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UCLA: Coddling Hamas on Campus While Trampling the First Amendment Supporting terrorist propaganda on the taxpayer’s dime. Sara Dogan

By on May 2nd, 2017

Editor’s note: UCLA is the latest school to be named to the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” It joins the campuses of Brooklyn College (CUNY), Tufts University, Brandeis University, and Vassar College on the list. These campuses provide 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 critical of Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States.

Last night, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between SJP and Hamas terrorists on the UCLA campus. UCLA administrators such as Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Jerry Kang have previously labeled similar Freedom Center posters “ethnic slander” and an effort to “trigger racially-tinged fear.” These posters pose a challenge to the UCLA administration to abandon these attacks on speech that exposes the truth about SJP and its ties to terrorism, and to fulfill its constitutional obligation to uphold the First Amendment on campus.

University of California-Los Angeles: Jerry Kang, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and Gene Block, Chancellor:

UCLA Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Jerry Kang has undergone extreme intellectual and political contortions in defending the UCLA chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as “an officially recognized student organization, based on political commitments, that is also in good standing” despite SJP’s constant manifestation of Jew hatred on the Los Angeles campus.

In one widely noted expression of the group’s anti Semitism, SJP members illegally questioned student government candidate Rachel Beyda about whether her status as a Jew would bias her decisions on campus matters. It also attempted to create a litmus test for student government candidates by introducing an initiative that would require them to sign a pledge to not take trips to Israel sponsored by pro-Israel organizations.

Such incidents violate UCLA’s Principles of Community which state, in part, “We are committed to ensuring freedom of expression and dialogue, in a respectful and civil manner, on the spectrum of views held by our varied and diverse campus communities.”

Despite his title as the UCLA administrator in charge of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Vice Chancellor Kang has ignored SJP’s continual violation of these Principles of Community, disregarding the harassment of Jewish students forced to endure SJP’s mock “apartheid walls” plastered with Hamas propaganda and its rallies decrying the founding of the Jewish state as “Al-nakba” or “the catastrophe.” But when the David Horowitz Freedom Center hung posters on campus exposing SJP’s ties to anti-Israel terror group Hamas, and naming campus activists who had worked to bring about the destruction of the Jewish state, both Kang and UCLA Chancellor Gene Block were quick to condemn them. In an email to the entire 50,000 member UCLA community, Kang said the posters were “designed to shock and terrify,” and accused the Freedom Center of using “the tactic of guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander, and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially-tinged fear.” In a second diatribe, he claimed the posters caused “chilling psychological harm” and “focused, personalized intimidation.”

University Chancellor Gene Block also reacted to the posters by stating “Islamophobic posters appeared on campus, in complete disregard of our Principles of Community and the dignity of our Muslim students. But we can, and we will, do our best to hold ourselves to the standards of integrity, inclusion, fairness and compassion that are the hallmarks of a healthy community.”

Quick to defend SJP and its violent rhetoric, Kang and Block have been missing in action when Jewish students faced intimidation and harassment from anti-Semitic speakers and Hamas propaganda plastered across campus.

In addition to the incidents listed above, UCLA SJP holds an annual “Palestine Awareness Week” on campus featuring speakers who endorse the genocidal BDS movement against Israel. SJP’s 2016 event featured journalist Max Blumenthal, who stated during his address that suicide bombing against Jews is justified by “the occupation” and described Palestinian terrorists as “young men who took up arms to fight their occupier.” He also compared Israel to the Islamic state, calling it “‘JSIL,’ the Jewish State in Israel and the Levant.” Another speaker, Miko Peled, also defended Palestinian terrorism, renaming it “a struggle for freedom and justice and equality,” and describing terrorists as “very brave Palestinians who are engaged in fighting this brutal occupation.” Peled also described Jews as analogous to Hitler, calling Jewish soldiers “young little Jewish gestapos,” and further accused Israel of “massive, violent, brutal oppression,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and of being “a colonialist, apartheid, racist system.”

