RUTHFULLY YOURS

A dominant narrative about the Trump Administration is that Donald Trump’s election ushered in a new wave of anti-Semitism. It’s an absurd claim, given that among Trump’s top advisors, eleven are Jews, including his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

That’s not to say anti-Semitism isn’t a problem. In fact, it is on the rise. But if you want to find where anti-Semitism is running rampant, don’t look to the Oval Office. Look instead to the place where you’re least likely to find a Trump supporter, the college quad.

I know this because at the recent Christians United For Israel Washington Summit, I spent time with student activists from CUFI On Campus. I listened to their harrowing stories of harassment and intimidation that Jewish (and Christian) students face from left-wing professors and Palestinian student groups whenever they speak up in support of Israel or resist misguided boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) schemes that single out the Jewish state for punishment.

While many in the media portray anti-Semitism as a phenomenon of the right, it is among young liberals that it is growing the most. Several recent studies demonstrate just how pervasive anti-Semitism has become on college campuses. An April report by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry found that there has been a 45 percent rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses between 2015 and 2016.

A study by the Anti-Defamation League found that such incidents rose by a third in 2016 from 2015 and increased 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017. Several other studies put the share of Jewish college students who experience anti-Semitism on campus at anywhere from half to three quarters.

The problem isn’t confined to students making threats against or hurling anti-Semitic slurs at Jewish students. A recent lawsuit suggests school administrators are partly responsible for creating an environment that’s unsafe for Jewish students.

In June, a group of current and former students sued San Francisco State University alleging that the university fostered a climate of anti-Semitism “marked by violent threats to the safety of Jewish students on campus.” The students complain that they were intimidated and prevented from holding events. The environment became so hostile that the students say they became afraid to do anything to indicate that they are Jewish, such as wearing Star of David necklaces.

It’s 2017. And this sort of thing should not be happening anymore.

Millions from the National Science Foundation are being funneled into left-wing social justice work. It’s a criminal waste of money and resources. All this from the folks who claim to love science.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) gave out more than three million dollars to fight “implicit bias,” “microaggressions,” and “lack of diversity” in STEM fields this July.

Texas A&M, meanwhile, received $1,999,000 to fund efforts to “dramatically improve the diversity, inclusion, and quality” of students and faculty in the Department of Aerospace Engineering.

Because that’s what we need in the field. Not talent. Not merit. Diversity.

The NSF also gave out another social-justice themed grant on July 5, this time awarding the University of New Hampshire $999,752 to explore strategies for preventing “bias incidents” perpetrated against minorities in science, building upon prior research funded by the NSF, which found that “bias incidents in the academic workplace create a negative climate for STEM women faculty and for other faculty with minority status.”

Over the next five years, with the support of the NSF grant, UNH will collaborate with researchers from Ohio State University, the University of Virginia, and the University of New Hampshire to create a comprehensive “bias awareness guide and intervention tool.”

So almost a million dollars in taxpayer money will be funneled into campus intimidation.

According to the NSF website…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…” NSF is vital because we support basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.

As we can see above.

The director and all Board members serve six year terms. Each of them, as well as the NSF deputy director, is appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. At present, NSF has a total workforce of about 2,100 at its Arlington, VA, headquarters, including approximately 1,400 career employees, 200 scientists from research institutions on temporary duty, 450 contract workers and the staff of the NSB office and the Office of the Inspector General.

How many of those 1,400 career employees are remotely needed for what the NSF does?

Carl Sandburg College in Illinois may put students through “disciplinary proceedings” for using “offensive language” or “disparaging comments” — a policy that some argue exposes the college to First Amendment lawsuits.

According to an article in Campus Reform, the college’s Student Code of Conduct allows administrators to “initiate disciplinary proceedings against” any student who “is verbally abusive; threatens; uses offensive language; intimidates; engages in bullying, cyber bullying, or hazing; [or] uses hate speech, disparaging comments, epithets, or slurs which create a hostile environment.”

Sam Harris, vice president of policy research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), told Campus Reform that the school’s status “as a public institution” would make it “highly vulnerable to a First Amendment lawsuit” over a policy like this.

