RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/conservative-donors-wake-up

The Supreme Court struck a symbolic blow to Harvard University this June by declaring its racial admissions preferences illegal. It remains to be seen what stratagems Harvard will use to try to continue engineering racial diversity. One thing is certain, however: the university will pay no price in reputation or in philanthropic support for the Court’s rebuke.

To understand just how confident Harvard can be in its irresistible appeal to donors, consider one of its recent windfalls. In April 2023, hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin bestowed $300 million on the university, close to the largest single donation in the institution’s history. Griffin’s cumulative giving to the school now totals over $500 million, spread between the education, law, and business schools, as well as other entities. In exchange for this latest gift, Harvard renamed its graduate division the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Business as usual, you may think; another billionaire plowing treasure into an institution whose values are, at best, in tension with American traditions and, at worst, antithetical to them. But Griffin is not your usual high-value donor—not a George Soros, Bill Gates, or David Geffen, say. He is a conservative.

Griffin believes that the United States still offers the American dream—opportunity, free markets, and individual freedom. He has called the U.S. Constitution a “sacred document.” (In 2021, he purchased an original copy for $43 million, to make that founding text widely available for “all Americans and visitors to view and appreciate.”) Griffin supports law enforcement. He opposes identity politics.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/brave_university_of_chicago_student_speaks_out_against_the_leftist_war_on_whites.html

An anti-white racial inquisition is poisoning America.  If you don’t believe it, read my new book, The War on Whites: How Hating White People Became the New National Sport.  The inquisition received support from the prestigious University of Chicago when it decided to offer a new course entitled “The Problem of Whiteness.”  This is not surprising when you realize that the left has taken complete charge of academia and can get away with overt anti-white racism.

By a margin of more than ten to one, left-leaning professors outnumber conservatives at our colleges and universities.  New professors are required to sign a diversity pledge, a ruse that guarantees leftist control on campus well into the future.  A friend of mine who is a professor at a prominent university told me that he is forced to keep his conservative views to himself or risk being ostracized by his peers.

Ironically, campus commitment to diversity excludes the all-important diversity of ideas.  “They are openly hostile to mainstream conservative values,” said Rita Panahi at SkyNewsAustralia.  If you are a conservative student in America, you’d better keep your mouth shut.

One brave student at U-Chicago refused to keep his mouth shut.  Sophomore Daniel Schmidt called out “The Problem of Whiteness” for what it is.  “This is clearly racist and anti-white,” said Schmidt.  “What the heck is that suggesting, that there is a problem with white people or whiteness and there is a solution?  It is the most egregious example of anti-white hatred I’ve ever seen.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/welcome-to-trans-kindergarten/

School districts across California are on a recruitment spree, doing what they can to enroll the state’s 4-year-olds into their year-old pre-K or “transitional kindergarten” (TK) program. Districts are trying to sell parents on TK by using school banners, bus bench ads, billboards, and texting and robocall campaigns. The $2.7 billion plan aims to have 400,000 4-year-olds enrolled by 2025, but it has been off to a sluggish start. Estimates from the Legislative Analyst’s Office put average daily attendance for the 2022-2023 school year at about 91,000, well short of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s estimates.

The idea of having the government in charge of educating 4-year-olds has been promoted for years. Most recently, in his State of the Union speech in February, Joe Biden asserted that “children who go to preschool are nearly 50% more likely to finish high school and go on to earn a two- or four-year degree.”

Right before he became governor in 2019, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom told supporters in San Francisco, “Our role begins when babies are still in the womb, and it doesn’t end until we’ve done all we can to prepare them for a quality job and successful career.”

President Obama touted the preschool idea in his 2014 State of the Union address, claiming research has shown that one of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is “high-quality early education.”

The National Education Association extols the virtues of TK on its website, claiming that children in early childhood education programs are less likely to repeat a grade, less likely to be identified as having special needs, more prepared academically for later grades, more likely to graduate from high school, and be higher earners in the workforce.

But all the rah-rah talk falls apart when the data are examined.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/where_woke_math_goes_to_die.html

The Mathematical Association of America, founded in 1915 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., is one of the most prominent math societies in the country. The MAA focuses on math education and research at the undergraduate level and higher, and its math journals are among the most highly circulated in the world. Unfortunately, the MAA has gone woke. Its publications and blogs have been flooded with writings supporting BLM, CRT, DEI, and LGBTQ+.

As an example of the latter, in an article on pages 34-35 of the December 2020- January 2021 issue of its newsletter, MAA FOCUS, the author, who describes herself as bisexual, quotes another professor discussing intersectionality who finds it objectionable that the set theory section of a basic textbook on finite mathematics contains the following example:

Let M = males, F = females, D = doctors. What is D ∩ Fc [that is, D intersect the complement of F]?

The answer, of course, is male doctors. But the professor feels “this question is problematic in that it alienates students in my class who feel strongly against the binary in gender identification.”

