RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/drag-university-at-princeton/

There is a new program, a new subject for study and teaching, at Princeton University, that should gladden the hearts of diversity, equity, and inclusivity devotees everywhere. It stretches the boundaries and pushes the envelope. Who could object? Well, you could, and I could.

Princeton, according to the latest list compiled by U.S. News and World Report, is ranked #1 among American universities. Think of that. #1.

And Princeton, no doubt hoping to solidify its status as #1, has just announced a new program that will train students in the Art of the Drag. Robert Spencer wrote about this here, and there is more here: “New ‘Drag University’ program at Princeton to fund students’ budding drag careers,” by Logan Dubil, The College Fix, September 28, 2023:

A new “Drag University” program launched at Princeton University will train students in the “artform.”

The program is offered through the school’s Gender + Sexuality Resource Center and is open to all undergraduate and graduate students interested in the world of drag, according to the center’s Instagram page.

Throughout the 2023-24 school year, enrolled participants will cover an array of topics, including the history of drag, “Sewing 101,” choreography, face painting, photoshoots and other topics, according to the program’s registration form.

The form was updated this week to note: “At this time we have reached our capacity for our scholarships, but you are more than welcome to attend our workshops.”

Prior to its update, the form stated the first six enrollees who attend the Sept. 19 orientation and commit to the program will receive scholarships to fully cover the cost of supplies, according to a copy screenshot by The College Fix.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-glimmer-of-hope-for-free-speech-in-higher-education-colleges-universities-civil-discourse-7330474?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The president of Bucknell University, John Bravman, stood behind a placard bearing the words “Freedom of Expression” last month and kicked off a yearlong forum on the subject. Mr. Bravman introduced columnist George Will, who inveighed against censorship for 45 minutes, skewering both political parties in the process.

It was a dream come true, considering the cancel culture flourishing on many college campuses. In 2021 we wrote a letter in these pages with the headline “Alumni Are Fed Up and Ready to Fight Back.” We saw what was happening at our alma mater and colleges nationwide and decided to do something about it.

We began Open Discourse Coalition, an alumni and student-supported organization. The coalition is an independent, nonprofit organization with an office blocks from Bucknell University. Its goal is to advance the school’s mission to offer students diversity of thought with an unwavering commitment to free speech.

Prominent speakers, confident they will be heard, have been drawn to Bucknell to discuss and debate national issues, with students from the right and left turning out in large numbers. Experts on some of society’s thorniest topics have civilly discussed, disagreed and answered challenging questions from students.

It “was not nearly as polarized as what I expected,” one student wrote in response to a program. Another: “I was pleasantly surprised at how civil the conversation [was] and highly appreciated the respect both views gave each other.” One professor told us it was the first time he heard two differing perspectives on gun control at the same program in more than 20 years on campus.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/but-johnny-cant-spell-g-a-y

It has been almost 90 days since Gay Pride month. According to the Los Angeles Unified School District, that is too long a hiatus from the imperative of immersing young children in the arcana of gay and trans identity. So throughout the week of October 9, many elementary school classrooms in Los Angeles will celebrate “National Coming Out Day,” which falls on October 11.  

October is itself LGBTQ+ History Month, the Los Angeles Unified School District bureaucracy has reminded what it calls the district’s “fabulous educators.” Other LGBTQ+ programming will take place throughout October, picking up where Gay Pride month left off.  The goals for the so-called Week of Action are ambitious: to turn six-year-olds into budding gender and critical race theorists.

An LAUSD teacher forwarded me the district’s “toolkit” for teachers laying out that agenda. Use of the toolkit, decorated with a Black Power Fist superimposed on neon rainbow stripes, is nominally optional, but elementary school teachers who forego LGBTQ programming during the Week of Action will surely risk stigmatization. (The district did not respond to queries regarding expected classroom participation rates.)

At the Week of Action’s start, teachers should engage kindergarten and first-grade students in discussions about identity, aided by an activity called an “Identity Map.” Pupils chart their experiences of discrimination or privilege along 12 axes, including race, gender identity, sexuality, mental health, and body size. This mapping allows seven-year-olds to see themselves through the “lens of intersectionality.” Teachers then post the identity maps on the wall for a class discussion about students’ multiple “identities.”

Each elementary school day during the Week of Action can be devoted to a different LGBTQ+ celebrity, whose identity will be announced in morning assemblies, suggests the toolkit.

