RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s note: The University of Chicago joins nine campuses on the list of “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” The University of Chicago provides financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech exposing the truth about Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States.

Last night, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between the terrorist group Hamas and SJP on the University of Chicago campus. When the Freedom Center placed similar posters on the campus last fall, a university spokeswoman called them “defamatory and inconsistent with our values and policies.” This latest round of posters serves to inform students about SJP’s true motives and allegiances and challenges the Chicago administration to uphold their stated commitment to free expression.

University of Chicago: Campus administration

The University of Chicago has long prided itself on producing independent thinkers and encouraging a certain iconoclasm among its students and faculty. In the fall of 2016, the university’s dean of students, John Ellison, engendered a national controversy by making an explicit statement in support of free speech in a letter to incoming students: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

It seemed that Ellison was bravely sailing against the winds of political correctness, but recent events at the University of Chicago suggest that this cherished commitment to free speech applies to students and campus organizations that seek Israel’s destruction, but not to those who defend the Jewish state and expose the terrorist connections of its enemies.

In the past few years, Chicago has witnessed the development of a highly active BDS campus movement, U of C Divest, which is currently supported by more than 20 student organizations on campus. In the spring of 2016, U of C Divest succeeded in passing a resolution endorsing BDS in Chicago’s student government. During the debate over the resolution, an amendment supporting the continued self-determination of the Jewish people and the existence of Israel was rejected, indicating that the coalition’s goals align with Hamas’s aims of destroying the Jewish state.

The University of Chicago has brought numerous pro-Hamas speakers to campus. In October 2015, UC-SJP hosted BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti for a speech on “BDS and the Ethical Obligation to End Complicity in Oppression.” During his address, Barghouti labeled Israel a “savage unrepairable society” that conducts “ethnic cleansing.” He praised terrorism against Israel’s Jews, stating that “resistance” is a legitimate response to “the violence of an oppressive system.” Several UC organizations and departments co-sponsored Barghouti’s address including the Global Voices Program – University of Chicago International House, the Pozen Center for Human Rights, the Department of Political Science, and the Department of International Studies.

Later that same month, UC-SJP held a panel titled “Jerusalem in Crisis: Insider Perspectives on the Violence in Palestine-Israel” as part of the “UChicago Israeli Apartheid Week.” One speaker at the event, a graduate student member of SJP, stated: “Palestinian violent resistance against the violent Israeli military is always justified; it is the equivalent of biting the hand that is trying to choke you to death.”

From 2009-2013, Janet Napolitano headed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security but as president of the University of California she has been unable to prevent violent thugs from quashing free speech on UC campuses. Napolitano has also remained silent during the smear surge against UCLA professor Keith Fink, but that should come as no surprise.

Janet Napolitano made her public debut in the 1991 smear campaign against Clarence Thomas, in an effort to keep the conservative African American off the Supreme Court. The lead smearer, Anita Hill, accused Thomas of sexually harassing her and Napolitano, then with a Phoenix law firm, represented Hill in the matter.

The false accusations of Napolitano’s client supplied ammo for white Democrats Howard Metzenbaum, a former Communist; Ted Kennedy, who sought support from the USSR against Reagan; and Robert Byrd, a former high-profile Ku-Klucker. Napolitano’s representation of Anita Hill came up in 1993 when president Clinton appointed her as a U.S. attorney.

In the confirmation proceedings, Napolitano interrupted Hill’s witness Susan Hoerchner, who after an off-the-record conversation, “suddenly developed amnesia,” about parts of her story that contradicted Hill. Napolitano refused to answer questions whether she had persuaded Hoerchner to change her testimony.

Napolitano’s great achievement as Arizona attorney general was to ban Christmas displays on public property. As Arizona governor, she inclined to cronyism, appointing to the state supreme court her campaign attorney Scott Bales, a liberal Democrat who also worked at her former law firm. Napolitano vetoed seven bills intended to fight illegal immigration but her anti-conservative zealotry came to the fore during her stint as Department of Homeland Security boss.

