RUTHFULLY YOURS

San Francisco State University leftists, who dominate that university, as per the left’s modus operandi, will allow only certain minorities it deems acceptable their “rights” while trampling on the rights of others – minorities, majorities, or just sincere non-identity-obsessed students. SFSU’s administration has, at most, passively accepted this state of affairs while often enabling the suppression of the rights of some in the face of violence by leftists.

And now, one minority group that has suffered in silence for years has said, “Enough! We have rights too and we’re demanding them!” No, not by counter-violence but by a lawsuit.

San Francisco State University Accused of Pervasive Anti-Semitism in Groundbreaking Federal Lawsuit Filed by Students and Members of the Jewish Community

A group of San Francisco State University students and members of the local Jewish community today filed a lawsuit alleging that SFSU has a long and extensive history of cultivating anti-Semitism and overt discrimination against Jewish students. According to the suit, “SFSU and its administrators have knowingly fostered this discrimination and hostile environment, which has been marked by violent threats to the safety of Jewish students on campus.” The plaintiffs are represented by a team of attorneys from The Lawfare Project and the global law firm Winston & Strawn LLP.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and also names as defendants, the Board of Trustees of the California State University System, SFSU President Leslie Wong and several other University officials and employees, alleges that “Jewish students at SFSU have been so intimidated and ostracized that they are afraid to wear Stars of David or yarmulkes on campus.”

The lawsuit was triggered following the alleged complicity of senior university administrators and police officers in the disruption of an April, 2016, speech by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat. At that event organized by SF Hillel, Jewish students and audience members were subjected to genocidal and offensive chants and expletives by a raging mob that used bullhorns to intimidate and drown out the Mayor’s speech and physically threaten and intimidate members of the mostly-Jewish audience. At the same time, campus police – including the chief – stood by, on order from senior university administrators who instructed the police to “stand down” despite direct and implicit threats and violations of university codes governing campus conduct.

A Marxist professor at Syracuse University just called on lunatics to come and kill us. “We almost have the fascists on the run,” she said from her Twitter account, @danaleecloud, “come down to the federal building to finish them off.” By “fascists” she means people like you and me who oppose Sharia law, and by “finish them off” she likely means death. This is what Robert Spencer has been saying since he was poisoned. The left dehumanizes us with violent rhetoric so it will be easier to kill us. They don’t want to challenge our ideas. They want to end our lives, and they are willing to do it by any means necessary. I don’t think they care if it’s a mentally ill person or a jihadi who does the killing, as long as we’re taken out. They themselves say, “The only good fascist is a dead one,” and it’s going mainstream. Plays in the park depict long, drawn-out scenes of Trump being stabbed to death. Kathy Griffin holds the president’s severed head. Rap videos play out the assassination of Trump. In fact, the whole concept of assassination has been normalized by the mainstream media.
“These people don’t think they’re killing someone they disagree with. They think they’re killing Hitler.”

The professor was talking about the March Against Sharia events last Saturday. Syracuse was one of dozens of cities that held a rally to oppose the worst Islam can get. I hosted the New York City one, which was organized by gay conservative Paxton Hart. The reason Sharia was chosen was to erase any ambiguity about what we’re here to protest. Whether there should be a moratorium on Muslim immigration is debatable. The assimilability of Islam is also a controversial subject. By going way out to the edge of religious extremism, we thought we found something everyone can agree on. We were wrong. Hundreds of protesters showed up in New York to “Drown us out,” as they put it. They said our event had nothing to do with Sharia and was all about hatred of Muslims. I honestly think they would have said the same thing if we had done a rally against child rape gangs. They held up huge pictures of the stabbing victims in Oregon as if Jeremy Christian was one of our guys (sorry, but he was a Bernie Bro just like the man who shot Steve Scalise). Islam apologist Dean Obeidallah made the same mistake and tweeted to me, “Saw ur last anti-Sharia rally on the train in Portland last week where 2 were killed-will ur people be killing more soon?” Some of us went over to speak to the protesters and explain that Jeremy was a deranged man who stabbed people because they were demanding he not offend Muslims. In other words, they died of political correctness. They threw piss at us (again) and we beat them up.

