RUTHFULLY YOURS

On March 14, I attended a public presentation entitled Islam 101 at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California. The presenter was Nicole Bovey, a convert to Islam and public information officer at the Islamic Institute of Orange County in Anaheim. Bovey also works with the Muslim Speakers Bureau in Orange County (an arm of the Islamic Networks Group). The presentation was sponsored by GWC professors Kaine Fini (Anthropology) and Communications Professor Kristine Clancy (most of the audience members were her students, and this was part of her class.) The event had been advertised publicly, hence was open to the public. Altogether, there were approximately 50 people present. I videotaped the entire proceeding. The event was scheduled to run from 6:45-9:30 pm. As it was, it was cut off at about 8:30 by one of the professors (more about that later.) During the event, Professor Clancy called in campus police and she admonished a couple of the people in the audience who had asked pointed questions.

Ms. Bovey’s presentation was a very basic and very vanilla presentation of Islam, explaining what Islam is, what it means, who Muslims are, Muslims’ worldwide demographic breakdown etc. Bovey’s lesson plan, consisting of slides posted on the walls, was about subjects like the 5 pillars of Islam, daily prayers etc. She stated at the outset that she was there to clear up misconceptions about Islam. In fact, the first image on the wall was of a masked man representing a terrorist. Yet, it was clear later into the presentation that she was not going to get into areas like terrorism or Sharia law. She invited the audience members to raise their hands to ask questions at any point.

Bovey was doing fine handling soft, non-controversial questions, but plainly could not handle pointed, uncomfortable questions from a few members of the audience, including myself. One audience member identified himself as a former Muslim from Egypt, who left Islam and became a Christian pastor. When he began to contradict statements by Bovey, she became uncomfortable. Subsequently, he was approached by Prof. Clancy who asked him to step outside. He returned a few minutes later. While Bovey was discussing Zakat (Islamic charity giving), another audience member asked her about the categories of Zakat and whether any of them allowed giving to non-Muslims. She was unable to answer the question. Another man in the audience, a Muslim, stated that there was a separate channel of giving other than Zakat that could be directed to non-Muslims.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center’s bold new campaign to expose the rampant anti-Semitism and dangerous, genocidal rhetoric of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and their student supporters across the nation is officially underway.

The campuses of four California universities –UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, UCLA, and USC— have already been blanketed with hard-hitting, fact-based posters that detail the virulent Jew-hatred of these activists and the neo-Nazi-sympathizing professors who try to grant them moral authority.

The posters are coming soon to many more college and university campuses across the country.

To bolster the campaign, the Freedom Center will be debuting a powerful new pamphlet by Sara Dogan titled SJP: Neo-Nazis on Campus, as well as publicizing the effort at its Stop University Support for Terrorists website.

This groundbreaking investigative report examines how anti-Israel activists affiliated with SJP, MSA, and likeminded groups are using social media to praise Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, urge an intifada-style uprising in the U.S., and call for a second Holocaust to exterminate the Jews. The same people also smear Israel, describing Jews as “colonial-settler” occupiers of a nonexistent state called “Palestine,” while calling Israel an “apartheid state” even though it is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and a staunch U.S. ally.

The profiles in the pamphlet—which were assembled using carefully documented references from the Canary Mission, a nonprofit group dedicated to cataloguing hatred across the political spectrum— showcase the statements, actions and motivations of 10 of the most ardent neo-Nazis leading the campus war against Israel.

PJ Media previously reported on the story of a 17-year-old high school student from Farmington, Conn., who was originally blocked from participating in a school assembly on March 14 where she had planned to present her conservative and pro-Second Amendment views. Thanks to the attention her story received, the student, Ashley Dummit, was eventually able to participate, and gave a speech at the assembly in defense of Second Amendment rights. In fact, she ended up being the only speaker at the assembly.

Unfortunately, not all incidents involving pro-Second Amendment students have ended so well.

Another high school student, 17-year-old Christian Breault, a senior at Middleburgh Junior/Senior High School, in Middleburgh, N.Y., found himself physically attacked for standing up for the Second Amendment when his school participated in the nationwide walkout on March 14. After the school participated in the walkout, an assembly was held in the school, featuring local law enforcement and community leaders to talk to the students about school safety. Instead of safety, the assembly turned political, tensions rose, and Christian found himself targeted for defending the Second Amendment. His father, Brian Breault, spoke out about the incident on Facebook:

Today the school my son, Christian, attends participated in the National School Walkout for Gun Control and School Safety. The school held an assembly after the walkout bringing in community leaders and law enforcement to speak. Toward the end of the assembly they showed an Anti-NRA video vilifying the gun organization and its members (American citizens).

