RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last Thursday, a Muslim college student in New York alleged that he was robbed by three masked men who “shoved him into a van” and “hurled racial epithets” at him.

The New York Post reported on his story with great gusto:

The 21-year-old student at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn was walking on 165th Street near 81st Avenue in Hillcrest Thursday at 4:35 p.m. when a black van pulled up alongside him.

The goons jumped out of the vehicle and threw the victim — who they repeatedly punched in the face — in the back of the vehicle.

“Get out of my country, you f–king sand n—er!” one of the attackers yelled at the victim, who is from Pakistan, police sources said.

The trio stole his backpack and his wallet, which contained his school ID, and $6 before kicking him out of the van and speeding off.

The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force investigated the incident as a possible bias attack and PIX11 converged on the alleged crime scene “as detectives canvassed the neighborhood, talking to residents and taking with them home surveillance video that may have caught on tape the ugly crime.”

Well, there was an “ugly crime,” all right. Making a false report about a “hate crime” is a crime, after all.

It didn’t take long for the Pakistani-American’s tale of woe to fall apart. On Saturday, PIX11 reported that the student recanted his entire story. Police sources say the incident never happened. He made the whole thing up.

For some reason, the “victim’s” name was never released.

As we are in the midst of a college “hate crime hoax” epidemic, wouldn’t it behoove the media to tread a little more carefully when a college student alleges a hate crime — so they don’t have egg all over their faces when the inevitable recantation takes place?

When did capitalism become anathema to young people—and why? About a year ago the Institute of Politics at Harvard released survey results showing that more than half of respondents between 18 and 29 do not support capitalism, the free-market system that underpins our economy. An astonishing one-third said they support socialism.

Clearly the tenets of capitalism are deeply and fundamentally misunderstood. No system has done a better job addressing the very issues that its critics think are important. Capitalism has stabilized our communities, created jobs, lifted people out of poverty, and empowered them to fulfill their dreams.

Consequently, the merits of America’s free-market system are inspiring economies around the world. According to the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes and Trends study, a global median of 66%, from developing and advanced countries, believe people are better off under capitalism. This view is particularly prevalent in emerging economies like Kenya, Nigeria and Vietnam, where growth has been ignited by expansion of the free market. Yet here at home capitalism is now condemned as an elitist system that enriches a few at the expense of the many.

At the same time that young people are rejecting capitalism and free markets, they celebrate entrepreneurs and free enterprise. This disconnect is at best confusing; at worst it’s troubling. Without access to capital, budding entrepreneurs see their ideas wither; without capital, there is nothing to fuel innovation. Capital is the lifeblood of our economy. It must flow freely to ensure the economy’s vitality and health.

I recognize that young people have come of age during some troubled economic times. I suspect this contributes to their discontent and their misguided belief that government interference is the answer. In truth, government meddling is a large part of the problem. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed in 2010, has made it harder for firms to lend money and for small and mid-cap companies in particular to access the capital markets. The 2012 JOBS Act tried to make it easier for smaller companies to issue equity in the public markets, but it is not enough. My father, Jack Stephens, used to say, “A great idea never fails for lack of capital, because capital will always find it.” Sadly, I’m not sure that’s true today.CONTINUE AT SITE

Videos from Evergreen State College in Washington state show mobs of students—mostly but not only black—haranguing their professors and accusing them of racist abuse. The college president, George Bridges, is heckled, insulted, mocked, and ordered to stand with his arms firmly at his sides because his gestures are considered threatening to the students, who have invaded his office and refused to leave. Bridges complies meekly with all demands, including buying gumbo for his captors.

It’s tempting for anyone who cherishes the liberal (in the original sense of the word) purpose of the university to view the outrage at Evergreen (and Middlebury, and Berkeley, and Claremont McKenna, ad nauseam) as an American recurrence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when students were encouraged by the ruling class to torment any teachers suspected of reactionary deviance. But the modern college campus is staffed and led by progressives, who have created the conditions for, and invited, students’ PC tantrums. In Marx’s classic formulation, history is repeating itself, but as farce.

By academic training, George Bridges is a sociologist whose work has focused on the criminal-justice system from the standpoint of race theory. In one of his most cited articles, “Racial Disparities in Official Assessments of Juvenile Offenders: Attributional Stereotypes as Mediating Mechanisms,” published in 1998 in American Sociological Review, Bridges observes that white youth are excused for delinquency on the basis of “external factors,” such as poverty or family problems, while black youth in similar trouble are blamed for “internal factors” like poor impulse control or inherent criminality. Thus, according to Bridges, black youthful offenders unfairly receive harsher punishments than their white counterparts. Judges and probation officers, he says, should second-guess their professional judgement through the lens of critical race theory, which holds that the doctrine of white supremacy influences every aspect of society and the legal system.

