RUTHFULLY YOURS

Something alarming is happening on campuses, fueled by tendentious and morally self-righteous progressive students, and some faculty, who have displayed a shocking disregard for the university’s cardinal virtue of free expression, deciding themselves who may say what about whom on their respective campuses—and purging from campuses those ideas they have deemed too hateful, too unsafe, too incendiary to tolerate or to allow to be heard.

Until now, these champions of the aggrieved have been less than transparent in both their motives and intentions, disingenuously asserting that their efforts to suppress the speech of those with opposing conservative views is done to protect perceived victim groups. Ideas which are contrary to these social justice warriors’ acceptable worldview are dismissed as contemptible—not even worthy of being debated—or are neutralized and debased by designations which characterize it as ‘hate speech’ because it is, depending on the victim groups attacked, racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, or homophobic. So sure of their righteousness and ideology are they that they do not even try to hide their preconceived notions and evident bias against ideas they have decided are beyond the pale or unworthy of being given voice.

Feelings, not ideas, are what count; emotionality now trumps rationality.

The defective rationale for the thuggish substitution of the suppression of other people’s speech for what is supposed to be two-sided academic dialogue was just revealed at Wellesley College, where both students and, unusually, faculty publicly articulated the shocking notion that only certain speech is to be permitted—namely, those ideas which promote and support progressive liberal views—and that opposing views, and the conservative speakers who utter them, are not even deemed worthy of being able to share their ideas on the Wellesley campus.

In an astoundingly facile editorial in the April 12th issue of the Wellesley News, the paper’s editors responded to recent debates over free speech on that campus, precipitated, somewhat ironically, by a series of lectures as part of Wellesley’s Censorship Awareness Week, during which one controversial speaker, Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, critiqued the notion that American campuses are awash with sexual assault. In her book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, in fact, Kripnis asserted the view that, “We seem to be breeding a generation of students, mostly female students, deploying Title IX to remedy sexual ambivalences or awkward sexual experiences, and to adjudicate relationship disputes post-breakup — and campus administrators are allowing it.”

That opinion was apparently intolerable to Wellesley’s students, and some faculty, who refused to acknowledge Kripnis’s notions, theories that contradict their preconceived worldview that men are predatory and women have to be protected from them, something she describes as “neo-sentimentality about female vulnerability.”

Virulently anti-Trump professors — by which I mean “most professors” — feel pretty invincible. After all, when a video recently surfaced of a professor comparing the election of Trump to a terrorist attack, the student filming it got punished.

So imagine Fresno State professor Lars Maischak’s surprise last week when his tweet demanding President Trump be hung was reported to law enforcement by Fresno State’s president:

Though Maischak did not respond to Campus Reform’s initial inquiry on the matter, he did try to clarify his comments on Twitter, saying that while he “did not intend to harm Mr. Trump” nor “wish for anyone else to harm Mr. Trump by way of an assassination,” he does think “given the nature of [Trump’s] regime, that he will be held accountable for his crimes in a court, and that historical precedent suggests that a death sentence is inevitable, if democracy prevails.”

Now, however, Campus Reform has been informed that university President Joseph Castro promptly alerted multiple federal agencies to the tweets after becoming aware of them, and has been in “regular contact with federal authorities” over the past several days.

“President Castro said that the university alerted the FBI, Secret Service, and Homeland Security as soon as it became aware of the comments made by Dr. Maischak on Twitter,” Director of Communications Kathleen Schock told Campus Reform. “He went on to say that the university been in regular contact with federal authorities. There are no other details we can disclose about those communications.”

The tweet in question from Maischak’s now apparently deleted Twitter account read:

To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance #DeathToFascism

I spend a lot of my time reporting some crappy news about school administrators. President Castro’s decision to adhere to the law is a welcome change and should be applauded.

It can be argued that Maischak didn’t spell out his desire to assassinate the president — that’s for the investigators to decide. However, his claims that he doesn’t want someone else to assassinate Trump rings hollow considering what he also expressed last week: CONTINUE AT SITE

The University of California-Davis’s student senate voted to allow the removal of the American flag from its meetings.

