RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-education-in-discrimination-1533502018

The Trump Administration in July withdrew Obama-era guidance that gave colleges a wink and a nod to racially discriminate. This means that colleges like Harvard that use racial preferences in admissions will receive more legal scrutiny, and the examination should be instructive.

Between 2011 and 2016, the Obama Education Department issued seven notices advising colleges how they may legally promote racial diversity. The 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits racial discrimination by institutions receiving federal funds. But the Supreme Court has held that colleges may consider race in admissions as long it isn’t the “decisive” factor. Quotas and point systems are forbidden.

The Obama department advised colleges to consider race as part of what it called an “individualized, holistic review of all applicants.” Colleges also were urged to consider race-neutral alternatives, but that they need not be adopted if they are “unworkable.” In other words, it’s the thought that counts. Many colleges took the guidance as cover to discriminate.

Harvard’s practices will be the first to be examined under this new spotlight. Students for Fair Admissions has sued the school for discriminating against Asian-American applicants and unconstitutionally favoring other minority groups. The case hasn’t gone to trial, but the plaintiff group’s legal filings based on discovery and depositions are revealing the secrets of Harvard’s use of race.

Consider Harvard’s “holistic” admissions review. Applicants are rated on a scale of one to six on academics, extracurricular activities, athletics and highly subjective “personal” criteria. Admissions officers also assign applicants an overall score.

https://www.nas.org/

NEW YORK, NY, July 30, 2018 – The National Association of Scholars has filed an amicus brief in support of Students for Fair Admissions’ (SFFA) motion for summary judgment against the President and Fellows of Harvard College. SFFA’s motion documents Harvard’s racially motivated admissions policies and calls on the college to release admissions data and to adopt race-blind admissions policies.

“NAS supports the principle that students should be admitted to colleges on the basis of academic achievement, proven ability, ambition, and commitment to learning,” said NAS President Peter Wood. “Racial identity should play no role in determining who should or should not be admitted, and the same standards should be applied to all individuals. Judgments about good character may be appropriate, but not when they serve as subterfuges to favor or disfavor whole categories of students. Harvard is guilty of racially stereotyping Asian students as lacking ‘positive personality,’ likeability, courage, and kindness, and not being ‘widely respected.’ These are not true judgments of character, but ways of disguising an animus against Asian students.”

The National Association of Scholars has opposed racial preferences in admissions policies since its founding in 1988. NAS members wrote the text of California Proposition 209, which made race-based admissions policies such as Harvard’s illegal in 1996. NAS previously urged legislation, not litigation, to end race-based preferences, and still desires such an outcome. Transparency in admissions policies is an important step toward that goal.

Wood noted: “By filing this amicus brief, we hope to throw the weight of evidence behind SFFA and sway the court toward transparency so that the public may decide if race-based admissions are for the greater good.”

NAS is a network of scholars and citizens united by a commitment to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and excellence in American higher education. Membership in NAS is open to all who share a commitment to these broad principles. NAS publishes a journal and has state and regional affiliates. Visit NAS at www.nas.org.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/study-says-trigger-warnings-might-harm-readers/

This is hilarious….one would think the word “trigger” with its gun reference would push the delicate snowflakes to the fainting couch…rsk

They ‘may inadvertently undermine some aspects of emotional resilience,’ say researchers.

A new study conducted by a group of Harvard researchers has found that “trigger warnings may inadvertently undermine some aspects of emotional resilience.”

The study was published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry late last week. The researchers asked two groups of test subjects to read material that depicted graphic violence and then to report their stress levels. One of the groups was presented with a trigger warning before reading the material, while the other group was not.

The researchers found that the presence of the trigger warnings increased three major reactions: “perceived emotional vulnerability to trauma,” “anxiety to written material perceived as harmful,” and “belief that trauma survivors are vulnerable.”

