RUTHFULLY YOURS

Shouts. Interruptions. Orchestrated chanting. The predictable convulsions of the contemporary university when a conservative comes to town. This time it was U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, speaking to students, faculty, and others gathered at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government last Thursday night. She joined former FBI director James Comey and current attorney general Jeff Sessions as the third cabinet-level official in the span of a week whose visit to a college campus was met with protests, caterwauling, and the now-rote charges of “white supremacism.”

Against this increasingly threadbare backdrop, DeVos delivered what is probably her best speech to date. It was a constructive, serious address from someone whose remarks have not always met that standard. DeVos spoke thoughtfully — at times, even eloquently — about how school choice empowers families, creates room for a healthful diversity, and is wholly consistent with the historic aims of public education.

DeVos rejected the false dichotomy that insists that the case for school choice rests on jeremiads against traditional public schools. She observed: “Education is not a binary choice. Being for equal access and opportunity — being for choice — is not being against anything.” She emphasized the stakes that can be obscured by abstraction: “It’s important for all of us to remember that we’re not just talking about abstract theory or some wild social experiment here. This is about putting people — putting parents and students — above policies and politics.”

She spoke measuredly about American educational performance: “We’re in the middle of the pack, at best, compared to other nations.” She argued that neither students nor the cause of public education are well served by squabbling over the particulars of anachronistic delivery systems. by broadening our vision of public education:

We can rethink school. And, I posit, we do that by embracing the future of education as one that fully integrates “choice” into every decision we make. Not choice translated as vouchers, or charter schools, or private schools, or any other specified delivery mechanism. No. Choice translated as giving every parent in this great land more control, more of a say in their child’s future. More choices. The future of choice lies in trusting and empowering parents — all parents, not just those who have the power, prestige, or financial wherewithal to make choices.

And she adeptly used her Harvard setting to challenge narrow, doctrinaire notions of what constitutes “public” education. As she put it:

The definition of public education should be to educate the public. That’s why we should fight less about the word that comes before “school.” I suspect all of you here at Harvard, a private school, will take your education and contribute to the public good. When you chose to attend Harvard, did anyone suggest you were against public universities? No, you and your family sat down and figured out which education environment would be the best fit for you. . . . Instead of dividing the public when it comes to education, the focus should be on the ends, not the means.

A brawl broke out in an “Empathy Tent” at the University of California, Berkeley last week, marking the official start of college riot season. Last week Attorney General Jeff Sessions braved protesters at Georgetown Law Center, where he promised to intervene in campus free-speech cases and urged students and universities to “stand up against those who would silence free expression by violence or other means.” The targets of suppression have ways to hold colleges and rioters to account using civil-rights statutes and common-law torts.
Illustration: David Gothard

Administrators often “coddle” and “encourage” censorship, Mr. Sessions observed. That’s nothing new. After the Civil War, white students at what is now Washington and Lee University in Virginia attacked blacks associated with the Freedmen’s Bureau. The college president, Robert E. Lee, offered pieties and looked the other way. In response to similar incidents, Congress safeguarded civil rights with legislation known as anti-Ku Klux Klan acts.

Public universities are subject to the full sweep of the anti-KKK laws, as well as more recent civil-rights statutes. At San Francisco State University, Jewish students have filed suit under Section 1983 of the federal civil-rights law, alleging disruption of their events violates the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The First Amendment requires public universities to treat speech neutrally, regardless of the message. Administrators may not tell police to stand down in the face of a “heckler’s veto.”

In 2013 at New York’s University at Buffalo, police let counterprotesters shut down a pro-life demonstration. This June the university settled, paying the plaintiffs’ attorney fees and promising to refrain from viewpoint discrimination in the future.

But universities are responsible only for taking reasonable precautions. A target of last semester’s antispeech riots, Bret Weinstein, was mobbed and hounded out of Evergreen State College after refusing to comply with a college-sponsored “Day of Absence” in which white people were “asked” to stay off campus. While Mr. Weinstein claimed that Evergreen State violated his right of free speech, the college could have argued that it acted reasonably because violent antispeech protests were still novel and Mr. Weinstein was physically threatened in class only once. He and his wife, also an Evergreen professor, settled their claim for $500,000 and an agreement to resign. Public universities now have notice of their duty to provide security, which UC Berkeley and the University of Utah just fulfilled for conservative writer Ben Shapiro.