Following the dismissal of the assembly Christian engaged in a conversation with other students who felt the assembly was not handled well. Christian expressed he felt the Anti-NRA video was over the top and he found it offensive. Another student not involved in the conversation threatened him for his view on the video going as far as telling the school nurse that he would punch Christian in the face if he didn’t stop defending the NRA. The nurse told the student he could not say that and no further action was taken. CONTINUE AT SITE

The campus mob at the University of Pennsylvania Law School has scored a hit. Prof. Amy Wax will no longer be allowed to teach required first-year courses, the school’s dean announced last week. Now the leader of Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania wants Ms. Wax’s scalp. According to a weekend newspaper report, if she isn’t fired within a week, “he plans to make things on the West Philadelphia campus very uncomfortable.”

Ms. Wax’s sin this time was to discuss publicly the negative consequences of affirmative action. Her punishment underscores again the dangers of speaking uncomfortable truths in a university setting.

The academic left has been gunning for Ms. Wax since last August, when she co-wrote a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed calling for a return to the “bourgeois culture” of the 1950s. She was branded a white supremacist for advocating personal responsibility, even though the op-ed criticized “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites.”

Half the Penn law faculty signed an open letter denouncing the op-ed. The dean, Ted Ruger, asked her to take a leave of absence and stop teaching her first-year course, Ms. Wax wrote last month in this newspaper. She declined his request. (The law school denied her account and said the discussion was merely “about the timing of a regularly-accrued sabbatical.”)

Simmons College, a women’s school in Boston, wants to make sure all students are completely up to date on what constitutes a microaggression. So they published an extensive list of no-nos so that absolutely no one on campus will ever be offended by anything anyone says ever.

They also took great pains to list what might be “microinvalidations,” “microinsults” and “microassaults.” And when I find out which microbrain thought these things up, I’ll let you know.

The Washington Times reports that on the college website they list “six ‘anti-oppression’ categories—’anti-racism,’ ‘anti-transmisia,’ ‘anti-ableism,’ ‘anti-Islamomisia,’ ‘anti-sanism’ and ‘anti-queermisia’—with which students should be familiar.”

Only six? Keeping the list short is probably a microaggression itself.

A description of the guide reads, “This guide is intended to provide some general information about anti-oppression, diversity, and inclusion as well as information and resources for the social justice issues key to the Simmons College community.” As you will see, the “general information” includes loads of specifics.

What exactly is “anti-Islamomisia”? Saying “God bless you” after a sneeze is to commit the microaggression because of the “assumption of one’s own religious identity as the norm.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Florida this week joined eight other states that have banned “free speech zones” at public colleges — which, in the topsy-turvy way things work on campus these days, is a win for free speech.
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It’s a win because schools set up such zones in order to limit speech everywhere else. This cuts at the (orderly) free exchange of views that is supposed to be at the heart of any college’s mission.

But that ideal runs counter to the progressive dogma that young men and women need protection from ideas that somehow cause them pain. And it makes things tough on college administrators who must deal with the kids (and non-student radicals) who’ll happily stage a riot to serve their inner censors.

Thus Florida State, for example, offered a campus “compliance” map showing the exact locations where literature distribution and sign postings can take place — because the zones are otherwise so hard to find.

Yes: It actually takes a law to stop many school officials from caving in to the left.

Interestingly, the states that have taken this principled stand tend to be “purplish” ones, neither deep lefty blue nor righty red: Virginia, Missouri, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee and now Florida — plus Utah, whose many Mormons have historic reasons for respecting speech rights.

It’s shameful that such laws are needed — and depressing that states like New York are behind the curve.

The cost of college has risen at more than twice the rate of inflation for decades, and the increasing availability of federal student loans is a principal cause. But even as demands grow daily to do something about student debt and loan defaults, hardly anyone laments the demise of a once-proud American aspiration: working your way through college.

In 1956, as a freshman at Yale, I waited tables in a student dorm for about $1 an hour, 10 hours a week, over the 30-week academic year. I received a full scholarship, but even if it had ended, I recall that Yale’s “all in” price—including tuition, room and board—was $1,800 a year. My work during the term could have covered one-sixth of that.

Today tuition, room and board at Yale run $66,900. Working the same amount as I did—even at, say, $12 an hour, an increase of roughly one-third after inflation—produces income of $3,600, or slightly more than 5% of the total. To earn enough to pay for one-sixth of a Yale education would require an hourly wage of more than $37! Yale’s own literature, by the by, lists the amount that a freshman on scholarship can expect to contribute during the school year at $2,850. The same basic economics applies to summer employment.

Yale’s experience closely tracks what has happened at virtually all of America’s elite private colleges and universities. The situation in public schools is little better. A half-century ago, the tuition and fees at many such institutions were barely above zero. Fully working your way through college was a real possibility. Now a year’s education at a typical state university, even for in-state students, can easily exceed $25,000, well beyond what can be earned while studying full-time. That is why so many students at public institutions are now leaving college, whether or not they graduate, with mountains of debt.

To reduce their need to borrow, increasing numbers of students are attending community colleges for their first two years while continuing to live at home. Admittedly this helps, although at the cost of greatly diminishing the college experience. But it doesn’t change the financial realities once these students then transfer to four-year institutions. CONTINUE AT SITE

Ten years ago while teaching English at Emory University, I noticed a trend. Each year there seemed to be more and more girls on campus. Also, from the time I started teaching college in 1993 as a graduate student, I would hear gripes from male students about their high school teachers and college professors who made them read books by Amy Tan and listen to lectures on feminism, even in math.

