RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/higher-ed-must-choose-merit-over-identity

Editor’s note: The following is adapted from the author’s remarks at a debate arguing the resolution, “Resolved, that academic DEI programs should be abolished,” co-hosted by the MIT chapter of the Adam Smith Society and the MIT Free Speech Alliance on April 4.

I start from the following proposition: being female is not an accomplishment. My being female should play no role in my being hired for a job. Of course, my sex undoubtedly has made me the target of sex preferences on numerous occasions, thus casting doubt on any actual qualifications I might presume to possess.

My being female should be particularly irrelevant in a university. Until recently, universities were dedicated to the Enlightenment ideal of universal knowledge. A male Chinese engineer and a female Nigerian engineer may have no spoken language in common, but they can communicate through the universal languages of mathematics and physics. Whether the buildings they erect stand or fall depends not on their nationality or sex but on their mastery of engineering principles.

I will go further. Being black, gay, or gender-fluid are also not accomplishments, and should have nothing to do with faculty hiring or student admissions. The only thing that should matter when, say, a medical school hires a researcher in pancreatic cancer is whether that oncologist is the best in his field.

The diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy is the nemesis of the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge. It puts relentless pressure on every academic department to hire on the basis of race and sex, not on the basis of intellectual achievement. Every faculty search today is a desperate effort to find even remotely qualified minority or female candidates. Being female or a non-Asian minority confers an enormous advantage in the hiring and tenure process.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/04/09/trans-ideology-is-destroying-the-university/

Academia is now hostile to free thought – especially when it comes to the trans debate. Few cases demonstrate this as clearly as that of London-based sociologist Dr Laura Favaro.

Last week, Favaro started a crowdfunding campaign to help her take her employer – City, University of London – to an employment tribunal. Favaro claims she was ostracised and ultimately dismissed by her university after writing about some of her research findings, which showed that gender-critical academics are terrified of openly expressing their views.

In 2020, Favaro joined City as a postdoctoral research fellow, where her main topic of study was the debate surrounding sex and gender. As part of her research, Favaro conducted interviews with 50 gender-studies academics on both sides of the trans debate, across multiple disciplines and universities. The gender-critical feminists she interviewed told her they face unrelenting harassment and intimidation. Some even claimed that their career progression had been blocked because of their views. Last year, Favaro wrote up some of these findings in Times Higher Education. Her research left her ‘in no doubt that a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold across universities in England and many countries beyond’.

Favaro was warned by her interviewees that her research could get her into serious trouble. It was not uncommon, Favaro said, for participants to tell her that ‘everybody is going to hate you’ for talking openly about the culture of silence around sex and gender in universities. After her THE piece was published, those warnings quickly came true.

Favaro claims on her crowdfunding page that City was bombarded with vexatious complaints, which branded her research ‘unethical’. An investigation by City found these claims to be baseless. Nevertheless, she says she was ostracised and frozen out by her department. She claims she faced bullying and harassment from a senior colleague. She also alleges there were attempts to persuade her to destroy interview transcripts. Eventually, she was dismissed, despite being on a fixed-term contract. City is then alleged to have prevented her from accessing the data she collected, and to have locked the email account she had used to communicate with participants in her study. In short, Favaro allegedly faced exactly the kind of hostile treatment that her research was trying to draw attention to.

There is now a long line of academics who have been attacked and censored for speaking out against trans orthodoxy. Philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, was infamously hounded out of her role at the University of Sussex in 2021, after students waged a relentless campaign against her. In 2018, Rosa Freedman at the University of Reading found her door covered in urine after she spoke out against gender self-identification. Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at Oxford University, revealed in 2020 that she needs bodyguards to accompany her to lectures. The list goes on.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/09/stanford-and-yale-are-elite-no-more/

Once among the West’s most prestigious institutions, Stanford and Yale are now beset with addicts of ideology who bring them to shame. Recent crises there are vivid episodes in the decline of Western institutions, which now face a choice: Will they, like libertine scions, insist every hungover morning that their namesakes hide their spreading notoriety? Or will they sober up?

At Stanford Law School last month, Judge Kyle Duncan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit came to speak on the rather academic topic of inter-court dialectic. A federal judge of any stripe used to be welcomed on a law-school campus like a legal celebrity. Federal judges have reached the pinnacle of their careers, and learning how they think should be the keen interest of would-be lawyers everywhere because persuading federal judges is how top lawyers get paid top dollar.

But at Stanford, supposedly a top training ground for future lawyers, Judge Duncan was greeted like a nun in a crack house by the school’s Woke cartel.

Students heckled him. “We hope your daughters get raped,” one shouted. Another screamed, “you scumbag!” One stood up and said, “I f— men. I can find the prostate. Why can’t you find the cl–?” Judge Duncan was unable even to begin his remarks before federal marshals had to whisk him off campus.

