RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-officer-and-a-gentlemanand-a-high-school-student-philadelphia-jrotc-office-student-military-army-bd7ec0ef?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Kaheem Bailey-Taylor was leaving a party last August at a cousin’s house in Northern Philadelphia when he heard gunshots. “The suspect started shooting out the door towards us,” he says. Police soon arrived and cleared the house. Mr. Bailey-Taylor followed officers in to assess the situation. Minutes later, he was sitting in the back of a police car applying pressure to a partygoer’s gunshot wounds.

Mr. Bailey-Taylor isn’t a paramedic or a cop; he’s a 17-year-old high-school junior. He is cadet colonel at the Philadelphia Military Academy, where all students are enrolled in the U.S. Army’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program. On my visit to the academy, Mr. Bailey-Taylor helps show me around. As we sit in the back of a 10th-grade class on first aid, he leans over and tells me that he used these skills, along with his lifeguard training, the night he helped save the partygoer, one of his classmates.

The class starts like any other, with the buzz of chatty students. It then cuts to silence in unison as a student leader takes his position at the front. Then students recite the cadet creed in one voice: “I will always conduct myself to bring credit to my family, country, school and the Corps of Cadets. I am loyal and patriotic. . . . I will seek the mantle of leadership and stand prepared to uphold the Constitution and the American way of life. May God grant me the strength to always live by this creed.”

Kaheem Bailey-Taylor Photo: Philadelphia Military Academy

Patriotism, duty and accountability may not be in vogue in most public schools, but here—and in the nearly 3,500 JROTC programs across all military branches nationwide—the values of the cadet creed are a proven formula for success. A 2017 RAND study found that JROTC cadets have better-than-average grades and attendance records and are less likely to drop out than other high-school students. The Philadelphia Military Academy’s graduation rate is 92%; the district average is 75%.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-death-of-the-professor-in-the-age-of-chat-gpt/

For years I have been stating that the university as we know it has been over for a while. I have also stated that the professoriate is dead. Especially for most of those who exist in the social sciences and the humanities, this demise is not necessarily a bad thing. I have written about the professoriate’s hatred of America and of capitalism, the ascendent socialist mindset, and the Marxist indoctrination by the professoriate of our youth. Despite these thoughts and insights, I never thought that I would stand before a class and feel my complete irrelevance as an educator; feel like a relic and some strange creature that should be retired instantly. And all because of an AI language model called Chat GPT.

Chat GPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. The tool itself and professors are in an arms race against each other – and professors are losing. It usually takes weeks to collect students’ papers after posting an assignment.  Deadlines are mostly a thing of the past. When Chat GPT was first launched, however, I had at least nine students turning in well-crafted, eight-page papers within an hour of posting the assignment.

After being a professor in the classroom for twenty-six years, I still spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for my classes. They are a combination of short lectures interspersed with discussion from students. I call on students frequently to respond to what they have read, and to offer analyses made by other students on the assigned readings. This allows us to form a community of thinkers and discoverers—of both fact and values. As a philosophic community we form a “brain attic.” Knowledge is shared collectively but processed individually. At any point each person can share his or her rendition of the facts and concomitant analysis of said facts.

Recently students have been coming to classes late or not at all. Some come to record the classes and type pertinent questions gleaned from the lecture into Chat GPT. Others are fact checking every utterance I make against the wisdom of the AI program. But when I asked a student for his reasoned viewpoint to a point John Locke made in his classic “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” the student typed the question into his computer and said: “It says here that….” and proceeded to read off the AI generated response. In the manner of most students, he made zero eye contact with me. Today, fewer and fewer students are looking at their professors during conversations, lectures and even during in-class discussions. I am speaking of polite and basically good human beings whose socialization via social media has left them bereft of appropriate social skills.

https://www.americanthinker.com/

Universities are forums for the free exchange of ideas, for learning how to think, not what to think; for debate, not indoctrination.  Unfortunately, that can no longer be said of American universities.  Open inquiry and critical thinking untainted by ideology have been supplanted by leftist dogma, including Critical Race Theory and social justice advocacy.  Except at the increasingly rare institution offering a classical liberal arts education, it has become impossible for impressionable students to earn a degree without becoming steeped in leftist rhetoric and the extreme ideas of race and gender.  They end up believing that America was built on racism and defining themselves as either oppressors or victims.