Private universities have no First Amendment obligation to provide a forum for speech. But many riots purport to attack white “supremacy” or “privilege,” and if private universities act with deliberate indifference to racially motivated attacks, they may be liable to students or speakers. Colleges are subject to antidiscrimination statutes such as Section 1981, an anti-KKK act that would cover student and speaker contract rights. If they accept federal funding—and all but a handful do—they are also subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Institutions are not the only prospective defendants. Campus rioters themselves may be liable under Section 1985(3), which covers private conspiracies and targets those who, like masked Antifa attackers, go in disguise—“a common tactic also used by the detestable Ku Klux Klan,” as Mr. Sessions noted. The statute applies most clearly to racially motivated physical attacks or efforts to exclude persons. Evergreen State is a classic case: After disrupting Mr. Weinstein’s class, students detained the college president and apparently posted photos of themselves brandishing baseball bats on Facebook . Some faculty members demanded disciplinary action against Mr. Weinstein and later assembled with masked Antifa members who attacked counterprotesters. CONTINUE AT SITE

As revealed in recent congressional testimony, Students for Justice in Palestine is a campus front for Hamas terrorists. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestrated and funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and other Islamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. The report and posters are part of a larger Freedom Center campaign titled Stop University Support for Terrorists. Images of the posters that appeared at UNC and other campuses may be viewed at www.stopuniversitysupportforterrorists.org.

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill:

UNC-Chapel Hill has supported the Hamas inspired and funded BDS movement on its campus in multiple ways, promoting apps that help consumers boycott Israeli products and inviting BDS proponents such as disgraced former University of Illinois Professor Stephen Salaita to campus. During his address, Salaita accused Zionists of making phony claims of anti-Semitism to hide Israel’s purported war crimes. UNC’s SJP chapter has also invited Laila Al-Arian, daughter of infamous University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, to campus. Sami Al-Arian is the number two leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, responsible for over 99 murders in the Middle East, who pled guilty to charges of terrorism. At a campus event, his daughter promoted the idea that her father was forced into a guilty plea. UNC SJP has celebrated “Israeli Apartheid Week” and has held numerous events to promote Hamas propaganda on campus including a “Vigil for Palestine” which claims to commemorate victims of the “Israeli Occupation” and screenings of films that vilify Israel such as “Occupation 101.”

Supporting Evidence:

In March 2016, UNC SJP hosted Laila Al-Arian, daughter of Sami Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of Southern Florida who was indicted and pled guilty in 2006 of conspiring to aid the terrorist organization, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The event also involved a screening of the film, “USA vs Al-Arian.” The film was promoted by SJP this way: “Is Al-Arian a threat to national security or is his First Amendment right to free speech at the heart of this case? At this time of heightened anti-Muslim rhetoric and sentiment, the film USA vs. Al-Arian is a sober reminder of the vulnerability of Arab Americans and Muslims living in the US and all of our civil rights.”

In March 2016, UNC SJP re-posted a link from anti-Israel activist Noura Erakat which celebrated the GS4’s decision to divest from Israel, thereby supporting the Hamas backed and funded BDS movement:

“G4S announces plans to drop its Israeli subsidiary to extract itself from ‘reputationally damaging work’ over the next 12-24 months. Translation: they’re about to divest from Israel. They’ll also divest from juvenile detention centers in the US and UK. What a tremendous success for a 4-year campaign. Mabruk to all the fierce ones who laid these tracks! #BDS #AnotherOne #Onward”

In December 2015, UNC SJP shared a video on social media about Israel’s security fence, which reduced Jewish deaths from terrorist attacks by more than 1,000 in its first year, labeled it an “Apartheid Wall” and falsely claimed that its key purpose is not security but rather to occupy more Palestinian land.

On November 18, 2015, UNC SJP hosted a screening of the anti-Israel film “Occupation 101” which falsely claims that Israel is occupying Palestinian land. According to the Amcha Initiative, “The film contains several anti-Semitic themes, including that Israel is guilty of ‘ethnic cleansing;’ that Israel’s actions against the Palestinians are a form of colonialist aggression; and that Jews in America wield excessive power over American foreign policy.”

On October 29, 2015, UNC SJP held a “Vigil for Palestine” to commemorate the Palestinians killed as a result of the “Israeli Occupation,” making clear that SJP takes the Hamas perspective that Israel is the aggressor in the Middle East rather than the victim of constant terrorist threats from the Palestinians. The event description states: “Since October 1, 52 Palestinians have been killed and over a 1,000 have been injured as a result of the Israeli occupation. Please join us in commemorating the lives of the dozens of Palestinians who have died in this month alone. This is an opportunity for students and community members to mourn and to remember the victims of this violent military occupation. The recent spike in violence exposes the ugly reality of the occupation and the incredible harm it does to those who have to endure it.” Of course there are no Palestinian deaths as a result of “Israeli occupation.” They are casualties of a terror war that Arabs have waged against Israel since 1948.