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Tufts and Brandeis College Administrations Promote Terrorist Propaganda, Silence Opposing Views Brandeis professor: “Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses.” Sara Dogan

By on May 1st, 2017

Editor’s note: Tufts University and Brandeis University are the latest two schools named to the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” These campuses provide 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 critical of Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States. Over the weekend, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between SJP and Hamas terrorists on both campuses. These posters pose a challenge to the Tufts and Brandeis administrations to defend speech that exposes the truth about SJP and its ties to terrorism, rather than ordering it silenced as they have in the past.

Brandeis University: Campus Administration

Brandeis University, located in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, is notable for being one of America’s few elite universities to be founded by Jews and is named for Louis B. Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court. In recent years, Brandeis has been conspicuous for a more disturbing reason—as an academic center that is uniquely welcoming to pro-terrorist speech and ideology directed against Israel while showing extreme hostility towards those who oppose Israel’s terrorist adversaries.

Members of Brandeis’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine have hosted numerous events featuring speakers that defend anti-Israel terrorism and the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Among these are radical professor Noam Chomsky who gave a speech describing Israel’s actions towards Palestine as “vicious, brutal and criminal” and claimed that Israel “is alone in denying” its “illegal occupation of territories.”

In April 2015, the Brandeis administration selected former U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering to be honored as the university’s commencement speaker. Known for his extreme anti-Israel views, Pickering has written that Israel has conducted a “half-century-long occupation” of Palestine that is tantamount to “the permanent subjugation and disenfranchisement of a people to which Israel refuses to grant citizenship in the Jewish state.”

In 2014, a Jewish student at Brandeis, Daniel Mael, exposed a secret faculty listserve where more than 90 left-wing Brandeis faculty exchanged radical views. Some of the listserve’s participants promoted Hamas propaganda while espousing anti-Semitic comments and expressing hatred of Israel. Professor Donald Hindley, for instance, referred to the Jewish state as “The Vile, Terrorist Israeli Government,” in a post about the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas terrorists.

Hindley also sarcastically wrote: “Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses…” and compared an event challenging the anti-Semitic BDS movement to “Germany in the later 1930s with everyone at least a Nazi sympathizer.”

Brandeis sociology professor Gordon Fellman, meanwhile, wrote on the listserve seeking signatures for an open letter to “end the illegal occupation in Palestine.” According to the letter, “the government of Israel, having provoked the firing of rockets by its rampage through the West Bank, is now using that response as the pretext for an aerial assault on Gaza which has already cost scores of lives.”

When Brandeis University president Fredrick Lawrence condemned these statements as “abhorrent”( but took no official action against the professors who made them), some faculty who participated in the listserve, along with the Brandeis English Department, condemned his comments and sought a faculty forum on freedom of speech on campus.

While welcoming anti-Israel and pro-Hamas speech on campus, Brandeis has also exhibited hostility towards those who are critical of Islamic terrorism. In April 2014, under pressure from students and faculty, the Brandeis administration acted to withdraw an honorary degree that had been offered to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born women’s rights activist and critic of radical Islam who has condemned the mistreatment of women in Muslim countries, and especially the practice of female genital mutilation. Eighty-seven Brandeis faculty members signed a petition citing Ali’s “extreme Islamophobic beliefs” as a reason why the honorary degree should be rescinded. Showcasing the university’s blatant hypocrisy, Brandeis had previously awarded an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner, who has a long history of anti-Semitic statements, among them the claim that “The biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community.”

Brandeis also failed to take action when SJP members disrupted a university panel featuring six members of the Israeli Knesset. The SJP activists repeatedly yelled the epithet “war criminals” at the panel participants and attempted to distribute fake warrants calling for their arrest.

For its history of repeatedly welcoming anti-Israel and pro-terror speakers and protests on campus while allowing those who would present opposing views to be silenced, the Brandeis administration makes our list of Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.

Tufts University: James M. Glaser, Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, and Jianmin Qu, Dean of the School of Engineering

The campus of Tufts University has repeatedly rolled out the red carpet for supporters of the BDS movement against Israel. In 2014, it hosted the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) National Conference, a secretive event which to which media access was strictly controlled and monitored but according to the conference agenda, instructed attendees on how and when to take “direct action” against supporters of Israel.

