RUTHFULLY YOURS

A new low for these appalling brats.

It often seems that campus activists are less about actually creating positive “change” and more about personal vanity. The latest entry comes from the upper-crust Sarah Lawrence College, where The College Fix reports that some activists feel they deserve to be compensated for their activism.

And not by the organizations they’re working with, but by the very peers they tend to annoy with their antics:

Students at Sarah Lawrence College, a posh, private liberal arts college in New York consistently ranked one of the most expensive colleges in the nation, recently called on peers and others to pay female campus activists for their “emotional labor.”

…

It was posted once on March 26 on Facebook in honor of Women’s History Month, then reposted in April as students exchanged heated words on Facebook over a campus controversy.

“In honor of Women’s History Month, and the labor that women and femmes of color do for Sarah Lawrence every month of the year,” the post states, then lists the student Venmo accounts. Venmo is a payment service app. The post, which includes a brightly colored poster declaring “Give your $ to Women & Femmes of Color,” was inspired by the #GiveYourMoneyToWomen hashtag created by prominent feminists.

Now, keep in mind that Sarah Lawrence is one of the most expensive schools in the country. These activist students are either from wealthy families and don’t need the money, or they’re scholarship students who should appreciate the amazing gift they are already getting from others, or they are receiving loans and working and should have a better sense of the value of a dollar.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop this pathetic attempt at extortion: a comment stating “[t]he community is watching you and holding you accountable” sounds an awful lot like a threat to me, and this “labor” they’re demanding to be paid for needs to be negotiated … beforehand.

It’s hardly news that teachers’ union honchos oppose any type of school choice, especially the kind that lets public money follow a child to a public school. But while making her case recently, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten descended down a rabbit hole.

It started with an event on “school vouchers and racism” hosted by the AFT and the Center for American Progress, a leftist research and advocacy organization financially supported by both the AFT and the National Education Association. CAP had just released a report claiming that educational vouchers were born in the effort by Southern states to resist racial integration after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling. In what segregationists termed “massive resistance,” Virginia’s Prince Edward County closed its public schools in 1959, and then gave vouchers to white families, which were used to pay tuition at segregated private schools. This ugly case represents the “sordid history of school vouchers,” as CAP sees it—conveniently overlooking the G.I. Bill, the country’s first significant voucher program, which was signed into law in 1944, 15 years before Prince Edward County’s gambit.

Taking the podium just a few days after the release of the CAP report, Weingarten declared that the ideas and proposals of school-voucher advocates were “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” She described the powerful teachers’ unions as “defenders of America’s public education system,” locked in a “David versus Goliath battle, and in this battle, we are all David.”

Weingarten’s outrageous comments did not sit well with school-choice advocates. Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, called Weingarten’s speech “not just ill-advised hyperbole, it is a deeply offensive, highly inflammatory insult to all the parents and people—of all races, backgrounds, and regions—who have worked to bring options, opportunities and reforms to an education system that has failed them for generations.” Kevin Chavous, founding board member of the American Federation for Children, said that Weingarten’s comments “spat in the face of every African-American and Hispanic child who’s trapped in a school that doesn’t serve [him or her] well.”

While Weingarten cites the segregationists of Prince Edward County, she declines to mention labor unions’ own racist history. As Herbert Hill wrote in Commentary in 1959, in various industries “trade unions practice either total exclusion of the Negro, segregation (in the form of ‘Jim Crow’ locals, or ‘auxiliaries’), or enforce separate, racial seniority lines which limit Negro employment to menial and unskilled classifications. . . . In the South, unions frequently acted to force Negroes out of jobs that had formerly been considered theirs.” Racism in unions was historically a much greater factor than it has ever been in the voucher movement.

Weingarten also ignores the popularity of private-school choice among minorities, the ostensible victims of these supposedly racist voucher programs. She is mum on the latest report from EdChoice’s Greg Forster, who regularly surveys the empirical research on private-school-choice programs. “Ten empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools,” he writes. “Of those, nine find school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools, and one finds no net effect on segregation. No empirical study has found that choice increases racial segregation.” Think Progress, a progressive news site associated with CAP, reports that American public schools are more segregated now than they were in 1968.

