RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ah, the beauty of a microaggression. If you’re not overly familiar with the term, a microaggression is when you say something that’s not outright racist or sexist but still upsets the recipient of the said comment nonetheless.

Some examples of microaggressions include asking someone’s ethnicity in any non-approved manner and mistakenly thinking someone of a given race can speak a particular non-English language because of his or her ethnic heritage.

Now, to be clear, some so-called microaggressions are understandably an issue, but not because of bigotry. Some people just say stupid stuff that comes out very differently than how it was intended.

However, as The College Fix reports, some professors are being urged to treat that poor wording just the same as a punch to the face.

Professors attending a recent academic conference were advised to treat racial microaggressions in the classroom like actual assaults, according to attendees’ tweets.

The advice was doled out at a panel workshop at the annual Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference, held in Las Vegas earlier this month.

The workshop at which the comments were made focused on ways to make theater for students of color a “safe space,” according to the conference’s program.

“A panel discussion exploring an adaption of the ‘Safe Spaces’ LQBTQ training model and applying it to faculty training for all theatre students of color,” the program states.

“Treating racism in our classrooms as we would an assault removes the burden from the victim and begins to create safe space,” one scholar in attendance, Professor Shawna Mefferd Kelty of SUNY Plattsburgh, tweeted out.

The problem, however, is that once again, the left is equating words with actual violence.

Editor’s Note: This Piece was originally published by Acculturated. It is reprinted here with permission.

Earlier this summer, I attended a two-week summer philosophy course that included many students from Ivy League universities. It didn’t take long for me to realize that although these students were brilliant, they seemed to be receiving an education that was harming them.

I learned that Ivy League schools have lost sight of what matters in education. Instead of focusing on truth, learning, and the higher things in life, our elite colleges have turned into pressure cookers designed to churn out the ideal professional. Instead of providing a challenging, rigorous education, our higher institutions of learning are content to indoctrinate their students before shipping them off to Silicon Valley or Wall Street, diploma in hand, to make their millions. That’s not what college is meant to be.

When our group of college seniors, which included students from Cornell and Stanford Universities, among other elite colleges, visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., this point was driven home. Viewing a particular piece of art, I made an offhand comment about Plato’s cave. The two students with me looked puzzled: “What’s Plato’s cave?”

Not everyone needs to know what Plato’s cave is, of course, but I was stunned that two elite students, hand-picked for a summer program that focused on philosophy, had never heard of one of the foundational ideas of Western civilization. My peers at Hillsdale College, a place not ranked among the nation’s elite colleges, read portions of Plato’s Republic during their freshman year, and even if they are not experts in philosophy, they can at least recognize an allusion to Plato. If “elite” students don’t understand history, philosophy, or literature, what are they learning?

Many of them are well versed in the contemporary grievance industry and can speak fluently on politically correct subjects such as “intersectionality.” Of course this is not universally true, but in the absence of real core curricula at many elite colleges, much falls through the gaping cracks.

By contrast, at many non–Ivy League liberal-arts colleges, communities of learning are intact. Students take small classes, work their way through a comprehensive core curriculum, and love learning and challenging ideas. But at the Ivies, I get the impression from my peers that accomplishments and skill and résumé-building often matter more than pursuing truth and risking failure in the process.

Randi Weingarten, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, has insulted millions of students and families. In a speech at a union conference last month, Ms. Weingarten claimed that the school-choice movement has its roots in 1960s-era racism. Charter schools and vouchers, she asserted, “are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”

This is a blatant attempt to rewrite history. The modern education-reform movement was originally propelled by African-Americans and progressives. Fannie Lewis, a Cleveland councilwoman and grandmother, fought for the Cleveland Scholarship Program that was enacted in 1995. Polly Williams, a Wisconsin state representative, helped push through Milwaukee’s early school-choice program in 1990.

Williams, a Democrat and former Black Panther, found few allies for school choice among her natural constituencies. But she firmly believed something had to be done to help children in failing schools. So she joined a diverse coalition, including conservative Gov. Tommy Thompson, to launch the Milwaukee program, which is still running strong more than 25 years later.