Tufts SJP has repeatedly condoned anti-Israel terrorism in its published works and statements and holds an annual “Israeli Apartheid” hate week during which the BDS movement against Israel is promoted. It has also violated campus regulations by distributing mock “eviction notices” to Jewish students in the dorms, which it falsely claims are similar to notices “routinely given to Palestinian families living under oppressive Israeli occupation.” Tufts SJP also attacked and delegitimized the campus pro-Israel group Students Supporting Israel (SSI) by labeling it “literally a hate group.”

No action was taken against SJP, yet when the David Horowitz Freedom Center attempted to hang posters describing SJP’s links to Hamas and its genocidal agenda, three Tufts administrators— Dean of Arts and Sciences James Glaser, Dean of the School of Engineering Jianmin Qu and Dean of Student Affairs Mary Pat McMahon—emailed a statement to the entire Tufts student body, condemning the posters and claiming that they violated the University’s community standards.

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Therapeutic Universities and Soft Despotism The safe-space’s heart of darkness. Bruce Thornton ****

By on May 1st, 2017

Bad ideas make bad schools, bad schools make bad citizens, bad citizens make bad laws, bad laws make bad government. That’s the recipe for tyranny.

The phenomenon of rich, privileged “snowflake” college students demanding “safe spaces” from “microagressions” rightly provokes derision and scorn from normal people. Those who live among the slings and arrows of the real world, where actions have consequences and one’s delicate self-esteem is a matter of indifference, can only shake their heads at such childish tantrums. But the roots of this degradation of the university’s traditional mission to cultivate critical reasoning rather than narcissism run deep in our therapeutic culture, and threaten the virtues and qualities of mind necessary for self-rule and political freedom.

Start with the “self-esteem” fad that colonized the schools more than 25 years ago. In 1991 a widely publicized “study” proclaimed, in the words of a New York Times headline, “Gender Bias in Schools Is Still Short-Changing Girls.” Because of the “unconscious bias” of teachers, the tale went, grade-school girls are wounded in their self-esteem and thus rendered incapable of excelling in traditional male-dominated disciplines like science and math. Though the study’s methodology and conclusions were quickly discredited, it went on to provide intellectual support for the $600 million Gender Equity in Education Act of 1993. It also encouraged the more expansive application of Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendment Act, which threatened the cut-off of federal money to colleges in order to coerce them into policing “discrimination” on the “basis of sex.”

This is just one example of how left-wing identity politics, in this case feminism, generated phony “research” that gave a patina of science to contested and dubious ideology, which then became enshrined in federal law. Today, the abuse of Title IX drives the administrative infrastructure of universities that caters to selected victim-groups, creates unconstitutional inquisitions that investigate and punish allegations of “sexual assault,” and shuts-down free speech by conservatives. After all, we mustn’t let wounded self-esteem damage the prospects of women and minorities already victimized by the “patriarchy” and “racism.”

So it’s not just the left-wing ideology that corrupts universities. Intellectual development and training have been replaced by an obsession with students’ feelings. How students feel is now more important than how well they think.

Indeed, over the years universities have developed numerous services for students that monitor their psychological health and offer therapeutic solace. For example, I just received an email from my campus of the California State University system, the largest in the U.S. with half a million students and 23 campuses. The email came from the Campus Assessment, Response, and Evaluation outfit, its acronym CARE revealing its therapeutic thrust. This “collaborative effort” uses a “community approach” to help professors identify “students who are facing significant personal struggles, in distress, or students of concern” and direct them to the appropriate services. These services include free counseling; “Let’s Talk,” a drop-in venue for therapeutic intervention; and a licensed clinical social worker available by appointment at no cost. We professors are supposed to monitor our students for “signs of stress” and then alert them to these services.

What has any of this to do with higher education? What business is it of the university to monitor the psychological well-being of legal adults? Partly schools are engaging in preemptively protecting themselves from liability or a federal investigation. If a depressed student commits suicide in a dorm, the existence of these services and programs for depressed students can offer protection from being sued. The university administrative apparatus also benefits from the expansion of its offices and services, and the added resources and manpower they require. This need to service students’ psychological health has contributed to the expensive administrative bloat in higher education, which has led to fewer full-time professors, more exploited adjuncts, and higher tuition costs.