Like the 44th president, Napolitano believed that radical Islam was not the primary threat. She expunged the word “terrorism” from the DHS lexicon and purged experts showing the connection between terror and jihad. She put out the DHS report Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, a sweeping indictment of conservatives for preferring limited government and constitutional measures such as the Second Amendment.

That, of all people, Barack Obama recently received the Kennedy Library’s “Profile in Courage” award proves that the latter has about as much to do with recognizing courage as the Nobel Peace Prize, of which the former President was also a recipient, has to do with honoring peace.

This is not meant to be a knock against Obama. Rather, it is an observation that no unprejudiced spectator of the contemporary American scene could fail to make. The stone-cold truth is that there is utterly nothing courageous about being a self-avowed “progressive,” a Politically Correct leftist, in today’s Western world.

And Obama is nothing if not a leftist.

No, neither Obama nor his ideological ilk in Washington D.C., Hollywood, the (fake) news media, and academia display a scintilla of courage in their public lives. Real bravery, as all of us teach our children, is a matter of resisting groupthink—or “peer pressure,” as we call it when referring to youth. Real courage consists in daring to challenge the prevailing ideological orthodoxy—or “what’s popular,” as the kids call it.

There are indeed people who are deserving of an award affirming courage. One such person is Paul Griffiths, a divinity professor at Duke University. Professor Griffiths, whose area of specialization is Catholic theology, is a prolific writer and scholar. He has been teaching at Duke since 2008.

He will not be returning to his position in the fall.

In February, an invitation was emailed to the divinity school faculty encouraging them to attend a two-day seminar on “racial equity” training. Anathea Portier-Young, an Associate Professor of the Old Testament, replied enthusiastically: “Those who have participated in the training have described it as transformative, powerful, and life-changing,” she wrote. “We recognize that it is a significant commitment of time; we also believe that it will have great dividends for our community,” she said.

Griffiths disagreed. He copied all of his colleagues on his response. “I exhort you not to attend this training,” he began. “Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show.”

Griffiths concluded: “Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual.”

Of course, Griffiths is entirely correct. “Events of this sort” are most definitely, always, profoundly anti-intellectual. They are instruments designed to totalize the groupthink, the religious-like dogma, of the academy. That Griffiths dared to defy the orthodoxy, that he dared to openly resist the “cool kids,” and that he undoubtedly knew what was to come next earns him a Profile in Courage award.

The Divinity school Dean, Elain Heath, responded to all faculty. She didn’t mention Griffiths by name. However, it was clear to all that it was he who she had in mind when she condemned the “inappropriate and unprofessional” nature of “mass emails” containing “disparaging statements—including arguments ad hominem” that are intended “to humiliate or undermine individual colleagues or groups of colleagues with whom we disagree.”

To insure that her point wasn’t lost upon anyone, Heath was explicit: “The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.”

While Dean Heath reportedly attempted to meet with Griffiths in person, this never came to pass. Subsequently, Griffiths sent out another mass email. The subject line read: “intellectual freedom and institutional discipline.” According to The News and Observer, Griffiths revealed to his colleagues that he had become the “targets” of two disciplinary proceedings. The first involves a harassment complaint filed by Portier-Young, the Old Testament professor who couldn’t rave enough about the “racial equity training.” The other has led Dean Heath to ban him from all faculty meetings and deprive Griffiths of funding for future research and traveling expenses.

As Griffiths sees it, Heath’s actions are “reprisals” against him, means by which she can “discipline” him for articulating views with which she disagrees. “Duke University,” Griffiths stated, “is now a place in which too many thoughts can’t be spoken and too many disagreements remain veiled because of fear.”

This being the case, Griffiths urged a “renunciation of fear-based discipline to those who deploy and advocate it, and its replacement with confidence in speech.”

Professor Griffiths has resigned from his position at Duke, effective next fall.

Griffiths richly deserves an award that recognizes his bravery. To be fair, however, so too does his colleague, Thomas Pfau, a professor of English and German, warrant recognition for having come to Griffiths’ defense. “Having reviewed Paul Griffiths’ note several times,” Pfau commented, “I find nothing in it that could even remotely be said to ‘express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.’ To suggest anything of the sort strikes me as either gravely imperceptive or as intellectually dishonest.”