When I got to the stage, I did the first half of my talk as a sexist pig who loved Sharia law. I said women are terrible drivers and with Sharia, you don’t have to worry about broads driving ever again. I said it’s awesome because you get to punish your wife if she doesn’t want to blow you. You make her sleep on the couch and if she still refuses, you get to beat the shit out of her. I also said Sharia is cool because you don’t have to hear women bitching about rape all the time. She has to get tons of witnesses and even then her testimony is worth only half what a man’s is. Finally, I said I get too horny walking down the street and can’t concentrate, but if we could cover up these chicks we could focus on just hanging out with the guys. I bombed, obviously, but that was the point. Like a true martyr, I used one big bomb to prevent future bombs.

Students at the University of Pennsylvania will learn to confront their “denial and unconscious bias” surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and other minority statuses during a new course offered this summer.

The class, “Diversity and Inclusion: Strategies to Confront Bias and Enhance Collaboration in 21st Century Organizations,” will be co-taught by Dr. Aviva Legatt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey Floyd, an organizational psychologist who works in leadership development.

“In the workplace, it is inevitable that difference between individuals will cause conflict—whether explicit or beneath the surface,” the course description says. “Denial and unconscious bias will prevent issues from being addressed.”

While decades of pop-psychology has argued that unconscious bias is a major influence on how white people treat black people, or how heterosexual people treat the gay community, new research has actually found scarce evidence to prove this link.

Gregory Mitchell, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, reviewed the most current research on the issue earlier this year and concluded:

Seventeen years after introduction of the [test that measures unconscious bias], only a handful of studies have examined the influence of implicit bias on real personnel decisions, and those studies have provided inconsistent and at best weak evidence that implicit bias has any impact on employment decisions.

So, why is this Ivy League class predicated on an outdated theory that has been criticized by numerous researchers in the last few years? Good question.

Nevertheless, eager students will learn to fight their “denial and unconscious bias” through a number of tactics in the class, including through writing personal reflections about their own biases and talking to their classmates about them.

While Professor Legatt declined to share a copy of the syllabus with PJ Media, she previously co-taught an online course dedicated to “Optimizing Diversity on Teams,” which taught business leaders “specific strategies to get buy-in for their diversity initiatives” and how to fight the “biases that can harm these efforts.”

During the course, Legatt identified a variety of ways that “hidden bias” can creep up in the workplace, such as “offering to help women when the help is not asked for” and giving women easier, “less-challenging,” work assignments. CONTINUE AT SITE

One restraint on economic growth is the increasing U.S. labor shortage, especially for jobs that require technical skills. Meanwhile, many college grads are underemployed and burdened by student debt. The Trump Administration is trying to address both problems by rethinking the government’s educational priorities.

President Trump directed Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta last week to streamline regulations to make it easier for employers, industry groups and labor unions to offer apprenticeships. Many employers provide informal apprenticeships for new workers, but the Labor bureaucracy regulates and approves programs whose credentials are recognized industry-wide.

About 505,000 workers are enrolled in government-registered apprenticeships. The programs typically pair on-the-job training with educational courses that allow workers to make money while honing skills in fields like welding, plumbing, electrical engineering and various mechanical trades. While construction apprenticeships are common, training programs are growing in industries like restaurant and hotel management.

Nearly all apprentices receive jobs and the average starting salary is $60,000, according to the Labor Department. That beats the pay for most college majors outside of the hard sciences. Last year’s National Association of Colleges and Employers survey estimated the starting salary of education majors at $34,891 and humanities at $46,065.

For decades the cultural and economic assumption has been that Americans will be better off with a college degree. This is still true overall, and economic returns to education have risen. This is especially true for those with cognitive ability who acquire skills in growth industries like software design or biological sciences. Politicians have responded by subsidizing college almost as much as they do housing—with Pell grants, 529 tax subsidies and more recently debt forgiveness.

Yet the politically inconvenient reality is that not every kid is cut out for traditional college, and those who struggle in high school may be better off learning a trade. Many without academic inclination or preparation often spend years (and thousands of dollars) taking remedial classes to compensate for their lousy K-12 education.

The six-year graduation rate for four-year colleges is 60% while the three-year graduation rate at community colleges is a paltry 22%. The Obama Administration response was to push even more subsidized student debt to force feed even more kids into college. Student debt doubled in the Obama years to $1.3 trillion, which will burden workers and taxpayers for decades.

Another problem is that few colleges and high schools teach vocational skills. The Labor Department Jolts survey of national job openings found more than six million in April—the most since Jolts began tracking in 2000. The vacancies include 203,000 in construction, 359,000 in manufacturing and 1.1 million in health care. These are not jobs that can be filled by Kanye West English deconstructionists. They are also typically jobs that can’t be supplanted by lower-wage foreign competition.

