RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

There is a lot of abstract talk these days on American college campuses about free speech and the values of free inquiry, with lip service paid to expansive notions of free expression and the marketplace of ideas. What I’ve learned through my recent experience of writing a controversial op-ed is that most of this talk is not worth much. It is only when people are confronted with speech they don’t like that we see whether these abstractions are real to them.

The op-ed, which I co-authored with Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego Law School, appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Aug. 9 under the headline, “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.” It began by listing some of the ills afflicting American society:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

We then discussed the “cultural script”—a list of behavioral norms—that was almost universally endorsed between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These norms defined a concept of adult responsibility that was, we wrote, “a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains and social coherence of that period.” The fact that the “bourgeois culture” these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s, we argued, largely explains today’s social pathologies—and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies.

In what became the most controversial passage, we pointed out that some cultures are less suited to preparing people to be productive citizens in a modern technological society, and we gave examples:

The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.

www.nas.org

https://www.nas.org/resources/charting_academic_freedom
On Thursday, February 1, the National Association of Scholars launched our newest report, Charting Academic Freedom: 103 Years of Debate. Academic freedom is a hot topic of discussion on nearly every American college campus, but until now, no single source documents and analyzes the most prominent, published statements on academic freedom to put all the details in perspective.

In addition to serving as a digest of the principles that underlie intellectual freedom, Charting Academic Freedom also allows us to see and understand the bigger picture so that we take appropriate action. For instance, our report makes it clear that the current threat to academic freedom no longer comes from sources outside the university. The new threats to academic freedom come from the faculty and their indoctrinated students, and that means that to protect and advance academic freedom, these statements must be updated to reflect the new reality.

Charting Academic Freedom is available as a free download from the NAS website. It is intended as a resource for anyone who would like to better understand the debate about academic freedom and what it means for our society; it is for faculty, students, journalists, administrators, parents, concerned citizens, and more. Please share the report with anyone you think would benefit from it.

Room, board, tuition and other fees cost $65,495.00 at Cornell. The average salary for professors there is $285,000. rsk

Cornell University’s Prof. Eric Cheyfitz isn’t a fan of the American Dream, it seems. The problem isn’t that he thinks it’s bad — it seems he believes the American Dream isn’t reality.

The Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters spoke at an event hosted by the Institute for Comparative Modernities on Tuesday. During the talk, he referred to his latest book, The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States. In it, he takes aim at the White House.

Yet, oddly enough, it’s not the Trump administration he focused on:

Obama’s speeches, he said, are classic examples of what Cheyfitz defines as “disinformation,” or the “rupture of political rhetoric from political reality with fatal results.”

In other words, Trump and our current political situation are not, contrary to what many people may think, the causes of disinformation.

“Trump is not the problem — he is the latest symptom of the problem,” Cheyfitz explained. Rather, the country’s major issue is the overlapping, “imbricated pair of income inequality and climate change.”

Cheyfitz also said:

If I were to sum up the book in one sentence, I would say it is a historical explanation about how and why the United States is still trying to live a narrative, American exceptionalism, that fails to rationalize the state any longer.

“This story has always confused capitalism with democracy when in fact the two systems are fundamentally at odds.”

This nonsense isn’t surprising coming from an academic. CONTINUE AT SITE

In a 1989 article in The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan made what he called “a (conservative) case for gay marriage.” Today same-sex marriage is legal everywhere in America, supported by majorities of voters and accepted as a part of American life.

Now Sullivan has cast his gaze on what he regards as a disturbing aspect of American life — the extension of speech suppression and “identity politics” from colleges and universities into the larger society. The hothouse plants of campus mores have become invasive species undermining and crowding out the beneficent flora of the larger free democratic society.

Sullivan can be seen as a kind of undercover spy on campuses, to which he is invited often to speak — because of his bona fides as a cultural reformer — by those probably ignorant of the parenthetical “conservative” in his 1989 article. As Jonathan Rauch did in his 2004 book, “Gay Marriage,” Sullivan argued that same-sex marriage, by including those previously excluded, would strengthen rather than undermine family values and bourgeois domesticity. That now seems to be happening.

The spread of campus values to the larger society would — and is intended to — have the opposite effect.

Take the proliferation of campus speech codes. Americans of a certain age have trouble believing that colleges and universities have rules banning supposedly hurtful speech. They can remember when campuses were the part of America most open to dissent. Now students are disciplined for handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution outside a tiny isolated “free speech zone.”

I belong to Freethinkers of Portland State University, a skeptic student group. On Saturday we’re hosting a panel on diversity featuring James Damore, the Google employee who was fired last July for writing a memo expressing heterodox views about sex disparities in the company’s workforce.

We expected controversy. But we also got danger. The left-wing newspaper Willamette Week published an article with a false and inflammatory headline: “Tech Bro Fired from Google for Saying Women Are Biologically Unfit to Be Engineers Will Speak at PSU Next Month.” The subheadline inaccurately attributed to Mr. Damore the view that “women can’t do math.”

Campus activists called us misogynists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis. A person claiming to work for campus audiovisual services tweeted that he could break into our event through a back entrance and “literally turn the whole building off.” There were threats of violence. A Facebook user—it’s not clear if he’s connected to PSU—suggested he’d throw “active grenades” at Mr. Damore onstage. Campus police took these threats seriously enough that they denied our request for a larger venue, despite overwhelming interest.

Every year, FIRE chooses the 10 worst colleges for free speech — and unfortunately, 2017 left us with plenty of options: Campuses were rocked by violent mob censorship, monitored by bias response teams, plagued by free speech zones, and beset by far too many disinvitation attempts. Although the number of colleges with the most restrictive speech codes has continued to decline, 90 percent of schools still maintain codes that either clearly restrict or could too easily be used to restrict free speech. https://www.thefire.org/the-10-worst-colleges-for-free-speech-2018/

Today, we present our 2018 list of the 10 worst colleges for free speech. As always, our list is presented in no particular order, and it includes both public and private institutions. Public colleges and universities are bound by the First Amendment; the private colleges on this list, though not required by the Constitution to protect student and faculty speech rights, explicitly promise to do so.

A new feature of this year’s list is our Lifetime Censorship Award. This “honor” goes to the one college or university that is so frequently discussed as a contender for our annual “worst colleges for free speech” list that it deserves special recognition. This year, that school is DePaul University.

Are you a student or faculty member whose free speech rights are imperiled on campus? Submit a case to FIRE. Also, check out FIRE’s Guides to Student Rights on Campus to help you fight for free speech, due process, religious liberty, and more.