RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/09/12/time_to_add_entrepreneurship_to_the_college_curriculum_110794.html

Colleges across the country have welcomed millions back to campus over the past few weeks in the midst of headlines heralding economic growth. Faculty, administrators, and student leaders should seize this opportunity to prioritize entrepreneurship and add it to the core curriculum. Entrepreneurship is the only skill that can give students true financial and occupational freedom in today’s fast-changing economy.

Sadly, American universities have long prioritized theory and knowledge at the expense of implementation and practice.

Few of today’s curricula — even in the “hard” disciplines such as science and technology — translate directly to the job market. According to a recent PayScale survey of more than 64,000 managers, 60 percent responded that recent grads lack critical thinking skills, nearly half responded that they didn’t have the necessary writing or leadership skills, and over a third said that they didn’t have adequate data analysis skills. In other words, around half of college grads don’t have the baseline attributes it takes to succeed in today’s economy — let alone flourish as entrepreneurs.

As a result, there are significant cracks in today’s generally strong economy. For instance, there are still vast geographic inequities in economic growth, a lack of economic vibrancy, and widespread underemployment.

A recent Wall Street Journal article dubbed small communities “the new inner city” because of their stubbornly poor socioeconomic indicators that are often apparent even from a casual drive through town.

The startup rate, a widely used proxy for economic vibrancy, is one of the few economic indicators to show little-to-no improvement since the Great Recession.

The new head of civil rights at the Education Department has reopened a seven-year-old case brought by a Zionist group against Rutgers University, saying the Obama administration, in closing the case, ignored evidence that suggested the school allowed a hostile environment for Jewish students. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/us/politics/rutgers-jewish-education-civil-rights.html

The move by Kenneth L. Marcus, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights and a longtime opponent of Palestinian rights causes, signaled a significant policy shift on civil rights enforcement — and injected federal authority in the contentious fights over Israel that have divided campuses across the country. It also put the weight of the federal government behind a definition of anti-Semitism that targets opponents of Zionism, and it explicitly defines Judaism as not only a religion but also an ethnic origin.

And it comes after the Trump administration moved the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, moved to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority and announced the closing of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington.

In a letter to the Zionist Organization of America, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Marcus said he would vacate a 2014 decision by the Obama administration and re-examine the conservative Jewish group’s cause not as a case of religious freedom but as possible discrimination against an ethnic group.

In so doing, the Education Department embraced Judaism as an ethnicity and adopted a hotly contested definition of anti-Semitism that included “denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination” by, for example, “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of” Israel “a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

In effect, Arab-American activists say, the government is declaring the Palestinian cause anti-Semitic.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/study-claims-gifted-math-classes-promote-academic-apartheid/

A math education professor is arguing that gifted math classes cause “academic apartheid” among students, claiming that the practice is rooted in “capitalist exploitations and settler colonialism.”

The study, “Understanding Issues Associated With Tracking Students in Mathematics Education,” was published in the new issue of the the Columbia University journal Mathematics Education by Cacey Wells, a professor at the University of Oklahoma.

In his article — which relies heavily upon social justice math theory — Wells takes aim at what teachers call “academic tracking,” which is the practice of placing students in different math classes (such as pre-algebra or gifted classes) depending on test scores.

Under the tracking system, for example, a student who scores in the top 10 percent of his peers may be placed into a precalculus course. On the other hand, a student who scores in the lowest 10 percent may be placed into a remedial math class, or perhaps pre-algebra.

While this practice is fairly common in high school, it has come under criticism by teachers who worry about the impact of the practice on the lower performing students. The confidence of some students may suffer at the expense of others, especially minorities, it is argued.

Not only that, but critics of the tracking system worry that standardized test scores may not fully encompass all of a students’ skills and abilities. This is especially true for students of color and children whose first language is not English, critics argue. CONTINUE AT SITE

This summer, the failure by Stanford University to adequately respond to threats of violence made by a Muslim student against other students dramatically illustrates that anti-Semitism does not rank anywhere near the same level of concern as hate speech against blacks or gays.

