RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Mitch Albom’s magical book titled The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto, “narrated by the voice of Music itself,” there is a singular line that describes what is sorely lacking in our world today. Many people speak of the cultural changes – perhaps even the cultural rot – demoralizing far too many Americans. Instead, we need, as Albom asserts, an understanding that “the secret is not to make your music louder but to make the world quieter.” Given the cacophony of brutal words spewed online via Twitter or by so many in show business and politics, we need a return to quiet introspection. It is imperative that we approach subjects with reason and logic rather than capitulate to the empty barrels that make the most noise.

In the world of education, it is long overdue to expect – in fact, demand – not perfection, but surely excellence. The soft bigotry of low expectations is producing a crop of young people who are functionally illiterate, historically ignorant, and frighteningly incoherent. For starters, the teaching of phonics must begin in kindergarten. I have college students who cannot sound out words or names because they were never taught how to use phonics. Moreover, students do not know what an anthology is because books are now replaced with readings on the internet. They have no clue about biblical or mythological allusions. There is a constant level of superficiality despite the plethora of information available to them. Few have learned the skills of separating the wheat from the chaff.

The so-called adults in the room are abdicating their responsibilities to mold and lead young people to make in-depth and thoughtful decisions. Instead, the focus is on who can scream the loudest and who can virtually blackmail higher authority. Facts are forsaken while censoring ideas is accepted, even applauded. This is not a good silence.

We need to return to ideas and language that evoke the sublime, not the gutter talk that pollutes so much conversation these days. We need to instill a return to the days of the “magic words” such as “please” and “thank you.” I cringe every time a person says “no problem” when I say “thank you.” It implies that being polite is a hardship in the first place.

Dizzy Gillespie once said, “It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” In fact, “[s]ilence enhances music” just as pauses offer think time. But there are few rests in life anymore. It is a constant din.

Who knew that removing the federal government from debates over school bathroom policies would be considered an assault on LGBT rights? That’s the argument activists made last week when the Department of Education (DOE) announced that it would begin enforcing Title IX the way the federal government always had, up until the second term of the Obama administration. That’s when the Obama DOE announced that the word “sex” now meant “gender identity” — and ordered schools to open up their bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and dorms accordingly.

It’s understandable that many ordinary Americans recoiled at this transgender mandate. Most Americans — including those who identify as transgender — aren’t activists and want to find ways to peacefully coexist. Most can understand why a man who identifies as a woman doesn’t want to be forced into the men’s room but also understand why women don’t want a man in the ladies’ room. These concerns are even more heightened when dealing with students.

New transgender policies raise five distinct areas of concern — privacy, safety, equality, liberty, and ideology — and the Trump administration is right to reject the radical Obama policies in favor of letting local officials work to find reasonable compromises.

“What made the event so memorable was how uneventful it was. This is what counts as a triumph on an American campus today. ”

Waiting to enter the university building that would house Thursday evening’s debate, I encountered a security guard, ruddy and robust. From a private firm, he looked unsure of his role on a college campus. “Expecting trouble?” I asked. He was noncommittal but gave off a whiff of apprehension. “Things could get out of hand,” he said. “A white supremacist’s coming to speak.”

The lecturer to whom he referred so damningly—and inaccurately—was Charles Murray, a libertarian social scientist who’s had more controversy thrust upon him than almost any other American public intellectual. Critics say that the disputation that shrouds Mr. Murray is entirely deserved, and many regard him in precisely the terms the unknowing guard had used.

This is largely on account of a book Mr. Murray co-wrote in 1994, “The Bell Curve.” Sections of it have been brandished as proving Mr. Murray believes that differences in IQ among individuals are attributable to race. Ergo, he’s a toxic racist. Mr. Murray’s lecture at Middlebury College last year was disrupted violently, sending his faculty escort to the hospital. This evening, Stanford took no chances.

Two hundred yards away, at a picturesque spot called History Corner, was a group of student protesters who didn’t want Mr. Murray on campus. “Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray’s got to go,” they chanted. Their gusto was impressive, though their lack of originality left me feeling shortchanged. Was that the best they could do with their world-class education? The drabness of their prosody was lifted somewhat by a spirited young rapper, although her punch line, “F— Steve Bannon, f— the Western canon,” seemed misdirected.