“A public school certainly cannot punish students for any and all ‘offensive language’ or ‘disparaging comments,’ nor is ‘hate speech’ a legally cognizable category of speech unprotected by the First Amendment,” Harris told Campus Reform. He added that “while some speech that is offensive or hateful may also constitute threats, harassment, etc., and for that reason be unprotected, most offensive [or] hateful speech is wholly protected by the First Amendment.”

College spokesman Aaron Frey, however, defended the policy to Campus Reform, insisting that officials at the college fully realize that “being open to differing perspectives and opinions is an integral part of the educational experience and growth of students.” But the administration simply “also find[s] it important that those ideas are exchanged in a manner that is respectful and free of speech that may be deemed abusive or hateful in order to maintain a welcoming environment for our students.”

Sorry, Frey — but I’m not buying it. After all, the school’s own policy goes beyond “abusive or hateful” speech; it includes speech that is merely “offensive” — which is, by the way, an entirely subjective descriptor. The thing is, that whole “differing perspectives” ideal that Frey claims that the school values so much means that the exact same statement might be considered “offensive” to people from one perspective but acceptable — or perhaps even “virtuous” — to people from another perspective. And it’s completely inappropriate to give school administrators the authority to dole out punishments to students based on their own interpretations of something that is so subjective. Oh, and for the record: Hate speech, although disgusting, is constitutionally protected, too.

Here’s the bottom line: This policy pretty clearly isn’t just about punishing harassment, because there are already laws against that. This is about something more. It’s about giving administrators broader power to control the speech of students — perhaps to ensure that it stays within certain ideological limits. This policy is not only potentially unconstitutional, but it’s also pretty clearly absurd on a logistical level. Think about it: A ban on “disparaging comments”? Honestly, I’d challenge any person in the world to think of a day that went by in his or her life without a making single “disparaging comment.”

Imagine if radical campus activists had to face the consequences of their actions. Imagine if they could no longer suppress and shut down speakers with impunity. Imagine if a college administrator grew a backbone and defended his institution from the barbarians at the gates.

We’re not there yet. But Claremont McKenna College, a prominent liberal-arts school in Southern California, is at least taking action. The school has suspended five students who led attempts to shut down a college-sponsored lecture by Heather Mac Donald, the pro-police conservative commentator, in April. Three will be suspended for a full year, while two will be suspended for a semester. Two more will be placed on conduct probation.

The students, along with many others from the Claremont colleges and outside the university, blockaded the lecture hall where Mac Donald was set to speak, forcing the event to be moved and livestreamed from a secret location. In a statement, Claremont McKenna explained that “the blockade breached institutional values of freedom of expression and assembly” and “deprived many of the opportunity to gather, hear the speaker, and engage with questions and comments.”

Claremont McKenna should be applauded, first for inviting Mac Donald to speak, and second for taking a stand in defense of the idea of the university. It could have taken the easy way out, slapping all the protest leaders on the wrists with a mandatory course or probation to put an end to the story. That’s what Middlebury College did when its students shut down an event featuring Charles Murray, the libertarian social scientist, and in the process assaulted Professor Allison Stranger, who ended up with a concussion.

In fact, nobody ever seems to get punished for preventing the free exchange of ideas on a college campus. Unwilling to anger student radicals and their defenders in the media, college administrators routinely back down. They appease the crocodile, hoping that he will be grateful for the school’s leniency and perhaps eat it last.

But appeasement has not worked. All across the country, student activists have become emboldened, trusting that they can do whatever they want, so long as they claim the moral high ground. After all, they only have to label a conservative as a “white supremacist” and they are free to take over campus and suppress her views. Their schools are too weak and fearful to stop them.

This is a sick state of affairs that should not continue. Claremont McKenna has shown that it is possible to take a stand. There is no reason why schools cannot suspend students who shut down campus speeches. Repeat offenders should be expelled. Anyone who participates in a violent protest should also be expelled. All schools should join Claremont McKenna in endorsing the University of Chicago’s Principles of Free Expression, which declare that the “University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.”

If, after that, a few radicals still seek to break the rules, let them suffer the consequences of satisfying their confused consciences. The rest of the student body — the ones who don’t want to spend the year back home with their parents — will get the message: You can speak and protest all you want, but you cannot prevent someone else from speaking.