It’s impossible to parody the left these days.

For example, the University of California-Berkeley has created an “empathy tent,” as the campus continues to be inundated with protests. Even more hysterically, a fight broke out in the aforementioned “empathy tent.”

So much for empathy. Members of opposing political groups clashed Tuesday inside a so-called “empathy tent” on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.

At least four people were arrested, police said.

The empathy tent was reportedly in place to offer protesters a calm place to unwind amid the choas around them. But the tent ultimately offered little respite — and nearly toppled during clashes between conservative students and leftist activists, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“It’s tough, but we do what we can to foster dialogue,” said Edwin Fulch, who reportedly used the tent for talks about the virtues of meditation and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Yes, it’s hilarious and a bit ironic that this happened. Unfortunately, it’s also indicative of the nature of political discourse these days.

Politics has moved from “the art of the possible” to being a bloodsport. The desire to compromise is dead, killed by constituencies that view compromise as surrender, where even the mere hint that you might be willing to work with the other side gets you targeted by your own party.

What happened in that “empathy tent” was someone who wanted both sides to sit down and talk found out that at least one side wasn’t interested. Yes, it sounds like it came from a Mel Brooks movie. I do know that such things are going to happen more and more often unless people take a step back and recognize that our system doesn’t work when people act like this. Instead, it simply bogs down.

While I tend to prefer gridlock to senseless legislation that only makes our lives more complicated, I also know that gridlock isn’t anyone’s ideal way of governing. Add laws, repeal them, whatever. We need active discussion and effort for anything positive to happen.

We don’t need “empathy tents.” We need some grownups who are willing to recognize that not everyone who opposes you is evil.

You know how low the bar is when you read the proud statement that no one has been murdered in a NYC high school sine 1992. You also know how meaningless a 73% high school graduation rate is in a school where more than half of those graduates were chronically absent in their senior year. The middle school that feeds into that high school had a pass rate of 13% on the statewide reading test and 5% in math. Simply put, 87% of the students who couldn’t read at an 8th grade level and 95% who couldn’t do 8th grade math were promoted into high school and subsequently shoved out with diplomas regardless of academic competence This Bronx high school with the lofty title of The Urban Assembly Wildlife Conservation School is headed by a non-profit organization that also runs 20 other schools in New York, all with pretentious claims to professional aspirations in law, justice, global commerce, media studies, environmentalism etc. It’s in the news today because it appears that one of the eponymous wildlife was actually inside the school and stabbed two fellow students, killing one and hospitalizing the other.

On its website, The Urban Assembly lists three pages of prestigious partners from the public, private, not-for-profit and higher education sectors – such impressive names as the Office of the Bronx D.A., JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Brooklyn Law School – even the New York Yankees. Will these partners look more closely at the 20 other schools supervised by this group now that the shocking failure rates on standardized tests give the lie to that inflated high school graduation rate? The murder has spurred demands for metal detectors in these schools but there should be an equal demand for mental detection on the part of overseers and the Chancellor of Education What is the point of a Board of Advisors and support from the community if they are not challenging the lack of achievement in the most basic tools of learning – reading and math? You can’t have a future in any career if you can’t read or count. And who is checking the budgetary expenses of schools with glaring disparities between test results and graduation rates? This is a red flag even for do-gooders suffering from cognitive dissonance and especially for politicos who have been steadily pushing the scandalous crisis in education under a thickly piled rug.

Whoever thought pronouns, those innocuous little words that take the place of other nouns in the English language, would ever cause so much of an issue? It was pretty simple when I was a kid. If someone was a girl, you used “she” and if the person was a boy, you used “he.” Today, however, that’s problematic. Are you misgendering someone by assuming — because they have long hair, a dress, and boobs — they’re a girl?

So, to solve this “problem,” some have started stating their preferred pronouns so everyone will know what to use at any given point.

At The Ohio State University, this has become a thing among the student government, but one student is outright refusing. From The College Fix:

Nick Davis is someone who likes to stand up for common sense and his personal beliefs.

[…]

Today, he continues to buck left-leaning tendencies at the state’s flagship campus. Recently Davis, a member of the Undergraduate Student Government’s General Assembly, declined to put his preferred gender pronouns on his name tag.