Saying “patriotism is different for every individual,” the senate voted to make displaying the flag optional.

Any idiot can see where this is headed.

Fox Insider:

Pete Hegseth pointed out that the senate appeared to say that there would be instances where the flag’s presence was inappropriate.

“We’ve got patriotism triggering people now,” Campus Reform reporter Cabot Phillips remarked.

In a statement, Student Senator Jose Antonio Meneses further clarified that the flag was not banned from meetings, but only had its mandated presence lifted.

Phillips said the vote was not an isolated incident, recalling a situation in New Mexico where a student was forced to remove a flag from his dormitory window.

Does anyone doubt that some snowflake will call for the flag’s removal? The student senate thought they were being clever in hiding their intent behind sophistry, but if there isn’t at least one member of that body who will complain about displaying the flag, I’ll be shocked.

The problem isn’t so much that one or two people will object to displaying the flag. It’s that there will be intimidation to force others to go along with it. That’s the true fascism on the loose on college campuses – the forced acceptance of a minority viewpoint through intimidation and threatened ostracizing of anyone who disagrees.

Anyone who feels uncomfortable about a national symbol that has stood as a beacon of liberty and freedom for the truly oppressed people of the world is probably too sensitive to survive outside a university setting. Most of them will be unable to live on their own and will end up living with their parents or marrying someone who will be forced to care for them.

Black men don’t do Latin. Or do they?

It may not be surprising to learn that a charter school named Boys’ Latin still offers courses in this dead language. But it is surprising to learn that this is an all-black school in an iffy part of West Philadelphia, and Latin isn’t merely an option here. It’s a requirement.

Turns out, too, that the young men of Boys’ Latin have become pretty good at distinguishing their ad hominem from their ad honorem. This month the school received the results on the introductory level National Latin Exam, a test taken last year by students around the world. Among the highlights: Two Boys’ Latin students had perfect scores; 60% of its seventh-graders were recognized for achievement, 20% for outstanding achievement; and the number of Boys’ Latin students who tested above the national average doubled from the year before.

“I invite anyone who doubts what this does for our students to come to a graduation and watch 100 black boys sharply dressed in caps and gowns and proudly reciting their school pledge in Latin,” says the school’s chief executive officer, David Hardy. “Not only is this an unexpected sight, it defies the low expectations society puts on young black men.”

The traditional arguments for studying Latin are well known. More than half of English words have Latin roots, so students who learn Latin improve their vocabularies and linguistic skills. In addition, the discipline of studying Latin—the logic, the structure, the rigor—helps train young minds to think more clearly and systematically.

All these arguments Mr. Hardy accepts and occasionally invokes himself. But for him Latin is also a way of addressing the most wretched fact of today’s Philly school system: Only 8% of young black men who graduate from one of the city’s public high schools will go on to a four-year college degree, according to a December 2015 longitudinal study called “From Diplomas to Degrees” by Drexel University’s Paul Harrington and Neeta Fogg.

Now, any columnist who notes the racial disparities in education, especially when coupled with a call for the parents of poor minority children to have more options when it comes to schools, invariably receives mail that begins like this: “I have been an educator in the public schools for more than 20 years, and you are badly underestimating the reason [bad families, poverty, IQ, whatever] these kids aren’t learning.”

Translation: Black children, or at least inner-city black children, are ineducable. Needless to say, Mr. Hardy and his merry band at Boys’ Latin hold a contrary view. In February they helped launch a campaign called #blackdegreesmatter to highlight why college, and the higher lifetime earnings it generally brings, is so vital for young black men. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266432/least-diverse-place-america-prager-university

What is the least diverse place in America? It’s the institution that most actively seeks racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural diversity: the college campus! Colleges want students to look different, but think the same. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, explains.

Three weeks after a coalition of professors publicly defended their right to censor Title IX naysayer and feminist intellectual Laura Kipnis, a Wellesley News editorial has caught viral flak from civil libertarians, conservatives, copy editors, and other sensible sorts for its clumsy defense of censorship in the name of sensitivity. All before the student paper’s server, and with it the editorial in question, went down Friday morning, that is.