Monday is Jazz Jennings Day. Jennings’s fame rests on being one of the youngest children to date to claim a trans identity. “Assigned male at birth,” as Jazz’s publicity materials inevitably put it, Jazz allegedly asserted female identity at age two, and was diagnosed with gender dysphoria at age four. Subsequent surgery tried to cut Jazz’s body into a simulacrum of a female one and resulted in undisclosed “complications.” On Jazz Jennings day, the LAUSD recommends that kindergartners engage in the fabulous activities of “Which Outfit” and “Which Hairdo.” (One day is not enough to acknowledge the fabulousness that is Jazz. January in the LAUSD is devoted to holding Jazz and Friends Reading Events, supplemented by reading inclusive books in every grade.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-student-wants-to-join-west-point-but-hes-the-wrong-race/

B is a high school student with a 4.2 GPA. One of his grandfathers fought in the Army on D-Day. Three of his family members are currently serving in the military. He would like to attend West Point Academy and continue a proud family tradition of military service, but there’s one problem.

He’s white.

The United States Military Academy is highly selective, but not in the way that it should be.

In 2019, Vice President Mike Pence addressed the graduates, hailing them as “the most diverse class in the history of the United States Military Academy” with the “highest number of Hispanic women graduates”. He told them that, “I couldn’t be more proud to stand before the graduating class of 2019 that includes the highest number of African American women cadets in the history of the United States Military Academy!” That’s been the emphasis at West Point for too long.

Earlier this year, West Point put out a press release boasting of its 38% minority enrollment as part of what a new lawsuit alleges is a practice of achieving its “desired percentages … of blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities” through systemic discrimination in admissions.

As the lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions on the behalf of B, the anonymous student, lays out, “West Point sets benchmarks for the percentage of each class that should be filled by ‘African Americans,’ ‘Hispanics,’ and ‘Asians,’ and it meticulously tracks its compliance with those figures down to a tenth of a percentage point.” The problem is too many white people.

During the Biden administration’s defense of racial discrimination in Harvard’s admissions policies, the federal brief complained that, “white service members are 53% of the active force, but 73% of officers.” West Point’s goal is to match the percentage of officers to the number of enlisted men and so there needs to be only 53% white officers. The white officers must go.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-year-in-teacher-union-double-dealing/

This has been an egregious year for the country’s teachers unions. Okay, you may be thinking, so what else is new? But 2023 has exposed them as hypocrites par excellence.

The National Education Association convention in July provides myriad examples. While one might think a gathering of teachers would be concerned with the lack of literacy in public school students, he would be dead wrong. This year’s NEA convention in Florida was strictly political, and sex- and gender-obsessed ideas were front and center.

This year’s New Business Items (messages of concern from the hoi-polloi to the NEA aristocracy) were indicative. For instance, NBI 4 asserts, “The NEA will inform states and locals of the following sample language that may be put in contracts and policies that is LGBTQIA+ inclusive. The language will be as follows: ‘Parental leave’ instead of ‘maternity leave,’ ‘parent’ instead of ‘mother’ or ‘father,’ ‘birthing parent’ instead of ‘mother’ or ‘father,’ and ‘non-birthing parent’ instead of ‘mother’ or ‘father.’”

NBI 88 wants the NEA to declare a national educator day of action whose purpose is to rally – among other things – to “protect LGBTQIA+ students and educators including the right to gender-affirming care…and stop book bans.”

And speaking of “banned” books, the NEA’s “Great Summer Reads for Educators” included kiddie porn like Gender Queer, which graphically depicts young people indulging in various kinds of sex. (Interestingly, this “banned book” is available on Amazon and in local public libraries. The union’s snit is over the fact that parents do not want the book in school libraries – just as Playboy and Penthouse do not grace their shelves).

The NEA also released a toolkit that offers teachers suggestions on how to circumvent rules that require them to call a student by their given name rather than a chosen “transgender” name.

Also, according to the most recent LM-2 form submitted by the NEA to the IRS, the union raked in $377 million in dues and agency fees during 2021. However, a mere $32 million was earmarked for representational activity, allegedly the NEA’s top priority, while it spent $66 million on political activities.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kipp-study-college-graduation-enrollment-mathematica-charter-schools-5f22e610?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

From pandemic learning loss to racial achievement gaps, many U.S. education ailments can be addressed by schools outside the traditional, union-dominated system. More evidence comes from a new report showing that the largest charter school network in the country helps students get into college, and then to get a degree.

Students who attended schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) for both middle and high school were 18.9 percentage points more likely to graduate from a four-year college five years after finishing high school than students who didn’t attend KIPP, according to a Mathematica study published last week.

“An effect of this size, extrapolated nationwide, would be large enough to nearly close the degree-completion gap for Hispanic students or entirely close the degree-completion gap for Black students in the United States,” the authors write.

The study compared students who enrolled in more than a dozen KIPP schools in 2008, 2009 and 2011 with similar students who had applied for the charter schools but weren’t selected in KIPP’s lottery admission system.

KIPP students were also more likely to enroll in college—and stick with it—than non-KIPP peers. Seventy-seven percent of KIPP students enrolled in a four-year college compared to 46% of non-KIPP students. Forty-one percent of KIPP students stayed in college through the first six semesters compared to 22% of non-KIPP students.

