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EDUCATION

Dartmouth Students Enraged Over Op-Ed Criticizing Student Life Board Being 80% Female By Tom Knighton

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 Jordan Peterson Phenomenon By David Solway

When we had lunch together one afternoon a few months back, Canadian psychologist and university professor Jordan Peterson, who has risen to meteoric prominence for his courageous stand against political correctness and legally compelled speech, looked distressingly frail and was on a restricted diet prescribed by his physician. The ordeal the press and the University of Toronto’s administration, which had threatened to discipline him for his refusal to accede to legislation forcing the use of invented pronouns, had obviously taken its toll. (Note: Peterson was willing to address individuals by their chosen pronouns, but was not willing to be forced to do so by law.)

Our conversation ranged over the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, C.G. Jung and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Peterson’s chief secular resources, as well as the Book of Genesis, the Prophetic literature and the Gospel of John, Peterson’s biblical lynchpins. His meditations on these texts have obviously struck a chord with his audience. From Nietzsche’s complex web of ideas, he focuses on the notion of critical strength to combat cultural weakness and the primacy of the individual over the group. From Jung comes the theory of the hero archetype, the feral “shadow” component of the psyche which must be both acknowledged and mastered, and the “animus dominated” feminist on a quest for societal control. He elaborates on the political wisdom of Dostoevsky’s novels The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov, and expands on a favorite quote from Notes from Underground, “You can say anything about world history. … Except one thing. … It cannot be said that world history is reasonable.”

From the biblical wellspring he develops the idea of creative vitality transforming darkness into light, reflects on the Prophetic summons to integrity, righteousness and the Kingdom of God — for Peterson the ground of the higher good and the divinity of the soul — and stresses the concept of the Logos, the principle that imposes order on chaos and seeks to make the unreasonable rational, which he identifies with the spirit of masculinity.

Identity U. The purpose of the university is no longer the pursuit of knowledge. Heather Mac Donald

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.

Jacob Rees-Mogg MP: Victim of Bristol University’s Red Guards By Paul Austin Murphy

The British Conservative MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has just been caught up in the middle of a violent scuffle while giving a talk at a British university. This is the very same Rees-Mogg who’s been tipped to be the next leader of the British Conservative Party.

He’d been speaking at the University of Bristol’s Politics and International Relations Society when it was stormed by left-wing Red Guards.

One Bristol University student, a William Brown, said:

“These people in balaclavas and sunglasses started shouting, things like ‘Tory fascist’.

“They were quite intimidating actually.

“They were waving their hands around, shouting very loudly.”

This student also stated that a few punches were thrown.

The same student added:

“Jacob went to calm them down, I think he came out of it very well.

“He was encouraging them to speak, without shouting, saying something like ‘I’m happy to talk if you want’.”

Tim Allen joins docudrama taking down PC culture By Marisa Schultz

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.

Inside a Public School Social Justice Factory The city of Edina has changed the way it approaches public education, putting social justice above learning. The results will shock you. 5:05 AM, Feb 01, 2018 | By Katherine Kersten

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.)

Professor Says White People Doing Yoga Contributes to White Supremacy By Tom Knighton

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.

Oxford University: Delirious Capital of Political Correctness by Giulio Meotti

Oxford University had been criticized for “lack of racial diversity”. So, in the name of the multiculturally correct view, Oxford purged “male, pale and stale” with gay, female and black icons. If you think about it honestly, that is racist.

The Oxford Equality and Diversity Unit, which monitors respect for the canons of anti-racism, has ruled that not looking into the eyes of a student belonging to a minority constitutes a “microaggression” that can lead to “mental disorder”. Oxford’s multicultural political correctness looks as if has come right out of George Orwell’s “1984”.

For the first time in 800 years, Oxford eliminated the obligatory course on Christianity for theology students.

Oxford Professor Timothy Garton Ash announced that today, at British universities, “Jesus Christ would be banned”.

“Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history”, Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar titled a column in The Times. He asked his colleagues and students to have “pride” in many aspects of their imperialist past:

“Pride at the Royal Navy’s century-long suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, for example, will not be entirely obscured by shame at the slaughter of innocents at Amritsar in 1919. And while we might well be moved to think with care about how to intervene abroad successfully, we won’t simply abandon the world to its own devices”.

