RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/17/ied-explodes-on-mits-campus/

Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, seems to be everywhere these days, from the White House to the boards of directors at Fortune 500 companies and to admissions and hiring policies at universities. We prefer to reverse the acronym, because IED – as in improvised explosive device – seems more apt, given the IED explosion in creating administrative bloat, invasive control of speech, and what used to be called “affirmative action.”

In a recent talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a speaker characterized the zeitgeist thusly: “Diversity is being invited to the dance. Inclusion is being asked to dance. And equity is sharing in the planning of the dance.” But for MIT and other academically rigorous universities and programs, the goal has always been to develop the brightest minds for the betterment of humankind in all fields of endeavor, not to create social butterflies.

MIT does not “invite” participants, because it is tantamount to a science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM”) Olympics. You compete feverishly to get in. You must be highly self-motivated to participate once there in absorbing every possible iota of knowledge and technique in your field of study. And it defies reality to assert that intellectual capacity and specialized aptitude are evenly distributed to allow equal contributions. The same applies to other higher education programs committed to advancing knowledge through its students and faculty. The dance metaphor for these schools is a gross distortion that reeks of the entitlement mentality of many in today’s younger generations.

In fact, the very assumption that there is a significant educational benefit of identity diversity is questionable for these academically rigorous schools, just as the Olympics are focused only on athletic excellence and have retained their exalted status as a result. Intellectual diversity, which is not the within the purview of IED departments, is what fosters advancement of knowledge. In any case, the similarities and intense focus among those students who are truly qualified tends to make identity diversity largely inconsequential in comparison. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yale-and-harvard-law-schools-unrank-themselves-u-s-news-and-world-report-rankings-college-heather-gerken-11668726298?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Yale and Harvard law schools said this week they will no longer participate in the annual law-school rankings published by U.S. News & World Report. Readers may see no one to root for in a showdown between elite schools and the higher-ed ratings complex, but there’s a point to be made about what appears to be a flight from merit and transparency at these schoo

Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken in a statement this week called the U.S. News rankings, which have long influenced the perception of prestige, “profoundly flawed.” Yale has “reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession. As a result, we will no longer participate.” Harvard Law School quickly followed, and on Thursday UC-Berkeley Law pulled out.

The U.S. News rankings have plenty of shortcomings, though being run by a “for-profit magazine,” as Yale swiped in its statement, isn’t one of them. Dean Gerken says the U.S. News methodology penalizes law schools that send students into public-interest fellowships, and that its metrics on student debt don’t account properly for loan-forgiveness programs. Berkeley also noted a per student expenditure rating that pushes tuition prices up and is not a proxy for an excellent legal education.

But Dean Gerken gave away the game when she wrote: “Today, 20% of a law school’s overall ranking is median LSAT/GRE scores and GPAs. While academic scores are an important tool, they don’t always capture the full measure of an applicant. This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford expensive test preparation courses.”

This sounds like cover for a desire by Yale to be free to admit students with lower test scores in service to diversity, but without taking a hit to its exclusive reputation. Yale has long been No. 1 in the U.S. News rankings.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/resistance-is-necessary/

Parents must do everything they can to stop CRT.

The teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in classrooms across America has raised the ire of parents—and for good reason. CRT’s principal claim is that America is systemically racist and incapable of racial justice. It is a wholesale ideological assault on the American experiment and rejects our founding principles—namely, that “all men are created equal” and should be treated as such under the law. Its ubiquity concerns parents, specifically, and citizens, generally, who object to this vision.    

The standard response by CRT apologists to parental pushback is to dissemble. They claim CRT is not really what its critics say it is, and that even if it is, CRT is not being taught in schools. But, even if it is being taught in schools, CRT is a necessary means to understand and interpret America’s racial past, present, and future. This strategy of obfuscation has been successful, because evidence of CRT’s spread in American schools has been largely anecdotal. Until now.   

A new Manhattan Institute study gives the lie to this narrative. The study asked “a nationally representative sample of 1,505 18- to 20-year-old Americans” whether they have been taught CRT and related concepts. The answers are troubling. Sixty-two percent of students report being taught that America is a “systemically racist country”; 57 percent report learning that “white people have conscious biases that negatively affect non-white people”; and 67 percent report hearing that “America is built on stolen land.” Among the students surveyed, 82.4 percent attend public schools.   

Ideologically, CRT is uniquely subversive, because it corrupts our future citizens. Its dissemination in public schools threatens the survival of the American regime.   

Preparing Students for Citizenship

The U.S. Supreme Court has explained that the “role and purpose of the American public school system” is to “prepare pupils for citizenship in the Republic.” The public school system, the Court has reasoned, is essential to “the preparation of individuals for participation as citizens, and in the preservation of the values on which our society rests.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivy-covered-fascism/

Introduction

In the last few decades since the conservative world began to sound the alarm about the disappearance of academic freedom and free speech on college campuses, the situation has grown increasingly dire.  The already unforgiving one-party political climate on college and university campuses has grown exponentially worse. The few professors who have dared to challenge the precepts of Critical Race Theory or other unquestionable tenets of the leftist narrative have found themselves facing immediate disciplinary action and calls for their termination from the cancel culture mob.

Even tenured professors are not fully protected from the puritan zeal of the Ivory Tower fascists who seek to scrub every last hint of dissent from their domains. Candidates for every position from the liberal arts to the hard sciences are now expected to craft Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements pledging their fealty to racial preferences and promoting “marginalized identities.” The mere suggestion that racial differences in performance are not solely due to structural racism and white supremacy is cause for immediate dismissal.

