RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/stop-law-students-blocking-free-speech-stanford/

When a federal appellate judge speaks at a major law school, he should expect tough questions from a learned audience. He should not expect to be shouted down. When he tries to speak but is heckled, jeered and disrupted, he should expect a university administrator to step in, read the students the riot act and restore order. He shouldn’t expect that administrator to sympathize with the disruptive students and let the trouble continue, as the feckless bureaucrat at Stanford Law School did.  

Her shameful behavior is hardly unique. It’s characteristic of mid-level bureaucrats hired to push “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” at universities across the country. They show very little concern for free speech, alternative views or robust debate. That’s a very big problem since those are the very essence of higher education in a democracy. 

These metastasizing DEI bureaucracies endow political ideologues with unchecked power over students’ lives and campus activities. The episode at Stanford shows how they use it. That needs to be fixed. One path to doing that (and lowering the cost of higher education, now encumbered by top-heavy administrative structures) is to abolish the entire DEI apparatus. 

The victim at Stanford was federal appellate judge Kyle Duncan and all the students who came to hear him. True, the university later apologized, but that’s just cheap talk unless it is followed by serious actions against the disruptive students and the administrator who failed in her basic responsibility. Of that, we have heard nothing. Only the naive expect much better from Stanford (or Yale, Harvard, Columbia and dozens more). Stanford students are so committed to their illiberal views, so cloaked in moral righteousness, that they actually protested the dean even issuing an apology. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/future-lawyers-who-are-afraid-of-debate/

Something disturbing is taking place with increasing regularity at elite law schools. For the third time this year, a guest speaker has been rudely confronted by a mob of tendentious scolds intent on suppressing views with which they disagree.

Not content merely with expressing their opposing point of view, these campus brownshirts are so sure of their beliefs, so positive that their perception is the valid one, the only true one, that they are comfortable with suppressing the alternate opinions and ideology of those whose speech they seek to silence.

And they exert their unearned moral and intellectual superiority to silence ideological opponents because feckless administrators have tolerated this outrageous behavior—the use of what is known as the “heckler’s veto”— for too long now and are reaping the inevitable backlash.

The heckler’s veto is an unethical tactic used the advance one’s own beliefs by defeating an ideological opponent’s argument by silencing him, instead of having to offer a compelling argument of one’s own; someone with alternate views has his speech canceled or, if it is held, shouted down, disrupted, and jeered at.

This is precisely what took place at the Stanford Law School on March 9th when Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan was scheduled to deliver a lecture on the topic of “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” Instead of being greeted by a polite group of students eager to learn from a federal judge’s wide experience, Judge Duncan, who had been invited by Stanford’s Federalist Society (FedSoc), instead stood at the front of a full classroom with some 100 jeering, insulting activists who only purpose of attending was to silence Duncan and prevent him from speaking at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/leftist-gestapo-tries-to-suffocate-charlie-kirks-voice-in-california/

“Another far-right speaker is coming to UC Davis. How should the community respond?” read the headline on a March 14 Sacramento Bee opinion piece by the Bee’s “opinion assistant” Hannah Holzer,  and UC Davis graduate.

The speaker is a “vocal transphobe and Donald Trump fanatic,” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Kirk’s visit is “upsetting and unwelcome, especially in light of nationwide attacks on the transgender community and on broader LGBTQ+ rights.” In addition, UC Davis has an “abysmal history” of public events that have gone wrong.

In 2011, cops were “pepper spraying students” but Holzer fails to recall that those students were protesting tuition hikes by University of California bosses. Holzer quotes UC Davis English professor Joshua Clover, who has “been targeted by TPUSA, in a recent op-ed for the university’s newspaper.” The Sacramento Bee opinion assistant fails to provide the back story.

In 2019, convicted criminal Kevin Limbaugh gunned down Natalie Corona, 22, a rising star in the Davis police department. The community hailed Corona as a hero and thousands of people, including police officers from across the country, attended a memorial service for the slain officer.

A photo of Corona holding the “thin blue line” flag went viral on social media. The UC Davis campus Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission proclaimed, “this flag represents an attempt by law enforcement to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Professor Clover, who moonlights as Communist poet, was “thankful that every living cop will one day be dead, some by their own hand, some by others, too many of old age.” 

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.