RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s been a rough year for free speech on campus, but there are glimmers of hope in Southern California. The colleges of the Claremont University Consortium have been laying down the law in response to those who act out to advance their idea of social justice.

Consider the case of Jonathan Higgins. In June, Pomona College announced that Mr. Higgins had been hired as the new director of the Queer Resource Center of the Claremont Colleges, which Pomona administers. Elliot Dordick, a student and writer at Pitzer College, looked at the new administrator’s Twitter feed and reported his findings at TheCollegeFix.com and in the Claremont Independent, a conservative student newspaper where I currently serve as deputy editor. Mr. Higgins, who is black, had responded to a tweet asking, “Who are you automatically wary of/keep at a distance because of your past experiences?” His answer: “White gays and well meaning white women.” In another tweet he asserted: “I finally have nothing to say other than police are meant to service and protect white supremacy.”

A day after the Fix and the Independent ran the article, Pomona announced that Mr. Higgins wouldn’t be taking the position after all. In an email to the Pomona student body, Associate Dean Jan Collins-Eaglin wrote that “we have reopened the national search for the Director of the Queer Resource Center.”

Then, two weeks ago, Claremont McKenna College announced punishments for 10 students who had violated college policy in April during a raucous protest against Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, author of “The War on Cops.” The protesters, who spent the evening chanting “No cops, no KKK, no fascist USA!,” blockaded entrances to the building where Ms. Mac Donald was speaking, so that she ended up addressing an almost empty hall.

“The blockade breached institutional values of freedom of expression and assembly,” the college declared in a statement. “Furthermore, this action violated policies of both the College and The Claremont Colleges that prohibit material disruption of college programs and created unsafe conditions in disregard of state law.” The punishments included suspensions, in contrast with Vermont’s Middlebury College, where students who disrupted a lecture by social scientist Charles Murray —and attacked and injured a professor as she was leaving the venue—received nothing more severe than “probation.”

So instead of defending Dr. Higgins for his high “intersectional” victim status—Pomona had originally touted him as “a motivational speaker dedicated to empowering all LGBTQ students with an emphasis on students of color”—they treated him as a professional whose behavior made him unfit for the job. And Claremont McKenna kept its promise to protect free speech on campus. In his original statement following the protest, the college’s president, Hiram Chodosh, wrote, “The breach of our freedoms to listen to views that challenge us and to engage in dialogue about matters of controversy is a serious, ongoing concern we must address effectively.” Bravo to him for keeping his word.

Even at the University of California, Berkeley, where spring riots shut down speeches by conservative controversialists Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, administrators now say they’ll allow the College Republicans to bring author Ben Shapiro for an appearance in the fall, a request the dean of students initially denied.

That actions such as these are considered unusual, even courageous, is a sign of just how bad things are on campus today. But colleges and universities across the country should be following the examples being set in California. CONTINUE AT SITE

In a stunning display of reverse discrimination Columbia University’s Teachers College organized a conference exploring the “problem of whiteness” and how to combat whiteness.

300 participants mostly K-12 teachers and principals were “reeducated” in ways to frame being white as the primary social problem to be addressed in elementary schools. Workshops and presentations titled “Whiteness in Schools,” “Three Ways to Face White Privilege in the Classroom,” “Teaching for Social Justice” are representative of the blatant prejudice and reverse discrimination intrinsic in the conference designed to “Reimagine Education.”

Black history exposes how black children were made to feel ashamed of being black. How does making white children feel ashamed of being white remedy the situation? It can’t.

Similarly, at a diversity conference for employees at Jesuit colleges Dr. Kris Sealey, associate professor of philosophy at Fairfield University, spoke about race in the university classroom. She has taught race based courses such as “Black Lives Matter” and “Critical Race Theory.”

“So more and more, the courses that I teach on race have become courses in which I expect my students to engage in the hegemonic power of whiteness.” Really?

Let’s discuss hegemonic theory. Early 19th century Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci was made famous by his theory of cultural hegemony which posits that the state and ruling class (the bourgeoisie in Italy) use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. Hegemony is just another word for dominance. The ruling class uses ideology rather than military force to achieve compliance to its cultural norms. The idea is that the lessons of accepted normative behavior are repeated and reinforced at home, at school, and at worship. The cultural norms become codified into laws which further enforce the cultural norms and thus cultural hegemony rather than force is used to maintain power.