While employers subsidize most apprenticeships, the President has proposed spending $200 million to promote the programs. This would still be a drop in the $26 billion bucket (not including student loans) that Washington spends on higher education each year.

Two of the three SUNY Albany female students who fabricated a racial hate crime in Albany, NY, early last year have been sentenced for falsely reporting the incident. The third woman accepted a plea deal.

Ariel Agudio and Asha Burwell were sentenced Friday to serve “three years of probation, pay a $1,000 fine, and perform 200 hours of community service.” The two women had been facing up to two years in prison, but neither will have to spend a moment in jail. Alexis Briggs, the third woman, agreed to apologize and was sentenced to perform community service as part of her plea deal with the district attorney.

The three African American students had claimed that they were victims of a racially motivated attack while riding a CDTA/UAlbany bus back to campus from the bars in Albany on January 30 of last year.

Early that Saturday morning, Agudio, Briggs, and Burwell reported to the police that a mob of 10-20 white people punched and kicked them while yelling racial epithets:

After the alleged assault, at least two of the women took to Twitter and Instagram with their claims.

“I just got jumped on a bus while people hit us and called us the ‘n’ word and nobody helped us,” wrote one of the students.

“I got beat up by 20 people screaming racial slurs,” wrote another, later adding that “a whole bunch of guys started hitting me and my two friends.”

One of them also wrote on Twitter: “I begged people to help us and instead of help they told us to shut the (bleep) up and continuously hit us in the head.”

Cell phone video and bus surveillance cameras would later tell a different story. The women themselves had perpetuated the racial hatred and violence.

In the face of protests and a fake news media circus, New York-based blogger Rusty Weiss of the Mental Recession was one of the first to report that the incident was likely a hoax:

The incident sparked protests at the school.

Protesters, including members of the National Congress of Black Women and the Albany chapter of Black Lives Matter, showed signs of support for the women, demanding change in the form of hiring minority faculty and providing sensitivity training for University police.

Burwell and her fellow alleged ‘victims’ gave tearful speeches on campus.

SUNY Albany president Robert Jones, before having any of the facts straight and going solely on what he heard from Burwell and her companions, issued a statement saying he is “deeply concerned, saddened and angry about this incident.”

People showed support for the trio on Twitter using the hashtag #DefendBlackGirlsUAlbany. Meanwhile, the students who were falsely accused of a racist attack were ostracized and threatened. San Diego Chargers lineman Tyreek Burwell — Asha Burwell’s brother — tweeted a threatening message to a student whom she had named as one of the attackers. That individual reportedly left campus — at least temporarily — out of concern for his safety.

Public figures, including then-candidate Hillary Clinton, used the highly questionable incident for racial pandering:

All of the people who jumped on the Albany hoax bandwagon should be ashamed of themselves.

The allegations never passed the smell test to begin with, and began to unravel almost immediately. It is only one of hundreds of fake hate crimes that have have been documented in recent years. What makes the Albany bus hoax so egregious is the fact that the accusers were actually guilty of the crime they were projecting onto others — and those innocent lives were adversely affected.

The disgraceful episode should be kept in mind the next time an unsubstantiated report of a hate crime hits the news — especially if it occurs anywhere near a college campus — because the fake hate crime epidemic shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. CONTINUE AT SITE

Professors at the University of Washington-Bothell have started scheduling alternative after-sunset exams for Muslim students during Ramadan, so that Muslim students’ performance on exams won’t be impacted by their fast during the day.

UW-Bothell Professor of Biology Bryan White told PJ Media that he got the idea for the after-sunset exam from a Muslim student he had last year who did well in his class right up until the final exam, during which she scored “drastically lower” than normal.

When he talked to his student afterwards, she explained she had trouble concentrating on the final because she hadn’t eaten beforehand, since the exam was held during Ramadan. Professor White said he “felt horrible” upon learning this, especially since it hadn’t crossed his mind that any of his students were fasting.

“It was at that moment that I decided I wanted to do something different next year,” he said.

So this year, just a few days before final exams started, Professor White sent an email to his students, wishing them both a Happy Memorial Day and Ramadan Kareem (the first day of Ramadan), and alerting them to an additional exam possibility — the option to take the final at 10 p.m. instead of during the normally scheduled exam slot during the day.

