RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you’ve ever taken a statistics class, you’ve probably read Darrell Huff’s “How to Lie with Statistics.” Teachers unions appear to have drawn some lessons from the 1954 book. They’re using misleading statistics to rally public support for teacher walkouts in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona and Colorado. Here are some of their distortions.

• They conflate school funding and state education spending. In Oklahoma, unions proclaimed that per pupil school spending fell by 28.2% over the past decade. That refers to the inflation-adjusted state’s general funding formula. But total per pupil outlays increased by 16% in nominal terms between 2006 and 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent public education finance report. Adjusting for inflation, that’s a decline of only about 2%.

On average across the country, state funds make up only 47% of total school spending. Most of the rest comes from local property taxes. Since property tax hikes are politically unpopular, unions put pressure on state lawmakers to increase education spending from general funds. That has the benefit of diffusing accountability for local spending.

• They use elevated spending baselines. Teachers unions nearly always compare school spending and teacher salaries today with peak levels before the great recession, which were inflated like housing prices. Between 2000 and 2009, average per pupil spending across the country increased 52%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. After flat-lining for a few years, per pupil spending ticked up by 7.5% between 2012 and 2015. School spending growth might have slowed over the past several years, but it still increased faster than the consumer price index.

Per pupil funding in Oklahoma shot up 46% between 2000 and 2009. During this period, average teacher salaries rose 52%. While average salaries have since fallen by 5%, even on an inflation-adjusted basis they remain higher today ($45,245) than in 2000 ($44,861) or 1990 ($44,088).

• They don’t account for other forms of compensation. Since 2000, per pupil spending on employee benefits has doubled. Benefits make up about 29 cents of every dollar of staff compensation, compared with 21 cents in 2000. In Arizona, about 24% of staff compensation goes to employee benefits, up from 18% in 2000. Teachers don’t see this in their paychecks, but pensions and health benefits are the fastest-growing expenses for many school districts, and most of the money goes to retired teachers.

• They elide data that don’t fit their argument. According to the National Education Association’s annual survey, the biggest average pay bumps in 2016 were in California (4.3%), Colorado (3.9%) and Wisconsin (3.5%). Wisconsin’s 2011 collective-bargaining reforms limit annual base salary increases to 2% while letting districts negotiate pay with individual teachers based on criteria other than job and education level. CONTINUE AT SITE

What do college presidents mean by “academic rigor”? Good “judgment” in the classroom? Making the campus “inclusive”? Recent developments on the campus of Hamilton College after the visit of Paul Gottfried, Horace Raffensberger Professor of Humanities Emeritus, Elizabethtown College, provide clues.

Gottfried was invited to speak to two classes by Robert Paquette, Executive Director of the nearby Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. As I described at the AHI’s website, Gottfried on October 25, 2017, discussed conservatism in the United States in “Modern Conservative Politics” in the Government Department, and then gave a lecture based on his recent book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept, in a history course, “Nazi Germany.” Although he was greeted by students holding signs accusing him of racism, Gottfried gave two informed performances and responded to questions, including hostile ones, with intelligence and courtesy.

Nevertheless, his visit inspired campus-wide denunciations in a letter from the Government Department, editorials in the student newspaper, and a letter from the college president.

Two days after the visit, students, faculty, and administrators received the following proclamation:

We the undersigned full-time members of the Government Department would like to speak out regarding Paul Gottfried’s visit to one of our courses. We are still learning about what transpired on Wednesday. . . . However, we have already heard multiple complaints from students about racist remarks allegedly made by Gottfried. We unequivocally condemn any and all such racist remarks. . . .

Similarly, the student newspaper vaguely claimed that Gottfried was “espousing hateful opinions” and therefore should not have been allowed on campus. It took until December 4 for President David Wippman to reply, which enraged student Katherine Barnes who wrote “Too little, too late, too tolerant: President Wippman fails to condemn Gottfried.”

Penn State’s Outing Club controversy is about keeping students in a state of childhood.

Penn State University’s Outing Club can no longer organize student-led hiking and camping trips, which the club has done for 98 years. This decision is not about the inherent risk of hiking. It is about letting students be independent adults.

At first, the university explained that the outing, scuba, and caving clubs are “losing recognition due to an unacceptable amount of risk to student members that is associated with their activities,” as a university spokesperson put it.