The MAA’s annual meeting, MathFest, takes place this week, August 2-5, in Tampa. As evidenced by a letter from the MAA, there has been a lot of handwringing about holding the meeting in Florida:

Dear MAA Community,

We know that the location of MAA MathFest this year is a source of concern in our community. Supporters of Gov. DeSantis in the state legislature have passed laws eliminating DEI efforts and restricting the free exchange of ideas in educational settings, limiting the rights of historically marginalized groups to protest, and restricting the choices of women and non-gender conforming individuals’ freedom to make deeply personal decisions regarding healthcare and even restroom use. However, Florida is not homogeneous, and the Tampa community does not reflect the perspectives expressed in these laws.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/01/why-universities-should-get-rid-of-dei-statements/                                                                                                        

Many U.S. universities, including MIT, our alma mater, now require Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) statements in applications for tenure-track professorships, and even for graduate students.  In many cases it is the first filter for applicants, so you may be the new Einstein but if your DEI statement says something like, “I treat all people equally regardless of race or gender,” you will be out of luck.  As discussed below, that isn’t what is meant by DEI, which demands fealty to equity – that is, equal outcomes – not equal opportunity free of discrimination.

Mandatory political pronouncements such as the anti-Communist oaths of the 1950s and 1960s were long ago ruled unconstitutional by U.S. courts. And given the recent Supreme Court decisions regarding affirmative action and freedom of speech, mandatory DEI statements should also be eliminated.

What is DEI, and why might there be objections, legal and ethical, to it?

Let’s start with the words themselves. Here is what Google (via Oxford Languages) says for Diversity: “the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.”  

Note what is not there: anything about a range of different ideas or viewpoints. But it is new ideas that will define future progress, not superficial differences such as skin color, ethnicity, or gender. And how does this comport with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s invocation to judge men not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character? Have we abandoned that?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-education-establishments-radical-new-ploys/

The results of a Gallup poll released earlier this month show that just 28% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in K-12 public schools. The number for Republicans is particularly damning: Just 14% of GOPers view education in a positive light.

Confidence in higher education has also taken a hit, with just 36% of those polled saying they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, down from 48% in 2018 and 57% in 2015.

Additionally, there is little hope on the horizon that things will change for the better. This month, NWEA, a student assessment organization, released a new report which reveals that students progressed more slowly in reading and math during the 2022–23 school year than in pre-pandemic years. In other words, during the past school year, most students fell further behind.

Mushrooming Spending

The money-grubbing educrats and unionistas can’t blame lack of funding as an excuse. The feds have poured $190 billion into education to make amends for the Covid-related school shutdowns. But a 10-month examination by The 74 reveals that, while some school districts have used the monies properly, some haven’t used the money yet, while others have “pumped millions of dollars into classroom additions, upgrading athletic fields and other expenditures unrelated to the pandemic.”

Some districts invested funds in silly things like “fidget cubes” and aromatherapy supplies. Worse, many districts involved themselves in shady business deals. In San Joaquin County, CA, a state district attorney launched a criminal probe into the Stockton Unified School District for spending “roughly $7 million on ultraviolet air purifiers from a company linked to a former mayor with a history of legal trouble. A state audit pointed to the board’s decision to approve the contract even though district staff gave the proposal a low rating. Less than half of the 2,200 filters purchased were installed, and the rest are stored in a warehouse.”

And the situation is about to get worse. As Linda Jacobson reports in The 74, the funds are going to run out in about a year when the drunken sailor-type spending ends. Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, explains, “Deficits will creep up quickly and really destabilize a district. In the end, the students will suffer if districts wait too long to rein in their spending.”

https://thespectator.com/topic/william-shakespeare-black-white-race/

Sarah Karim-Cooper first came to public attention at the cosmetics counter. Her book on makeup in Renaissance theater, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, was published in 2006. Its enduring popularity is not so much a testament to her scholarly insights on powdered hogs’ bones mixed with poppy oil — the old stage recipe for pale skin — or Shakespeare’s sardonic references to the kind of beauty “purchased by the weight” in The Merchant of Venice, as to Karim-Cooper’s celebrity: for more than a decade she’s been one of the leading racializers of Shakespeare’s work.

Perhaps the key moment in her rise to fame was her 2018 curation of the Globe Theatre’s first “Shakespeare and Race Festival,” now held annually. Those who are scratching their heads trying to think where, besides Othello, or perhaps Shylock, you can find “race” in Shakespeare, should hie them to the postmodern cosmetic counter. Race is not where we find it — it is where we put it. And Karim-Cooper puts it everywhere.

In 2018 the hype explained: “This festival will highlight the importance of race to the consideration of Shakespeare not only in his time, but more urgently, in our own.” The festival included a lecture by Kimberlé Crenshaw, better known on this side of the Atlantic as an inventor of “Critical Race Theory” and the concept of “intersectionality” — the notion that people who fall into more than one stigmatized category suffer more than the sum of their grievances.

