RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/save-the-sat-writing-test-1531074658

Princeton and Stanford last week became the latest schools to drop the SAT essay requirement. The College Board made the section optional in 2016. Skeptics will applaud this essay’s demise as a return to a test that measures real aptitude. But the essay, introduced in 2005, turned out to be useful. Ditching it is another plan by colleges to make all standards of admissions subjective and easily rigged.

The writing test began in 2005 in order “to improve the validity of the test for predicting college success,” according to the College Board. A pilot program found that “scores on the new SAT writing section were slightly better than high school grades in predicting first-year college grades.”

There were problems with the exam. One MIT professor found students were rewarded for sheer length. Another criticism was that it wasn’t graded on accuracy. Students could make factual errors, or make things up.

In 2014 the College Board revised the essay test, asking students to read a passage and then answer a question with a persuasive argument using evidence from the text. Test-takers, their parents and guidance counselors criticized this new approach as well. There was too little time. It stressed students out. It raised the cost of preparation and of the test itself.

Princeton cited cost as its reason for eliminating the exam. But taking the essay part of the test adds only $14 to the registration fee, and poor kids can get waivers.

It is true that 25 minutes is not much time to write an essay, but one can discern a few things about a student’s command of grammar, vocabulary and logic from three paragraphs. True, grading a writing test is more subjective than scoring a multiple-choice test. But writing is a real skill, and colleges should measure it.

https://nypost.com/2018/07/03/trump-to-revoke-obama-era-guidelines-on-race-in-college-admissions/

The Trump administration is set on Tuesday to revoke a series of Obama-era guidelines that encourage considering race in the college admissions process as a means of promoting diversity, according to a report.

Two sources told the Wall Street Journal that the move comes as the Justice Department investigates whether Harvard University illegally holds Asian-Americans to a higher standard in the admissions process.

The guidelines — put in place during the Obama administration in 2011 and 2016 — laid out legal recommendations that Trump officials argue “mislead schools to believe that legal forms of affirmative action are simpler to achieve than the law allows,” the paper reported.

Anurima Bargava, who led civil rights enforcement in schools for the Justice Department during Obama’s presidency, disagreed with that assessment, saying the documents simply offered guidelines to schools looking to continue using affirmative action legally.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/marquettes-black-eye-1530916646

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has given Marquette University a bracing refresher on contracts and academic freedom. In a decision overturning a lower court’s dismissal of the case, the court on Friday ruled that Marquette breached its contract with political science professor John McAdams when it disciplined him “for exercising his contractually protected right of academic freedom.”

The case stems from a blog post by Mr. McAdams about a graduate instructor who had told a Marquette student that opinions against same-sex marriage would not be tolerated in her ethics class. The university says Mr. McAdams proved himself unfit by naming the graduate instructor, Cheryl Abbate, and linking to her publicly available website in his post on the encounter, so it suspended him. Even after losing the case Friday, the university continues to accuse Mr. McAdams of having used his blog to intentionally expose “her name and contact information to a hostile audience that sent her vile and threatening messages.”

The court is categorical in rejecting this argument. “Our review of the blog post,” reads the majority opinion, “reveals that it makes no ad hominem attack on Instructor Abbate, nor does it invite readers to be uncivil to her, either explicitly or implicitly.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270593/assault-learning-academia-jack-kerwick

As I show in my latest book, Higher Miseducation: A Dissident’s Essays on the Attack Against Liberal Learning (Stairway Press), matters are not all that well in academia.

This is but another way of saying that at institutions of higher learning all across the country the left has substituted training in their political ideology for a classical liberal arts education. Nor should anyone be misled into thinking, as so many people continue to assume, that this is happening only within Humanities and Social Science departments.

STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics) has been infected as well.

At the University of Washington, a computer science professor, Stuart Reges, wrote an op-ed with the title, “Why Women Don’t Code.” Reges, who admits to having taught over the years hundreds of women on how to code, reveals the extent to which universities, like his own, have buckled under Politically Correct pressure when it comes to the issue of the gender imbalance that is found in STEM disciplines.

