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EDUCATION

Five Takeaways From Mike Rowe’s Speech About Work In America Nicole Russell

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/19/five-takeaways-from-mike-rowes-speech-about-work-in-america/

The former host of the Discovery channel’s “Dirty Jobs” received the Independent Women’s Forum “Distinguished Gentleman” award over the weekend. MikeRowe inspired the audience with tales demonstrating both the commonplace and the extraordinary in his acceptance speech, including on the role of moms, taking risks, perception, and work ethic.

Whether you’re a pediatrician or a plumber, an avid fan of the show or not, the speech is well worth your time.
1. Never underestimate the power of motivation and humble beginnings.

While most of America might recognize Rowe’s tanned face and rugged good looks from “Dirty Jobs,” which ran for eight seasons, few know of the show’s humble beginnings. During his speech, Rowe described how it all started.

He was “impersonating a host” for a local network’s show called “Evening Magazine” in 2001. It was an entertainment segment that ran after the news. Rowe went to wineries, restaurants and swanky events, profiling the glitz and glamour of San Francisco. Hardly satisfied with his work, but unsure of what to do about it, his mother — whom he referenced positively at least a dozen times in his speech — phoned him and reminded him of his grandfather, who was aging.

Rowe’s grandfather wasn’t anyone famous, wealthy, or reputable by any means, but the kind of man many of us who have any kind of blue collar roots can recognize. Even though he had the education of a 7th grader, he had learned valuables trades and could do the work, at any given time, of an electrical contractor, plumber, steamfitter, welder, and more. Rowe said he could build a house without a blueprint and could repair almost anything.

“He was heroic in his day,” he said. “Today, sadly, he would be overlooked.”

When his mother called, she simply said, “Wouldn’t it be terrific if your grandfather turned on the television and saw you doing something that looked like work?” That was all the motivation Rowe needed.
2. Risk taking and persistence will pay off.

In that phone call, Rowe said he had “what the Greeks called a peripeteia” — a reversal of fortune or a sudden change in circumstances. “I realized everything I thought I knew about my job was wrong.” Rowe went to his boss and said, “Why do we always have to film ‘Evening Magazine’ at wineries? Why not the sewer?”

The boss didn’t think enough people were even tuning in to care, so he gave Rowe the green light. While Rowe was in the sewer, threatening to get eaten by cockroaches and overcome by the stench, he determined this kind of gruesome and gross, yet vital, work would be the focus of his show.

“I put together a segment that I knew would get me fired. It’s okay, it got me here,” he said to applause. Without risk and focused insight, Rowe’s idea never would have seen a television channel.

After he got fired, Rowe pitched his idea to everyone in the news industry. “Everyone said no except Discovery,” he said. In 2003, they took him on, tweaked the title, and when the show wrapped in 2012, he had done 300 dirty jobs over the course of ten years, filming half a dozen times in every state.

“In my role as a quasi-host I really functioned as an apprentice doing the kind of jobs that make civilized life possible,” he said, quoting the show’s tagline. The show enjoyed tremendous success. So many Americans loved it that in 2008, it was the number one show on cable.

The Free Speech Crisis on Campus Is Worse than People Think by Bradley Campbell

https://quillette.com/2018/11/14/the-free-speech-

Last month Samuel Abrams, a politics professor at Sarah Lawrence College, published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators.” Abrams, who describes himself as conservative leaning, pointed to the titles of some recent events put on by his campus’s Office of Student Affairs: “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Understanding White Privilege,” and “Microaggressions.” He described these events as politically lopsided and noted that this kind of highly politicized socialization of college students is occurring throughout the country. A lot of campus critics have pointed to the left-wing political skew of faculty, he said, and have worried about indoctrination in the classroom. But indoctrination is much more likely at campus events outside the classroom, and the political skew of administrators in charge of student life is even greater than that of faculty. (He surveyed a representative sample of 900 “student-facing administrators” and found a ratio of 12 liberals for every conservative, compared to 6 to 1 for academic faculty.)

Remember, Abrams is a tenured professor commenting about a widely discussed issue and writing about his research in the New York Times—America’s pre-eminent newspaper, hardly some right-wing rag. And what was the reaction at Sarah Lawrence College? Campus activists, after apparently trying to break into Abrams’s office, vandalized the office door, taking away the items he had put up, including a picture of his newborn son, and putting up signs with statements such as “Quit” and “Our Right to Exist Is Not ‘Ideological’ Asshole.” The student senate held an emergency meeting to discuss the offending op-ed, and the college president, Cristle Collins Judd, suggested to Abrams that he had created a hostile work environment and asked him whether he thought it was acceptable to write op-eds without her approval. She also asked him if he was on the job market, perhaps as a suggestion that he should be.

