RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/03/27/florida-man-desantis-makes-universal-school-choice-a-reality-n1681850

The anti-progressive pathogen known as universal school choice spread to Florida today, as Gov. Ron DeSantis put his signature on the state’s House Bill 1.

DeSantis said at the signing that the new law represents “the largest expansion of education choice not just in the history of this state, but in the history of these United States.” Florida is generally ranked well in education, “despite” — please notice the scare quotes — spending less per pupil than almost any other state.

The new law ensures “eligibility of the state’s Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and Family Empowerment Scholarship to any resident of Florida” eligible for K-12 public education, according to Click Orlando.

“At the end of the day,” DeSantis also said, “we fundamentally believe that the money should follow the student and it should be directed based on what the parent thinks is the most appropriate education program for their child.”

Under the law, new Education Savings Accounts will give families up to $8,000 to spend on education outside the public school system. The amount is based on need, with families of four earning under $51,000 (or 186% of the poverty line) getting dibs on voucher dollars. The second tier of funds goes to families whose incomes do not exceed 400% of the poverty line.

DeSantis was on a roll against critics of universal school choice: “There were some that said, ‘Oh, you know, parents… don’t know what they’re doing. They shouldn’t be involved.’ You hear these crazy arguments, but I can tell you if you talk to most teachers, if a parent is engaged in the student’s education, the student is going to do much better.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/26/who-owns-the-university/

The most recent shout-down debacle at Stanford’s law school, one of many such recent sordid episodes, prompts the question: “Who owns our universities?” 

The law students who are in residence for three years apparently assume they embody the university. And so, they believe they represent and speak for a score of diverse Stanford interests when they shout down federal Judge Kyle Duncan, as if he were an intruder into their own woke private domain. 

After all, Stanford, like most of the Ivy League universities, is a private institution. Are then its board of trustees, its faculty, its students, and its administration de facto overseers and owners? 

Not really. 

In the case of public institutions of higher learning, there is no controversy: The people own the university and, through their elected representatives, pay for and approve its entire budget. Again, through their selected regents and overseers, the taxpayers adjudicate the laws of these universities.  

But private universities, while different, are not really so different.  

Take again Stanford as a typical example. It receives about $1.5 billion per year in federal taxpayer grants alone to its various faculty, labs, research centers, and programs. 

Its annual budget exceeds $8 billion. If Stanford accepts such huge federal and state direct largess, do the taxpayers who provide it have some say about how and under what conditions their recipients use their money? 

Second, the university also has accumulated a $36 billion endowment. At normal annual investment returns, such an enormous fund may earn well over $2 billion a year.  That income is almost all tax-free, based on the principle that Stanford is a nonprofit, apolitical institution. 

But is it? 

One could imagine what would have happened had, say, a radical abortion proponent been shouted down at Stanford Law School. Further, conceive that conservative law students had called her scum and wished for her daughters to be raped. Envision obscene placards flashing in her face—before she was stopped speaking entirely by a conservative Stanford dean who hijacked her talk and informed the pro-abortion speaker that she more or less asked for such a mob reception. The perpetrators, we know, would have been expelled from the law school within 24 hours, and the dean fired in 12. And, alternately, had the architects of this real, vile demonstration faced an open hearing, where evidence of the event was presented, and had been found guilty of violating university policy and then had been expelled and ostracized from the law school, even after much chest-thumping and performance-art braggadocio, it is unlikely the debacle would be repeated. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/philosophy_professor_dont_go_to_college_become_an_electrician.html

I don’t think you should send your kids to any universities.  [I told] my daughter, “Don’t go to college.  Become an electrician.”  I never would have imagined 10 years ago that I would [say] that. … It’s better to stare at a wall … [or] do nothing than to learn things that are false.  — Peter Boghossian, former Philosophy Professor Portland State University, Feb. 28, 2023

It is astonishing when a liberal philosophy professor tells people, including his own daughter, not to go to university because they have become “indoctrination mills.”  Many other types of professors can make a living outside universities.  However, there is no real market for specialists in Kant’s transcendental deductions outside the university.  With slight exceptions, philosophers have little choice but to work in universities.  So, when Prof. Boghossian tells his own daughter not to go to university, he must believe that universities have become dangerously unhealthy.  Although Boghossian cites Harvard, Yale and Oberlin as “non-starters”, he says that all universities have been destroyed by “woke” nonsense and should be defunded.  University people, Boghossian says, “live in make-believe land.”