International mockery helped the Outing Club regain recognition as a student organization, but it will not be allowed to organize trips. It can bring speakers to campus and hold meetings, but going hiking together on club-organized outings is no longer acceptable.

A university spokesperson suggested to the Centre Daily Times that alcohol use was a factor in the decision, though Outing Club says there is no alcohol use on its trips. The real reason was surely contained the sentence before the mention of alcohol use:

In addition to the inherent risks found in many of these student activities that occur without fully trained guides or leaders, the behaviors of some students on unsupervised trips have become a concern. These concerns have, at times, included the misuse of alcohol in the context of already risky activities. This mix is obviously dangerous.

Conservative students at the University of California, Berkeley will be allowed to move forward with their lawsuit alleging the school discriminated against conservative speakers.

U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney ruled Wednesday that the lawsuit levied by two student groups can continue, shooting down the school’s request to dismiss it.

The Berkeley College Republicans and the Young America’s Foundation accused the school of efforts to “restrict and stifle the speech of conservative students whose voices fall beyond the campus political orthodoxy,” after two speakers they invited to campus had their events cancelled.

Conservative author Ann Coulter was bumped from a planned appearance at the school in April 2017 after angry protests by left-leaning students caused security concerns. After a national backlash, the school allowed Coulter to speak in early May during a “dead week” when many students were off campus.

Another conservative writer, David Horowitz, had a speech canceled the same month after difficulties with campus security and accommodations, and the previous February, a Milo Yiannopoulos event was also shut down over safety concerns.

The Counseling and Mental Health Center at the University of Texas at Austin recently launched a new program to help male students “take control over their gender identity and develop a healthy sense of masculinity.”

Treating masculinity as if it were a mental health crisis, “MasculinUT” is organized by the school’s counseling staff and most recently organized a poster series encouraging students to develop a “healthy model of masculinity.”

The program is predicated on a critique of so-called “restrictive masculinity.” Men, the program argues, suffer when they are told to “act like a man” or when they are encouraged to fulfill traditional gender roles, such as being “successful” or “the breadwinner.”

Though you might enjoy “taking care of people” or being “active,” MasculinUT warns that many of these attributes are actually dangerous, claiming that “traditional ideas of masculinity place men into rigid (or restrictive) boxes [which]… prevent them from developing their emotional maturity.”

“If you are a male student at UT reading this right now, we hope that learning about this helps you not to feel guilty about having participated in these definitions of masculinity, and instead feel empowered to break the cycle!” the program offers.

The program is currently without leadership, but not for long. The school is in the process of hiring a “healthy masculinities coordinator” to run the program, and a school official tells PJ Media that some hopeful hirees are interviewing for the position later this week. CONTINUE AT SITE

The University of California at Berkeley’s thuggish request to throw out an important civil rights lawsuit that could hold the school accountable for its blatant viewpoint discrimination that involves slapping unreasonable restrictions and fees on appearances by conservative speakers like David Horowitz and Ann Coulter was refused this week by the federal judge hearing the case.

It has long been known that the administration at UC Berkeley only pretends to adhere to the First Amendment’s speech protections. When conservatives are scheduled to speak on campus the administration typically doesn’t forbid their appearances. Instead, it makes the speeches inconvenient to the point of impossibility, requiring the use of venues a mile off campus at times when students can’t attend.

This bears more than a passing resemblance to the shadow-banning practices of social media giants like Twitter and Facebook that secretly limit politically disfavored users’ reach online. It’s ugly, Orwellian stuff but that’s what the Left is all about today.

But Twitter and Facebook are private for-profit businesses so when they push conservatives around and arbitrarily punish them the First Amendment isn’t implicated. Not so with UC Berkeley, which as a taxpayer-supported university must abide by the First Amendment or suffer legal consequences.

In San Francisco, U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney, appointed in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, said Young America’s Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans may pursue their claim that UC Berkeley applied policies for high-profile speakers in a way that unfairly burdened conservative speech, Reuters reports. Chesney preliminarily rejected the transparently false arguments by campus administrators that the school’s speaking policies were enforced equally against all speakers regardless of ideology or politics.

The climate that prevails on today’s college campuses can only be described as chilling.

