RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, a student panel at Yale University suggested that white supremacy is central to nonprofit charities. According to Yale students, the “white savior” mentality turns charities into a racist and oppressive “nonprofit industrial complex” keeping people of color down.

“The nonprofit industrial complex is very real and very alive in New Haven and needs to be dismantled just like any other oppressive system,” Kerry Ellington, organizer for People Against Police Brutality, argued. “White folks are centering themselves in these spaces and don’t know how to listen to the communities they serve.”

The U.S. Health Justice Collaborative, an initiative started by students in Yale’s health professional schools, organized and hosted the event. The panelists included a journalist, nonprofit directors, and several organizers. Each of them discussed how their careers in nonprofits involved “white saviorism.”

Over 1,300 people said they were “interested” in the event on Facebook, and many attendees were turned away at the door, organizer Robert Rock, a senior with the class of 2018, told the Yale Daily News. Those turned away could watch the event livestreamed on Facebook.

Barbara Tinney, executive director of the New Haven Family Alliance and a member of the panel, described her initial shock at the “audacity” of the event’s title: “Paved With Good Intentions: White Saviorism and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.” Even so, Tinney said the panel echoed themes she had previously discussed with her colleagues over her long career in the New Haven nonprofit scene.

Tinney suggested there is a conflict between the work nonprofits do and “many of the oppressive power dynamics they can help maintain.”

Panelists lamented the predominance of white people at the head of nonprofits, and launched into a discussion of “white fragility,” a term referring to the alleged widespread avoidance of difficult racial discussions in order to prevent “white discomfort.”

“When my white allies use their claws, they could get pushback,” Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change, said on the panel. “When I hiss, I could get shot.” Even so, she suggested that discomfort should not stop “white allies from showing up to support people of color,” the Daily News reported.

Journalist Jordan Flaherty half-jokingly referred to Batman as a “white savior,” the Daily News reported, “because he is a rich white man who dedicates his money to gadgetry and vigilante justice, rather than investing in his community.”

The “white savior” panelists suggested that many nonprofits, led by white people, misunderstand the needy communities they aim to serve, entrenching poverty rather than alleviating it. CONTINUE AT SITE

What took them so long? That was our first question when we heard the latest news about the distinguished University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. Last summer, Professor Wax created a minor disturbance in the force of politically correct groupthink when she co-authored an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.”

What, a college professor arguing in favor of “bourgeois” values? Mirabile dictu, yes. Professor Wax and her co-author, Professor Larry Alexander from the University of San Diego, argued not only that the “bourgeois” values regnant in American society in the 1950s were beneficial to society as a whole, but also that they were potent aides to disadvantaged individuals seeking to better themselves economically and socially. “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake,” Professors Wax and Alexander advised.

Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Such homely advice rankled, of course. Imagine telling the professoriate to be patriotic, to work hard, to be civic-minded or charitable. Quelle horreur!

Wax and Alexander were roundly condemned by their university colleagues. Thirty-three of Wax’s fellow law professors at Penn signed an “Open Letter” condemning her op-ed. “We categorically reject Wax’s claims,” they thundered.

What they found especially egregious was Wax and Alexander’s observation that “All cultures are not equal.” That hissing noise you hear is the sharp intake of breath at the utterance of such a sentiment. The tort was compounded by Wax’s later statements in an interview that “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans” because “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.”

Tenure used to protect professors against termination for anything short of criminal behavior. In today’s PC climate, however, it’s no match for administrators who want to get rid of someone who’s said things they dislike. Violations of vague “harassment” policies are the weapon they employ.

That’s what Louisiana State professor Teresa Buchanan discovered in 2015 when she was terminated over her tendency to use coarse, blunt language. Even though she was a good teacher (she taught in LSU’s school of education), the administration decided to fire her after some complaints from students and an outsider. Objections from the faculty senate, which opposed Buchanan’s firing, made no difference.

With the assistance of FIRE, Buchanan took her case to court, but lost when the district court judge dismissed her complaint. I write about the case in this Martin Center article.

I have never been a great fan of tenure, but universities that have it should not undermine it with terminations for speaking in ways that offend “progressive” ears. Faculty (tenured or not) shouldn’t have to worry that the next thing they say or write will upset one of those people on campus who are looking for excuses to drop the ax on their perceived ideological enemies.

Students at several Chicago and Boston-area universities awoke this week to find their campuses papered with posters exposing members of Students for Justice in Palestine as neo-Nazis and supporters of anti-Israel terrorism. The posters were designed by the David Horowitz Freedom and were placed in the early morning hours on the campuses of Harvard University, Brandeis University and Tufts University in the Boston area and at the University of Chicago and DePaul University in Chicago.

The posters reveal comments that student activists affiliated with SJP have made on social media praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and calling for the extermination of the Jews.

These statements include:

“How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough”

“Wow White Jews are so entitled LMFAOOO Please die.”

“Had to write about a leader for DCL class. Wrote about Hitler. Cuz he’s a boss.”

A second poster exposed Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of SJP, as an anti-Semite and supporter of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas. Bazian recently came under fire for an anti-Semitic tweet which featured a caricature of an Orthodox Jew with the caption “MOM LOOK! I IS CHOSEN! I CAN NOW KILL, RAPE, SMUGGLE ORGANS & AND STEAL THE LAND OF PALESTINIANS *YAY* ASHKE-NAZI.” He has also openly called for an intifada, or violent uprising, in America.

