RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/03/14/prestigious-womens-college-to-vote-on-whether-to-admit-trans-men-n1678211

Wellesley College, one of the most prestigious women’s colleges in the United States, will vote on Tuesday in a non-binding referendum on whether to admit transgender males.

Trans men are already attending Wellesley, having transitioned after arriving on campus. But this would be a step that would end Wellesley’s identification as a place of education for females.

Opponents, including the president, Paula Johnson, said the referendum changes Wellesley’s mission, which they say was founded to educate women. Last week, Johnson raised the ire of activists by saying in a statement that Wellesley is “a women’s college that admits cis, trans and nonbinary students — all who consistently identify as women.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/desantis-is-putting-the-public-back-in-public-universities/?utm_

Florida’s extraordinary House Bill 999 is the most ambitious legislative pushback against the woke university yet. Sponsored by Representative Alex Andrade, H.B. 999 is the legislative flagship in Governor Ron DeSantis’s armada of higher-education reforms.

It has been introduced in the Florida house, and a hearing has been scheduled.

To be sure, H.B. 999 has its problems. In a follow-up piece, I’ll speak to the need to pare back some of the overreach that’s left critics of DeSantis in a dither. Yet the thrust of H.B. 999 is most welcome — and long overdue. Dealing with the bill’s many initiatives and controversies will take several posts. Last week, I defended H.B. 999’s provisions on faculty appointments. Today, I want to examine the bill’s mandates for civic education and the study of Western civilization.

H.B. 999 directs Florida’s public universities to build general-education requirements around courses that “promote the education for citizenship of the constitutional republic.” H.B. 999 also insists that general-education courses “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization.” On top of that, the bill requires that general-education courses, where appropriate, include “studies of this nation’s historical documents, including the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments thereto, and the Federalist Papers.”

Are you shocked yet? Most people, of course, will find these provisions perfectly ordinary and acceptable. Many professors, on the other hand, see these requirements as downright scary.

The critics will tell you that it’s not so much the content of these requirements that bothers them as the principle at stake. Actually, for many, the content is what they object to. In any case, the principle in play is articulated by liberal campus-free-speech expert Keith Whittington, who frets that “Florida is breaking new ground in insisting that state universities convey the government’s favored message in its classes.” New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall worries about DeSantis laying out “what must be taught.” In Edsall’s view, politicians ought not to be leveraging public universities “in the service of their own agenda.” (Civics and Western civilization: DeSantis’s nefarious agenda exposed!) John Sensbach, chairman of the history department at the University of Florida, says he’s “not convinced that the founding fathers would have endorsed” such an approach.

My Manhattan Institute colleague Heather Mac Donald has published a provocative new essay in City Journal, titled “The Great Feminization of the American University.” Mac Donald begins by pointing out that women now constitute the ruling majority on campus: 75 percent of Ivy League presidents, 66 percent of college administrators, and 58 percent of recent graduates are now female.

And the consequences, Mac Donald argues, are troubling. “Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma,” she writes. “For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus.”

In my new video essay, I analyze this cultural shift and explain how the modern university has become a “therapeutic institution,” which, according to my recent reporting on university DEI programming, is characterized by the following trends:

https://www.city-journal.org/the-great-feminization-of-the-american-university

Sometimes a single incident efficiently summarizes a larger trend. So it is with New York University’s selection of its new president, Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker and an NYU social work professor. She researches trauma and bias, as well as race and gender in the legal academy. She is a documentary filmmaker and teaches advocacy filmmaking. She serves as an NYU vice chancellor and as a senior vice provost for Global Programs and University Life. In all these roles, Mills is the very embodiment of the contemporary academy. The most significant part of her identity, however, and the one that ties the rest of her curriculum vitae together, is that she is female, and thus overdetermined as NYU’s next president.

Mills is part of the Great Feminization of the American university, an epochal change whose consequences have yet to be recognized. Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not. Among the official diversity bureaucrats installed in their posts since July 2022, females predominate: the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at the University of California, San Diego; the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at UCLA; the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Maryville University in Missouri; the chief diversity officer and vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the School of Education at the College of Charleston in South Carolina; the vice president for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at Kansas State University; the associate dean of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at the University of Kansas School of Law; the vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the vice president for inclusion and community impact at Herzing University in Wisconsin; the associate provost for faculty and diversity initiatives at Muhlenberg College (this associate provost also became Muhlenberg’s first chief diversity officer); the first chief officer of culture, belonging, and community building at Delta College in Michigan; the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh; the vice provost for faculty diversity, equity, and inclusivity at the University of Texas, Austin (a lateral move from the position of managing director of diversity in UT’s office of the executive vice president and provost); the vice president for equity, culture, and talent at Prince George’s Community College—all are female.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-crisis-is-the-universities/

“The source of our current ills – the  lawlessness in our streets, the destruction of our borders, the racist ‘equity’ policies of the Democrat Party, the “woke” derelictions of our military leaders, can all be traced to the indoctrination of our educated classes in hatreds spawned by cultural Marxism.”
–David Horowitz, ‘De-Fund the Universities!’