Mr. Murray had been invited by Stanford as part of a new university initiative “to help promote discussion of a diversity of perspectives” on campus. He was to debate Francis Fukuyama, perhaps America’s best-known political scientist, on the subject of “Inequality and Populism.” In the weeks preceding the event, argument had raged among students, and some faculty, about the merits of inviting Mr. Murray. Objections to his presence came at a furious pace and fell into two categories.

The abstract of a paper by Jacob S. Bennett published in the scholarly journal Whiteness and Education, Feb. 6:
IT IS HARD TO THINK THAT THIS IS REAL AND NOT A PARODY…..RSK
The goal of this interpretive study was to further research in the field of Whiteness studies by empirically analysing how a racially conscious white male teacher interacts with his minoritised and White students. The teacher’s classroom was examined using Critical Race and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). Two empirical assertions were developed based on the continual search for disconfirming evidence within interview and observational data. Results show the teacher participant created a learning environment in which his black minoritised students felt comfortable, trusted, and respected.

It started innocently enough, with a poster advertising a Women In Math club event at BYU that featured “data science, topology, number theory and dynamical systems.” It had photographs of the people who would speak at the event.

But because those speakers are men, it was attacked:

The College Fix reports that the school apologized for the optics, which were accidental, but it wasn’t enough for some people:

When the university’s math department apologized for any offense taken Wednesday morning, while saying they were amused by the optics of the poster, that just led to more accusations of being insensitive to women or marginalizing them somehow.

Well, the optics were amusing. You see, while some were tweeting out things like this:
Naty Clementi @ncclementi
Replying to @stephdriggs
The might have change the poster but it seems that there will be 4 dudes talking anyways. This is the definition of mansplanning in a poster…
Dr. Batman @BackFromTen
Replying to @stephdriggs
Yeah, I think the issue here is that a group of men is going to give some sort of workshop to women about women… mathematically mansplaining. Bring in some outside female mathematicians if you don’t have any.

Well, the poster was designed by Bryn Balls-Barker, a research assistant at Brigham Young University. A woman.

Whoops.

Unfortunately, this is the world we live in today. People see four dudes speaking to a women’s math club, and automatically are offended. It couldn’t possibly be anything but nefarious. They want to get offended.

The truth is, nothing happened. There was no “mathematical mansplaining” taking place. Balls-Barker argued: “A lot of my success in statistics has come from networking, which has included men, and I think it was a good idea to try to include more voices in your department in the club.” In other words, she invited the male speakers to provide networking opportunities for the women. CONTINUE AT SITE

A writing guide at Purdue University advises students to avoid words with “man” in them — such as “mailman” and “mankind” — in order to write “in a non-sexist, non-biased way.”

“Although MAN in its original sense carried the dual meaning of adult human and adult male, its meaning has come to be so closely identified with adult male that the generic use of MAN and other words with masculine markers should be avoided,” the guide states.

“Writing in a non-sexist, non-biased way is both ethically sound and effective,” it advises. “Non-sexist writing is necessary for most audiences; if you write in a sexist manner and alienate much of your audience from your discussion, your writing will be much less effective.”

According to the guide, “mankind” should be replaced with words such as “humanity,” “people,” and “human beings,” and “mailman” should be replaced with “mail carrier.” One of the other words it cautions against is “man-made,” suggesting that students use instead the word “synthetic,” “manufactured,” or “machine-made.”

I’m all for gender equality, but I have to say that this seems a bit overblown. I’m a woman (not to brag), and I can tell you that there is approximately a zero percent chance that seeing a word like “mankind” in someone’s work would “alienate” me as the guide suggests. It’s just not that serious, and I’m just not that sensitive.

Taxes are down. Jobs are forming all over. Regulations have been slashed. Government coffers are filling up. Companies are forming. Migrants are choosing legal over illegal immigration. The nightmare of Obamacare is almost over. Europe is paying its NATO bills. The ISIS empire is dead. North Korea is trembling. Russia is on the run.

And somehow, according to a widely dispersed poll, we elected the worst thing we could have done to ourselves in our current president. All those good things, and somehow President Trump has nothing to do with them.

This new poll, put out by a couple of political science professors, places President Trump at rock bottom in its rankings of all the U.S. presidents. Worse than Warren G. Harding. Worse than James Buchanan. Worse than Franklin Pierce. Worse than Jimmy Carter. And certainly worse than Barack Obama, who correspondingly rose to the top ten in the same estimation of the same political scientists. After bringing us the Iran deal, Obamacare, the one-way love-fest with Castro, the unmaskings, the IRS targeting of dissidents, the global apology tour, the SEIU thugcraft, the politicization of the Department of Justice, and Ben Rhodes, he’s top ten!

