RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/10/mandatory-dei-statements-at-universities-theyre-distasteful-but-are-they-legal/

“So, we say to all university presidents, starting with our own, MIT President Sally Kornbluth: Tear down this wall of hypocrisy and immorality. Disavow the use of mandatory DEI statements in any aspect of hiring, promotion, or admissions.”

Many U.S. universities now require Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements in applications for tenure-track professorships and even for graduate students. Often, rather than demonstrated excellence or promise, it is the first filter for applicants. You may be a latter-day Einstein, but if your DEI statement says something like, “I abhor discrimination and treat all people equally, regardless of race or gender,” you will be out of luck because you’re out of step with contemporary DEI virtue signaling.

What is DEI, and what are its shortcomings as a filter? Let us 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 that the New Age definition omits any mention of a range of different ideas or viewpoints. But it is precisely new ideas that will spur progress in the arts, science, and technology, not a mix of superficial differences such as skin color and gender.

But worse than this (pseudo) Diversity is Equity. Many people mistakenly conflate equity with equality, but there is a world of difference. For example, here are the definitions used by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Mechanical Engineering Department:

The goal of equity is to ensure fair treatment. It differs from the principle of equality in that equality affords everyone the same treatment, while the principle of equity acknowledges existing inequalities and adjusts and tailors resources to afford everyone equal opportunity. … Finally, we measure equity based on outcome rather than intent. If a policy, program, activity, building or other physical structure contributes to inequities, then it is unjust and must be modified to ensure all members of the community can thrive. (Emphasis added.)

In other words, if members of a certain group perform poorly on tests, it is the fault of the test (and those who constructed it), so it must be modified by eliminating it, lowering the bar for a passing grade, or inflating the grades of the underperformers.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/we-should-not-live-by-lies-heather-mac-donald-warns-america-to-wake-up/

The constant mantra that racism defines America and is deeply embedded in all of the nation’s institutions is leading to policies and practices that are slowly destroying the country from within, writes Heather Mac Donald in her new book “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.”

Mac Donald recently joined College Fix editor Jennifer Kabbany to discuss how America is committing civilizational suicide and what can be done to reverse the trend.

One big step that must take place across American society: “We should not live by lies,” Mac Donald said.

Watch the full interview here:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dei-brings-kafka-to-my-law-school-ohio-tenure-collegiality-viewpoint-discipline-102d62b8?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested, prosecuted and killed by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. I’m Josef K.

Around 1 p.m. on Friday, April 14, Ohio Northern University campus security officers entered my classroom with my students present and escorted me to the dean’s office. Armed town police followed me down the hall. My students appeared shocked and frightened. I know I was. I was immediately barred from teaching, banished from campus, and told that if I didn’t sign a separation agreement and release of claims by April 21, ONU would commence dismissal proceedings against me. The grounds: “Collegiality.” The specifics: None.

Josef K. never learns what he’s alleged to have done wrong. The offenses I’ve allegedly committed haven’t been revealed to me, either. But I have an educated guess.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ohio-legislature-salmon-p-chase-school-ohio-state-university-free-speech-university-of-toledo-568261f9?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Free speech on campus has been making a modest comeback of late, as more schools look for ways to reintroduce classical liberal principles of civic debate and expression. The latest step forward is in Ohio, where the Legislature is planning a new school for free expression and academic inquiry in Columbus.

Lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a bill to create the Salmon P. Chase center for civics, culture and society at Ohio State University. Named for the former Ohio Governor who was also a Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the school would be an independent academic unit on campus that would focus on the “historical ideas, traditions and texts that have shaped the American Constitutional order and society.”

The school is intended to encourage greater academic diversity. It will “create a community dedicated to an ethic of civil and free inquiry, which respects the intellectual freedom of each member,” according to the legislation. Classes will include lessons on the “books and major debates which form the intellectual foundation of free societies.” A school with a similar writ will be created at the University of Toledo College of Law.

Ohio State’s plan, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Robert McColley and Sen. Jerry Cirino, follows a similar effort at the University of North Carolina, where the trustees this year announced a new School of Civic Life and Leadership. That plan enraged many in the school’s left-leaning faculty who are trying to block the project.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2023/05/05/georgetown-the-oldest-catholic-university-in-the-u-s-opens-a-big-mosque-on-campus-n1692878

Georgetown University, which was founded as Georgetown College in 1789 and is the oldest Catholic university in the United States, has earned yet another distinction: it is now the oldest Catholic university in the U.S. that has a large new mosque on campus. This is great news, right? This is just the sort of openness and good-heartedness that will erase misunderstandings, melt hostility and mutual suspicion, and usher in a new era of peace. Won’t it? Meanwhile, we eagerly await the announcement of which Islamic university anywhere in the world is planning to open a Christian chapel on campus.