Pfau added: “I also felt that differences of opinion, however stark, ought to be respected and engaged, rather than being used for the purpose of moral recrimination.”

Pfau describes Griffiths as “one of the pre-eminent theologians working in the United States today and a vital resource for students and colleagues engaged in rigorous theological reflection here at Duke.” He claims to “profoundly regret” Griffiths’ decision to part ways with Duke, and told him that he believed that it was a “mistake.”

Evidently, though, it is too late.

In response to the racist-banana incident at the private American University – now under investigation by the U.S. attorney in D.C. as well as the FBI – the editorial board has declared that all colleges should censor students if someone thinks their speech or behavior is racist:

Two-bit provocations such as hanging nooses on campuses play on emotions made raw in the wake of a presidential campaign that featured the vilification of minorities and barely veiled race-baiting. For university administrators, the challenge is to address that legitimate pain with sensitivity and make crystal clear that racist signs, symbols and speech are off-limits.

UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar, doesn’t try to explain away what appears to be a clear and chilling call for censorship from a legendary newspaper. He writes in his own Post column today:

This is an editorial, the product of carefully considered labor on the part of a group of people, not an extemporaneous remark …

And the editorial’s proposal is an awful idea. At public universities, it would violate the First Amendment; at private universities, it would violate many of the universities’ stated commitments to open debate, as well as basic principles of academic freedom.

The editorial board has no clue how wide a swath of speech it would be implicating, according to Volokh: Claims of “whites being an oppressor race” could just as easily be punished as bananas found hanging from makeshift nooses.

The same goes for criticizing Islam as illiberal, calling for stricter immigration limits or condemning Israeli policies:

All such advocacy that runs against university administrators’ political views would be deterred when “university administrators” “make crystal clear” that “racist … speech” — racist in the views of whatever disciplinary committee is making decisions — is “off-limits.”

Hans Bader, former lawyer in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, said in an email today the Post has reached the “opposite extreme” from its past position:

Once upon a time it called for Congress to pass Congressman Henry Hyde’s bill to ban campus speech codes even at private campuses. Of course, that was years ago, when moderate Democrats still existed. …

A conservative professor at UCLA claims his superiors are working to get him fired because they do not like his politics. https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32533/

UCLA communication studies lecturer Keith Fink’s assertion comes several months after his department chair put a cap on the number of students who could enroll in his class. That left a long line of very frustrated students saying they wanted to take his class, and there were empty seats inside Fink’s classroom, but campus administrators effectively blocked their ability to enroll.

Fink, a conservative, an attorney, and a free speech defender who has been openly critical of ways in which UCLA has trampled on students’ free speech rights, said the discrimination against him has grown worse.

Now he claims his department “has done everything it can to rig” his performance review in an attempt to oust him from teaching at his alma mater.

‘Modern day star chamber’

A vote on the popular lecturer’s excellence review took place last week, but the results might not be known for up to two weeks, teaching assistant Andrew Litt said.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Fink described last week’s closed-door meeting as akin to a “modern day star chamber.”

Lecturers at UCLA are required to go through the excellence review process by the end of their 18th quarter of teaching and the review includes compiling an “Initial Continuing Appointment” dossier.

Included within the file are items such as a curriculum vitae, list of students to be solicited for reviews, a list of those who might not provide objective evaluations, a classroom observation, and an optional list of names who may speak to the lecturer’s teaching ability.

In his candidate response to the department’s dossier, Fink lays out that his right to a fair review was denied. He alleges, in the document obtained by The College Fix, that the communication studies department worked to keep evaluations from students of his choice out of the file and that a teaching evaluation is “riddled with falsehoods and distorted facts,” written by a faculty member Fink deemed biased at the beginning of the excellence review process.

Last month, I attended an interfaith panel discussion, “Unpacking Misconceptions,” at Portland State University, where I’m a political-science graduate student. I ended up being fired as the multimedia editor of our student newspaper, the Vanguard, for tweeting about what was said there.