You may be sure that Karim-Cooper is on top of this. She has been effacing Shakespeare professionally for some seventeen years at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where she is currently co-director of education and research. She is also professor of Shakespeare studies at King’s College, London, and has written prolifically on the bard and Jacobean theater. This month, Penguin Random House will release her newest book, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/transgender-secrecy-policies-at-public-schools

More than 10 million American children attend public school in districts that require employees to hide students’ gender transitions from their parents. The revelation of how widespread secrecy polices are comes thanks to a list compiled by the parental-rights advocacy organization Parents Defending Education. While the prevalence of these policies is alarming in itself, the philosophy underlying them is what parents should be most concerned about.

Districts are using legal theories pushed by activist groups like the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Among the most important are that children have a federally guaranteed right to privacy from their parents in school, that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishes children’s right to transition without the consent or knowledge of their parents, and that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects transgender students from the “harassment” of school districts “outing” them to non-compliant parents. The Title IX theory, the most chilling, is supported by the radically progressive notion that parents represent a danger to the welfare of transgender children until they prove otherwise by providing “affirmation.”

School districts that buy into these theories are not merely embracing the idea that hiding children’s gender transitions from their parents is legal, but that divulging the information without the child’s consent is illegal and possibly perilous to the student’s safety. In Dover, Pennsylvania, for example, a mother of a middle school student castigated a local school board after discovering that school staff had been addressing her 12-year-old daughter with male pronouns for a year. School officials even sent the child to a hospital for an evaluation without informing the parents. When the mother confronted the school board, she was told that there was a law against informing her. School boards in Chico, California, New Castle, Maine, and beyond have said the same.

No such law exists, however—and the legal theories pushed by activist groups to legitimize secrecy policies are baseless.

The law that districts most commonly cite is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). That’s likely due to boilerplate policy language promulgated by GLSEN that claims FERPA establishes a child’s right to privacy from their parents. This interpretation of the law is also pushed by public education groups like the Pennsylvania School Counselors Association, which told a local media outlet that “Transgender and nonbinary students have a FERPA-protected right to privacy.”

Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, Vice-President of the Virginia Association of Scholars, and a former law professor at Scalia Law School, George Mason University. 

Last month, two conservative groups made court filings to oppose Florida’s anti-woke law: The Academic Freedom Alliance (“AFA”) joined the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (“FIRE”) challenging the statute’s constitutionality.

The Florida law bans promotion of divisive concepts, based on race or sex, in the educational setting. Its language is similar to President Trump’s Executive Order 13950 which applied to the federal workforce but was withdrawn when Biden took office.

Challengers claim that the Florida law chills the free speech rights of professors and therefore violates both the First Amendment and what is called “academic freedom,” a term that is variously defined but here refers to the right of professors to teach as they see fit.

The law is actually a laudable and constitutionally sound measure to rein in the political radicalism and race-baiting that are so rampant in American schools and especially in universities. Most have heard of anti-American teaching materials such as the New York Times 1619 Project, which says that America is inherently racist, or the concepts of “white privilege,” which teach that Americans of European descent (“whites”) are “oppressors,” and even “race shaming” where teachers separate students by race, calling some groups “permanent oppressors” and others “permanently oppressed,” recently exposed and denounced by Moms in Duvall County, Florida.

The legal arguments against Florida’s law are misguided and lack merit. In fact, those committed to Martin Luther King Jr.’s principle – that we be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character – should be thanking Florida officials for this legislation, not suing them.

One irony here is that the law actually forbids attempts at thought control, notwithstanding press reports to the contrary. Obviously, fighting thought control is a good thing. The law therefore secures greater freedom of inquiry and expression, not less.

For example, the law’s first provision reads in relevant part:

Subjecting any individual …. to required activity that … compels such individual to believe any of the following [racist] concepts constitutes discrimination based on race ….

The law therefore forbids compelling individuals to believe or parrot something. What’s objectionable here?

The law then gives examples of bigoted, divisive concepts that cannot be imposed. The list includes: 1) that one race is superior to another; 2) that individuals of one race, by virtue of that race, suffer from “unconscious bias;” 3) that one’s moral character is determined by race; and 4) that individuals can be held responsible, or punished, for actions committed in the past by other members of their race.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/07/english-a-discipline-in-search-of-a-purpose/

Only in the world of English teaching could you leave an industry conference feeling more confused about the purpose of your discipline than when you arrived. This conference was held in February by VATE (the Victorian Association of Teaching English) bringing secondary English teachers and department leaders from across Victoria to Deakin University. The dark cloud hanging over the industry, in the form of a national teacher shortage, did not dissuade the typical good-natured banter and cheerful complaining between the mutually fatigued.

Teachers became students as the day was divided into several sessions broken by recess and lunch. Those from the independent schools made comparisons between who had done a better job of gaming their median study score the previous year through tactical enrolments and expulsions, while those from state schools looked over in envy before turning to each other with tall tales of wrangling delinquents and plucking gems from the great unwashed masses. Scattered throughout the room were a few fearful whispers of ChatGPT. As a teacher two years into his career, I was here to learn how to better teach English—but what is teaching English?