In the Evergreen videos, we see Bridges struggling to be as passive and compliant as possible with the crowd of angry students occupying his office. When he is yelled at for saying “Please,” he apologizes. When he admits to having a claustrophobia-induced panic attack, he is derided and told to “get to work” transcribing the mob’s demands. Bridges could have called the campus police at any time to end the illegal occupation of his office and his imprisonment, but he ordered them to stand down—presumably because, according to his own academic doctrine, police intervention is necessarily fascist and racist.

The spectacle of Bridges’s humiliation is initially horrifying, but it isn’t clear that he disagrees with the students. In fact, he seems to appreciate, or even enjoy, being forced to submit to what he, after all, likely acknowledges as a just cause. In an August 2016 op-ed in The Seattle Times, Bridges condemned the dean of the University of Chicago for dismissing the importance of “safe spaces” for students on campuses. “Trigger warnings can alert students to genuinely distressing content that could otherwise cripple their learning,” he wrote, worrying that students “often lack confidence in their capacity to succeed, believing that they don’t belong at a major college or university (the so-called ‘impostor syndrome’).”

U.S. policy-makers have long pushed more high-school students to go to college, citing data showing that college graduates earn more money over their lifetime, pay more taxes, enjoy better health and are more likely to vote.

But in reality, students who rush into college, incur debt and drop out without a degree can be worse off than those who didn’t go at all—fueling an increasing backlash to the one-size-fits all push for students to go straight from high-school to the college quad.

A new Gallup report released Thursday highlights the amount of buyers’ remorse many people feel about their college experience.

More than half of 90,000 people surveyed between June 2016 and March 2017, said they would change at least one decision they made about their education if they had to do it all over again: 36% would choose a different major, 28% would choose a different institution and 12% would pursue a different degree.

The people with the most misgivings are liberal-arts majors who earned bachelor’s degrees, 48% of them said they would have chosen a different major and 57% said they would have made at least one decision differently.

The random-sample survey was funded by the Strada Education Network, a nonprofit in Indiana dedicated to helping young people complete college and launch their careers.

“The voice of the consumer is absent in higher education,” said Carol D’Amico, an executive vice president with Strada and a former assistant secretary for adult and vocational education in the George W. Bush administration. “We’ve gotten the message out that many good paying jobs require credentials after high school, what’s less clear is the options open to them to follow their passion.”

Perhaps the most profound finding to emerge from the survey is that going to college to find yourself has become a luxury many Americans can no longer afford. Instead, those who expressed the least regret were best able to align their education with a career. CONTINUE AT SITE

he racist, Leftist hotbed of Evergreen State College is spiraling out of control.

First, students threatened the safety of a professor who disagreed with an event that demanded whites not come to campus for a day. Then they were caught on video threatening administrators and shouting racist demands.

Did the school’s president contact the police and start issuing expulsions?

Nope. As Campus Reform reports, he rewarded the racist mob with HOMEWORK EXEMPTIONS:

Videos from Evergreen have since continued to leak, painting a chaotic portrait of campus in which protesters try to bully administrators into kowtowing to their demands, and in one case even tell the school’s president, George Bridges, to “shut the fuck up.”

…

“All of us are students and have homework and projects and things due. Have you sent an email out to your faculty letting them know?” one student protester asks, saying “what’s been done about that” and noting that she and her peers were participating in the meeting “on [their] own time.”

“It’s the first thing I’ll do. I have not done it yet, I will do it right now,” Bridges replies while one protester declares that professors “need to be told that these assignments won’t be done on time and we don’t need to be penalized for that.”

Later in the video, which appears to be taken after student protesters had submitted a list of demands to Bridges, one student declares that if Bridges were to avoid responding to the demands on deadline he would subsequently “need to pay for a potluck.”

Disgraceful.

Mr. Bridges, the correct answer is that students who commit crimes will be referred to authorities, and that students who have so little regard for academia are using up valuable space at your school and should withdraw.

The professor in question, Bret Weinstein, did nothing wrong. He disagreed with the event, and stated he preferred the way it had been handled in previous years when minorities voluntarily left campus to show just how vital they were to the school’s daily operations. So he is apparently a “progressive” himself, but just not extreme enough for the mob.