Indeed, government- and union-run schools are much more segregated than the voucher schools that Weingarten disdains. “Less recognized, but equally pernicious, is the structural segregation all across America, where zoned school systems maintain racial and economic segregation,” writes Peter Cunningham, who worked at the Department of Education during the Obama administration. Cunningham also pointed out that New York City, where Weingarten formerly ran the teachers’ union, has one of the nation’s most segregated school systems.

Weingarten engaged in a telling Twitter exchange with her nemesis, Education secretary Betsy DeVos. “@BetsyDeVosED says public $ should invest in indiv students,” Weingarten wrote. “NO we should invest in a system of great public schools for all kids.” DeVos fired back: “They have made clear that they care more about a system—one that was created in the 1800s—than about individual students. They are saying that education is not an investment in individual students. They are totally wrong.” Weingarten and her cronies are more interested in keeping the government-union duopoly in place than in educating children. Protecting the system takes priority.

New law mandates sanctions for free speech disruptors, abolishment of ‘free speech zones’ hhttps://www.thecollegefix.com/post/35137/

In the wake of anti-free-speech demonstrations at colleges across the country, the North Carolina legislature recently passed a law that strengthens free speech protections on college campuses in that state.

House Bill 527 “includes several important provisions that will better protect campus free speech,” according to the Foundation for Equal Rights in Education.

Among the bill’s provisions is a mandate that colleges allow students to distribute literature in “outdoor areas.” As FIRE’s Tyler Coward writes, “[R]oughly 1 in 10 colleges maintain problematic policies that restrict expression to certain areas on campus, oftentimes called ‘free speech zones.’ These misleadingly labeled ‘free speech zones’ are routinely struck down by courts because they unconstitutionally limit student expression to tiny, out of the way areas of campus.” HB527, Coward notes, will hopefully mitigate “the need for litigation over this issue in North Carolina.”

The law also “requires institutions to create a range of sanctions for any person under its jurisdiction who ‘substantially disrupts the functioning of the constituent institution or substantially interferes with the protected free expression rights of others.’” The “substantial” qualifier, Coward points out, is intended to ensure that protected speech such as “fleeting boos” remains protected, while “conduct that materially disrupts or otherwise silences others” can (and will) be sanctioned by universities.

From the report:

The language of this law is different from laws or bills in other states requiring specific mandatory minimum sanctions for students who materially disrupt the free expression of others. Instead, this law reminds institutions that they have an obligation to take action when people engage in conduct that silences their opponents on campus, while giving institutions the flexibility to evaluate each case in its individual context. This helps to ensure that those who shout down a campus speaker aren’t required to be treated the same as those who physically assault a speaker.

HB 527 also states that colleges and universities “may not take action, as an institution, on the public policy controversies of the day in such a way as to require students, faculty, or administrators to publicly express a given view of a social policy.” This language prevents institutions from taking positions on controversial issues in a way that forces others to conform to their view. For example, if an institution felt that marijuana should remain illegal, it could say so, and it could also require students to avoid its use on their campus. But the school could not force students, faculty, or administrators to publicly agree that marijuana should remain illegal. While institutions rarely overtly try to force constituent groups to take positions that conform to the school’s viewpoints, the problem is not unheard of. This law will prevent such an occurrence in North Carolina.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267454/lsu-conference-forces-engineers-take-mark-tapson

Louisiana State University hosted its second annual Consortium for Innovation in Manufacturing and Materials (CIMM) RII Symposium last week, and some engineering students were confused by the addition of an hour-long workshop on microaggressions, according to Campus Reform.

A befuddled graduate student who went by the user name “CuseTiger” at TigerDroppings, a forum for LSU fans, posed the question, “Who all has had implicit bias, sterotypes, microinsults, microaggressions, and [T]itle IX training? Cause I’m at an engineering symposium in lod cook today and have been dealing with snowflakes and trigger warnings all morning. They scheduled an hour for us to learn about all this.”

