RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/14/the-dei-retreat-demise-or-disguise/

For months, skeptics of DEI mandates have celebrated as Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and even the Ivy League have rolled back DEI programs. The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action appeared to cool Americans’ re-infatuation with treating people differently according to race.

But history should temper our optimism. Some recent policy changes look less like a full-fledged rout and more like a strategic maneuver.

Take, for instance, the universities that have recently abandoned mandatory diversity statements from job applicants. For decades, hiring committees have used such statements as a tool to discriminate against right-of-center viewpoints and white or Asian applicants. 

Now, MIT and the Harvard Department of Arts and Sciences have scrapped diversity statements. Some critics of the practice seem to take this move as a sincere change. The New York Times quoted the former dean of the Harvard Medical School as saying “the large, silent majority of faculty who question . . . these diversity statements — these people are being heard.” Likewise, some observers called MIT’s move a “watershed moment.”

But, as Hamlet warned, “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” The Harvard deans themselves claim they’re ditching the requirement because it doesn’t work, not because these policies are wrong or illegal. They said diversity statements are “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and “confusing” to international candidates.

And the Harvard deans still want to consider candidate “efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” They will now use two statements: a “service statement” about how an applicant has strengthened academic communities and a “teaching and advising statement” about how an applicant has fostered an open learning environment.

MIT’s move appears more genuine, at least on the surface. MIT President Sally Kornbluth issued a statement recognizing that these statements “impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.” The MIT decision is also university-wide and supported by MIT’s general leadership. But even here, we should not let optimism overrun skepticism. President Kornbluth herself confirmed that MIT remains committed to DEI by other means.

This Fall will mark two years since the far-left DEI programming at the Pentagon’s K-12 schools became a national controversy.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com spearheaded the oversight and detailed reporting.  

Congressional inquiries and heated public hearings ensued, followed by a claim from the Department of Defense (DoD) that they’d closed their DEI offices for good.  

Said “closure” of the DoD’s DEI offices was a lie by omission.  

Our final report on DoDEA schools, released last month, illustrated that although the DoD closed the DEI department, they replaced it with a secret steering committee to inject DEI ideology across the entire school system serving 70,000+ students.

Furthermore, the DoD secret committee was using so-called Social Emotional Learning to ask kids about their emotional state, engage in private chats with them (hidden from parents) and record the data in perpetuity using technology like Google for Education.

Finally, the secret committee’s teacher training materials made claims about “antiracism” and critiqued mainstream holidays like Thanksgiving. Teachers participated in online discussions that devolved into struggle sessions about white privilege and how-to’s on transmitting this worldview to children.  

Thankfully, leaders in Congress, especially Reps. Elise Stefanik, Jim Banks, and the House Armed Services Committee, take this matter seriously.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-trustee-solution-for-higher-education

Conservatives who have witnessed higher-education reforms fail to stop the spread of political correctness have good reason to be dismayed. There is, however, a promising tactic available to them right now, at least in some states, that requires little manpower and no extra cost. All it takes is a determined governor plus a few individuals experienced in academic politics and practice. Consider Florida.

In December 2022, a staffer in the office of Governor Ron DeSantis asked if I would serve as a trustee of New College of Florida, the small honors college in the state system founded in Sarasota in 1964. I agreed, as did Christopher Rufo, Charles Kessler, Matthew Spalding, and, later, Ryan Anderson. By the time of our first board meeting in late January 2023, word of our appointment had spread, and dozens of news stories fashioned a narrative: conservative vandals ruin liberal arts gem. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the hall with megaphones and placards, while 200 students, professors, parents, and activists crowded inside to deliver public comment laced with invective. 

What happened next provided a lesson for the Right: a few conservatives and a strong governor can enact genuine reform—if they exploit the proper power center. Over the next several months, amid faculty and administrator hostility, media attacks, censure from scholarly associations, nonstop lawfare, and reproofs from politicians (California governor Gavin Newsom even came to Florida to commiserate with protesters), we fired the president and general counsel, hired a new president, ended DEI operations, denied early tenure to five candidates, abolished the gender studies major, recruited donors and new professors (sometimes over faculty opposition), and steered curricular revisions in a classical direction.

https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-california-gender-law-newsom

Child predators follow a common playbook: target the victim, gain their trust, fill a need, and, crucially, isolate the child from her parents. For several years, this has also been standard California state protocol with regard to schoolchildren questioning their gender identities. On Monday, this scheme became law.

The “SAFETY Act,” AB 1955, signed by California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, legally forbids schools from adopting any policy that would force them to disclose “any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent.” Schools may not, as a matter of policy, inform parents of a child’s new gender identity unless the child volunteers her approval. The law also prohibits schools from punishing any school employee found to have “supported a pupil” hurtling down a path toward risky and irreversible hormones and surgeries.

The law effectively shuts down the local parents’ rights movement in California by eliminating its most important tool: the ability to organize at the community level to stop schools from deceiving them. No longer can families hope to convince their school boards to require schools to notify parents that their daughter, Sophie, has been going by “Sebastian” in class; that her teacher, school counselor, and principal have all been celebrating Sebastian’s transgender identity; that they’ve been letting her use the boys’ bathroom and reifying the sense that she is “really a boy.” 

