RUTHFULLY YOURS

Growing up, I was told that college wasn’t just where the best and brightest should go, but also anyone who didn’t want to be a massive loser. While colleges tended to foster liberal ideas, conservatives certainly could find their place at many institutions of higher learning. Even most liberal professors would engage in intellectual debate with conservative students without rancor.

Of course, those days are long over. Today, colleges are actively hostile toward right-leaning students. Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle — noting that conservative support for the college experience has cratered from 58 percent to 36 percent in just a few years — addresses the situation:

Looking at this poll, Philip Bump of the Washington Post blames this on the focus “by conservative media on tensions at universities.”

“Conservative media,” he adds, “focused its attention on the idea of ‘safe spaces’ on college campuses, places where students would be sheltered from controversial or upsetting information or viewpoints. This idea quickly spread into a broader critique of left-wing culture, but anecdotal examples from individual universities, such as objections to scheduled speakers and warnings in classrooms, became a focal point.”

It’s the sort of theory that may sound plausible on first read, except … see the first sentence of this column. Conservatives in the media have been complaining about liberals in academia for a very long time — just about as long, in fact, as academia has been trending liberal. After all, William F. Buckley rose to fame, and midwifed the modern conservative movement, after writing “God and Man at Yale.” As the book’s title suggests, it complained that elite educational institutions were excessively secular, collectivist and disposed toward government intervention in the economy. It was first published in 1951.

So what changed?

Well, McArdle argues — and I completely agree — that colleges went from being places with a simple liberal bent to becoming dangerously hostile towards any right-of-center thought. We’ve seen riots because of right-leaning speakers at Berkeley and Middlebury. College campuses have made it clear that conservative and libertarian thinkers are persona non grata.

That’s not all, however:

Indeed, schools’ responses to leftists’ riots have been: to make it maximally inconvenient for conservatives to speak (or be heard); to deliver a slap on the wrist against violent protests; and to allow students to corner, bully and imprecate upon professors.

Academia is a left-wing institution, and I suspect that when the people in charge of it look at left-wing protesters, they see basically good-hearted kids who are overexuberant in their pursuit of the common good. And who wants to wreck the lives of a nice kid who made a bad mistake out of the best possible motives?

Whatever the reason that this has been allowed to happen, the picture that emerges from these events is of an academia where orderly conservatives are unwelcome, but disorderly — even violent — leftists are tolerated. No wonder conservatives’ opinion of academia is falling. CONTINUE AT SITE

Political agitation on campus can be hard work, and its rigors deserve to be recognized when professors are handing out student grades. Believe it or not, that’s a new theme at several schools of supposedly higher education where students have erupted.

Take Evergreen State College, where biology professor Bret Weinstein was harassed and advised by police to stay home after he opposed a racially segregated “Day of Absence” in which whites were told to stay off campus. The student haranguing was extreme enough that Evergreen president George Bridges was “apparently not free to go to the restroom on his own,” as Evergreen facilities engineer Rich Davis put it in an email obtained by these pages through a public records request.

But far from punishing students for such behavior, interim Evergreen provost Kenneth Tabbutt wrote in a May 25 email that “student protestors have diverted time and energy from their academic work to promote institutional change and social justice.” Professors have discretion on student evaluations, he added, so “I am asking that you consider the physical and emotional commitment the students have made and consider accommodations for that effort, including the learning that is going on outside of your program.” This is a novel spin on the old school of hard knocks.

In recent years administrators at Columbia, the New School and elsewhere have also encouraged grading concessions for students who chose protests over mere book learning. At Oberlin some 1,300 students unsuccessfully petitioned the school president for no failing grades for activists. Oberlin’s Black Student Union has also demanded an $8.20-per-hour stipend for student protesters’ “continuous organizing efforts.”

Today’s millennial activists aren’t likely to behave better if the punishment for antisocial or violent behavior is a higher GPA.