CuseTiger added a screenshot of the Symposium’s agenda, which included the “workshop/panel discussion” on “implicit bias, stereotypes, microinsults, microaggressions, [and] Title IX” just before the conference broke for lunch.

“At one point they had us write a microaggression that we gave or someone gave us,” the post continued, providing several pictures of a bulletin board covered with sticky notes.

“When people learn that I am from Colorado, they assume I smoke weed,” wrote one participant, while others complained about stereotyping such as “I thought all Asians were good at math” and “You probably lived on the west side of campus, right?”

Campus Reform has more:

Sara Hernandez, the Associate Dean for Inclusion and Student Engagement at Cornell University, and Dr. Jenna Carpenter, the Dean of Engineering at Campbell University, presented the implicit bias workshop as part of their roles with CIMM’s Diversity Advisory Council (DAC).

Carpenter told Campus Reform that the DAC recommends everybody be educated about the impacts of implicit bias, asserting that “When faculty and students aren’t aware of implicit bias, they unwittingly engage in behaviors that continue the discrimination and discouragement of women and underrepresented minorities in science, mathematics, and engineering disciplines.”

Dr. Pedro Derosa, who chaired the panel discussion, agreed that “social stereotypes” are the main reason for the lack of women and minorities in STEM fields, explicitly rejecting the notion that the observed differences have anything to do with qualities inherent to any of those groups.

“When implicit biases result in entire groups being underpaid or being subjected to higher scrutiny or standards or being excluded from opportunities altogether, we have a problem,” Derosa said.

Emory University professor Scott Lilienfeld, who published a research paper earlier this year calling for “a moratorium on microaggression training” and “abandonment of the term ‘microaggression,’” told Campus Reform that this approach is more likely to “exacerbate racial tensions” by “sensitizing” students to perceived offenses. Exactly.

Rather than trying to promote diversity through such workshops on microaggressions and implicit bias, notes Campus Reform, Lilienfeld suggested that a more effective approach would be for individual professors to lead by example, saying, “Faculty need to invest more time, energy, and effort in mentoring and encouraging minorities and women.”

A philosophy professor argues that white people enjoy a “sense” of importance, calling it “white priority,” a term the scholar coined to summarize her claim that people with white skin feel superior to others. https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/35063/

“White priority concerns a white person’s felt conviction about herself (however egregious or misplaced, and often unconscious) that no matter the quantifiable, statistical details of her life, she is not on the very bottom run of society’s ladder,” writes Professor Shannon Sullivan.

Sullivan, department chair of the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, made the comments in a recent scholarly article in “Critical Philosophy of Race.”

The piece takes issue with the term “white privilege,” with Sullivan writing that it doesn’t quite hit the mark in describing the “advantages of whiteness.” But “white priority” describes a white person’s “sense of coming before someone else,” noted Sullivan, who is white.

“As a poor, struggling white person, I might not be financially privileged or very high up in social circles and many people might disparage me, but at least I’m not the lowest of the low. I come before someone else: people of color and black people in particular,” Sullivan wrote.

The article, headlined “White Priority,” was published in a special issue of “Critical Philosophy of Race” dedicated to “Race after Obama.” A listing of Sullivan’s academic papers shows she’s written on whiteness multiple times throughout her career.

Sullivan did not respond to The College Fix’s request for comment. An automatic reply said she’ll have “irregular access” to her email account until Aug. 10.

In “White Priority,” Sullivan argued that the word privilege suggests one’s lived an easy life and it doesn’t quite fit for white people who’ve faced hardships. White privilege is “the right term to describe middle-class and affluent white people’s particular racial advantages,” but she argued that white priority applies to all white people no matter their financial standing.

This nuance is important, she wrote, because “life after Obama is a time for greater nimbleness and dexterity as we think about race and its intersections with class.” She argued there was a “white backlash” against President Barack Obama during his tenure in the Oval Office, an alleged backlash that stemmed from what individuals saw as his “extremism.” This extremism wasn’t based on Obama’s policies but rather that a black man was president, Sullivan wrote.