Dr. Sealey and the presenters at Teachers College are criticizing cultural hegemony as the evil method used for maintaining white power while they are hypocritically attempting to reformat American cultural institutions with reverse discrimination to establish cultural hegemony and establish black power. Reverse discrimination is still discrimination and cannot remedy the problem of discrimination it can only exacerbate it.

Reverse racism taken to its extreme will necessarily end in a race war – the white population will not submit without a fight. The social chaos of a race war will not end well for America. The police force will be nationalized and the federal government will declare martial law and all individual freedoms will be suspended.

There is an alternative.

America’s judicial system was created with the dream of blind justice. This meant that the judicial system would focus exclusively on the WHAT of behavior and ignore the WHO. To realize the dream of fairness requires a commitment to the ideal of the meritocracy not a campaign to institutionalize reverse racism. Racism and reverse racism are the opposite of fairness because they focus on the WHO of behavior not on the WHAT of behavior.

Consider the blind auditions for orchestras. They are the fairest system and yield the most talented artists for positions in the orchestra. Musicians sitting behind a screen play for judges – there is only the music – it does not matter if the musician is white, black, hispanic, Asian, old, young, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. Only the music matters. The competence and achievement of the musician is measured – not the color of his/her skin.

The meritocracy is the structure of fairness that supports the American dream of upward mobility. The meritocracy focuses exclusively on the WHAT of behavior and ignores the WHO.

City College was among the finest in the nation. It was called the “Harvard” of Convent Avenue and listed as one of the regional leaders in quality education. The list of alums includes seven Nobel laureates, prominent jurors, scientists, artists and intellectuals….tuition was free and admission based on meritocracy.In 1970, response to the spring 1969 building takeovers and riot threats by Puerto-Rican and black City College students, they instituted a policy of open admissions, guaranteeing every New York City high-school graduate acceptance to a CUNY campus and remedial courses anyone requiring them. …..the rest is history….rsk

When the president of the City College of New York resigned unexpectedly in October during a financial scandal, the school quickly named an interim leader and said it planned to pick a replacement by the end of the academic year.

But with the new school year less than a month away, no candidate has been chosen to replace Lisa S. Coico, who remains under federal investigation for using money from a college foundation to pay personal expenses.

Last month, in an unusual letter to the City College community, James B. Milliken, chancellor of the City University of New York, the college’s parent entity, cautioned that the search could take longer than anticipated.

“The search committee and our consultant continue their good work on this critically important responsibility, and I have assured them they should take the time required to see this process to a successful conclusion,” Mr. Milliken wrote.

Whether a successor is named in weeks — or months, as some officials are now speculating — the continued vacancy in the president’s office comes at a pivotal moment for City College, the flagship of CUNY, the country’s largest public urban university.

The CUNY system is playing a central role in Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s newplan to help make public colleges in New York tuition-free for middle-class students, and has been attracting more national attention as an affordableengine of upward mobility. With 16,000 students, most of whom are undergraduates, City College has been called “the poor man’s Harvard” for educating thousands of poor, minority and immigrant students.

But its more recent history has been troubled. In May 2016, The New York Times reported that the 21st Century Foundation, a nonprofit group affiliated with the college, had paid for some of Ms. Coico’s personal expenses when she took office in 2010. The foundation was then reimbursed for more than $150,000 by the Research Foundation of CUNY, which manages research funds for the entire system. As questions swirled over the handling of Ms. Coico’s expenses, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York began issuing subpoenas seeking records.

Ms. Coico resigned one day after The Times informed the college that a memo from 2011 concerning her reimbursements appeared to be fabricated, possibly to mislead prosecutors.

Surprisingly, their survey of psychology students revealed that white students at “predominantly white institutions” had “greater awareness of racial oppression” than those who attended “racially balanced” schools.

Mary Ann Priester and Ronald Pitner, both of whom teach in the College of Social Work at USC, advanced that claim in a July 19 research article examining the prevalence of color-blind attitudes among psychology students.

