Displaying posts categorized under

EDUCATION

The Blue, the Black and UC Davis Student commission disses murdered police officer Natalie Corona. Lloyd Billingsley

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.”

Lawsuit: Sorority Punished for ‘Hazing’ for Requiring Members to Study 25 Hours per Week By Katherine Timpf

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.

Thoughtcrime and Punishment: A Year Of Shunning and Law Suits at a Canadian University written by Lindsay Shepherd

https://quillette.com/2019/01/08/thoughtcrime-and-punishment

In late 2017, I found myself at the centre of a controversy at Wilfrid Laurier University, where I was an M.A. student and teaching assistant (TA) in the Communication Studies department. In the class for which I was serving as TA, I played part of a panel discussion that had aired on Ontario public television. As many readers will know, this material featured University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson making the argument against alternative gender pronoun usage, as well as Sexual Diversity educator Nicholas Matte’s arguments encouraging their use.

Because I chose not to disavow Peterson’s views before airing the clip, I was brought into a subsequent disciplinary meeting. The supervisor for the course in question, Nathan Rambukkana, as well as the coordinator for my M.A. program, Herbert Pimlott (also known, at times, as “Hillary X Plimsoll”), and Gendered Violence and Sexual Assault Prevention manager Adria Joel accused me of breaking the law by airing a clip of Peterson in a classroom, as well as threatening and targeting trans people, thereby creating a toxic environment. All of this is well-known because I taped the whole meeting.

Apparently, “one or more” students had complained about the class in question—though that claim later turned out to be false. Both Rambukkana and Wilfrid Laurier University President Deborah MacLatchy apologized to me, and I was cleared of any wrongdoing after a neutral third-party fact-finding investigation concluded I hadn’t done anything wrong. The investigator also determined that “basic guidelines and best practices on how to appropriately execute the roles and responsibilities of staff and faculty were ignored or not understood.”

Professors Rambukkana and Pimlott disappeared from public view after the semester ended in December, 2017. Rambukkana deleted his personal social media accounts, and Pimlott locked his Twitter account. The posters and décor they had on their office doors were stripped away and the doors were locked for the entirety of 2018. Pimlott was the instructor for my graduate colloquium course, but all of our colloquium meetings for the remainder of that term were cancelled. For the January-April, 2018 semester, he was replaced by another professor, with no explanation offered to students. I also noticed that Pimlott’s name had been removed from the website listing our M.A. program coordinator. I emailed an administrative assistant to ask why Pimlott was no longer the program coordinator, and she told me there had been “departmental changes.” Our graduate class year-end get-together was cancelled.

This was a common pattern from thereon out: No one at Wilfrid Laurier University would give me a straight answer about anything. It was a climate of evasiveness and secrecy.

Can Higher Education Be Saved? By Victor Davis Hanson

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.

Sharifa Alkhateeb Talks About Using Public Schools to Convert America to Islam When Muslims aren’t shy about stating the nature of the threat. Frontpagemag.com

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272486/sharifa-alkhateeb-talks-about-using-public-schools-frontpagemagcom VIDEO

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4732679/sharifa-alkhateeb-talks-public-schools-convert-america-islam&fbclid=IwAR123wunxJyyl99nwvi41n76-fkmXBXeaU1MLnCqNGnL8Fm7eUVrVfyllJg

Using ‘anti-racism’ to avoid teaching students proper English By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/using_antiracism_to_avoid_teaching_students_proper_english.html

It’s almost as if some universities are trying to convince parents that it’s not worth spending more than a quarter of a million dollars on a degree. If you don’t learn how to write standard English and go from campus out on the job market, your will find your career opportunities limited. If not right away, then later on.

But the racial frenzy gripping higher education seems to insist that any standard that minorities have disproportionate difficulty meeting must be discarded. Even if it sabotages those students’ chances of future success.

Jeremiah Poff of The College Fix explains:

American University is hosting a seminar next month to teach faculty how to assess writing without judging its quality. In the seminar’s own words: “grading ain’t just grading.”

It’s led by Asao Inoue, a University of Washington-Tacoma professor, and the purpose is to pursue “antiracist ends” through writing assessments.

A national scholarly organization that preaches its “commitment” to academic excellence came out swinging against the seminar, telling The College Fix that Inoue’s ideas are “destroying the very idea that composition classes should teach all students to write well.”

In an email, National Association of Scholars spokesperson Chance Layton said Inoue is “substituting social justice ideologues’ bigotry for instruction in composition”:

The national dominance of social justice educators such as Prof. Inoue indoctrinates college graduates nationwide into social justice ideology and bigotry–but fails to teach them how to write a coherent sentence.

For Men: Class Dismissed By Helen Smith

https://pjmedia.com/drhelen/for-men-class-dismissed/

If you ever wonder why fewer and fewer men are attending traditional colleges, just read this article at “Minding the Campus” that explains why men are boycotting these places in droves:

North American universities have been taken over by women. Men are decreasingly university students, professors, and administrators. “Gender equality,” a feminist war chant, apparently does not apply when females dominate.

