RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-desantis-schools-the-college-board-ap-african-american-studies-curriculum-crt-condoleezza-rice-11675293239?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The College Board has released a serious rewrite of its framework for a new high-school advanced placement (AP) course in African-American Studies. Critical race theory is out, and Condoleezza Rice is in. The group insists that revisions were done for pedagogical reasons and completed in December, but even assuming that’s true, it’s vindication for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Florida rejected the last version of the curriculum, which featured topics on “Black Queer Studies,” “‘Postracial’ Racism,” and “the case for reparations.” That framework suggested teens read a text from an academic exponent of critical race theory. “We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think,” Mr. DeSantis said, “but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them.”

Even as it deletes this academic theorizing, the College Board denies it’s reacting to Florida’s criticism. The other explanation is that it arrived at a similar conclusion on its own. Mr. DeSantis’s critics have accused him of trying to erase black history, though he was doing nothing of the sort. If the revised AP framework actually was drawn up in December, then the curriculum committee had already decided that none of this nonsense was needed for teaching black history to high-schoolers.

The College Board’s CEO is calling the revised course “an unflinching encounter with the facts and evidence of African-American history.” One thing driving the changes, he said, was that students in the pilot class were engaged by primary sources, but they found the academic theories “quite dense.”

Yesterday, I joined Governor Ron DeSantis in Sarasota, Florida, to support his new education reform initiative, which promises to abolish DEI bureaucracies, prohibit coercive “diversity statements,” ban mandatory critical race theory-style “diversity training,” and end identity-based preferences in all Florida public universities.

In my speech to the press, I stood with the governor and explained the Orwellian nature of DEI, which sounds well-intentioned, but in truth, divides Americans into “oppressor” and “oppressed,” actively discriminates on the basis of ancestry, and seeks to create equality of outcomes, rather than equal treatment under the law.

DeSantis’ proposal is a bold one. For decades, conservatives have ceded the universities to the most intolerant and ideological factions of the Left. We’ve been paralyzed by the fear of specious accusations of “censorship.”

No more. It’s time to restore public authority over our public institutions. I will do everything in my power to help leaders such as Governor DeSantis—who has proven to be the most ambitious and strategically-minded political figure in the United States—succeed in transforming these proposals into the law of the land.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/this_is_how_you_do_it_make_woke_academics_live_up_to_their_own_rules.html

Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” apply to all radicals, including those who take the radical position that patriotic constitutional conservativism is a good thing. Conservatives need to enshrine his sixth rule: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” That’s the wonderful move the descendants of T.C. Williams made when the University of Richmond deleted his existence.

The University of Richmond is a private liberal arts college in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. It was founded as a Baptist institution in 1830 and officially became a college in 1843. During the Civil War, its entire student body enlisted in the Confederate Army, while its buildings were a hospital for wounded Confederate troops.

The college fell on hard times after the Civil War and was saved thanks only to a $5,000 donation ($93,332 in 2023 dollars) in 1866 from James Thomas. Thomas’s papers are at the Duke University Library, which describes him as “one of the largest of antebellum tobacco manufacturers.” If he wasn’t a slave owner, I’ll eat my…well, I don’t have a hat, but I’d eat it if I did. No schools or buildings, however, carry his name.

And then there’s the law school. It was founded in 1870 but got its real boost in 1890 when T.C. Williams, a trustee, passed away, and his family donated $25,000 ($803,999 in 2022 dollars) to start an endowment for the law school. That endowment was so important that, by 1920, the University of Richmond renamed the law school. Up until last year, it was The T.C. Williams School of Law.

What changed in 2022 was the left’s crusade to wipe out the stain of American racism by renaming everything that carried the name of someone associated with racism or slavery in any way. (I’m still waiting for Democrats to rename everything associated with Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the federal government.) So it was that The T.C. Williams School of Law will henceforth be called the “University of Richmond School of Law.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/do-children-belong-to-the-public-schools/

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, co-authors of The Communist Manifesto, derided what they called the “bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child.”
Soviet revolutionary and Marxist theoretician Alexandra Kollontai, who served as the People’s Commissar for Welfare in Vladimir Lenin’s regime, claimed that parents were “not capable of educating the ‘new person.’” Only qualified educators, she added, will provide the right environment for the child to “grow up a conscious communist who recognizes the need for solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective.”

Leftists today have embraced this Communist anti-nuclear family ideology. They believe that it takes the “collective” to raise a child. For example, Melissa Harris-Perry, a professor affiliated with the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Wake Forest University and former host for MSNBC, declared in a commercial she recorded for the network that “we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

Leftwing school administrators and teachers have infiltrated public school systems across the country, allowing them the opportunity to indoctrinate their captive student audiences with poisonous propaganda.

Thus, it is no surprise that these leftwing ideologues are pressuring public schools in many states to step in the shoes of parents and take over deciding what is in the children’s best interests. Public schools are enabling impressionable students as young as eleven to deal with their underlining mental and social problems by expressing a gender identity other than their biological sex. Administrators and teachers play mind games with their students by calling them by their preferred names and pronouns and allowing them to select the bathrooms they wish to use, while hiding all this from the students’ parents. That is child abuse.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-of-north-carolina-school-of-civic-life-and-leadership-daily-tar-heel-board-of-trustees-11675203324?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Our editorial on Friday about the University of North Carolina’s effort to create a new school dedicated to free inquiry and open academic discourse has caused a fuss on campus that illustrates why the new school is needed. It seems that faculty grandees are outraged that the UNC board of trustees thought such a school is necessary and didn’t even seek the faculty’s permission.