“Deficits in awareness are not only unethical, but can also perpetuate White norms within the professions.” Tweet This

Defining color-blindness as “denial or lack of awareness of race-based privilege, institutional racism, and/or racial discrimination,” they argue that “this lack of awareness has been identified as a barrier to developing therapeutic rapport with racially diverse populations.”

“Color-blind racial attitudes may prevent White individuals from developing a deeper level of awareness of racial oppression,” the professors assert, later adding that “deficits in awareness are not only unethical, but can also perpetuate White norms within the professions.”

Because of the harm allegedly caused when white people subscribe to color-blind racial attitudes, the professors surveyed 409 college students to determine the prevalence of “color-blind racial attitudes” among students with varying levels of “diversity exposure.”

Students were considered to be color-blind if they agreed with meritocratic statements such as “Everyone who works hard, no matter what race they are, has an equal chance to become rich” and “Race plays a major role in the type of social services that people receive in the United States.”

The professors determined that “being White was associated with higher scores on the color-blindness measure, indicating a greater lack of awareness of White privilege and racial discrimination among White students,” and speculate that this might be due to the fact that “race is often not as central” to the identity of white individuals.

Curiously, they also found that “students who attended predominantly White undergraduate institutions had greater awareness of racial oppression than students who attended institutions that were racially balanced,” a result that runs contrary to conventional wisdom.

Citing “greater levels of exclusion and racial microaggressions at predominantly White institutions,” they suggest that “White students may become more sensitized to racism when they witness differential treatment of racial/ethnic minority students on campus.”

Reiterating their assertion that color-blindness presents a barrier to establishing “therapeutic rapport with clients,” the professors conclude that “understanding how diversity exposure influences color-blind racial attitudes…can better inform multicultural training curriculum and strategies.”

Neither Priester nor Pitner responded to requests for comment from Campus Reform.https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=9502

The University of Michigan is looking to hire a new “Bias Incident Prevention and Response Coordinator” to clamp down on “students of concern” and “enact cultural appropriation prevention initiatives.”
The full-time job, which pays between $46,000 and $57,000, oversees handling of “bias incidents” reported on campus, as well as various “social justice initiatives.”
The role also has crisis-management components, such as providing “a safe listening space in which to offer compassion, support, and guidance to students” after especially severe “bias incidents.”

The University of Michigan is looking for someone to clamp down on “students of concern” and “enact cultural appropriation prevention initiatives.”

A job posting on the school’s website seeks candidates to fill the role of “Bias Incident Prevention and Response Coordinator,” a full-time position within the Dean of Students Office that comes with a starting salary range of $46,000 – $57,000.

“Provides a safe listening space in which to offer compassion, support, and guidance to students.” Tweet This

UMich estimates that about 40 percent of the job will involve coordinating “bias incident response efforts,” which entails coordinating “appropriate and effective intervention and communication between multiple campus offices…and the provision of support to individuals and groups targeted by bias behaviors.”

Over the last century America has gone from a nation that prized self-reliance to one where millions seem unbothered by dependency. For a political leader just to hint at curtailing entitlements or adding a work requirement certifies him as evil. This is hardly surprising is that Washington itself promotes dependency and this training for irresponsibility begins early in life. Long before a youngster can vote, he or she learns, regardless of what economist say, that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

A recent Wall Street Journal article (July 19, 2017, A3) highlighted how this sorrowful condition is encouraged. The Journal article concerns government financed school meals (lunches but increasingly larger numbers of breakfasts). This generosity, in addition to providing daily vitamins and minerals also supplies a daily message that government, not parents, put food on the table. To be specific, in 2016, 73.3% of all school children availing themselves of school lunches ate either free or reduced priced lunches; this compares to 15.1% in 1969.

More is involved than just instructing youngsters in the statist Lord’s Prayer where the Department of Agriculture (USDA), not the Lord, gives us our daily bread. This “instruction” also applies to the millions of other youngsters whose families do not financially qualify for subsidized meals and must therefore pay something toward their daily bread. At least they, unlike those on the subsidized meal plan, ought to see the connection between the sweat of somebody’s brow and their daily bread.