Regardless of whether students were fasting for Ramadan, all students were invited to the after-sunset exam slot. “It was very important to me to give this opportunity to ALL of my students,” said Professor White. “I do not know all of the responsibilities and challenges that my students face, especially during finals.”

During the night exam, 11 Muslim and 12 non-Muslim students showed up to take the exam. Beforehand, Professor White’s colleague, Dr. Raina Hussein, showed up with snacks for the students. Hussein was able to be a role model to “the young Muslim students [and show] that it is okay to be proud of your religion,” according to White.

Students praised White’s decision in interviews with PJ Media.

For Jashan Kaur, a sophomore at UW-Bothell majoring in health studies, the after-sunset biology exam was a welcome option. “I’m not Muslim but I still decided to take the exam after sunset because I usually study at night,” said Kaur. CONTINUE AT SITE

At the collegefix.com site, one learns that at New York University, students demanded that “an entire floor of the mixed use building in the Southern Superblock plan be entirely dedicated to Students of Color, and another for Queer Students on campus.” At “Oberlin University, students have demanded ‘safe spaces’ for black students.” In 2016 at San Francisco State University, an “Afro-themed dorm floor” was created.

Leo Hohmann documents how “an Illinois college has defended its restriction of portions of a mandatory course to black students even though part of the stated goal of the class is to teach students ‘an appreciation for diversity.'” In an effort to achieve better graduation rates among black students, the University of Connecticut is “implementing a ‘bold’ new strategy to help boost its abysmal graduation rates for black males. The plan involves the clustering of 40 black male students in a portion of one dorm, no whites or Asians allowed, in what the university calls a ‘learning community.'” On the other hand, the University of Vermont “provides a safe space for white students to explore their ‘white privilege.'”

Walter Williams explains that since so many black college students are not prepared for college work, “for college administrators and leftist faculty, the actual fate of black students is not nearly so important as the good feelings they receive from a black presence on campus.” Williams asserts that it is a “gross dereliction of duty for college administrators to cave to these demands.”

Nevertheless, WeDemand.org has a “list of hundreds of ‘demands’ by black student movements at universities across the country. Many of the demands include calls for major reductions in white faculty and separate ‘safe spaces’ for black students.” At the University of Missouri, there was a demand for a “blacks only healing zone.” Whites were told to leave the room and meet somewhere else. In 2015, the Motley Coffeehouse at Scripps College maintained that it would be open “from 6-10 only for people of color and allies that they invite … to decompress, discuss, grieve, plan, support each other[.]”

Oberlin College demanded that “space throughout the campus be designated as a Safe Space for Africana-identifying [sic] students.” At Harvard University, “[b]lack members of the class of 2017 decided to form an individual [graduation] ceremony.” According to the students, “[t]he separate graduation is an effort to highlight the aforementioned struggles and resilience it takes to get through[.]”

One is reminded of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson’s thesis, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” wherein the first lady-to-be “wondered whether or not [her] education at Princeton would affect [her] identification with the Black community.” Thus, Ms. Robinson argued “that the relative sense of comfort [respondents] may feel when interacting with Blacks in comparison to Whites (and vice versa) in various activities reflects the relative ease and familiarity the respondents feel with Blacks in comparison to Whites which, in turn, indicates the extent to which the respondents are personally attached to Blacks as individuals in comparison to Whites as individuals.” That such drivel was used in a Princeton thesis some 31 years ago explains why the race-obsessed presidency of Barack Obama is not a surprise.

As a lineal descendant of this line of thinking, it follows that “Courtney Woods, who is finishing a master’s degree in education policy and management from the Graduate School of Education, asserts that ‘Harvard’s institutional foundation is in direct conflict with the needs of black students. There is a legacy of slavery, epistemic racism and colonization at Harvard, which was an institution founded to train rising imperialist leaders. This is a history that we are reclaiming.'” Michael Huggins, who is graduating with a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, asserts that “[t]his is an opportunity to celebrate Harvard’s black excellence and black brilliance.”

America’s historic strength is not diversity, but an enforced commonality of value.

I attended one of the premier educational institutions in the United States in the nineteen fifties: P.S. 104 on the corner of 95th Street and Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It’s still there. But as Dr. Thomas Sowell said about one he attended in those years, it might be the “same building” but it’s not the “same school.”