That was the finding of the 2018 Presidents & Executive Politics Presidential Greatness Survey, released Monday by professors Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Boise State University. The survey results, ranking American presidents from best to worst, were based on responses from 170 current and recent members of the Presidents and Executive Politics section of the American Political Science Association.

What it really shows is how politicized the faculty lounges at the nation’s university departments of political science and maybe history have gotten. Diversity of opinion in what should be a largely apolitical field is over. Faculty member A vets faculty applicant B, and only the leftists, with views exactly like those of the ruling cliques, get in. Nobody else is allowed; conservatives are shut out. And then they get together and put out rubbish like this.

Course looks at ‘whiteness’ as ‘culturally constructed and economically incorporated entity’

Yale University is offering a course this semester which aims to help students understand and counteract “whiteness,” exploring such topics as “white imagination,” “white property” and “white speech.

”http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/42121/

According to the syllabus for “Constructions of Whiteness” obtained by The College Fix, the English course is an “interdisciplinary approach to examining our understanding of whiteness.”

The class, which is apparently being offered for the first time this semester, discusses “whiteness as a culturally constructed and economically incorporated entity, which touches upon and assigns value to nearly every aspect of American life and culture.”

The goal of the class is to “create a lab for the construction of counternarratives around whiteness in any creative form: play, poem, memoir, etc.,” states the syllabus.

Taught by Professor Claudia Rankine, the class is divided into eight topics: Constructions of Whiteness, White Property, White Masculinity, White Femininity, White Speech, White Prosperity, White Spaces and White Imagination, according to the syllabus.

Students in the course are asked to read books such as Michael Kimmel’s “Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era,” Richard Dyer’s “White: Essays on Race and Culture,” and Richard Delgado’s and Jean Stefanic’s “Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror.”

Other required readings include Hazel Carby’s “White Woman, Listen!,” Juliana Spahr’s “My White Feminism” and Professor Rankine’s own work, “The White Card.”

An adjunct professor at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), pending the school’s investigation into his case, may soon be the latest victim of the campus “microaggression” craze.

Eric Triffin has since 1986 been an adjunct at SCSU, where he’s taught dozens of public health classes. He’s known for his upbeat personality, and often begins class by asking a student to pick and play a song. Oftentimes, Triffin joins in and sings along, too.

This hasn’t been a problem for years. But last week, one student played a rap song allegedly featuring the line “I’m a happy n——.” Triffin — as usual — had been singing along.

Immediately, one black student complained — and just as quickly, Triffin apologized.

“I immediately apologized in the moment when it happened,” Triffin told PJ Media. But that wasn’t enough. The Black Student Union was told about the incident, and within hours, it released a video statement calling for the administration to take action against Triffin.

“Students of color should not be subjected to faculty and staff using racial slurs during the process of their education,” said Eric Clinton, president of the Black Student Union.

“To the administration, please do not excuse the actions taken by professor Eric Triffin.”

In an interview with PJ Media, Clinton argued that — regardless of Triffin’s intentions — there is no “positive” way a racial slur could be used, especially since Triffin is white. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Yale psychiatrist who wanted President Trump “contained” for an emergency mental health evaluation is still at it.Bandy Lee spoke to the Yale College Democrats on Wednesday evening about “the impact an unstable public leader can have on society,” and the duty folks in her profession have to speak out about it.

“I’ve been concerned about the deteriorating state of public mental health, and part of that showed up in the attraction and election of an impaired leader in the first place — pathology attracts pathology,” Lee told the audience. “If we were able to educate people [enough], we could prevent a lot of these things.”

According to the Yale Daily News, Lee said the morning following Trump’s huge upset election victory, “thousands of people contacted her” with their worries about impending violence.

Based on what she had seen in some of her past patients, Lee said, she felt an obligation to warn the public about Mr. Trump.

From the story:

Lee stressed that she did not diagnose Trump when she spoke out about his mental state to congressmen; rather she assessed the danger he poses to the public. She noted that the president’s tendency to boast about sexual assault, taunt nuclear power and endorse violence in key public speeches can cause harm “because [he’s] laying the groundwork for the culture of violence.”