“Ever since Google fired James Damore [who wrote an internal memo delineating his views of gender differences while complaining that Google will not tolerate any deviations from leftist orthodoxy] for ‘advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace,’ those of us working in tech have been trying to figure out what we can and cannot say on the subject of diversity.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/stanford-u-teaches-male-privilege-with-its-men-and-masculinities-project/

Stanford University is pushing the myth that male identity is a “social privilege,” despite numerous studies indicating that men disproportionately suffer from unique issues that circumvent their economic, educational, and social pursuits.

The claim was made by the school’s Men and Masculinities Project. The project aims to convene male students with counselors to help them develop “healthy and inclusive male identities,” almost as if male students oppress women by their very existence.

“We acknowledge that male identity is a social privilege, and the aim for this project is to provide the education and support needed to better the actions of the male community rather than marginalize others,” explains Stanford officials.

Instead of aiming to help men regain parity with women in academia — men nationwide are less likely to attend college, and less likely to graduate in four years than women — the school instead aims to help men “redefine masculinity.”

College men should be “active agents of positive and sustainable change on campus and in the community, striving to understand male privilege, redefine masculinity, [and] dismantle systemic structures of power and oppression,” the program states.

Of course, men do enjoy certain privileges in society. They don’t have to worry about sexual harassment and stalking to the same extent as women, and they are far less likely to find themselves victims of sex trafficking.

But privilege isn’t a black and white issue. To acknowledge the plight of women — especially regarding sexual abuse — shouldn’t preclude a discussion of the issues that men face. Yet that is precisely what the Stanford University program does.

The issues that men face start young. Men are significantly more likely to face issues in K-12, and are significantly less likely to graduate from high school, a disparity that is even more pronounced in minority and working-class communities.

Men also are less likely to attend college, disproportionately less likely to graduate, less likely than single women to become homeowners by age 30, far more likely to be in dangerous fields of work, and significantly more likely to be homeless. Men are also far more likely to remain homeless — nonprofits and state services prioritize women and their children. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.city-journal.org/

The Supreme Court’s recent Janus decision ends mandatory fees for public-sector employees who don’t want to belong to a union. Previously, in 22 non-right-to-work states, such employees had to pay these fees for the union’s services on their behalf, which could include collective bargaining, but also a host of political activities to which many employees objected. Most of the debate in the case, appropriately, focused on legal questions, not the ramifications for higher education. Yet hundreds of thousands of professors teach at public universities in the 22 states affected by Janus; the example of one of New York’s largest higher-ed unions, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), shows how relevant the Court’s ruling might prove to be.

In her Janus dissent, Justice Elena Kagan maintained that “everyone knows the difference between politicking and collective bargaining.” Yet a lawsuit against the PSC brought by my Brooklyn colleague, David Seidemann, demonstrated how difficult it is to draw these lines in the higher-education context. In a 2009 Second Circuit decision, a unanimous three-judge panel noted a lack of clarity about the PSC’s political expenditures in a wide variety of activities common to higher-ed unions—a contract campaign, donations to the parent union, lobbying of the state legislature, and paying salaries of union employees. (That the union listed political expenditures as office supplies, while claiming that a Woody Guthrie concert shouldn’t count as a political expense, did little to enhance its credibility.) The Second Circuit judges held that “courts must examine union activities carefully to ensure that dissenters are not charged for ideological undertakings not related to collective bargaining.” Rather than allow that careful examination of its expenditures to occur, the union settled with Seidemann.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-war-on-admissions-testing-1530481487

The “test optional” movement has won its most high-profile convert in the University of Chicago, which announced last month that applicants to the school would no longer need to submit ACT or SAT scores.

The University of Chicago has become known in recent years for its commitment to academic rigor and resistance to coddling and group think. But in this decision it has increased the momentum of a fashionable but damaging ideology overtaking elite education: That standardized metrics of any kind are discriminatory and elitist, and that each student is so special that he or she can only be evaluated according to uniquely personal traits.