No such luck. Though the Department of Agriculture that administers school food programs explicitly requires schools to notify parents when junior is a deadbeat, inaction regarding no-pays is commonplace. Yes, some school districts are cracking down, for example, banning freeloaders from attending graduation or even withholding meals until the bill is paid (legally permissible), but many other school districts permit junior (and his parents) to stiff Uncle Sam. For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District recently absorbed $629,000 in debt for these unpaid meals; the Yonkers New York School District had an even more forgiving policy and thus wound up with a deficit of $800,000.

This tolerance for freeloading is predictable. Public schools are not like McDonald’s and few educators seem alarmed over burgeoning education costs. In fact, some educators resist any effort to get deadbeats to pay up for their meals and if a school instead supplies a bag lunch to lunchroom deadbeats, the school is condemned for “lunch shaming” (nearly half of all schools engage in some form of shaming). Though shaming is permitted by USDA rules, Texas and New Mexico currently prohibited it and other states are now considering anti-shaming measures. A proposed federal law — the Anti-Lunch Shaming Act of 2017 — has even been introduced in Congress. And needless to say, a no money, no food policy is unthinkable in today’s educational hyper-compassionate environment.

You’d think someone who advocated for a “white genocide” on Twitter might feel an inkling of responsibility for the backlash he has faced. Unfortunately for George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel, he clearly hasn’t.

After being blasted over his earlier comments, Ciccariello-Maher now claims sites like Campus Reform and The College Fix are part of a coordinated effort to unfairly attack left-leaning professors:

From Campus Reform:

George Ciccariello-Maher, an assistant professor of political science, told The Triangle that it is vital to note that conservative outlets are “targeting professors and looking for anything.”

“The bigger question we need to understand is the actual machinery behind what’s going on right now,” he told the publication.

“We’re living in a moment in which organized and coordinated groups are attacking professors. And I was sort of, maybe, on the early end of this in this year. There are cases in the past, many cases. But we’ve since had more than a dozen cases of groups like Campus Reform, Turning Point USA, The Campus Fix [sic] and all these websites — Breitbart — and then up into Fox News targeting professors and looking for anything,” he added.

Ciccariello-Maher also defended Trinity College professor Johnny Eric Williams who was put on leave after appearing to endorse the notion that first responders to June’s congressional baseball shooting should have let the GOP lawmakers “f***ing die.”

Talk about not getting the point.

As someone who spends a good bit of time on this topic, I can say that Ciccariello-Maher is giving us way too much credit. We’re not that coordinated.

What happens is a leftist professor says something that makes you scratch your head. Maybe it’s stupid, maybe it’s evil, but it’s always something that causes alarm among people with an interest in the education of young adults. Then sites like Campus Reform and The College Fix get wind of it and write about it. CONTINUE AT SITE

A dominant narrative about the Trump Administration is that Donald Trump’s election ushered in a new wave of anti-Semitism. It’s an absurd claim, given that among Trump’s top advisors, eleven are Jews, including his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

That’s not to say anti-Semitism isn’t a problem. In fact, it is on the rise. But if you want to find where anti-Semitism is running rampant, don’t look to the Oval Office. Look instead to the place where you’re least likely to find a Trump supporter, the college quad.

I know this because at the recent Christians United For Israel Washington Summit, I spent time with student activists from CUFI On Campus. I listened to their harrowing stories of harassment and intimidation that Jewish (and Christian) students face from left-wing professors and Palestinian student groups whenever they speak up in support of Israel or resist misguided boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) schemes that single out the Jewish state for punishment.

While many in the media portray anti-Semitism as a phenomenon of the right, it is among young liberals that it is growing the most. Several recent studies demonstrate just how pervasive anti-Semitism has become on college campuses. An April report by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry found that there has been a 45 percent rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses between 2015 and 2016.

A study by the Anti-Defamation League found that such incidents rose by a third in 2016 from 2015 and increased 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017. Several other studies put the share of Jewish college students who experience anti-Semitism on campus at anywhere from half to three quarters.

The problem isn’t confined to students making threats against or hurling anti-Semitic slurs at Jewish students. A recent lawsuit suggests school administrators are partly responsible for creating an environment that’s unsafe for Jewish students.

In June, a group of current and former students sued San Francisco State University alleging that the university fostered a climate of anti-Semitism “marked by violent threats to the safety of Jewish students on campus.” The students complain that they were intimidated and prevented from holding events. The environment became so hostile that the students say they became afraid to do anything to indicate that they are Jewish, such as wearing Star of David necklaces.

