RUTHFULLY YOURS

Many pundits describe the Ivy League as “a hedge fund with classes.”

They are right, and Congress seems to agree. House and Senate Republicans are proposing a new 1.4 percent tax on endowment income for America’s richest private colleges – including the eight Ivy League schools.

Harvard President Drew Faust fiercely opposed the tax, claiming the school’s endowment is “at work in the world” not “locked away in some chest.” But Faust isn’t complaining about the largesse the Ivies receive from the federal government even though the Ivies have amassed an enormous endowment.During the spring, we released our OpenTheBooks Oversight Report: Ivy League, Inc. that showed how $42 billion in U.S. taxpayer subsidies, special tax-breaks, and Federal payments (contracts and grants) went into the eight Ivy League colleges during the past six years. In our comparison of federal contracting and grant payments, the Ivy League outranked sixteen state governments as a recipient of funds – despite amassing a $120 billion endowment.

Here are 10 reasons why tax reform should include the Ivy League:

Ivy League payments, subsidies and special tax treatment cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in taxpayer-backed perks per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.
The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).
In monetary terms, the Ivy League’s “government contracting” business ($25.27 billion – federal contracts and grants) exceeded their educational mission ($22 billion in student tuition) FY2010-FY2015.
The eight colleges of the Ivy League received more money ($4.31 billion) on average annually from the federal government (contracts and grants alone) than sixteen states:see report.
The Ivy League endowment funds (2015) exceeded $119 billion, which is equivalent to nearly $2 million per undergraduate student. At current gift and investment growth rates, the Ivies are pacing for a collective $1 trillion endowment over the next twenty years.
As a non-profit, educational institution, the Ivy League pays no tax on investment gains. Between FY2011-FY2015, the Ivy League schools received a $9.6 billion tax break on the $27.3 billion growth of their endowment funds. In FY2014, the tax-free subsidy on endowment gains amounted to $3.4 billion, or nearly $60,000 per student.
With continued gifts at present rates, the $119 billion endowment fund is equivalent to free tuition to the entire student body in perpetuity. Without new gifts, the endowment is equivalent to a full-ride scholarship for all Ivy League undergraduate students for 51-years, or until 2068.
In FY2014, the balance sheet for all Ivy League colleges showed $194,332,115,120 in accumulated gross assets. This is equivalent to $3.35 million per undergraduate student.
The Ivy League employs 127 professors, administrators or executives who each earned more than $400,000 annually; 47 employees made more than $1 million a year; and four executives made more than $20 million each over the past five years.
In a five-year period (2010-2014) the Ivy League spent $17.8 million on lobbying, which included issues mostly related to their endowment, federal contracting, and immigration and student aid.

Gather ’round children! The Canadian Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario has some super interesting new information for you! First, we’re going to learn a new acronym. Can you say, “LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP?” Let’s try it to the tune of “Old MacDonald!” Everyone sing along! Next, we’ll learn what these letters mean. Are you ready?

L — Lesbian (everyone knows what this is, right?)

G — Gay (and I’m sure I don’t need to explain this to you smarties!)

G — Genderqueer Now this one is new. So let’s make sure we all understand what this means. “Genderqueer; denoting or relating to a person who does not subscribe to conventional gender distinctions but identifies with neither, both, or a combination of male and female genders.” That’s easy, isn’t it, kids? Basically, this is a person who has no idea who or what xey are, okay?

B — Bisexual (That’s self-explanatory, isn’t it?)

D — Demisexual Oh boy! Another new one! Let’s get out the ever-expanding queer dictionary to figure it out! “A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction unless they form a strong emotional connection with someone.” This used to be known as monogamous love. But now we throw the word “sexual” on it to make it attractive to the kids. Got it?

T — Transgender (You all know all about this one! These are boys or girls who dress up like the opposite sex and want everyone to pretend not to notice!)