The snowflakes brook no disagreement with their opinions. Free speech doesn’t exist in their little bubbles. They aren’t open-minded, or tolerant, or liberal, or forward-thinking; they are old-fashioned, textbook totalitarians.

There’s now a proposal to privatize the school, removing all state funding, from Republican State Representative Matt Manweller. The bill will be introduced alongside a letter calling for an investigation into civil rights violations for intimidating an entire ethnic group off campus. Bravo.

That inchoate but pervasive ideology known as “Political Correctness,” a dogma that is enshrined in and enforced nowhere to the extent that it is in academia, truly is toxic. It is a poison that all decent people concerned with the future of Western civilization should resist with every fiber of their being.

If the latest happenings at Evergreen State College aren’t enough to convince any and every person who isn’t a leftist fanatic of this, then nothing else can.

Even before UC Berkeley, Evergreen should be extolled as the poster school for academic corruption, a picture worth the proverbial thousand words as to all that’s gone wrong with Higher Education. In the latest events at Evergreen we have on display the radical subversion of academia’s historical mission as the premiere civilizing cultural institution, for at Evergreen, it is now savagery that rules.

As it turns out, every year for the last several years, Evergreen would hold its annual “Day of Absence.” On this occasion, non-white students and faculty would stay home while white students and faculty would attend “anti-racism” seminars and the like. This year, however, someone decided to reverse the agenda by encouraging non-whites to come to campus and coercing whites to stay home.

Biology professor Bret Weinstein, himself a white leftist, protested the new arrangement through an email that he sent to a Rashida Love, the college administrator who organized this year’s “Day of Absence:”

“There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles…and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”

Weinstein continued:

“You may take this letter as a formal protest of this year’s structure, and you may assume I will be on campus on the Day of Absence. I would encourage others to put phenotype aside and reject this new formulation, whether they have ‘registered’ for it already or not. On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”

Weinstein even offered to come to campus to hold a discussion on race and evolution.

None of this, however, went over very well with those black students who were determined to keep whites off of campus. The militants videoed themselves harassing Weinstein, who calmly pleaded with them to engage in “dialectic,” not “debate” with him. In a debate, he noted, each party is “trying to win.” Dialectic, in contrast, transpires when each party listens to the other with the intention of trying to “discover what is true.” “I am only interested in dialectic,” Weinstein said, “which does mean I listen to you, and you listen to me.”

Twice in the past year, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has placed posters on the campus of San Francisco State University, as well as at a dozen additional schools, exposing the links between the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and the Hamas-funded hate group, Students for Justice in Palestine. These poster campaigns took place last October and this May. Now the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a group known for supporting Palestinian terrorism and calling for the end of American aid to Israel, is charging that the Freedom Center’s posters are “racist, Islamophobic, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian” and create a “hostile environment” for Muslim and Arab students on the campus.

The Freedom Center’s posters are not aimed at Muslims but at terrorists. The posters placed on campus in October identified BDS activists who are supporting the Hamas-inspired and funded boycott movement. They also charged that the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine supports Hamas terrorists “whose stated goal is the elimination of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.” The Hamas charter states this goal explicitly and SJP receives funding and organizational support from a Hamas-funded front group, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). SJP also supports the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

A second poster placed on campus in both Fall and Spring depicts a gun-toting Hamas terrorist holding the strings of a puppet labeled “American Muslims for Palestine” which in turn controls a marionette labeled “Students for Justice in Palestine.” Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is described as “The chief sponsor of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities on campus.” Hamas is identified as “A terror organization pledged to wipe out Israel” (a goal explicitly stated in the Hamas charter) while AMP is the “Hamas-created chief organizer and funder of SJP.” All these statements are documented in the Freedom Center pamphlet: SJP: A Campus Front for Hamas Terrorists.

Even in the radicalized world of anti-Israel student movements, SFSU stands out for its extreme actions and rule-breaking and its pro-terrorist sympathies. In April 2016, when Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat appeared on campus, a mob from SFSU’s General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS)—an SJP surrogate—protested Barkat’s visit by shouting “Intifada” and chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!,” itself a call for the obliteration of the Jewish state, forcing the cancellation of his speech. When SFSU President Leslie Wong called tepidly for an investigation into the protestors who shut down Barkat’s speech, GUPS responded by asserting that this request “criminalize[s] anti-racist speech on campus.”

I was not expecting to hold my biology class in a public park last week. But then the chief of our college police department told me she could not protect me on campus. Protestors were searching cars for an unspecified individual—likely me—and her officers had been told to stand down, against her judgment, by the college president.

