RUTHFULLY YOURS

How can we save our universities from the rot that has invaded their precincts, eroding the traditional core of Western literary, cultural, scientific, technological, and professional instruction? What would such a makeover involve?

To begin with, Title IX should be abolished a.s.a.p. Originally intended to prevent sexual and racial discrimination — a well-intentioned but ill-conceived bipartisan measure signed into law in 1972 — Title IX has been corrupted beyond recognition, trampling due process in sexual harassment cases, feeding the campus rape panic, curtailing free speech rights in an effort to avoid “offense,” diluting the curriculum via “trigger warnings” and “microaggression” claims, establishing a culture of grievance, allowing talks and lectures by conservative speakers to be cancelled or disrupted, gutting men’s sports programs, and surrendering to the most absurd and untenable student demands. This abomination was promoted under the rubric of “equality” in a world where natural and imprescriptible inequalities abound in both the physical and intellectual domains. The casualties are merit and individuality. As R. B. Parish writes, in the name of equality our universities “renounce culture and strive to reduce everyone down to a common level… There must be no excellence.”

Additionally, measures should be taken to prevent universities from raising tuition fees irresponsibly (which, among other advantages, would also go a long way toward reducing unsustainable student debt). According to HSDC’s (Homeland Security Defense Coalition) annual report for 2016, the average cost of tuition fees in the U.S. is in the vicinity of $33,000 per academic year, rising in the elite universities to $60,000 and more. This is unacceptable. As I’ve written previously, “Tuition fees will need to come down, perhaps by decoupling Pell grants from tuition hikes,” and subsequently capped at a rate tied to inflation.

Universities will then have to devise ways of living within their means, by drastically shrinking administrative bloat, reducing professorial salaries by a percentage to be determined, and downsizing or eliminating Humanities departments that are either irrelevant or marginal, that is, courses of study that cannot deliver basic competence in reading and writing, knowledge of civics and history, familiarity with the classics of the Western tradition, and economic productivity.

Stringent provisions will have to be made within the new education bill indicating which departments and programs are to be subject to contraction or termination, in particular the variety of trendy identity studies, which produce undereducated and unemployable graduates who become a burden both to themselves and to society.

Another factor in salvaging the university would involve flensing excess SocProg blubber like Commissions for Ethnicity, Race and Equity or President’s Advisory Committees, among a myriad of such irrelevancies. These institutions are preoccupied with such nonacademic issues as inclusivity and diversity, aboriginal health sciences, accommodating students’ religious, indigenous, and spiritual observances, diversifying food on campus, and supporting survivors of sexual violence on campus (an epidemic that doesn’t exist). They are parasites and misfits, empowered by arbitrary authority, not by long tradition, codified religion or settled law, and eating up scarce resources that could actually be invested in education. Every university in North America is saddled with the enormous collective weight — and judging from the typical photos, the substantial weight of many of its members — of these useless and self-serving bodies parroting the cultural bromides and shibboleths of the day. The Club Med of every token identity group imaginable, they have got to go if the university is ever to be restored to scholarly vigor and parietal sanity.

When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.

“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”

These believers are transforming the campus from a citadel of intellectual freedom into a holy space—where white privilege has replaced original sin, the transgressions of class and race and gender are confessed not to priests but to “the community,” victim groups are worshiped like gods, and the sinned-against are supplicated with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt says, but they are “very intimidating” since they wield the threat of public shame. On some campuses, “they’ve been given the heckler’s veto, and are often granted it by an administration who won’t stand up to them either.”

All this has become something of a preoccupation for the 53-year-old Mr. Haidt. A longtime liberal—he ran a gun-control group as an undergraduate at Yale—he admits he “had never encountered conservative ideas” until his mid-40s. The research into moral psychology that became his 2012 book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” exposed him to other ways of seeing the world; he now calls himself a centrist.

In 2015 he founded Heterodox Academy, which describes itself as “a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars” concerned about “the loss or lack of ‘viewpoint diversity’ ” on campuses. As Mr. Haidt puts it to me: “When a system loses all its diversity, weird things begin to happen.”