The Duke of Wellington reportedly stated that the battle of Waterloo was won on the fields of Eton College. George Orwell countered that, “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

America’s battles against foreign and domestic enemies have been lost in our ‘Etons’, our schools and universities which have turned their graduates against the country and its values.

The source of our social and political crises is the destruction of our educational institutions through a successful fifty-year effort by radical activists to purge conservatives and patriots from American academic faculties. This was followed by a massive reconstruction of the academic curriculum and the transformation of universities into one-party indoctrination and recruitment centers for the anti-American left.

We at the David Horowitz Freedom Center were among the first to confront the problem and take the battle to campuses across the country, but as the last conservative faculty are purged and conservative students are silenced, the old remedies of adversarial dialogue and debate are no longer available. Conservative speakers are violently assaulted on campuses and events are shut down. College administrators are finding ways to force out even tenured conservative faculty while mandatory anti-white, anti-Jewish, anti-Asian and anti-patriotic “diversity” measures keep the doors firmly closed to conservatives and patriots.

It’s time to recognize that this is an existential threat to America and to take action against it. That’s why we’re calling for the defunding of universities.

A Survey of the Problem

Universities have become efficient indoctrination centers that couldn’t be any more destructive if they were being run by China and Russia.

DPS Comment: “If I even need an attorney, as with doctors, I will only hire one who is past his/her late 30’s or into their 40’s.” Could not agree more….rsk

‘You’ve invited me to speak here, and I’ve been heckled nonstop,’ the judge tells the seething crowd as a dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion denounces him for causing ‘pain.’

A conservative federal judge on the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals was screamed at on Thursday by dozens of Stanford Law School students who disagreed with his rulings, bringing new light to the conversation about freedom of speech at America’s elite universities.

At an event titled “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter,” Judge Kyle Duncan was met by an angry crowd of students and faculty. The judge had been invited to speak by the Stanford chapter of the conservative Federalist Society. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/preserving-academic-freedom-at-the-university-of-chicago/

Perhaps when literary critic C.S. Lewis despaired of “omnipotent moral busybodies . . . who torment us for our own good,” he was anticipating the tendentious rants of members of the University of Chicago’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a toxic campus group of anti-Israel activists who have helped lead a campaign of libel and delegitimization against the Jewish state, and, at times, have inspired ugly anti-Semitism disguised as being merely criticism of Israeli government policies.

SJP has a long history since its founding in 1993 of bringing vitriolic anti-Israel speakers to their respective 200 or so campuses, and for sponsoring Israeli Apartheid Weeks, building mock “apartheid walls,” and sending fake eviction notices to students in their dorms to help them empathize with Palestinians.

Now, SJP’s U Chicago chapter has mounted a targeted campaign to deplatform a course, “Security, Counter-Terrorism and Resilience: The Israeli Case,” being taught by visiting professor and Israel Institute Fellow Meir Elran, former deputy director of Israeli Military Intelligence and retired Israeli brigadier general who also directs the domestic research programs of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

SJP’s attempt to boycott and dissuade their peers from enrolling in this class is not the first effort this year to interfere with teaching at the university. In January, for instance, SJP posted on its Instagram page the shocking admonition, “DON’T TAKE SH*TTY ZIONIST CLASSES.” Students were asked to “Support the Palestinian movement for liberation by boycotting classes on Israel or those taught by Israeli fellows.”

According to the SJP post, any students who enrolled in the two classes, “Gender Relations in Israel” taught by Meital Pinto and “Narrating Israel and Palestine through Literature and Film” taught by Stephanie Kraver, would be “participating in a propaganda campaign that creates complicity in the continuation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine” and that, in its view, “Israeli-centered classes are designed to obscure Palestinian perspectives.”

The arrival of General Elran, a veteran of the Israeli military, was particularly offensive to the SJP scolds, inspiring them to issue a statement in which they based their critique of the course on their own ahistorical, factually-flawed narrative about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, opposing any pro-Israel views to be expressed and claiming, as they always do, that Israel is an illegitimate entity that exists on stolen Palestinian lands which it illegally and brutally occupies with its tactical and strategic military force.

