RUTHFULLY YOURS

Northwestern is hiring a new “assistant director of Fraternity and Sorority Life.” Greek organizations are a key aspect of the college experience for millions of students, and the organizations are deeply involved in the college itself. Sounds normal.

But Northwestern University has decided that Greek Life, just like the rest of the campus, needs to be a training ground for Leftism. From Campus Reform:

The new “ Assistant Director, Fraternity and Sorority Life” will be responsible not only for advising fraternity and sororities, responding to emergency situations, and ensuring adherence to university policies, but also for assisting in the coordination of “social justice education” programming.

Minimum qualifications for the position include at least three years of experience working with fraternities and sororities, understanding of the educational environment at “highly selective institutions like Northwestern,” and “demonstrated experience” in the field of “social justice.”

While the new assistant director should also ideally hold a Master’s Degree from an accredited college or university, according to the listing, Northwestern will also consider applicants with an “appropriate combination” of work and educational experience.

[…]

Those skills will likely come into play when the new assistant director begins to “assist in the coordination of thematic programmatic/educational initiatives,” which can include leadership/community development, harm reduction/risk management, or social justice education.

Northwestern wants someone to lead the indoctrination of fraternity and sorority members into social justice zealotry. They can try to present this any way they want, but it’s nothing but a case of indoctrination of a politically charged ideology. Students simply shouldn’t find themselves being indoctrinated into a radical ideology that ultimately boils down to blaming straight white males for all the ills of the world.

At least Northwestern is a private university, which means they’re not blowing taxpayer dollars directly. Of course, they do receive plenty of taxpayer money in the form of federal student loans and grants.

I look forward to the day that parents and students recognize social justice nonsense for what it is, and understand how this movement is exploiting the campus environment to spread its noxious ideology.

At a dinner for Silicon Valley executives in early 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to America. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” the typically blunt Apple cofounder told the president. Examining Jobs’s claim, the New York Times looked at Apple’s vast Chinese operations and found that workers there not only worked for less than Americans did; more of them were skilled. To oversee production and guide some 200,000 assembly-line workers, Apple, for instance, needed 8,700 industrial engineers—positions that required more than a high school diploma but less than a full college degree. While abundant in China, these kinds of employees are harder to find in the United States. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” an unnamed Apple executive told the Times.

That’s a refrain that more and more American business executives are uttering these days. Even as politicians argue over how to create or keep “good jobs” in the U.S., a recent National Federation of Independent Businesses survey reported that the percentage of small businesses saying that they get no or few qualified applicants for available jobs has hit a 17-year high. Studies estimate that hundreds of thousands of positions in manufacturing firms went unfilled, even during the post-financial-crisis downturn and subsequent weak recovery, because of the lack of skilled workers. “Open manufacturing jobs are at an all-time high,” the former CEO of Siemens USA, the industrial giant, observed in December.

Much of the problem, say business leaders and employment experts, is an educational failure. Career and technical training in the U.S. hasn’t evolved to keep up with the transformation of the modern economy—with many schools even slashing funding for vocational education. Worse, parents, guidance counselors, and even politicians keep pushing students to enter four-year college programs that provide no clear paths to employment. Meantime, jobs in traditional blue-collar trades—from manufacturing to automobile repair—have grown more sophisticated and demanding. A huge gap between job seekers’ skills and employers’ needs has resulted.

The good news is that some visionary businesses, educators, and nonprofit funders are intensifying efforts to revamp and upgrade career education—twenty-first-century vocational education—in the United States. The obstacles to such efforts are many, including school officials’ reluctance to partner with industry and lingering prejudices against vocational schooling. But for the rising number of students participating in programs that tailor education to career goals—programs that emphasize work-related experience and teach to the high standards necessary for modern jobs—the payoff has been impressive. Now the challenge is to build on those successes to ignite a broader cultural change that makes high-quality career training central to American education.

Congress may have had good intentions in 1917 when it passed the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act to promote vocational training in agriculture, industry, and trades. But the law, which required any student receiving trade-skill instruction with federal funds to spend at least half of his time in vocational training, tended to cut off vocational training from public school education. Career education eventually developed into something that teachers and guidance counselors encouraged students of low academic achievement to pursue. Though the robust post–World War II American economy provided many of these students with a solid middle-income living, vocational school became stigmatized. That stigmatization only intensified as American industrial jobs, battered by global competition and automation, started to disappear during the early 1980s, making four-year college seem for many the surest route to better jobs and higher earnings. Policymakers reinforced the message with subsidized student loans and other initiatives that sought to make college readily available to all.

Unfortunately, many students wound up enrolling in four-year colleges who weren’t suited for it, and the results haven’t been pretty. These days, only 55 percent of college students graduate within six years, leaving many with no degree and dismal job prospects. Meanwhile, student-loan debt has swelled to a monstrous $1.3 trillion.