“These findings may be driven by the college preparatory culture at network high schools,” the report notes. “KIPP provides access to rigorous, college preparatory coursework (including Advanced Placement courses), as well as counseling and other college and career-related supports.”

KIPP students also tend to do better on standardized tests. The nearly 30-year-old network enrolls roughly 120,000 students across 280 schools, and most are low-income and black or Hispanic. The best way to help disadvantaged kids is by giving them the choice of schools that provide a quality education and practical guidance for college and career.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/californias-war-on-parents

A promising revolt has begun in California. Seven school districts there have recently passed parental-notification policies. And not a moment too soon. As many parents are discovering, the local school board is the one place where they can effect positive change in their children’s public schools—if, that is, the state doesn’t find a way to stop them.

Notification policies require that school officials inform parents in a timely fashion about certain occurrences in their children’s lives. These typically include a child bullying someone or being bullied, giving evidence of suicidal ideation, or identifying with a nonbiological gender. It is this last point upon which a storm of reaction has ensued by state officials. In July, during policy deliberations by the Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD), the first of the seven districts to pass such measures, Tony Thurmond, California’s superintendent of schools, made a personal appearance to warn the board against its passage. Fortunately, and under the leadership of board president Sonja Shaw, the board passed the policy by a vote of four to one. A month later, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed an action against CVUSD in Superior Court for declaratory and injunctive relief. Additional lawsuits are all but certain. In the meantime, vitriol and death threats have been leveled against an embattled school board member for exercising what was once regarded as common sense.

What’s behind California’s hostility to parents being apprised of their children’s gender identity? It stems from two central presumptions.

The first is that nonbinary gender identification is an essential good that must be encouraged. As stated on California’s Department of Education’s Health website, “gender and sexuality are a continuum, they are often fluid, and they do not fit neatly into categories.” This belief is official state orthodoxy with roots that go back more than 20 years—much further than most people realize.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/20/west-point-sued-over-race-based-admissions-process/

On Tuesday, an anti-affirmative action group filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Military Academy at West Point over its race-based admissions process in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning such practices.

As reported by Axios, the lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by Students for Fair Admissions (SFA), the same advocacy group that ultimately ended affirmative action through two cases it had filed before the Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. In both cases, SFA successfully argued that affirmative action unfairly benefits black and Hispanic students, while disproportionately discriminating against White and Asian students.

Although the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action – the practice of admitting students based on their race rather than their qualifications – was an unconstitutional practice, the court did allow an exception for military academies such as West Point. The lawsuit by SFA declares that military academies should also have to adhere to the same standard as public and private universities.

“West Point sets benchmarks for the percentage of each class that should be filled by ‘African Americans,’ ‘Hispanics,’ and ‘Asians,’ and it meticulously tracks its compliance with those figures,” the lawsuit states. “These racial benchmarks vary by year, based on the ever-shifting demographics of the enlisted ranks.”

In the Supreme Court’s decision in June, the 6-justice majority specifically noted the “potentially distinct interests” that military academies might have in maintaining a level of racial diversity, and thus allowed such schools to be exempt from the ruling. In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared to denounce this exemption, saying that “the Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom.”

In either case, the outcome of SFA’s new lawsuit could also apply to other prestigious military academies in the United States, including the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/1539869/

Just weeks before the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admission policies in late June, an influential professional body known as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) was busy reassuring its members that medical schools across the country would remain committed to diversity, regardless of the case’s outcome.

The organization’s president, Thomas Nasca, released a note to the “Medical Education Community,” explaining that existing ACGME requirements ensuring medical schools “engage in ongoing, mission-driven, systematic recruitment and retention of a diverse and inclusive workforce,” still stood. Nasca explained that “nothing in the ACGME’s standards is intended to require programs or institutions to violate the law.”

“While political and legal decisions may create uncertainty regarding the ‘how’ we accomplish our responsibility, there is no doubt about the ‘why,’” he signed off the June 13 public letter.

Exactly how ACGME can maintain its efforts to promote diversity without running afoul of the Supreme Court’s decision is unclear. Diversity efforts are now baked into all aspects of medical-school evaluation, according to a family-medicine professor at a prominent medical school who asked not to be identified for fear of professional reprisal.

“The new definition of what it means to be a family physician includes that they advocate for social justice.” Specifically, ACGME could ask prospective medical schools what “your program is doing to advance social justice.”

Do No Harm, a group of medical professionals seeking to remove “radical, divisive, and discriminatory” ideologies from health care, issued a report in August 2022 calling attention to the ways in which medical schools are trying to get around federal anti-discrimination law. One commonly used tactic involves application essays aimed at teasing out ideological commitments and possibly even the race of the applicant.

Duke University’s School of Medicine, ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, underscores to applicants the institution’s “commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion.” Application essays feature questions such as: “Describe your understanding of race and its relationship to inequities in health and health care.”