RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

These days the California State University Fresno isn’t getting attention for its world-class agricultural college or for its top-rated nursing program. Instead, it’s getting noticed for its hard-left professors tweeting outrageous insults about President Trump, or violating students’ free-speech rights. First was the adjunct history professor who last year tweeted “Trump must hang.” A month later a public-health professor got into an argument with pro-life students, then started defacing their approved chalk messages with his foot because they weren’t in a “free speech” area—an idea patently unconstitutional.

This week, an English professor tweeted that ex-First Lady Barbara Bush, who died on April 17, was a “racist” who raised a “war criminal,” and that she “was happy the witch was dead.” The predictable conservative media storm of dudgeon followed, turning an obscure academic mediocrity into a left-wing heroine and free-speech martyr.

Way to go, guys. Next time try ignoring whatever juvenile tweet-tantrum comes from someone desperate for attention and spurious “Resistance” credibility. Professors saying stupid things is a dog-bites-man story.

Nor will all the coverage accomplish anything. Forget demanding that she be fired. As she bragged in a follow-up tweet, “sweetie i work as a tenured professor. I make 100K a year doing that. i will never be fired” [sic throughout]. Apart from exaggerating her salary, she is right. Professors in the Cal State system are not just protected by tenure, but by a powerful union that the system usually doesn’t think is worth the time and money challenging. I know our provost here at Fresno State implied otherwise, claiming a tenured professor can be fired. But that’s a sophistic sop to media critics and disgruntled donors. The tweet was issued on the professor’s own twitter account, and the message is political speech of a sort long protected by the First Amendment and by the idea of academic freedom, which in the politicized university is very elastic. The only way for a tenured professor to get fired is to be convicted of a felony or to find her job eliminated by budget cuts. And firing a “woman of color” like a self-proclaimed “Palestinian” Arab is an even longer shot.

2017 was a bad year at Fresno State. 2018 looks to be even worse.

In the winter of last year, Lars Maischak had tweeted, “To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance.”

The next day he inquired, “Has anyone started soliciting money and design drafts for a monument honoring the Trump assassin, yet?”

Toward the end of the week, he proposed the mass murder of Republicans, “Justice = The execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant.”

Maischak was a history adjunct at Fresno State whose topics had included, “Marx and Hegel for Historians.”

President Castro eventually clarified that calls to murder the President of the United States and millions of Republicans, “do not reflect the position of the University.”

Castro failed to clearly condemn Maischak’s murderous tweets. Instead Maischak took a voluntary leave “conducting research off campus”. His university faculty page appears to be active.

Had an adjunct called for the murder of Obama, the reaction would have been very different.

Now, Randa Jarrar, a tenured Muslim professor in Fresno State’s Department of English, responded to Barbara Bush’s death by calling the deceased 92-year-old woman a “racist”.

“I’m happy the witch is dead,” she gloated. “Can’t wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise.”

Two professors, one in California and one in New Jersey, are reportedly under investigation by their employers for behavior that at a minimum is rude and arrogant and that, some hope, could cost them their jobs. I believe that both are exemplars of the moral hazard that accompanies the exalted status accorded professors, often aggravated by the practice of granting tenure.

Tuesday evening, following news of the death of Barbara Bush, Professor Randa Jarrar, who teaches creative writing at Fresno State University, violated the norms of decency when she tweeted:

…and followed up with tweets obviously intended to inflict emotional pain on the family survivors:

To top it off, she tweeted a taunt that she is invulnerable thanks to her status as a tenured professor.

Imagine finding this quote in your kid’s history book, calling you a racist, angry bigot because you voted for Trump:

Trump’s voters saw the vote as a victory for the people who, like themselves, had been forgotten in a fast-changing America–a mostly older, 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. [Emphasis added]

This gem was found in the high school AP History book entitled By the People, A History of the United States, published by Pearson Education. Source sent photographs of the material to WNOW radio program “The Joe and Alex Show.” The book pulls no punches when it comes to criticizing Christians as terrified bigots. “Those who had long thought of the nation as a white and Christian country sometimes found it difficult to adjust.” The book continues on, calling Trump an outright racist. “Trump tapped into a sense of alienation and ‘being left behind’ that many voters–most of all white poor and working-class voters–felt. But quite unlike Sanders, Trump was also extremely anti-immigrant, especially attacking Muslim immigrants.”

But if that’s not bad enough, don’t worry! It gets worse!

“Most thought 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.” CONTINUE AT SITE

In another example of how pretentious the modern college generation can be, the protesters who disrupted a speech by Duke president Vincent Price to alumni this weekend are miffed that they were admonished by school officials, and not those in attendance who had dared to voice their displeasure.

On Saturday, demonstrators crashed the stage while Price was speaking, shouting “President Price get off the stage” and “Whose University? Our University!” and then listed demands which include training staff to deal with undocumented students, and nixing “medically unnecessary surgery on intersex infants” in the Duke Health System.

Angered alumni booed, used profanity, and even turned their backs to the activists as they spoke.

According to The Chronicle, the protesters were “surprised by the extent of the alumni’s negative reactions.” SeniorBryce Cracknell said he was “disappointed that the administrators focused more on stopping the students than angry alumni” (emphasis added).

“Instead of actually going to the alumni and saying ‘that’s not appropriate’ or removing them from the space, they were more worried about us,” he said.

From the story:

The students regrouped outside on the steps of the Chapel to provide further explanation of their 12 demands. Several supportive alumni joined them, even offering suggestions for how to update their manifesto, Walk noted.

“I think when we walked out all of us were kind of shaken by the negative feedback, but so many alumni came up to us and were like, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you for continuing this work,’” Walk said.

Back inside the auditorium, David Henderson, Trinity ‘68, connected the students’ protest to the 1968 Vigil [see here] in a comment to Price during the Q&A session after his speech.

“Nobody in the administration thought that what we did was appropriate. In history it has come to be enshrined,” Henderson said. …

In a group statement, the protesters condemned any potential punishments.

“What an incredible irony it would be if in the midst of celebrating a history of activism, Duke is considering punishing the current generation of organizers on campus and the student groups, faculty and alumni that support us,” they wrote.

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?”