Of the 40 student senators, Davis is the only one who did not go along with adding it.

The “He/him/his” “She/her/hers” additions to the name tags were not required. Nor, Davis said, did he think it was needed, at least in his case.

“I don’t think it is necessary when it comes to myself personally,” he told The College Fix.

He went on, “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s safe to assume it’s a duck. I look like a male, I sound like a male, it’s safe to assume I’m a male.”

Seems fair enough.

While Davis doesn’t appear to be catching much of a backlash over his stance (at least not yet) this whole thing is stupid.

As revealed in recent congressional testimony, Students for Justice in Palestine is a campus front for Hamas terrorists. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestrated and funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and other Islamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. The report and posters are part of a larger Freedom Center campaign titled Stop University Support for Terrorists. Images of the posters that appeared at Brooklyn College and other campuses may be viewed at www.stopuniversitysupportforterrorists.org.

Brooklyn College:

Brooklyn College is home to a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter which has repeatedly promoted Hamas propaganda and defended terrorism against Israel. BC SJP posted an advertisement titled “The Third Intifada” on its Facebook page, and has also used the slogan “From the River to the Sea” which is a genocidal threat to destroy Israel and its Jewish population. BC SJP continues to promote the Hamas-inspired and funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and held an event to discuss its policy of refusing to dialogue or establish “normalization” of relations with pro-Israel organizations and students. A gang of 10 campus activists affiliated with SJP stormed a campus faculty meeting, calling one faculty member a “Zionist pig” and issuing demands for “Zionists off campus.” In spite of these actions, Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson ordered posters exposing the links between SJP and Hamas be immediately torn down and called them “hate speech,” while defending SJP’s right to continue its operations on campus.

Supporting Evidence:

In January 2017, BC SJP shared an announcement from NYC SJP about a protest on its Facebook page. The protest announcement stated “Fight Trump, Free Palestine, From the River to the Sea.” The statement “From the River to the Sea” is a genocidal call for the elimination of the entirety of Israel and its Jews which lie between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

In November 2016, Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson responded to posters exposing the links between the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and Hamas by tearing them down and denouncing their sponsor, the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Anderson’s response included lofty passages about the importance of free speech and intellectual diversity on a college campus, yet she exempted the Freedom Center from these protections by calling its posters “hate speech” and accusing the posters of “target[ing] individual SJP leaders with the aim of bullying them and making them vulnerable to additional harassment or worse.”

In May 2016, Brooklyn College SJP held a demonstration at City Hall Park in New York to commemorate “Al-Nakba.” Nakba is an Arabic term meaning “catastrophe” that is used by Hamas and its supporters to describe the creation of Israel. For the record, Israel was created by the United Nations on land that belonged to the Turks (who are not Arabs, let alone “Palestinians”) for 400 years previously. Israel was created in the same way Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq were created, without becoming the targets of terrorist aggression.

On April 15, 2016, the Doctoral Students Council of the City University of New York (CUNY), of which Brooklyn College is a subsidiary, voted 42-19-9 in favor of a resolution calling for a boycott of “Israeli academic institutions for as long as the Israeli state continues to violate Palestinian rights under international law,” thereby endorsing the Hamas-sponsored BDS movement and its false claims that Israel violates Palestinian rights. In fact, the million plus Arabs who are Israeli citizens have more rights than the Arabs of any other Middle Eastern state, including the territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

On April 03, 2016, Brooklyn College SJP posted an article defending terrorism and the BDS movement.

On February 17, 2016, a gang of approximately 10 anti-Israel activists stormed a campus faculty meeting, calling one faculty member a “Zionist pig” and issuing demands for “Zionists off campus” and for an end to supposedly “racist” course offerings. Some of the faculty present applauded the student demands.

On November 26, 2015, Brooklyn College SJP shared a video link on its Facebook page purporting to show the “loss of land” that occurred through a series of maps as Jews allegedly colonized Palestine. These fraudulent maps which begin with a map showing a non-existent “Palestine” in 1947, were created by Hamas to justify its terrorist war against the Jewish state.

Other rankings, although Harvard, Yale, Princeton still dominate, vary in their judgements. The fact is that you can go to any of the top colleges and graduate a functional illiterate, ignorant of history and literature, but replete with bogus social justice and “progressive”notions, and political opinions force fed by peer pressure and openly biased professors and political correctness and fashionable “socialism” without even having to read crib notes on the depredations of Marxism….rsk

Silicon Valley is rising. Mobile Americans are flocking to the Sunbelt. But most of the best colleges and universities in the U.S. remain rooted in the Northeast.