Many of the students would have been better off receiving some kind of vocational training. Both as candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has tapped into widespread blue-collar discontent with his call to overhaul free-trade agreements to keep jobs from heading overseas. The reality, though, is that plenty of good-paying jobs are already available for properly trained workers. These positions typically fall into a category known as middle-skilled, meaning that they require some postsecondary education—for instance, a certified apprenticeship or a two-year associate’s degree from a community college—but not necessarily four years of university. These jobs are found in health care, information technology, manufacturing, and construction, among other fields. According to a 2013 Brookings Institution study, more than half of all jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) do not demand four-year degrees—and they pay an average annual salary above $50,000. Further, while high-paying STEM jobs requiring advanced degrees do cluster in a few major urban centers, plentiful middle-skilled jobs—ranging from cybersecurity specialist and web designer to robotics engineer and industrial-engineer technician—are dispersed throughout most American metropolitan areas, making them within geographical reach of most Americans.

Yet many of those jobs go unfilled. A 2011 survey by the consulting firm Deloitte and the Advanced Manufacturing Institute found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers—at a time when unemployment nationwide was above 8 percent. (By one estimate, some 1.5 million manufacturing jobs that America has added since the 2008 recession have been for workers with more than a high school education.) Even though the U.S. is graduating some 3 million high school students every year, nearly half of whom will enter the job market instead of continuing school, an estimated 1 million middle-skilled jobs in all fields remain unfilled.

A 2011 survey found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers.

A string of protests on college campuses that shut down events hosting conservative speakers has prompted universities around the country to pledge more tolerance for diverse opinions, but skeptics say they’ll believe it when they see it.

Johns Hopkins University announced Thursday a $150 million effort to “facilitate the restoration of open and inclusive discourse.”

The University of California, Berkeley, where protesters halted speeches by conservatives Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, is debating bringing in conservative faculty to broaden the spectrum of political discourse on campus.

About a dozen schools have signed on to a new doctrine from the University of Chicago that puts free speech above concerns about political correctness.

“I think there’s a lot of embarrassment on campuses, so some kind of statement from the top might have good-sounding words but actions speak louder than words,” said Jack Citrin, a professor of political science at Berkeley. “I’d like to see what happens the next time [conservative intellectuals] Charles Murray or Ayaan Hirsi Ali try to speak on a campus.”

Dr. Citrin is a member of the Heterodox Academy, a consortium of about 900 academics that aims to broaden the diversity of opinions on campus. This week the group released its second university rankings, which aim to measure just how well the most elite schools in the nation are faring in that regard.

The organization says its members come from across the political spectrum. The largest group (25%) consider themselves moderates, according to an internal poll of their members posted on their website.

Harvard University, which has repeatedly been in the crosshairs of free-speech advocates, was 103rd out of 106 schools in the Heterodox ranking.

Heterodox, which weighs schools’ regulations as well as the ratings of other first-amendment groups, cited Harvard’s history of censoring outside speakers, a blacklist on private clubs, fraternities and sororities, and a laminated “social justice” place mat handed out to students before winter break in 2015. The aim of the place mat was to help students prepare “for holiday discussions on race and justice with loved ones.”

Striking the balance between protecting both students and the First Amendment isn’t easy, said Ari Cohn, a director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He called it “advanced citizenship.”

But he also condemned university leaders for “wanting to have their cake and eat it too.” He pointed to the commencement address delivered by Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust in May.

“If some words are to be treated as equivalent to physical violence and silenced or even prosecuted, who is to decide which words?” she said.

A week later, Mr. Cohn said, the answer became clear: Harvard would decide. CONTINUE AT SITE

In an exclusive interview with The College Fix, venerable conservative Harvard University Professor Harvey Mansfield laments he is ‘not very optimistic about the future of higher education’ https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32311/

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Harvey Mansfield has been in higher education for a long time. In fact, he’s been a faculty member at Harvard since 1962. Yet, after all those years, the conservative professor of government isn’t hopeful about future of his trade.

“No, I’m not very optimistic about the future of higher education, at least in the form it is now with universities under the control of politically correct faculties and administrators,” he said.

His remark came during a 35-minute interview in April in his fourth floor office at Harvard, where the 85-year-old Mansfield lamented universities for losing their aspiration, describing them as bubbles of staunch liberalism ruled by faculties that have failed to make universities reach their potential.

‘Bubbles of decadent liberalism’

Once America’s pride, Mansfield argues universities are no longer the marketplace of ideas nor the bastions of free speech.

“Now [universities’] sole function seems to be to attack a free country and to try to narrow freedoms to privileges, for those who have been designated victims,” he says.

What universities have become are “bubbles of decadent liberalism,” that teach students to look for offense when first examining an idea.