Before a few years ago, law students almost never acted this way. If they did, they regretted it. At the University of Chicago Law School, one student led the heckling of a speaking event, and he got expelled. But now, at law schools that are supposed to be our nation’s best, heckling is common—while consequences are scarce.

At Yale Law School last year, hundreds of students heckled a panel of Supreme Court lawyers. They raised their middle fingers. They stomped their feet and banged on the walls. One even screamed “b–ch!” None faced discipline.

These are students who have hit rock bottom, and the mark of their rock bottom is the mark of any addict’s, whether of substance or of ideology. It’s angry self-abasement. Their public vulgarity is their point because it’s a revenge they exact at the expense of their own dignity. By covering themselves in muck, they can say to their targets, “welcome to the pig sty: this is where you belong.”

https://nypost.com/2023/04/06/cornell-stanford-stand-up-to-woke-mobs-for-free-speech/

On March 31, I reported that Cornell’s student assembly unanimously voted to require trigger warnings for “traumatic” classroom lessons.

The resolution would have required the university’s professors to warn students about materials or lectures with topics “including but not limited to” sexual assault, domestic violence, self-harm, suicide, child abuse, racial hate crimes, transphobic violence, homophobic harassment and xenophobia.

While trigger warnings might be well-intentioned attempts to protect sensitive students, many researchers are finding they aren’t all that effective.

They also run the risk of chilling speech and causing professors — who can’t possibly anticipate what might trigger each student — to self-censor.

As I asked, “Is the implication that college students are too weak and feeble to hear the truth?”

But there’s some good news.

On Monday, Cornell president Martha Pollack and provost Michael Kotlikoff responded to the student assembly with a resounding “No!”

In an email to the student assembly, the pair said the trigger warning policy “violates our faculty’s fundamental right to determine what and how to teach” and could even tarnish the “academic distinction of a Cornell degree.”

They affirmed the policy “would unacceptably limit our students’ ability to speak, questio, and explore, lest a classroom conversation veer into an area determined ‘off-limits.’”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/snitches-get-sheepskins-as-colleges-train-student-informants-dei-east-germany-bias-protected-class-f941ee11?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Anonymous informers have always been a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Friends, neighbors and even family members are encouraged to inform on those who speak against the regime. This is effective social control: Nowhere is safe to discuss politics, and everyday life is subdued. To this day, when Cubans want to discuss something sensitive, they go into their bathrooms, let the water flow and whisper.

Who would want to live under such conditions? Apparently, America’s colleges and universities do. They have been setting up their own systems of anonymous informers.

According to a recent study by the free-speech watchdog organization Speech First, 56% of American universities have adopted schemes that encourage students to report on one another anonymously for “bias” or “protected identity harm.” This means that anyone who falls short of campus orthodoxy on “pronouns,” transgenderism, microaggressions and proscribed language might soon be denounced and deprived of basic due process, including the right to face an accuser. Zealots at Stanford recently denounced a fellow student who was photographed holding a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The number of universities that have institutionalized snitching has doubled since 2017. The damage this will do to campus life is easy to imagine: It will chill free expression via self-censorship both in and out of the classroom; it will infantilize protected classes of students even more than they already have been; it will reinforce the campus culture of victimhood; it will further strengthen the radical orthodoxy; and it will divert yet more energy from learning to ideological activism.

Anonymous reporting has a self-selection component: Decent people won’t do it because they consider it morally repugnant. A system that rewards spying on friends and neighbors will disproportionately attract cowardly people motivated by the worst of human nature—resentment, jealousy, grudges and dogmatic intolerance. The snitches will be people who don’t understand the damage Stasi-like behavior will do to our universities.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/school-for-radicals/

In case you haven’t yet caught up with the Spring 2023 issue of UCLA’s online magazine, its feature story is “The Justice League” by journalist Ashraf Khalil: laudatory profiles of a handful of social justice alumni from a unique UCLA initiative called the Activist-in-Residence Program. Established in 2016 by the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, this Program “plugs activists into the power grid of resources offered by a top-tier research university” to empower these aspiring revolutionaries to overthrow the society they despise so deeply.

As described on its website, the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy “advances radical democracy in an unequal world through research, critical thought, and alliances with social movements and racial justice activism.” By “radical democracy,” they don’t mean individual freedom without limits, but collectivism and enforced equity. Their methodology is almost a parody of woke buzzwords and phraseology such as “decolonizing the University”: “We root our work in abolitionist and decolonial traditions of thought that refuse extractive and exploitative research and instead build forms of knowledge accountable to movements and communities on the frontlines of struggle.”

The Luskin Institute’s Activist-in-Residence initiative grants residents a stipend and free rein of campus resources for five months to develop their varied missions and help educate the next generation of activists. “The UCLA Activist-in-Residence program’s objective is to “turn the university inside out” through “power-shifting scholarship and pedagogy focused on social change.”