“Participants in the trigger warning group believed themselves and people in general to be more emotionally vulnerable if they were to experience trauma,” they state in the study’s abstract. “Participants receiving warnings reported greater anxiety in response to reading potentially distressing passages, but only if they believed that words can cause harm.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/is_there_a_cure_for_the_modern_university.html

So much has gone wrong with the modern university that one scarcely knows where to begin. Innumerable books have been written on the subject, from Hilda Neatby’s 1953 So Little for the Mind to Michael Rectenwald’s 2018 Springtime for Snowflakes. Articles abound in the thousands. As a former laborer in the educational vineyards, I have attempted a modest contribution to the literature, consisting of three books and dozens of essays and articles, to no particular avail. The academic outlook continues to degenerate, following an agenda that seems to be unstoppable, as if programmed by some ideological Doomsday Machine.

The reasons for the precipitous decline in academic rigor, standards, and outcomes are many and have been thoroughly canvassed. It may be worth bulleting some of them here to suggest the scope of the problem:

the emergence of a therapeutic culture absolving the individual from the demanding and sacrificial pursuit of excellence, valorizing feeling over thought and leading to an observable dumbing down of student capacity and performance. As Philip Rieff wrote in his magisterial The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “the cry of ‘one feels’ [has become] the caveat of the therapeutic.”

political factionalism accentuated by the rise of the postmodern left more interested in indoctrination than scholarship.

the scandal of affirmative action based on criteria of race and sex coupled with quotas placed on qualified white male and Asian students – a numerus clausus rationalized by an ethos of guilt reparation.

equity hiring protocols, the professional counterpart of affirmative action, favoring women, blacks, and indigenous candidates regardless of discipline-specific competence. In Rectenwald’s words, such “blatant tokenism in hiring and promotion jeopardizes the integrity of higher education.”

the incursion of gender politics and the social justice movement into the academic “space” where it has no business being.

the curtailing of academic freedom, which, as Frank Furedi writes in What’s Happened to the University?, has been “devalued through the sanctification of other values” – coercive regulation of conduct, speech codes, politically correct decrees against giving offense, sexual policing, etc.

opening the gates to a vast and intellectually unprepared student clientele in part for reasons of subprime pseudo-justice – everyone deserves a university education irrespective of native ability – and in part for crass monetary purposes – prohibitive tuition fees and per student government grants. This latter goes hand in hand with the industrialization of the university as a corporate enterprise seeking profit rather than truth.

the transformation of a reading culture into a visual and digital culture, rendering students progressively incapable of mastering the nuances, complexities, and semantic rules of written language as well as the habit of, like, coherent, like, conversation. Like, I kid you not, dude!

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/liberal-arts-education-prepares-students-for-public-life/

A liberal-arts education prepares students for participation in public life.

During an era of “fake news,” post-truth politics, political intolerance, and polarization, various solutions to these woes have been proposed. Potential reforms range from changing political institutions to establishing new standards for social-media companies.

Much less-discussed — and almost forgotten in the fray — is the educational role of universities.

Liberal education, when done well, puts Americans into contact with ideas that are challenging and difficult. It teaches them how to talk with — rather than past — each other. Today, university administrators need to reckon with the ways in which the hollowing-out of the liberal arts has exacerbated rather than mollified the distemper in our public discourse.

More than calls for free speech and the need for ideological diversity on college campuses, we urgently need a renewal of the liberal arts. “The free search for truth and its free exposition in the liberal arts, are essential components of a functioning democracy,” noted the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Association of University Professors in May.

The debate over free speech on college campuses is symptomatic of a deeper problem: Many colleges have abandoned the core liberal-arts commitment to pursue truth about the human condition. Liberal arts –whether literature, history, or philosophy — have become attenuated. Certain disciplines are now heavily politicized, and core curricula have been dismantled in favor of an à la carte approach to class selection, as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has documented.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270858/ridicule-not-reasoned-debate-best-medicine-bruce-thornton

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley recently told a high school audience that conservatives shouldn’t delight in “owning the libs” –– i.e. triggering a progressive into a hysterical response that you proceed to make fun of. Instead, we should be “persuading” progs with reasoned argument and “bringing people around to your point of view,” as Haley said.