Identity politics programs also find such offices to be useful allies for reinforcing their ideological agendas. Identity politics is predicated on victimhood, and victimhood generates demands for compensatory programs and services. Minority students and women presumably are being psychologically wounded by racism and sexism, and thus should have services that apply therapeutic balm to their psychic wounds. Given the rarity these days of legal or violent expressions of sexism or racism, victims must look to psychological effects like “low self-esteem” or subjective perceptions of “microagressions” as evidence of “unconscious racism” and other occult biases. The therapeutic services offered by the university validate this victim narrative, as do sexual harassment policies, “hate speech” codes, and other policies all backed up by badly written federal and state laws. They all assume the therapeutic imperative to protect students from damage to their self-esteem.

More generally, this therapeutic infrastructure infantilizes students, and contributes to the dumbing down of university standards of admissions and evaluation, lest students suffer even more trauma from poor academic performance, flunking courses, or dropping out. Thus apart from the hard sciences, most college curricula today are the equivalent of high school courses fifty years ago, and in some cases are not even up to that standard. The obsession with “hurtful” speech similarly assumes a child-like sensibility that must be cossetted and protected in order to avoid psychological damage. In the case of black students, this attitude is particularly patronizing and insulting. College students whose ancestors survived everyday racist slurs and lethal violence now must be protected from subjective slights often invisible to most other people. And universities tolerate and even enable the violent tantrums thrown by those who have been led to expect the whole world to respect their tender sensibilities and inflated perceptions of themselves and their political beliefs.

Hence the sorry state of higher education in America. Legal adults who can join the military and vote, who drink and fornicate, who drive cars watch porn, are treated like preschoolers who need hand-holding and constant guidance from bureaucratic nannies. Standards of admission are lowered and grade inflation runs rampant so that privileged victim-groups aren’t slighted and their self-esteem damaged by hidden racism and sexism. The administrative bureaucracy waxes ever fatter, even as the number of full-time professors diminishes and tuition costs soar. And the tax-payer is on the hook for much of the bill, as the federal government now backstops the over $1 trillion in student debt, billions of it unlikely ever to be repaid.

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The Roots of Campus Progressivism’s Madness Why do so many left-wing students subscribe to a profoundly illiberal conception of political discourse? By Deion Kathawa

By on May 1st, 2017

— Deion Kathawa is an alumnus of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with degrees in both philosophy and political science, the former editor in chief of the Michigan Review, and a contributor to American Greatness.

This weekend, I became one alumnus among thousands of University of Michigan alumni heading out into the world to begin discharging my duties as a citizen: voting, paying taxes, and engaging my co-citizens in the public square. Some have argued that a sizeable number of my fellow graduates will not be able to make it in the real world. Because they have been conditioned to have an “expectation of confirmation” of their ideas, the thinking goes, these “snowflakes” will “melt” upon contact with different opinions. While that is a striking (and horrifying) thing to contemplate, I think we ought to take a step back and try to understand the campus mindset more thoroughly, because if we don’t, we’ll be subject to increasingly extreme displays of illiberalism and anti-intellectualism that will inevitably trickle out of universities and infect the wider society — to our collective detriment.

The first thing to know is that the picture that is painted in the media of campuses as incubators and hotbeds of far-left radicalism is, too often, accurate — and depressing. What’s more, too many of the most politically active liberal students understand neither free speech nor one of its prime functions: to discover what’s true. And why would they? After all, free speech and truth itself are nothing more than oppressive, white-supremacist social constructs! Nearly every liberal college student with whom I have spoken in-person or engaged online believes that the First Amendment proscribes so-called hate speech, by which they seem to mean nothing more than speech that expresses ideas with which they disagree or that offend them. And when they find out that the First Amendment does not actually achieve this, to them, desirable end, they bristle: Well, it should!

“That’s offensive!” is a common retort among my peers, and it shows how far standards of discourse have plummeted. The numbers bear this out. But while clustering, the political polarization of academia and society more generally, and the rise of social media bear their share of the blame, they are not by themselves sufficient explanations for what is happening on our elite campuses. Why are students behaving in ever more fascistic ways?

