RUTHFULLY YOURS

In US academic tradition, university administrators choose commencement speakers they believe embody the zeitgeist of their institutions and as such, will be able to inspire graduating students to take that spirit with them into the world outside.

In this context, it makes perfect sense that Ayman El-Mohandes, dean of the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy at City University of New York (CUNY), invited Linda Sarsour to serve as commencement speaker at his faculty’s graduation ceremony.

Sarsour embodies Mohandes’s values.

Mohandes’s Twitter feed makes his values clear. His Twitter feed is filled with attacks against Israel.

Mohandes indirectly accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of wishing to commit genocide. Netanyahu, he intimated, wishes to “throw the Arabs in the sea.”

He has repeatedly libeled Israel as a repressive, racist, corrupt state.

Mohandes has effectively justified and legitimized Islamic terrorism and the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza. The Islamic terrorist assault against Israel, led by Hamas from Gaza, is simply an act of “desperation,” he insists.

By Mohandes’s lights, Hamas terrorists are desperate not because they uphold values and beliefs that reject freedom, oppress women and aspire to the genocide of Jewry and the destruction of the West. No, they are desperate because Israel is evil and oppressive.

Who could Mohandes have chosen to serve as his commencement speaker other than Sarsour, given his positions? Sarsour, the rising star of the Democratic Party, not only shares Mohandes’s values and positions, she has taken those common values and positions and amplified them on the national stage.

Georgetown University Professor Jonathan Brown, already notorious for past scandalous comments justifying Islamic slavery (including rape), only worsened his reputation with a recent May 8 lecture. Before about 90 listeners filling Georgetown’s small Riggs Library, the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) director clinically explicated disturbingly dark Islamic political doctrines.

In conjunction with Cambridge University Professor Philip Sheldrake, a Christian, the American Muslim convert Brown slavishly addressed “Power: Divine and Human—Christian and Muslim Perspectives” in a manner hardly flattering to Islam. He noted that “in the Quran, God’s power is the superlative of all superlatives, it is total, absolute, and without exception.” Correspondingly, the “word that the Quran uses over and over to refer to human beings” is the “slaves of God.”

“The power of God,” Brown elaborated, “we ponder as his slaves” and in Islam “mortal reason must remain apart from Him.” Islam’s ninth-century Mutazilites had argued that “God was constrained by justice and was unable to do evil . . . yet this school of thought was and remains a decidedly minority one.” By contrast, mainstream Sunni Islamic thinking concluded that “God is not constrained by justice, because God is justice.”

The detached Brown elaborated that the Quran’s imperious divinity “historically . . . gave birth to a worldview in which power was a main idiom of formatting society and framing relations.” “In the Islamic worldview there is a hierarchy of power that was not moral or metaphysical, but essentially functional.” “Life is not egalitarian . . . because people have different abilities and talents and because they must fulfill different functions.” In the Quran, for example, (feminists should mark his words) “God has ‘favored men over women’ not in any moral or absolute sense, but because he created two different genders with complementary capacities.”

Brown explained how literally Islam’s “master-slave relationship between God and man is reflected in the structure of ordered subordination amongst mankind.” “Although the Quran repeatedly urges Muslims to free their slaves and even commands it as expiation for certain sins, the Holy Book takes the existence of the slave-master relationship for granted” as a “structural feature in that world.” Ominously for non-Muslims, “when Muslim scholars speculated on the theological ideology of slavery as a condition, they settled on it being a punishment for disbelief, since the only people that Muslims could enslave were non-Muslims.”

One would think that a graduation ceremony, where family and friends assemble to celebrate the grand passage from the youthful dependency of college to the presumed self-sufficiency of adulthood, would be marked by joy, rather than expressions of infantile behavior that should have been harnessed and unlearned some 20 years earlier.

Sadly, such was not the case at the Notre Dame commencement last Saturday where a small group of graduates (along with some of their parents) walked out of the proceedings in protest of Vice President Mike Pence.

Consider: they were not protesting anything the vice president said. They didn’t bother to stay to hear what he had to say. Preemptive non-listening is a favorite tactic of the radical left. Had they stayed, they would have heard Pence say: “Notre Dame is a campus where deliberation is welcomed, where opposing views are debated, and where every speaker, no matter how unpopular or unfashionable, is afforded the right to air their views in the open for all to hear.”