“It is as if a black intruder broke in and was allowed to stay, and we could say this almost literally given the white imaginary understanding of blackness as inherently criminal,” Sullivan stated.

As for proof that white priority exists, Sullivan stated she does not exactly have any, noting “white priority is not something that can be empirically verified or disproven.”

A black student at Cambridge University has just said that “all white people are racist”. (This was in response to Saturday’s riots in Dalston, east London.) His name is Jason Osamede Okundaye. He’s also the President of the Black and Minority Ethnic society at the University.

Okundaye wrote:

The other fantastically ironic thing is that he also claimed that “middle-class white people” have “colonised” Dalston. In full:

Of course, if white people had claimed that Dalston was formerly colonised by black people, they’d have been classed as racist by anti-racists. Though since blacks can’t be racist (they don’t “have the power”), then this statement can’t be racist either. Nothing a black person says or does can be racist. This is according to the standards of the many and various anti-racist theorists and academics who exist today; some of whom will teach at Okundaye’s Cambridge University.

Predictably, once the news spread outside of the Students’ Union and the University itself, a spokesperson from the University said: “The College is looking into this matter and will respond appropriately.”

However, if blacks can be racist, then what can Cambridge University do about this? Jason Osamede Okundaye has done nothing wrong. That is, according to many theorists and academics at Cambridge University, he’s done nothing wrong. He’s black and therefore he can’t be a racist. He’s only a victim. Not a suspect or even a free agent. He’s a black man. A man infantilised by anti-racist theory and anti-racist activists.

According to Trinity College [Cambridge] Students’ Union website:

“BME, Black and Minority Ethnic, is a term used in the UK to describe people of non-white descent.”

Thus, the Black and Minority Ethnic society seems to think that all people who aren’t white have something in common. That’s from middle-class African blacks (like Jason Osamede Okundaye?) to deprived Indians who’ve been given a scholarship. So this institution is racist for the simple reason that it places an absolute emphasis on race and colour. What better definition of racism can there be? After all, racism can be both positive and negative. Presumably, the BME sees itself as practicing and promoting positive racism; though it won’t use the word “racism” about itself.

For example, at Cambridge University there are academic courses which teach that “all white people are racist”. They won’t, of course, use the same inflammatory “discourse” which Jason Osamede Okundaye uses. Nonetheless, he’s the logical/political conclusion of such theoretical and academic anti-white racism.

There have also been a series of seminars on Critical Race Theory in July this year at Cambridge University. The University also featured “research” under the headline: ‘Racism in the US runs far deeper than Trump’s white supremacist fanbase’. (It was written by Nicholas Guyatt, a Cambridge University lecturer.) More relevantly, the University of Cambridge published a piece which states that it’s wrong to single out or “demonize” the “white working class for racism”; when, as a matter of fact, all white people are racist. (This, I presume, is class prejudice.)

So I wonder if Jason Osamede Okundaye will win one of the “award categories” which Cambridge University Students’ Union (CUSU) has just announced as part of its “anti-racism campaign.” After all, what better way is there of being anti-racist than being racist against all whites?

Jason Osamede Okundaye is digging his own grave anyway; even if he is a student at Cambridge University. If “all white people are racist”, then that must be some kind of racial fact. A fact about white DNA, perhaps. And if that’s the case, there’s nothing white people can do about it. Therefore, condemning white racism is pointless. It’s racial. It’s genetic. It’s a given. So why the political and moral outrage? Changing white racism would be like changing the colour of one’s skin or how many fingers one has.

On July 27, two House subcommittees held a joint hearing on “Challenges to Freedom of Speech on College Campuses.” Congressman James Raskin (D-MD) called it “the most fascinating hearing” he’s attended during his his six months in office. It was fascinating, for what it brought out both about the alarming reality of American higher education today and about the determination of some people on the left to deny or obscure that reality.

