RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Pennsylvania Gazette, my alma mater’s glossy alumni magazine, doesn’t stray far from institutional self-admiration. Or it didn’t, until this month’s issue.

The letters column featured the frank narrative of a class of 1973 undergraduate who says she was sexually harassed by a long-affiliated, greatly honored (and deceased) chairman of the Graduate School of Fine Art. Women in the program called him “the Silver Fox,” the correspondent reports.

She managed to evade an invitation to his island retreat to “model” for him: “Somehow I knew I would avoid him sleeping with me, and I was successful at that,” she writes. But one-on-one sessions to discuss her work were 90 minutes of navigating sexual advances and innuendo.

Sexual harassment has been the official term for this since before Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas in 1991. But in the 1990s, that decade of third-wave feminism, it was assumed that sexual harassment was something conservatives visited upon women to punish them for straying from traditional roles. When Bill Clinton was caught in the act, progressives from Gloria Steinem to Susan Faludi and Ms. Hill herself rushed to confer ideological immunity upon him.

That immunity ended with Hillary Clinton’s political career, as Harvey Weinstein and a host of figures in entertainment, the news media, politics and the arts have learned. The Gazette letter is a sign that progressive immunity is disappearing from an even more politicized zone: higher education.

Not that colleges and universities haven’t come under scrutiny for sexual harassment before. The Obama Education Department’s notorious 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter insisted that Title IX, which prohibits schools receiving federal money from engaging in sex discrimination, required them to abandon due process in adjudicating accusations of sexual misconduct. CONTINUE AT SITE

The defense of free speech has always been a bedrock bipartisan principle. So it’s unusual to hear a veteran liberal politician excuse campus outrage squads that shout down dissent. But that’s exactly what former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee head Howard Dean did in a recent appearance — and his embrace of the campus left reveals a lot about the nation’s current cultural moment.

On a panel at Kenyon College last month, Dean brought up a notorious incident at Yale two years before. In 2015, lecturer and residence hall co-supervisor Erika Christakis had set off protests with an e-mail defending students’ freedom to wear Halloween costumes — such as ones based on the Chinese-inspired cartoon character Mulan — that some may find culturally insensitive. A viral video showed protesters mobbing and berating her husband, professor Nicholas Christakis. The couple later resigned their leadership posts, and Erika Christakis stopped teaching.

Dean’s take on this was that there are “consequences to free speech.” He caricatured Erika Christakis’s thoughtful, sensitive letter as an ugly screed mocking “snowflake” students and defending racist costumes. He also described the protesters as well-behaved, despite their screaming and bullying. That an academic became a target of red-hot rage for challenging progressive dogma on cultural appropriation did not seem to bother him in the least.

Dean is hardly alone in pooh-poohing worries about the illiberal academic left. With Republicans in control of the government and Donald Trump in the White House, many say that it’s crazy, maybe downright perverse, to worry about college students as a threat to liberal society. But not every form of power involves government authority. And what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus.

Education holds the key to unlocking the full potential of all children. A high-quality education can equip a child with the knowledge and skills needed to pursue the American dream.

Unfortunately, today millions of students remain stuck in schools that aren’t allowing them to thrive. Their parents want an educational environment that works better for their children, but are told “no” — by bureaucratic school systems, by politicians, or by those who have a stake in preserving the status quo regardless of its consequences for students.

We trust parents with all kinds of important choices for their children: what they eat, the media they consume, who they spend time with, and what happens during the 130 hours a week they are not in school. So when it comes to their children’s education, why do we refuse to give parents the freedom to choose?

National School Choice Week is a time for us to celebrate those schools and innovative learning organizations that are giving students a better chance: public charter, private, magnet, faith-based, home, districts with open enrollment, virtual, and many traditional public schools. All of these provide environments in which students can flourish.

Who is this man, this Jordan Peterson, academic clinical psychologist, tenured at the University of Toronto with hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers, who has made a splash recently as a voice of reason, battling the political correctness elites and upsetting the academic grandees?

Less than a week ago, we got a stormy weather alert in an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “What’s So Dangerous about Jordan Peterson?” by Tom Bartlett, with the tease “Not long ago, he was an obscure psychology professor. Now he leads a flock of die-hard disciples.” One might suppose, considering Mr. Bartlett’s choice of words, that Peterson is a Jim Jones-style cult-leader, but instinctively, I knew I would like to find out about anybody described as dangerous by the trade paper of American higher education.