Could we be approaching the end of the Bernie Sanders era in liberal political thought? The pendulum has been swinging so fast and so far in the direction of radical leftism that even mainstream publications have become comfortable dismissing endorsements of western civilization itself as “alt-right” nativism. But a new book from a chaired history professor at Duke University could represent the end of the cycle.

In “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” Duke’s Nancy MacLean argues that Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan was not simply a pioneer in “public choice” theory, which holds that government officials act out of self-interest just like everyone else. In Ms. MacLean’s view, Buchanan was also the author of a plan to subvert democracy and favor rich white people.

Your humble correspondent has not read the book. And some readers of this column will say that a university professor flinging outlandish accusations at a critic of big government is not news. But what is news here is that Ms. MacLean’s book is not finding the public reception she might have expected. Yes, certain far-left pundits have praised the work, but the trade publication Inside Higher Ed writes that the “story keeps unfolding, with MacLean’s critics alleging inaccuracies and other problems with her book,” and “MacLean in turn alleging a coordinated attack against her by libertarian scholars.”

Many libertarian scholars have criticized her book. George Mason law professor David Bernstein is among those who have posted critiques on the Washington Post website.

But it’s not just libertarians who cite problems with the MacLean rendering of history. At Vox of all places, two academics who describe themselves as “on the center left” have written a piece entitled, “Even the intellectual left is drawn to conspiracy theories about the right. Resist them.” The authors write:

In language better suited to a Dan Brown novel than a serious nonfiction book, she describes Buchanan as an “evil genius,” and suggests he had a “diabolical” plan to permanently “shackle” democracy, so that the will of the majority would no longer influence government in core areas of the economy. In MacLean’s account, Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the contractual and constitutional bases of decision-making but is nearly unknown to the public, prepared the plan that the Koch brothers and other conservative funders and activists have been carrying out ever since.

The Vox contributors conclude: “MacLean is not only wrong in detail but mistaken in the fundamentals of her account.” Could it be that progressives have been moving left so quickly that the young adults at Vox have already become—at least in relative terms—the moderate elder statesmen of the movement? Perhaps the pendulum is starting to swing back. Regardless, it’s refreshing to see that at least one progressive website intends to help serve as a reality check on Duke’s history department.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267259/hatem-bazian-terrorist-professor-hamas-promoter-frontpagemagcom

Is Hatem Bazian the most dangerous professor in the USA? Nablus-born Bazian, is notorious for calling for intifada [violent uprising] in the United States.
He is the founder of the radical organizations Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). He is a serial pusher of conspiracies, and has a “project” to re-write history. More worryingly, he is largely responsible for the wave of anti-Semitic incitement across North American campuses.

For more info about Bazian, go to this link at the indispensable Canary Mission website. The Canary Mission database was created to document people and groups that are promoting hatred of the U.S., Israel and the Jewish people, particularly on college campuses in North America.You can also learn more about Bazian, SJP and AMP at their comprehensive profile pages at the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks resource site.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
A collection of eyebrow-raising pronouncements from an American professor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2k5QaUOBE4

Asserts the uploader, Canary Mission, which has a must-read post here,

‘Nablus-born Hatem Bazian, is notorious for calling for intifada [violent uprising] in the USA. He is the founder of radical organizations, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). He is a serial pusher of conspiracies, and has a ‘project’ to re-write history. More worryingly, he is largely responsible for the wave of antisemitic incitement across North American campuses.’

On Wednesday, a faculty committee at Harvard University has suggested “phasing out” fraternities, sororities, and other social groups on campus, with the goal of “ending the gender segregation and discrimination” of such historic college organizations.

“Harvard students may neither join nor participate in final clubs, fraternities or sororities, or other similar private, exclusionary social organizations that are exclusively or predominantly made up of Harvard students, whether they have any local or national affiliation, during their time in the College,” the proposed rule stated.