Ms. Weingarten must know these facts, because they have been exhaustively chronicled. Yet she actively hides and obfuscates this history. What’s really motivating her over-the-top rhetoric? The answer lies in the numbers. While thousands of children are on waiting lists for charter schools, the AFT’s membership is in decline. As the union’s head count drops, so does its political clout.CONTINUE AT SITE

I would like to expand upon Ruth King’s posting on her website 8.3.17. http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2017/08/03/my-say-re-education-campus/

“In China The Cultural Revolution, that took place from 1966 until 1976 had a stated goal: to purge capitalism and traditional culture from Chinese society. They instituted brutal labor re-education camps. In America anxious seniors are now worried about SAT scores, interviews and essays that have to demonstrate their passions for justice and human rights and a green planet and diversity. The chief question they ask is not about the price of tuition and room and board or the required courses. They want to know if they will be happy. In late summer of 2018 they will take their trunks with their Che Guevara T shirts, torn designer jeans and grungy sneakers and ingrained ignorance off to campus. And once settled into their cushy dorms, their re-education will commence. Unless they major only in science, they will learn to despise capitalism, national cultural norms, shed all gender pronouns and identity, atone for their privileges by joining all the inviting “anti” groups that rail, riot and demand recognition, avoid reading old white authors, approach every aggression and barbarism with moral relativity, read alt-history, especially about the Middle East and Palestine. They will learn that Mao Zedong of the aforementioned re-education labor camps was a progressive.” Ruth King
There is a Cultural Revolution taking place in America today. The stated goal: to purge capitalism and traditional American culture from society. Leftist educational curricula in schools and anti-establishment messaging via television programming (all streaming devices) deliver the dogmatic ideology of the revolution.

The Leftist re-education programming begins long before college. Pre-school educational programs with fanciful characters and talking animals are not benign. Sesame Street creatures are not advocating individual growth, independence, critical thinking skills, excellence, and the merit system which support capitalism and democracy. They are advocating group-think, dependence, passivity, mediocrity, and collectivism which prepare your children for socialism. Students already indoctrinated toward collectivism enter the university re-education programs passive, unaware, and compliant. The re-education curriculum at the university reinforces their passivity and students graduate uninformed, disinformed, and misinformed with degrees in the orthodoxy of liberalism that is tyrannical in its demand for conformity.

The graduates are now credentialed “authorities” in the social sciences who become zealous members of the Leftist echo chamber that reinforces collectivism and dominates television. The left-wing liberal narrative of political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism is reflected in the programming and commercials being streamed into your household and mobile devices twenty-four hours a day. Television programming and television advertising are in the business of social engineering. They are purging capitalism and traditional culture from American society. They are selling socialism.

Their sales strategy pits subjective reality against objective reality. This is how it works.

The Leftist re-education programming presents subjective reality in televised commercials. In the real world of objective reality most families are not intermarried and every play group, luncheon, dinner table, and family picnic does not have one Asian, one white person, one black person, and one Hispanic in attendance. In the real world most couples are not homosexual, white men and women are not all idiots, and black men and women are not all judges, doctors, and lawyers. Why does television programming and commercials portray contrived fabricated scenes and plots of subjective reality instead of factual scenes and plots of objective reality to sell their products? Because they are not selling products they are re-educating America.

The radical left-wing agenda is selling socialism. They are re-educating America on television just like the schools are re-educating America in the classroom. The unreal subjective reality of the programming is intentionally confusing and creates cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the destabilizing state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially relating to behavioral decisions and attitude changes. Cognitive dissonance creates extreme stress because people seek psychological stability and consistency. The contradictory images being televised do not comport with objective reality so they threaten and destabilize the viewer’s sense of what is real. Cognitive dissonance is the psychological equivalent of physical pain – people will do anything to stop it.

Democracy lives in the adult world of objective reality and facts. It embraces diversity that includes differences of opinion, protects freedom of speech, and insists upon individual personal responsibility. Socialism lives in the childish world of make-believe, subjective reality, diversity that excludes differences of opinion, restricts freedom speech, and rejects personal responsibility. The Left seeks to destroy objective reality and create social chaos. WHY?

Social chaos is the prerequisite for seismic social change and the Leftists seek to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism. How does it work?

The medium is the message. In 1964 Marshall McLuhan explained that the medium is separate from the message and has a separate social effect upon the recipient. Television is the greatest vehicle for social engineering and mass psychological indoctrination ever invented. The images on the screen become familiar and familiarity brings acceptance. The separate social effect of television (including any screening device) is that the images are accepted as reality. For children talking animals and cartoon characters acquire authority. For older kids, adolescents, and adults the characters in the plots become reality and their fictitious lives no matter how anti-establishment become normative and acceptable. The breakdown of rules, restrictions, and cultural norms appears progressive to an adolescent but is in fact extremely regressive to an adult.