T — Transexual (You are familiar with these people too! Same as above, only they’ve gone through irreversible surgery to remove healthy body parts because feelings. Let them in your bathroom. Everything is fine.)

T — Two-Spirit Oh my goodness! How exciting! It’s another category no one on earth has ever heard of! This one is complicated, dear ones. For sure you have to be a Native American. And smoking a lot of peyotes could only help to understand what the heck a two-spirit is. It appears to be a third gender not yet discovered by science and only found in the Native American community by gender studies majors who take adventure vacations and hang out in sweat lodges.

I — Intersex (This is that very rare condition that we used to call hermaphrodite, where a child is born with both sex organs of male and female. It is very rare, as in, hardly ever happens. It is a birth defect.)

We are just motoring through all these new terms and if you need a snack to recharge, choose something high protein! We are going to need those brains functioning at peak capacity for this one!

Q — Queer Just when you thought you couldn’t use the word “queer” because it’s an insult, think again! It’s back! Queer is an umbrella term designed to describe all people who aren’t normies. I think. It’s hard to tell. These things do change on an almost daily basis.

Q — Questioning is a term used for people who are still deciding where they are going to fall on this list. It seems contradictory to the “born that way” theory—to have a bunch of people still questioning their sexuality—but the LGBTQWTF brigade says it’s fine, so rest assured, there’s nothing to question about questioning.

A — Asexual people have no interest in sex. This also used to be known as people who are married with kids. See the classic TV show “Married with Children” for an example.

On June 6, 1944, American soldiers risked their lives to storm the beaches of Normandy in what is known as D-Day. Fast-forward 74 years later, and you will find ungrateful students confused about their genders hiding in their safe spaces on the politically correct grounds of a college campus.

Yes, the cult-based schools in which you were once encouraged to express new ideas has now become a place to go and get brainwashed into conforming to leftist beliefs, all while leaving in crippling debt. Students and faculty can now prevent conservative speakers from appearing on the campuses by violently protesting without permits, and they are encouraged to do so. If any of the students hears something he does not like, he declares himself triggered and runs to a safe space.

This booming wave of crybabies are known as the Millennials, “a generation raised not to believe in freedom of speech, but rather that they should have freedom from speech.” According to FIRE, 54% of public and 59% of private universities impose politically correct speech codes. An example of the anti-First Amendment speech codes happened at a university in California on Constitution Day (September 17), 2013. A student was told he could not protest NSA surveillance outside the free speech zone, which made up only approximately 1.37% of the campus. My roommate had a personal story up at University of Minnesota, Duluth where his boss told him he must not refer to females as wo-men when designing school posters, as the inconvenient root may offend feminist activists on the campus. So there you have it: college campuses in today’s society are breeding grounds for fascism, while the students shroud themselves under the veil known as the safe space.

So how can we stop this nonsense? First, we eliminate safe spaces and promote the expression of new ideas instead of filtering out ones you do not like by aggressively coloring your anger out in a room filled with puppies (yes, these places do exist). Second, we allow students to assemble peacefully on campuses to express their ideas and beliefs without being shut down by protesting students who think they are right because they talk louder than their opposition. Third, we stop implementing political correctness in school handouts, posters, and newsletters. Fourth, we hire professors fit for the job, regardless of their ideological beliefs. They are there to teach, not to use their appeal to authority fallacy to push their biased political agendas. Lastly, we eliminate useless majors and subjects and departments that just waste money and are there only to persuade students into adopting their political agendas. There are too many students enrolling in majors that do not prepare them for a real job, and there are too many departments that segregate everyone on the basis of identity politics.

We need more students to rise up and start fighting back. We are stronger in number, and there are plenty of students from both sides of the political spectrum who agree that the political correctness and safe space culture on campuses is a violation of the First Amendment.

