RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, Reverend Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., the president of DePaul University, prevented a College Republicans poster bearing the phrase “Unborn Lives Matter” from being displayed on campus.

According to Holtschneider’s open letter to the DePaul community, the poster constituted “bigotry . . . under the cover of free speech” that “provokes the Black Lives Matter movement.” Linda Brown Blakely, vice president of public relations and communications at DePaul, tells National Review that the banner in question “was, at best deceptive, and the words, font, colors, and design clearly were intended to do a disservice to the Black Lives Matter and pro-life movements.” Both Holtschneider and Blakely cited the university document “Guiding Principles on Speech and Expression,” which draws a “distinction between being provocative and being hurtful” and states that “speech whose primary purpose is to wound is inconsistent with our Vincentian and Catholic values.”

But Jorin Burkhart, the junior at DePaul who designed the poster in question, says that he did not mean for it to be “hurtful” to anyone. “The intention was for the poster to be eye-catching,” he tells National Review. The club planned to print the design on a large banner and hang it on the second floor of the student center beside a number of other large posters advertising student clubs.

“It has to stand out somehow if it’s going to hang there,” Burkhart added. “I decided to use a fairly simple, black-and-white design, with this three-word phrase [Unborn Lives Matter.] Yes, the style resembles the Black Lives Matter slogan and the way they tend to design it, but that was in an effort to make it stand out and to get people to look at it.” John Minster, a sophomore at DePaul and vice president of the College Republicans, agrees with Burkhart. He says the posters were merely meant “to promote our meetings, our presence on campus, and our values.”

“[The administration] constantly claims to know what our intentions are without ever asking us . . . or doing any sort of digging to figure out what we were thinking along the way,” Burkhart explains. “If we do something they don’t like, they assume we had bad intentions.” He also says that no one in the administration asked him or other club members what their intentions were either before or after the decision was made to ban the posters.

Some students at DePaul want to put up a pro-life poster.

You might think that would be uncontroversial at a Catholic university.

Wrong.

This is DePaul, where Free Speech Comes to Die.

They not only banned the poster. They cited “Catholic values” for banning it. You have to give them credit for a droll sense of humor.

Here’s the poster and here’s one article about it.

Now, just for fun, see if you can guess how this poster violates Catholic Values?

Here is the open letter from DePaul’s President explaining his reasoning.

As we have declined to host a proposed speaker and asked students to redesign a banner that provokes the Black Lives Matter movement.
Some people will say that DePaul’s stance unfairly silences speech to appease a crowd. Nothing can be further from the truth.
–Letter from DePaul Pres., Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., to the university community about speech and DePaul’s values

Editor’s note: This article is crossposted from Minding the Campus, the original article can be viewed here.

There was a time, within living memory, when the term multiculturalism was hardly known. More than twenty years ago, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and in late July speaker at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, wrote a book with fellow Stanford alum David Sacks called The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (1995).

The book’s title refers to the pretense that embracing “diversity” actually promotes diversity of all types, a claim commonly heard to this day. Thiel had been a student at Stanford when, in January 1987, demonstrators defending “the Rainbow Agenda” chanted “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” This protest led to the infamous “revision” (i.e., suppression) of the Western Culture requirement at Stanford, replaced with a freshman sequence called Cultures, Ideas, and Values, mandating an emphasis on race, gender, and class.

In her foreword to Sacks and Thiel’s book, the well-known American historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese referred to Stanford as “a surreal world of social engineering and institutional arrogance” and highlighted the school’s efforts to wage a “campaign to reshape thought and behavior.” She noted that while the term “affirmative action” had been replaced by “diversity,” the latter term, far from actually promoting intellectual diversity, rested on “a series of interlocking attitudes and practices.”

Furthermore, “multiculturalism” did not involve greater emphasis on mastering foreign languages or carefully studying cultures other than those of the English-speaking world. Instead, work in literature and culture programs was (and still is) done increasingly in English and focused on contemporary writers. Nor did multiculturalism, any more than the word diversity, mean familiarizing students with a diversity of views. Rather, as Fox-Genovese summarized it, it meant requiring students “to agree with or even applaud views and values that mock the values with which they have been reared.” And all this, she observed, was being accompanied by rampant grade inflation.

It’s time to send the sniffer dogs into the rubble of America’s 2016 presidential election to see if there’s anything worth saving. We’ve learned some important things. We have learned that at the lower end of the income scale, the white vote is broken, or more accurately, brokenhearted. Many middle-class white voters are angry over a system they say has failed them.

They aren’t the only ones. America’s inner cities, its poorest neighborhoods, are increasingly on edge. One of these days, they could blow on the scale of the 1960s.

Much of this has to do with dismal job prospects, and better growth is part of the answer. But there’s a bigger problem than growth—the diminished state of American education.

Without an education upgrade that matches learning skills with modern jobs, all these people will still lose ground, and personal behavior will continue to degrade.

No better source of information exists on this than employers, especially manufacturers, who say U.S. schools, notwithstanding claims of improved “graduation” rates, are not producing sufficient numbers of workers able to perform at the level they need for the realities of the 21st century workplace. Apparently the universal skill of being able to manipulate a cellphone to take a selfie isn’t enough.

