RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/07/18/meet-the-texas-teachers-100000-club-7300-six-figure-educators-cost-taxpayers-903-million/#5716c31710ae

Do public schools in Texas pay $232,000 for coordinating PE classes? What about paying $340,000 to a high school music teacher and $127,000 to a librarian?

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found 7,327 Texas public school administrators, athletic directors, teachers, and other employees pulled down six-figure salaries costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion. In fiscal year 2017, superintendents earned as much as $450,000; “executive directors for assessment and compliance” received up to $302,820; and principals made as much as $313,870.

Using our interactive mapping tool at OpenTheBooks.com, quickly review (by zip code) every Texas educator who made a salary of $100,000 or more in 2017. Just zoom in, click a pin (zip code), and scroll down to see the results.

To see all 2017 Texas Education Agency payroll data at OpenTheBooks.com, click here.

Less than six percent of these highly compensated Texas educators were teachers. In fact, we found as many athletic directors and business managers (406) earning six figure salaries as teachers (407). Additionally, “educational aides” received up to $203,658; “assistant principals” made up to $202,115; “counselors” earned up to $186,092. What about those “athletic directors?” They received up to $155,156.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/at-upenn-movement-to-erase-campus-ties-to-slavery-heats-up/

New information about its 18th Century trustees sparks activism.

The University of Pennsylvania campus in West Philadelphia is a long and spiraling network of old buildings, crosswalks, and pedestrian bridges linking the Penn Library (where one may examine the papers of essayist Agnes Repplier) and the Kelly Writers House (where Susan Sontag once described the public reaction to her New Yorker essay on the September 11th attack in New York City). In the 1970s, the Penn campus was a major hangout of Ira Einhorn, founder of Earth Day and touted as a Philadelphia notable by city politicians until he was arrested for murdering and stuffing the body of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, inside a trunk in his Powelton Village apartment.

Outwardly, the Penn campus is a pretty quiet place, although in 2017 the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported that neo-Nazi posters were appearing on campus with messages like “Stop the blacks,” and “join your local Nazis.” While Penn has a policy that “no poster shall be prohibited or restricted solely on basis of content,” enough students were riled up to attract the attention of local media. Although the offending posters mysteriously disappeared shortly after their discovery, student activists covered the “LOVE” sculpture near City Hall with hundreds of anti-Nazi posters warning “We are ready to resist.”

But resist what? Neo-Nazi sympathizers in the City of Philadelphia are about as numerous as sub-groups of transgender Mennonites. If there are any neo-Nazis here, they are quiet basement dwellers who rarely make public appearances. The zero-to-none neo-Nazi activity in Philadelphia suggests that the “Nazi” posters were put up by leftists so that they would have something to protest against. False flag operations are common on the Left, since it is the Left that pushes for fascist, totalitarian interdiction of freedom of speech.

The Left, of course, also likes to espouse its calumny anonymously, because it is not interested in freedom or justice but rather seeks to control lives by government-enforced restrictions on freedom.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/war-over-campus-politics-matters/What happens in the academy rarely stays there.

Universities have become key battlegrounds in the American culture wars. Conservatives rail against “leftist monoculture” in academia, liberals decry the conservative “obsession” with college campuses, and the air is quickly filled with the heat of mutual recriminations.

Amid the crossfire, some liberal commentators have offered moderate and well-reasoned interpretations of academia’s troubles. They point out that although university faculties do lean overwhelmingly to the left, it’s quite rare for students to be “successfully” indoctrinated by their progressive professors. Others note that there already exists a certain degree of viewpoint diversity in some areas of academia, given the prevalence of right-leaning professors in, for example, economics and law departments. There’s some truth to such arguments, though I would maintain that many college environments are indeed stifling intellectual freedom. (A personal example: When I wrote an essay for my college paper defending the Western literary canon, I was promptly accused in print of having been “indoctrinated by white supremacy.” Needless to say, nobody enjoys being accused of such things.)

But another common view among many liberals holds that even if academia has an ideological-homogeneity problem, it is artificially amplified by the right-wing media’s addiction to covering the excesses of leftist university culture. Sure, this argument goes, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and hysterical breakdowns over Halloween costumes can be annoying, but they do not merit the relentless stream of conservative op-eds, Fox News segments, and right-wing-news stories condemning “liberal snowflakes” and “radical professors.” The social-justice mobs might be scary, but their influence is confined to a tiny sector of society: universities, and elite universities at that.

https://www.weeklystandard.com/andrew-ferguson/supreme-court-on-cue-yale-law-school-students-freak-out-about-kavanaugh?mod=article_inline

When President Trump announced last Monday that he had chosen Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy, his little speech rang out like a starter pistol. Instantly every activist, party hack, and ideological mainchancer bolted from the blocks, issuing petitions and press releases and formal statements with astonishing speed and at maximum volume. This includes Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Yale Law School, and a contingent of his fellow Yalies.

It took only an hour after Trump’s announcement for the law school’s flacks to announce the news that Trump had chosen one of their own: “President Donald Trump today nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh ’90 . . .” etc., etc. The rest of the school’s press release was a series of testimonials from acquaintances about Kavanaugh’s overall magnificence. One professor called him “a terrific judge.” Another said that “Kavanaugh commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers, judges, and justices.” A man with the impressive job title “John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence” summed up: “We are proud that he is our graduate.”

We? Speak for yourself, Herr Professor. By the next day a collection of not-proud and indeed horrified Yalies had posted a rebuttal to the school’s press release, with the title “Open Letter from Yale Law Students, Alumni, and Educators Regarding Brett Kavanaugh.” They were, they wrote, “ashamed of our alma mater.”

The letter, which is twice as long as the press release, is a masterpiece of pure scold. The signers criticize the “press release’s focus on the nominee’s professionalism, pedigree, and service to Yale Law School.” What the hell, they ask, do professionalism and pedigree have to do with anything? Especially when “the true stakes of his nomination” are so high? Kavanaugh’s nomination is an “emergency,” they tell us, and the school’s implicit embrace of him raises a “disturbing question: Is there nothing more important to Yale Law School than its proximity to power and prestige?”

Disturbing or not, it’s the kind of question that answers itself. And the answer is no sir, there is not—absolutely nothing whatsoever. The reason Yale Law School exists is to convey its “students, alumni, and educators” as close as possible to power and prestige. You can’t charge $255,000 for a law degree unless you throw in a healthy portion of P&P. This is why all those people who signed the open letter went to Yale and not to Oklahoma City School of Law. Nothing against OKC. I’m sure it’s terrific.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270679/affirmative-action-ropes-bruce-thornton

A case is currently under litigation that however it is decided, will likely reach the Supreme Court. There the diversity industry may face a challenge that brings the institutional racism of affirmative action and its baleful effects to an end.

In 2014, an organization called Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard University for excluding Asian students who were far better qualified than other applicants who had been admitted. Last November the Justice Department opened an investigation into Harvard’s admission practices, and is threatening to sue the university, throwing its support behind the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs have viewed admission records through discovery, and want them publicized because the evidence for arbitrary and discriminatory evaluations is so obvious no trial is necessary. More recently, the Trump administration has rescinded Obama’s 2011 rule advising universities to use race as a criterion in admissions. Finally, the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy creates an opening for a Constitutionalist judge who will not, as Kennedy has serially done, subordinate the law to politics or social engineering.

Such portents are heartening, for race-based policies of the last forty years have rested on a preposterous justification on the basis of “diversity,” the “compelling state interest” used to violate principle and law. Indeed, the word recurs like a mantra in Supreme Court decisions. In the 2016 Fisher vs. University of Texas case, for example, Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion wrote, “It remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity.”