of a monthly journal focused on “feminist geography” is a sign of something gone awry in academia. The journal in question—Gender, Place & Culture—published a paper online in May whose author claimed to have spent a year observing canine sexual misconduct in Portland, Ore., parks.

The author admits that “my own anthropocentric frame” makes it difficult to judge animal consent. Still, the paper claims dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’ ” and issues “a call for awareness into the different ways dogs are treated on the basis of their gender and queering behaviors, and the chronic and perennial rape emergency dog parks pose to female dogs.”

The paper was ridiculous enough to pique my interest—and rouse my skepticism, which grew in July with a report in Campus Reform by Toni Airaksinen. Author Helen Wilson had claimed to have a doctorate in feminist studies, but “none of the institutions that offers such a degree could confirm that she had graduated from their program,” Ms. Airaksinen wrote. In August Gender, Place & Culture issued an “expression of concern” admitting it couldn’t verify Ms. Wilson’s identity, though it kept the paper on its website.

All of this prompted me to ask my own questions. My email to “Helen Wilson” was answered by James Lindsay, a math doctorate and one of the real co-authors of the dog-park study. Gender, Place & Culture had been duped, he admitted. So had half a dozen other prominent journals that accepted fake papers by Mr. Lindsay and his collaborators—Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University, and Helen Pluckrose, a London-based scholar of English literature and history and editor of AreoMagazine.com.

The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences. “I think that certain aspects of knowledge production in the United States have been corrupted,” Mr. Boghossian says. Anyone who questions research on identity, privilege and oppression risks accusations of bigotry.

Beginning in August 2017, the trio wrote 20 hoax papers, submitting them to peer-reviewed journals under a variety of pseudonyms, as well as the name of their friend Richard Baldwin, a professor emeritus at Florida’s Gulf Coast State College. Mr. Baldwin confirms he gave them permission use his name. Journals accepted seven hoax papers. Four have been published.

This isn’t the first time scholars have used a hoax paper to make a point. In 1996 Duke University Press’s journal Social Text published a hoax submission by Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University. Mr. Sokal, who faced no punishment for the hoax, told me he was “not oblivious to the ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment,” adding that “professional communities operate largely on trust; deception undercuts that trust.”

But he also said he was criticizing an academic subculture “that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside.” He concluded: “How can one show that the emperor has no clothes? Satire is by far the best weapon; and the blow that can’t be brushed off is the one that’s self-inflicted.” Messrs. Lindsay and Boghossian were already known for a hoax paper titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” which they published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences last year under the names Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle. CONTINUE AT SITE