That determination was on display from the outset. Val Demings (D-FL), a black woman and former police chief of Jacksonville, professed to recognize the problem on U.S. campuses and to be a strong defender of the First Amendment. But she was quick to insist that the real “clear and present danger” on campuses doesn’t involve the shutting down of “high-profile speakers like Ann Coulter” but “the increase in white supremacist hate groups.” She recounted a recent incident at American University in Washington, D.C., where somebody hung bananas on nooses from trees, apparently a racist response to the election of a female black student, Taylor Dumpson, as student-government president. Dumpson, who sat in the audience at the hearing, had also been the target of “cyberbullying” that Demings characterized as “unprotected hate speech.” The real problem on campuses, Deming concluded, is “criminal acts being wrapped in banners of free speech.”

The banana incident would come up again several times during the nearly three-hour-long hearing, even though this isolated event had nothing to do with the actual topic of the hearing.

At one point during the hearing, one of the Democratic members complained that the Republicans had picked four of the five persons giving testimony. This was surprising, because only one of those five, Ben Shapiro, is a self-identified Republican or conservative, and three of the others – Nadine Strossen, a law professor and former head of the ACLU; Michael Zimmerman, former provost at Evergreen State College in Oregon (setting of the current controversy surrounding Professor Bret Weinstein); and Frederick Lawrence, National Commissioner at the Anti-Defamation League – were largely in denial about the extent to which American colleges are dominated by authoritarian leftists. Yes, they all repeatedly, if sometimes vaguely, expressed support for free speech, rejected “safe spaces” and “free-speech zones,” and agreed that even “hate speech” should be permissible as long as it did not shade over into “hate crime.” But they also made troubling assertions.

Strossen, for example, testified that she, the ACLU, and the Southern Poverty Law Center are “all on the same page” when it comes to these matters. Well, if she’s on the same page as the ACLU, which condemned the YouTube video mendaciously blamed by Obama and Hillary for the Benghazi killings, and the SPLC, which is a far-left smear machine masquerading as a human-rights organization (and which has named the David Horowitz Freedom Center as a hate group), game over. Asked by Jim Jordan (R-OH) if most efforts to shut down free speech have been aimed at conservatives, Strossen was at first only willing to admit that this was true of “most of the well-publicized” cases. When pressed, she admitted that, well, yes, most people on campuses are on the left, and the majority of victims are, indeed, non-leftists.

When President Trump presented his budget, he defunded Title VI from $72 million to zero. But it’s up to Congress to make it happen.

What’s Title VI?

Title VI of the Higher Education Act set out to fund international studies that would promote our national security. But on many campuses, Title VI centers undermine our national security by supporting Islamic terrorists.

The Higher Education Opportunity Act mandated that Title VI centers reflect a “wide range of views”. Instead when it comes to the Middle East, Title VI centers have only one point of view.

Title VI centers are the organizing points for Islamist and anti-Israel activities on college campuses. The attacks on Jewish speakers and students, the BDS resolutions and terror support begin with Title VI. So do the pro-Hamas speakers who spew hatred on campuses across America.

Instead of a wide range of views, 6 Title VI Middle Eastern studies directors have backed an academic boycott of Israel. Not only do they not promote a range of views, but they suppress pro-Israel views.

Title VI faculty play a crucial role in supporting campus hate groups from SJP to JVP to MSA. And Title VI material then finds its way from colleges into school classrooms.

All of this hatred is funded by taxpayers. But it doesn’t have to be.

Rep. Grothman, joined by Rep. Allen, Rep. Garrett and Rep. Lamborn are trying to defund Title VI and move funding over to the National Security Education Program (NSEP). But they face an uphill battle.

Defunding Title VI would do a great deal to neutralize the ugliness and hatred on campuses.

Take the Center for Near East Studies at UCLA. The Center is busy touting a faculty member’s attack on Trump. The faculty includes Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, a leading authority on Sharia Islamic law, whom Daniel Pipes named a “stealth Islamist.” El Fadl provided an “Affidavit of Support” for top Hamas terrorist Abu Marzook. He donated to and defended the Holy Land Foundation: a Hamas front group.

In more recent articles, Abou El Fadl has defended Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. He distinguished between “countries and movements adhering to ideologies of resistance” including “Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas” in contrast to the “moderate” appeasers of America and Israel.