It’s 2017. And this sort of thing should not be happening anymore.

Millions from the National Science Foundation are being funneled into left-wing social justice work. It’s a criminal waste of money and resources. All this from the folks who claim to love science.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) gave out more than three million dollars to fight “implicit bias,” “microaggressions,” and “lack of diversity” in STEM fields this July.

Texas A&M, meanwhile, received $1,999,000 to fund efforts to “dramatically improve the diversity, inclusion, and quality” of students and faculty in the Department of Aerospace Engineering.

Because that’s what we need in the field. Not talent. Not merit. Diversity.

The NSF also gave out another social-justice themed grant on July 5, this time awarding the University of New Hampshire $999,752 to explore strategies for preventing “bias incidents” perpetrated against minorities in science, building upon prior research funded by the NSF, which found that “bias incidents in the academic workplace create a negative climate for STEM women faculty and for other faculty with minority status.”

Over the next five years, with the support of the NSF grant, UNH will collaborate with researchers from Ohio State University, the University of Virginia, and the University of New Hampshire to create a comprehensive “bias awareness guide and intervention tool.”

So almost a million dollars in taxpayer money will be funneled into campus intimidation.

According to the NSF website…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…” NSF is vital because we support basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.

As we can see above.

The director and all Board members serve six year terms. Each of them, as well as the NSF deputy director, is appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. At present, NSF has a total workforce of about 2,100 at its Arlington, VA, headquarters, including approximately 1,400 career employees, 200 scientists from research institutions on temporary duty, 450 contract workers and the staff of the NSB office and the Office of the Inspector General.

How many of those 1,400 career employees are remotely needed for what the NSF does?

Carl Sandburg College in Illinois may put students through “disciplinary proceedings” for using “offensive language” or “disparaging comments” — a policy that some argue exposes the college to First Amendment lawsuits.

According to an article in Campus Reform, the college’s Student Code of Conduct allows administrators to “initiate disciplinary proceedings against” any student who “is verbally abusive; threatens; uses offensive language; intimidates; engages in bullying, cyber bullying, or hazing; [or] uses hate speech, disparaging comments, epithets, or slurs which create a hostile environment.”

Sam Harris, vice president of policy research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), told Campus Reform that the school’s status “as a public institution” would make it “highly vulnerable to a First Amendment lawsuit” over a policy like this.

“A public school certainly cannot punish students for any and all ‘offensive language’ or ‘disparaging comments,’ nor is ‘hate speech’ a legally cognizable category of speech unprotected by the First Amendment,” Harris told Campus Reform. He added that “while some speech that is offensive or hateful may also constitute threats, harassment, etc., and for that reason be unprotected, most offensive [or] hateful speech is wholly protected by the First Amendment.”

College spokesman Aaron Frey, however, defended the policy to Campus Reform, insisting that officials at the college fully realize that “being open to differing perspectives and opinions is an integral part of the educational experience and growth of students.” But the administration simply “also find[s] it important that those ideas are exchanged in a manner that is respectful and free of speech that may be deemed abusive or hateful in order to maintain a welcoming environment for our students.”

Sorry, Frey — but I’m not buying it. After all, the school’s own policy goes beyond “abusive or hateful” speech; it includes speech that is merely “offensive” — which is, by the way, an entirely subjective descriptor. The thing is, that whole “differing perspectives” ideal that Frey claims that the school values so much means that the exact same statement might be considered “offensive” to people from one perspective but acceptable — or perhaps even “virtuous” — to people from another perspective. And it’s completely inappropriate to give school administrators the authority to dole out punishments to students based on their own interpretations of something that is so subjective. Oh, and for the record: Hate speech, although disgusting, is constitutionally protected, too.

Here’s the bottom line: This policy pretty clearly isn’t just about punishing harassment, because there are already laws against that. This is about something more. It’s about giving administrators broader power to control the speech of students — perhaps to ensure that it stays within certain ideological limits. This policy is not only potentially unconstitutional, but it’s also pretty clearly absurd on a logistical level. Think about it: A ban on “disparaging comments”? Honestly, I’d challenge any person in the world to think of a day that went by in his or her life without a making single “disparaging comment.”