RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/01/26/the-morning-briefing-good-news-school-choice-is-back-on-the-agenda-for-republicans-n1665175

When I first began writing about politics, I had two areas that I focused on more than any others: liberal media bias and school choice. In fact, the first political conference I ever attended was focused on school choice.

A dozen or so years ago, the Republican party was focused on it too. Somewhere along the way, that focus was blurred. The support for school choice was still there, the issue just wasn’t front and center.

I wrote in September of 2021 that the pandemic gave the GOP a chance to “get serious” about school choice. The teachers’ unions peeled back their masks and showed how truly evil they are during the worst of the COVID shutdown days. Well, a lot of us already knew that they were evil, but COVID made that plain to even the naivest among us.

The issue appears to be on the menu again for some in the GOP, especially in Iowa. Rick has the story:

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds was in an ebullient mood on Tuesday when she signed into law the most sweeping and revolutionary school choice program in the nation.

“What an amazing day for our children!” she exclaimed to the crowd of kids, parents, and lawmakers who had gathered in the Iowa Capitol rotunda to witness the historic signing.

Indeed, the new law, which will take effect this year, is a game changer for parents. The law will allow any Iowa family to use taxpayer funds to pay for private school tuition — at a cost of $345 million annually to the state once fully phased in.

ttps://graboyes.substack.com/p/overcoming-college

If you wish to squander your children’s potential and incinerate any appeal they might hold for employers, America is chock-full of colleges and universities anxious to harness their vast infrastructures to help make them unemployable. These services, refined over many decades, won’t come cheap. But America’s student-loan complex will happily offer tuition money by the wheelbarrow. Decades hence, when you tire of progeny residing in your attic, politicians will squeal at the opportunity to foist their student loan debts onto other Americans who made better decisions.

Mind you, not all colleges and universities—or programs within those institutions—fit this description. And regardless of where and what said progeny intend to study, you and your children have the capacity to make higher education a worthwhile experience. But in general, the task of making college worthwhile cannot be entrusted to colleges. I’ve spent much of my adult life in and around universities and always took great pleasure in helping students to navigate employment markets. Here are five bits of advice from my experience.

Check under the hood before shelling out the money.
Make sure your children understand that their merits are not obvious.
Master at least two things.
Begin the job search no later than the beginning of freshman year.
Reinvent yourself when necessary.

I’ll elaborate below on all five points.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/what-is-dei-spread-college-campuses

The phrase diversity, equity, and inclusion may appear to be benign, but it has quietly become the latest frontier in the culture war against woke education .

Often billed as necessary programs and trainings to ensure racially diverse and successful institutions, diversity, equity, and inclusion, also known as DEI, has been decried for stoking racial resentment and prioritizing physical characteristics over merit.

The commonplace programs, which opponents say are just another example of the prevalence of critical race theory in contemporary institutions, have forced college students and many corporate employees to sit through hours of discussions on maintaining a diverse and “inclusive” space.

The expansion of DEI has proved financially lucrative for some, as it has created an entirely new class of employee. In 2022, LinkedIn ranked diversity and inclusion manager as the second-fastest growing job over the past five years.

In higher education, the programs continually rolled out of DEI offices are changing the entire collegiate experience by requiring a host of trainings and programs for students and faculty, beginning with freshman orientation.

In 2021, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, released a report highlighting what it called “DEI bloat” in university administrative offices. The report found that the 65 universities that made up the “power five” conferences had an average of 45 employees tasked with “promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The University of Michigan took the title for the most DEI employees with 163, far more than the University of Virginia and the Ohio State University, which both had 94.

https://www.city-journal.org/recapturing-higher-education

The most significant political story of the past half-century is the activist Left’s “long march through the institutions.” Beginning in the 1960s, left-wing activists and intellectuals, inspired by theorists such as Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, made a concerted effort to embed their ideas in education, government, philanthropy, media, and other important sectors.

This process came to spectacular fruition following the 2020 death of George Floyd, when it seemed that every prestige institution in the United States got busy advancing the same ideological line on race, gender, and culture—which, whether they knew it or not, mimicked the precise themes that the old radicals had originally proposed. 

The long march through the institutions, in other words, was complete.

But conservatives, too, have updated their playbook. They have read their Gramsci and have begun to understand that ideological capture poses a grave threat to the American system. President Donald Trump shook conservatives out of their complacency with instinctual, if sometimes crude, cultural countermeasures. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has built on this approach, offering a sophisticated policy agenda for protecting families against captured bureaucracies.

Last week, DeSantis raised the stakes and proposed, for the first time, a strategy for reversing the long march through the institutions, beginning with what Marcuse believed was the initial revolutionary institution: the university. The governor appointed a slate of new trustees to the board of the New College of Florida, a notoriously left-wing campus, similar to that of Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington. DeSantis tasked the new board with transforming it into, to quote the governor’s chief of staff, the “Hillsdale of the South”—in other words, a classical liberal arts college that provides a distinctly traditional brand of education and scholarship.