“They don’t prepare you for the real world or for even an unreal world. They prepare you to be sort of lifelong college students,” he said.

Who’s to blame? Mansfield argues it’s a combination of administrations, students and faculties. However, he also puts most of the onus on his counterparts.

“I would put the blame primarily on the faculty because they could have their way and if their way was of a vibrant and remarkable university, they could have their way if they wanted it,” he said.

Too many professors, according Mansfield, give in and allow themselves to be cowed by deans and presidents that don’t want their faculty to make trouble. However, Mansfield himself hasn’t bought into the politically correct campus culture.

“You know, I try to use my tenure. If you are a professor and you have tenure, you ought to use it to say things which politicians who depend on getting votes can’t say,” he says.

Universities don’t know why they exist

Mansfield argues that higher education isn’t sure anymore why education is higher than anything else. For him, the current state of higher education stems from the current conception of culture.

Speaking in philosophical and theoretical language, Mansfield said culture used to mean refinement. Today, he says it “just means the way a society happens to think and there’s no value judgement in it any longer.”

“With this, universities have lost their sense of aspiration, of providing direction or questioning or thought,” he said. “So I think this is a general malaise of higher education. It doesn’t know why it exists.”

Though, that isn’t the biggest change the government professor has seen in his more than half century in higher education. That belongs to the 1960s, and the conception of liberalism that decade ushered in.

“What happened then was students who were mostly liberal and the faculty who were mostly liberal turned against themselves. The late [1960s] was an attack on liberalism, not on conservatism,” he said.

He adds the 1960s led liberals away from being concerned with liberty, with them losing a sense of speaking for Americans and humans as a whole and instead focusing on particular groups, like blacks and women.

“So, the universal ideas were turned into ideas for promoting the tribe, a kind of section within our democracy,” Mansfield explained.

What it led to, he says, was the labeling of certain social groups as “officially designated victims.”

“We have a society now of officially designated victims plus the rest. In the recent election, I’d say the rest took notice and rebelled,” he said.

Only engineering prof got funding to redesign a class around social justice https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/33779/

The Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve University is offering students and professors thousands of dollars each to promote, research and advocate for social justice.

While the university says “social activism” has been a focus since its founding by an abolitionist, the seven-year-old institute – which is directly funded by the administration – has more recently started paying people to make this “hallmark” of Case Western Reserve a reality.li

Undergraduates can apply for up to $2,500 to support any research project related to social justice, and graduate students can apply for grants up to $3,500.

Professors who wish to redesign their classes to better promote social justice can also receive grants, to the tune of up to $2,500.

Tenured or tenure-track professors who can “demonstrate a long-term commitment to social justice” can also apply for up to $10,000 in grants to support a research project, as long as they can justify how it relates to social justice.

Their university-funded research can “uniquely shape both the university’s efforts to combat inequality and other local, national and global issues,” says the fellowships page.

“Social justice is defined as eradicating systems of power and oppression with the purpose of advancing fairness and equality through the redistribution of resources and opportunities and exalting human dignity and respect,” the application reads.

The funding is consistent with the mission of the institute, according to Lisa Kollins, the institute’s head administrator.

Barely a week goes by without our political atmosphere becoming more noxious and the rhetoric growing more heated. A recent incident at my alma mater, the University of Georgia, highlights the toxicity of today’s discourse, especially on the Left.

On May 11, someone at the Twitter account for the Young Democratic Socialists at the University of Georgia retweeted an article about a professor who said that Republicans in Congress should be rounded up and shot with, “This is absolutely outrageous. House Republicans should NOT be shot! They should be guillotined.”

The group has since deleted the tweet — and the rest of their account — but, fortunately for us, screen shots are forever.

Campus newspaper The Red & Black notes that the organization’s former leader claims the tweet was a joke (because the only jokes anyone can make today must come at the expense of conservatives):

According to David Littman, founder of the Young Democratic Socialists, the inflammatory tweet was intended as a joke and should not be taken literally.

“I wouldn’t have made that joke myself, but it is clearly and obviously facetious,” Littmann said. “As a strict pacifist, I believe that all violence is immoral, period. But it’s absurd to take the joke literally.”

For what it’s worth, Littman graduated from UGA in 2016 and is no longer affiliated with the organization.

According to a document on Rowan University’s official website, saying that “gender plays no part in who we hire” is a microaggression, and you should intervene and correct people if you hear them saying it.

The phrase is just one of many on the official “Tool: Interrupting Microaggressions” handout, which contains a list of microaggressions, a method for “Third Party Intervention,” and a “Communication Approach.”

“Gender plays no part in who we hire” is listed as a “microaggression” under the subhead “Myth of Meritocracy.” The suggested way to intervene, according to the document, would be to say: “How might we examine our implicit bias to ensure that gender plays no part in this and we have a fair process? What do we need to be aware of?” (Because that’s a really normal way to talk.)