Having studied religions across cultures and classes, Mr. Haidt says it is entirely natural for humans to create “quasireligious” experiences out of seemingly secular activities. Take sports. We wear particular colors, gather as a tribe, and cheer for our team. Even atheists sometimes pray for the Steelers to beat the Patriots.

It’s all “fun and generally harmless,” maybe even healthy, Mr. Haidt says, until it tips into violence—as in British soccer hooliganism. “What we’re beginning to see now at Berkeley and at Middlebury hints that this [campus] religion has the potential to turn violent,” Mr. Haidt says. “The attack on the professor at Middlebury really frightened people,” he adds, referring to political scientist Allison Stanger, who wound up in a neck brace after protesters assaulted her as she left the venue.

The Berkeley episode Mr. Haidt mentions illustrates the Orwellian aspect of campus orthodoxy. A scheduled February appearance by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos prompted masked agitators to throw Molotov cocktails, smash windows, hurl rocks at police, and ultimately cause $100,000 worth of damage. The student newspaper ran an op-ed justifying the rioting under the headline “Violence helped ensure safety of students.” Read that twice.

Mr. Haidt can explain. Students like the op-ed author “are armed with a set of concepts and words that do not mean what you think they mean,” he says. “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or harm. But as students are using the word today, ‘violence’ is words that have a negative effect on members of the sacred victim groups. And so even silence can be violence.” It follows that if offensive speech is “violence,” then actual violence can be a form of self-defense.

Down the hall from Mr. Haidt’s office, I noticed a poster advertising a “bias response hotline” students can call “to report an experience of bias, discrimination or harassment.” I joke that NYU seems to have its own version of the morality police in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia. “It’s like East Germany,” Mr. Haidt replies—with students, at least some of them, playing the part of the Stasi. CONTINUE AT SITE

A radical Drexel University professor who once wished for “White Genocide” for Christmas and hoped to “Abolish the White Race” is under fire again. This time, he said he wants to “vomit or yell about Mosul” after someone gave their seat to a uniformed soldier.https://heatst.com/culture-wars/giving-up-a-seat-for-a-soldier-makes-pro-white-genocide-drexel-prof-want-to-vomit/?mod=sm_tw_post

Drexel professor George Ciccariello, currently a visiting researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, shocked his online followers after he complained about an act of appreciation for a soldier.

“Some guy gave up his first class seat for a uniformed soldier. People are thanking him. I’m trying not to vomit or yell about Mosul,” he tweeted.

Senior Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter slammed Ciccariello, saying: “You tried not to vomit or yell? No, you just sat there quietly like a little bitch. Ignored, irrelevant, wishing you were a man.”

“Because you’re a douchebag?” tweeted prominent conservative Ben Shapiro.

This isn’t the first time the Drexel professor has been criticized. Last December, he tweeted how “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide.” Dexel investigated the issue and ended up releasing a statement claiming the professor’s tweets fall under the category of “protected speech” and that he wouldn’t lose his job.

Ciccariello, meanwhile, brushed off the backlash, insisting it was just a joke because “White isn’t a race” and blamed white supremacists for trying to make his tweets into an issue.

The professor has made a near-habit of posting inflammatory tweets on social media. He once tweeted “Abolish the White Race” and claimed that Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof “simply put into practice what many white Americans already think.”

He has also claimed that the murder of some 4,000 white people during the Haitian Revolution was a “good thing.”

When Chester Evans Finn, Jr., a former United States Assistant Secretary of Education, observed in 1989 that university campuses had become “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” he was anticipating a troubling and prevalent trend now poisoning academia, namely, the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barraged with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service to the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.

This is the tragic and inevitable result of a decades of grievance-based victimism by self-designated groups who frame their rights and demands on identity politics and who have been successful in weaponizing this victim status to stifle debate. In the space of the past two months, for example, tendentious and morally self-righteous progressive students, and some faculty, 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.

At Middlebury College, in one of the most astonishing examples, Charles Murray, political scientist, libertarian, and author of the controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, was verbally assaulted by a crazed audience of students intent on shutting down his planned speech—a crowd that eventually physically surrounded Murray and a Middlebury professor, Allison Stanger, and shoved them with sufficient force that she was hospitalized. “Your message is hatred, we cannot tolerate it,” the intellectual thugs screamed out.