No test is perfect, but the ACT and SAT are powerful predictors of college performance. As psychology professors Nathan Kuncel and Paul Sackett wrote in The Wall Street Journal in March: “Longitudinal research demonstrates that standardized tests predict not just grades all the way through college but also the level of courses a student is likely to take.”

Standardized tests are especially important in a time of severe grade inflation, especially in more affluent high schools. That doesn’t mean students who don’t test well can’t succeed, or that students with high scores are guaranteed to graduate summa cum laude. But it’s clear scores are at least as valid a predictor of college performance as a students’ roster of carefully selected extracurricular activities or “personal essays,” which may be rewritten by tutors.

So what’s behind the campaign against standardized assessments? A University of Chicago spokeswoman says the test “may not reflect the full accomplishments and academic promise of a student.” This is true but could be said of any single part of a college application, including high school grades.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/06/26/professors-penis-size

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Alicia Walker is used to the snickers, the juvenile puns and raunchy jokes. But she is not fooling around with her latest research project.

The assistant professor of sociology at Missouri State University launched a study this month that explores how the size of a man’s penis affects the rest of his life. And she’s documenting the work with pictures.

“The kind of work I do is not for everybody,” she said.

Walker said the project looks at how penis size — and, as importantly, a man’s perception of his penis size — affects overall health, sexual activity, condom usage, self image, social interaction and mental health.

“So far I’m hearing a lot of anxiety and a lot of low self-esteem related to size,” she said.

As part of the study, Walker hopes at least 3,600 men will fill out an online survey and upload photos of their genitalia. The participants must be age 22 or older.

“These are not sexy pictures,” she said. “These are clinical pictures.”

She said photos are necessary to ensure men carefully follow the instructions when measuring their flaccid and erect penis.

https://pjmedia.com/parenting/ohio-lawmaker-introduces-bill-to-protect-kids-from-transgender-mafia-at-school/

Parents have the right to say no to dangerous hormone therapies and disfiguring surgery.

In a recent court decision, Sylvia Sieve Hendon, an Ohio juvenile court judge, awarded custody of a gender-confused minor to the grandparents so he could defy his parents’ wishes and get hormone therapy. The decision alarmed lawmakers and parents in the state so much that new legislation is being considered to stop it from happening again.

Ohio House Bill 658 sets out clear guidelines regarding parental rights when children face the mental disorder of gender dysphoria. The bill ensures that parents have the final say on how to treat their children who are experiencing gender confusion and makes it illegal for anyone else to do so (like teachers or school therapists) without parental consent. The law also would make it illegal for a judge to remove a minor from his parents’ custody for refusing to treat gender dysphoria with irreversible, dangerous drugs that can cause sterility and disrupt natural development. Further, the law would require any adult with authority over a child to inform the parents if the child is considering gender “therapy.”

Transgender activists are intent on demonizing this law. From the gay publication Them, Mary Emily O’Hara writes,

Ohio House Bill 658 would turn school employees, psychologists, and social workers into spies of a sort; the legislation mandates that they disclose to parents if a minor approaches them with questions about gender identity or seeks mental health care for gender dysphoria. And if they don’t inform the child’s parents — regardless of concern for the safety or wellbeing of the child — they would face felony charges.

In every school across this nation, teachers and counselors are prohibited from giving a minor Tylenol without parental consent, yet activists want them to be able to refer kids for body mutilation without telling their parents? Parents must give consent to send kids on field trips, watch movies, and even eat a hot lunch. Why is it offensive to inform parents when their minor child is having an identity crisis? What kind of educators would want to hide such a serious thing from the people who love the child the most? Parents in this nation are held responsible financially and otherwise for the well-being of their children. They take on all the risks and burdens of parenting and are responsible for anything their minor child does (and sometimes can even go to jail for it). Shouldn’t parents get the benefit of making major decisions concerning those minors when it comes to something as life-altering as gender reassignment surgery or “therapy”?

If state legislatures don’t do something to protect parents’ rights soon, the Gaystappo will be forcing parents to not only agree to poisonous hormone “therapy,” but making them pay for it too! Already in several states the gay rights activists have pushed through legislation that bars parents from seeking Christian counseling for their children suffering from gender or sexual confusion.