These ideological intrusions were insidiously mainstreamed from the seventies onward, especially in the humanities departments, by gradually building an ecosystem fostering faculty members who are left-leaning and sidelining those who are not.  Universities are now taking this to the next level by precluding the recruitment of independent thinkers and conservatives.  They are requiring prospective faculty to submit a loyalty oath to the tenets of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE; sometimes DEI) as a de facto litmus test of their political affiliation.

Examples abound of universities where DIE statements are a prerequisite for consideration for any job.  At Arizona’s public universities, they are a standard feature of the hiring process for all faculty, professional, and staff positions.  Some institutions in the state require prospective candidates to demonstrate their allegiance to DIE ideology even before a review of their qualifications takes place.  At the University of Washington, support for DIE principles is de rigueur, and faculty applicants must justify their commitment by describing their past actions and explaining how they will continue to pursue DIE goals if appointed.  The University of Pennsylvania website gives applicants guidelines for composing effective DIE statements.  And at all campuses of the University of California (U.C.), faculty applicants must submit DIE statements that will determine if they merit consideration, regardless of their academic credentials or their teaching and research plans.  From their statements, applicants are evaluated for DIE awareness and experience and their plans for advancing DIE on campus.  They must agree to treat individuals differently based on their race, sex, and gender identity.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kafka-comes-to-college/

On Friday, April 14 2023, Ohio Northern University law professor Scott Gerber and his students were shocked and alarmed to see campus security officers, backed up by armed local police, unceremoniously enter the classroom, remove Gerber, and escort him to the Dean’s office. There the professor with 22 years experience, a history of excellent evaluations, and courses filled to capacity was immediately barred from teaching, banished from the ONU campus, and told that if he didn’t sign a separation agreement and release of claims by April 21st, the university would commence dismissal proceedings against him. On what grounds? Insufficient “collegiality.”

The real reason, as Gerber went on to explain in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published a few weeks later, titled “DEI Brings Kafka to My Law School,” was insufficient compliance with the school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, to which he had objected publicly and in newspaper op-eds and television interviews.

The mission of DEI, of course, is the implementation of social justice revenge. It has metastasized throughout every institution of society: government agencies, the military, corporations, the legal and medical fields, law enforcement, the entertainment industry, literally every Human Resources department anywhere. But perhaps nowhere is it more deeply entrenched than in the field of higher education, where Critical Theory – the subversive ideology behind DEI – originated and was developed.

It is hardly news anymore that university administrations and faculties skew far left politically and are dominated by a totalitarian degree of wokeness. Lockstep conformity to political correctness is expected or persecution for your lack of “collegiality” will ensue: at best, being ostracized by one’s peers, and at worst, being exiled from a career you trained for, excelled in, and loved. “And more than anything else, I love teaching,” Gerber wrote.

As he details in his WSJ piece, in the week prior to being essentially frog-marched out of his classroom in the middle of a lecture – an outrageously unnecessary measure clearly intended to send an intimidating message to any other professor who might step out of line – he had published an op-ed at The Hill defending Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s “right to have friends – even rich ones,” referring to the Left’s recent attempt to manufacture a corruption scandal involving the black conservative Justice whom the Left considers a race traitor.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2023/05/chalk-and-cheese-education-then-and-now/

In chapter one of The Abolition of Man, published in 1944, C.S. Lewis criticises the way education, instead of teaching students to discriminate between what is true and false and what is good and bad, conditions them to rely on emotions and a subjective view of how individuals relate to one another and perceive and understand the world.

In opposition, drawing on Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian and Oriental teachings (what he describes as the Tao), Lewis writes “… what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect.  It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others are really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are”.

Lewis goes on to suggest, for those immersed in the Tao, calling children delightful and old men venerable is not “to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognise a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not”. Central to Lewis’ argument is that children must be taught to appreciate the true nature of things as opposed to the progressive, romanticised view that children grow naturally to discernment and knowledge (now rebadged as ‘self-agency’ and ‘personalised learning’ where teachers are guides by the side).

Lewis writes children “must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust and hatred of those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful”.  For teachers to do otherwise is to impoverish children with a barren, soulless and ego-centred education more akin to what he describes as “merely propaganda”.

