RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

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.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/05/9-years-common-core-test-scores-indoctrination/

It’s been about nine years since the Obama administration lured states into adopting Common Core sight unseen, with promises it would improve student achievement. Like President Obama’s other big promises — “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” — this one’s been proven a scam.

“If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments; if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom; if you turn around failing schools — your state can win a Race to the Top grant that will not only help students outcompete workers around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential,” President Obama said in July 2009.

He went on to state his faith that Common Core — at that point unwritten — would “not only make America’s entire education system the envy of the world, but we will launch a Race to the Top that will prepare every child, everywhere in America, for the challenges of the 21st century.” Race to the Top was a $4 billion money pot inside the 2009 stimulus that helped bribe states into Common Core.

So here we are, nine years later. Common Core has been officially rolled out into U.S. public and even many private schools for at least three to five years now. Are American children increasingly prepared for the “the challenges of the 21st century”? We’re actually seeing the opposite. They’re increasingly less prepared. And there’s mounting evidence that Common Core deserves some of the blame.
Student Achievement Largely Down or Flat

ACT scores released earlier this month show that students’ math achievement is at a 20-year low. The latest English ACT scores are slightly down since 2007, and students’ readiness for college-level English was at its lowest level since ACT’s creators began measuring that item, in 2002. Students’ preparedness for college-level math is at its lowest point since 2004.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271822/pinko-nostalgia-bruce-bawer

Full disclosure: the one time I met Martin Duberman – who, now aged 88, could arguably be identified as the dean of Queer Studies – he was a jerk. It was 1994, and he was already a “distinguished gay historian,” and I was this young upstart who, the year before, had published a successful book, A Place at the Table, that challenged the longtime effort by Duberman and others to keep the wagon of gay rights forever hitched to the mule of the far left. We met on the set of Charlie Rose’s program, where we took part in an episode commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots. He was unconscionably rude and condescending. Re-watching that episode recently – on which Duberman’s most memorable line was something about “celebrating diversity” in a “conformist society” – I was reminded of what an intellectual lightweight he is.

Not that you’d know it from his list of accomplishments and accolades. The founder of CUNY’s Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies, he’s won a bushel full of awards and honorary degrees. His two dozen or more books include a reverential biography of the Stalinist singer Paul Robeson and an equally reverential biography of another full-fledged Commie, Howard Zinn (whose People’s History of the United States is more responsible than any other single book for the contempt in which many young Americans today hold their own country). As those last couple of items might suggest, Duberman is a hard leftist. And it’s his stubborn refusal to grow beyond the fatuous politics of his youth and middle age that forms the foundation of his new book, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

It should really be entitled Has the Gay Movement Failed the Left? Or maybe, since the author is so staggeringly self-absorbed: Has the Gay Movement Failed Me? Duberman’s answer: you betcha. A quarter of a century ago, along with the rest of the gay left, he deliberately presented straight Americans with an image of gays as marginal, promiscuous rebels – unalterably hostile to capitalism, the family, religion, and every other bourgeois convention. For Duberman and friends, the unforgivable thing about gays like me was that we told straight America – correctly – that most gay Americans were ordinary, politically moderate, law-abiding folks who just wanted to be able to lead our lives in peace.

https://quillette.com/2018/11/02/trigger-warnings-and-mass-psychogenic

Contrary to the tradition of free inquiry, many college students now demand the suppression of ideas they find offensive. As if to raise the stakes by transforming the issues in play into medical ones, many also claim that such ideas traumatize them. Implying as it does that offensive material doesn’t just insult decency or pollute the public realm but wounds the very psyche of those exposed to it, the term “trauma” as deployed by the critics of free inquiry has indeed taken the argument to a new level. What are we to make of the contention that students are so vulnerable that the syllabus of a lit course should carry a “trigger warning” to the effect that their psyches might suffer damage merely as a result of the reading?

A medical argument calls for a medical reply.

Suppose rumors begin to circulate in a small town that the insulation stuffed into local walls and attics contains a toxic substance. Literally surrounded by toxicity, the residents begin to report symptoms like nausea, headache, dizziness and poor concentration, with each new case producing others in a cascade effect. The Emergency Room overflows. Upon investigation, however, no toxic source can be found. According to the medical literature, we have here a case of mass psychogenic illness (or mass hysteria): a social phenomenon in which people suddenly fall ill, and inspire others to do so as well, in the belief that they have been exposed to a toxic agent, though in fact the belief itself is making them sick. Such an outbreak poses a spurious emergency.

So too, I argue, does the trigger-warning movement. A mass reaction to an imaginary toxin and an over-reaction to the perceived dangers of toxic ideas represent parallel events (except that the threat allegedly posed by toxic ideas lacks the local and limited character of a classical psychogenic incident). Just as the former has the suddenness of a panic, the latter flares up instantly on the slightest provocation, as documented recently by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their critique of the trigger-warning movement, The Coddling of the American Mind. In both cases an incident can become an immediate cause célèbre, with ambulances, fire trucks, investigators, and reporters hastening to the scene of a psychogenic outbreak, and the news media, social networks, student populations, and university authorities swept up in a comprehensive reaction to students’ claims of injury.