During a September visit to a charter school in a black neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side, Donald Trump said, “I will be the nation’s biggest cheerleader for school choice,” and an advocate for merit pay “so that we reward our best teachers instead of the failed tenure system that rewards bad teachers and punishes the good ones.”

He at least will say publicly that the U.S. public education system just doesn’t work anymore for too many people.

The natural A-students will be fine. This reality allows many smart people to stop thinking about the country’s most socially destructive problem. But for many others, elementary and secondary school is a drag on lifetime achievement. What the cry from the Trumpian heartland has revealed is that many rural schools also offer the same futureless education as inner-city schools.

These people aren’t irredeemably stupid. Their schools are stupid. Fix the schools and half of America’s myriad problems are solvable.

A new element is the descent of U.S. colleges and universities into PC hell. A basic mission, to prepare students for the new workplace, is being rechanneled into wheel-spinning controversies, such as “hurtful” speech or names on buildings. A Clinton win will empower this insanity.

Some of these institutions of higher learning actually brag about the remedial-education programs they offer first-year students who were waved through 12 years of inadequate public schooling. By 18, it’s too late. They will never catch up.

Take your schools pick: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. It’s no choice, because the proposed education policies of Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale) are, incredibly, a step back from the baby steps Barack Obama managed.

The National Education Association has spent $14 million so far to elect Hillary. The chances that a President Clinton would buck this industrial-age teachers union, whose raison d’être is killing teacher accountability, are zero. Her web site extols pouring more federal money down the public-schools mine shaft. CONTINUE AT SITE

The toxic Black Lives Matter narrative is continuing to infiltrate our mainstream culture. It is even finding its way into our public schools. Case in point is the plan by about 1000 teachers in the Seattle public school system, with the strong backing of the school system administration, to wear “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts this week. Some of the educators’ t-shirts include a raised fist, not exactly a symbol of racial harmony and peaceful dialogue.

The participants in this solidarity “wear-in” also want a school curriculum that indoctrinates students to counter what one Black Lives Matter activist and Seattle high school teacher, Jesse Hagopian, called “institutional racism”and the “multiple oppressions that our kids face.” Hagopian opposes standardized testing as an example of such institutional racism.

The Seattle Education Association (SEA) Representative Assembly passed a resolution unanimously supporting the Black Lives Matter initiative. The SEA is a public teachers’ special interest organization. Its resolution stated that SEA will “endorse and participate in an action wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts on Wednesday, October 19, 2016 with the intent of showing solidarity, promoting anti-racist practices in our schools, and creating dialogue in our schools and communities.”

The superintendent of schools also supports the demonstration of solidarity with Black Lives Matter on school premises.

The Seattle school system is not the bastion of “institutional racism” that Black Lives Matter and its supporters are making it out to be. Seattle is one of the most progressive cities in the nation. Its school district had passed a landmark “Ensuring Educational and Racial Equity Policy” in August of 2012, which called for the elimination of “the racial predictability and disproportionality in all aspects of education and its administration.” It also mandated the use of a Racial Equity Tool to ensure that “race be clearly called out and institutional and structural racism be addressed within our own organization.” The intent was to devise policies and curricula that close the “opportunity gap” holding students of color back.

Last night the Freedom Center’s poster campaign to expose the links between campus anti-Israel activists and Hamas terrorists targeted the terrorist-supporting network at Vassar College. Vassar is the smallest campus on the Center’s list of “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists,” but one of the most extreme in its advocacy of the genocidal claims of Students for Justice in Palestine and the BDS movement against Israel.

Vassar College supports a highly active Hamas-inspired and funded boycott movement that successfully passed a BDS resolution on campus last spring. BDS is a toxic movement that even Hillary Clinton has denounced as anti-Semitic The Vassar chapter of SJP also distributed a pamphlet celebrating Omar Barghouti the founder of the BDS movement, which is a genocidal attempt orchestrated by terrorists to strangle the Jewish state. Vassar SJP celebrates terrorism by selling T-shirts picturing convicted anti-Israel terrorist Leila Khaled holding a gun with the words “Resistance is not Terrorism.” The chapter also posted a 1940’s era anti-Semitic Nazi graphic on social media.

The Freedom Center’s poster operation campaign identifies Students for Justice in Palestine as a campus front for Hamas terrorists and the Hamas intermediary American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). AMP was revealed in recent congressional testimony to be funneling terrorist dollars to Students for Justice in Palestine to support the Hamas-sponsored, anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in America.

One of the posters features Vassar College Professor Joshua Schreier who is described on the poster as “SJP Supporter, BDS Supporter, Anti-Israel Activist.”

The posters are part of a larger Freedom Center campaign to Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus. The campaign is designed to confront the agents of campus anti-Semitism and expose the financial and organizational relationship between the terror group Hamas and Hamas support groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. As part of the campaign, the Freedom Center has placed posters on several campuses including San Diego State University, Brooklyn College, San Francisco State University, and the University of California-Los Angeles. The campaign also recently released a report on the “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists” which may be found on the campaign website, www.StoptheJewHatredonCampus.org. Vassar College is among the campuses listed in the Top Ten report. The section of the report demonstrating Vassar College’s support of anti-Israel terrorists follows below.