Much of the discussion was uncontroversial. The students on the panel mainly shared complaints of what they perceived as misconceptions about their religions. A Hindu student lampooned author Reza Aslan for his depiction of Hinduism on CNN’s Believer, which showed a minority sect’s practice of eating human flesh. A Jewish student said most Jews don’t have payot, the side curls worn by some Orthodox Jewish men. An atheist student spoke on behalf of a secular-humanist worldview and challenged the audience to think about how we as a society can develop our own moral framework without religion.

At one point, a woman in the audience asked the Muslim student if a specific verse in the Koran actually permitted the killing of non-Muslims. “I can confidently tell you, when the Koran says an innocent life, it means an innocent life, regardless of the faith, the race, like, whatever you can think about as a characteristic,” he began.

At this point, I took out my mobile phone and began recording as he continued:

And some, this, that you’re referring to, killing non-Muslims, that [to be a non-believer] is only considered a crime when the country’s law, the country is based on Koranic law — that means there is no other law than the Koran. In that case, you’re given the liberty to leave the country, you can go in a different country, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. So you can go in a different country, but in a Muslim country, in a country based on the Koranic laws, disbelieving, or being an infidel, is not allowed so you will be given the choice [to leave].

Although I was not there officially as a reporter to cover the event, I shared a 40-second snippet of the video on my personal Twitter account, with a message that conveyed my understanding of the speaker’s meaning — namely, that non-Muslims would be killed or banished in a state governed by Koranic law:

At @Portland_State interfaith panel today, the Muslim student speaker said that apostates will be killed or banished in an Islamic state. pic.twitter.com/YpsVSB1w9P
— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 27, 2017

I later posted a longer version of the video in a follow-up tweet to provide more context:

.@Portland_State Here is full clip that I recorded. An audience member asked about Quran 5:51 & “infidels.” He summarizes Quran 5:32 just before video starts pic.twitter.com/7FMgsPbFR6
— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 27, 2017

This longer video includes a response by someone in the audience who disagreed with the speaker, saying it was “perfectly okay for non-Muslims to live in Muslim lands.” The audience member cited the existence of religious-minority communities in the Middle East as an example of Islamic tolerance.

College campuses aren’t welcoming places for any speaker who isn’t a Leftist — the Left’s dirty little secret is that identity doesn’t really matter to them at all.

Everything you’ve heard about “intersectionalism” and “privilege” gets thrown out the window if you have an opposing viewpoint. Gay? Well, Milo Yiannopoulos tried to speak at Berkeley, and a riot erupted. Female? Anne Coulter never spoke at Berkeley due to similar violence, and Betsy DeVos just gave a speech to a bunch of turned backs.

The latest example is a name many of us are unfamiliar with. Chadwick Moore did a profile of Milo for the gay magazine Out, and writes for various other gay-interest publications. This didn’t buy him any credence with the Left, as his speech at Portland State University was just targeted:

The speech, “The Joys of Being an Infidel: Challenging Orthodoxy and Standing Up for Free Speech in America,” drew roughly 60 students and community members, including about a dozen student protesters.

They held signs declaring “No sympathy for alt-right trash” and “Destroy your local fascist,” and at times disrupted the speech with verbal outbursts. Moore responded in sometimes feisty rebuttals as the two sides clashed.

Moore entered the national spotlight after coming out as a conservative in an op-ed in the New York Post in February that detailed the intense backlash and hatred he received from his once beloved and supportive gay community for writing a feature on Milo Yiannopoulos for Out magazine.

“If you dare to question liberal stances or make an effort toward understanding why conservatives think the way they do, you are a traitor,” Moore wrote in his coming out piece. “It can seem like liberals are actually against free speech if it fails to conform with the way they think. And I don’t want to be a part of that club anymore.”

Now, as an emerging defender of free speech, he finds himself a target. CONTINUE AT SITE

The University of Arizona is hiring students to be “social-justice activists,” and the job description demands that they “report any bias incidents or claims to appropriate Residence Life staff.”

