RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/milwaukees-public-school-barricade-1534203534

Teachers’ unions and their liberal allies are desperately trying to preserve the failing public school status quo. Witness how the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system is defying a state mandate to sell vacant property to charter and private schools.

Milwaukee’s public schools are a mess. Merely 62% of students graduate from high school in four years, and proficiency rates are 15% in math and just over 20% in English. Families are escaping to charter and private schools, which has resulted in 11,000 vacant seats and a budget shortfall that’s expected to swell to $130 million within five years.

We wrote in 2015 about how MPS blocked charter and private school purchases of empty school buildings, which prevented high-performing schools like St. Marcus Lutheran from expanding. The state legislature then passed a law ordering the city and school district to sell vacant public school buildings.

Well, what do you know, the district still hasn’t sold a single vacant building to other schools despite 13 letters of interest from private and charter operators for 11 vacant buildings, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. Following protests from the teachers’ union, a local zoning board denied a bid by Right Step, a private school for children expelled from Milwaukee public schools. The city hasn’t even classified many unused buildings as “vacant.”

Fox News reports on Newton teachers’ emails against “objectivity” in the classroom.

APT recently unearthed emails from Newton high school teachers which show extreme political bias and a pathologically politicized approach to educating Newton students. One teacher writes of not wanting to “get fired for being a liberal propagandist,” while another fears that “the call for ‘objectivity’ may just inadvertently become the most effective destructive weapon against social justice.”

Our exposé of this scandal in The Federalist went viral, and has now made Fox News.

Fox & Friends has featured APT’s findings on the Newton schools scandal twice in two days now.

At 76 I am old enough to have experienced the old-fashioned kind of discrimination. It happened in 1965, when I was in my second year at Harvard Law School. I was looking for a job as a summer associate, a rite of passage that generally leads to permanent employment. I remember feeling pretty confident, having ranked 40th out of 530 in my first-year grades.

I applied to the four law firms I considered the best—all “white shoe” firms in downtown New York. I arrived at each interview in my best suit, hair trimmed and shoes shined. The interviews went smoothly, but at no point did anyone offer me a job. By my last interview I figured I must be missing something, so I asked instead what his firm was looking for in an associate. I recall that he looked at me in silence for about 60 seconds, as though trying to figure out a polite way of explaining the situation. He told me that the most important thing for any lawyer was to be able to relate to the clients, and that of course it is always easiest for clients to relate to lawyers who are like themselves.

It had taken four wasted interviews, but I finally understood. I went from that last firm to my apartment and took out a telephone book. I knew of three so-called Jewish law firms in New York at that time, so I called the one that came first in the book, Kaye Scholer, and asked to speak to the hiring partner. Though it was 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, he asked if I could come over right away. An hour later I was interviewed, first by him, then by a preppy-looking partner with a bow tie, and finally by the firm’s administrative partner, who offered me a job. I accepted on the spot.

After working at Kaye Scholer that summer, I joined the firm as a regular associate in 1966, became a partner in 1975 and stayed there until I retired two years ago, when it merged into a larger firm. Thanks in part to a Fulbright year I had spent in Berlin, I developed a large practice representing German clients—people who were not at all like myself—the very thing the white-shoe firms had assumed I could never do.

After I began my job, I found out that many of the older partners had experiences similar to my own. Some had been hired by downtown firms but left when they realized they had no future there or when an anti-Semitic partner blackballed them for partnership. Firms like Kaye Scholer benefited enormously from the downtown firms’ bigotry.

Since my experience in 1965, all of the firms at which I had interviewed have overcome their prejudices and now hire and promote Jewish lawyers, as well as women, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Kaye Scholer became similarly diverse.

Yet as the old kind of discrimination has died out, a new form has emerged—this time under the banner of “diversity.” It’s good to open opportunities to people who were previously excluded. But promoting “diversity” by discriminating against nonfavored categories of people seems quite a different thing.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/racism-debate-sarah-jeong-academia-cannot-define-words/

The latest controversy stems from a deep confusion about how language works.

A “descriptivist” is someone who studies how language is used. A “prescriptivist” is someone who tells other people how to use language correctly. And while these are often framed as opposing camps, they need not be: A thoughtful descriptivist realizes that strongly established usage patterns should generally be treated as rules by someone who wants to communicate effectively; a thoughtful prescriptivist realizes that the rules emerge from constantly evolving usage patterns.

