RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/objectivity-among-white-mythologies/Some progressives believe that the most important thing in any situation is to inject identity politics.

A course that will be taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges next year will teach students that “objectivity” and “meritocracy” are examples of “white mythologies” and “social constructs.”

“This course explores the history and ongoing manifestations of ‘white mythologies’ — long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm against which the peoples of the world are to be understood and judged,” states the description for the class, which is titled “White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions.”

“Students will explore how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race, and as justifications for colonial interventions, slavery, and the subordination of women,” the description continues.

As crazy as this story may sound, this is far from the first time that we’ve seen this kind of thinking on a college campus. In April of 2017, a group of students at Pomona College wrote a letter to the school’s outgoing president claiming that “the idea that there is a single truth . . . is a myth and white supremacy.” Also last year, a professor at Pennsylvania State University–Brandywine argued that “meritocracy” is a “whiteness ideology.” This year, two University of Denver professors claimed that scientific objectivity works to “spread whiteness ideology.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/universities_marking_down_students_for_using_banned_gender_terms.html

Gender madness is being enforced with the iron fist of bad grades at some of Australia’s leading universities. Natasha Bita of the Courier-Mail of Brisbane reports:

Queensland’s top universities all demand that “inclusive language’’ be used in essays, assignments, lectures and conversation, in “nanny state’’ policies rubbished yesterday by an angry federal Education Minister.

Other words – including “she”, “man”, “wife” and “mother’’ – are also off limits at some universities.

University of Queensland students have complained about academics docking marks for using the word “mankind’’ in essays.

A politics student was penalised for using the grammatically correct pronoun of “she’’ to describe a car.

“People are losing marks for using everyday speech because it’s not gender-neutral,’’ the student, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Courier Mail yesterday.

“I lost marks because I used ‘mankind’’ in my assignment, and I referred to a car I owned as ‘she is my pride and joy’.’’

A science student also lost marks for using “mankind’’ in an essay about the philosophy of scientific method.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/hillary-clinton-harvard-speech-alexander-solzhenitsyn-was-better/Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard speech was infinitely wiser than Hillary Clinton’s recent remarks at Yale.

Most commencement addresses, truth be told, are neither memorable nor meaningful. Filled with platitudes and banalities about the unmatched accomplishments and unlimited promise of each year’s crop of new college graduates, the predictable speech thankfully fades away as quickly as the moment passes, pleasantly recalled but rarely recollected.

Yet every once in a while, a commencement address comes along that has something to say and deserves to be remembered and reread, again and again.

Consider Hillary Clinton’s address recently at Yale University’s annual Class Day. Between jokes about the 2016 election (she says she is still “not over” the loss), the former senator, secretary of state, and presidential nominee spoke intently of the “full-fledged crisis in our democracy” brought on by her unnamed former political opponent.

Clinton warned the enthralled graduates that “there are leaders in our country who blatantly incite people with hateful rhetoric, who fear change, who see the world in zero-sum terms.” The inexorable result is that our fundamental rights, civic virtue, freedom of the press, and even facts and reason are “under assault like never before.”

Following the Yale tradition of sporting silly headgear for Class Day, Clinton pulled out a Russian ushanka cap to underscore her point, surrendering subtlety along with any gravitas she had left. Then came the cliché: The Class of 2018 had “already demonstrated the character and courage that will help you navigate this tumultuous moment.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270382/video-antifa-public-school-teachers-frontpagemagcom

Editor’s note: Below is Sean Fitzgerald’s new video exposing Antifa radicals in America’s public schools and their efforts to indoctrinate students with their violent ideology.

C-Span’s Brian Lamb interviewing Yale historian John Gaddis, May 28:

Brian: What is it like inside of Yale talking about Donald Trump?