Another example of a microaggression, according to the document, is to say to a black person, “Why do you have to be so loud/animated? Just calm down.” Now, the fact that that is actually being defined as a “microaggression” seems pretty absurd to me. If anything, this anti-microaggressions guide seems like it is engaging in some microaggression itself by implicitly suggesting that only black people are inappropriately loud. I mean honestly — if someone were to say something like “Why are black people so loud?” then of course that would qualify as being racially offensive, but how can making a race-neutral statement telling someone to “calm down” be considered racist? Should no one ever tell anyone who is not white to “calm down,” no matter the situation, for fear of being branded a bigot?

Well, if you hear someone telling a person who happens to be black to “calm down,” you should intervene, the guide advises, and say: “It appears you were uncomfortable when ___said that. I’m thinking that there are many styles to express ourselves. How we can honor all styles of expression — can we talk about that?”

Here’s the thing, though: Could you imagine someone actually doing that? I don’t know about you, but if someone ever felt the need to interrupt one of my conversations to babble on about how he was “thinking that there are many styles to express ourselves,” I’d have a hard time deciding between giving him the stink-eye and asking him if he needed medical attention because he was acting so erratically.

This story was previously covered in an article at Campus Reform.

Mere days after a Bernie Sanders supporter shot Congressman Steve Scalise and two black members of his police detail, a Connecticut professor posted a Medium article on Facebook declaring: “Let Them F*cking Die.” The professor went on to write that white people are “inhuman a**holes” who still prop up a “white supremacy system,” so black people should not help them if their lives are in danger.

“I’m fed the f*ck up with self identified ‘white’s’ [sic] daily violence directed at immigrants, Muslim, and sexual and racially oppressed people,” Johnny Eric Williams, associate professor of sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., posted on Facebook Sunday, Campus Reform reported. “The time is now to confront these inhuman a**holes and end this now.”

How should the allegedly oppressed “end this now”? Another post explained that. “It is past time for the racially oppressed to do what people who believe themselves to be ‘white’ will not do, put end to the vectors of their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system,” Williams added in another post, including the hashtag #LetThemF*ckingDie.

On Thursday, Williams also posted a Medium article by that very title, which lamented that black Capitol Police officers who were assigned to Scalise’s detail had acted to protect him. The article, posted under a pseudonym, advocated letting white people die, as a form of combatting white supremacy.

What does it mean, in general, when victims of bigotry save the lives of bigots?

For centuries, black people have been regarded as sub-human workhorses whose entire purpose is to serve white people’s whimsies.

For centuries, queer people have been regarded as sub-human degenerates whose whole existence was an anathema to cisgender heterosexual people’s off-hand sensibilities.

The article attacked even the idea of morality as a tool for the immoral to oppress the moral. “They, these white/cisgender/heterosexuals, have created entire systems, philosophies, and values in which goodness, peace, and benevolence are virtues — but only, always, in other people. In themselves, though, it is only ever pretense.” CONTINUE AT SITE

While some high-school students spend the summer playing video games or hanging out with friends, other teens have different plans — and many of them are learning how to become social justice activists through college-sponsored summer programs.

Next month, Brown University will play host to one of these programs, a “Leadership and Social Justice” class geared towards students as young as 15.

Taught by Caitlin Murphy, a social studies teacher with a history of teaching kids social justice, the class vows to teach students “the tools and theory needed to become successful activists” and to fight for “social justice” in the realms of LGBTQ and immigration rights, among others.

The course appears to be a kind of advocacy boot camp.

During the course, students will be asked to “engage in various hands-on workshops and simulations, such as identifying an issue, developing a realistic timeline, publicizing a campaign, engaging the press, catering to an audience, and choosing effective tactics,” according to the course description.

Students will also be asked to develop a “Social Action Plan” with the help of their teachers, a detailed game plan on how they can fight for social justice once the program concludes and the students return home.

While the course description says it’s perfect for students who are already activists, students who don’t have a background in social justice advocacy shouldn’t be discouraged. “Students who hope to become activists” are invited too.

The class is part of Brown University’s Leadership Institute for high school students, which has been hosting leadership programs for teens since at least 2010.

Recent alumni who took other courses through Brown’s Leadership Institute — not the new one focused explicitly on social justice — praised the program in interviews with PJ Media.

Peter Prastakos, who just graduated high school and will be headed to Yale University in the Fall, credited the program for inspiring him to create an environmental club at his high school. “I always knew I wanted to do something related to the environment,” Prastakos said.

During the program, he worked alongside his instructors to devise a plan for an environmental club at high school, and when he got back to his high school the following year, he put his plans into action. CONTINUE AT SITE