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the law supports the priming of minor children for a secret life with a new gender identity. This includes having school-aged children participate in sexualized discussions and make identity declarations with school faculty, which are often actively hidden from the child’s parents. Elon Musk called the law “the final straw” for families and announced his intention to move both SpaceX and X, two of California’s most prominent tech companies, out of the state as a result. “The goal [of] this diabolical law,” he tweeted, “is to break the parent-child relationship and put the state in charge of your children.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/17/the-republic-is-asleep/

The scale of America’s civic ignorance is staggering. In June, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) conducted a national survey of college students that delved into their basic knowledge of American history and government and found that significant numbers of college students graduate without even a rudimentary grasp of America’s history and political system.

For example, 60% of college students could not correctly identify the term lengths of members serving in U.S. Congress, and 63% were unable to identify the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Importantly, these were multiple-choice questions. Hence, students didn’t have to recall John Roberts’ name, only recognize it. The same is true for the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, whose name was only known to 35% of students. More than two-thirds didn’t know that impeachment trials occur before the Senate. A majority of students believe that the Constitution was written in 1776 rather than 1787.

On the other hand, 89% know that Jeff Bezos owns Amazon, and 75% are aware that Jay-Z is married to Beyoncé.

While the above numbers are distressing, they are not surprising, as fewer than 20% of American colleges and universities require a course on U.S. government or history to graduate, according to ACTA.

The ACTA report is hardly a one-off. The Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey, released late last year, found that 34% of Americans could not name all three branches of government, 10% could name just two, 7% knew only one, and 17% didn’t know any. Additionally, when respondents were asked to name the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, 77% named freedom of speech, but just 40% knew that freedom of religion is included, 33% named the right to assembly, 28% knew freedom of the press, and a paltry 9% mentioned the right to petition the government.

As Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, points out, a U.S. citizenship test has been in place since 1986. The exam consists of 100 questions about American history, our system of government, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens.

https://www.afterbabel.com/

Introduction from Zach Rausch and Lenore Skenazy:

We now describe The Anxious Generation as a tragedy in three acts. Act 1, the loss of community, began in the 1960s and 1970s, when local communal life and obligations began to weaken, and social distrust began to rise (as described in Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone). This loss of trust led to Act 2, the loss of the play-based childhood. That began in the 1980s but really accelerated in the 1990s when children were pulled indoors, away from the unsupervised play with peers that had been typical for most of human history. As more immersive and exciting virtual worlds emerged, kids were drawn away from the real world and into the virtual one. The early 2010s marked the beginning of Act 3, the rise of the phone-based childhood, with the advent of smartphones and enhanced-virality social media.

Today’s post focuses on Act 2, the loss of play-based, free-range childhood, and its wide-ranging ramifications. Jon and Zach (and Lenore Skenazy, Peter Gray, and others) claim that the decline of a play-based childhood with ample independence caused children born in the late 1990s and later (Gen Z, and Gen Alpha) to become progressively more anxious. This dynamic prompted Camilo Ortiz, a professor of psychology at Long Island University and a clinical therapist, to wonder if the problem could be addressed by reversing the process:  Could increasing childhood independence decrease childhood anxiety?

Camilo took this simple idea and developed a new therapeutic intervention, “Independence Therapy,” that has just been published in The Journal of Anxiety Disorders. Camilo has found remarkable success with his patients and hopes that many more psychologists will adopt this new intervention as an approach to addressing the rising tide of anxious children (and parents).

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/07/07/universities_should_promote_rigorous_discourse_not_stifle_it_151217.html

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an advocacy article that attacks academic freedom and urges stifling contentious campus debates. Specifically, Evan Mullen, Eric J. Topol, and Abraham Verghese urge universities to “speak out publicly” and issue official institutional opinions about public controversies involving its professors “when it concludes that a faculty member’s opinion could cause public harm.” 

The NEJM authors write in the context of Stanford University refusing to institutionally condemn the arguments made by one of its scholars, Dr. Scott Atlas, when he advised the Trump administration on COVID policies in the early days of the pandemic. The authors, one of whom is a physician trainee (Mullen) and another the former vice chair of education (Verghese) at Stanford, are university colleagues of Atlas, as is one of the authors of this essay (Bhattacharya). They claim that Atlas’ publicly expressed skepticism of masking as an effective prophylactic against infection and his belief that lockdowns and school closures would cause more harm than good were so potentially harmful that Stanford itself – as an institution – should have condemned Atlas’ opinions.

Why? It wasn’t as if some of his colleagues didn’t criticize Atlas. Indeed, more than a hundred Stanford professors and physicians wrote publicly opposing his advice. The letter’s signatories also pushed a vote through the Stanford Faculty Senate in November 2020 condemning Dr. Atlas, using quasi-religious language to declare his positions “anathema.” But that wasn’t enough, apparently, because “institutional silence may be interpreted as tacit approval.”

Controversy between professors is the norm at the frontiers of science. It is utterly unsurprising that there would be discord over the proper policy to follow in the wake of a pandemic featuring a new virus, with great uncertainty about its epidemiological and biological aspects. In the intervening years, Dr. Atlas’ positions in 2020 on school closures and mask mandates have been proven legitimate, demonstrating the wisdom of Stanford not taking a position as an institution.