Boghossian was one of the professors who exposed the lack of academic standards in a set of “woke” journals in the 2017-2018 “Grievance Studies affair,” also referred to as the “Sokal Squared” scandal (referring to a similar case in 1996 perpetrated by NYU physics professor Alan Sokal). James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, using pseudonyms or borrowed identities, submitted absurd papers to journals in culture, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to test the integrity of their editorial peer review process. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/colleges-preparing-for-massive-resistance/

What will happen if the Supreme Court rules that racial preferences in higher education violate the law? At many schools, administrators will just keep on doing what they’ve been doing, believing that it would be nobler to fight on for the wonders of diversity (and never mind the litigation expenses) than to stop a policy that makes them feel so good.

We read here that officials at Rice University have proclaimed their dedication to racial preferences. Rice’s release declares, “We will strive to do all we can, within the bounds of the law, to continue to recruit and retain a widely diverse student body.” What that means, I submit, is that they’ll find ways to continue discriminating that they can claim aren’t illegal.

The school also claims that “diversity” is a national security imperative as well as a boon to the nation “socially, economically, and culturally.”

We have been hearing that blather for a long time. The fact of the matter is that if colleges stop using racial preferences, the only result is that some of the students from preferred groups will go to less prestigious institutions (where they will learn just as much if not more) and some of the students kept out of schools like Rice because they aren’t “diverse” will go there. The impact on the U.S. “socially, economically, and culturally” would be negligible — except for the benefit of once again focusing education on learning rather than on the follies of “identity.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-kyle-duncan-stanford-law-school-tirien-steinbach-dei-students-babc2d49?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Critical race theory is becoming institutionalized across American universities, and a major reason is the educational bureaucracy. Most universities now have offices for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, that exercise a broad writ on campus and act as speech police within the university.

That power was on ugly display last week at Stanford Law School, where a mob of law students shouted down Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan in a spectacle unfit for any institution of higher learning. (Judge Duncan relates his experience nearby.)

Heckling unpopular speakers is common on campus, but what makes this episode stand out is the role played by administrators. As the room grew unruly, Judge Duncan asked that a college official step in. The law school’s associate dean for DEI, Tirien Steinbach, took the podium. “Me and many people in this Administration do absolutely believe in free speech,” the dean said, but then went on to ask if “the juice is worth the squeeze”—that is, whether tolerating free speech is worth the pain it causes.

Ms. Steinbach characterized the judge’s speech as something “that feels abhorrent, that feels harmful, that literally denies the humanity of people.” And she lectured Judge Duncan: “Do you have something so incredible and important to say about Twitter, Guns and Covid that it is worth the division of these people?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-owns-the-university-florida-hamilton-center-board-administrator-students-dei-bureaucracy-tenure-651c812f?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

American higher education is in crisis. The rise of diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies and a growing intolerance for dissent has spurred political battles for control of campus decision-making in North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere. The fights point to a fundamental question: Who “owns” a university? Perhaps the question is better phrased: To whom does a school belong?

In the competitive private marketplace, ownership is clear. When Elon Musk buys a company like Twitter, few question his authority to fire staff or change access rules. While practices vary enormously among the thousands of American colleges and universities, seven groups often claim at least partial ownership and control:

• The board. Most schools, public or private, are overseen by a legally constituted governing board.

• The politicians. At public institutions, state government usually is the legal “owner” of the school.

• The administrators. A school’s president and senior bureaucrats are vested with executive responsibility, which resembles ownership.

• The faculty. The professors who administer academic offerings and conduct grant-inducing research often feel the school belongs to them.

• The students. They are a primary reason for the school’s existence and their families pay substantial tuition and fees.

• The alumni. Graduates constitute the donor base at most private schools and some public ones as well.

