RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s also a women’s studies course

Tufts University is refusing to answer questions about a “Colonizing Palestine” course taught by an anti-Israel activist who is listed as a member of a group that supports violence against Israeli civilians.

Prof. Thomas Abowd doesn’t want to talk about his course either, telling The College Fix in an email that he would call the police if contacted again.

“Colonizing Palestine” shows up on the fall course list for two programs, Colonialism Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

While pro-Israel activists have criticized Tufts for offering the course, citing both its reading list and its instructor’s background, they have not questioned Abowd’s academic freedom to teach the subject.

Israel ‘illegally occupies Palestine’

“This course will explore the history and culture of modern Palestine and the centrality of colonialism in the making of this contested and symbolically potent territory,” the course description reads.

It does not mince words on its view of Israel, which “illegally occupies Palestine”:

Students will examine the region in which Palestine is embedded through a range of path breaking writers, filmmakers, and thinkers. … Themes covered include notions of nationalism and national identity, settler-colonialism, gender and sexuality, refugee politics, cultural hybridity, class politics, violence, and memory.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271127/ucla-disgrace-shiri-moshehttps://www.algemeiner.com/2018/08/22/ucla

It appears that UCLA is unsure about hosting this conference in November, BUT EVEN THE WILLINGNESS TO HOST IT SHOWS THE UNDERLYING BIAS IN THE ACADEMIES….RSK

National Students for Justice in Palestine announced on Sunday that it will host its eighth annual conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, drawing concerns from some members of the school’s pro-Israel community.

The event, based on the theme of “resistance in the face of adversity,” will take place from November 16-18.

In a note explaining the conference’s goals, National SJP and its chapter at UCLA defined Zionism — a diverse national liberation movement that supports the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their historic homeland — as “ethnic cleansing, destruction, mass expulsion, apartheid, and death.”

Prominent Jewish groups like the World Jewish Congress and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations — whose umbrella includes the nation’s principal bodies of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism — have in the past described Zionism as “a longstanding and sincerely held religious belief central to the Jewish religion.”

The conference will seek to remind students “that Zionism is not an insurmountable force,” the organizers explained. “The reason we can have hope is that Zionism is a human ideology and a set of laws that have been challenged and can be destroyed.”

https://www.nas.org/articles/an_open_letter_to_the_college_board_on_ap_world_histor

The College Board revised two of its Advanced Placement history exams in recent years—United States History and European History. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) formulated analyses of how progressive bias affected these revised exams. NAS also spearheaded two national campaigns to have the College Board eliminate this political skew. In both cases the College Board changed the exam for the better, although the NAS judges that significant bias remains.

The College Board recently announced, apparently as a result of pressure by activist teachers, that it will extend the coverage of its revised Advanced Placement World History exam from ca. 1450 AD to the present to ca. 1200 AD to the present. The College Board also announced that it will add a second World History examination, covering the period before ca. 1200 AD.

We now publish this open letter from NAS President Peter Wood to David Coleman, President of the College Board.

***

August 1, 2018

David Coleman, President

College Board

250 Vesey Street

New York, NY 10281

Dear Mr. Coleman,

The College Board recently announced that it will add a second World History examination, covering the period before 1200 AD.

We are committed to offering a second AP world history course—AP World History: Ancient. To develop an AP World History: Ancient course, exam, and accompanying resources, we first must confirm the willingness of colleges to award credit for an additional AP world history exam and the interest among high schools to offer two full, separate AP world history courses.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12880/israel-nation-state-law

A basic U.S. history course at Clemson University focused on the post-Civil War era to modern times teaches the subject of America’s past largely from a far-left perspective, including subjects such as “White Rage” and Black Lives Matter, according to the required readings for the course.

History 1020, or History of the U.S., focuses on the “political, economic and social development of the American people from the end of Reconstruction to the present,” according to its online description.

This fall, one professor teaching the class is Assistant Professor Maribel Morey, whose required readings include the books “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide,” “How Race is Made in America,” “Making of Black Lives Matter,” “Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights,” and “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment.”

Each of the books portray an apparent liberal bias against various political issues. Professor Morey adds more details about the course on her personal website.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/police-investigating-unlawful-and-dangerous-toppling-of-silent-sam-confederate-statue-at-unc/

On Monday night, a group of roughly 250 violent protesters toppled a Confederate monument from its plinth at the University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill. “Silent Sam” commemorated the UNC students who had gone off to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Protesters had scheduled a rally entitled “Until They All Fall,” for 7 p.m.

According to the flyer, the event would be “a demonstration against institutional white supremacy at UNC, in solidarity with Maya Little on the day of her trial for marking Silent Sam with her own blood.”

In May, UNC Ph.D. student Maya Little — who is black — mixed her own blood with red paint and dashed it on the “Silent Sam” statue. She was arrested for defacing a public monument, and her trial started Monday. “That statue is not a historical object,” Little told The News & Observer. “It’s missing its history. What I did was give it some context.”

UNC’s independent student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, shared pictures and video of the protest.

Demonstrators chanted “tear it down!”

The crowd went crazy when Silent Sam fell.

Ph.D. student Samee Siddiqui shared an image of the fallen Silent Sam, where protesters proceeded to bury its head in the dirt. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2018/08/21/uchicago_must_defend_professor_against_social_justice_slander.html

David Randall is the Director of Research at the National Association of Scholars.