In that way, we make a convert rather than energize partisans into clinging more tightly to their beliefs and voting to empower them.

Having spent more than 40 years in the incubators of today’s leftist nonsense, universities, I am skeptical about the power of reasoned argument among today’s ill-educated students. Most of their teachers, like most progressives, are pretty much immune to reason, evidence, and coherent argument, little of which makes it into their courses. As the old gag goes, arguing with a leftist is like playing chess with a pigeon: It knocks over the pieces, craps on the board, then struts around like it won the game. Reasoned argument cuts no ice when confronted with the irrational caprices and gratifying passions of human beings.

In fact, the assumption behind Haley’s plea is the old Socratic one that virtue is knowledge, that if one knows the good, one will do the good––one of the foundational bad ideas of modernity. When people believe wrong or dangerous ideas, the paradigm goes, that’s because they’re deficient in knowledge. They just need to be better informed of the facts, and better trained to spot incoherent and fallacious arguments.

http://www.bostonherald.com/opinion/editorials/2018/07/editorial_colleges_must_stop_coddling

College campus culture should be fair game for criticism. After all, college is very expensive and in many circles considered a compulsory rite of passage for young people.

More and more we hear stories of speakers being shut down by student protesters amid sometimes violent actions. Speakers running the political gamut from Ben Shapiro to Alan Dershowitz have been on the receiving end of angry mobs.

Yesterday’s college radical is today’s “social justice warrior” and their mission is to disrupt free speech whenever it does not conform exactly to their worldview. It happened at UMass Amherst in 2016 when Milo Yiannopoulos, Steven Crowder and Christina Hoff Sommers attempted to speak.

Whether it’s University of California, Berkeley, Middlebury College or Evergreen State University, there always seems to be at least one institution in the news associated with an attempt to thwart free speech.

Earlier this year, at Portland State University, when biologist Heather Heying made the point that women and men are biologically different, protesters in the audience screamed and excoriated her and tried to damage the sound system before they were removed. “We should not listen to fascism. Nazis are not welcome in civil society,” a protester said.

Year after year, our campuses seem to produce a bumper crop of loud and angry social justice warriors.

Yesterday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions took campus culture to task during a speech at Turning Point USA’s High School Leadership Summit in Washington.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/dartmouth-business-school-will-evaluate-applicants-based-on-niceness/

But wouldn’t jerks just lie and make up stories that make them seem like decent people?

Dartmouth’s business school has announced that it will judge its applicants partially on their “niceness.”

The Tuck School of Business will decide whether to admit applicants based on four criteria: smartness, accomplishment, niceness, and awareness, according to a post on Tuck’s official website.

A subsection on the school’s “Admissions Criteria” we page, titled “Tuck Students Are Nice,” states:

This is quintessential Tuck, where you cultivate a habit of kindness. You actively encourage, celebrate, and support others. But being nice does not mean you’re a pushover who always agrees and defers. Nice Tuck candidates exhibit emotional intelligence. You layer compassion onto courage, and challenge others tactfully and thoughtfully. You display both strength and vulnerability. You ask for help, and you help others. You’re positive and principled. You act with respect and integrity, even when it’s not convenient or easy. You show empathy for the diverse experiences of others, while also sharing your own. You recognize that your success and others’ success are interdependent, and generously invest in both. Being nice at Tuck means building trust through deep, genuine connections that endure for life.

In an effort to evaluate a student’s level of niceness, the list of essay questions on the school’s webpage includes this one: “Tuck students are nice, and invest generously in one another’s success. Share an example of how you helped someone else succeed. (500 words)” According to an article in The College Fix, the school is now also asking references about the applicants’ niceness.