RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/chinese_infiltration_in_american_schools.html

In April of 2017, Rachelle Peterson of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) published an in-depth study titled “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education.” Her findings reveal China’s Trojan horse under the guise of intellectual sharing.

The Confucius Institutes are funded through an agency called the Hanban, which has direct ties to the Chinese government, thus ensuring that China gets to weigh in on topics. There is outright suppression on certain subjects – e.g., praising the Dali Lama, the status of Taiwan, and the persecution of members of Falun Gong.

With “China footing the bill, critics say Confucius Institutes are ready-made platforms for … promoting an overly rosy image of China while discouraging discussion of the ‘three Ts’: Tibet, Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.” In fact,”[t]he Chinese director of one Institute explained that if a student asked about Tiananmen Square, she would ‘show a picture and point out the beautiful architecture.'”

Moreover, any discussion of China’s oppression of 10 million Muslim Uyghurs in its Xinjiang province, where up to one million Muslim Uyghurs have been detained in camps, would be verboten.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/at-the-university-of-oregon-fight-against-toxic-masculinity-costs-90k-a-year/

The University of Oregon Men’s Center recently revamped its mission to start fighting “toxic masculinity,” now a monumental effort that will cost the student body nearly $90,000 this upcoming school year alone.

Founded in 2002, the Men’s Center initially served as a hangout for men to learn about healthy living and nutrition. But in early February, the Men’s Center was taken over by a young woman who announced that it would be overhauled to focus on social justice.

“We are working towards the radical idea of a socially just world. For far too long men have been absent from the discussion of social equality,” reads a February 2018 announcement. “Our focus is to use social justice… to reconstruct what we know masculinity to be.”

Now, the Men’s Center organizes events exclusively to fight “toxic masculinity.”

According to their website, toxic masculinity includes “outbursts of anger, emotional repression… when men engage in catcalling, physical touch without consent, and even just very obviously looking a woman up and down.”

Since it was initially founded by students, the Men’s Center runs as a student club. Even so, it is essentially a para-administrative operation with a full-time staff member and an exclusive office space in the school’s Student Center.

Of course, because the Men’s Center is still technically a club, it is funded by mandatory student fees. According to the recently approved 2018-2019 Budget Book, a copy of which was obtained by PJ Media, the Men’s Center is slated to cost students $89,910 next year.

For comparison, the Jewish Student Union will cost students $4,100 next year, the Jam Squad is earmarked $275, and the Geology Club will get $8,150. PJ Media asked UO why the Men’s Center was approved for such an unusually high amount, but received no response.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/16/identity-politics-rapidly-destroying-value-college-degrees/

I attended the College of William and Mary from fall 2014 until winter 2016, during the arguable height of social justice outrage. The infamous University of Missouri protests happened soon after I started school, where professor Melissa Click threatened a student journalist with physical violence.

At Yale, the Christakises were protested for arguing against over-coddling administrators telling students what they should not wear for Halloween. The Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus” that was later found fraudulent came out during my first year of school. It’s not for these reasons alone that college was futile, but the leftist insanity that perpetually surrounded me certainly played a part.

This spring was set to be my graduation from college. Had I not sped things up and graduated in two years, instead of four, I would have walked across the stage, taken pictures with my family, and graduated with $40,000 in debt. I wouldn’t have been able to earn editing and writing experience (like bylines at The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Reason, and The Houston Chronicle). I recommend the same path to other young conservatives — escape debt and leftist indoctrination, if you can. Choose work experience, trade school, or a fast-tracked route through college instead.
College Often Isn’t Worth Your Time and Money

Elite colleges aren’t designed for critical thinking or open inquiry anymore. According to Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post, “A fifth of undergrads now say it’s acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes ‘offensive and hurtful statements.’”

The same survey indicates that about four in every ten students believes the First Amendment does not allow “hate speech.” Meanwhile, even at elite colleges like the liberal arts school Pomona, nearly 90 percent of students say their campus climate chills speech because they fear saying things others might find offensive.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-state-charity-1534546826

Any day now the IRS will release new rules that address efforts by states including Connecticut, Oregon, New York and New Jersey to evade last year’s tax reform by masking tax payments as charitable contributions. The danger is that nonprofit scholarship organizations that are funded in part by tax credits could end up as collateral damage.

The issue arises because certain states—mostly left-leaning—have been looking for gimmicks to claw back the state and local deductions that were capped at $10,000 in the new tax reform. State politicians understand that because taxpayers can no longer fully deduct their high state taxes on federal forms, they are going to pay a higher price for their states’ big-spending ways.

Governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo have concocted a scheme to get around this. Essentially they’ve set up fake charities, which would collect in charitable contributions money that taxpayers formerly deducted from their federal taxes—which the states would then use to pay for state programs. Because the tax reform didn’t cap charitable deductions, taxpayers would effectively be taking a charitable deduction as a substitute for their formerly unlimited state and local tax deductions.

The IRS is rightly skeptical and in May issued Notice 2018-54 indicating it would adopt new regulations for such proposals. The danger now is that these new rules will not distinguish between “charities” that are really government fronts to collect taxes and Scholarship Granting Organizations that are not government entities, that do not funnel money back to the state, and that were set up by the states to expand opportunities for students.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/university-of-virginia-marc-short-miller-center/

Big universities are prone to bouts of craziness and one that’s particularly susceptible is the University of Virginia. The campus has been in an uproar one year after the alt-right vs. Antifa riot last summer. The turmoil was triggered by a horrible, provocative move by a center located at the university — it hired someone who worked in the Trump administration!

Charlottesville native and frequent Martin Center contributor John Rosenberg writes about the resulting affray in this essay.

Marc Short, who served as Trump’s legislative director, was recently hired by the Miller Center, which focuses on politics and the presidency. But hiring anyone who ever had anything to do with Trump is now verboten — at least in the minds of woke faculty members.

Said another prof at the Center, “Short’s hiring is an institutional and moral crisis” because “the Trump presidency does not represent American democracy and has upended the political order.”

Rosenberg’s comment on the ranting over Short’s hiring: “The unrecognized irony here, of course, is that there is a name for the intolerance of universities and other institutions refusing to hire anyone defending illiberalism: McCarthyism.”

Two Miller Center faculty members resigned rather than work under the same roof as Short. He’s being treated like a leper just for having been part of the Trump team.