The Daily Tar Heel documents the angst in the Chapel Hill faculty lounge in a Jan. 30 story that is unintentionally hilarious in its ivory-tower indignation. The reporter quotes UNC law professor Eric Muller as saying, “I thought: how on Earth? How on Earth could The Wall Street Journal know this.”

Here on Earth, it’s called journalism.

Chair of the Faculty Mimi Chapman told the Tar Heel she is “flabbergasted” at the trustees’ decision and tweeted that UNC alumni are “leading and civically engaged left, right and center” with the hashtag #solutioninsearchofaproblem.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-graves-of-academe-a-job-announcement/

A job announcement posted at H-Net on January 19, 2023:

The Department of History in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Simon Fraser University, respectfully acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), qiqéyt (Qayqayt), qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen), Səmyámə (Semiahmoo), and sc̓əwaθən (Tsawwassen) Peoples, on whose ancestral, traditional, and unceded territories Simon Fraser University’s three campuses stand. We are committed to reconciliation through decolonization and Indigenization, telling inclusive stories about the past, and acknowledging different historical epistemologies.

The Department of History invites applications for a full-time tenure-track appointment in History at the rank of Assistant Professor, to start as early as July 15, 2023. We seek a scholar with expertise in the history of the Black Americas, broadly conceived. We especially welcome scholars whose research and teaching focuses on Canada, the Caribbean, or Latin America, while also welcoming comparative, transnational, and cross-regional approaches.

The successful candidate must have research and teaching interests and lived experience in Black communities, including a demonstrable history of community involvement. Ideal candidates will have experience teaching a diverse student body.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/27/a-21st-century-high-school-movement/

From 1910 to 1940, the soaring demand for educated workers to staff new white-collar jobs in the manufacturing sector created the American high school movement. It led to “a spectacular education transformation” that raised enrollment of 18-year-olds from 19 to 71 percent, and graduation rates from 9 to more than 50 percent. This lifted the United States to the forefront of educational attainment in the world. 

Today, we see the beginnings of a 21st-century high school movement, created by efforts in K-12 education to connect high school students to work through career pathways partnership programs. 

These programs acquaint students with the demands of the workforce and employers by engaging them in work with adult mentors from backgrounds different from their own. Such connections produce new cross-class friendships, social networks, and information sources among students, teachers, employer mentors, and other program supporters. These relationships with young people help shape their expectations, aspirations, and behaviors by showing them worlds previously unseen and opportunities not imagined. They allow students to build social capital and gain workforce experience. 

Finally, these programs nurture civil society by creating new social networks and forms of community for the young people and adults who participate in them. While the full fruits of this growing movement have yet to be reckoned, cumulatively they suggest a sea change in education that will enable people to thrive in the 21st-century workforce.   

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/26/desantis-college-appointees-like-chris-rufo-show-the-battle-for-americas-academies-is-far-from-over/

Fixing education has to start sometime, and it has to start somewhere; it looks like that time is now, and that place is Florida.

SARASOTA, Fla. — In early January, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed a group of six conservative academics and activists to the board of trustees of the New College of Florida in Sarasota. Some of the individuals nominated to the small liberal art school’s board include Chris Rufo, who has led the charge against the proliferation of critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology in America’s classrooms and boardrooms; renowned constitutional scholar Charles Kesler; and Matthew Spalding, the current dean of Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government.

Shortly after the announcement was made, DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, indicated that a priority of the new trustees would be establishing a curriculum specifically dedicated to “classical” education, giving New College further distinction from the rest of the institutions of higher learning that are currently a part of Florida’s state university system.

Speaking with The Federalist, Rufo suggested that by embracing classical education, New College could stave off the bureaucratic materialist bloat that has come to characterize and bog down much of higher education. Colleges have “adopted this kind of empty materialist enterprise that has squashed the more significant spiritual and intellectual enterprise of learning,” he said. “And I think classical schools are really at the forefront of saying, ‘we’ve lost our way, let’s look to the past to try and make a more meaningful present.’ Maybe then we’ll actually have something that matters to people.” 

New College’s approach to learning would become similar to that of classical schools like Hillsdale College in Michigan. As Uthmeier said earlier this month, “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/british-universities-putting-trigger-warnings-shakespeare-greek-tragedies-being-too-dark

British universities have reportedly begun putting trigger warnings on great Greek and Shakespearean tragedies for students who may be sensitive to their dark content. 

U.K. outlet The Telegraph reported Wednesday that the University of Derby and several other British universities have deemed celebrated tragedies like Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as “potentially upsetting” for students.

As such, university staff have attached “trigger warnings” to a school literature module that covers classic tragedies, cautioning students that the works are “obsessed” with suffering.

One British university has placed a “trigger warning” on a class featuring works of Shakespeare, thanks to the stories’ dark content. (The Associated Press)

The Telegraph added, “Athenian dramas concerning the deaths of mythical kings, and Arthur Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman, are also on the reading list for the module, which has been given a blanket advisory on how the tragic could be troubling.”

The outlet provided the text of the warning provided by professors for their students, which stated, “Tragedy is a genre obsessed with violence and suffering, often of a sexual or graphic kind, and so some of the content might be triggering for some students.”

The “trigger warning” provided an additional note from the class instructor: “If you feel that your engagement with particular texts or themes is going to present challenges, do speak to me in advance of the class.”