A new moral culture

If you were a time traveler from 10 years ago—maybe even five years ago—you’d probably have trouble following some of that. What’s a microaggression? What’s woke? And how could a New York Times op-ed lead to that kind of uproar on campus? But if you’ve been around, and if you’ve been following the happenings on American college campuses, you’re familiar by now with conflicts like this and the new moral terminology guiding the campus activists. In the last few years we’ve seen professors such as Nicholas Christakis at Yale and Brett Weinstein at Evergreen State College surrounded by angry, cursing students, with Christakis and his wife, Erika Christakis, soon leaving their positions as the masters of one of Yale’s residential colleges and Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, leaving Evergreen entirely. We’ve heard about microaggressions, said to be small slights that over time do great harm to disadvantaged groups; trigger warnings, which some students demand before they are exposed to course material that might be disturbing; and safe spaces, where people can go to be free of ideas that challenge leftist identity politics. We’ve heard claims that speech that offends campus activists is actually violence, and we’ve seen activists use actual violence to stop it —and to defend this as self-defense—when administrators fail to do so.

Fight the Denigration of American History By Michael Finch

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/16/fight-the-denigration

American history is everywhere under attack. The recent skirmishes started with the campaign to remove Confederate statues, but it surely won’t end there. As our betters in America’s universities want us to know, the whole of American history is suspect. In our media, in the popular culture, and in our schools, we’re subject to an unending drumbeat of how America was founded to promote imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and genocide—unimpeachable facts, we’re told, for which all Americans must forever share the burden of collective guilt and shame.

For America to atone for her sins, her history must be denounced and then purged.

This assault on America’s past is hardly news to the Right; the Left has been waging war against American history for well over a half a century. But given this ongoing and unceasing hostility, the response of so many conservatives to recent events is terribly disturbing. While it is perhaps it is to be expected given our predilection to fight amongst ourselves (e.g., the Trump debate on the Right), it is extremely ill-advised and destructive to the things we still share in common.

One thing we should have learned is that the Left never stops; there is no end to their relentless pursuit of destructive hate. There is no room for reasonable adjudication of their claims. We are hopelessly naïve if we believe that once the Robert E. Lee statues come down, the Left will be satisfied. We all know what will follow; indeed it has already started.

The nation was founded, in large part, by slaveholders, from the author of the Declaration of Independence, to the Father of our Country, to the prime author of our Constitution. Jefferson, Washington and Madison were slave owners and the list goes on. They will need to be removed just as swiftly and lustily as the statues of General Lee.

There was a time when conservatives defended the remembrances of our past. What happened? In just the past few years we have watched as conservatives—attempting, one assumes, to act in good faith and build good will—have gone along with (or at least not objected to) utterances such as John C. Calhoun was a precursor to Adolf Hitler and that the removal of statues of Confederate icons such as Robert E. Lee, and certainly Nathan Bedford Forrest, is necessary or at least, understandable. These fought for slavery and against the Union, after all. Beyond Lee and his lieutenants, the other true American hero that has come under attack from so many on the right is Andrew Jackson. Again, we hear the ridiculous comparisons to Hitler and Nazi Germany. This isn’t just sloppy history, it is disgraceful to the memory of the man who, whatever his flaws, did so much to solidify this nation.

The Top Ten University Leaders Who Are Supporters of Terror Aiding the Hamas terror campaign to thrive on campus. Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271974/top-ten-university-leaders-who-are-supporters-sara-dogan

Editor’s note: In a report released today, the David Horowitz Freedom Center named university leaders from prestigious American campuses including UCLA, Columbia University, Kent State University, Tufts University, and the University of Chicago to the list of the “Top Ten University Leaders Who Are Supporters of Terror.”

These university leaders provide organizational and monetary support to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a campus organization which functions as an arm of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and which has repeatedly acted to terrorize Jewish students on campus. They also imbue SJP with a false veneer of legitimacy by permitting it to benefit from its association with the university’s academic prestige. Even when SJP chapters repeatedly violate campus rules prohibiting the disruption of campus events (usually pro-Israel events) or when its members chant genocidal slogans, use hateful slurs, and commit violence against Jewish students on campus, university presidents and administrations repeatedly ignore or forgive these hostile, discriminatory, and unlawful acts.