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Trump and Congress Can Help Restore Campus Free Speech Withdraw the Obama Title IX ‘guidance’ and tie federal funds to respect for the First Amendment. By Harvey Silverglate

By on May 1st, 2017

Mr. Silverglate, a co-author of “The Shadow University,” is a co-founder and board member of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Samantha Harris, FIRE’s vice president for policy research, contributed to this article.

The culture of censorship within higher education is now legendary. And although the problem is of long standing, the Obama administration made it worse by giving academic bureaucrats a convenient excuse—“the feds made us do it”—for punishing speech. The Trump administration and Congress could help restore academic freedom, without which higher education cannot flourish.

Campus censorship affects faculty as well as students and guest speakers. And conservatives aren’t the only targets. At Louisiana State University, Teresa Buchanan’s tenure didn’t protect her from dismissal in 2015 for occasionally using vulgar language in her education classes. She did so, she said, to prepare future teachers for the language they would encounter from some students. Administrators ignored a unanimous faculty committee recommendation against termination and a report of the American Association of University Professors that found Ms. Buchanan’s academic freedom was violated.

In a statement to the press, LSU claimed it was following “the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ advisements.” That would be a 2013 OCR statement, in a settlement with the University of Montana, that in order to comply with federal antidiscrimination laws, universities must ban “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal” conduct—in other words, speech. LSU gave these “advisements” weight because of OCR’s power to withhold federal funding. The Obama administration’s overreach in higher education produced many stories like Ms. Buchanan’s.

The new administration has an opportunity to undo this damage. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos should instruct OCR to rescind its “guidance” undermining the right to free speech and guarantee that universities that receive federal dollars return to their role as centers of inquiry and learning, not censorship and indoctrination. Further, OCR’s practice of setting national standards through “guidance”—without seeking comment from academic institutions and the public—should end. Future regulations should be subject to open debate, as mandated by the Administrative Procedure Act. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Spreading Tentacles of Censorship By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on May 1st, 2017

The list of those who are “disinvited” to forums where free speech should exist keeps getting longer. In some ways, it is a badge of honor to be included in that list; in other aspects, of course, it is the abject failure to respect the right to hold an opinion. Ultimately, it is “campus fascism” on the rise.

Phyllis Chesler is the latest victim after having been “disinvited by the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas Law School.” In her article titled “Being a Zionist is even worse than being an Islamophobe,” she describes being censored by a state university. She was part of a conference on a subject on which she is an expert, having studied the topic of honor killings for many years and she has a track record as an academic, an author, a human rights activist and women’s rights leader. But none of this mattered since, as so many are learning, “objectivity, true facts, clear reasoning, genuine intellectual diversity and the capacity for self-criticism” are now verboten — gone from centers of academic learning.

Instead they are replaced with vulgarity, incivility, obtuse thinking, censorship, and outright violence.

Bruce Bawer writes a searing appraisal of the hypocrisy of three Center faculty members — Joel Gordon, Ted Swedenburg and Mohja Kahf — who “slammed” Chesler. These three found Chesler’s alleged anti-Muslim bigotry, hate speech and lack of a diversity of views so abhorrent that she needed to be shut down. The fact that Chesler has “spent her career decrying the systematic misogyny in Islamic cultures” while highlighting the refusal of many of her former feminist allies to address this issue was just too much for these intellectual weaklings.

Thus, Phyllis Chesler joins the ranks of other worthy and courageous individuals such as Milo Yiannopoulous, Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, Heather McDonald, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Brigitte Gabriel, and David Horowitz, whose voices are being silenced in institutions of higher learning.

And so the symposium went on without the expertise of Dr. Chesler. In fact, “no one contacted [her]. No one sent a letter of regret or support and no one issued a statement of solidarity.” Consequently, “. . . yet another disgraceful episode in the ever-lengthening chronicle of campus compromise and cowardice on the topic of Islam” occurred.

It is way overdue that every one of these speakers who truly put their lives on the line to uphold the core principle of freedom of speech receives the unwavering support of all Americans.