Racially charged, anarchic protests have engulfed Evergreen State College, a small, public liberal-arts institution where I have taught since 2003. In a widely disseminated video of the first recent protest on May 23, an angry mob of about 50 students disrupted my class, called me a racist, and demanded that I resign. My “racist” offense? I had challenged coercive segregation by race. Specifically, I had objected to a planned “Day of Absence” in which white people were asked to leave campus on April 12.

Day of Absence is a tradition at Evergreen. In previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus—a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning. This year, however, the formula was reversed. “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave the campus for the day’s activities,” the student newspaper reported, adding that the decision was reached after people of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”

In March I objected in an email to all staff and faculty. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles . . . and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away,” I wrote. “On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”

My email was published by the student newspaper, and Day of Absence came and went almost without incident. The protest of my class emerged seemingly out of the blue more than a month later. Evergreen has slipped into madness. You don’t need the news to tell you that—the protesters’ own videos will do. But those clips reveal neither the path that led to this psychosis, nor the cautionary nature of the tale for other campuses.

Evergreen is arguably the most radical college in the country—and while it does lean far to the left in a political sense, it is the school’s pedagogical structure to which I refer. Rather than placing students in many separate classes, most of our curriculum is integrated into full-time programs that may run the entire academic year. This structure allows students and professors to come to know each other very well, such that Evergreen can deliver a deep, personally tailored education that would be impossible elsewhere. When it works well, it is unlike anything else. Last week’s breakdown of institutional order is far from an indictment of our founder’s wisdom.

Rather, the protests resulted from a tension that has existed throughout the entire American academy for decades: The button-down empirical and deductive fields, including all the hard sciences, have lived side by side with “critical theory,” postmodernism and its perception-based relatives. Since the creation in 1960s and ’70s of novel, justice-oriented fields, these incompatible worldviews have repelled one another. The faculty from these opposing perspectives, like blue and red voters, rarely mix in any context where reality might have to be discussed. For decades, the uneasy separation held, with the factions enduring an unhappy marriage for the good of the (college) kids.CONTINUE AT SITE

University of California president Janet Napolitano stashed away $175 million in a secret slush fund while publicly beating the drum for tuition and fee increases. Napolitano interfered with state auditors, prompting UC students and workers to call for her arrest and Democratic legislators to demand her resignation. For their part, the UC regents publicly defended Napolitano, and it has now emerged how the regents responded to students and worker protests.

The night of the protest, May 17, CBS News reported, “the regents threw a $15,199 party at San Francisco’s elegant Palace Hotel for 59 people – a $258-a-head event also billed to the university.” Back in January, the night before they voted to raise tuition, the regents hosted a $17,600 banquet, one of many such events in recent years.

While planning to jack up tuition 28 percent in 2014, the regents threw an $8,000 party, and the year before, during a financial crisis, they blew $15,600 on a feast. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Napolitano’s office has reimbursed the regents for more than $225,000 in dinner parties since 2012. What the regents have to celebrate remains unclear to many observers.

State auditor Elaine Howle not only uncovered the president’s $175 million slush fund, she also questioned the performance of the regents in their oversight of Napolitano’s office. The state auditor recommended that the legislature could increase accountability by taking over the regents’ job. True to form, the regents found no fault whatsoever with president Napolitano.

“There has been no criminal activity and no slush funds,” according to regent Sherry Lansing, a former movie executive. She blasted “distortions” in the media, hailed Napolitano’s “wisdom and integrity,” and proclaimed, “her leadership has been incredible.”

Regent Bonnie Reiss, an attorney who produced president Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration ceremony, complained of “salacious” newspaper headlines. Press descriptions of a “slush fund,”

Reiss explained, “hurt my heart.”

Regent Norm Pattiz was “delighted when I found out we had a chance to have Janet Napolitano as our president and was “still delighted” after the audit. Last year during a commercial, Pattiz asked television writer Heather McDonald, “Wait a minute — can I hold your breasts?” and referred to his hands as “memory foam.”

It has not emerged whether Pattiz exhibited similar behavior at any of the lavish regents’ parties.

The Daily Bruin, a UC student publication, has described Pattiz as a “porn connoisseur” and called for him to resign. Handyman Pattiz has not done so, and is “still delighted” with Janet Napolitano.

The former Department of Homeland Security boss disputes the $175 million slush fund and is sticking to her guns on the tuition and fee increases. Part of the campus assessment fee, she told the Daily Bruin, goes toward paying off UCPath, an upgrade for the UC payroll system. UCPath was supposed to cost $156 million but after spending $327 million over four years, UC bosses now estimate a final cost of $504 million.