“Many members of our community, including students, alumnae and faculty, have criticized the Wellesley community for becoming an environment where free speech is not allowed or is a violated right,” the editorial accurately observes. “Many outside sources have painted us as a bunch of hot house flowers who cannot exist in the real world.” True.

In their defense of the modern academy’s responsibility to assimilate the unenlightened, the students distinguish “free speech” from “hate speech.” But their failed experiments in sentence structure, as well as logical leaps none among the uninitiated could easily follow, backfire: “Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech.” The pronoun “it” floats free, unbound by any antecedent, after the semicolon. The editorialists may have meant the second half of the sentence as a coded message to the world outside their coddling cell: Shutting down rhetoric is hate speech, of course it is! Send help!

But, in a likelier reality, they’ve offered an object lesson in undergraduate groupthink. On your typical elite campus, divergence from the status quo merits hostile rebuke rather than debate: “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” And no one seems to remember her—or, I’m sorry, their—elementary writing mechanics or American history.

“The founding fathers put free speech in the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of the government,” they write. “The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.” The unthinking reflex to stay safe from dissent and foster intellectual sameness at the expense of rigorous debate has no particular precedent in actual history—or really anywhere off campus, or in any prior generation.

“Vindictive protectiveness” may be the fault of turn-of-the-millennium helicopter parents, Facebook’s fostering of oversensitivity, widespread political polarization, or an emphasis on emotional reasoning in soft sciences.

Jonathan Brown, director of Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), brooks no disagreement. Having expelled this writer from a February 7 apologist lecture on Islamic slavery that provoked nationwide outrage, Brown ejected me from another Georgetown event on March 16.

I achieved infamy as a “Jihad Watch correspondent who had written sensationalist pieces about Georgetown events” according to Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of the über-establishmentarian Foreign Policy in her March 16 online article, “Islamophobia Inc.” Jihad Watch publisher Robert Spencer comprehensively rebutted this “lurid fantasy.” (For the record, I also report regularly for Campus Watch.)

Brown was visibly surprised when I entered Georgetown’s Alumni House for the opening dinner of the Peace Requires Encounter Summit. The summit ostensibly sought to “build relationships” — apparently only with those approved by Islamic supremacists — co-sponsors included the Muslim Brotherhood-derived Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Franciscan Action Network (FAN), and Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), a producer of pro-Islam films.

UPF’s Daniel Tutt, of Marymount University, invited me via email to the Friday-Sunday summit after I registered for the screening of UPF’s latest production, The Sultan and the Saint. Upon spotting me at Friday evening’s kick-off, an agitated Brown demanded that I leave the invitation-only event before summoning Tutt, who obsequiously acknowledged his mistake in having invited a “noted Islamophobe” who had “slandered” Brown. Tutt apologized to me before I left, but at Saturday’s screening he asked if I would disrupt the showing, a paranoid inquiry I denied.

Tutt’s previous writings demonstrate why he holds such a sinister perception of Islamic supremacism’s critics or as he puts it, a “growing right-wing populist reactionary neo-Fascist network.” He maintains that the current “intensification of Islamophobia must be understood and diagnosed primarily, but not exclusively, as the outcome of capitalist exploitation.” This false view excuses Islamic supremacist behavior and blames “the system.”

Alas, the feature film presented an equally whitewashed view of Islamic history with an examination of the 1219 meeting between St. Francis of Assisi and the Egyptian sultan al-Malik al-Kamil in Egypt during the Fifth Crusade. The film — as narrated by actor Jeremy Irons — falsely contrasts St. Francis “preaching about the Lord of love” while the “medieval Church still holds to the vision of a ferocious, vengeful God who summons believers to war.” Various scenes show al-Kamil as a boy reciting Quran 2:256, a verse often misunderstood by non-Muslims as documenting Islamic tolerance, and Muslims praying the Fatiha (Quran 1:1-7) with the key omission of its last verse. According to numerous authoritative Islamic interpretations, its terms condemn Jews and Christians. Irons avoids any such disquieting analysis as he concludes the film, stating that “angry, dehumanizing words sparked violence today as before. Transcending differences, the road to peace runs through the common humanity that we all share.”