This report exposes ten presidents and chancellors of prominent American universities who have renounced their duty to protect the welfare of all students on their campus by allowing the hateful, pro-terrorist rhetoric and actions of Students for Justice in Palestine to proceed unchecked.

Read the full report below.

The Top Ten University Leaders Who Are Supporters of Terror

Introduction:

For nearly two decades, the campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has established a beachhead of support for anti-Israel terrorists on American campuses, resulting in a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incidents and the harassment of Jewish students. After many years of denial, the American and Jewish press have finally begun to take notice of this epidemic of hostility towards Jews and supporters of Israel, but the true depravity of SJP still escapes their notice. While most of the press coverage debates whether SJP’s anti-Zionism has crossed the line into anti-Semitism, this discussion misses the larger and far more sinister truth that SJP is not just the leading promoter of Jew hatred on American college campuses, nor does it content itself to spread anti-Semitic lies and propaganda defaming Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East as an “apartheid state”—though assuredly it does these things. The media posturing misses the truth that SJP is a full-fledged arm of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas, which is using American campuses as a launching pad to gain more widespread support for its goal of eliminating the Jewish state.

SJP receives substantial funding and organizational support from Hamas, through a network of Islamic “charities” and front groups. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestrated and funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian—a cofounder of SJP and a professor at the University of California-Berkeley—and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and other Islamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. Hamas is a State Department-designated terrorist organization whose explicit goals, as stated in its charter, are the destruction of the Jewish state, and the extermination of its Jews.

In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jonathan Schanzer, an expert who previously worked as a terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury, described how Hamas funnels large sums of money and provides material assistance to Students for Justice in Palestine through AMP for the purpose of promoting BDS campaigns and disseminating Hamas propaganda on American campuses.

Schanzer explained, “At its 2014 annual conference, AMP invited participants to ‘come and navigate the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.’” He proceeded to describe AMP as “arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is the most visible arm of the BDS campaign on campuses in the United States.” He revealed that AMP “provides speakers, training, printed materials, a so-called ‘Apartheid Wall,’ and grants to SJP activists” and “even has a campus coordinator on staff whose job is to work directly with SJP and other pro-BDS campus groups across the country.” Furthermore, “according to an email it sent to subscribers, AMP spent $100,000 on campus activities in 2014 alone.”

Dartmouth Lawsuit Says School Allowed ‘Animal House’ Culture Among Professors, Students Seven women allege psychology department was rife with leering, groping and sexual assault By Douglas Belkin

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dartmouth-lawsuit-says-school-allowed-animal-house-culture-among-professors-students-1542311799?cx_testId=0&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

Seven current and former Dartmouth College students filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Ivy League school on Thursday, alleging it ignored an “Animal House” atmosphere created by three professors in the school’s department of psychology and brain sciences.

The lawsuit, which seeks $70 million in damages, claims the professors “leered at, groped, sexted, intoxicated and raped female students.” It alleges the professors conducted meetings at bars, invited students to late-night hot tub parties in their homes and invited undergraduate students to use cocaine during class.

The professors involved resigned from the Hanover, N.H., school last summer at Dartmouth’s request. The New Hampshire Attorney General is conducting a separate investigation.

In a press release, Dartmouth said it applauded the women’s courage for coming forward but disagreed with the characterizations of the school’s actions and will respond through court filings.

Due to the misconduct it found earlier this year by the three faculty members, the school said Thursday it took “unprecedented steps toward revoking their tenure and terminating their employment.” The professors “are no longer at Dartmouth and remain banned from our campus and from attending all Dartmouth-sponsored events, no matter where the events are held.”

The suit alleges the behavior started as far back as 2002 and the school “did nothing and ignored” students’ complaints. In April of 2017, a group of female graduate students contacted Dartmouth’s Title IX office and reported in detail the behavior of the professors. The suit alleges the school again did nothing and the sexual harassment continued. Over the next several months, at least 27 complainants came forward, the suit says.

“This lawsuit is the only means these women have to remedy the College’s past wrongs and ensure the institution implements meaningful reforms,” said Deborah Marcuse, an attorney representing the women.