Dozens of Oxford academics immediately united to condemn the “simple-minded” defense of British colonialism by the professor. Student associations also branded Biggar a “racist” and a “bigot”, and asked the university to suspend him. Trevor Phillips, former chair of the UK Equalities and Human Rights Commission, said that Biggar’s critics are using “an attack line of which Joseph Stalin would have been proud”. Its goal, in fact, seems the moral destruction of the intellectual adversary.

Biggar’s case illustrates the atmosphere in Oxford, the West’s capital of political correctness. Oxford’s students and professors are the leaders of a movement which, under the guise of “anti-racism”, is closing the Western mind and killing the Western culture with dogmatism, tribalism, anti-intellectualism and groupthink. All this indoctrinating has led only to a militant loathing of the Western past and a public revulsion for humanistic Western values, culture and the ability at least to try to correct our wrongs — as only the West does. Students and professors are now unable to explain why a culture that treats women and men equally or that protects freedom of thought is superior to a culture that subjugates women and oppresses individual choice.

The Dark Secret of Two-Faced Academics by Giulio Meotti

Nadine el Enany, the first signatory of the appeal against the United States’ so-called “Muslim ban”, is one of the signers of the appeal to boycott her Israeli academic colleagues.

The restrictions the U.S. administration placed on potentially hostile immigrants were intended to prevent terror attacks on Americans and their free, democratic way of life. The goal of the campaign against Israel is to attack the freest and only democracy from Casablanca to Calcutta — and a place where Muslim students are free — freer, in fact, than in many Muslim and Arab countries.

The dark secret of the hypocritical academic class is that apparently what they really relish is the idea of Israel’s destruction.

The United States government’s restrictions (or “ban”) on the admission of travelers from six Muslim-majority countries (which were chosen by former President Obama) — unless, as President Donald J. Trump has said, there can be vetting — triggered the anger of the Western academic community. Their distress seems to center around the exclusion from the United States of researchers and scholars from Islamic countries sanctioned by the American administration. Harvard, Yale and Stanford sued the White House. 171 scientific societies and academic organizations protested what they wrongly titled Trump’s “Muslim ban”. “Among those affected by the Order are academics and students who are unable to participate in conferences and the free communication of ideas”, says an appeal signed by 6,000 scientists, academics and researchers around the world.

What is more “progressive” than a Western academic community struggling to keep the scientific gates open? Sadly, however, many of those who have promoted these appeals have been instrumental in spreading other, racist, appeals to boycott their Israeli colleagues. It is, in the same universities, the “Israel Ban”. The discrimination is not directed at scientists from Yemen or Somalia, but only at those with a passport from the Jewish State.

Nadine el Enany, for instance, the first signatory of the appeal against the United States “Muslim ban”, is one of the signers of the appeal to boycott her Israeli academic colleagues. The same double standards apply to Sarah Keenan and Bill Bowring, and to Italian professor Paola Bacchetta, who teaches “gender studies” at Berkeley. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, a professor of literature at SOAS University in London, announced that, to protest Trump’s supposed “xenophobia”, he will cancel a U.S. tour for his book. What about protesting his own xenophobia? A progressive “conscience” did not prevent Adib-Moghaddam from also signing an appeal to boycott Israeli researchers and professors.

Marquette and the First Amendment Wisconsin’s Supreme Court will judge a promise of academic freedom.

A political-science professor who says Marquette University violated his employment contract’s guarantee of academic freedom will get his day in court. Though a judge for a lower state court earlier ruled for the university, last week the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to John McAdams’s request that it bypass the appeals courts and take up his suit directly.

Professor McAdams is now in his seventh semester outside the classroom because of a November 2014 post on his Marquette Warrior blog. The post criticized a graduate instructor, Cheryl Abbate, for telling a student with more traditional views that she would tolerate no dissent on same-sex marriage in her class on ethics.

After the post Ms. Abbate received several ugly emails. Mr. McAdams was blamed and punished, though he had nothing to do with those messages. The university contends that Mr. McAdams’s offense is having identified a student by name—Ms. Abbate. The characterization is telling, because though Ms. Abbate was indeed a grad student she was also a paid employee of the university teaching a course. If any student was harmed here, it was the Marquette undergraduate who was told there was no room for his views in Ms. Abbate’s classroom.

No one forced Marquette to enter into an employment contract with Mr. McAdams. But it did. And that contract says he cannot be fired for exercising a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. By any reasonable standard that would include the First Amendment—even at a Jesuit university.