The anti-establishment strategy is to present television commercials and programming that attack established cultural norms of American family, religion, and government with destabilizing images and messages creating cognitive dissonance. By destroying the three pillars of society the Left hopes to advance its agenda of socialism. The Left advertises socialism as the structure that will provide social justice, income equality, and escape from cognitive dissonance. Socialism is advertised as the stabilizing equalizing answer to your problems. Anyone who watches television commercials knows that there is little truth in advertising. Wiping a rag across the shower door does not remove the soap scum.

The truth about Leftist diversity is that it only includes people who LOOK different not people who THINK differently. There are no conservatives invited to the luncheon or sitting at the picnic table. There is no diversity of thought. American democracy is founded on principles of equality, freedom of speech (thought), and individual rights. Socialism is collectivism and values the group over the individual. There is no social justice or income equality in socialism. In the long run socialism never works because as Margaret Thatcher said, “Eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

It’s easy to get fired from an American college these days. Just make some innocent remark that a member of a recognized victim group claims to find offensive and you’ll be on your way to the unemployment office pronto.

On the other hand, it’s really, really tough to lose your college teaching job by spouting off leftist slogans. Which makes Kevin Allred a very special guy. He is a white man who, for several years, taught a course in the Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University entitled “Politicizing Beyoncé.”

Judging by all accounts, it was a perfect example of a thoroughly ridiculous 21st-century humanities course, heavy on pop culture and political correctness and light on anything remotely resembling academic or practical value. It was a very popular course with the Rutgers student body, doubtless because it was less challenging than, say, Quantum Mechanics.

(Sample student comments from Rate My Professors: “Awesome professor! Doesn’t believe in grades and is very lenient. No actual homework.” “BEST. PROFESSOR. AT RUTGERS. Like the second class the computer wasn’t working and he cancelled class.” “He doesn’t even lecture, we watch one or two of Beyonce’s music videos and then we discuss them … super easy.” “SUPER CHILL! Like literally, he let us choose our final grade!”)

Allred had a sweet deal. After studying his Twitter and Facebook accounts and listening to his idiotic podcast, I can testify that he has very little in the way of intellectual heft to offer. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, he’s a silly drama queen whose mind, such as it is, is a ratatouille of left-wing ideological clichés.

Nonetheless, he had succeeded in landing a job teaching – or, rather, “teaching” – at one of the best colleges in the country. Note well that a far more highly qualified individual with moderate or conservative political views would find it tough, if not impossible, to secure such a gig in a Rutgers humanities department.

In short, Allred was one lucky fluff-head. But his ivory-tower idyll would not last forever. In November, Trump’s election victory unhinged him so much that comments he made on campus – and on Twitter – led to a visit to his home (in Brooklyn, where else?) by members of the NYPD, who took him to Bellevue for psychiatric evaluation.
Professor Calls Whites “Inhuman A**holes,” Tells Blacks to “Let Them F*cking Die”

“We were informed by Rutgers PD,” explained the NYPD in a statement, “that he made threats to kill white people.” Allred himself, in a piece published online last month, maintained that “[a]n anonymous complaint from a parent claimed I forced students to destroy an American flag, threatened every white student in class by saying I would shoot them all given the chance, then returned home and tweeted proof of my dangerous behavior.”

The tweet read as follows: “will the 2nd amendment be as cool when I buy a gun and start shooting atrandom [sic] white people or no…?”

Although the doctors at Bellevue sent Allred home, he was later visited (he says) by members of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. And Rutgers, after temporarily suspending him, gave him the heave-ho. In the aforementioned piece, in which he depicted himself (naturally) as a victim and rejected all the accusations made against him, Allred said that the whole episode “makes me want to teach harder, more ferociously, and more unapologetically than ever.”

One microdrama this week came from a leaked document revealing that the Justice Department may staff up an investigation into “intentional race-based discrimination” in college admissions. The left is accusing Justice of dismantling racial preferences, though acceptance practices at elite universities deserve more scrutiny, particularly regarding Asian-American applicants.

In 2015 a coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups filed a complaint with the Justice Department Civil Rights Division that alleges admissions discrimination at Harvard University, and the details are striking. In 1993 about 20% of Harvard students were Asian-American, and that figure has barely budged over two decades, even as the Asian-American share of the U.S. population has grown rapidly. Harvard’s admitted class of 2021 is 22% Asian-American, according to data on the university’s website, and the numbers are roughly consistent at Princeton, Yale and other Ivy League schools.