The College Fix reported Friday that Georgetown “recently completed a major construction project erecting a large mosque on campus.” The university happily proclaimed that the Yarrow Mamout Masjid, which was named after a famous Muslim freed slave and entrepreneur who lived in the Georgetown area in the early nineteenth century, is “the first mosque with ablution stations, a spirituality and formation hall and a halal kitchen on a U.S. college campus.” How exciting! And really, what could possibly go wrong?

The Georgetown mosque has been happily welcomed at the highest levels. The College Fix stated that it has actually been operating since 2019 while construction continued, but finally the building “was completed earlier this year to much fanfare, with a dedication ceremony March 18 drawing Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who issued a proclamation recognizing the mosque.”

Yet even with a proclamation from the mayor and proud Catholic university administrators boasting about ablution stations and a halal kitchen, the university didn’t seem eager to talk about its grand new structure. The Fix noted that “Georgetown University’s media relations, as well as representatives of its Catholic Faith Communities, Catholic Ministry and alumni center, all ignored requests over the last week from The College Fix seeking comment on the mosque.” Now, that’s downright strange. Are they proud of their new mosque or not?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/miguel-cardona-naep-scores-national-assessment-of-educational-progress-civics-history-schools-ron-desantis-acc73985?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The federal Department of Education’s mission is supposed to be . . . what exactly? Apparently Education Secretary Miguel Cardona thinks it’s something other than improving educational results. New national test results this week showed eighth-grade U.S. history scores at an all-time low, and Mr. Cardona’s response was to attack the GOP.

The data released is from 2022 tests on U.S. history and civics under the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the “nation’s report card.” The average eighth-grade history score is down five points from 2018 and nine points from 2014. It’s the lowest on record, going back to 1994. Scores dropped the most among the lower performers. Only 13% of students were deemed NAEP proficient. The civics results are similarly depressing.

This is a damning record for the educational establishment, on top of last year’s news that NAEP math scores for eighth-graders in 2022 fell to a 20-year low. For all the money the U.S. keeps pumping into education, surely somebody in authority ought to be embarrassed by these pitiful outcomes, working to reverse them, and explaining to the citizenry what is being done. Maybe that person is supposed to be the U.S. Education Secretary?

Mr. Cardona’s statement on the poor NAEP showing begins by saying that it “further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading.” This might be a workable start if Mr. Cardona went on to acknowledge that Zoom classes were a generational error and that the teachers unions that lobbied to keep schools closed should accept some responsibility.

Instead Mr. Cardona turns to a partisan diversion. “Now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes,” he says. “We need to provide every student with rich opportunities to learn about America’s history and understand the U.S. Constitution and how our system of government works. Banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-merit-comes-to-science/

Last week the Wall Street Journal published a column by two scientists, Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov, detailing their travails in trying to get scientific journals to publish their “commentary about how modern science is being compromised by a de-emphasis on merit.” They were met with rejection, one editor calling the essay “downright hurtful,” and another one writing that “the concept of merit . . . has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow.” It finally was published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which champions “free inquiry,” a fast-disappearing virtue in our age of “woke” intolerance.

The politicization of academic disciplines in the humanities or history or the “human sciences” is bad enough, but its dangers are nothing compared to the corruption of the hard sciences by illiberal identity politics. The roots of this dangerous ideology lie in the notion of “equity,” a fancy word for the equality of results. Both “equity” and ideological distortions of science have a long history of destructive outcomes.

The notion of absolute equality or radical egalitarianism was born 2500 years ago with democracy and its extension of political rights to non-elites. As Aristotle defined radical egalitarianism, “it arises from the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” As such it is inherently tyrannical, for given the unequal distribution of talent, brains, opportunity, industry, and sheer luck, only by unjustly reducing the equality of some can absolute equality exist for all.

And as James Madison said in his discussion of “faction,” the clashing “political interests and parties” that can threaten our freedom result from “unequal faculties of acquiring property”––just as we see today with “equity” and “disparate impacts” and the redistribution of wealth in order to mitigate what one faction deems are unfair distinctions based on a spurious “merit” that makes some wealthier and more privileged than others. “Equality of outcome” thus exacerbated this inherently contentious and divisive dynamic.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-ed-sec-says-low-civics-scores-show-students-need-critical-race-theory/

You have to give the promo lefties credit for staying on message. No cult member has ever been as determined to ignore everything factual, moral or legal in pursuit of the agenda. They start fires and then show up to pour more gasoline on them while warning that cuts to the arson department will undermine our best defense against fires.