UW Institutes ‘Diversity’ Training After Professor’s Op-Ed on Sex Differences By Toni Airaksinen

https://pjmedia.com/trending/uw-institutes-diversity-training-after-professors-op-ed-on-sex-differences/

The University of Washington-Seattle has caved to student demands culminating after a computer science professor pointed out why efforts to close the “gender gap” in computer science may be futile.

The controversy began in June, when UW-Seattle Professor Stuart Reges published “Why Women Don’t Code” for Quillette, in which he articulated why women are less interested in computer science than men. (Hint, hint: men and women are different).

Though Reges admits the title was hyperbolic — as he has taught hundreds of women to code during his career — UW students didn’t see it as such. They circulated an internal memo of concern ad lobbied UW against his “gender harassment.”

Roughly five months later, a group of graduate students have announced that they’ve negotiated with senior officials at the UW computer science school to ensure that “more will be done to address gender harassment at the Allen School.”

While it’s unclear exactly how many “grievance demands” students filed, the school agreed to at least three.

From now on, UW will provide “intersectional diversity and sexual harassment training to both [student employees] and [the professors who supervise them]” which all students and professors will be highly encouraged to attend.

Additionally, going forward, “a group of mostly senior faculty will review the introductory programming courses to ensure that they are inclusive of students from all backgrounds.” To be fair, it’s unclear what this means.

How will professors make coding classes more “inclusive of students from all backgrounds”? Will they mandate textbooks feature more racial and gender minorities? CONTINUE AT SITE

Academic anti-Semitism Encounters Setbacks By Kenneth H. Ryesky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/academic_antisemitism_encounters_setbacks.html

University of Michigan professor John Cheney-Lippold unabashedly reneged upon his agreement to write a recommendation letter for his student Abigail Ingber solely because the program to which Ms. Ingber sought admission is under the aegis of an Israeli academic institution. This, in turn, has evoked various controversies in academic circles.

Even if motivated by politics, bias, or hatred, a professor’s decision to write or to not write a letter of recommendation for a student needs to be the sole and unquestioned prerogative of the professor; else recommendation letters would have no value or meaning. There must, however, be ethical behavior on the part of the professor.

Cheney-Lippold has a surfeit of ethical issues which extend beyond the fact that his reneging was admittedly timed to follow his receipt of his tenure letter from the university, beyond the fact that a few weeks prior to his tenure grant he presented a paper at a conference cosponsored in no small part by an Israeli academic institution, and irrespective of whether academic boycotts of any sort are or are not ethical.

First and foremost, Cheney-Lippold misrepresented his personal participation in the BDS academic boycott of Israeli institutions as the policy of his department, and when called out on that misrepresentation (which ran contrary to official University statements issued and publicized in 2013 and in 2017) lamely explained that his initial e-mail to Ingber

An Israeli Agent on Campus written by Ari Blaff

https://quillette.com/2018/11/09/an-israeli-agent

“Academia ought to be a forum for the battle of minds and the testing of arguments and ideas. Instead, students such as myself seeking a fair-minded supervisor face a paucity of options as departments congeal around a monolithic interpretation of Middle Eastern politics and history. The result is that a toxic political environment has been allowed to flourish, unrestrained, in specific departments across elite universities. In an environment struggling to balance the broad aims of diversity and inclusivity, many Jewish students remain on the outside looking in.”

In late 2017, having completed a Masters in History and another in Political Science, I was considering the possibility of a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies. The academic path and research-heavy workload were a natural fit and I figured it would buy me some time to reflect on what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So, at the end of last year, I contacted a handful of professors whose academic interests overlapped with mine to ask their advice. The first two of these were productive and fruitful, and focused mostly on research, career advice, and language skills—par for the course for a graduate student in search of a supervisor. However, my third attempt did not go well at all, and the experience has led me to worry about the effects of ideological homogeneity on university scholarship, particularly in the field of Middle Eastern history and politics.

On December 13, I wrote a short email to Jens Hanssen, an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean History at the University of Toronto. I explained that I was a graduate student at the Munk School of Global Affairs, that I had found his profile on the History Department website, and that I was hoping to ask him some questions about Middle Eastern history and academia. Later that day, Professor Hanssen responded:

Dear Mr. Blaff, You have probably contacted me because you were alerted to an interview I gave last week to the News Section of UofT’s website on President Trump’s declaration to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Now, you may be a graduate student at the Munk School, but you are also a Hasbara fellow. As far as I know, Hasbara fellows are Israeli advocacy activists sent to North American campuses on behalf of the World Union of Jewish Students, now under the auspices of the new Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, which earlier this year has called for a “new offensive against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” activists.