Why did they leave? According to their press release, the protestors said they were expressing solidarity with “marginalized people,” adding that “Mike Pence’s policies target the most vulnerable groups in our society.” The organizers also cited Pope Francis’ “call upon the world… to support Syrian refugees, to acknowledge and respect the humanity of sexual minorities and to bring down all walls that separate us…”

Perhaps these students missed the Catholic doctrinal teachings on the most vulnerable group in our society: unborn children. According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: “As a gift from God, every human life is sacred from conception to natural death. The right to life is the first and most fundamental principle of human rights….”

So, one must wonder how it is that among the protest’s organizers were leaders of Planned Parenthood and the Indiana Reproduction Justice Coalition, who attacked Vice President Pence for his longstanding views on the sanctity of life, a fundamental Catholic doctrine.

The protestors selective citing of the pope also extended to Catholic teachings on marriage and those “sexual minorities” the students were invoking. Recall that Pope Francis disappointed the LGBT community in his issuance last year of a report in which he affirmed the longstanding Catholic doctrine on the subject of homosexuality and marriage: “…only the exclusive and indissoluble union between a man and a woman has a plenary role to play in society as a stable commitment that bears fruit in new life…(w)e need to acknowledge the great variety of family situations that can offer a certain stability, but de facto or same-sex unions, for example, may not simply be equated with marriage.”

The pope cited the 2015 report of the synod of Catholic bishops saying, “There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”

And while the pope called on the church to provide “respectful pastoral guidance” to those experiencing “same sex attraction”, he stated clearly that from the church’s viewpoint, “God’s will” means people should not act on such attractions.

Oops. Protestors must have missed that class? In other words, these graduates justified their objections to Pence’s presence as the commencement speaker at a major Catholic university for mirroring Catholic doctrine.

Evergreen State College, a small liberal-arts school in Washington State, has long had an interesting tradition. Each year, there is a “Day of Absence” on which students and faculty members of color meet off campus to hold solidarity-building activities, leaving the remaining community members to recognize the absence — and thus the value — of their peers. Later there is a “Day of Presence,” with similar activities but for the entire campus community.

But this year, the event changed. On the April 12 Day of Absence, minority students and faculty remained on campus, while whites were asked to leave. According to the local student newspaper, the decision reflected concerns following the 2016 election that students of color no longer felt comfortable on campus. This was to be their chance to reassert their right to belong on campus . . . by asking everyone else of a particular skin color to leave.

One liberal biology professor, Bret Weinstein, took issue with this change. Weinstein wrote a powerful e-mail to his colleagues on March 15. Deeply respectful and generous in tone, he made a simple point:

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 underappreciated 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.

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.

For this fundamentally liberal argument and act of protest, Professor Weinstein has been pilloried. More than that, those words — words forming as reasonable a dissent as any — incited a mob on Tuesday. Students occupied and barricaded the campus library, and accosted Weinstein outside his classroom. As you can see in this video, the mob surrounded him, yelled at him, swore at him, and openly admitted they did not want to allow him to respond.

Evergreen State College hosts an annual event called a “Day of Absence” where, traditionally, minority students and faculty step away from the campus for the day to show just how significant their impact is. Additionally, white students attend workshops on racism.

This year, the school apparently thought it would just be a hoot to change things up and just kick all the white folks off campus instead. Biology professor Bret Weinstein, however, took issue with the event.

Now, students are calling for his head:

Students at Evergreen State College in Olympia, who filmed their exploits and posted the videos on social media, have occupied and barricaded the library, shouting down anyone who disagrees with them or shows insufficient passion for racial justice.

Biology professor Bret Weinstein was berated by dozens of students outside of his classroom Tuesday morning for refusing to participate in an event in which white people were invited to leave campus for a day. Now, he says police have told him to hold his classes off campus due to safety concerns.

Things are “out of control at Evergreen,” he said.

“Police told me protesters stopped cars yesterday, demanding information about occupants,” Mr. Weinstein told The Washington Times. “They believe I was being sought. It appears that the campus has been under the effective control of protesters since 9:30 a.m. Tuesday. Police are on lockdown, hamstrung by the college administration. Students, staff and faculty are not safe.”