Gaddis: It can’t really be done on a rational basis most of the time. within the university—a university like Yale, the feelings are so visceral, it is hard to have any conversation that does not say predictable things. . . . Anybody who tries to say something less than predictable is apt to be disregarded. People do not try. It is almost that way with students, but not quite as much. I think we are in a kind of bubble, like many places on the coast are. One of the things we have tried to do in the summer, with our grand strategy students—we have always built in what we call a summer odyssey somewhere. . . . The exotic climes we have been now pushing with our students are simply America. How many of you have taken a road trip across America? Surprisingly few. We are financing road trips across America for Yale students with the encouragement to stop in small towns and stay there. . . . They write this up as their projects. It is very simple. We just ask them, write about what you saw, write about what you heard. They can draw their own conclusions from this. . . . It is just our small effort to try to break down some of the isolation that somehow the elite universities have locked themselves into, the bubbles into which they have placed themselves.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/progressive-education-today-1528326470

‘It’s like the [Education Department’s] motto is, ‘If it’s not broken, break it.’” So said state Assemblyman Jeff Dinowitz, in an apt summary of plans by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to diminish standards at eight high-performing public high schools.

Mr. Dinowitz, who was quoted in the New York Post, is a proud alum of the Bronx High School of Science. In America’s largest school system, where most children are failing proficiency tests in math and reading, only a modern progressive such as Mr. de Blasio could think the solution is watering down standards at the schools where students are achieving.

The mayor is alarmed because Asian students are disproportionately doing far better than black and Latino kids. At Manhattan’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School, for example, 2.8% of students are Latino and 0.69% black. But 72.9% are Asian-American.

The disproportion is similar at other high-achieving New York City schools where admission is determined by an achievement test. Mr. de Blasio’s solution requires taking seats at these elite schools from Asian or white students and giving them to less qualified black and Latino children who may not be prepared for the academic demands. Either he’s setting these students up to fail, or he’ll have to ruin the schools by dumbing down their standards.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/changing-subject-15950.html

As he moves to wreck New York City’s eight justly famed competitive-entry high schools, New York mayor Bill de Blasio implies he’s on a mission from God, but it seems more like a mission from the United Federation of Teachers. “Blessed are those who act justly,” the famously self-reverential chief executive declared at Harlem’s Bethel Gospel Academy Sunday, later returning to the theme to describe critics of his plan to impose entrance quotas on the eight schools: “I think scripture also tells us about the naysayers and the doubting Thomases,” he said. “Can I get an amen?”

Well, no. The mayor’s scheme needs to be seen for what it is—an effort to change the city’s public-school-performance conversation rather than a constructive public policy proposal. Plus, it’s a blatant pander to his political base—and a firm notice that a reelected de Blasio has no intention of turning away from progressive obsessions in favor of sensible governance. And he said as much Sunday. “I’ve got a new mandate from the voters. [And] I have a new chancellor who is focused on social justice.” The mayor might have added that the new chancellor, Richard Carranza, is focused on social justice to the exclusion of all else.

Following relatively brief and undistinguished stints heading the San Francisco and Houston school systems, Carranza arrived in New York in April, announcing that his top priority would be desegregating New York’s public schools. True to his word, he almost immediately attacked “wealthy white Manhattan parents” for, he claimed, blocking integration efforts—then instructed a critic to take “anti-implicit bias training.” Carranza has returned to the bias theme repeatedly, ignoring the central shame of the city’s schools: the thousands of students who graduate from its woeful high schools each year unable to do college-level academic work and—perhaps more significantly—incapable of performing in New York’s twenty-first-century economy, either.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/diversity-not-merit-15948.html

For decades, admission to New York City’s eight elite “specialized high schools” has been based strictly on a high-stakes test administered to the city’s eighth-graders. The meritocratic premise is simple: regardless of who you are or how much your parents make, if you hit a certain score on the test, you’re guaranteed a place in one of these high schools, all among the best in the United States. But if Mayor Bill de Blasio gets his way, New York will scrap this venerable system for one that is as close to a race-based quota scheme as constitutionally possible.