Compare that with California, where a 1990s referendum banned the state’s public universities from considering race as an admissions factor. The share at University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles tops 30%, as the complaint notes. At the private California Institute of Technology, which by choice does not consider race as a factor, more than 40% of students were Asian-American in 2013, up from 26% in 1993.

Also notable is research on how much more competitive Asian-Americans must be to win entry into Harvard or other hallowed progressive halls. All else being equal, Asian-American must score 140 points higher on the SAT than a white counterpart, 270 points higher than a Hispanic student, and 450 points higher than a black applicant, according to 2009 research from Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and co-author Alexandria Walton Radford.

Schools are allowed to consider race as a “plus” factor, and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in recent years has muddied the legal standards, most recently in Fisher v. University of Texas. But the Asian-American disparities look like evidence of de facto admissions quotas that the High Court has explicitly declared illegal.

The threat to free speech in the United States is by no means restricted to colleges and universities, but they have become breeding grounds, training camps, and launching pads in the campaign to curtail liberty of thought and discussion. It is on our campuses where the battle for free speech will be won or lost.

In this year alone, protesters at Claremont McKenna College disrupted a talk by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald; protesters at Middlebury College intimidated American Enterprise Institute Scholar Charles Murray and assaulted his host, Professor Allison Stanger; and, in the successful effort to prevent journalist and right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, protesters at the University of California, Berkeley set private property aflame in a rampage across campus.

These are the tip of the iceberg. For a 2017 report, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education “surveyed publicly available policies at 345 four-year public institutions and 104 of the nation’s largest and/or most prestigious private institutions.” A disheartening 39.6 percent “maintain severely restrictive, ‘red light’ speech codes that clearly and substantially prohibit constitutionally protected speech.”

Administrators and faculty have conspired to produce an intellectual environment hostile to free speech. The educational authorities teach students to demand trigger warnings for potentially disturbing subject matter; to perceive opinions with which they disagree as forms of “violence” and to scrutinize everyday utterances for actionable microaggressions; to expect the establishment of public “safe spaces” that exclude disfavored opinions; and to disinvite speakers who depart from campus orthodoxies.

Some high-ranking university officials have gone so far as to tout the policing and curtailment of expression as victories for free speech. In April, in a lengthy New York Times op-ed, “What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech,” Ulrich Baer — vice provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity, and professor of comparative literature at New York University –advanced a supposedly more “sophisticated understanding.”

If “views invalidate the humanity of some people,” he asserted, “they restrict speech as a public good” and so these humanity-invalidating views, he contended, should themselves be restricted to improve free speech. The traditional name for Baer’s policy is censorship.

Commentary magazine’s summer feature “Symposium: Is Free Speech Under Threat?” canvasses a diversity of opinion on the subject, including the academic establishment’s studied obliviousness to the danger. Despite the massive evidence, First Amendment scholar and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger assures in his contribution that the threat is the invention of demagogues. “I do not for a second support the view that this generation has an unhealthy aversion to engaging differences of opinion,” Bollinger writes. “That is a modern trope of polarization, as is the portrayal of universities as hypocritical about academic freedom and political correctness.”

Yet the bulk of the Commentary symposium—which includes 27 distinguished writers, scholars, broadcasters, and university presidents—reveals just the opposite. It illuminates a wide variety of threats to free speech while recognizing—especially in essays by New York University law professor Richard Epstein, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center history professor K.C. Johnson, and Mac Donald—that the struggle on campuses is pivotal.

The Justice Department plans to invest more resources in investigating a complaint of racial discrimination at American universities. Naturally, so-called liberals are dismayed.

One of the results of the increasing diversity of the United States is that questions involving race and ethnicity no longer amount to whites vs. blacks or whites vs. everybody else — there are more players at the table. But don’t tell that to the editors of the New York Times, who immediately tried to present the question as the Trump administration working to stir up white racial resentment. The Times reported that the DOJ would target “affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants,” even as it concedes three paragraphs later that relevant policy document “does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions.”

The Times talks a good game about diversity, but one wonders whether any of the Asian editors on its staff were given the opportunity to consider that sentence.

In reality, as the DOJ itself has now confirmed, the directive involves a complaint filed by a group of 64 Asian-American organizations, a complaint made during the Obama administration, which never got around to resolving it. The DOJ has not received any new policy direction on affirmative action as a general practice, much less as it specifically relates to white students.

It should.

There are questions — legitimate ones — about the ways in which affirmative-action policies in college admissions disadvantage white applicants relative to their black and Hispanic counterparts, questions that are of particular interest when applied to affirmative-action programs that disproportionately benefit wealthy black and Hispanic applicants from abroad rather than the members of struggling domestic minority populations these policies are intended, in theory, to serve.