A student interviewed denies any knowledge of Weinstein being specifically sought.

Weinstein’s sin is simply thinking that asking white folks to leave the campus was very different than minorities choosing to remove themselves from campus. He has a point. It appears that the original intent of this event is to show just how important minorities are to the proper functioning of the school. So why will demanding 66.7 percent of the student body, as well as Lord only knows how many faculty and staff, accomplish that same purpose?

Weinstein took issue with the change in an email, which led to him being confronted by students who refused to listen to the professor:

When the professor tells the students he will listen to them if they listen to him, one student responds, “We don’t care what terms you want to speak on. This is not about you. We are not speaking on terms — on terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion. You have lost that one.”

Another protester asks the professor whether he believes “black students in sciences are targeted.”

After asking for a clarification, Mr. Weinstein says, “I do not believe that anybody on our faculty, with intent, specially targets students of color.”

That remark prompts shrieks of outrage.

Way to keep those lines of communication open, kids. Way to go.

Popular atheist author calls them a ‘cult’

Racism is alive and well at Evergreen State College – and its target is white people who refuse to apologize for being white.

Students at the Washington liberal arts school, whose main claim to fame is alumnus and Simpsons creator Matt Groening, harassed Biology Prof. Bret Weinstein because he refused to leave campus for the annual “Day of Absence” April 12, The Washington Times reports.

Incredibly, they are trying to get him fired.

Evergreen State practices explicit and institutional racial segregation once a year. Typically nonwhite students and faculty leave campus (to show how valuable they are) and the whites stay on campus (to be indoctrinated in “anti-racism workshops and seminars”), but this year it was reversed, and Weinstein told the director of a campus multicultural office that he was staying put.

Bay Area entrepreneur William Treseder posted Bret’s email to the diversity official, which said the mandatory absence of whites from campus was “a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself”:

You may take this letter as a formal protest of this year’s structure, and you may assume I will be on campus during the Day of Absence. … On a college campus, one’s right to speak – or to be – must never be based on skin color.

As an alternative to leaving campus, Weinstein offered to organize a public discussion of “race through a scientific/evolutionary lens,” as long as “people attend with an open mind, and a willingness to act in good faith.”

Protesters decided to raise hell after reading about Weinstein’s refusal to judge people by their race.

They recorded their harassment of Weinstein, apparently thinking they would be applauded for their bravery of surrounding and yelling at a professor (possibly unaware it backfired at Yale).

Weinstein tries to “reason with dozens of students who routinely shout him down, curse at him and demand his resignation,” as captured on video:

“There’s a difference between debate and dialectic,” Mr. Weinstein says in the video.

“Debate — wait a second — debate means you are trying to win; dialectic means you are using disagreement to discover what is true. I am not interested in debate. I am only interested in dialectic, which does mean I listen to you, and you listen to me.”

One student responds, “We don’t care what terms you want to speak on. This is not about you. We are not speaking on terms—on terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion. You have lost that one.” …

Depending on the institution of one’s choice, those who are planning to enter college for the first time in the fall may be expected to read an assigned book over the summer. That is, many schools have a “common reading program,” a program designed to insure that incoming students read the same book before embarking upon their college career.

As the National Association of Scholars has amply demonstrated in its recent “Beach Books Report (BBR),” the ideological indoctrination of college students can’t begin quickly enough.

The BBR is a study of 348 institutions of higher learning. This includes 171 public four-year schools, 81 private sectarian schools, 70 private nonsectarian institutions, and 26 community colleges. Fifty-eight of these schools were identified by U.S. News & World Report as among the top 100 universities in the country, while 25 are among the top 100 liberal arts colleges. The colleges and universities covered by the BBR report are located in 46 states and Washington D.C.

What the study found is that colleges “rarely assign” classic texts, making “the common reading genre…parochial, contemporary, and progressive.” In fact, 75% (271) of the common reading books were published between 2010 and 2016 while 94% (327) were published between 2000 and 2016.

The books were all published during the lifetime of the students.

As for the most popular subjects and themes, anyone who knows anything at all about contemporary academia won’t be surprised by the BBR’s findings.