Two Stanford administrators present — Nanci Howe, associate dean and director of student affairs, and Snehal Naik, assistant dean and associate director of student affairs — not only nodded approvingly at the walk-out, but actively aided it, first by denying entry to many students who actually wanted to attend the event, and then by not allowing them to enter after the walkout, despite the fact that the auditorium was largely empty. They also forbade the hosts from live-streaming the talk on the Internet.

The reason for having to smear Robert Spencer was clear. Portraying him as someone who has led to the killing of Muslims was the way to try to have him banned from the campus, without abandoning the principle of free speech. Yet no student or faculty member produced a shred of evidence linking Spencer to violence against Muslims at Stanford or anywhere else. All they were able to produce as “proof” of Spencer’s incitement was the same libelous blurb on the Southern Poverty Law Center website.

What De Leon, Najaer, Beckman and Fine failed to mention was that a mere few months earlier, at the end of May, the Stanford student senate voted to fund an on-campus speech by the son of Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail for orchestrating three deadly attacks.

It is no surprise that students at Stanford University disrupted best-selling author Robert Spencer’s lecture on November 14. Given the lead-up to his talk — “Jihad and the Dangers of Radical Islam: An Honest Discussion” — the scenario was scripted in advance, with the encouragement and support of the school’s administration.

As soon as the Stanford College Republicans invited Spencer, founder of the website Jihad Watch, to speak on campus — as part of the Fred. R. Allen Freedom Lecture Series, sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation — a concerted campaign was launched to prevent him from being allowed to set foot on the premises. Stanford students, faculty members and administrators published a steady stream of articles in the student publications the Stanford Daily and Stanford Review, claiming not only that Spencer was unqualified to speak to them — despite frequently addressing FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force, military, and other government groups for years — but also pronounced that his presence threatened Muslim students on campus; that he enabled anti-Semitism; that his message deprived Muslims of “personhood;” and that he was endangering students by replying to their attacks on his website.

When that effort failed, they employed other means to intimidate Spencer and the students who wished to hear what he had to say. Not only did hundreds of protesters cause a disturbance outside the venue, but another 150 entered the auditorium, played Arabic music loudly to drown out what Spencer was saying, and then staged a mass walk-out minutes after the event began.

Two Stanford administrators present — Nanci Howe, associate dean and director of student affairs, and Snehal Naik, assistant dean and associate director of student affairs — not only nodded approvingly at the walk-out, but actively aided it, first by denying entry to many students who actually wanted to attend the event, and then by not allowing them to enter after the walkout, despite the fact that the auditorium was largely empty. They also forbade the hosts from live-streaming the talk on the Internet.

The president of Rutgers University in New Jersey defended the free speech rights of three faculty members who have recently come under intense criticism for their comments on Israel and Jews.https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/11/20/rutgers-president-defends-academic-freedom-of-three-professors-blasted-for-comments-on-israel-jews/

Speaking in a town hall sponsored by the Rutgers student government on Thursday, President Robert Barchi noted ongoing media attention focused on Michael Chikindas, a microbiology professor who published multiple antisemitic, homophobic and misogynistic social media posts; Jasbir Puar, a women’s studies professor whose latest book accuses Israel of injuring Palestinians “in order to control them”; and Mazen Adi, an adjunct professor of international law who accused Israeli officials of trafficking children’s organs while serving as a spokesperson for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Barchi began his address by illustrating the difference between free speech and harassment, noting that placing “a swastika on the side of a building on campus” would not be a violation of the First Amendment, even if it might breach university policies against vandalism.

His argument drew an objection from a woman in the crowd, who said to applause, “it is not free speech.”

Since our universities have become intellectual black holes—dead stars which no longer radiate light but instead suck enlightenment into darkness by the irresistible gravitational pull of their collapse—little wonder that whatever they have to say about their own history and slavery is mere obscurantism. But Princeton, for the moment, wins the palm and the laurel for militant ignorance. Here’s an educational institution that, more than any other, could boast of giving us our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Instead, it is engaged in today’s apparently gratifying (if perverse) self-flagellation of counting the ways in which it was complicit with slavery—minor, compared with the ways in which it gave us our liberty.