A third poster depicts the organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as a puppet of Hamas terrorists. As has been revealed in recent congressional testimony, Students for Justice in Palestine is a campus front for Hamas terrorists. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestrated and funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and otherIslamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. Hamas is a State Department-designated terrorist organization whose explicit goals, as stated in its charter, are the destruction of the Jewish state, and the extermination of its Jews.

It seems that it’s impossible to pass through a single week without hearing about multiple outrages in academia. And it seems just as obvious that the most obscene of these outrages tend to unfold at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning.

Take, for instance, the University of Pennsylvania. Penn is an Ivy-league school located in the city of Philadelphia. It has recently been in the news because of “controversial” comments made by one of Penn’s veteran faculty members, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law, Amy Wax.

Back in September of last year, Wax appeared on The Glenn Show, the on-line podcast of Brown University professor, Glenn Loury. During their exchange over some of the deleterious consequences of those race-based preferential treatment policies favoring black student applicants, Wax shared with her host—who is black—some of the observations that she’s made over the duration of her career at Penn.

“Here’s a very inconvenient fact, Glenn: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the first half of my required first-year Civil Procedure course.”

Wax and Loury were discussing what’s come to be known as the “mismatch” effect of so-called affirmative action: In their eagerness to satisfy their quotas for black students, colleges and universities wind up mismatching students with institutions. So, Penn, say, recruits black students that, while they would’ve performed excellently at a second-tier school, lack competitiveness at an Ivy-league school. This move on the part of the first-tier schools in turn has ramifications that affect the whole available pool of black students, mismatching them with institutions throughout the entire system.

A powerful conservative perspective is essential to ensuring students, including liberals and progressives, obtain the greatest benefit from their education https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/43408/

In the late 1990s, a group of conservative students convened at Claremont McKenna College to create a new political journal at the Claremont Colleges. They aspired to inculcate an “appreciation for the privileges and obligations of citizenship in a free society,” and to mount a full-throated defense of conservatism both on campus and beyond. Thus was born the Claremont Independent.

Today, more than 20 years since our founding, it is striking to reflect upon how far the Independent has come since those quiet beginnings. We started as a print publication—the internet era was yet to arise—circulating copies on our campus in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Today, the Independent is an award-winning national media outlet with tens of thousands of online readers; and we cover a Claremont campus that is now a raging hotbed of progressive activism.

Our independence—we take no money from any of the Claremont Colleges—has permitted us to hold administrators and campus activists accountable through tough reportage and sharp opinion editorials. We have taken Title IX coordinators to task for serious alleged violations of the rights of students to impartial adjudication of sexual assault cases; have uncovered sexist and anti-gay tweets from, ironically enough, the (now-former) director of the Claremont Colleges’ LGBTQ center; and have covered the shutdown of conservative speakers on campus, including, most notably, pro-police scholar and Black Lives Matter critic Heather Mac Donald last April.

Gary Fouse is retired from the Drug Enforcement Administration (1973-1995). From 1998-2016, he was an adjunct instructor of English as a Second Language at the University of California at Irvine Extension. During the last ten years of that period, he was an activist fighting anti-semitism at UCI as well as other UC campuses. He has his own blog (Fousesquawk) at http://garyfouse.blogspot.com, which deals with national and international issues from a conservative perspective.

‘….Last week, I received a standard, template response from the public information office at Golden West College in response to my letter to their administration complaining about the conduct of Golden West staff in trying to silence questions about Islam from the audience at their Islam 101 event on March 14. It was an event to which campus cops were actually called in order to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws. Here is the response:

We have received your comments and appreciate your voiced concerns. As you know, Golden West College recently opened a scheduled class to the public which included a presentation and opportunity to engage in questions and answers. The event was intended to be an introductory educational overview of Islam as part of an intercultural program for students in the class. We understand that the presenters and audience members have varying views about the effectiveness of the event. We are regretful that when campus security was called to help ensure the safety of the environment, that anyone may have felt uncomfortable, singled out, or discouraged from expressing their opinions.

We work hard to ensure that faculty and staff on campus treat others with dignity and engage in respectful interaction with others. We fully support free speech and the right to express diverse thoughts. We are apologetic that the event did not serve the intended purposes for all. We remain committed to the inclusive values and mission of Golden West College. Thank you.

Not even a name was attached to this letter (email). And whoever wrote this response had the gall to state, “We fully support free speech and the right to express diverse thoughts. ”

And yet, campus police were called in because they didn’t like certain questions.

Protests against free speech in the name of free speech have become the political flavor du jour. Although the MSM tends to avoid covering these unseemly episodes, anyone with a computer and the interest to go with it can witness online these totalitarian irruptions at universities, colleges and libraries across the continent: Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley, Jordan Peterson at Queen’s University, Heather Mac Donald at Claremont-McKenna, Gavin McInnes at DePaul, Charles Murray at Middlebury, and so on ad vomitatum. But one gets a different perspective — obviously more immediate, more appalling — when one is present at these public displays of doctrinaire belligerence and repressive violence so dear to the Left. One cannot shake a sense of disbelief and moral shock, at least at first.

Just the other day and not for the first time, I experienced this feeling of helpless rage and moral incredulity when my wife Janice Fiamengo was invited by a newly formed undergraduate group, the University of Ottawa Students for Free Speech, to give a lecture titled “Is the University about the Pursuit of Truth or about Protecting Approved Ideologies” at the Ottawa Public Library. When we arrived, we found the doors blocked by a crowd of Antifa offshoots calling themselves, variously, the Revolutionary Student Movement and Ottawa against Fascism, pre-programmed automatons wearing masks, carrying placards and blaring slogans through bullhorns. One of these slogans was paradoxically apt: No Platform for Hate. No Debate.