RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/1/if-orwell-were-alive-today

It’s time for another trip to Williams College. Regular readers will recall some of our earlier trips to that quaint, protected menagerie tucked away in the Berkshires where, for a mere $69,950 per annum, you can—supposing you got the right grades in high school or check the right boxes—while away four years claiming to be oppressed and, if you enjoy pretending that you do not know whether you are male or female, try on a bizarre list of made-up personal pronouns announcing your indeterminacy. Wot larks!

Regular readers will also recall our words of praise for the so-called “Chicago Statement” a few years back. What made that document so unusual in the fetid atmosphere of timorous totalitarian conformity that is the rule at most academic institutions these days was its rousing defense of free speech. Everywhere from Yale to Berkeley, coddled students clamor to be protected from “offensive” ideas—that is, from ideas that challenge their taken-for-granted pieties about the world. It used to be that higher education was about expanding one’s horizons and learning new things. More and more these days, it is about donning the ideological blinders so that no idea not certified to reinforce one’s prejudices slips through to unsettle one’s complacency. Into that humid atmosphere came a major university saying, Balderdash! If you want a “safe space” into which scary ideas will not intrude, the statement said, in effect, you should not come to the University of Chicago. The essence of the statement is captured in these few lines:

In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.

The good news is that some fifty-three universities, including such distinguished institutions as Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Purdue, and Michigan State, have adopted the principles enunciated by the Chicago Statement. The bad news is that the adoption is often nominal and that fifty-three out of some 5,300 is a pretty small number.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13456/intersectionality-islamism

Censored from today’s campuses is discussion of another, in various respects competing, intersectionality: That of the shared, intersecting, predicaments of today’s victims of Islamist aggression, including terrorism.

Hamas’s operatives have trained in Sudan and worked with Sudanese forces, including those that have been engaged in the Darfur genocide. This is the organization whose supporters are leading movers behind the campus intersectionality/boycott campaign and have become the moral arbiters of campus political correctness.

Of those killed at the Twin Towers on 9/11, 215 were black (136 men, 79 women). Other African Americans were murdered in subsequent Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks in California and Florida and elsewhere, and are as likely to be victims of future such terror attacks as anyone else. But work to prevent, and minimize the impact, of such assaults apparently counts for no more to Black Lives Matter, when weighed against promoting an anti-Israel agenda, than it does to SJP and other Hamas-linked groups.

The “intersectionality” promoted on campuses and beyond by Hamas/SJP and their fellow travelers seeks, in pursuit of its anti-Israel agenda, to distract attention from the Islamist onslaught, its ongoing savaging of populations in Africa, Asia and America.

The term “intersectionality” was coined by an African-American academic, Kimberlé Crenshaw, in 1989 to denote the circumstance of being the target of more than one bias. Crenshaw saw herself as the potential victim of both anti-black racism and misogyny, thereby living at the intersection of the two bigotries. In recent years, the term has gained prominence on many of the nation’s campuses to signify something else: the supposed shared, “intersecting,” predicaments of racial and ethnic groups — as well as women and sexual minorities — victimized by white male racism and its history of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and slavery.

While one can fully acknowledge the depredations of European imperialism and its exploitation of non-European populations, one can also debate the extent of its current impact on non-European populations, women and sexual minorities. Except that one cannot debate it: In much of Western, including American, academia today, such debate is not permitted.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/student-found-to-have-violated-title-ix-by-asking-another-student-on-a-date/
Dating can be awkward enough without adding legal hazards to the mix.

A student at the University of Missouri was found to be in violation of Title IX because he asked another student out on a date and is physically larger than she is.

According to a deposition about the case, the male student was deemed to have violated civil-rights law — and was guilty of sexual harassment — because he asked a female student out on a date that she did not want. Why? Because he was bigger than her, and his “physical size” meant that “he was perceived as having power over her.”

The deposition gained some attention after it was shared by KC Johnson, a Brooklyn College professor, on Twitter. It’s not clear from the documents what kind of punishment, if any, the student faced for his violation — but the fact that an official even deemed what he did to be a violation is scary enough.

Sexual harassment and discrimination are both very serious issues, and it’s important to have policies in place to protect people from them. This, however, is quite clearly a total abuse and misuse of Title IX.

It would be one thing if this student were a teacher or other type of authority figure. Then I could certainly understand how that would be sexual harassment. But this was not the case. This was simply one student asking another student out on a date, which, believe it or not, is completely normal and appropriate human behavior. So what if he was bigger than her? Spoiler alert: Most men are bigger than most women. If it’s a violation to ask out a woman who is smaller than you, then both men and women are going to have a lot fewer options in their romantic lives.

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.