As time passed, I also noticed a change in the demeanor of boys. Each year they seemed to become less confident. By 2013, my last year of teaching, many were walking in a stooped-over shuffle and ending statements with a question.

In 2008, in an article for the Weekly Standard, I looked into the decline of boys’ academic performance. Forced to read books about feminine topics and forced to learn under feminine pedagogy, they weren’t performing well academically. While slightly more men than women held bachelor’s degrees in 2005, women made up 57 percent of total fall enrollments and were much more likely to graduate. By 2014, 30.2 percent of women held bachelor’s degrees opposed to 29.9 percent of men. Among younger adults, aged 25 to 34, 37.5 percent of women hold bachelor’s degrees, but only 29.5 percent of men do.

Men in 2008 still held a slight advantage in earning doctorate degrees, but were projected to drop behind women by 2014. Today, women earn the majority of doctoral degrees and outnumber men in law school and medical school, as Tucker Carlson reports. He also reports that younger women now surpass men in rates of homeownership and wages. Men’s addiction and suicide rates are rising, while testosterone levels are plummeting.

From Bad to Worse to “Uncomfortable”
In the intervening 10 years, as things have gotten worse for boys and men, the rhetoric about “white male privilege” has become more strident. There are mandatory classes on diversity. Workshops on “toxic masculinity” tell men they aren’t OK. Men are even attacked forthe way they sit on a chair or a subway seat. Many teachers make it a policy to call on boys last in class and to give girls extra attention. On most campuses when it comes to charges of rape, there is a presumption of guilt. Fraternities have been banished on many campuses.

Inclusion is merely the new soft, cottony term for marginalizing, shutting down, and kicking out the disfavored.

When a large-scale survey of college students’ attitudes toward free speech was released this week, the terms were puzzling. Students were presented with the following choice: Is it more important to protect free-speech rights or promote a diverse and inclusive society? A disturbing 53 percent chose the latter option, including large majorities of women, blacks, and Democrats.

The question on everyone’s mind was: How can it be that “free speech” and “inclusion” are opposites? The whole point of the First Amendment, in its clauses on both religion and expression, is to protect the right to think and express unpopular, minority, even radical views. Yet the question in the survey was cleverly phrased: It unveiled the troubling truth that like so many other euphemisms, inclusion has come to signify its opposite. The important student constituency of the Democratic party simply revealed what is true of the Left overall: When they say “inclusion,” they’re talking about “exclusion.”

The survey doesn’t make sense unless you acknowledge this fact. “Free speech” and “in the name of diversity, everyone is allowed to say their piece” aren’t opposing ideas. “Free speech” vs. “shut up, heretic” are. When these students extol “inclusion” they aren’t talking about being welcoming to minorities, women, or unpopular viewpoints. They aren’t thinking about Jason Riley (a black author who was disinvited from a Virginia Tech speaking engagement because of the administration’s fear that he might spark protests) or Christina Hoff Sommers (who this month was blocked from entering the forum for her speech at the law school of Oregon’s Lewis & Clark College, then repeatedly shouted down and interrupted, then asked to cut off her remarks by the dean of diversity and inclusion because the students were getting “antsy”). They are portraying free speech as a zero-sum game in which the speech of X cancels out the speech of Y, who after all could have been appearing in that hall or on that op-ed page instead.

Fewer and fewer college students are choosing to major in English. Professor Duke Pesta, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh laments that and thinks he knows what it will take to arrest that decline. As he writes in today’s Martin Center article,

A major in English was once a serious endeavor masquerading as a frivolous one. Despite the occasional “do you want fries with that?” condescension from business or science students, the study of literature — immersion in its aesthetic, historical, and philosophical contexts — conserved for posterity a reservoir of truth and paid forward for humanity a legacy of beauty that inspired business to philanthropize the arts, and science to technologize our access to the great authors.

Today, a major in English is an increasingly frivolous endeavor masquerading as a serious one.

What has gone wrong? The problem, Pesta argues, is that English Departments have largely been taken over by “progressives” who don’t care much about great literature, but are fixated on leftist politics. You know the type — everything must be analyzed from race, class, and gender angles.

If the people in charge wanted to turn things around (and Pesta isn’t saying they do), there are three big things they could do.

First, go back to teaching classic books and authors. He writes,

For thousands of years, Western culture defined, evaluated, and accepted certain values and aesthetic experiences as canonical. These values had very little to do with politics, broadly understood, but expounded higher moral understandings and offered deeper insights into human nature. Racial, sexual, and economic biases were never the primary (or secondary or tertiary) criteria by which canon-building occurred.

Second, focus on ideas, not ideologies. Pesta rightly says,

The classics only matter if we give them fair hearing. Across English departments, postmodern reading strategies drown out or shout down original texts and voices, reducing them to strawmen and co-opting them to speak the language of progressivism.