Progressives criticize the admissions test as an instrument of “segregation” because black and Latino kids are underrepresented among students accepted at schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. Indeed, in 2016, Stuyvesant had only 20 black students among a student body of more than 3,000. Brooklyn Tech, where de Blasio’s son went, is somewhat more racially diverse, with 14.8 percent black and Latino representation. But in a city where blacks and Latinos make up two out of every three public school students, black and Latino enrollment in the most elite secondary schools is undeniably thin—a direct result of student performance on the entrance test.

Yesterday, the mayor, backed by his new schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, announced that he plans to scrap the entrance test for the eight elite schools and replace it with a system offering admission to the kids in the top 7 percent of every junior school in the city. This change, according to the mayor, will make the schools “look like New York City” and answer the “demand for fairness” that supposedly rings across the five boroughs.

http://politicalmavens.com/

In keeping with the logic of Mayor de Blasio and his school chancellor, who both believe that a good solution for black and Latino minorities to get ahead in school is simply to eliminate the standardized test to get into New York’s toughest academies, why not do the same with the La Guardia school for the performing arts? Let’s forget about auditions and portfolios and try to even the number of boys who are admitted since only 26% of the student body is currently male. Why give priority to talent if you believe that intelligence and discipline, as reflected in the ability to ace a standardized test, are not essential pre-requisites for advanced academic work And why not insist that Asians are proportionately represented at La Guardia even if they don’t express as much interest in music and art. Or that girls, who currently account for only 40% of Stuyvesant are similarly favored to even their quota there.

Community activists argue that the discrimination against minorities is economic as much as racial but this is belied by the very population that is so well represented at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science – how many people know that the minority with the highest poverty rate in our city is Asian? Just as you can’t put the cart before the horse, you can’t pretend that by eliminating the screening for those who have the capacity to do advanced work, others will absorb it magically once they are in the company of advanced students The standardized test is the fairest prognosticator we have of student achievement, certainly more than subjective references from past teachers or even report cards from schools that may inflate their grades to enhance their own reputations and obscure their failures.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270346/politics-and-free-speech-dartmouth-jack-kerwick

A recently conducted Dartmouth University survey supplies some invaluable insights.

According to The Dartmouth, “undergraduates were asked if learning that another student had political beliefs opposite from their own would affect a range of possible interactions with them.” Reportedly, 42% of respondents said that they would be less likely to befriend a person if that person’s politics were contrary to their own. Seventy percent remarked that they’d be less likely to get romantically involved with someone with differing political views. And 30% admitted to being less likely to trust a person with an opposite political perspective.

Yet the report is quick to note that these numbers in themselves conceal “sizable political differences [.]”

Democrats, it’s reported, are far more likely than Republicans or Independents to allow their politics to affect their relationships.

“While 82 percent of respondents who identified as Democrats say they would be less likely to date someone with opposing political beliefs, only 47 percent of Independents and 42 percent of Republicans said the same.”

When it comes to potential friendships, “55 percent of Democratic respondents said opposite political views would make them less likely to befriend another student, compared to 21 percent of Independents and 12 percent of Republicans.”

Judging from these results, students who are Democrats are the most intolerant of political differences while Republican students are vastly most tolerant than Democrats and even more tolerant than Independents—a situation that is the exact opposite of the picture that the left has been painting for decades.

The survey also found that while “majorities” of respondents claimed that knowledge of the political commitments of their professors would not dissuade them from taking classes with those professors, Democratic students were less likely than Independents and Republicans to enroll in courses taught by those with differing political views.

“Democratic students express less willingness to take classes from a Republican professor (38 percent) than Republican students do to take a class taught by a Democratic professor (23 percent).” Moreover, of the four political orientations offered in the survey—Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and Socialist—the 25 percent or so of student respondents who expressed a disinclination to enroll in a course whose instructor subscribed to a political perspective at odds with their own, Republican professors were most unpopular.