RUTHFULLY YOURS

I was talking with an ex-university professor recently who told me that he was very happy to be retired. He said he was glad to be out of the hornets’ nest, away from a world so filled with political correctness that it was difficult to get through the day. Life on campus, he said, is rife with so many non-issue “issues” that it’s like walking barefoot on sidewalks littered with broken glass.

He related how he once told a fellow professor that she “looked very nice today,” meaning that she had selected a particularly nice outfit. Rather than thank him for the compliment, the professor took him to task for being sexist and going out of his way to objectify her as an object (a piece of meat) to be admired.

“You wouldn’t say the same thing to a male colleague,” she scolded. The male professor was taken aback and told her that she was wrong. “I do say the same thing to male colleagues. I do it all the time.” The professor also happened to be gay, so he wasn’t thinking about female objectification (the meat factor) when he said what he said. Welcome to university life in 2018, where every word out of your mouth has to censored, and where even paying a colleague a compliment can get you into hot water.

The ex-professor told me another story, of when his university invited a well-known woman speaker to lecture to students. While the speaker’s presentation was flawless and held the audience spellbound, during the Q and A a well-dressed young man stood up and said that the speaker had disparaged African Americans.

“I compliment you on a good talk, however you made one gross mistake that is offensive to the African American community,” he began. The speaker asked in a soft voice what the offensive remark was.

“In your introduction, you described yourself as being the ‘black sheep’ of your family,” the student said. “The use of the word black in this instance connotes negativity and undesirability and as such it casts a poor light on African American students. It is racist.”

Yes, she was right up there with the Ku Klux Klan.

The speaker swallowed hard, not quite sure what she should say when another woman professor in the audience stood up and complimented her on a stellar lecture and added that she was certainly entitled to express her views anyway she wanted to, including using any word she felt was appropriate. Common sense won out in this instance — the easily triggered student who called the speaker a racist became so unpopular on campus that he eventually transferred to a school outside the United States. CONTINUE AT SITE

At NYU, administrators threatened the protesters’ financial aid, and the woke warriors went back to their rooms.

Spare a thought for those knights of social justice, the student protesters. Motivated by the yearning for a better world, they sacrifice their time and energy in service to their ideals. They display courage, stamina, determination, and creativity in coming up with rhymes in their chants.

Except if you tell them they’re jeopardizing their financial aid or their housing. Then they fold immediately.

The extent of student fortitude was mapped out in a natural experiment conducted at New York University last week, when students vowed to occupy a student center around the clock (it normally closes at 11 p.m.) until their demands for a meeting with the board of trustees were met. A photo in the Village Voice showed seated students blocking access by taking up most of the space on a stairway. The underlying ideals appeared to be the usual dog’s breakfast of progressive fancies — something about divesting from fossil fuels, and also allegations of unfair labor practices.

NYU administrators showed little patience for the activists disrupting the proceedings at the Kimmel Center for University Life. But how to dissolve the protest? It turned out that there was no need to bring in the police. Ringing up the students’ parents was all it took. The phone calls advised parents that students who interfered with campus functions could be suspended, and that suspensions can carry penalties of revoked financial aid or housing. The students “initially planned to stay indefinitely,” notes the Voice’s report. “Instead, the students departed within forty hours.”

So the intended public display of solidarity with the oppressed classes and the besieged earth itself ended meekly. It was like the thrilling climax of Spartacus as reimagined by the writers of Veep: “I’M SPARTA — wait, what? Do I like my one-bedroom with eat-in-kitchen in Greenwich Village? Why do you ask?”

Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript of Edwin Black’s April 11, 2018 keynote address in the Michigan Capitol Rotunda for that state’s official Holocaust Commemoration.

Today, I come not just to mourn nor to scorn but rather to warn our world, that is, the world of today whose memories are still whistling and bristling with the torments and tribulations of a generation now passing before our eyes. But also, for the world of tomorrow — and the day after — pulsed by a generation whose torments and tribulations may yet be in store. The outrages are audible just over the horizon. But in many cases the horizon is speeding toward us like an unstoppable tsunami preparing to crash.

Many of us dwell in the dark past hoping to immunize our future from the maniacal and ideological fires that immolated six million Jews and so many others— and left a world’s hands and souls smoke-singed in the process. The Holocaust was unique among history’s great cruelties, for it was a 12-year international persecution and murder machine perpetrated in the glare of broad daylight as well as the dim of night… emboldened by its own German Ministry of Propaganda advertising it and amid incessant media coverage that bled across the front pages of newspapers, crackled into regular radio reports, flickered in newsreels, and even saddened the whispers and diaries of children hiding in an Amsterdam attic. The world knew.

