RUTHFULLY YOURS

Academia has, for many decades, been a bastion of leftist orthodoxy. But the current extremity of its actions and beliefs have reached a level that should trouble the majority of Americans, and call into question the wisdom of funding, through taxes, tuition, grants or donations, of institutions that may be doing the nation far more harm than good.

Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn notes that in a survey of young Americans, “one in two ‘millennials’ say they would rather live under Socialism or Communism than a capitalist democracy. This follows trends from the 2016 elections, in which more millennials in the primaries voted for avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders than for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump combined.”
The reasons for that preference become abundantly clear upon examining the educational experience they have been subjected to.

A survey of reported incidents and academic attitudes across the nation indicate that it’s not a liberal perspective that is purveyed, promulgated, and forced upon students, but something significantly more extreme, including attitudes that oppose the very founding principles of the United States.

Writing in Commentary, Sohrab Ahmari worries that , “the most celebrated education-reform organization in the U.S.” has “transformed itself into an arm of the progressive movement? Teach for America, or TFA, the national corps of recent graduates who commit two years to teaching in underserved classrooms across the country, was founded to help close the achievement gap between rich and poor students. But now it increasingly functions as a platform for radical identity politics and the anti-Trump “resistance…In remaking itself, TFA has subtly downgraded the principles that had won it allies across the spectrum…TFA’s message seems to be that until numerous other social ills are cured-until immigration is less restricted, policing becomes more gentle, and poverty is eliminated-an excellent education will elude the poor. That was the status-quo defeatism TFA originally set out to challenge…TFA’s leaders have now fully enlisted the organization in the culture war-to the detriment of its mission and the high-minded civic sensibility that used to animate its work.”

College progressives these days are obsessed with gender parity: they say there aren’t enough women seeking STEM degrees, for example.

But they do say they want “parity.” So it must be progressive to criticize a lack of gender parity when men are underrepresented, right?

A Dartmouth op-ed recently criticized the school’s hiring of primarily women to fill roles on the student life executive board at the school. Student Ryan Spencer made a bid to be part of the board, a bid that ultimately failed. Of the 19 current members, only four are male. In other words, 80 percent of those hired for the board are female.

Spencer took to the pages of The Dartmouth to take issue with the disparity. He stated his disbelief in claims that merit was the deciding factor, not gender.

Spencer has a valid point, of course. If the numbers were flipped, wouldn’t feminists be outraged? Wouldn’t people be demanding a change? Of course they would. They’d launch protests over the exclusion of so many women — and maybe with good cause.

However, there are no protests planned in Spencer’s defense. Instead, the outrage is all directed at him.

The diversity bureaucracy has finally swallowed an entire college. San Diego State University has just named to its presidency a vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity, hired from the University of California, Davis. The new SDSU president, Adela de la Torre, is a peerless example of the intersection of identity politics and the ballooning student-services bureaucracy.

As vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity at UC Davis, de la Torre presided over a division made up of a whopping 28 departments—not academic departments, but bureaucratic and identity-based ones, such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Resource Center; the Center for African Diaspora Student Success; the Center for Chicanx and Latinx Student Success; the Native American Academic Student Success Center; the Middle Eastern/South Asian Student Affairs Office; the Women’s Resources and Research Center; the Undocumented Student Center; Retention Initiatives; the Office of Educational Opportunity and Enrichment Services; and the Center for First-Generation Student Scholars. This gallimaufry of identity-based fiefdoms illustrates the symbiosis between an artificially segmented, identity-obsessed student body and the campus bureaucracy: the more that students carve themselves into micro-groups claiming oppressed status, the more pretext there is for new cadres of administrators to shield them from oppression. (The causation runs in the opposite direction as well: the very existence of such identity-based bureaucracies encourages students to see themselves as belonging to separate tribes.) The admission of students who do not share the academic qualifications of their peers also creates a vast bureaucratic genre of retention services, one now taking aim at traditional pedagogy said to handicap underrepresented minorities.

WASHINGTON – Actor Tim Allen has joined the cast of new movie aimed at disrupting the liberal and PC culture in Hollywood, on college campuses and in comedy.