For the academic year 2016-2017, the study’s authors ascribed to the common readings 576 subject labels that are divided into 30 subject categories. “The most popular subject categories,” it states, “were Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery (74 readings), Crime and Punishment (67 readings), Media/Silence/Technology (34 readings), Immigration (32 readings), and Family Dysfunction/Separation (31 readings).”

The BBC also broke the readings down into 251 theme labels and 18 theme categories. That most of these “register the common reading committees’ persisting interest in ‘diversity,’ defined by non-white ethnicity at home and abroad,” is hardly unexpected to readers of this column. Some other findings, though, while anything but shocking, are nevertheless telling.

“Many common readings discuss books of which a film or television version exists, an increasing number are graphic novels [what used to be called “comic books”] or memoirs, many have a protagonist under 18 or simply young-adult novels, and a significant number have an association with National Public Radio (NPR).”

Comic books; young-adult novels; books based on popular films and TV shows and associated with NPR—this is much of the stuff of common reading programs.

The BBR summarizes its findings: “The themes register most strongly the common reading genre’s continuing obsession with race, as well as the infantilization of its students, its middlebrow taste, and its progressive politics.”

Indeed. This past academic year, “the most popular themes were African-American (103), Latin American (25), Protagonist Under 18 (25), African (15), and Islamic World (13).”

For the last three consecutive years, “Racism/Civil Rights/Slavery and Crime and Punishment were the two most popular subject categories,” and “African-American themes were…the most popular theme [.]” These subjects and themes became even more popular this past year than they had been in the two preceding years.

The “top books” for common reading illustrate this trend. The most routinely assigned text is Bryan Stevenson’s, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. This is a work of nonfiction. The theme is “African-American” and the subject categories are “Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery” and “Crime and Punishment.”

Then there is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir, Between the World and Me. The theme is “African-American,” and the subject categories are “Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery” and “Crime and Punishment.”

More than two months after Charles Murray went to Middlebury College in Vermont to give a lecture and was shouted down and roughed upon his leaving, school authorities have concluded their review of the incident and will not suspend or expel any students involved.

The school announced that 67 students had received various slaps on the wrist. The 8 masked demonstrators who violently attacked Murray and a professor from the school when they were trying to leave could not be identified, so police will take no action.

Inside Higher Ed:

While the department said that “it had identified a number of other people who were in the crowd of more than 20 people outside the event venue, on consultation with the Addison County State’s Attorney it was determined that there was insufficient information to charge any specific person who participated in damaging the car or interfering with or blocking the car’s progress as it exited the parking lot.”

Ever since the Murray visit, Middlebury has been subject to national scrutiny over how it would punish those involved. Some have argued for tough punishments, while others have said that no punitive sanction would be appropriate. Murray is the co-author of The Bell Curve, a book widely denounced as racist for its conclusions on race and intelligence, but he was not planning to speak about that book. Stanger was the professor selected to lead questioning of Murray. While she defended his right to speak, she never endorsed his views.

Middlebury policy permits protests of speakers but not activities that prevent someone from speaking. While many were involved in doing just that (and were seen on social media doing so), still others were involved in what has widely been seen as a more serious incident after the talk, when Stanger was attacked outside and the car carrying her and Murray from the event was attacked. Middlebury announced early on that it asked the town police to investigate that part of the incident. In addition, college officials said early on that they believed some of those involved in the more violent portion of the protest were not students or otherwise affiliated with the college.

Middlebury officials have refused to answer detailed questions about the punishments, citing privacy issues with regard to the students. But they have indicated that they expected to have different punishments for different groups of students, depending on their level of involvement.

The college’s announcement Tuesday said of the more serious “college discipline” punishment that some received that it “places a permanent record in the student’s file. Some graduate schools and employers require individuals to disclose official college discipline in their applications.”

So ends one of the more shameful episodes of suppressing free speech on campus in recent history. What made this incident so damaging was the actual, physical violence that erupted following the event’s cancellation that was reminiscent of Nazi storm troopers suppressing opposition speech. The irony of referring to Murray as a “fascist” as many protesters did was lost on the troublemakers whose knowledge of history is deficient as were their manners.

If colleges were serious about enforcing the free exchange of ideas, they would have suspended most of those 67 students and expelled others. Until universities show these fascists that they are serious about protecting free speech, the suppression of opposing viewpoints will continue – and get worse.