With study, revelation, and investigation, many now understand how we got here. Make no mistake. The Germans did it. Their allies and accomplices did it. Hitler did it.

But Hitler had help.

Der Fuhrer adopted the Jew-hating ideology of Henry Ford, whose car company distributorships mass-circulated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Dearborn Independent so often quoted and lionized by Hitler. Nazism was driven by the American pseudoscience of eugenics that called for the elimination and even the chamber gassing of so-called inferior social groups, a murderous medical discipline developed in America by our great universities in the first two decades of the twentieth century, but then transplanted into Nazi Germany and even into Mengele’s Auschwitz laboratory by the million-dollar charitable programs of the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. Hitler’s troops dismounted their WWI-era horses and stormed into Poland and the rest of Europe in a never-before-seen Blitzkrieg, driving the Blitz truck and flying JU-88 bombers both manufactured under corporate camouflage by General Motors under the direct supervision of its offices in Detroit. And it was up to IBM—the solutions company—to organize all six phases of the Holocaust: identification, exclusion, asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination. With its advanced punch card technology, IBM knowingly conducted the census to identify the Jews, religious or not, made the railroads run on time, and pinpointed Jewish bank accounts to seize. Every concentration camp had its own IBM customer site. The infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number before it morphed into other serial systems.

“If you’ve read Marx, there’s really no reason to read Howard Zinn,” notes author Daniel Flynn, but many have read Zinn’s million-selling A People’s History of the United States. As Rutgers history professor David Greenberg notes in a 2013 New Republic article headlined “Agit-Prof,” Zinn’s famous book is “a pretty lousy piece of work.” Even so, it gets great reviews within a circle of Marxist academics such as Eric Foner, leftist rockers such as Rage Against the Machine, and actors such as Matt Damon, who in Good Will Hunting tells his psychiatrist that A People’s History will “knock you on your ass.”

For Howard Zinn, America was evil and capitalism bad – except for his lucrative publishing deal, and prestigious professorship at Boston University. Zinn was pretty quiet about the Soviet Union and what he might have done during the Stalin-Hitler Pact, but Mao Tse-Tung’s China was the closest thing to a “people’s government.”

In 2010 Zinn passed away at 87 during a swim in Santa Monica. The New York Times noted that the “proudly, unabashedly radical” professor’s A People’s History of the United States, “inspired a generation of high school and college students to rethink American history.” Zinn’s handlers set about transforming the rotting corpse of his work into the keystone of America’s history curriculum.

“Howard Zinn is no longer just for washed up actors like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon,” wrote Daniel Greenfield in 2012. “His neo-Communist propaganda is being wedged deeper and deeper into the educational system, because teaching kids to hate America is the new education.” Zinn contended that the Constitution was devised solely to formalize the inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians, and the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful.

A protestor’s sign put it, ‘Rule of law = white supremacy, violence against [people of color], violence against immigrants.’ These were law students protesting the rule of law.

The latest “non-platforming” of a speaker at a purported academic institution happened to my good friend and sometime co-author Josh Blackman at City University of New York Law School two weeks ago, when he attempted to give a lecture on the importance of free speech on campus. As he wrote on his blog in an epic post accompanied by copious pictures and video, once publicity for the event began after spring break, enraged students began planning a protest.

When Josh asked his host, the president of CUNY’s Federalist Society chapter, why his classmates were up in arms, he got the explanation that “first, that this is a Federalist Society event; and second, they saw a few of your writings (specifically a National Review article praising Sessions for rescinding DACA and ACA), and instantly assume you’re racist; and third, our event being titled about free speech is reminiscent of events that claim free speech just to invite people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter.”

Indeed, that sentiment resulted in Josh being greeted with assorted signs. Some attacked him personally: “Josh Blackman you are not welcome here” and “Pronouns matter, Josh Blackman does not.” Others went after the Federalist Society, which some smeared was “founded to uphold white supremacy.” Still others took on the Constitution itself: “The First Amendment is a weak shield for white supremacy” and “The First Amendment is not a license to dehumanize marginalized people.”