Mr. Bartlett considers Dr. Peterson a threat because Peterson deviates from the leftist academic canon – a conservative, traditionalist, moralist anti-political correctness psychologist academic. He objects to the speech police and the tyranny of the left. He that a totalitarian-speech police state is developing in Canada, and, by instinct and conviction, he objects strongly to the “good speech” laws demanding the use of concocted or inapposite pronouns and labels preferred by the little darlin’s of the newly concocted gender-identity claxon, cowbell, and tin drum army.

Peterson objects to speech police tactics, and he does it eloquently. That’s a threat to and dangerous for the academic poobahs who live and breathe censorship and intellectual tyranny. Bartlett’s essay is an alert: watch out for this conservative who has a bad attitude on lots of things and opposes our new pronoun gender identity group project and our promotion of the grievance status of the newly formed sex-gender-dysmorphist deviant group.

If you want to know what the culture war is about, look no farther than the spectacular eruption in Britain during the past few days over Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto.

For Peterson, who reportedly holds many liberal views, the concern is not over transgender issues or pay gaps or any of today’s causes. It is rather that truth and freedom are now under assault from neo-Marxism, which defines everything in terms of relativism and power and which has taken over the universities.

The threat Peterson perceives is not just to political but cognitive freedom. His own use of words is so precise because, as he believes, words are integral to our ability to think and thus our freedom to make sense of the world. That’s the way we arrive at the truth as we see it, and for him truth trumps everything else.

That’s why he said he would go on hunger strike in prison rather than submit to being told what personal pronouns he must use.

Upon learning that conservative speaker Ben Shapiro had been invited to campus, the University of Connecticut immediately offered its student body counseling services.

“We understand that even the thought of an individual coming to campus with the views that Mr. Shapiro expresses can be concerning and even hurtful and that’s why we wanted to make you aware as soon as we were informed,” stated a campus-wide email from associate vice president and chief diversity officer Joelle Murchison, according to an article in Shapiro’s Daily Wire.

According to the email, there hasn’t even been a “date, location or time” confirmed for the speech — but apparently the school still believed that it was necessary to start offering time for counseling now.

I like to think of myself as a sensitive person, but this is something that I simply cannot wrap my head around. There are a ton of people I can’t stand who are out there giving speeches every single day, and yet “the thought” of that has had absolutely zero impact on my mental health. It’s not “hurtful.” It doesn’t affect me. I have a life. I think it’s fine.

What’s interesting to me about this particular story is that it wasn’t even a group of students who ran to ring that “triggered” bell. (Although I’m sure that would have happened eventually.) This time, it was the school sending out a preemptive email, basically telling students that they should be upset. Talk of oversensitivity on college campuses is so often centered on the students-are-snowflakes narrative that people don’t realize how often it’s the school itself that’s prompting these sorts of things.

You would think science — like any field of study based on, you know, the truth — should be immune from the campus takeover by the Social Justice Warriors.

After all, science is simply the observation and discovery of facts. While we may argue about the results of a scientific study being definitive, we can’t just decide that, say, men and women are exactly the same because it makes someone feel better.

Just kidding. Of course science is now under siege by SJWs, because that’s what they do. For example, see the event being held at UC Santa Cruz titled “Research Justice 101: Tools for Feminist Science.”

Yes, “feminist science.” The event description reads:

Participants will be challenged to apply principles and practices of justice to their own work, interrogating questions such as: Who benefits? Who is harmed? Who is most vulnerable? … And ultimately, who do we do science for, and why? The workshop will conclude with practical skills and resources for participants to push their research communities to be more inclusive, equitable and attentive to social justice.

The event is being organized by an Los Angeles-based group titled — sigh — “Free Radicals.”

According to The College Fix:

The mission of the Free Radicals is to enact political and social change by advocating scientists “think through the hidden assumptions in their methodological approaches and challenges researchers to think more deeply about the political implications of their work,” its website states.

Got that? They want scientists to only undertake studies and only publish conclusions that will support a radical feminist worldview.

Testicular cancer is striking down many men in their prime, you say? Well, don’t you dare invest scarce research money into finding a cure — men already have too many advantages.

What Free Radicals and anyone else associated with this nonsense are arguing for is to ignore the pursuit of truth — even, to suppress it — and to only focus on making sure a certain political argument is supported. They don’t want science to find the truth, just to support “their truth.”