Pierre Ryckmans, in his 1996 Boyer Lectures, also stresses the danger of subjectivism.  After recounting an episode where an academic attacks Chinese literati painting as bourgeois, Ryckmans writes “From his perspective, value judgments were necessarily a form of cultural arrogance… a vain and subjective expression of social prejudice”.  Ryckmans goes on to argue, given the lack of objective values, universities are now dead, but nobody has noticed.

The way literature is taught in schools provides a striking example of how destructive and impoverished education has become.  Since the mid-to-late 1960’s the definition of literature has been exploded to include multi-media texts, graffiti, SMS texting, posters and student’s own writing. No longer are students introduced to classic myths, fables, legends and fairy tales and those enduring works that have stood the test of time, have something profound and insightful to say about human nature and the circumambient universe and that are exemplary examples of their craft.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-parents-saying-no-to-smartphones

Every time one of his classmates gets a smartphone, Jhett Rogers thinks to himself: There goes another one. 

“It kind of feels like I’ve lost a friend. Whenever I’m with them, they’re zoned out and always on their phone.” 

But Rogers, a middle schooler in Salt Lake City, says he still can’t shake the desire to join the club. Six months ago, the only other holdout in his 30-strong group of friends got an iPhone.

“It kind of made me feel left out and jealous,” he says. “But later I don’t want one because I know what happens.”

He says kids in the hallways now bump into each other, with everyone staring down at their phones. Teachers have started giving up on his school’s no-phone policy, knowing students hide their devices up their hoodie sleeves and pull them out as soon as no one’s looking. At lunch hour, he says, everyone eats alone, scrolling TikTok while they chew. 

At 13, Jhett is part of a small, but growing, minority group of holdouts. By age 12, seven out of ten American kids own a smartphone. They also spend about eight hours online a day, inhaling TikTok trends, toggling between texts, and turning their daily lives into Snapchat and Instagram content. Most will have seen pornography by age 12, with three in four teenage boys saying they watch adult content at least once a week.

Meanwhile, a growing body of research shows that smartphones are at least partly to blame for skyrocketing rates of teenage anxiety and depression. As author Jonathan Haidt, reporting on a recent worldwide study on smartphone use among nearly 28,000 youths, put it: “The younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health the young adult reports today.” 

For years, the risks have been clear as day among Silicon Valley’s brightest minds, including Bill Gates and Google’s Sundar Pichai, who famously kept smartphones away from their own kids, and Steve Jobs, who limited his children’s screen time altogether. But it has taken the Covid-19 pandemic for ordinary Americans to come to the same conclusion: that their kids had become dependent on their phones, and their school work suffered as a result. This year, an increasing number of school districts—in Ohio, Maryland, Colorado, and other states—have banned the devices in class. And in July, the state of Florida will enforce a new phone fatwa, barring their use during instructional time at all public schools.

https://rufo.substack.com/p/the-great-university-reform-debate?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Earlier this month, I participated in a friendly debate hosted by Stanford University’s Classical Liberalism Initiative, on the topic of “Academic Freedom and Higher Education Reform.”

I made the case that the modern university has lost its sense of purpose and requires significant institutional reform, even political recapture, to restore the principles of classical liberal education, while my interlocutor, Princeton professor Keith Whittington, argued for a more cautious approach, emphasizing the values of academic freedom, faculty governance, and institutional autonomy.

My belief is that the old right-libertarian solutions, which rely on procedural values, are doomed to fail. In fact, they are responsible, in large part, for the current mess. Rather than continue to pursue this dead end, I believe that we must revive the democratic governance of our public universities and shape them according to the principles and priorities of voters, who elect legislators to govern state institutions in the interest of the common good.

The following are some highlights from this debate.

On the Question of “Who Decides”

Christopher Rufo: These are all political decisions. And I think, in opposition to many of my libertarian friends, that the universities are not overly politicized. The universities are overly ideologized and insufficiently politicized. We should politicize the universities and understand that education is, at heart, a political question. Aristotle presents his theory of education in Book VIII of the Politics. The point of education, he says, is to train citizens for participation in the polis, in political life. And so, libertarian conservatives who would want to retreat are actually abdicating an enormous responsibility. These are public universities funded by taxpayers. This is not a free marketplace of ideas; this is a state-run monopoly on education institutions. And we have a duty and responsibility to use political power to shape them towards serving the citizens, towards serving the public good.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-bar-exam-puts-dei-over-competence-ncbe-family-law-schools-9c0dd4e8?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

The bar exam is about to get a nationwide overhaul. The National Conference of Bar Examiners, or NCBE, which creates and administers the uniform bar exam, plans to roll out a revamped version of the bar exam, which it calls the “NextGen” exam, in 2026. After attending the NCBE’s annual meeting this month, I have serious concerns about how this test will affect law students, law schools and the legal profession.