Students on campus fare even worse than faculty in this totalitarian environment. Encumbered by often-unconstitutional speech codes, Students can be suspended, expelled, or forced to submit to re-education for the merest stray remark or attempt at humor. Many universities maintain elaborate “bias reporting systems” to enable students to snitch on their classmates. A University of Arizona student became the subject of such a report when she attempted to draw the word “cotton” for an online Pictionary game. Observers claimed that her depiction of a possibly dark-skinned individual picking cotton was racist and demeaning. The U Conn Stamford College Republicans were reported for a photo which pictured a student making the “OK” sign; the reporter questioned whether it was a “White Power” symbol.

Our nation’s colleges and universities were constructed to be bastions of free and open debate by scholars engaged in the search for truth; instead they have become ideological prisons where the merest stray remark can be cause for expulsion and colleagues and classmates function as Stasi informers to hold the party line.

The following report exposes the worst offenders of this collegiate climate of censorship as the “Top Ten Fascist Colleges and Universities.” In particular, we are targeting those campuses who have instigated disciplinary proceedings or investigations of faculty or students who have dared to challenge leftist narratives and causes, those that censor conservative and libertarian speech on campus, and those campuses that maintain and enforce unconstitutional speech codes that restrict free expression, which should be a foundational principle of higher education.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/12/the-systemic-racism-of-the-teachers-unions/

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could reverse the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which SCOTUS asserted that the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The current case specifically cites the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, maintain that Harvard violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “which bars entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Hispanic applicants.”

One of the glaring outrages of the case is that the two national teachers unions—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—filed amicus briefs in which they pound the racial bean counting drum. The unions insist that “diversity” must remain a factor in choosing who gets to be admitted into a given college.

The NEA brief claims that “elementary and secondary schools remain heavily segregated. In the 2019–2020 school year, the average White student attended a majority White school. By contrast, students of color are far more likely to attend schools where the majority of students are also students of color.”

The irony of the teachers unions’ deploring racism in education is glaring, because it is the very same unions that essentially imprison children – notably poor children of color – in substandard public schools. Specifically, the union-mandated collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), in place throughout most of the country, bring to light why government-run schools fail so many kids.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/waste-fraud-and-abuse/seducation-department-funding-middle-east-studies-hubs-pushing
Also Read:https://www.nas.org/reports/hijacked/full-report

This week’s Golden Horseshoe is awarded to the Department of Education (DOE) for giving $2.9 million to 11 university-affiliated Middle East Studies Centers (MESCs) that are promoting left-wing causes and narratives, according to OpenTheBooks.com’s report on a recent investigation.

The public spending watchdog group reported on an investigation by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) concluding that the 11 Middle East Studies Centers, which receive federal funds, have “veered from their purpose, now pushing overtly anti-West ideologies focusing on social issues such as Islamophobia and immigration at the university level, and even pushing critical race theory to K–12 educators.” 

The 11 hosting universities identified by NAS are: Columbia University, George Washington University, Georgetown University, Indiana University, New York University, University of Arizona, UCLA, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, and a UNC/Duke University partnership.

While there are 50 MESCs in universities nationwide, the 11 targeted for scrutiny by NAS are designated as National Resource Centers, which receive federal funds. The 11 centers each receive $260,000 in Title VI funding annually from the DOE, amounting to $2.9 million.

The MESCs were originally founded to study Middle Eastern politics, culture, and language, NAS recounted in a press release. “But our analyses and case studies demonstrate that Middle East centers have since shifted their focus to promoting left-wing ideologies,” asserts the conservative nonprofit.

The NAS report, “Hijacked: The Capture of America’s Middle East Studies Centers,” provides case studies in how the centers have shifted focus to become hotbeds of anti-Western activism. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-systemic-racism-of-the-teachers-unions/

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could reverse the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which SCOTUS asserted that the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The current case specifically cites the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, maintain that Harvard violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “which bars entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Hispanic applicants.”

One of the glaring outrages of the case is that the two national teachers unions – the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers – filed amicus briefs in which they pound the racial bean counting drum. The unions insist that “diversity” must remain a factor in choosing who gets to be admitted into a given college.

The NEA brief claims that “elementary and secondary schools remain heavily segregated. In the 2019–2020 school year, the average White student attended a majority White school. By contrast, students of color are far more likely to attend schools where the majority of students are also students of color.”

The irony of the teachers unions’ deploring racism in education is glaring, because it is the very same unions that essentially imprison children – notably poor children of color – in substandard public schools. Specifically, the union-mandated collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), in place throughout most of the country, bring to light why government-run schools fail so many kids.

Last year, Old Dominion University professor Allyn Walker was forced to resign after an uproar about his campaign to destigmatize pedophilia, which included the suggestion to rebrand the word “pedophile” as “minor-attracted person” and to provide child pornography to offenders to appease their illicit desires.

Many considered the case open and shut. But this month, the American Society of Criminology, a professional association housed at Ohio State University, published an unequivocal defense of the embattled professor. They suggest that Walker should never have been forced to resign and lay blame on what they call a “hate and trolling attack” motivated by “misinformation” targeting Walker’s “non-binary, transgender and Jewish” status.

“Our friend and colleague lost their job [Walker is a female-to-male transgender and uses “they/them” pronouns] because they were defined as the problem instead of the transphobic, antisemitic hate,” wrote Old Dominion professors Ruth Triplett and Mona Danner. “Dr. Walker is a real live person with family, friends, pets and a home, who was on the path to obtaining tenure at an institution they were committed. Little concern is given to the harm done to them when the university rejected them just when they needed the support of a strong community.”

This is becoming a common defensive technique on the Left. Activists defend any transgression—even a campaign to destigmatize pedophilia—with the shield of “misinformation,” “transphobia,” and “harassment.” And, unfortunately, in many cases, it is enough. After resigning from Old Dominion, Walker quickly found new employment at Johns Hopkins University, where he works at a research center on child sex abuse.