That’s in quotes, because modern Leftists like Free Radicals tend to support postmodernist thinking that argues there is no such thing as a universal truth — that everything is a matter of perception and social construction. They’re hoping to harness the field of scientific discovery to support this idea.

The University of Oxford has added extra time to maths and computer science exams because female students aren’t performing as well as their male counterparts.

Students sitting maths and computer science exams last summer were given an extra 15 minutes to complete their papers because “female candidates might be more likely to be adversely affected by time pressure,” according to a decision seen by The Daily Telegraph.

The number of male students achieving first-class degrees was double that of women before the change was made, the Telegraph reported. As a result, the department changed the goal posts in an attempt to help female students achieve better grades.

But while the change was implemented in order to help more women achieve first-class degrees, the added time simply helped more female students achieve 2:1 grades overall, with fewer women securing a lower class 2:2, according to the Telegraph.

Antonia Sir, an undergraduate representative of Oxford Women in Computer Science, told the Telegraph: “I am uneasy about schemes to favour one gender over another.

Are colleges colluding? The U.S. Justice Department wrote the National Association for College Admission Counseling Jan. 10 seeking information on its “ethics code.” The department’s aim is to determine whether colleges, through NACAC, may be violating antitrust law by seeking “to restrain trade among colleges and universities in the recruitment of students.”

It’s long been an open secret that American colleges engage in cartel-like behavior. Schools that are supposed to be wholly independent agree on when students can submit applications, when admissions officers must inform them of a decision (including a financial-aid offer), when students must accept or decline the offer, and when to let students off the waiting list. In response to an earlier Justice Department investigation, Ivy League schools in 1991 agreed to stop sharing information about offers of financial aid.

Colleges argue that this cooperation benefits applicants. Its purpose is “to provide access to college in a way that is transparent, is clear and easy to understand, in a way that parents and school counselors can understand how the process works,” Todd Rinehart, a University of Denver administrator who led the committee that rewrote the code last year, told InsideHigherEd.

Perhaps, but the code also serves to ensure that colleges cannot get an “unfair” advantage over one another. What if one school decided to allow applications before the NACAC-decreed Oct. 15 start date? What if it was so impressed by an application it sent an admission offer the following day? The student would save months of work filling out applications and hundreds of dollars on application fees. But the other colleges would be out of luck.

What about the way colleges agree on what it means to apply “early decision”? Students promise they’ll enroll in a school no matter what other offers come in and risk being blacklisted if they back out. Katharine Fretwell, dean of admission and financial aid at Amherst College, told U.S. News in 2016 her school and about 30 other colleges share lists of students admitted through early decision—and of those who subsequently decided not to attend. CONTINUE AT SITE

Over the last decade, programs to accommodate students with disabilities have been installed at most institutions of higher education, spurred largely by government mandate. Like George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind Act, with Title I provisions to aid the disadvantaged, the thinking is that no student should be left behind owing to disability. This measure is a subset of the “social justice” movement that seeks to equalize job and social outcomes irrespective of talent, competence, personal input, and professional responsibility.

Nobody wants to de-privilege the disadvantaged or the suffering. The disability fetish, however, has adversely affected the performance of the average student, created enormous difficulties for teachers, and complicated administrative procedures to the point of functionary chaos.

I have recently examined an accommodation document issued by a university, which I won’t name. The data are stunning. Student A requires extended time for assignments and exams. Student B requires a word-processor with spell- and grammar-checker. Student C must not write more than one exam per day. Student D requires one day between exams. Student E requires “mind maps” (i.e., cheat sheets). Student F needs N.C. (noise-canceling) headphones to prevent distraction. And so on all the way down the alphabet. Indeed, even as I write, a professor at the University of Guelph has been suspended for allegedly chastising an anxiety-disability student.

There are at least six obvious problems with the disability regime of the modern university, listed here in random fashion.

First, there is the problem of invisible disabilities, which far outnumber physical ones. When is test anxiety, for example, anything but a normal occurrence, and why should it be classed as a pathology requiring accommodation? We have all been through this and survived.

Though many disabilities may be genuine, the opportunity for suddenly developing a qualifying infirmity is immense and has undoubtedly been taken advantage of by the thousands. A number of disabilities can easily be faked; in addition to test anxiety, there are agoraphobia, depression, bipolarity, panic attacks, “struggles with mental health” – and those that aren’t deliberately manufactured may still be more a matter of interpretation than a measurable impairment.