At NYU, Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice Media and the host of The Gavin McInnes Show on Compound Media, was showered with pepper spray by agitated and raucous protesters before his scheduled February 3rd speech.

Ezra Levant, conservative political activist, writer, and broadcaster, had to endure a similar experience at Canada’s Ryerson University in March when protesters set off alarms, pounded on doors, and continuously interrupted his speech while chanting, “no Islamophobia, no white supremacy.”

A California college professor who had one of the more notorious classroom meltdowns following the election of now-President Donald Trump last November has been honored with a Faculty of the Year award, an honor she has declined.

After a student surreptitiously recorded Orange Coast College human-sexuality professor Olga Perez Stable Cox calling Trump a “white supremacist” and his election “an act of terrorism,” his video went viral, sparking a nationwide debate about how much political commentary is appropriate in the classroom.

Caleb O’Neil, the student who videotaped Cox’s rant, shared the recording with the Orange Coast College Republicans club’s president, Joshua Recalde-Martinez, who posted it online. OCC announced it would suspend O’Neil in February for violating rules against recording class discussions without permission, but after the 19-year-old filed an appeal and threatened to sue, the board of trustees announced it would cancel the punishment.

The university had originally planned to suspend O’Neil until at least the fall of 2017, also putting him on disciplinary probation and requiring him to write a letter of apology to Olga Perez-Stable Cox, the professor he recorded. But after convening a special meeting, the board of trustees voted Wednesday to lift O’Neil’s punishment, also saying they would not take action against Cox.

Now the college wants to honor the professor who called Trump’s election “an act of terrorism” with a prestigious award.

Doug Bennett, executive director of the Orange Coast College Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times that Cox was notified of the award last week, “but she declined to accept and did not want to participate in related activities.”

The annual honor is typically received during a public ceremony, and the winner addresses the graduating class during commencement.

The Costa Mesa college didn’t make a formal announcement about Cox winning the award, Bennett said, but students heard rumors about her nomination and began sharing information on Facebook.

OCC’s Professional Development Committee chooses the winner of the award. The committee consists of faculty members, classified staff and past recipients of the award.

Any student or faculty member can recommend a member of the faculty for the honor. The committee then gives nominees credit for their involvement on campus and evaluates their methods of teaching.

The committee does not plan to select another recipient for this year’s award, Bennett said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Starting next fall, English majors at Harvard will be required to take a course in authors “marginalized for historical reasons.” Those “reasons” include “racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity,” the English Department’s chairman, James Simpson, told the Harvard Crimson.

Campus agitation for an identity-based curriculum is by now drearily familiar. But Harvard’s recent mandate goes further, creating a new literary typology: On one side are the marginalized authors; on the other, authors who, by implication, may have benefited from “racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity.” Academia has already furnished unlettered students with excuses aplenty to ignore the greatest works of Western civilization. Now they’ve got another one.

The Harvard English major imposes few substantive demands: a one-semester survey spanning the millennium from 700 to 1700; a semester of poetry; a course that serves as a vehicle for immigration and postcolonial themes; and one semester of Shakespeare. After that, students are on their own, free to fill out their credits with random classes in literature, theory, creative writing, or “related courses” outside the English Department.

In other words, Harvard, like virtually every other college today, eschews any responsibility for ensuring that students are systematically exposed to the landmarks of the literary canon and that they understand the evolution of literary forms. For Harvard to add a requirement in “marginalization” signals that the faculty considers it important enough to override the department’s laissez-faire philosophy.

It is unclear, though, how the prestigious status will be conferred. How will the faculty decide whether an author has been marginalized because of “patriarchy,” say, rather than because she wasn’t that good in the first place, or because literary tastes have changed? There were female novelists and pamphleteers in the 19th century who have disappeared from view. Is that sexism, or simply the judgment of time? Does Oscar Wilde qualify as marginalized? “Heteronormativity” may have made his final years miserable, but it had no effect on the boundless success of his plays.