In other words: These kids are being paid to tattle on other kids for anything they might consider to be a microaggression, and any students who gets these jobs should probably identify themselves so that other students will know to never invite them to their parties.

According to the university’s website, the official title of the position is “social-justice activist,” and it pays $10 per hour. They can expect to work about 15 hours per week, which, as the Daily Caller notes, means that they will be making roughly $600 per month to behave like self-righteous, meddling nightmares.

In addition to reporting the potentially offensive behavior of their peers, other parts of the job include planning social-justice programs for the residence halls, increasing “awareness and knowledge of diverse identities and how they influence interactions,” and promoting “inclusive communities through positive interactions.” And all of that is fine. I’m all for being a nice, sensitive person, but encouraging outside sources to report “bias incidents” whenever they feel that other students have been wronged is a terrible idea. It’s one thing to give students a place to report any problems that they’ve experienced themselves, but shouldn’t it be up to the person who was involved to decide whether or not there even was a problem in the first place? After all, we’re living in a world where many schools consider “you guys” to be a sexist phrase, and chances are that there will be reports of incidents committed against “victims” who never even felt that they were victims to begin with.

It’s a very likely scenario, especially when you think about what kind of person would apply for a job as a “social-justice advocate.” No doubt, the people who are hired will be the kind of buzzword-salad-spewing sycophants who do think that “you guys” is problematic, or else they wouldn’t be interested in having that sort of job in the first place. No one would want a job policing microaggressions unless he or she is the type of person who loves policing microaggressions, and we all know that those sorts of people are growing more and more ridiculous by the day. Students should feel comfortable at school, absolutely, but it’s also important to remember that these students are adults — which means that we should trust them to decide how to handle their own social problems the way that they themselves see fit.

At Reed College, a mandatory freshman literature course focused on the works of great thinkers underpinning Western Civilization has come under fire from campus activists, who allege the mandate is systemically racist because the class only assigns the works of white authors and therefore perpetuates white privilege and racism. https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32453/

The target is Humanities 110, “Greece and the Ancient Mediterranean,” an introduction to the works of celebrated Greco-Roman thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus and Ovid.

Humanities 110, which has evolved over the years, has been a required course at the private, Portland, Ore.-based liberal arts college for decades, but a group of students calling themselves Reedies Against Racism want the curriculum changed.

In their words, it must be “reformed to represent the voices of people of color.”

Last fall they launched frequent protests against the class — an effort that continued through spring semester and prompted scholars to now consider revising the course.

During many of the lecture sessions of Hum 110 throughout the school year, while professors spoke on “The Rise of Rome” or “On the Nature of Things,” protesters sat or stood in the lecture hall holding up signs that read “I am more than a way to get federal funding” or “We cannot be erased.”

Some even wore tape across their mouths to signify that “Greece and the Ancient Mediterranean” is silencing them by only teaching white authors. Some professors asked the students not to crash their lecture halls, but those pleas were ignored.

The protests prompted scholars to move up the course’s review to this year. The results of that review, and any possible changes to the Humanities 110 syllabus as a result, may be announced this summer, a campus spokesman told The College Fix.

“The current humanities course focuses on the Classical world in its ancient Mediterranean context; this has not always been the case and the faculty differ on how important they think this focus is to the course,” Reed spokesman Kevin Myers said via email, noting faculty make all curricular decisions.

“Among other questions, the review will consider the focus for the next iteration of the course​. Regardless of its content, the main emphasis of the humanities course is ​for students to ​develop the skills that will help ​them succeed in their classes at Reed and their lives after graduation,” Myers stated.

Western Civ on trial

Despite the criticisms from the vocal minority, many Reed students have appreciated the course as is.

It aims “to understand the philosophical underpinnings of Western society, and goes a long way towards giving students the context to think through the great problems of government and society themselves,” senior economics major Zachary Harding, who has taken the course, told The College Fix.

Another former student of the class, 2016 Reed College alumnus Aristomenes Spanos, agreed. “There is value in learning the different methods people used to tackle the same problems we deal with today,” Spanos told The Fix.