The one institution that is designed to serve as a bastion of critical thought, a marketplace of ideas, has been reduced by many faculty, student, and administrator alike to a so-called “safe space,” a space designed to immunize the campus against any and all ideas that its self-appointed gatekeepers deem a threat to their hard leftist orthodoxy.

Of course, this is not news to anyone who has been paying any attention. And conservatives regularly and loudly complain about the attacks on “free speech” in the University.

However, this way of characterizing the situation, though accurate as far as it goes, doesn’t go nearly far enough. Thus, its focus on the abstraction of free speech grossly understates the real danger that concrete flesh-and-blood human beings risk when they dare to entertain alternative views.

Principles, like the principle of free speech, don’t bleed. People do.

It isn’t an intangible, airy concept that is under attack on today’s campus. It is those speakers, faculty, and, most concerning, students who militant leftist SJWs deem insufficiently “progressive” who enjoy this dubious distinction.

A recent incident at Texas State University is all too representative of the atmosphere with which those who deviate from the Creed of identity-politics must contend.

Connor Clegg, a young white Republican student and student body president, was impeached just two days before his term was set to expire. Those students from such organizations as the Pan-African Action Committee, Latinas Unidas, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Unit 6875-B, Texas Rising for LGBTQIA Equality, and the Student Community of Progressive Development who had been pushing for Clegg’s ouster erupted in cheers when his impeachment was announced.

Last week, political scientist and author Charles Murray spoke at a dinner in Manhattan about the death, as he calledit, of the American Dream. The “Disinvitation Dinner,” is given annually by Lauren Noble’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program to honor a speaker who has been kicked off a college campus for espousing unpopular views.

Murray wished to warn his audience that our unelected bureaucracy, invested with law-making power by a lazy legislature, is threatening Americans’ natural tendency to take care of themselves and their neighbors. These views may not be terribly contentious, but it doesn’t take a lot to upset a college student these days.

And Murray has upset students tremendously: In 1994, he and Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein wrote The Bell Curve. The book suggested that, based on available data, one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that some aspects of intelligence are hereditary. Hence, college students believe, Murray is a racist fascist bigot so dangerous that even seeing a photograph of him may cause mental damage.

What is particularly shocking is that students can be so delicate and so violent at the same time, like oversized toddlers who careen around a room smashing into everything.

This is no joke — one year after student protests ended Murray’s visit to Middlebury College, the editor of the student newspaper had to apologize for printing a photograph of Murray, saying, “I recognize that [the picture] may be especially jarring, particularly for students of color who feel that Charles Murray’s rhetoric poses a threat to their very humanity.” In other words, don’t even look at Murray or your igloos will melt.

It is sadly common for conservative presidents and political leaders to be portrayed in a less-than-flattering light in the left-leaning textbooks used in public school and college classrooms, but a new volume on American history gives a new spin on the term “rush to judgment.” Less than a year-and-a-half after taking office as America’s sitting president, Donald Trump is already being maligned in the pages of an upcoming high school history text which insinuates that he and his supporters are driven by racism and that he is mentally unfit to serve as our Commander-in-Chief.

Textbooks rarely receive a high profile before their publication, but the new history text “By the People: A History of the United States” written by New York University Professor James W. Fraser and set to be published by the Pearson Education publishing company has already proved controversial for its radical left-leaning and insulting narrative on Donald Trump’s election as president. The book’s one-sided nature was exposed not by an educator but by high school student Tarra Snyder, a junior and AP History student at Rosemount High School in Minnesota, who was provided with Fraser’s book as a sample text that might be used for class instruction next year. Snyder was so incensed by the work’s slanted portrayal of history that she shared images of the book with Indianapolis radio show host Alex Clark, who tweeted images of the text along with commentary that quickly went viral:
Alex On-Air
✔ @yoalexrapz

“In case you didn’t think there was an effort going on in public schools to indoctrinate kids with an anti-conservative agenda, a friend of mine took pictures and highlighted parts of this AP US History book.”

The book’s concluding section titled “The Angry Election of 2016” puts NYU Professor Fraser’s hatred and disdain for President Trump on full display. “Most thought that Trump was too extreme a candidate to win the nomination, but his extremism, his anti-establishment rhetoric, and, some said, his not-very-hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters,” Fraser writes.