Indeed, the incident made clear that the justice system and even many Jewish groups were reluctant to act or even issue strongly worded rebukes. When Jews are the targeted hate population, many today give only weakly worded expressions of “concern,” but do nothing of consequence to stop anti-Semitism which only encourages more such expressions of hatred and endangers the safety of Jewish college students.

The incident at Stanford occurred in July, university student Hamzeh Daoud made violent threats on Facebook against pro-Israel students. Daoud had some stature on campus as a former student Senate member and a soon-to-be, residential advisor (RA) for a dormitory. He also worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and was active in the terror-linked, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

Daoud’s SJP involvement is a cause for concern. The anti-Semitic group, founded by Hatem Bazian, who raised money for a Hamas front and headed the UC Berkeley Muslim Student Association, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, is described by NGO Monitor as “the organization most directly responsible for creating a hostile campus environment saturated with anti-Israel events, BDS initiatives, and speakers.”

SJP routinely smears Israel by falsely characterizing it as an “apartheid state,” denounces Israel’s self-defense measures against Arab-Palestinian terrorism and supports the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state.

To be white, Christian, and proud of one’s heritage is now the kiss of death in academia.

There can be little doubt that the modern university, in its obsession with race, gender, and sexual orientation under the rubric of “social justice,” has violated its core mandate, which, in the words of Matthew Arnold from Culture and Anarchy, is to familiarize readers and students with “the best that has been thought and said.” The Academy has turned Arnold’s maxim on its head, instructing students in the worst that has been thought and said – and done. The curricular fetish of “social justice,” which is destroying the university as an institution of higher learning, continues to metastasize.

Indeed, the university as a social and cultural institution is a slow-motion train wreck picking up speed: equity hiring, affirmative action, anti-conservative and overt leftist politics, the “diversity and inclusion” myth on which the academy prides itself, groupthink, speech codes, snitch lines, trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, the attack on academic freedom – the list goes on.

The bogus issue that has recently acquired major prominence in the quagmire of campus politics is “whiteness,” especially the “hegemony” of straight white males and their champions, guilty, apparently, of every conceivable ill that has bedeviled the world since the first silverback descended from the trees. This is merely a prime manifestation of the reigning hysteria on college campuses, in particular its mephitic obsession with race. “The toxic racial climate of colleges looks to be perpetual,” warns Scott Greer in No Campus for White Men; anti-white ferocity “remains established as an unchallenged dogma.” There is no campus for some white woman as well. Witness the current vendetta against distinguished University of Chicago medievalist Rachel Fulton Brown.

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-

In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.

Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.

Darwin had also raised the question of why males in many species might have evolved to be more variable than females, and when I learned that the answer to his question remained elusive, I set out to look for a scientific explanation. My aim was not to prove or disprove that the hypothesis applies to human intelligence or to any other specific traits or species, but simply to discover a logical reason that could help explain how gender differences in variability might naturally arise in the same species.

I came up with a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological and evolutionary principles and enlisted Sergei Tabachnikov, a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, to help me flesh out the model. When I posted a preprint on the open-access mathematics archives in May of last year, a variability researcher at Durham University in the UK got in touch by email. He described our joint paper as “an excellent summary of the research to date in this field,” adding that “it certainly underpins my earlier work on impulsivity, aggression and general evolutionary theory and it is nice to see an actual theoretical model that can be drawn upon in discussion (which I think the literature, particularly in education, has lacked to date). I think this is a welcome addition to the field.”

So far, so good.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-university-is-ripe-for-replacement/

“Education is a weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down.” — Stalin, interview with H.G. Wells

Beginning in early K-12 and continuing to the highest levels of university education, Leftist indoctrination is the gravest dilemma that afflicts education in North America, rendering it perhaps the most powerful instrument of anti-Western bias and socialist propaganda of the modern era.