The rule also emphasized punishments for students in such organizations. “The College will take disciplinary action against students who are found to be participating in such organizations. Violations will be adjudicated by the Administrative Board.”

While the rule was vague about the type of organizations which would be specifically forbidden for students to join, Harvard spokeswoman Rachael Dane insisted that “appendix 2 in the report (page 17) clearly outlines which organizations they are suggesting.”

That appendix listed: social clubs with gender-neutral policies such as the Spee Club, the Oak Club, and the Seneca; female final clubs like the La Vie Club, the Bee Club, and the Pleiades Society; male final clubs like the Delphic Club, the Fox Club, and the Phoenix S.K. Club; fraternities like Alpha Epsilon Pi, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and Sigma Chi; and sororities like Alpha Phi, Delta Gamma, and Kappa Kappa Gamma.

Dane argued that that list was the entirety of the groups considered in the proposed ban, but the language of the rule — “private, exclusionary social organizations that are exclusively or predominantly made up of Harvard students” — suggested a wide berth of organizations, which could broadly be construed to include religious groups, activist groups, and social welfare groups.

The emphasis on preventing discrimination pervaded the document. “As long ago as 1988, a faculty member observed that ‘the final clubs are where Harvard students learn to discriminate.’ Such an attitude hardly prepares students for the pluralistic world into which they will graduate,” the committee wrote.

The Harvard faculty committee’s proposal outlined the “explicit goal of ending the gender segregation and discrimination of these organizations in a manner that is consistent with our educational mission, non-discrimination principles, and applicable law.” The proposal also noted that the committee “turned for inspiration to the practices of peer institutions that have taken steps to diminish the role of fraternities and sororities and/or equivalent exclusive-membership private social clubs on their campuses.”

The vague language employed in the second quote might be a hedge, in order to prevent students from forming organizations like fraternities and sororities while using other names to refer to them.

Even so, such a drastic action as forbidding all fraternities and sororities would open the door for the college to prevent other expressions of students’ freedom of association. If avoiding discrimination is the goal, why stop at gender discrimination? Religious and viewpoint discrimination may be fundamental to Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, or political advocacy groups on campus. CONTINUE AT SITE

The end of the school year at Fieldston Lower, one of two elementary divisions at the elite Ethical Culture Fieldston School, is usually a time of celebration: class picnics on the school’s bucolic 18-acre campus in the Bronx, the fifth-grade graduation in the gym.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/nyregion/ethical-culture-fieldston-school-principal.html

But this year, these events were overshadowed when, on June 1, two weeks before classes ended, the head of the school, Jessica L. Bagby, issued a terse announcement that George Burns, the longtime principal of Fieldston Lower, was retiring.

The news shook many parents and staff members. Mr. Burns had worked there for 18 years and had given no indication that he planned to retire. Almost no one believed that his departure was entirely voluntary.

Some angry parents wrote to Ms. Bagby, demanding an explanation. In a heated meeting, staff members at Fieldston Lower told her and Caryn Seidman-Becker, the chairwoman of Fieldston’s board, that their trust in

Ms. Seidman-Becker and Ms. Bagby, who assumed her position a year ago, declined to discuss with staff members or parents why Mr. Burns had left. And so, in the absence of information, some supplied their own theory — that Ms. Seidman-Becker and some board members want to change the direction of Fieldston, which was founded in the late 19th century by Felix Adler as a free school serving poor children and is now one of New York City’s top private schools.

Ms. Seidman-Becker and Ms. Bagby, who assumed her position a year ago, declined to discuss with staff members or parents why Mr. Burns had left. And so, in the absence of information, some supplied their own theory — that Ms. Seidman-Becker and some board members want to change the direction of Fieldston, which was founded in the late 19th century by Felix Adler as a free school serving poor children and is now one of New York City’s top private schools.