Yes, lots of slave-owning Southerners attended the College of New Jersey in its early days. And yes, the university’s first six presidents, from the time of its foundation in 1746, owned slaves—not astonishing when you consider that New Jersey did not abolish slavery until 1804, and that even such a vehement abolitionist as John Jay, a founder of the New York Manumission (anti-slavery) Society, also owned a slave or two at one point in his life. America was—to its everlasting shame—a slave-owning republic, until the northern states outlawed it out of a sense of justice and then fought a Civil War to extirpate it from the rest of the nation—not, as W.E. B. Du Bois rightly says, to assert states’ rights, or to adjust borders, but simply out of the moral recognition that slavery was wrong.

Every slave-owning Founding Father knew that it was wrong, including Thomas Jefferson, who wrote into the Declaration of Independence the immortal words that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to liberty, and who wrote later in his life that “When the measure of [the slaves’] tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress, and . . . by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not to be left to the guidance of a blind fatality.” And so He did, with His terrible swift sword.

One of those early Princeton presidents—the sixth, John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence—was a Scotch Presbyterian minister who brought to these shores the Scottish Enlightenment that also produced Adam Smith and David Hume, and that bristled with a belief in independence of thought and conscience and radical republicanism. And to whom did this great man impart these beliefs? None other than his favorite pupil, Virginia slave-owner James Madison, who went back home to the Piedmont on fire with the idea of liberty of conscience, an idea that, it so happened, ends only in political liberty for the intellectually consistent, as Madison emphatically was. And so Madison sat in his library overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains, reading history and political philosophy, until he arrived at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 with a fully formed plan for the Constitution—which, with remarkable political flexibility, he was able to compromise into something that all the representatives could sign and all the states ratify. And when he understood, as leader of the first Congress under the new Constitution, how avid was the nation’s thirst for a Bill of Rights, he wrote one, and passed it through the legislature, sorry that he hadn’t made it his first piece of business.

‘You’re a racist white supremacist!” a Williams College student shouted at Christina Hoff Sommers, after she finished a recent campus talk on feminism.

To their credit, a handful of students responded to Ms. Sommers’s talk with challenging questions and cogent criticisms. But insults, rants and meltdowns consumed the majority of the question-and-answer session. As president of Uncomfortable Learning, a student group that invites controversial speakers to campus, I did my best to moderate.

After one student activist shouted “f— you!” at the speaker, an administrator seemed to affirm the heckler’s veto, signaling to me with a timeout gesture that it was time to end the event. In an effort to give as many students as possible a chance to engage the speaker, I approached the administrator and negotiated another 15 minutes for questions. But the remainder of the Q&A consisted mostly of bellicose rhetoric and long-winded stories of personal trauma, many of which had little to do with the topic at hand. Ms. Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and critic of third-wave feminism, endured such “questioning” for more than an hour.

As a college senior eager to engage in lively debate, I’m disappointed in students who used this event as an opportunity to taunt and disparage a speaker who made every effort to engage in good faith. Although many student activists at Williams seem hostile to conservative ideas, I believe all of my peers are capable of disagreeing without being disagreeable.

But college administrators aren’t much help. Since Ms. Sommers’s talk at Williams, my college’s president, Adam Falk, has characterized the event as a success. He wrote in the Washington Post this week that “our students listened closely, then responded with challenging questions and in some cases blunt critiques.”

That grossly misrepresents what happened. During Ms. Sommers’s talk, many students did not “listen closely.” Instead, they acted disruptively by mocking her and snickering derisively throughout her entire speech.

For each “challenging question,” there were at least five personal attacks, directed either at her or at me for inviting her. One student started yelling aggressively, blaming me for his parents’ qualms about his sexual orientation. His rant lasted for at least five minutes. Other students stood up and exclaimed that they were better than the speaker because she was “stupid, harmful, and white supremacist.”

