RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

The tuition at those schools now averages $75,000.00 per year for the total re-education of students into group think “progressives” incapable of debate or respect for dissenting opinions. rsk

The odds of getting into Harvard and other elite universities are slimmer for students who apply in the regular pool than for those who apply in early rounds.

This harsh reality will be driven home when Harvard, Yale, Penn and other Ivy League institutions release their regular-decision admission notices Wednesday evening: Large proportions of their incoming first-year classes were locked in months ago under early-admittance programs.

High-school seniors desperate for a leg up in the brutal competition for spots at selective colleges have increasingly been applying through binding early-decision or more flexible early-action programs, rather than meeting Jan. 1 application deadlines and waiting until spring for an answer.

The admission rate for early-round candidates, who typically learn their fates in December, is often two or three times that of regular applicants. Harvard last year admitted 14.5% of early-action applicants and about 3.3% of regular-decision applicants. At Yale, those rates were 17.1% and 5%, respectively. Many institutions fill 40% or more of their incoming classes with early applicants.

Dartmouth College expects students admitted through its early-decision process to make up nearly half its first-year class next fall. The school received 2,270 early applications, compared with roughly 20,000 in the regular cycle. Early-decision applicants make up 53% of Northwestern University’s current freshman class, and just over half at Vanderbilt University.
​The Early Bird Gets AcceptedIvy League schools take a much higher shareof applicants during early-admission rounds.Admission rates for class of 2021Source: the schools*Columbia’s admission rate combines early- andregular-round admission figures.
Early admitRegular admitBrownColumbia*CornellDartmouthHarvardPrincetonPennYale0%102030

“It’s staggering,” said Brennan Barnard, director of college counseling at the Derryfield School in Manchester, N.H. This year, 62 of his 65 seniors submitted an application by Dec. 1 and about three-quarters of the class had an acceptance coming out of the early rounds. Many apply early not necessarily because they are attached to one particular school, but because they fear missing out on the chance to get in somewhere, he said.

Students see schools’ single-digit acceptance rates, worry about their chances and apply early, perpetuating the rush for another year, says Stephen Friedfeld, chief operating officer at Newton, Mass.-based admission-consulting firm AcceptU.

Early-round applicants are either accepted, rejected or deferred to be reconsidered in the general pool. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continuing its campaign to expose the campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine as neo-Nazis, the David Horowitz Freedom Center placed posters this week on the campuses of the University of Texas-San Antonio and the University of Texas-Arlington. The posters document 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. The posters also expose Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of SJP, as an anti-Semite and supporter of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas.

Statements shared by SJP activists on social media, which are documented on the posters 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.”

Students for Justice in Palestine was co-founded in 2001 by Hamas-supporting Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian who has openly called for an intifada, or violent uprising, in America, and has shared anti-Semitic memes on social media. One of the posters placed on the campuses exposes Bazian’s recent 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.”

SJP employs funds from the terrorist party Hamas—funneled to American campuses through an intermediary group, American Muslims for Palestine, chaired by Professor Bazian—in order to launch an all-out political assault on the Jewish state and to create a climate of hatred towards Jews and students who support Israel on campus.

As a result of this support and funding from Hamas, SJP has become the principal collegiate organization in the Hamas terror network and the campus propaganda war against Israel. It heavily promotes the Hamas-endorsed and funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, a form of economic terrorism which seeks to weaken, delegitimize, and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.

‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” observed― Philip K. Dick in “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.”

Somewhere deep in a file drawer, or on a computer server humming away in a basement, are thousands upon thousands of numbers, with names and identities attached. They’re called grades. They represent an objective reality, which exists independent of what people want reality to be. They sit silently, completely indifferent to indignation, angry petitions, irritable gestures, teachers’ removal from classrooms—all the furor and clamor of institutional politics.

Those numbers are now solely within the control of the individual students who earn them and the educational institutions that generate them—powerful entities ruled by bureaucracies that serve as gatekeepers to privileged positions in our society. They are jealously guarded, protected by cloaks of confidentiality and secrecy. But they are what they are. Hiding facts is not the same as changing them.

Of course the numbers can be ignored. When it comes to grades—which measure students’ knowledge, proficiency and achievement—we can declare they don’t matter and that complete nondisclosure is therefore a wise course.

The problem is that students, including law students, go out into the real world. They are hired, paid and expected to perform, and their actions have real consequences for others. Whether we like it or not, grades help predict future performance. Some social actors acknowledge this, implicitly or overtly. As a law professor, I observe, for example, that federal judges unapologetically select clerks based on academic record and rank, and that elite law firms are also highly grade-conscious.

The diversity imperative demands dissimulation and evasion. The academic-achievement gap, the behavioral differences that produce socioeconomic disparities, and the ubiquity of racial preferences must all be suppressed in public discourse, since they undercut the narrative that white racism is the driving force in American society. This dissimulation was on display last week at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, when Dean Ted Ruger announced that law professor Amy Wax would no longer teach mandatory first-year law courses at the school. In a memo announcing his decision, Ruger accused Wax of “conscious indifference” to truth. It is Ruger, however, who has distorted facts.

Ousting Wax from her first-year civil-procedure class has been a desideratum of the academic Left since she published an op-ed last August celebrating bourgeois virtues like the work ethic, respect for authority, and sexual temperance. Wax was deemed a “white supremacist” for suggesting that not all cultures were equal in preparing people for participation in a modern economy.

In December, Dean Ruger asked her to desist from teaching first-year students and to take a leave of absence, in the hope that the controversy spurred by her op-ed would die down. As a “pluralistic dean,” he said, he needed to accommodate all factions in the school. Wax declined the request and reported the details of the conversation immediately thereafter to friends. (I was one of the people to whom she spoke.) Wax later described the conversation in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Ruger denied her account through a spokesman, claiming that he had merely engaged in a pro forma discussion of her sabbatical schedule, such as he would have done with any other professor. Ruger’s version is not credible, though: in an informal survey, no law professor polled reports ever having a dean drop by his office to discuss a routine sabbatical. This alleged bureaucratic convention does not exist, unless Dean Ruger has only recently introduced it.