RUTHFULLY YOURS

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).

Thankfully, the plan didn’t work.

A STEM professor at the University of Akron in Ohio was trying to boost his female students’ grades — just because those students are women.

On Monday, the professor, Liping Liu, sent an email to students letting them know that three groups of students may see their grades raised a “level or two,” according to a screenshot of the email that was posted on Reddit.

The screenshot has since been removed because it contained recipients’ email addresses, however, a redacted copy of it was provided by a student to Campus Reform. It stated:

The following categories of students may see their grades raised one level or two:

1) Female students (it is a national movement to encourage female students to go to information sciences)

2) Students who had earned scores in exams (especially final exams) demonstrating a higher performance than their calculated ones

3) Students who attended class but missed reporting attendance (as long as I can tell)

Liu told The College Fix that he was well aware that his attempt to raise women’s grades could be “questionable,” but that he decided he wanted to “test the water” anyway and see if the grade raises might “attract female students into future classes.”

In a win for sanity, however, the plan didn’t work. The Fix reports that an administrator contacted the publication to say that Liu’s idea was “unacceptable,” and that no one’s grades would be raised.

This is an outrage, but it is common nationwide: the Daily Caller News Foundation reports that Mountain Ridge Middle School in West Virginia is “instructing junior high students to write the Islamic profession of faith ostensibly to practice calligraphy.” Students are made to write out the Shahada, which states: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

This is exactly what I warned about in my book, Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance, in the chapter “The Mosqueing of the Public Schools.”

In order to convert to Islam, one says the shahada. Saying the shahada makes you a Muslim. The shahada is what is on the black flag of jihad.

No non-Muslim student should be forced to write or say the shahada without the qualifier “Muslims believe that…” This is because it is a statement of faith. If the school exercise is requiring students to write it, it should be clear from the wording of the exercise that this is Islamic faith, not the student’s faith. That distinction has been glossed over in many, many school textbook presentations.

This is in West Virginia, not Baghdad. And it’s a problem not just in West Virginia – it’s a national problem.

Rich Penkoski, the father of a Mountain Ridge student, contacted me and explained the situation further. He sent me the packets the school gave out for the Jewish and the Christian lessons and commented:

Notice no bible verses, no reciting the 10 commandments or the Lord’s prayer. No practicing writing in Hebrew (not even the 10 commandments) as compared to the Islamic packet.

Why on Earth would Yale invite Hillary Clinton, the whiniest woman on the planet to speak at its commencement? Did the administrators not have advance knowledge of her psychosis? Her address to Yale grads was all about her: her loss, her anger at those who did not vote for her. She is, without a doubt, the sorest of sore losers.

Hillary quoted Dickens when bemoaning the constitutional crisis she herself has created by inventing the Trump-colluded-with-Russia hoax. She is the person who colluded with Russia in numerous ways. It was Hillary who saw to it that the U.S. sold twenty percent of our uranium to Russia. She is the one who benefited financially, to the tune of $145M, from that deal. She is the one who commissioned and paid for the fake dossier on Trump and then had her like-minded felons in the Deep State use it to spy on the Trump campaign and probably everyone within it. It was she who was and is affiliated with Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie, the law firm that facilitated much of the skullduggery perpetrated on her behalf. It was she who sabotaged Bernie Sanders during the primaries. And looking back, it was she who made a mess of Libya and is responsible for the deaths at Benghazi. The complete list of her failures and crimes against the nation is too long to include here.

Mrs. Clinton and her husband are the most corrupt people in U.S. history to dominate a political party. They have become fabulously wealthy by selling access to U.S. government favors and via other unscrupulous schemes. And still she whines. She wanted more; she wanted the presidency and believed with absolute certainty that it was hers for the taking.

Hillary is clearly convinced that her defeat in the 2016 election was a near-death blow to American democracy. In her view, Trump’s victory is an assault on our republic. She is still furious at all the deplorables who did not vote for her. She has no concern for those of us who are victims of and are outraged at the senseless crimes committed by illegal aliens protected by sanctuary cities or the businesses shut down by the tyranny of the diversity police.

Dear Grads: How can you make an impact on this world? Michael Keaton told Kent State students, “I’m Batman.” Ronan Farrow encouraged Loyola Marymount’s class of 2018 to “trust that inner voice.” Human-rights lawyer Amal Clooney told Vanderbilt grads last week, “Courage is needed more than ever.”

Maybe you’re looking for something less vacuous than warmed over “Wizard of Oz” themes? If so, put down your JUUL vape pen, unplug from “Fortnite,” tuck in your “I Am the Change” shirt, and listen up. Scale or bail.

Many of you graduates think you want socially conscious careers—giving back, fighting injustice and making a difference. “Well, you know, we all want to change the world.” You want to reduce inequality, end poverty, comfort the homeless, expand human dignity. Guess what? Me too! But you’re going about it the wrong way.

Some 44% of millennials believe they do more to support social causes than the rest of their family, according to the 2017 Millennial Impact report. If you’re volunteering at shelters or working for most nonprofits, that’s all very nice, but it’s one-off. You’re one of the privileged few who have the education to create lasting change. It may feel good to ladle soup to the hungry, but you’re wasting valuable brain waves that could be spent ushering in a future in which no one is hungry to begin with.

There’s a word that was probably never mentioned by your professors: Scale. No, not the stuff on the bottom of your bong or bathtub. It’s the concept of taking a small idea and finding ways to implement it for thousands, or millions, or even billions. Without scale, ideas are no more than hot air. Stop doing the one-off two-step. It’s time to scale up.

I hear you talking about food deserts and the need for urban eco-farms to enable food justice. You certainly have the jargon down. You can hoe and sickle and grow rutabagas to feed a few hungry folks, but then it’s really all about you. A better option: Find a way to revamp food distribution to lower prices. Or reinvent how food is grown and enriched to enable healthier diets. Call it a Neo-Green Revolution.

Ms. Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America, which has more than 1,200 chapters on college and high school campuses.

Free speech is out of fashion on college, university and even high school campuses, and pro-life students are hit especially hard. Putting aside any feelings about the issue of abortion, consider that pro-life students increasingly find their ability to make their case suppressed by fellow students and administrators. With more than 1,200 college and high school chapters, Students for Life of America works daily addressing obstacles to student speech. Among them:

• Vandalism and theft of displays and signs. Defacing displays like a Cemetery of the Innocents, set in remembrance of lives lost to abortion, occurs regularly, and was captured on video recently at the Miami University of Ohio. Chalking is a popular way to express thought peacefully. Recently a California State University, Fresno, professor was required to pay $17,000 and undergo free-speech training for destroying student pro-life chalk messages and encouraging his students to do the same.

• A tax on speech in the form of selectively assessed security fees. When a Students for Life chapter at the University of Michigan invited Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King to speak, the school sent the students a bill for more than $800. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys intervened, noting: “The government may not charge speakers for the security costs driven by listeners’ response to that speech.” CONTINUE AT SITE