It is way overdue that parents of students attending schools such as the University of Arkansas, University of California-Berkeley, and Claremont McKenna College to name a few, should remind administrators that such suppression of expression is a “view at odds with the foundation of this country. In fact Frederick Douglass, once said “speech suppression is the equivalent of theft.” And if a university fails to acknowledge this supremely profound idea, then it no longer deserves financial support.

It is high time that administrators publicly explain how they can justify violence on a campus that is supposed to be dedicated to the freedom of thought. Instead what we see are “administrators responding to the intellectual thuggery with sympathy and understanding.” They need to be held personally accountable for the violence and censorship.

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Sharia, Arkansas Style A low block by the Razorbacks. Bruce Bawer

By on April 27th, 2017

On April 13-15, the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas held a symposium on so-called “honor violence,” as exemplified by honor killings, forced marriage, and other such delightful acts. I’ll get back to this – but first of all, am I the only person who still finds it jarring to see words like “King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies” in the same sentence as words like “University of Arkansas”?

The Center, as its website informs us, “was founded with a $20 million endowment from the Saudi government in the mid-1990s. An initial endowment of $2 million, dedicated toward language, literary translation and publication was followed by a much larger $18 million gift designed to spark the foundation of a comprehensive Middle East Studies program at the undergraduate and graduate levels.”

Of course, this isn’t the only so-called “Middle East Studies” shebang based at a Western university, named for a Saudi royal, and funded by Saudi cash. Georgetown University famously boasts the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding – which, when you stop to think about it, is a strange name for a unit of a university, where you’d imagine that the idea would be not “understanding” in the touchy-feely sense suggested by the phrase “Muslim-Christian Understanding” but, rather, “understanding” in the sense of becoming informed about a subject. But anyway.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the regal moneybags behind Georgetown’s lavish propaganda operation (as of last year he was the 41st richest person in the world) is also responsible for the Alwaleed Centre at the University of Edinburgh, the Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard, and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Islamic Studies at Cambridge, plus centers for American Studies bearing his name in Beirut and Cairo. In addition, according to Wikipedia, he’s “Citigroup’s largest individual shareholder, the second-largest voting shareholder in 21st Century Fox, and owns Paris’ Four Seasons Hotel George V and part of the Plaza Hotel,” presumably the one in New York.

A quick look at the prince: he’s tweeted that he wouldn’t “visit Jerusalem…until its liberation from the Zionist enemy.” He’s the guy who, after fifteen of his fellow Saudis laid down their lives for their God on September 11, 2001, gave then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a $10 million check and a lecture about the terrorist attack’s supposed roots in U.S. policies. (Giuliani, to his everlasting credit, turned down the check, in response to which the prince suggested that he’d done so out of fear of “Jewish pressures.”)

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Clemson Director Wants Student Gov’t Candidates to Pass ‘Intercultural’ Test By Tom Knighton

By on April 26th, 2017

Altheia Richardson, Clemson’s director of the Gantt Multicultural Center, thought she had a heck of an idea when she recently stepped in front of the Clemson Undergraduate Student Government (CUSG) Senate: require that all future student candidates take an ideological poll test.

Yes, really.

She proposed that the body adopt an “intercultural competency” exam which students must pass prior to announcing their candidacies:

The “intercultural competency” test requirement for Student Government candidates who wish to run for office was just one of the ideas Altheia Richardson, Clemson’s Director of the Gantt Multicultural Center, proposed in a recent presentation to Clemson Undergraduate Student Government (CUSG) Senate. As an alternative, Richardson also suggested group training for CUSG members once elected.

“So when it comes to this whole idea of intercultural competence, what would it look like to have a standard for if you’re going to be elected as an officer, or hold a seat within CUSG, that you have to demonstrate that you have a certain level of intercultural competence, before you’re allowed to take that office, or that seat,” Richardson stated, according to CUSG Senate’s public livestream.

When asked by one CUSG senator to elaborate on “the standard for intercultural competency,” Richardson responded that “it could be training, workshops, things like that. It could look very different, but it was just a suggestion that I made to some of the folks that came to me.”