The proposed NextGen exam will be shorter than the current two-day evaluation, test fewer areas of law, and probe each subject less deeply. Certain topics won’t be tested at all. The exam will also feature new client-interaction exercises, though it’s unclear what this feature will look like and how the NCBE will ensure it is graded objectively.

Some of these changes may prove salutary. Working with clients, for example, is an essential feature of any law practice. But the new exam also seems far less rigorous and could hamper the ability of states to determine who should be admitted to practice law. The results could be ruinous. States can’t maintain functional court systems unless clients and judges can trust the basic competency and integrity of attorneys admitted to the bar.

The proposed exam will also eliminate family law and trusts and estates as tested subjects. Tens of millions of Americans live in rural areas and small towns, where legal needs typically revolve around family law (marriage, divorce, custody and adoption) and probate matters (estate administration, guardianships and conservatorships). In many rural areas, residents’ access to justice depends on the ability of only a handful of practicing attorneys. These residents need to know that new lawyers have the foundational knowledge to serve their needs or at least the threshold understanding necessary to refer them elsewhere. If these areas of legal practice are eliminated from the exam, it will be difficult to replenish the requisite knowledge in our lawyer ranks.

But perhaps the biggest concern is the NCBE’s use of the NextGen exam to advance its “diversity, fairness and inclusion” agenda. Two of the organization’s stated aims are to “work toward greater equity” by “eliminat[ing] any aspects of our exams that could contribute to performance disparities” and to “promote greater diversity and inclusion in the legal profession.” The NCBE reinforces this message by touting its “organization-wide efforts to ensure that diversity, fairness, and inclusion pervade its test products and services.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/have-you-looked-inside-any-of-these-books

President Joe Biden and the Democrats think that they’ve found a potent campaign issue in “book banning.” Indeed, a recent piece in Politico asserts that the Biden campaign has “made the issue of book banning a surprisingly central element of his campaign’s opening salvos.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been the most prominent Republican leader supporting the removal of inappropriate books from schools. I live in Florida, and I checked out five of these “banned” books to see why they were removed from school libraries.

All five books were easy to find at my local library. They are categorized as “young adult,” i.e., titles intended for children ages 12 to 18, according to the American Library Association. After reviewing them, I’m convinced that the overwhelming majority of the public wouldn’t find their removal controversial, if they knew what was contained in these provocative, and in some cases pornographic, titles.

Politico quotes a Democratic pollster who claimed that “book banning tests off the charts,” with Americans overwhelmingly opposing it. “They associate it with really authoritarian regimes, Nazi Germany,” said Celinda Lake. This is likely because the media and Democrats have misled the public in several ways. First, in using the word “ban,” they’ve created the impression that books removed from schools are also being removed from public libraries and bookstores. They’re not.

Second, prominent figures on the left have not told the truth about the content of the “banned” books and which ones have been removed from schools. For example, many progressives promoted a false claim that Duval County, Florida banned books about Robert Clemente, Hank Aaron, and Rosa Parks. Duval County schools wrote a post on February 17 correcting the misinformation, but that didn’t stop Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from blaming the GOP for allegedly prohibiting a book about Parks in Duval County more than a month later in a speech on the floor of Congress. “The Life of Rosa Parks— this apparently is too woke for the Republican Party,” she said.

The first book I looked at, This Book is Gay, written by transgender author Juno Dawson, is marketed as a “bestselling exploration of sexuality and gender for young adults.” Dawson writes in one chapter that “perhaps the most important skill you will master as a gay or bi man is the timeless classic, the handjob.” She continues, “Something they don’t teach you in school, is that in order to be able to cum at all, you or your partner may need to finish off with a handy.” The book also offers graphic descriptions of oral and anal sex, among other adult topics. “Being on bottom makes a dude no less manly than his top partner,” Dawson writes of anal sex. “He is literally taking it like a man.”