“Why is Saudi Arabia so hostile to political Islam movements such as Hamas, Hizbullah, or the Muslim Brotherhood?” El Fadl asks. And the answer is that the Saudis have become “westernized and secular”.

El Fadl has been touted as a moderate because he criticizes the Wahhabis. But his criticism is not moderate, but Jihadist. He complains that Wahhabis care more about whether a Muslim woman wears a veil than “about the invasions of Iraq, Gaza, or the fate of Jerusalem.”

Should Title VI be in the business of funding centers that echo Osama bin Laden?

I get it. Donald Trump isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Some people love him, some people hate him, and some of us just watch the left howl over the guy while personally feeling kind of “meh” about him as president.

But some Leftist academics, for example, hate him so much they wish for assassination. Here’s the latest example, as reported by The College Fix:

“Trump is a f*cking joke. This is all a sham. I wish someone would just shoot him outright,” tweeted educator Kevin Allred from his personal account Friday night.

Earlier that day, Allred also tweeted the infamous picture of comedian Kathy Griffin holding a decapitated model of Trump’s bloody head under the word “mood.”

Allred, who has a history of controversial tweets, was listed as an adjunct instructor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program at Montclair State University as recently as July 29, according to a screenshot of the university’s website.

..

After Allred tweeted his presidential assassination sentiments on Friday, he received reaction — and some backlash. He quickly deleted the tweet, but continued to defend it, asserting just 25 minutes later in a tweet: “saying you wish donald trump was dead is different than making a direct threat against him. just saying … ”

In 2008, before Obama was even president, a Fox News contributor was forced to apologize for a joke regarding the then senator that was, at its worst, a similar kind of remark.

In 2010, blogger Solomon “Solly” Forrell was blasted by the left after tweeting that the country had gotten over the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy and would get over Obama being assassinated, too. The left was furious over it.

These were just two examples of liberal outrage over similar remarks. Why is it only wrong when the right does it?

CONTINUE AT SITE

Roanoke launches new Center for Economic FreedomRoanoke College will launch a new Center for Economic Freedom with a special event in September.

Inspired by economist Milton Friedman and his passion for free markets and individual choice, the Center for Economic Freedom’s mission is to educate students and the community on the freedom of markets and individual choice in a liberal arts setting. Dr. Alice Kassens, the John Shannon professor of economics, will direct the Center, which will be funded by grants from several foundations.

Through the Center’s programs, the goals are to:

Promote an environment of educated discourse and discovery
Explore the role of economic freedom and individual rights in prosperous societies
Motivate students to actively seek opportunities in classically liberal minded scholarship and service
Develop a network of alumni and friends that remain active in the Center for Economic Freedom

The first event will be a public lecture to mark the opening of the Center for Economic Freedom Lecture Series on September 1 with featured speaker Dr. Chris Coyne. He is the associate director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Coyne has written several books, including Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails. He is a prolific writer of articles for scholarly journals, has published numerous policy briefs, and also has written for the Daily Caller, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and others. Coyne is the co-editor in chief of the Review of Austrian Economics, the coeditor of the Independent Review, and the book-review editor of Public Choice. He is a member of the Board of Scholars for the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.

“I have admired Milton Friedman, both his work and style, since I first studied economics,” Kassens said. “The Center for Economic Freedom is a way to bring his ideas to students and the Roanoke College community to expand the public discourse regarding markets and regulation. I am thrilled to open the Center officially in September with a lecture by Chris Coyne.”

In addition to the annual lecture series, the Center will host a variety of events and activities for students, both those majoring in economics and those studying other disciplines. Opportunities for students include an economics reading group, a research assistantship, an economic freedom group and library of materials related to economic freedom. The center also will have a seminar travel fund to help support student travel. The center also will sponsor a faculty reading group and will hold Milton Friedman Remembrance Day each year on November 16, the anniversary of his death.

For more on the Center for Economic Freedom, visit the center’s web page, follow the center on Facebook
and Twitter @CEFreedomRC for the latest information. The email address is freedom@roanoke.edu.