Shortly after the event, I heard from several friends that many members of the Black Student Union want nothing to do with me or other black students associated with Uncomfortable Learning. I expect this kind of recrimination. But I can’t speak for other students who’ve told me they worry about how their interest in my group may affect their relationship with their black classmates.

This article originally appeared at Minding the Campus on October 18, 2017.

Once many years ago I spoke to an Army recruiter who tried to convince me that I would learn many valuable skills in the military, including how to jump from helicopters. I was puzzled. How exactly was learning to jump from a helicopter a valuable skill? He explained that I could then qualify for a career as a flame jumper fighting wildfires.

I passed up that career in favor of the far more practical training in social anthropology. But sometimes it seems I still ended up in the business of jumping into burning terrain. Attempting to make sense of the claims and counterclaims in the debates over free speech strikes me as something like smokejumping. The destination is often obscure, the heat is intense, and the goal keeps changing.

I have good friends in Santa Rosa and don’t mean my metaphor to diminish the awful reality of the devastating California fires. But the image has some purpose. Here, there, and then suddenly over there on a distant ridge, the wildfires burst to life. So too the assaults on intellectual freedom.

I have been working on a larger project in which I attempt to reframe many of the current controversies about free speech by looking at the psychological and anthropological aspects of verbal defiance and transgression. As part of that project, I have been looking over recent examples and attempting to draw distinctions between what we should, perhaps with gritted teeth, accept as provocative speech that still must be tolerated, and speech that “crosses the line” into what should not be tolerated. Not everyone will agree with the lines I’ve drawn. It is easiest, of course, to draw fire from those who profess a doctrine of “no lines.” But as an anthropologist, I know that “no lines” is a fiction. All societies have them. The real questions are Where are they drawn? Who draws them? How are they maintained?

Heckling Democrats at Whittier

On October 5, Whittier College in California hosted an event titled, “A Conversation with the Attorney General,” which was intended to be an hour-long Q & A session with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. The event, open to the public, had been organized by Ian Calderon, a Democrat and majority leader of the California State Assembly. Becerra has been in the news for his public opposition to President Trump’s positions on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) which deals with the legal standing of the approximately 800,000 individuals in the United States who arrived here illegally as children.

The Q & A session took an unexpected turn. About a dozen pro-Trump hecklers showed up and attempted to shout down Becerra and the other speakers. They didn’t succeed in derailing the event, but they impeded it. This is apparently not the first time that pro-Trump protesters have disrupted events put on by elected officials, but it is, as far as I know, the first time it has happened as part of an organized campus event. A key figure and possibly the organizer of the Whittier protest is Arthur Schaper, who has publicly boasted of his role in disrupting other public events involving Democratic speakers. FIRE, which reported the Whittier incident, quotes Schaper as saying:

“I am prepared to be an uncivil civilian, and I don’t care who’s offended. Civility, accommodation, and playing nice with Republican and Democratically elected officials is over. … Making America great again is not about placating and pleasing everyone, but standing up for what is right, even if it means disrupting a few tea parties.”

Stanley Kurtz, writing at National Review Online, responded to the FIRE report and the accompanying video of the protest with distress. Kurtz noted that many have warned that the “leftist campus disruptors” were endangering their own rights by creating a precedent that right-wing activists could copy. That’s exactly what happened at Whittier on October 5. A small consolation is that the protesters included few if any students. This was a mob of partisans from off campus. That doesn’t absolve the college for its failure to maintain order, but it means that the eventuality of heckling from both political extremes among students hasn’t yet materialized.

Lest there be any ambiguity about this, the National Association of Scholars strongly condemns the shout-down of Attorney General Becerra at Whittier College. The actions of Mr. Schaper and others in his group are an assault on academic freedom, the integrity of higher education, and the civility on which our republic depends.