RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/06/04/provocateurs_on_campus_distract_from_real_free_speech_problems_110653.html

This spring, as the last of the college commencements come to a close, let’s recall what these colorful pageants are ostensibly celebrating: the graduates’ completed experience of free inquiry, scientific exploration, reasoned discourse, and challenging instruction.

Yet, on far too many campuses, the occasional invited speaker may provide the only opportunity for students to hear an adult unapologetically and intellectually take on prevailing campus orthodoxy. Given the dearth of viewpoint diversity among faculty and the reluctance of conservative faculty to ruffle the feathers of their colleagues, guest speakers may be the one chance students have to hear an authoritative rebuttal of familiar assumptions or comfortable groupthink.

And students need that exposure, as many of their classmates have become hesitant to speak up. A recent survey reported that 54 percent of students stop themselves from sharing an idea during their college years — and 30 percent of students have “censored themselves” in class — because they feared their ideas would be frowned upon by classmates.

This all leads to a timely question, one that merits a bit of reflection during this summer’s respite from the campus free speech wars: What is the point of free speech on campus? After all, it was never intended to promote the utterance of naughty phrases or merely to shock bourgeois sensibilities. It was meant to protect free inquiry, searching discussions, and challenging instruction.

This purpose has gotten lost amid a muddle of sophomoric provocation, defensive posturing by campus officials, and protests by leftist student mobs seeking to suppress uncomfortable ideas. It has also been undermined by conservative groups and campus Republicans themselves who, frustrated by their status as outcasts, have helped make professional provocateurs the face of the campus free speech debates by inviting controversial speakers whose primary function is to rattle progressives and stick a thumb in the eye of campus administrators. Such speakers have lent credibility to apologists who insist that concerns about free speech are overblown, while distracting from efforts to call out and talk seriously about the left’s campus hegemony.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/im-running-to-restore-yale-values-1528054042

I love Yale. It’s where I pursued a passion for sketch comedy, started writing a newspaper column, came out of the closet, and gained the critical-thinking skills that equipped me for a career in journalism. But recent events leave me worried that my alma mater is changing for the worse.

A sign that something had gone terribly wrong came in October 2015, when a viral internet video revealed a student mob shrieking at Nicholas Christakis, then master of Yale’s largest residential college. That these students were treating a professor with such disrespect was bad enough, but the impetus for their outrage was an innocuous email written by his wife, fellow professor Erika Christakis, doubting Yale needed to warn students about “appropriate Halloween wear.” Yale’s failure to stand up for the Christakises—he stepped down as master, she left the university—left me ashamed. When the university rewarded two of the mob’s leaders with a prestigious prize, something was deeply amiss.

Further developments have only confirmed my worries. Yale ditched the title “master” on the ludicrous grounds that it is racist; a survey finds half the faculty approves of “trigger warnings” for readings and classroom discussions, and the number of campus administrators continues to swell while the cost of attending has increased to $70,000 a year.

To reverse these worrying trends I have decided to mount a petition campaign to join Yale’s Board of Trustees.

Yale instilled in me the two basic values that guide me as a writer: freedom of expression and the pursuit of knowledge. I have traveled to many countries where people are physically attacked or imprisoned for speaking their minds. That taught me never to take America’s freedoms for granted.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/02/duke_erodes_liberal_education_137167.html

On May 8, the Duke University student newspaper published a stirring letter addressed to the school community that was co-signed by 101 students and former students. The letter protested the decision of the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy to decline to renew the contract of Evan Charney, associate professor of the practice of public policy and political science, and called on the provost to reverse the decision.

To no avail. On May 23, incoming Sanford School Dean Judith Kelley informed Charney that Provost Sally Kornbluth rejected his appeal.

Duke’s termination of Charney, a productive scholar with wide-ranging interests in ethics and politics who has taught at Duke for 19 years (and with whom I worked in the 1990s when he was a graduate student at Harvard and I was an assistant professor), has all the earmarks of faculty and administration acquiescence to the swelling forces of campus intolerance and anti-intellectualism. At the same time, the legions of grateful students who have rallied around Charney show that a reservoir of love for learning survives at Duke — among the young.

“Professor Charney’s teaching style is wonderfully thought-provoking and challenging,” according to the Duke Chronicle letter. In his classes, the students explained, “ideas are vetted and sharpened through rigorous debate and discussion on issues ranging from physician assisted suicide to the legalization of sex work.” Charney treats all opinions equally: “No thought goes unexamined; no assertion goes unchecked.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-catholic-school-difference-1527894168

For the thousands of nuns who have served as principals at Catholic schools, their emphasis on self-discipline must seem like common sense. But a new academic study confirms the sisters are on to something: You can instill self-discipline in students, a virtue that will help them in their studies and later in life.