Rachel Fulton Brown has been calumnied and no one will stand up to defend her good name.

Brown is a professor of history at the University of Chicago, but this isn’t just an academic dispute. What’s happened to her is what happens to anyone who speaks up against social justice warriors.

It all started because Brown got tired of medievalist social justice warriors saying that the middle ages were essentially about white supremacy, and that if medievalists didn’t spend all their time teaching the middle ages as a story about racism, they were complicit in modern-day racism and white supremacy — or even outright advocates for the same. In 2015 she wrote a blog post arguing against the social justice warriors — “Three Cheers for White Men.”

The result, of course, was that Brown got called a racist and a white supremacist herself — and accused of “inciting violence” against her most vitriolic interlocutor, Dorothy Kim of Vassar College, because she’d posted screenshots on her own blog of Kim’s defamatory writings against her. More than 1,400 of her colleagues wrote an open letter to condemn her — an open letter that endorsed these defamatory accusations.

All of this is doubleplustrue because Brown likes Milo Yiannopoulos and writes nice things about him. Brown is guilty by association.

Except that she is guilty of nothing. Ask Professor Daniel Franke of Richard Bland College, who has explained the accusations of racism and white supremacy: “Fulton Brown’s conservative beliefs in the value of ‘Western civilization’ have been publicly attacked since 2016 as ‘white supremacist’ by Dorothy Kim of Vassar.” Professor Brown’s “incitement to violence”? Professor Franke properly concluded that “Fulton Brown’s response to Kim hardly qualifies as ‘persecution.’”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271074/china-ratchets-its-us-spying-programs-michael-cutler

Russian efforts to corrupt American politics captivates the media, but they pay scant attention to the aggressive actions of the Chinese. This under-reporting is concerning, given the concerted Chinese efforts go well beyond the hacking of U.S. computers – an illegal activity of great concern – but they also extend onto the campuses of our universities.

There are, however, occasional acts of real reporting on Chinese espionage. One example comes from, the usually liberal and globalist publication, Newsweek back on May 20, 2015, A New Cold War, Yes. But It’s With China, Not Russia.

Another story worthy of mention is this from the Houston Chronicle reported on August 8, 2018, which reported: FBI warns Texas academic and medical leaders of ‘classified’ security threats.

The piece led off with this ominous excerpt:

In an unprecedented gathering, FBI officials warned top leaders of Texas academic and medical institutions Wednesday about security threats from foreign adversaries, the first step in a new initiative the bureau plans to replicate around the country.

Then went on to note:

The meeting reflects the bureau’s increasing concern, made in public comments and before congressional committees, about cybersecurity threats posed by adversaries such as China, Russia, and Iran. Following a 2017 report that found intellectual-property theft by China costs the U.S. as much as $600 billion annually, FBI Director Christopher Wray this June called China “the broadest, most significant” threat to the United States and said its espionage is active in all 50 states.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-free-tuition-education-1534805635

New York University announced late last week that it will offer free tuition for every current and future student attending its medical school. That’s pretty cool and will save students some $55,000 a year and a lot of debt. But in the spirit of Milton Friedman’s line that there is no such thing as a free lunch, allow us to suggest that every NYU student should have one obligation in return for accepting the gift—read and write an essay on Ken Langone’s autobiography, “I Love Capitalism!”

The medical students should at least know where the money for their free tuition will come from. It doesn’t flow from the good intentions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and it isn’t a product of the Cuban health-care system.

It will come from capitalists like Ken Langone and his wife Elaine, who donated about $100 million of the $600 million that NYU says it will need to fund the scholarships. The son of a plumber and a cafeteria worker, Mr. Langone went to Wall Street after Bucknell and NYU business school. He went on to found Home Depot , the national home-improvement chain that now provides a livelihood for some 400,000 people.

Mr. Langone has channelled much of his wealth into philanthropy, including the medical center at NYU that is named for him and his wife. As Mr. Langone explains in his book, this is how a free society creates wealth and then redistributes it. Socialism creates little wealth and redistributes poverty, as Venezuelans are discovering. The medical students could spend a semester in Caracas to learn these lessons, but they can save time and considerable pain by reading Mr. Langone.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/college-offers-class-on-consequences-of-whiteness/

The University of Oregon is offering a course this summer to teach students about the “consequences” of masculinity in the United States.

Taught by Ashley Woody and Tony Silva, Sociology 399: Whiteness, Masculinity, and Heterosexuality is a featured course on the sociology department’s website, and it aims to take a critical approach to the historical development of masculinity and heterosexuality.

The class —which also goes by “Sociology 399: Straight White Heterosexuality Masculinity” — must be taken for a grade by sociology majors, but its description notes that grading is “optional for all other students.”

“What do whiteness, heterosexuality and masculinity mean today? How do they differ across contexts? How do they intersect, and what are the consequences?” the course description opines.

Neither Woody nor Silva responded to a request for more information about the class, but they appear to take a social constructionist approach to gender theory. In one of Silva’s recent works, for example, he interviewed 19 men from Grindr and Craigslist to document the “centrality of heterosexuality to normative rural masculinity.”

According to Silva’s research, hobbies such as hunting, fishing, cutting firewood, ranching, and farming are ways that certain men “perform a rural masculinity,” as Silva documented in his seminal article “Bud-Sex.”