Despite the fact that my wonderful grandmother was a native Swedish speaker P.S. 104 didn’t feel compelled to celebrate my “heritage” the way it would today. They taught me where Sweden was because we studied geography (and don’t we wish our children still did) but not to put too fine a point on it, they knew I wasn’t growing up in Stockholm. I had a friend whose father was a senior NCO at the Fort Hamilton Army Base a few blocks away and nobody went lyrical about how he, just by being black and therefore “different”, enriched our educational experience either. I had another friend whose father had flown a Focke-Wulf 200 multi-engine bomber for the Luftwaffe during WWII and it goes without saying that there wasn’t a chance in hell of anybody applauding his antecedents. Or for that matter the fact that another’s father was deputy something-or-other at the Yugoslav mission to the United Nations, another’s a survivor of the Holocaust or maybe just up from Puerto Rico with the family hoping to start a better life.

None of that mattered.

Instead the school simply thought it should do its job. Shape every kind of child white, black, brown, short, tall, skinny, kids with Coke-bottle glasses, kids dragging one leg behind them into useful citizens by teaching them how to read and write English well while at the same time having them master eight years of arithmetic, penmanship, history, and civics. And boy weren’t they lucky if they got to do just half that because most of us, the boys at least, would much rather be playing stickball or dangling a crab net off the sea wall in Shore Road Park.

Of course, in looking back I see that that principal (there were no administrators then) and those teachers did themselves proud, and that I loved them.

Flash forward fifty years. A long piece appears in The New York Daily News entitled: “We’re ready for real diversity.” It’s author is Shino Tanikawa a mother of two in public schools in Manhattan who has a completely different, but now very popular take on things. Below is an excerpt:

I also wanted my daughters, who are mixed race, to recognize and embrace their Japanese heritage, and not be ashamed of it as I was in my 20s (a rather stereotypical Asian response to a white-dominant society). For this to happen, I knew they needed to be in a racially diverse environment where they were not the only ones who are “different.”

I knew that public schools are where my children could meet and befriend people who are not like them; there aren’t many other places like that, even in a city known as a melting pot. So I sought out schools with diverse student bodies, and that’s what I got — though in this city, where kids tend to cluster by background, it wasn’t easy to find.

Mixing works. Both my daughters learned a great deal from attending elementary schools where classes had two grades or students with and without disabilities learning together.

What they learned does not show up in their test scores. Rather, they have the ability to see strengths in all people, particularly the ones society might label “difficult.” And they have humility about their status in this society.

‘Exploitation, domination and irrationality’https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/33448/

A class at University of Wisconsin-Madison studies how capitalism “generates harms” and “is irrational in ways that hurt nearly everyone,” according to a copy of the syllabus recently obtained through a public records act request by the MacIver Institute.

Berkeley-born and educated sociologist Dr. Erik Olin Wright, who teaches the graduate student course called “Class, State, and Ideology: An Introduction to Social Science in the Marxist Tradition,” goes on to instruct students on how to challenge capitalism.

Capitalism is an oppressive system, according to the syllabus, and “should therefore be criticized from the point of view of the interests it harms — especially the interests of the working class, but also other social categories whose interests are harmed.”

The course explores the “full range of harms and forms of injustice associated with capitalism. These critiques can be broadly grouped under three rubrics: exploitation, domination, and irrationality,” it states.

Mere critique is not the end goal of this course, however, but societal and institutional transformation. Its purpose, according to the nearly 80-page syllabus, is to teach Marxism as an “emancipatory social science,” that is to “fulfill the goal of generating critical social scientific knowledge relevant to the task of challenging systems of oppression.”

“Ultimately the point of Marxist social science is to generate theoretical knowledge relevant to the practical task of transforming the world in ways that increase the possibility of human emancipation,” the syllabus reads.

Though the end goal of “human emancipation” is not specifically delineated, Dr. Wright assigns his own work, Envisioning Real Utopias, for this section of the course. He also plans an end of term retreat weekend in Upham Woods featuring academic sessions on “Real Utopias,” complete with a gourmet potluck.

A 2012 bio on Wright by the American Sociology Association states that “real utopias,” according to the scholar, include “participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil; the production cooperatives of Mondragon, Spain; and even the collective self-organization of Wikipedia.”

As for the syllabus, nowhere does it offer the opposing view that capitalism is beneficial.

Though there is a section titled “American Exceptionalism,” the syllabus does not use this term in its traditionally positive sense, but rather subverts it, arguing that “the U.S. working class is unique, or ‘exceptional,’ in never having even formed durable electoral vehicles of its own to wage policy struggles in the state.”