The study was conducted for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute by University of California-Santa Barbara associate professor Michael Gottfried and doctoral student Jacob Kirksey. The authors analyzed two waves of national data on elementary school students collected under the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study for the National Center for Education Statistics. They compared children in Catholic schools with those in public schools and other private schools, religious and secular.

The authors found statistically meaningful evidence that students in Catholic schools exhibited less disruptive behavior than their counterparts in other schools. “According to their teachers, Catholic school children argued, fought, got angry, acted impulsively, and disturbed ongoing activities less frequently,” the authors write. Specifically, students in Catholic schools “were more likely to control their temper, respect others’ property, accept their fellow students’ ideas, and handle peer pressure.” In other words, they exhibited more self-discipline.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/06/11/yale-racial-grievances-university-bows-diversity-enforcers/

On the university’s latest kowtow to the diversity enforcers

Once again, a college president has chosen to fan the flames of racial grievance rather than to calm them. This time, that president is Yale’s Peter Salovey. No surprise there, since Salovey has rarely missed an opportunity to signal his racial virtue by declaring that he presides over a campus harboring “hate,” “exclusion,” and “discrimination.” Yale’s response to a recent incident of petty dormitory tyranny is a textbook example of how not to lead a university.

On May 8, at 1:40 a.m., a female graduate student at Yale turned on the light in the graduate-dorm common room and found another woman sleeping there, amid books, a laptop, a pillow, and a blanket. The first woman allegedly told the second woman that she didn’t have the right to sleep there and called the Yale police to report an unauthorized person in the common room. Three Yale Police Department officers showed up five minutes later.

For the next 15 minutes, two of the officers and the erstwhile sleeper, Lolade Siyonbola, a 34-year-old MA candidate in African studies, interacted warily on the landing outside Siyonbola’s dorm room, as the cops tried to corroborate her identity. On another floor, the third officer questioned the caller, Sarah Braasch, a 43-year-old Ph.D. candidate in philosophy. Confirming Siyonbola’s identity took longer than usual since the name on her campus ID did not match the name she had chosen to use in Yale’s student database. Once the discrepancy was resolved, the officers admonished Braasch that Siyonbola had every right to be in the common room and left.

As captured on Siyonbola’s smartphone video, Braasch appears to be an officious control freak, believing herself empowered to enforce her own private code of dormitory conduct. Ordinarily, this trivial incident would have passed without notice. But because Braasch is white and Siyonbola is black, the episode has become an international scandal, and Yale has gone into crisis mode.

First out of the gate with a racial mea culpa was the dean of Yale Law School, Heather Gerken. In an email to the “Law School Community” on May 10, Gerken claimed that the police check of Siyonbola represented a “corrosive” pattern: “We are well aware that this is not the first time that people of color, and African Americans in particular, have been questioned about their right to be in a building on the Yale campus. Similar incidents have happened over the years here at the Law School.” Gerken is right: Such questioning has happened at the law school — to black and white students. Several black law students complained on Facebook after the Braasch episode about being asked for identification when their family was visiting and taking pictures. A white Yale law student has had the identical experience: “I’ve been asked for my ID at the law school when I had my family enter the building with me to take pictures,” he told me via email. He has been asked for his ID when a substitute security guard was at the building’s front entrance and when walking into the library. All of these potential “incidents” occurred during the day, not in the middle of the night.

You can’t tell me 20 hours a week of milquetoast make-work is so stressful that it causes two-thirds of college students to feel ‘overwhelming anxiety.’

Mental illness diagnoses have been increasing in the United States ever since big-money drugs for them were developed then taxpayer-funded through health welfare programs starting in the 1960s. Taxpayers now pay for the majority of U.S. mental health services, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Concurrently, colleges have for several years been reporting spikes in mental health problems among students, and the Wall Street Journal reports some new numbers:

As many as one in four students at some elite U.S. colleges are now classified as disabled, largely because of mental-health issues such as depression or anxiety, entitling them to a widening array of special accommodations like longer time to take exams…

Small, private schools have the greatest concentration of students with disabilities. Among the 100 four-year, not-for-profit colleges with the highest percentage of disabled students, 93 are private, according to a WSJ analysis of federal data.

Public schools have also seen a significant uptick in test accommodations. From 2011 to 2016, the number of students with special accommodations increased by an average of 71% among 22 flagship state schools, according to data obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/05/the_leftist_college_student_handbook.html

Welcome to Leftist College. As a student at our prestigious institution, you will be required to comply with all of our rules, written as well as unwritten.

Each of you has by now been issued a dictionary of permitted words. Words not found in the approved dictionary are forbidden.

Each year, the student dictionary has been revised so as to contain fewer words than the previous edition. These redacted revisions serve two purposes. One is to avoid newly fashionable trigger words that in prior years were considered acceptable but now are tools of verbal aggression by white racist bigot homophobe (lengthy list redacted) Neanderthals. Those words have been excised from the approved vocabulary.