It would be very tempting to dismiss this as a fluke, as something that’s not happening in your local schools or state, some crazy thing that only affects other people and other people’s kids. A radio host recently posted pictures of a textbook she says a friend’s Minnesota district is considering for Advanced Placement courses, which are typically the top students’ last U.S. history class ever.

This appears to be a forthcoming 2019 edition of an existing textbook from the global education publishing giant Pearson, whose materials are ubiquitous. The friend highlighted some sections that show clear bias against political conservatives, President Trump and his administration, and Americans of faith. Here are some transcriptions from those images.

In describing the rise of Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of the Ferguson, Missouri shooting: “The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupying army in the mostly African-American town.” In a section discussing President Trump’s cabinet, the book says “They were largely white males, more so than any cabinet since Ronald Reagan.” In a discussion of the nation’s politics after 2012, it says “Those who had long thought of the nation as a white and Christian country sometimes found it difficult to adjust” to secularization and an increase in people of other races. Elsewhere, it describes Trump’s “not-very-hidden racism.”

A section discussing the 2016 elections returns to these paranoid, highly politicized interpretations of some Americans’ decisions to vote for Trump:

Trump’s supporters saw the vote as a victory for people who, like themselves, had been forgotten in a fast-changing America–a mostly older, often rural or suburban, and overwhelmingly white group. Clinton’s supporters feared that the election had been determined by people who were afraid of a rapidly developing ethnic diversity of the country, discomfort with their candidate’s gender, and nostalgia for an earlier time in the nation’s history. They also worried about the mental stability of the president elect and the anger that he and his supporters brought to the nation.

The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released this week, offer little to celebrate. Political leaders and education advocates are struggling to find evidence that their preferred policy—whatever it might be—is having much impact on student performance. Progress has stalled in recent years, and results at the state and national level are far below where most education policymakers thought they would be by now. Despite the efforts of George W. Bush, many children are still being left behind; despite the efforts of Barack Obama, the race to the top didn’t produce many winners.

Administered to a representative sample of youngsters, the NAEP is a rigorous test, the only instrument we have to make valid comparisons across states—and some major local school districts—and to track nationwide progress over time. The test sets a high bar for achievement: it defines “proficiency” as mastery of challenging subject matter, as distinguished from grade-level proficiency (good enough to pass). The NAEP results reveal that slightly more than a third of the nation’s eighth-graders were proficient in reading and math in 2017. These numbers have moved up slowly: since 2003, math proficiency is up five points, to 34 percent, and reading is up four points, to 36 percent. But the average eight-grade math score is currently 16 points below proficiency, while the average reading score falls 14 points short—discouraging figures, though better than 2003. If improvement continues at this glacial pace, it will be 45 years until the average eighth-grader is considered proficient in mathematics and 49 years for an average eighth-grader to achieve reading proficiency.

We should not be surprised by the NAEP findings, as they align with trends in college completion. Nationally, 84 percent of high school students graduate, and of those, about 70 percent enroll in a two- or four-year college. But college-completion rates are just 60 percent for four-year colleges and 30 percent for two-year colleges. Overall, only about 30 percent of the students who start out in the American K-12 system complete a college degree by age 25. Students who plan to complete college should be scoring at the NAEP’s proficiency levels by eighth grade; two-thirds are not doing so.

When members of Columbia’s Students Supporting Israel campus group set up a memorial booth on April 11th, for Holocaust Remembrance Day, honoring the 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, the memorial was disrupted by the screaming chants of anti-Israel protesters.

The table for the commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day had testimonials from Holocaust survivors as well as memorial candles laid out. After an hour in which Jewish students shared the stories of holocaust survivors, a large group of anti-Israel protests gathered across the plaza from the SSI table.

INCIDENT REPORT

Students Supporting Israel at Columbia University
Incident Report on Harassment and Violations of University
Policies and State and Federal Rules by the Students for
Justice in Palestine (SJP)

As one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher
education, Columbia University has an obligation both to its
students, and faculty constituency as well as the broader American
academic community to foster and protect nuanced and
constructive dialogue on complicated issues affecting New York, America and the world.
Unfortunately, groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP)
and Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) have monopolized the conversation on
campus relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict and have systematically maligned, harassed and
silenced groups like Students Supporting Israel (SSI) and other pro-Israel voices on campus, who
provide alternative — and critically important — views on these issues, in clear violation of their
rights under both Columbia rules and regulations, and U.S. law.