Remember Rigoberta Menchu? Twenty-five or so years ago, she, and the book “I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala,” were the rage in academia. Menchu had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work advancing the cause of indigenous Guatemalan women, and the book, which she co-wrote with Elizabeth Burgos-Debray, caught on, appearing on mandatory reading lists at schools, colleges, and universities all over the country.

I remember particularly a conference at St. Johns University in New Mexico where the debate topic was which book would have greater educational value, George Orwell’s “Burmese Days” or “I, Rigoberta Menchu.”
‘I, Rigoberta Menchu’ was the hot read of the early ’90’s.

Enough academic traditionalists were present for Orwell to garner a few votes, but the liberals wanted Menchu. She was relevant. She spoke for the oppressed people who had no voice, for diversity, ethnic and racial justice, for political virtue. She was the perfect counterpoint to the dominant white male culture, so slow, so reluctant to yield some place for minorities, women, native peoples.

Is anybody reading Rigoberta Menchu today? The book is ranked around 32,000 on Amazon, which indicates that it still sells, if modestly. But if the summer reading lists being assigned to the current crop of rising college freshmen is any indication, she’s had her time. The culture has moved on to other books of the moment.

Still, as the latest in an annual report on summer reading titles done by the National Association of Scholars shows, the trend represented by Menchu a quarter century ago – the trend favoring social justice, diversity, and immediate relevance – is, if anything, more dominant now. Menchu already represented a turn away from what were called, with a strong element of denigration, the white male classics, a yearning for otherness, for students to be alert to the struggle against racism and oppression, and that trend is ever more reflected in the books college freshmen are being asked to read, and to be ready for visits by the authors and small-group discussions on campus in the fall.

The scholars’ group is made up of politically moderate and conservative professors at numerous institutions of higher education across the country, generally united in their belief that an often-intolerant liberal orthodoxy threatens to wipe out genuine intellectual diversity. Not surprisingly, the group’s 191-page report, “Beach Books, 2016-17: What do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class?” comes to an unfavorable conclusion: that the choice of books is “banal and intellectually unchallenging” even as it mirrors liberal and progressive preferences, to the exclusion of contrary ideas.

Freedom of speech is foundational. Without freedom of speech there are no other freedoms.

In a stunning new guide to colleges that ranks “a diversity of viewpoints and a culture of free and open discussion” New England colleges and universities are exposed as the most close-minded in a comparison of diversity of political and cultural points of view. Considering that the New England colleges and universities are some of the most prestigious in America and that they graduate future leaders and “authorities,” the study results are particularly disturbing.

Report: New England Colleges Worst in Country for ‘Viewpoint Diversity’

The silencing of Conservative voices on campus is a deliberate strategy to expand the widening echo chamber of left-wing liberal tenets of political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism. Parochial schools are very clear in their mission to educate students in the particular tenets, customs, and ceremonies of their chosen religion. Religious schools freely and unapologetically attempt to perpetuate their religions through education. There is informed consent – the parents and students being fully aware of the purpose of their education.

The problem today is in non-parochial schools because parents believe their children are receiving a secular American education not a parochial education. The reality is that American students from pre-school through college are being indoctrinated in left-wing liberalism by their Leftist teachers. Leftism is the new religious orthodoxy of the Democratic Party and the Democrats are busy proselytizing their religion in the classroom. There is no informed consent and no consumer protections. There is only buyer beware.

Slowly parents are beginning to examine the content of the curricula their children are being exposed to and are rightfully alarmed by the anti-American, anti-establishment, anti-democracy lessons being taught. Their children are being propagandized toward anti-American collectivism and socialism every day all day.

Whoever controls the curriculum controls the future. Indoctrination presented as education is an abuse of power.

When liberal professors outnumber their conservative colleagues 28:1 a culture of ideological tribalism is created and freedom of speech ceases to exist. Conservative voices are silenced because the academic and social tyranny of the Left demands conformity. It is an ideological war that demands submission.

Tyranny cannot tolerate freedom of speech because in ideological wars words are the weapons. The Left is engaged in a very undemocratic effort to silence any voices of opposition. The tribal mind focuses on membership in the tribe as the absolute value which explains the malicious shunning and disparaging of anyone who disagrees. To be in the tribe one must demonstrate loyalty to the tribe and adhere to its cultural norms.