In that largely white and wealthy world, Ethical Culture Fieldston is the most politically liberal of the schools, with an explicit mission to mold students into “ethical individuals who aim to make the world more humane and just.” Its Conversations About Race program, which is mandatory for all fourth and fifth graders, is among the most aggressive attempts by an independent school in New York to confront racial issues.

Mr. Burns, in particular, had made it his goal for Fieldston Lower to reflect the city’s diversity. He had championed Conversations About Race, which has gained national acclaim but has proved controversial among some parents. As part of the program, children are divided into groups by race to discuss their experiences.

In an interview, Ms. Bagby said the school was not backing away from its commitment to diversity and to tackling racial issues. While neither she nor Sarah Danzig Simon, the assistant head of school for institutional advancement, would directly address why Mr. Burns had left, it is clear, based on documents and interviews, that he and Ms. Bagby had a falling out shortly after the beginning of last school year. The dispute comes down to a meeting between them on Oct. 20, of which they have given radically different accounts, and which was later investigated by a member of the school’s board.

Mr. Burns’s version is encapsulated in a bias report he filed in December with the school’s human resources director. At the time, Mr. Burns shared the report with his former assistant, Rama Ndiaye, and she provided it to The New York Times.

According to that account, during the meeting Ms. Bagby mentioned that two parents had contacted her with concerns about the Conversations About Race program. She then asked Mr. Burns, “You know what the problem here is?” When he asked what it was, he wrote, she said something that sounded to him like “the scientists.” He was confused and asked her to repeat herself. At that point she said, apparently referring to the parents who had complained, “It’s the Zionists — the Jews.”

Mr. Burns wrote that he was stunned and told her that there were plenty of Jewish families who supported the program and families of different backgrounds who opposed it. Mr. Burns said she then made an additional comment about “this group of Jewish parents” who were complaining about the program.

In Mr. Burns’s telling, he emailed Ms. Bagby the next morning saying he was disturbed by her comment and wanted to discuss it further. They did not talk until their regularly scheduled meeting the next week, at which he told her that he found the remark as offensive as if she had said, “The problem in the school is the colored people.” He wrote that she ultimately offered a kind of apology — saying, “Well, I’m sorry if that’s what it sounded like to you, but I didn’t mean it that way” — but that he found it belated and unsatisfying.

For the past 30 years, a Philadelphia-based organization called Need in Deed (NID) has been training elementary and middle-school teachers “to use the classroom to prepare young people for civic responsibility and service to others.” And how, exactly, does NID do this? By training its teachers to engage students in long-term “service projects” whose objective is to: (a) inculcate youngsters with the notion that America is an oppressive wasteland where nonwhite minorities, women, homosexuals, the poor, and even the natural environment are routinely exploited and abused; and (b) turn children into budding political activists and community organizers who seek to fundamentally transform that deeply flawed society.

For example, in one NID project at Grover Washington Jr. Middle School in Philadelphia, eighth-grade students explored “some of the discriminatory housing forces – practices like redlining, steering, predatory lending and ethnic intimidation – that have influenced the[ir] city’s racial and economic segregation” over the years. As part of their instruction, these students watched an ABC Nightline segment titled “Race in America,” which examined the case of a black family that had fearfully fled their new home in a mostly white section of Philadelphia after neighbors harassed them with racial epithets and threatening letters. After watching the video, the students were asked to express, in writing, their outrage over how the black family had been mistreated.

As part of that same NID project, Princeton sociologist Doug Massey, author of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of an Underclass – a book claiming that black urban poverty is largely a result of massive discrimination in U.S. cities – addressed the students personally. In a subsequent lesson, the youngsters watched a documentary titled Race: The Power of an Illusion, which, in the words of its producer, “reveals how our social institutions ‘make’ race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.”