There’s a certain strain of prescriptivism, though, that merely seeks to impose rules on other people’s language, often on nothing more than one’s own say-so. Overwhelmingly, these folks are harmless-if-annoying self-appointed “sticklers” who insist, for example, that you must not split infinitives or start sentences with conjunctions. But ill-founded prescriptivism also rears its head with political terms, and we’ve been seeing a bit of that lately from the woke left.

Some academics who study racial matters use the word “racism” to mean not “dislike of people on the basis of race,” which is how most people use it, but rather something like “prejudice plus power” or what is more clearly called “institutional” or “systemic” racism — meaning, conveniently, that members of minority groups by definition cannot be racist. And as Scott Alexander noted at Slate Star Codex back in 2014, parts of the Left are no longer willing to admit that this is a departure from standard usage by saying something along the lines of, “I suppose a group of black people chasing a white kid down the street waving knives and yelling ‘KILL WHITEY’ qualifies by most people’s definition, but I prefer to idiosyncratically define it my own way, so just remember that when you’re reading stuff I write.”

Many simply point to academic definitions, as though academia had the power to redefine words for the rest of society; that, of course, is not how language works.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/betsy-devoss-loan-forgiveness-rule-slimed-by-college-cartel/

The new standard is clearly better for colleges, taxpayers, and students who are willing to repay their debts.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has issued new guidelines on federal student-loan forgiveness in an attempt to more sensibly balance the rights of borrowers and taxpayers. Predictably, the higher-education cartel and its media allies were aghast. The New York Times headlined its story “DeVos Proposes to Curtail Debt Relief for Defrauded Students.” Other headlines included “Betsy DeVos’ Message to Students: You Have the Right to Be Ripped Off” and “Betsy DeVos’ New Proposal Aligns Her With For-Profit Colleges Over Debt-Saddled Students.” The Center for Responsible Lending’s Ashley Harrington huffed that the proposal was “a roadmap for institutions seeking to abuse students.”

What made this so bizarre, even by the standards of the mud-slinging higher-education debate, is that it’s unclear whether all students seeking loan forgiveness have actually been defrauded. Indeed, the impetus for DeVos’s action was the likelihood that the previous rules, put forward under President Obama, were going to put taxpayers on the hook for billions to bail out students who hadn’t been victimized.

Certainly, one can quibble about the particulars of the new rule — including an unfortunate and arbitrary provision stipulating that only borrowers who enter into default can apply for borrower defense. But to allege, for example, that DeVos is curtailing “Debt Relief for Defrauded Students” is to beg the key question.

The new guidance concerns a provision of the federal student-loan program known as “Borrower Defense to Repayment.” This is a mechanism for forgiving the loans of students who attend colleges that engage in fraud, such as by misrepresenting program information or future employment and earnings. So far, so good.

The problem is that the Obama administration, as part of its larger crusade against for-profit colleges, issued guidance that created an astonishingly far-reaching definition of fraud — opening the floodgates for across-the-board loan discharges, at taxpayer expense, if “public interest” minions could show merely that colleges made modest, inadvertent mistakes in marketing or advertisements.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/smith-college-employee-follows-policy-now-investigated-for-doing-so/

Have you ever followed the rules of your job, only to land yourself in hot water because of it?

For most of us, if it happened, it was soon resolved because, yes, we followed the rules. It’s a pain in the rear, but it’s soon taken care of and life goes on.

For a staff member of Smith College, that may or may not happen.

You see, the staff member saw what he believed to be a man lounging in the common area of a building at a women’s college during the summer. That seemed suspicious, so he called it in as Smith College policy requires him to do.

The campus police arrived and investigated and found out that it was a student, though one with an extremely short haircut, one short enough to offer a bit of confusion as to the sex of the individual without a more thorough examination.

I’m sure the student wasn’t happy about that, and who could blame her? Being called a guy isn’t exactly cool, and I get a woman being upset about that, even if it’s based on a mere glance.

However, what is the student is most upset about? Well, she’s black and so now it’s a whole racial thing.

As The College Fix reported, “With no evidence, the teaching assistant and residential advisor claimed on Facebook last week that the incident was an example of racism.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/sarah-jeong-boring-typical-product-higher-education/

To decry her anti-white ‘racism’ gives her too much credit for originality.

The most significant feature of Sarah Jeong, the New York Times’ embattled new editorial board member, is not that she is a “racist,” as her critics put it. It is that she is an entirely typical product of the contemporary academy.