Allen’s “Last Man Standing” sitcom was canceled last year and outraged fans believe ABC pulled the plug because the family comedy highlighted conservative values. ABC denied it was over politics.

Allen has signed onto the docudrama “No Safe Spaces” that’s expected to hit theaters in the fall.

Fellow comedian Adam Carolla and conservative radio show host Dennis Prager are making the movie to promote free speech at a time they say the entertainment industry, media and college campuses too often shut down or blackball controversial viewpoints.

“Nothing kills comedy quite like people who are constantly offended,” Carolla told The Post. “It’s impossible to be funny if we’re not allowed to poke fun at each other and that’s what’s happening with a new generation of people who seem to be offended for a living.

“If we can’t have fun with one another than we lose our humanity. If free speech goes, then our basic freedoms will follow soon after.”

In a movie clip released to The Post, Allen joins a roundtable discussion with fellow comedians about how the PC culture is hurting comedy.

For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and students increasingly fear bullying and persecution.

The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the “All for All” strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to “racial equity.”

“Equity” in this context does not mean “equality” or “fairness.” It means racial identity politics—an ideology that blames minority students’ academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s color-blind ideal, and focuses on uprooting “white privilege.”

The Edina school district’s All for All plan mandated that henceforth “all teaching and learning experiences” would be viewed through the “lens of racial equity,” and that only “racially conscious” teachers and administrators should be hired. District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina’s racial achievement gap, which they attributed to “barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.”

As a result, the school system’s obsession with “white privilege” now begins in kindergarten. At Edina’s Highlands Elementary School, for example, K-2 students participate in the Melanin Project. The children trace their hands, color them to reflect their skin tone, and place the cut-outs on a poster reading, “Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone elses!-[sic] Everyone is special!”

Highlands Elementary’s new “racially conscious” elementary school principal runs a blog for the school’s community. On it, she approvingly posted pictures of Black Lives Matter propaganda and rainbow gay-pride flags—along with a picture of protesters holding a banner proclaiming “Gay Marriage Is Our Right.” On a more age-appropriate post, she recommended an A-B-C book for small children entitled A is for Activist. (Peruse the book and you find all sorts of solid-gold: “F is for Feminist,” “C is for…Creative Counter to Corporate Vultures,” and “T is for Trans.”)

At Edina High School, the equity agenda is the leading edge of a full-scale ideological reeducation campaign. A course description of an 11th-grade U.S. Literature and Composition course puts it this way: “By the end of the year, you will have . . . learned how to apply marxist [sic], feminist, post-colonial [and] psychoanalytical . . .lenses to literature.”

The primary vehicle in the indoctrination effort is a year-long English course—required of all 10th-graders—that centers, not on reading literature and enhancing writing skills, but on the politicized themes of “Colonization,” “Immigration” and “Social Constructions of Race, Class and Gender.”

One student characterized the course this way on the “Rate My Teachers” website: “This class should be renamed . . . ‘Why white males are bad, and how oppressive they are.’” (The negative review has since been deleted from Edina High’s “Rate My Teachers” page; but this is a screenshot from before it was memory-holed.)

Namaste, brownshirt.!!!!

When it comes to exercise, yoga is one of the more unique practices. Hailing from Hindu religious tradition, it focuses on flexibility, balance, and awareness. It has been popular in the United States for decades, growing into a robust industry.

However, the bigoted Leftist ideology that condemns “cultural appropriation” has led one professor to lecture people of the “wrong” DNA for doing it.

Shreena Gandhi, a professor of religious studies at Michigan State University, recently co-wrote an article where she claims the practice of yoga by white people contributes to white supremacy. Her co-author, Lillie Wolff, is a self-described “antiracist white Jewish organizer, facilitator, and healer.” The article begins: “To the so many white people who practice yoga, please don’t stop, but please do take a moment to look outside of yourself and understand how the history of yoga practice in the United States is intimately linked to some of the larger forces of white supremacy.”

Insanity.

Basically, they’re rehashing the claim that partaking in activities not invented by your ancestors can somehow damage people who trace their lineage to that activity’s founding culture. If you do not practice the activity with sufficient reverence — say, you do yoga for fitness but ignore the Hinduism — you might be a racist.

There. I saved you the hassle of having to read a whole lot of nonsense.