“It was a way of shifting who is seen as a scholar, who is seen as a teacher at an elite research university like UCLA,” Professor Ananya Roy, the Luskin Institute’s founding director, told Ashraf Khalil. She added that she wants the program to expand to other universities across the country, envisioning this “shared terrain of scholarship across universities and movements… to be very fertile ground for making change.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/save_stanford_appoint_scott_atlas_or_jay_bhattacharya_as_president.html

Stanford University’s reputation is in freefall as this once-revered university makes headlines for all the wrong reasons. Recently, a mob of law school students shut down a conservative judge’s speech, screeching insults at him to the approval of a Diversity Dean and the disgust of the country. Then there’s the FTX fiasco, in which a Stanford-linked cryptocurrency company collapsed amidst lurid charges of fraud and money laundering. Victor’s Davis Hanson’s lament “What Happened to Stanford?” adds other disasters to the list, including the arrest of a Chinese agent and the disclosure of $64 million in Chinese donations.

I’ve been studying Stanford’s decline for a while, and I think I have a partial explanation: the fish rots from the head.  Stanford’s president is a renowned neuroscientist currently under investigation for scientific fraud. Dr. Tessier-Lavigne made his reputation studying Alzheimer’s, but evidence has emerged that has critics alleging that he may have manipulated images in multiple influential papers published in Science and Nature.

Americans are losing faith in their institutions, and the story of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne exemplifies why. His first problematic study dates back to 2001, but that didn’t stop his meteoric rise through biotech pioneer Genentech to the presidency of Rockefeller University and then Stanford in 2016. Now that his alleged frauds have come to light, Stanford’s Board of Trustees has opened an investigation, but it’s being conducted by Board members, instead of outside experts. To many observers, it appears that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne may be getting the privileged treatment awarded those with favored credentials and opinions.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/teachers_unions_are_destroying_american_education.html

American public schools are witnessing a mass exodus of teachers.

The term “stampede” may be more appropriate. According to one poll conducted in 2022, some 55% of educators were ready to leave the profession, and this unease is often translated into action. In one Chicago school nearly every teacher bailed out. Many teachers are not even waiting for the end of the school year and are leaving in mid-term.

These departures overwhelming result from school violence, disorderly classrooms, insufficient administrative support, and trying to teach kids who just don’t care. According to one study during the 2020-21 school year, one-third of teachers reported at least one incident of harassment or threats of violence while 14% were actually physically attacked. The American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on Violence against Educators and School Personnel reports that threats can even come from parents convinced that junior is “a good kid” despite carrying a knife to the classroom.

Cold statistics understate the fear of violence, especially in schools where poor, single-parent minority students predominate. Reports of physical confrontations quickly spread to others as does the unwillingness of school administrators to punish culprits.  Further add daily in-your-face hostility to learning such as talking during lectures, constant iPhone use, and obvious boredom that can kill a teacher’s commitment.

Under such circumstances, the usual workplace incentives are of little value to unhappy teachers. A 3% salary raise, or better medical plan, cannot compensate for daily living in fear for one’s safety. This is not the Great Depression where a secure teaching job was prized no matter what. Nor are today’s female teachers limited in their vocational options.   

The problems of unsafe and dangerous working conditions are the classic tribulations that precipitated America’s labor movement. After all, what could be more central to a union?  So, how are the two teacher unions responding? Answer: By making it worse.

https://www.city-journal.org/battle-over-hasidic-schools-is-a-broader-battle

For almost 130 years, New York State has required private and non-public schools to offer a curriculum “substantially equivalent” to those offered in local public schools. That requirement has been loosely enforced, and the state education department issued new regulations in September 2022 that promised a more aggressive approach. But last week, New York Supreme Court Judge Christina Ryba partially invalidated those regulations. The ruling overturned neither the state’s compulsory-education law nor the substantial-equivalency law upon which the September regulations had been based. Rather, it invalidated the enforcement mechanism included in those regulations, which, Ryba found, would shut down schools out of step with the substantial-equivalency requirement. The compulsory-education law applies to parents, not schools, Ryba argued; accordingly, enforcement actions would have to be brought against parents instead of the schools themselves.

The ruling comes at a time of fierce debate over substantial equivalency at religious schools serving Hasidic Jewish New Yorkers. One side of the debate has reduced these schools to a set of caricatures—arguing that the education provided in these schools is of low quality, that their graduates are consigned to lives of poverty, and that parents are coerced by religious leaders to enroll their children in these schools. Reality is more complicated.

While performing research for a Manhattan Institute issue brief on the subject, I visited a yeshiva (religious school) for Hasidic boys in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. It offers no instruction in secular subjects, but the boys I observed all seemed to be fluent English speakers. I was told that they came from homes where English was freely spoken and that some parents may choose to augment the yeshiva’s instruction with tutors in English and math. Judge Ryba’s decision anticipated that a family could ensure substantial equivalency through a combination of religious school attendance, tutoring, and homeschooling.