In the United States, women outnumber men in colleges and universities — by 2026, the Department of Education estimates, 57 percent of college students will be women. In Canada, according to the “2001 Census, universities had clearly become the domain of women, as they made up 58% of all graduates. And according to the 2006 Census, women accounted for 60% of university graduates between the ages of 25 and 29.” Women also dominate in British universities. The same imbalance is seen in universities around the world….

Men are equally left out in Britain. James Knight was the only candidate to [send] his name forward to be men’s officer at the University of the West of England, and said he wanted to highlight male mental health issues. However, the National Union of Students officers began a campaign against the role, and he pulled out after claiming he [was] harassed. The university said the post was suspended pending review.”

Colleges Are Breeding Grounds for Civil War Ray DiLorenzo

https://canadafreepress.com/article/colleges-are-breeding-grounds-for-civil-war

We have become a nation of angry people. Too many of us carry a chip on our shoulder and find racism everywhere, sexism everywhere, misogyny rampant, homophobia out of control. It is no wonder we have masked leftists lashing out with violence, a new congresswoman making profanity-laced speeches demanding President Trump’s impeachment. We now have a Democrat majority House of Representatives with scores of avowed communists in their ranks who are in no mood to cooperate with the system as founded, but to overturn it.

Heather MacDonald, political commentator, essayist, attorney, and journalist says that universities and colleges in America today are breeding grounds for hate and planting seeds for civil war. Students are being trained by cultural Marxists in faculty and administration and it’s been going on for decades.

Students taught to hate Western civilization, each other

In the 80s, students were told the only thing they needed to know about a book was the author’s race and gender to decide whether it was of value to read. Hence, much of the works of Western Civilization were discarded. It is much worse today.

New York State Declares War on Private Education By Avner Zarmi

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-york-state-declares-war-on-private-education/

In recent years, certain advocacy groups have criticized private Jewish schools, generally known as yeshivoth, claiming that the schools provide a substandard education. At issue is the interpretation of a New York state law passed in the late 19th century that requires private schools to provide an education “substantially equivalent” to that offered in the public schools. Through the decades, the various private school networks, whether religious or non-sectarian, have managed to meet this vague requirement to the satisfaction of local authorities and the New York State Education Department (NYSED).

Until now. Under substantial pressure from an organization called Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFED), which has actually filed suit against NYSED to try to force the matter, NYSED recently issued detailed guidelines concerning its interpretation of “substantially equivalent.” The guidelines contain a precise syllabus that must be followed, and also dictate how many hours per week are to be devoted to each of the secular subjects by grade level.

The result threw the world of private education in New York into a tizzy. Most glaringly, the guidance from NYSED required 35 hours a week of secular studies in grades 5 through 8 — a requirement which would have left virtually no time for sacred studies, the raison d’être of religious schools.

Under intense public pressure via petitions, telephone calls, and emails, NYSED revised the guidelines. It eliminated the time requirements in grades 5 and 6, and cut the amount of time required for secular education in grades 7 and 8 roughly by half.CONTINUE AT SITE

Dumb and Increasingly Dumber : Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/01/dumb-and-increasingly-dumber/
“Unfortunately, we are living in a time when a growing number of children and students are being dumbed down and turned out into the world by teachers, lecturers and professors whose minds have been corrupted by disconnected thinking over a long period. The process is akin to communist re-education. ”

If you train the brain to ignore consequences then it seems to me, admittedly as a non-neurologist, that you will perforce become increasingly stupid as the lessons of repeated failure are ignored. And thus, the progressive Left must be treated as a race apart when IQ testing is conducted.

I read something the other day which suggested that intelligence was falling. I couldn’t find the article, which is always annoying, so turned to the internet. Judging by the first Google page, there seems to be a degree of consensus that IQ scores are on the way down in the developed world. God knows what the IQ scores are in the struggling world. A Norwegian study was cited by CNN in June 2018, for example, with the added comment that “similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores.”

This all means, of course, that younger people, on average, are dafter than older people. It used to be that intelligence was linked to genes. However, the latest fad points to environmental factors like the emergence of the moronic addiction to electronic displays and social media and to the quality of teaching. Me, I don’t discount the brain-sapping effects of screen living or being taught by green-left dolts, but it seems obvious too that the higher survival rates of dullards, who would have otherwise perished because of poor hygiene, nutrition and medical care, does little for average IQs. In sum, if it is happening, it’s probably down to a mixture of environmental factors and genes.

But is it happening? Are the tests reliable? I am no longer sure that it is possible to undertake rigorous studies of intelligence without stratification of the subjects’ political allegiances. In other words, to my point, I wouldn’t be surprised if both older and younger people on the progressive Left were not (downward) biasing the outcome of recent testing.

I conjecture that young conservatives have retained the intelligence of their parents and grandparents. Whereas, those on the progressive Left whether older or younger have regressed. They are, in fact, on this account, more accurately termed ‘regressives’. Why would this be the case, you might ask?