After lefties, doing the bidding of teachers’ unions, closed the schools, the educational system ceased to function leading to catastrophic drops in test scores. None of the lockdowners has been willing to claim their share of the credit and Biden’s Secretary of Education manages to suggest that poor civics scores is proof that we need to teach kids more critical race theory.

Knowledge of civics among the nation’s eighth-graders fell for the first time since the federal government began testing children under the current framework in 1998, according to new results that come amid a broader concern about pandemic-era learning loss.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, known as the Nation’s Report Card, also show a 5-point decline in average scores in history.

Biden’s Secretary of Education, who kept trying to close schools, has some thoughts on the matter.

“The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement, noting the abysmal math and reading NAEP scores released last fall.

“It tells us that now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes,” the secretary said.

We spent insane amounts of money on a school system that did not function because the primary beneficiary of all that ed spend, bureaucrats, teachers’ unions and assorted administrators, decided to close the schools. If we want to increase spending on schools, let’s claw some of that money back from their salaries and budgets.

And no matter how much we spend, it’s not going to get any better because education isn’t a money game. It’s a parent game. All the stats clearly show it. If the parents don’t care, then a student has to be really dedicated to overcome that hurdle. And how many kids are?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/public-educations-days-of-reckoning

Public school districts across the United States closed for unprecedented periods during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enrollments plunged, as students either headed to private schools or stayed home for schooling. Other children simply disappeared from schools and remain unaccounted for even today by school officials. Now, because of this exodus, school districts nationwide are grappling with another kind of closing: empty classrooms and underused school buildings are prompting waves of school shutdowns, as education officials look to downsize their operations in response to smaller student populations and disappearing Covid bailout funds. In many communities, the process is messy, with parents, teachers, and teachers’ unions objecting. But failing to act will only worsen budget deficits at a time of economic uncertainty.

According to an international study, American schools closed for an average of 70 weeks during the pandemic—far longer than schools shut down in most European countries, though the length of closures varied by state. Schools in Texas and Florida, for example, were closed for just a fraction of the time that schools in California and New York were shuttered. In all, public schools lost some 1.2 million students in the first two years of the pandemic. Some migrated to private institutions, where enrollments grew by 4 percent, while homeschool numbers rose by 30 percent.

Among states sustaining the biggest losses are California, which saw public school enrollment shrink by some 245,000 in two pandemic years, and New York, where enrollments fell 80,000 in the same period. In these states and elsewhere, Covid accelerated a trend already underway. School enrollment had peaked in many states in the mid-2010s and begun slipping shortly after, a result of fewer births, outmigration, and modest growth in homeschooling and alternative schools. New York State, for instance, has lost about 6 percent of its students, or 120,000 children, since 2016. California’s enrollment has dropped by 382,000 students since the 2014 school year.

https://thespectator.com/topic/china-influence-puzzle-confucius-institutes-ccp/

A“Chinese puzzle” in its classic version is a game where you must fit a variety of ill-assorted boxes inside other boxes. The term came to mean any intricate problem, especially one in which what looks like the way forward leads only to new obstacles.

These days, in which we are warned not to use ethnonyms for fear of giving offense, it might be safer to say something like “brainteaser.” But the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to manipulate American society genuinely deserve the old term.

The news this past week adds a few curious details to those efforts. Details first; explanations to follow.

Professor Charles Lieber, former chairman of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, had been facing a possible sentence of twenty-six years in federal prison for actions related to his involvement with a CCP program. A federal jury found him guilty on all felony charges, but the prosecution oddly reduced its recommendation to ninety days. On April 26, Judge Rya W. Zobel handed down a sentence of two days in prison
According to the New York Times, at the beginning of 2022, the FBI had more than 2,000 open investigations dealing with Chinese theft of US information and technology. The Biden administration promptly shut them all down
The Department of Defense announced in March that it would grant waivers to colleges that wish to host Chinese influence operations. The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) prohibited the disbursement of federal defense dollars to all colleges that host these Chinese operations. The new rule essentially voids the law
A bill has been introduced in Congress, the “Transparency in College Foreign Payments Act,” that would require the disclosure by universities of the name of the foreign government and its agency that provides funding to and the name of specific campus recipients of this funding. The key person in the House is Congressman Jim Banks who serves on the new House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the US and the Chinese Communist Party

What’s going on? Let me back up several steps.