• The accrediting agencies. The federal Education Department charges these bodies with certifying an institution’s right to confer degrees.

https://thespectator.com/topic/stop-law-students-blocking-free-speech-stanford/

When a federal appellate judge speaks at a major law school, he should expect tough questions from a learned audience. He should not expect to be shouted down. When he tries to speak but is heckled, jeered and disrupted, he should expect a university administrator to step in, read the students the riot act and restore order. He shouldn’t expect that administrator to sympathize with the disruptive students and let the trouble continue, as the feckless bureaucrat at Stanford Law School did.  

Her shameful behavior is hardly unique. It’s characteristic of mid-level bureaucrats hired to push “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” at universities across the country. They show very little concern for free speech, alternative views or robust debate. That’s a very big problem since those are the very essence of higher education in a democracy. 

These metastasizing DEI bureaucracies endow political ideologues with unchecked power over students’ lives and campus activities. The episode at Stanford shows how they use it. That needs to be fixed. One path to doing that (and lowering the cost of higher education, now encumbered by top-heavy administrative structures) is to abolish the entire DEI apparatus. 

The victim at Stanford was federal appellate judge Kyle Duncan and all the students who came to hear him. True, the university later apologized, but that’s just cheap talk unless it is followed by serious actions against the disruptive students and the administrator who failed in her basic responsibility. Of that, we have heard nothing. Only the naive expect much better from Stanford (or Yale, Harvard, Columbia and dozens more). Stanford students are so committed to their illiberal views, so cloaked in moral righteousness, that they actually protested the dean even issuing an apology. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/future-lawyers-who-are-afraid-of-debate/

Something disturbing is taking place with increasing regularity at elite law schools. For the third time this year, a guest speaker has been rudely confronted by a mob of tendentious scolds intent on suppressing views with which they disagree.

Not content merely with expressing their opposing point of view, these campus brownshirts are so sure of their beliefs, so positive that their perception is the valid one, the only true one, that they are comfortable with suppressing the alternate opinions and ideology of those whose speech they seek to silence.

And they exert their unearned moral and intellectual superiority to silence ideological opponents because feckless administrators have tolerated this outrageous behavior—the use of what is known as the “heckler’s veto”— for too long now and are reaping the inevitable backlash.

The heckler’s veto is an unethical tactic used the advance one’s own beliefs by defeating an ideological opponent’s argument by silencing him, instead of having to offer a compelling argument of one’s own; someone with alternate views has his speech canceled or, if it is held, shouted down, disrupted, and jeered at.

This is precisely what took place at the Stanford Law School on March 9th when Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan was scheduled to deliver a lecture on the topic of “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” Instead of being greeted by a polite group of students eager to learn from a federal judge’s wide experience, Judge Duncan, who had been invited by Stanford’s Federalist Society (FedSoc), instead stood at the front of a full classroom with some 100 jeering, insulting activists who only purpose of attending was to silence Duncan and prevent him from speaking at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/leftist-gestapo-tries-to-suffocate-charlie-kirks-voice-in-california/

“Another far-right speaker is coming to UC Davis. How should the community respond?” read the headline on a March 14 Sacramento Bee opinion piece by the Bee’s “opinion assistant” Hannah Holzer,  and UC Davis graduate.

The speaker is a “vocal transphobe and Donald Trump fanatic,” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Kirk’s visit is “upsetting and unwelcome, especially in light of nationwide attacks on the transgender community and on broader LGBTQ+ rights.” In addition, UC Davis has an “abysmal history” of public events that have gone wrong.

In 2011, cops were “pepper spraying students” but Holzer fails to recall that those students were protesting tuition hikes by University of California bosses. Holzer quotes UC Davis English professor Joshua Clover, who has “been targeted by TPUSA, in a recent op-ed for the university’s newspaper.” The Sacramento Bee opinion assistant fails to provide the back story.

In 2019, convicted criminal Kevin Limbaugh gunned down Natalie Corona, 22, a rising star in the Davis police department. The community hailed Corona as a hero and thousands of people, including police officers from across the country, attended a memorial service for the slain officer.

A photo of Corona holding the “thin blue line” flag went viral on social media. The UC Davis campus Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission proclaimed, “this flag represents an attempt by law enforcement to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Professor Clover, who moonlights as Communist poet, was “thankful that every living cop will one day be dead, some by their own hand, some by others, too many of old age.”