“On Elran’s telling of Israeli history,” the statement contended, “Israel appears not as an expansionist apartheid state predicated on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land, but as an embattled liberal democracy surrounded by ‘large hostile Muslim populations’ and mired in a ‘Muslim-Jewish conflict’ not of its own making.” In other words, SJP believed, the reality that the Jews of Israel have faced a genocidal onslaught from psychopathic terrorists determined to extirpate the Jewish state and murder its Jews is merely a fiction, a false narrative promoted by Israel. The truth, according to SJP, is that Israel was created on Palestinian land and now oppresses the indigenous population with a system of racist apartheid and military occupation, all factually and historically incorrect, as any sentient observer knows.

Anticipating that defenders of the course would point to the University’s own commitment to academic freedom and the right of faculty and students to enjoy free and open debate—even concerning controversial topics—SJP said that Elran’s course should not be insulated by those precepts. Why? Because, as their statement put it, again reversing fact and narrative to suit their own advantage, “No principle of ‘academic freedom’ or ‘intellectual diversity’ justifies hosting classes taught by complicit Israeli military personnel – particularly not classes that misrepresent Palestinian history, treat Palestinian deaths as fodder for ‘strategic’ military theorizing, and inundate students with the Orientalist worldview of Israeli colonists.”

SJP’s opposition to General Elran has not been limited to published statements denouncing the professor and the course content. On February 2nd, SJP members mounted an in-person protest at Cobb Hall, the building where Elran’s course is being taught, something the activists have been doing since the class began and a tactic meant to physically and morally intimidate enrolled students as they enter and leave the building. The February 2nd protest was particularly grotesque since it had as its secondary purpose, according to an SJP Instagram post, “to commemorate the 10 martyrs of the Jenin Refugee Camp.”

Consider how shocking and morally deranged it is for students on an American campus to celebrate terrorists whose supposed martyrdom is achieved by murdering Jewish civilians in Israel—and to do so outside of a classroom full of Israeli and Jewish students and a professor who reasonably understand that their support for Israel would make them justifiable targets for the psychopathic madmen who feel compelled to murder civilians as “resistance” to and occupation of a factitious Palestine.

Consider how a university community would respond to a similar protest that glorified the murder of 10 black people in Buffalo by a white supremacist in May of 2022 or the 2016 murder of 49 gay people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando by a deranged homophobe. The response and criticism of such a demonstration for such psychopaths would be thunderous, immediate, and severe, but at the University of Chicago, the event passed without comment.

The so-called martyrs that SJP commemorated in their protest died in the Jenin refugee camp, a location that is notorious for being a terrorist stronghold and, as i24News has noted, is “a central base for terror groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades . . , Hamas,” Lion’s Den, Fatah, and others. Nowhere acknowledged by SJP, of course, is the fact that Jenin is proudly referred to by Palestinians “as the ‘Martyrs’ Capital,’ [and] at least 23 of the 60 suicide bombers that attacked Israel came from Jenin, according to Israel —more than any other Palestinian city.”

And typical of SJP’s virulent anti-Israel narrative, Israel and the IDF are depicted as a brutal, nearly sadistic force that regularly and randomly murders innocent Palestinian civilians. But the inverse of that is actually true, and the IDF is methodical and fastidiously careful in its incursions to suppress terror against its citizens, as it was in the latest Jenin operation.

“2023 has seen increased terror attacks & IDF counter-terror operations,” noted Honest Reporting, a media watchdog organization, “with an equal number of Israeli & Palestinian civilian casualties.” But the media and activists like SJP “report all Palestinian deaths equally,” Honest Reporting noted, “choosing not to mention that 49 of the 60 Palestinian deaths were confirmed terrorists actively engaged in attacking Israelis. And 8 were under the age of 18.” Given that Palestinian terrorists wear no uniforms and regularly embed themselves in civilian populations, it is the unfortunate reality that, even given Israel’s extreme care in minimizing casualties, some civilian deaths occur—regrettable, of course, but the fault of the terrorist groups who initiated conflict against Israelis with rockets, bombings, knife attacks, car ramming, and shootings.

Aside from the evident moral indifference SJP demonstrated in honoring those who murder Jews, other important academic considerations are being compromised by the group’s disruption of the Elran class.

When a visiting faculty member is asked to teach a course, as is the case here, he or she is thoroughly vetted in advance by departmental faculty and others with an academic interest in or knowledge of the proposed course and professor. To teach at an elite institution such as the University of Chicago, a visiting professor must possess both professional experience and academic credentials to satisfy the hiring committee and to insure that the course will be taught to the standards of the host university. Clearly, General Elran is qualified, both academically and professionally.