Another NID project – designed to introduce young people to purportedly heroic women who have battled the forces of “racism, homophobia, [and] sexism” – required the pupils to read the Kate Schatz book Rad American Women A-Z. The women who are profiled and lionized in Schatz’s book are almost all leftists, and in some cases Marxists or political revolutionaries. Among them:

Angela Davis, a lifelong America-hating Communist, and a former member of the murderous Black Panther Party;
Rachel Carson, a staunch anti-capitalist and the founder of the modern radical environmental movement;
Sonia Sotomayor, a Supreme Court Justice whose worldview is thoroughly steeped in identity politics;
Wangari Maathai, a pro-socialist environmental activist who once charged that “some sadistic [white] scientists” created the AIDS virus “to punish blacks” and, ultimately, “to wipe out the black race”;
Qiu Jin, a Chinese feminist and revolutionary who believed that the traditional family structure was oppressive to women;
Dolores Huerta, a longtime socialist, labor leader, and advocate of mass immigration; and
Ella Baker, an influential civil-rights leader and avowed socialist who had ties to the Communist Party USA, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, and the Weather Underground.

I want to make a prediction: The next successful Republican politician will rally the Right by making America’s universities his punching bag — and said universities will prove even more vulnerable to that politician’s attacks than the media were to Donald Trump’s.

A new study from the Pew Research Center shows that Republican opinion of the nation’s higher-education system has deteriorated remarkably in a very short time. In 2015, 58 percent of Republicans thought that colleges and universities had a positive effect on the country; an only slightly larger share of Democrats, 65 percent, agreed. Just two years later, the numbers are dramatically different: Only 36 percent of Republicans view colleges positively, compared to 72 percent of Democrats. A whopping 58 percent of Republicans think that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country.

Now imagine what could happen to that number if a Republican presidential nominee tweeted every day and gave speeches around the country attacking our colleges. Imagine how many more Republicans would come to view the nation’s academic enclaves negatively if their party’s standard-bearer complained daily about the indoctrination of our children, the ceaseless rise in tuition costs that bleeds regular folks dry, the decline in pedagogical rigor, the political bias, the lies. Imagine what would happen if such a politician branded universities as the “enemy of the American people.”

Post-Trump, the Republican party will likely be disunited. Voters and politicians will wonder what the party stands for anymore. Is it pro– or anti–military intervention? Pro– or anti–free markets? Culturally conservative or vulgar? The GOP will need a message around which to coalesce. More precisely, it will need an enemy. Republican voters may disagree on policy and principle, but they can agree on whom they don’t like:

Radical professors, race-obsessed provocateurs, gender-studies grifters, anti-Israel fanatics, weak-kneed administrators, disgusting libertines, angry feminists, and illiberal student protesters.

Conservatives can get on board with this critique. They have long railed against the liberal bias of colleges and their effect on America’s young. They might get uncomfortable when the critique gets extreme, of course, but the extreme version of the message is not meant for them. It will hammer the same themes as before but excite populists with different terms. “Radical professors” will become “anti-American” or “Communist.” “Racial provocateurs” will become “anti-white racists.”

In short, everyone will hear what he or she needs to, and respond accordingly. The alt-right will cheer. Conservative intellectuals will write treatises on the pernicious influence of radical intellectuals and call for a new type of American university. Policy wonks will cite studies demonstrating the decline in intellectual diversity on American campuses, drawing up plans to lower tuition or expand technical education while noting responsibly that universities are not for everyone. Each story about silly student protesters and each intimation of a speech code will spark a thousand “hot takes,” a Fox News interview, and comment from public officials. Populists will decry the “end of free speech.”

These blows will land for three reasons: 1) They’re partially true; 2) universities and the Left are in denial about their truth; and 3) Republican voters have been primed to believe them.

The American college system is incredibly screwed up. Only its most servile apologists will deny that. For one, it’s a bubble. Tuition prices never stop rising, far outpacing inflation, even as the services rendered seem to have deteriorated. Exorbitant tuition imposes immense strain on parents, who often must reshape their lives around paying college bills, and on students, many of whom struggle under the burden of student debt for years after graduation.