He then informed me that I had received instruction from something called “The Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus”—a text I had never heard of, let alone read—about “how to approach professors, students and administrators and convince them that legitimate, non-violent criticism of the state of Israel amounts to discrimination against Jews everywhere.” Hanssen continued: “In fact you [are] instructed to conflate Judaism and Zionism and are encouraged to give the impression on our campus that such criticism constitutes antisemitism.”

He went on to accuse me of “slandering” a number of people in an article that he claimed (incorrectly) I had written for the student newspaper the previous September (it actually ran on the Hasbara Fellowship’s blog page). He concluded by announcing that, while the Munk School might be indifferent to the “grave threat Hasbara organizations such as yours pose to academic freedom and the intellectual independence of the university,” he most certainly was not. Consequently, for “ethical and academic” reasons, he would avoid any interaction with people such as myself.

Public University Could Expel Students for Causing Others ‘Emotional Distress’ By Katherine Timpf

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/public-university-could-expel-students-for-causing-others-emotional-distress/

You read that right: The code of conduct at Mississippi’s Delta State University allows administrators to punish students simply for upsetting others.

Delta State University, a public university in Mississippi, has a policy that states that students can be expelled if they “inflict mental or emotional distress on others.”

Policy 27 of the school’s “student regulations” declares that “words, behavior, and/or actions which inflict mental or emotional distress on others and/or disrupt the educational environment at Delta State University” could “subject violators to appropriate disciplinary action, including suspension and expulsion.”

“Any student charged with or convicted of a violation of . . . University regulation, injurious to the health and welfare of the University community shall be subject to immediate administrative suspension, with or without prejudice, depending upon the nature and circumstances of the case by the President of the University or his delegate,” the policy states.

Zakiya Summers, a spokeswoman for the Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union, told The College Fix that the organization has concerns the policy might not be constitutional.

“In addition to Policy 27, Policies 4, 16, and 18 raise First Amendment concerns,” Summers told the Fix. “They are over-broad and vague and could restrict protected speech.”

As the Fix notes, the additional policies that Summers named ban “disorderly, lewd, indecent, or obscene conduct or language,” “inciting others to violate written University policies and regulations,” and participation in an “unauthorized demonstration.”

Now, I’m not a lawyer. Personally, I can’t say whether or not any of these policies violate the Constitution. What I can say, however, is that policy 27 definitely raises some practical concerns.

How Saudi “Donations” to American Universities Whitewash Its Religion by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13260/saudi-donations-american-universities

Saudi funding of an American academic “doesn’t mean that he’s bought and paid for.” Rather, “there is a kind of silencing effect. It’s more about what doesn’t get written about… there may be some self-censoring on certain topics you don’t raise unnecessarily, topics that are sensitive to the Saudis.” — from a Washington, DC “insider,” quoted in Vox.

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the heartland of Islam, the birthplace of its history, the site of the two holy mosques and the focus of Islamic devotion and prayer. Saudi Arabia is committed to preserving the Islamic tradition in all areas of government and society….. The Holy Qur’an is the constitution of the Kingdom and Shari’ah (Islamic law) is the basis of the Saudi legal system.” — Website of the Saudi Arabian Embassy, Washington, DC.

A Saudi fatwa — in Arabic only — entitled, “Duty to Hate Jews, Polytheists, and Other Infidels,” was written by Sheikh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz (d. 1999), former grand mufti and highest religious authority in the government. It comes from the fatwa wing of the government, meaning it has the full weight of the government behind it.

Why would the center of illiberalism, religious fanaticism, and misogyny ever sponsor the center of liberalism, secularism, and gender equality?

This is the question that crops up when one considers the largesse that human-rights-abusing Saudi Arabia bestows on the leading universities — those putative bastions of progressive, free thinking — in the United States.

According to a recent report in the Daily Caller:

“… elite U.S. universities took more than half a billion dollars from the country [Saudi Arabia] and its affiliates between 2011 and 2017. Saudi Arabian interests paid $614 million to U.S. universities over a six-year period, more than every country but Qatar and the United Kingdom.”