So the troublesome issue here is that a small group of activist students, SJP, with a poisonous enmity toward Israel, Zionism, and Judaism have assumed the right to overrule the decision of the University’s faculty and call for a boycott and cancellation of a course. The course in question is not, importantly, a mandatory course, so any student can avoid the course by simply not enrolling. If the morally sensitive SJP members were compelled to take Elran’s course, they might have a stronger argument for having someone else teach the course or not making it mandatory, but that is not the case here.

SJP and other anti-Israel activists on campuses would prefer, of course, that nothing that might be construed as pro-Israel ever be uttered or taught or written about on campus. The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once quipped that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” something SJP has yet to realize or comprehend. They are certainly permitted to have their own version of history and their own narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian debate, but people as knowledgeable, and even more knowledgeable, than they also have their own narratives, facts, and set of truths.

And SJP’s latest repellent tactic of physically disrupting the operations of the University, of course, are more than simply annoying; they are violative of the University’s own rules of student life and conduct. “The right of freedom of expression at the University,” the code reads, “includes peaceful protests and orderly demonstrations. At the same time, the University has long recognized that the right to protest and demonstrate does not include the right to engage in conduct that disrupts the University’s operations or endangers the safety of others,” precisely what SJP’s protest outside the classroom and building entailed. The code also has a warning to offenders that “Any member of the University who engages in disruptive conduct will be subject to disciplinary action,” although it seems SJP has yet to be punished for their aggressive activism.

Coincidentally, it was the University of Chicago that published a seminal set of guidelines for university free speech, the 2014 “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression,” often referred to as the Chicago Principles.

“Although members of the University community are free to criticize and contest the views expressed on campus, and to criticize and contest speakers who are invited to express their views on campus,” the report read, they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe. To this end, the University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.”

SJP must recognize that, while they have the right to express their views publicly and forcefully, they cannot expect or attempt to suppress those same rights of expression enjoyed by others.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-onslaught/

DEI has gone national. The belief that quality takes a backseat to racial bean counting wormed its way into the White House in February, when President Biden signed an executive order that promises to create a national “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” bureaucracy. As Christopher Rufo reports, the DEI diktat, “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” proposes three key strategies:

Creating internal cadres and power centers through the deployment of “Agency Equity Teams.”
Funding third-party political activism through grants to “community[-based] organizations.”
Weaponizing civil rights law by requiring federal agencies to use artificial intelligence “in a manner that advances equity.”

The order prescribes that equity be “embedded… into the fabric of Federal policymaking and service delivery.” Also, this will not be a one-time project, and instead must be a multi-generational commitment, and remain the responsibility of agencies across the Federal Government.

To that end, the government will establish an “Agency Equity Team… to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives.” Every aspect of government down to the design, development, and acquisition of artificial intelligence must advance equity.

The executive order, dripping with cultural Marxism, posits that “by advancing equity, the Federal Government can support and empower all Americans, including the many communities in America that have been underserved, discriminated against, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/upenn-laws-race-inquisitors-seek-to-silence-amy-wax/

When he wryly observed that “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,” Orwell may well have had academia in mind, where challenging prevailing ideology can have a calamitous effect on one’s reputation and career—something especially true of faculty.

One ubiquitous ideology in academia now is an obsession with race, manifested in the relentless pursuit of recruiting and retaining minority students as part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion, (DEI) campaign. The campaign for diversity is based on an assumed, but unproven, assumption that diverse student populations are automatically superior to non-diverse ones, and that diversity not only benefits minority students but all students and the university as a whole. This belief is accepted by woke virtue-signaling administrators and diversocrats as a given, but it is certainly still a topic that can be questioned, critiqued, and challenged, and a faculty member has the right to not accept it as settled doctrine.

DEI bureaucracies have also had another unintended, negative side-effect, namely, that minority students are counseled to see themselves as victims of systemic racism—both in their own universities and in the country as a whole. Students have quickly realized that once they are designated as victims and given a bucket of accommodations and benefits not enjoyed by their white and Asian peers, they have become emboldened to demand further concessions—one significant one being the “right” not to be challenged or offended by the views of others that question the prevailing dogma on liberal campuses.

Actual racism—from faculty, students, and administrators—is so rare and benign that in order to identify cases where racism reveals itself, university diversocrats and the student victims they serve must assiduously ferret out examples of racist thought and behavior—including accusations of systemic racism, invisible racism, triggers, microaggressions, white privilege, and, recently, instances when faculty or students have defended law enforcement or criticized the motives and tactics of Black Lives Matter. Any challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy of these victim students and their administrative enablers are stamped down, attacked, and deemed racist and indicative of white supremacy. And when it is faculty members who dare to question affirmative action, diversity, systemic racism, and white supremacy, the wrath of the woke mob is immediate and unrelenting.