Moreover, to what does all that tuition really entitle a student, anyway? The elimination of core curricula in the ’80s and ’90s has destroyed the foundation of American liberal-arts education. The “studies” majors have themselves drawn students in without being able to offer a promise of real erudition or substantial job prospects. Many disciplines have shifted dramatically toward the study of race, gender, and class.

The bias is undeniable: Left-wing professors and students predominate, while conservative thought is often ignored, sometimes marginalized, and occasionally forbidden by oppressive speech codes or threatening mobs. Political correctness and identity politics rule many campus student groups. And college life reliably promises socialization into progressive ideas and sexual mores, as well as a confrontation with the most relaxed attitudes toward drinking and drugs.

Nor do universities themselves recognize the validity and potency of their critics’ charges. In covering the Pew survey, InsideHigherEd laid blame for the shift in Republican attitudes at the feet of “perceived liberal orthodoxy and political correctness in higher education.” This is typical of how these discussions go. There are only “perceived” problems. The evidence of how fields have drastically changed and how the professoriate has drifted radically leftward since the 1990s is ignored.

Does this sort of denialism sound familiar? If so, it is likely because the media made the same arguments for years when they were accused of liberal bias. Conservatives were always either “making it up” or they weren’t, but bias was just unavoidable. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” joked Stephen Colbert. “On the liberal bias of facts,” read the headline on one Paul Krugman column in the New York Times.

By refusing to own up to their own bias and weaknesses, the media didn’t make their critics disappear; they only angered and empowered them, making themselves more vulnerable to attack. Trump took advantage of that vulnerability by proving he could strike at the media harder than anyone else ever had. A lifelong Democrat and buffoon, he proved his bona fides to Republican voters by waging war on mainstream journalists.

A seemingly obscure fight among academic elites might not seem worthy of broad public concern, but a move underway at Harvard University should concern everyone. Kathryn Hinderaker reports at The College Fix:

Harvard University will delete the reference to Puritans from its alma mater song, saying the word is not inclusive.

Its Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging is now taking submissions for a new line to replace the one referencing Puritans.

The final verse of “Fair Harvard” currently reads:

Let not moss-covered Error moor thee at its side,
As the world on Truth’s current glides by;
Be the herald of Light, and the bearer of Love,
Till the stock of the Puritans die.

According to the task force, the alma mater as it stands “suggests that the commitment to truth, and to being the bearer of its light, is the special province of those of Puritan stock. This is false.”

The task force states it is looking for a more inclusive phrase that will appeal to all members of the community, “regardless of background, identity, religious affiliation, or viewpoint.”

This is utter nonsense, of course. Puritans founded Harvard and the Massachusetts Bay Colony that hosted it. They dedicated the new university (originally founded to train clergy) to Truth with a capital T, and phrased it in Latin on the new university’s crest: Veritas.

All who have been welcomed to Harvard in the wake of this magnificent legacy can share in the quest for truth and membership in what was called “the university community” in the two decades I spent there as a student and faculty member. Incidentally, I have no Puritan ancestors, and never for a moment felt excluded by the Puritan heritage.

It appears that this change is top-down, not a response to demands of students:

The “Purtians” line was not even a point of contention among students prior to the announcement that it will be rewritten, the Crimson reports.

Evidently, Harvard’s “Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging” has unlimited powers, if it can reach into minutiae like the historic alma mater song and alter what the decades or centuries have sanctified as a tradition. Could it decide that Truth itself is now a suspicious concept, the product of white, hegemonic, male culture, and this demand the rejection of Veritas as the University’s motto?

The confused thinking of the Task Force is revealed int his tantalizing sniuppet:

In addition to changing the lyrics, the task force would also like to see the whole alma mater in new musical variants, such as “choral, spoken word, electronic, hip-hop, etc.” Inspired by Hamilton, they say they have the goal of “re-inventing [their] past to meet and speak to the present moment.”