Literary reputations rise and fall—for white men as for everyone else. England’s first poet laureate, John Dryden, was once regarded as the heir to Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. Today, at least in the U.S., he is barely read. Likely explanations are that neoclassical verse has fallen out of favor and that few modern readers have the contextual knowledge to understand his satires. Why do similar explanations not hold for “marginalized” authors?

Moreover, given the historical disparities in educational opportunity, it is wrong to assume that all groups should be proportionally represented in the literary pantheon. For centuries, only European males (with few exceptions) received the rigorous training in the Classics that provided the materials for literary creation.

The reasons to study literature include linguistic beauty and insight into the human condition. Being “marginalized” is not one of those reasons, nor should an author’s sex and race count for or against him. If a great work happens to be unknown, that is another matter, one that has nothing to do with social justice. CONTINUE AT SITE

Charles Murray was not met with riots when he showed up to speak at NYU last Friday, as he had been at Middlebury College a few weeks before. Still, his reception hardly served as a model for campus discourse. Security was beefed up, and his hosts, a student group affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, had to restrict access to the event. A small crowd showed up to protest Murray’s presence — and to hurl insults at attendees and the university itself.

In response to what occurred at Middlebury, the speech’s venue was moved to an underground room in NYU’s Torch Club, and tickets had to be reserved ahead of time, angering many who had hoped to gain admission in order to protest.

The protest was an unimpressive showing. Demonstrators numbered about 20 and brandished signs with such inane slogans as “No Eugenics on Campus — Fight Fascism.” They chanted about Murray but also directed opprobrium at NYU for permitting his visit. Pairing Murray’s alleged prejudice with that of the university, a chant of “How do you spell ‘classist’? N-Y-U!” rang out as I stood waiting to get through security, and many signs accused Murray of racism. Indeed, NYU’s Faculty of Color Caucus wrote a letter indicting Murray’s talk as “hate and fear under the guise of scholarship and free speech.”

The strongest condemnation of Murray focused on his supposed view of the poor as an underclass deserving of their situation. One student, Shirish Sarkar, told me: “Charles Murray is the latest in a long line of people that have been pushing this sort of eugenics-based poverty myth, where there’s a correlation between intelligence and poverty.” The Faculty of Color Caucus summarized Murray’s book Coming Apart, on which the talk was based, as “[blaming] poor whites for their own poverty.” Those of us who listened to what Murray had to say in his talk in fact heard him sharply reprove the out-of-touch elite that had smugly abandoned the working class and poor to their fate.

As Murray entered the Torch Club through a side door, flanked by security, his talk began with shouts of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” faintly echoing from above ground, outside of the restaurant. He referred to the hullabaloo only with an opening joke that it was all wasted on a talk that will make listeners think, “That’s it?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-ivy-leagues-admission-bias-a-trade-secret-1490740763

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s dispiriting decision last year in Fisher v. University of Texas, which upheld the use of racial preferences in college admissions, Gallup released some encouraging poll results. More than 6 out of 10 white, black and Hispanic respondents said they disagreed with the ruling. And 7 in 10 people—including 76% of whites, 61% of Hispanics and 50% of blacks—said colleges should admit applicants based “solely on merit.”

Of course, the Supreme Court’s job is to interpret the commands of the Constitution, not opinion surveys. Still, the polling results are a reminder that the courts and the college administrators who cheered the ruling are much bigger fans of racial double standards than are the general public—even those who supposedly benefit from race-based affirmative action.

But the Gallup poll also illustrates how our national discussion of racial preferences in higher education has gotten so dated. Nowhere mentioned in the survey—and only glancingly referenced in the Fisher majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy—are Asian-Americans, though they are the country’s fastest-growing racial group and have become increasingly fed up with their treatment at elite colleges.

“The old paradigm of affirmative action being about white versus black has been completely upended,” says Edward Blum of Students for Fair Admissions, a group that opposes racial preferences. “California, Arizona, Texas, Florida—these are states that are becoming majority-minority, multiracial, multiethnic. We’re competing as different racial and ethnic groups that really have less and less meaning in our multiracial and multiethnic society.”