Harvard University topped this year’s Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, and about a mile down the street in Cambridge, Mass., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earned a tie for third place. Columbia, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and Cornell—all of which sit within 400 miles of Harvard Square—took five of the top 10 spots. Stanford, Duke and the California Institute of Technology rounded out the top 10.

“There are a lot of perceptions of Harvard you have before you arrive,” says Chris Cruz, who left his home in California to attend school there and graduated last year. “At least for me Harvard exceeded all of my expectations.”

Jeff Sessions has joined the debate over censorship on campus. At Georgetown Tuesday, the attorney general criticized institutions that capitulate to the heckler’s veto—when “administrators discourage or prohibit speech if there is even a threat that it will be met with protest.”

It’s been a banner year for hecklers, including violent ones. The University of North Carolina says that it “is not willing to risk anyone’s safety” to allow white nationalist Richard Spencer to speak on campus. He’s banned at Michigan State “due to significant concerns about public safety,” and at Texas A&M, though he spoke there last December.

At Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., professors had to hold classes off campus in a park while police politely asked radical students to stop arming themselves with bats and “patrolling” campus.

Social scientist Charles Murray was literally chased out of Middlebury College in Vermont, then disinvited from Assumption College in Massachusetts. Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos still hasn’t spoken at the University of California, Berkeley, where Antifa extremists rioted to stop his appearance in February. Neither has Ann Coulter, leading her would-be student hosts to sue.

A recent Associated Press report claims colleges are “grappling with how to balance students’ physical safety with free speech.” But the idea that free speech is in opposition with safety is nonsensical.

You are not safe if you are under threat of physical attack for expressing or listening to political views. Debate and dissent are normal parts of living in a free and diverse society, and that should be especially true at an educational institution. Silencing dissenters in the name of physical safety simply punishes the victims of wrongful, sometimes criminal behavior.

In no other situation do colleges simply throw up their hands and say that student safety is an unreachable goal. Campuses have vast bureaucracies dedicated to combating sexual assault, eliminating discriminatory harassment, and discouraging alcohol abuse. Emergency phones, designated drivers and safe-escort programs are thick on the ground. Colleges even attend to students’ “emotional safety” by setting up “bias response” teams that “intervene” when somebody says something hurtful.

Yet colleges have allowed the heckler’s veto to flourish, which only encourages more violence. Under its new chancellor, Berkeley reportedly spent up to $600,000 to ensure that commentator Ben Shapiro was able to speak on campus two weeks ago. Critics moan about the expense, dismissing such speeches as stunts unworthy of academia and not worth the price. But the cost of bowing to mob rule is far higher.

Making the statement that violence will not be allowed to substitute for debate will save far more in the long run—and, more important, teach the coming generation about how a free society resolves its differences.

Mr. Shibley is executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Via Dose Of Dissonance: Philosophy professor at Harvard, Dr. Cornel West, debates Trump supporter Paris Dennard on Tuesday’s edition of CNN’s ‘Anderson Cooper 360’ about the president’s feud with NFL and what role race plays in the culture war.

CORNEL WEST: I think the president needs to get off the symbolic crack-pipe. And have a sense of reality. The reason why these courageous young people are standing up is because they have a love for black people, a love of justice, and they are concerned about a racist criminal justice system.

And it is a beautiful thing to see this kind of moral and spiritual awakening taking place among the athletes, so they represent not just athletic excellence, but they are now aspiring to spiritual and moral excellence. Excellence is about unarmed truth, unapologetic love, you step down in order to let the world know you have a love for these people who are not being treated right. You have a love for these people who are being treated unfairly.

You know, I am a Christian, so every flag is under the cross for me. The cross signifies unarmed truth, unapologetic love.

Patriotism is fine, but when it scapegoats, Mexicans, Arabs, Jews, gays, lesbians, trans, etc. When it scapegoats black people and brown people, there is a critique to be brought to bear in the name of truth and in the name of love.

It’s clear President Trump has a disrespect for the American people, he has a disrespect for the flag, when he scapegoats American people, and when he lies to the American people.

Mendacity is a form of violation, in patriotism. It is a form of violation in the face of truth, and in the face of love.

So the question becomes: How wonderful to see the white brothers and sisters, all the different colors standing up out of a love for black people who are being victimized too often by a racist criminal justice system.