In a follow-up question, the senator asked whether Richardson was “implying that if there’s a threshold that people who have been elected democratically to this body, are then not allowed to serve those peers, because of a certain level they don’t reach in certain areas.”

“Well, it could happen before the democratic election process,” she answered. “If that is set by your Elections Board as a standard, then if you’re vetting the candidates who are running, then it can happen even before the democratic process takes place.”

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Riots Expected to Greet Ann Coulter at UC Berkeley Thursday By Debra Heine

By on April 26th, 2017

As the Berkeley Police Department gears up for yet another showdown between First Amendment supporters and violent “anti-fascists,” questions have arisen regarding the mayor’s ties to a local anti-fascist group. Ann Coulter vowed to move ahead with a planned speaking engagement at the university on Thursday after her speech was canceled due to security concerns.

Law enforcement sources told Fox News there is a “99 percent” chance that the college will erupt in violence over the appearance — whether she shows up or not.

Charles “Sid” Heal, a retired commander from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department who met with Berkeley police on Monday, said that authorities are preparing for the worst because extremist groups from across the spectrum are heading to Berkeley, and because the past three protests that devolved into violence were met by a “lackluster” response from local police.

“We’ve been told they’re going to come no matter whether Ann Coulter comes or not, and the next riot is not a standalone in isolation but a natural consequence of the lackluster approach of the past,” Heal said, adding that because protesters felt police didn’t protect them at the last riot many are pledging to defend themselves. “People are becoming vigilantes.”

According to Fox News, Heal and others are saying “there is deep discord between the Berkeley Police Department and the city government.” Mayor Jesse Arreguin, 32, has been accused of being in cahoots with the protesters because, as this reporter noted at PJ Media’s Hot Mic on Friday, he was a member of the Facebook group “By Any Means Necessary,” or BAMN, the violent anarchist group that has instigated riots in Berkeley and across the country. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Academics Play the Global Warming Card By Norman Rogers

By on April 26th, 2017

Philip Kitcher of Columbia and Evelyn Fox Keller of MIT are professors specializing in the philosophy and history of science. The philosophy and history of science is pretty boring, so people in that academic field try to write about controversial subjects so as to make their work less boring. The professors have written a book: The Seasons Alter, How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts.

The book is filled with scientific errors regarding climate science. Clearly the authors have a poor understanding of the main topic. They are apparently attracted to apocalyptic predictions of disaster that call for farsighted persons, such as themselves, to warn the world. Apparently that role is so enticing that the authors’ critical facilities have been put into hibernation.

Global warming has an establishment side and a dissenter side. The establishment receives vast amounts of government money because they claim that we face an imminent global warming disaster. Nobody would care about their field of science except for the predictions of disaster. Nor would they get much government money if they didn’t predict a looming disaster. Environmental groups are part of the establishment side. Looming disasters are stock in trade for environmental groups.

The global warming dissenters consist of people who say that the emperor has no clothes. The dissenters include climate scientists who are secure enough in their jobs that they can dissent, even though it makes their colleagues furious. Other dissenters are scientists from related fields, or even non-scientists who have taken an interest in the controversy. The existence of the Internet has made it possible for amateur scientists, in the sense of not receiving a paycheck from a university, to enter into the discussion. The Internet provides a path around the establishment gatekeepers that run the scientific journals. The amateur scientists have the advantage of being disinterested. They aren’t worried about where their next grant is coming from or about what their academic friends and enemies will think. Of course, some of the amateurs are crackpots, but others are excellent scientists. (Some tenured professors are crackpots too.)

The authors used the graph below, a version of what is known as the famous Hockey Stick graph. The graph purports to show that the Earth’s temperature was roughly constant until large quantities of CO2 were emitted into the atmosphere and as a consequence the temperature soared. The graph has been completely discredited as a work of science. (See here, here and here.) But as a work of propaganda it is a brilliant achievement. What’s wrong with the graph? It erases the medieval warm period that existed at the year 1000. The graph does not show the little ice age when it got very cold around the year 1600. These temperature fluctuations are well established and supported by historical records.

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