The other purpose is to avoid words that students educated in public schools used to understand but no longer do. Warning: Not all the words in the approved dictionary are spelled according to white racist homophobic (lengthy list redacted) Neanderthal standards, so if you do not find a word right away, ask some students who were educated in public schools to find them for you.

If it happens that you are found guilty of violating any one of our voluminous, byzantine rules, you will be afforded the opportunity to be rehabilitated. The process consists of several steps.

First, you must recant whatever words or actions you committed that violated one or more of the rules.

Second, you must apologize. The apology must be sincere. It must be both written and spoken. Spoken words will be recorded on video and analyzed for any hint of insincerity, no matter how well disguised that insincerity is. Tears and wailing are helpful.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-advice-to-grads-start-mopping-1527518588

Every commencement season, thousands of graduates are treated to something I call “standard keynote language.” Everyone can recognize these tiny, easily digestible nuggets of wisdom: “Don’t be afraid to take risks,” or “Be courageous.” And the classic: “Follow your passion.” This is sound, albeit clichéd, advice. What would I recommend? “Mop your way to success.”

A mop, used for cleaning floors, isn’t a magical tool for success. Rather, it is a reminder that there should be no task considered beneath you.

When I was a student at Duke, I worked in a retail store. Many of my co-workers were also college students, some in graduate school, and one was on her way to dental school. Many of my colleagues hated mopping, which required going into the haven of filth that was the public bathroom. I had plenty of practice in this area as a former Marine Corps private, so I always volunteered for the job.

My managers noticed. They named me employee of the month and promoted me to management for the holiday rush—a small success at a small store. I learned that a sense of entitlement is a burden. People who believe themselves above something, or entitled to something more because of past achievements, will find that new opportunities slip away.

I volunteered for the necessary task, signaling my work ethic and dedication to the organization. I simply wanted to do my job as best as possible. Perhaps I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was emulating senior Marines who would roll up their sleeves and get dirty when the job required it.

I have met countless others who tell similar stories. A successful consultant told me that after graduating from a top-tier university, he spent a year piecing together tedious part-time jobs while volunteering at startups—only to prove himself. As competitive as the U.S. economy is, efforts like this are only becoming more common. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/stanford-law-school-political-correctness-intolerance-conservative-views/here’s a growing intolerance of conservative views.

Nestled in the heart of what is now Silicon Valley, the Leland Stanford Junior University was, for much of its hundred-plus-year history, lightly regarded as a playground for the idle rich. To the extent that Stanford bore any resemblance to its aspirational cousins on the East Coast, it was to their previous incarnations as polite finishing schools for those who made their money the old-fashioned way — that is, by inheriting it.

All of this began to change during the 1960s with the advent of the modern semiconductor industry. Although this development was largely a fortuitous coincidence, some combination of luck and shrewd decision-making soon tied Stanford’s fortunes to the trajectory of its now-prosperous environs. The results, of course, are nothing short of breathtaking. The undergraduate college regularly boasts the nation’s lowest acceptance rates, and both the graduate business school and the law school likewise rank at the very top of their respective fields.

But all is not well on a campus where many T-shirts bear Stanford’s unofficial mantra that “Life Is Good!” Last year, former provost John Etchemendy warned publicly of a threat from within — a “growing intolerance” that has manifested as a sort of “political one-sidedness.” His admonition was, predictably, politely ignored. However, my experience at Stanford Law School suggests that, if anything, Etchemendy has understated the scope and the scale of the challenge that elite universities now face.

At Stanford Law School, no more than three of approximately 110 full-time faculty publicly identify as conservative or libertarian. (By way of contrast, Stanford Law School touts on its webpage 23 full-time faculty under the inartful rubric of “minority.”) As a consequence, many of my classmates will graduate having never engaged with a law professor whose worldview and convictions track those of nearly half the voting public.

President Trump’s vow to change a “rigged system” helped propel him to victory over stodgy supporters of “liberal” and “conservative” non-alternatives. His Department of Justice has sided with Asian-Americans claiming discrimination in admissions at Harvard and, again on their behalf, expressed interest in the possibility of antitrust violations in early admissions to elite schools.

As the putatively Chinese proverb has it, one picture is worth a thousand words (or even a whole article). This graph depicts the issue:

Source: Althea Nagai, “Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions,” Center for Equal Opportunity, May 22, 2018.

Displayed are the percentages of Asian-American undergraduate students at California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, from 1980 to 2015, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics of the Department of Education.

Do elite universities in America discriminate against Asian-Americans and establish a quota in the form of a ceiling on their numbers? The graph above (the only one among the thousand or so words here) shows a plateau for MIT and Harvard against the results at Caltech, where undergraduate Asian-American enrollment has risen over 40 percent Caltech does not practice affirmative action (forbidden by the California constitution, courtesy of Proposition 209).