Schools appear to be the most common venue for psychogenic outbreaks, perhaps because a population concentrated in a tight setting makes an ideal conductor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/college-assignment-compare-trump-administration-nazi-policies/

That comparison is offensive to everyone who suffered at the hands of the Nazis

A University of Arizona student reports that her class was asked to compare President Donald Trump administration and the Nazis’ policies as part of an extra-credit assignment for a course on the Holocaust.

“Now that you have studied the Vichy Anti-Jewish Laws, the German Ordinances, and pre-Vichy laws imposed on the Jews (French, immigrant, and refugee) and the repercussions that they had for Jews in France, examine and analyze more current anti-immigrant laws in the United States,” states the extra-credit assignment, a copy of which was obtained by Campus Reform.

One Jewish American student, L’wren Tikva, told Campus Reform that she was offended by the assignment, saying that it was “insensitive” and that it felt “extremely one-sided and [like] full-on indoctrination.”

“As a Jewish American who has ties to those who survived the Holocaust it’s pretty trivializing comparing Trump’s policies to the Holocaust,” Tikva reportedly wrote to her professor. “Almost all of these policies are in no way comparable and the President is in his legal authority to implement these policies.”

Apparently, the professor responded and stated that she was also a relative of Holocaust survivors, that “her intent was not to compare Trump to Hitler,” and that she was “not [at] all comparing what eventually transpired in Vichy, France to what is happening now in the U.S.A.”

“I am certainly not cheapening the Holocaust by looking at the laws emphasized in pre-war France and examining the focus and rhetoric of certain immigration laws in the recent past and current moment in the States,” the professor continued.

Here’s the thing, though: That is exactly what she’s doing. She can try to defend herself and say that she wasn’t trying to compare what the Nazis did to what Trump is doing, but simply reading the assignment is enough to show that that was clearly her intent. She wasn’t simply asking students to examine Trump’s policies, she was asking them to examine Trump’s policies through the lens of what happened in Nazi Germany, which clearly insinuates that she is looking for students to draw some similarities between the two.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-problem-with-columbias-statement-on-pittsburgh/

In the Columbia student’s vocabulary, few labels are more damning than the word “problematic.” The Western canon central to our school’s curriculum is problematic (an affirmation of whiteness and the patriarchy). As is our free-speech supporting, union-skeptic university president (ditto). And the endowment’s investment in fossil-fuel companies (ditto). Succinctly put,“problematic” — to the average student and, in my experience, to some instructors — is the antonym of“woke.” Never mind that this is a grammatically tenuous use of the word: At Columbia, this definition is gospel.

Our campus paper, the Columbia Spectator, reported this morning on an email the Office of University Life addressed to the Columbia community following the anti-Semitic massacre in Pittsburgh. What makes this article worthy of attention? The university’s statement omitted the words“anti-Semitic” and “Jewish.”

Here’s the text of the message:

We are deeply saddened by the senseless violence at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday morning. Violence in our nation’s houses of worship is an affront to the freedoms our community holds dear. We stand strongly against these efforts to create fear and terror.

For some in our community, this is a particularly frightening time as we have seen a growing number of highly visible attacks directed at faith and identity – on worshippers and people of faith as they go through their daily lives, on groups gathered to celebrate an LGBT Latin night at Pulse Nightclub, on civil rights and anti-racist protesters in the streets of Charlottesville, and in so many other places, as occurred in last Wednesday’s shooting of two African-American shoppers in Kentucky. Please know that you are not alone, and that you are a part of this community founded on the fundamental dignity and worth of all.

The Columbia Spectator reports that following pushback from Columbia students and alumni, the Office of University Life issued a revision to this initial statement that characterized the attack as anti-Semitic and acknowledged that the attack specifically targeted the Jewish community.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/nolan-finley/2018/10/29/finley-anti-semitism-fight-begins-campus/1806326002/

If you’re hunting for the places where anti-semitism thrives in America, you’d be better off looking on its college campuses than in the White House.

Just two days after the slaughter of Jewish worshippers inside a temple in Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan staged a teach-in dedicated to the nationwide drive to prod universities to shun Israel.

The Boycott, Disinvest and Sanction (BDS) Movement condemns the Jewish state as an apartheid government for its treatment of Palestinians, and pressures colleges to break ties with Israel.

It has a vigorous presence at UM, and that’s caused discomfort for Jewish students who have traditionally found a welcoming environment on the Ann Arbor campus. It’s a thin line between demonizing Israel and dehumanizing Jews.

Former student Molly Rosen, writing in The Tower magazine in 2014, said when she arrived at UM, “I was not prepared to be told that, if I cared about human rights, I could not support Israel. I was not prepared to be told that my community was racist.

“I was not prepared to see my fellow students attacked with anti-Semitic slurs.”