Instead of participating in the proud American tradition of open debate the Leftist leadership of the Democratic Party has adopted the tyranny of censorship, intimidation, and intolerance. Instead of encouraging respectful discourse for the merits of ideas to be debated the Left silences its opponents with its tyrannical demand for compliance to its tenets of political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism. The Leftist orthodoxy silences any heterodoxy. The Democratic Party has devolved into ideological tribalism where membership in the group is determined by adherence to its orthodoxy.

Jerry Coyne, a professor in the department of ecology and human evolution at the University of Chicago, recently posted a defense of killing disabled infants on his Why Evolution Is True blog:

If you are allowed to abort a fetus that has a severe genetic defect, microcephaly, spina bifida, or so on, then why aren’t you able to euthanize that same fetus just after it’s born?

His argument, which is riddled with flaws and mistaken assumptions, begins with a claim commonly found in the works of pro-infanticide philosophers:

After all, newborn babies aren’t aware of death, aren’t nearly as sentient as an older child or adult, and have no rational faculties to make judgments (and if there’s severe mental disability, would never develop such faculties). It makes little sense to keep alive a suffering child who is doomed to die or suffer life in a vegetative or horribly painful state.

In short, lack of sentience and reason boosts the moral acceptability of killing deformed and handicapped infants. This reasoning makes sense only in a “throwaway culture,” which presumes that it’s right to discard the weakest and most vulnerable simply because they don’t meet an arbitrarily imposed marker of when life is worth saving.

It is the logic of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: eliminate any responsibility to care for the suffering by trying to remove all suffering. The problem, however, is that killing is a poor means of reducing pain and suffering. It fosters a culture that undermines the value of life. And this isn’t merely words on a page. In the Netherlands, for example, some patients have been euthanized because they were “tired of living,” as the Washington Post reported in a recent story on assisted suicide. Promoting death is a recipe for more suffering and loss, not less.

Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, and Patrick Lee, a professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville, have pointed out, in “The Wrong of Abortion,” additional problems with this argument:

This argument is based on a false premise. It implicitly identifies the human person with a consciousness which inhabits (or is somehow associated with) and uses a body; the truth, however, is that we human persons are particular kinds of physical organisms. . . . We are not consciousnesses that possess or inhabit bodies. Rather, we are living bodily entities.

George and Lee continue by arguing that “it makes no sense to say that the human organism came to be at one point but the person — you or I — came to be at some later point,” because “to have destroyed the human organism that you are or I am even at an early stage of our lives would have been to have killed you or me.” Coyne’s primary claim, that lack of sentience or rational faculties significantly bolsters the case for killing disabled newborns, is flawed.

Coyne later tries to put a positive spin on his argument by asserting that changing views about euthanasia are “the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world, a tide described and explained by Steve Pinker in his superb book The Better Angels of Our Nature.”

King’s College in London has announced that it will replace some of the portraits of its founding fathers from its main entrance because they are “white,” and that that might be “intimidating” to people who are not white.

The portraits will be replaced with those of “BME [black and ethnic minority] scholars,”according to a article in the Telegraph. All portraits of the school’s former deans will also be taken down from the main area and hung in other locations.

The replacement is being implemented by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience. The Institute’s dean of education, Patrick Leman, announced the changes, explaining that the old entrance was “alienating” because it was full of “busts of 1920s bearded men.”

According to the Telegraph, the “bearded men” represented in the busts that Leman is referring to are “believed to be” the British psychiatrist Dr. Henry Maudsley and neurologist Sir Frederick Mott — and the Institute “owes its existence” to these two people.

Yep. According to the Telegraph, there would be no Institute without a donation from Maudsley and 1896 course plans from Mott, and yet, they somehow still may not deserve to be honored in the main hall because they just so happen to be white dudes.

Now, to be fair, the Telegraph is reporting that only “some” of the King’s College founders are being replaced, so it isn’t absolutely certain that these two busts will be among the ones to go — although the fact that Leman brought them up specifically, and the fact that the Telegraph interviewed a descendant of Mott certainly does suggest that they will be, and that is wrong, wrong, wrong.