But the children of white working-class families who pay a racial penalty when competing for college spots against the children of Nigerian college professors and Colombian oil executives are not the only ones with a legitimate complaint. The de facto discrimination against Asian and Asian-American students is spectacular, undeniable, and shameful. They are in effect subjected to the same quota system that the Ivy League once used to keep down its Jewish population — the “bamboo ceiling,” some call it. Asian-American groups pursuing litigation against these policies have demonstrated that students of Asian background on average have to score 140 points above white students to have similar chances of college admission — and 270 points higher than Hispanic students, and 450 points higher than black students. The “Asian penalty” is especially heavy in places such as California’s prestigious state universities.

The DOJ is absolutely in the right to take up this question.

The Justice Department’s new focus on affirmative action is shining a spotlight on a decades-old debate: whether the benefits of using race in college admissions outweigh the costs.

The question is part of a high-profile lawsuit accusing Harvard University of discriminating against Asian-American applicants.

The federal lawsuit, filed in Boston in 2014, was brought by a nonprofit called Students for Fair Admissions, which alleges that Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans in its admissions practices by limiting the number of Asian students who are admitted and holding them to a higher standard than students of other races. The group claims the school’s practices violate federal civil rights law and equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

Members of the nonprofit, which advocates for the elimination of affirmative action, include Asian students who were denied admission to Harvard.

The lawsuit’s allegations formed the basis for a separate complaint against Harvard filed in 2015 by a coalition of 64 Asian-American groups. On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it would begin an investigation of the complaint, which was filed with the department’s civil rights division and other government agencies.

It’s unclear whether the Justice Department will also seek to intervene in the federal lawsuit against Harvard.

Asian-American groups have been raising concerns about the fairness of Ivy League admission practices since at least 1989.

In this case, lawyers for the plaintiffs say their goal is to reach the Supreme Court and overturn racial preferences in university admissions. As part of the lawsuit, the students are asking the judge to prohibit Harvard from using race as a factor in future undergraduate admissions decisions.

Harvard has defended its policies by pointing to a handful of Supreme Court precedents over the past 40 years that have allowed universities to consider race as a factor in admissions to obtain the benefits of a diverse student body.

Harvard’s admissions process reviews many factors and “considers each applicant as a whole person, consistent with the legal standards established by the U.S. Supreme Court,” said a spokeswoman for the university.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the idea that universities have a compelling interest in assembling a diverse student body because it promotes “cross-racial understanding” and better prepares students for a diverse workforce. In a 2003 ruling involving the University of Michigan Law School, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that classroom discussion is more enlightening with students of different backgrounds, resulting in better learning outcomes.

In the Harvard lawsuit, the plaintiffs are challenging parts of that premise.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs in May asked Harvard to turn over data showing the academic performance and academic preparation of enrolled students by ethnicity. The request is part of the plaintiffs’ argument that Harvard’s admission of underrepresented minorities who they say are less academically prepared ends up hurting those students in the long run. Known as the “mismatch theory,” the plaintiffs say underprepared minority students get lower grades and opt out of difficult majors in college, reinforcing damaging stereotypes.

The plaintiffs hope to use any data provided by Harvard on student performance by race to show that affirmative action has a negative effect on certain students after they enroll. Such a finding could undermine the justification for considering race in admissions decisions.

The lawsuit also proposed race-neutral ways for the university to achieve diversity, such as giving more weight to socioeconomic status or eliminating legacy preferences, which primarily help white and wealthy applicants to the detriment of minorities.

Harvard’s response to the request is under seal. A spokesman for WilmerHale, the law firm representing Harvard, declined to comment.

In an brief filed earlier in the case, a group of current and prospective Harvard students said the mismatch theory has been repeatedly disproved. They pointed to research showing that while the selectivity of a school doesn’t increase earnings for students as a whole, it does for black and Latino students. These students achieve higher grades and graduate at higher rates than their peers at less selective schools, the brief said.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled that Harvard wasn’t required to produce academic performance data of enrolled students, but said the court may reconsider the issue at a later time. Judge Burroughs did order the university to turn over comprehensive admissions databases.

She also required four top high schools, including Stuyvesant High School in New York and Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Va., to respond to subpoenas by the plaintiffs seeking evidence of possible discrimination by Harvard, including depositions of guidance counselors or school officials. CONTINUE AT SITE