Here my concern is with the abandonment of genuine scholarship, fact-based historical research, familiarity with the “Great Books” and the development of critical thinking habits, particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The curriculum now in place is one of intellectual dysphoria promoting the circulation of false or unprovable narratives — Anthropogenic Global Warming, Islam as a religion of peace, the campus rape epidemic, toxic masculinity, the scandal of American history, the glories of “diversity and inclusion,” the benefits of socialism, to cite just a few among a veritable encyclopedia — and furthering the revolutionary project of social and political deconstruction. Education has been transformed into a grooming operation for social justice warriors, radical feminists, anti-white vigilantes and budding socialists.

Moreover, to compound the septic plunge into calamitous absurdity, the self-contradictory adoption as a kind of state religion of postmodern thought and doctrine — briefly, the suspicion of reason, the belief that reality is a conceptual construct, the rejection of fixed or objective truth — has served to turn the university into a parody of its original purpose, the pursuit of genuine knowledge.

Defenders of the status quo need to be taken not with a grain of salt but an entire salt mine. Case in point: Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders, a rabid anti-conservative, an apologist for Islam, a believer in rampant immigration, and one of the shoddiest journalists in Canada, fully rejects the charge of university malfeasance. Rather, he claims, the campus is “less radical, more tolerant, more open and more politically moderate than ever before.”

https://pjmedia.com/parenting/high-school-english-students-forced-to-learn-gender-bending-pronouns-and-anti-white-propaganda/

If you send your kids off to high school thinking they will learn how to diagram sentences and write competently, you may want to check their English requirements. John F. Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has other ideas about learning English that include gender-neutral pronouns, discussions of sexuality, and anti-white propaganda.

A student posted an assignment to social media, handed out by teacher Emily Thomson of Kennedy High’s English department, that detailed “power and privilege” in America which, according to the assignment, names “U.S. born,” “white people,” “Christians,” “middle, owning class,” “heterosexuals,” “men,” and “veterans” as the oppressors of non-white humankind. How this is not a violation of the school’s policy against discrimination based on race, creed, and sexuality is baffling.

In case you’re tempted the think the right column is not referring to the oppressors, think again. Here’s the very next image in the “Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege” program. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271241/her-too-bruce-bawer

Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Les Moonves, Al Franken: the list of high-profile persons who’ve been accused of using their professional power to sexually exploit others continues to grow. One of the most recent additions to the roster is a woman – a lesbian, in fact – whose name may mean nothing to you but who, like Weinstein in Hollywood and Franken on Capitol Hill, has long wielded considerable power within her own professional community. Her name is Avital Ronell, and she’s a 66-year-old “superstar” professor at New York University, where she’s a member of both the Germanic Languages and Literature Department and the Comparative Literature Department, and at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where she’s on the philosophical faculty.

Ronell’s accuser, a young gay man named Nimrod Reitman, alleges that back in 2012, when he was one of Ronell’s grad students, she sexually assaulted him at her pied à terre in Paris, proceeded to flood his in-box with scores of romantic e-mails, and then, some time later, moved into his Manhattan apartment (and bed) when Hurricane Sandy cut off the electricity to her NYU apartment. When, after his graduation, he finally began resisting her aggressive moves – he says he was too worried about professional retaliation to do so earlier – she allegedly tried to sabotage his career.

A protégée of the late Jacques Derrida, Ronell practices what is known, broadly, as postmodern theory, churning out prose – at once playful, pretentious, and deliberately obscure – that’s meant to be a shot across the bow of the rational post-Enlightenment West. Half a century or so ago, professors in English departments taught literature. Philosophy professors taught the history of philosophy. Their present-day successors, such as Ronell, whom you can put in any and all humanities and social-sciences departments, because they’re all working pretty much the same scam, view themselves as doing something infinitely more consequential than passing on the great ideas of Western civilization.