After the New York Times announced Jeong’s hire in early August, web sleuths dug out a mother lode of tweets demonstrating an obsession with whites. Samples include “white men are [bullsh**],” “#cancelwhitepeople,” “National/ Pretty goddam white/ Radio,” “I’m tired of being mad about white dudes. I’m going to pretend they don’t exist for a week,” and “I figured it out. Powerful white women automatically receive officer status in Club Feminism. Unless they disavow.” Both the Times and Jeong blamed her posts on . . . you guessed, it, whites. Her status as a “young Asian woman,” in the Times’ words, made her a subject of frequent online harassment, to which she responded “for a period of time” by “imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”

This argument was, to borrow a phrase, bullsh**. Jeong’s five-year tweet trail is much longer than a mere “period of time” during which she allegedly experimented with counter-trolling. But most important, her tweets are not imitative of anything other than the ideology that now rules the higher-education establishment, including UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School, both of which Jeong attended. And that ideology is taking over non-academic institutions, whether in journalism, publishing, the tech sector, or the rest of corporate America. Sarah Jeong’s tweets and blog posts are just a marker of the world we already live in.

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

Kenyon College, a small liberal arts college in Ohio, is my alma mater (and that of AT editor Thomas Lifson). Both of us highly valued the educational experience we received there, particularly as political science majors in a department full of outstanding professors who valued teaching over other pursuits. Many of the faculty in the department were trained by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago and highly skilled at the Socratic method of class discussion.

All colleges have changed since my time as an undergraduate, but Kenyon for many years retained many of its unique charms – a campus acknowledged as one of the most beautiful in the world, a high level of collegiality among pretty much all members of the campus community, an ethos that would not allow disruptions of speakers or threats to outside speakers, and a tolerance of people who might think differently about something. The intangible aspects of those charms seem to have disappeared in the last year.

Recent graduate Adam Rubenstein described for the Weekly Standard the brouhaha created when a liberal drama professor sent out an advance copy of her new play about illegal aliens working on a farm, planned for a premiere on campus. The professor was soon blasted by the “Latinx” community and others in solidarity with this “marginalized” group. One might have thought the professor had committed war crimes, given the ugliness of the response, but after all, how dare a white woman try to write about a minority community? The author withdrew the play, and it was never performed on campus.

With a new campaign underway to raise $300 million for the college, Kenyon needed to prevent the news of what had happened from getting out to alumni in an unfiltered fashion, potentially doing damage to the college’s reputation. The college’s Alumni Bulletin decided to address issues raised by the play in a summer issue with essays by faculty, students, and alumni. I was asked to be one of the writers, and as it turned out, I was the only one of the eight authors who seemed uncomfortable with the new obsession at the college, thoroughly endorsed by the administration in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (or, in reality, identity politics and white privilege). The essays were reviewed and edited by the Alumni Bulletin’s staff. At least mine was significantly edited and shortened. The essays can be read here (mine was the seventh of the eight in the link).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-education-in-discrimination-1533502018

The Trump Administration in July withdrew Obama-era guidance that gave colleges a wink and a nod to racially discriminate. This means that colleges like Harvard that use racial preferences in admissions will receive more legal scrutiny, and the examination should be instructive.

Between 2011 and 2016, the Obama Education Department issued seven notices advising colleges how they may legally promote racial diversity. The 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits racial discrimination by institutions receiving federal funds. But the Supreme Court has held that colleges may consider race in admissions as long it isn’t the “decisive” factor. Quotas and point systems are forbidden.

The Obama department advised colleges to consider race as part of what it called an “individualized, holistic review of all applicants.” Colleges also were urged to consider race-neutral alternatives, but that they need not be adopted if they are “unworkable.” In other words, it’s the thought that counts. Many colleges took the guidance as cover to discriminate.

Harvard’s practices will be the first to be examined under this new spotlight. Students for Fair Admissions has sued the school for discriminating against Asian-American applicants and unconstitutionally favoring other minority groups. The case hasn’t gone to trial, but the plaintiff group’s legal filings based on discovery and depositions are revealing the secrets of Harvard’s use of race.

Consider Harvard’s “holistic” admissions review. Applicants are rated on a scale of one to six on academics, extracurricular activities, athletics and highly subjective “personal” criteria. Admissions officers also assign applicants an overall score.