RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thecollegefix.com/nearly-half-of-students-uncomfortable-expressing-controversial-views-on-campus-new-fire-free-speech-report/

Majority of students opposed to bringing conservative speakers on campus, report found

College students at America’s largest 203 colleges continue to censor themselves inside and outside of the classroom, a national survey of 45,000 students concluded.

Students play a significant role in censoring free speech on campus, but colleges can enforce policies that protect it, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s third annual College Free Speech Rankings, released in September, for the 2022-23 school year.

Adam Goldstein, FIRE’s vice president of research, told The College Fix in an email on December 16 that the wider culture has contributed to an atmosphere of thought and speech suppression on campus, measured by the report.

“To the extent there are clues in the existing data, cultural forces in the general public seem to create more discomfort than just on-campus interactions.” Goldstein stated. “For example, 41% of students were uncomfortable disagreeing with a professor in a written assignment, but 59% were uncomfortable disagreeing publicly.”

“Similarly, 48% of students were uncomfortable expressing their views on a controversial political topic on campus, while 60% were uncomfortable expressing unpopular opinions to fellow students on social media,” Goldstein stated.

However, Goldstein told the Fix that when it comes to students engaging in at least some forms of censorship, schools can play a big role in protecting free speech by enforcing policies against violent or disruptive tactics.

“Lots of campus censorship isn’t expressive, such as theft of newspapers, ongoing heckler’s vetoes that prevent speakers from speaking entirely, or trashing flyers from ideologically opposed campus groups,” he wrote. “To the extent campus policy or existing law prohibit those actions, enforcement is important. A policy is only ever as good as the will to enforce it.”

Columbia University ranked lowest, receiving a score of ‘Abysmal’

https://thespectator.com/topic/claudine-gay-harvard-president-racial-spoils-system/?utm_source=

Peter Salovey must be fretting.

The longtime president of Yale University has done everything in his power to pander to the forces of woke identity politics. He changed the name of Calhoun College at Yale because students didn’t like that it was named after John C. Calhoun, a supporter of slavery in the early nineteenth century.

Salovey covered over or ripped out artwork across the university that a specially appointed committee deemed insensitive or offensive. He shoveled tens of millions of dollars into “diversity” initiatives in an effort to appease student crybullies.

But Salovey has one insuperable handicap. He is white.

In the great racial sweepstakes of the day, that is (if I may so put it) an insuperable black mark. Harvard understands this. Which is the world’s richest university has just named Claudine Gay, a black woman, to be its next president.

Would she have been appointed had she been white? To ask the question is to answer it.

Gay will take office this summer, just when the Supreme Court will decide an important affirmative action case against the university.

How can Salovey compete with Gay? Is he thinking fondly of Al Jolson? I suspect that one way or the other, Salovey will have to leave the presidency of Yale soon. As a fully paid-up member of the racialist sisterhood, Yale will have to emulate its cousin in Cambridge if it is to maintain its bona fides as a suitably progressive institution in the vanguard of virtucratic fatuousness.

It will be hard to do better than Claudine Gay. Plaudits to Penny Pritzker, head of Harvard’s search committee. Name sound familiar? Yep, she was Obama’s commerce secretary, finance chair of his presidential campaigns. She is also the sister of J.B. Pritzker, the current Illinois governor.

The New York Times reports that some 600 people were considered for the top spot at Harvard. Gay, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, had all of the key credentials. As I say, the conditio sine qua non was race.

Beyond that, though, Gay is the right kind of black, which is to say she is all in on the Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bandwagon.

As Francis Menton explains in “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!” — a wide-ranging outline of Gay’s career — she has long been “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.” For example, she worked to bury complaints that one Harvard scholar, Ryan Enos, had falsified data in a study about public housing. Why? Because Enos had come to the right, i.e., the left-progressive conclusions in his study.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/22/the-36-million-question-college-presidents-wont-answer/

“Where’s the racism?”

This is the question that college presidents nationwide—and most everyone in their administrations—refuse to answer.

If you want to see a college president tap-dance to avoid accountability, go ahead and ask: “Who are the racist people, and what are the racist policies, programs, and procedures on your campus you claim is ‘rampant’ with ‘racism?’”

Enjoy the public relations messaging, but don’t expect a real answer. They can’t answer, because finding actual racism on a college campus is as likely as sighting Bigfoot. And just about as credible.

Now, college leaders are even more likely to circle the wagons against accountability, largely due to fears of litigation. Thanks to the resolution of a legal case in Ohio last week, this has become a $36 million question. Oberlin College paid up on a $36.6 million judgment to a local family bakery for libeling their business as “racist.”

The sad and completely unnecessary case of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College is likely to reshape the conversation about so-called antiracism efforts on university campuses in coming months and years, even as colleges fund expensive bureaucracies, commission task forces, and hire well-heeled bureaucrats to solve a problem that is almost nonexistent at their institutions. 

To Catch a Thief

The incident that led to the judgment occurred in November 2016, when a black Oberlin student shoplifted a bottle of wine from the bakery, was chased and caught by one of the owners, all of which resulted in a scuffle. The thief and his two accomplices, who intervened for their friend to pummel the clerk protecting his business, were all arrested.

Within 24 hours, Oberlin moved swiftly into action. Not to upbraid the students, nor to apologize to the bakery and to the owner’s son, Allyn D. Gibson, whom the trio attacked.

Rather than assist in the prosecution of the student, Oberlin shifted into high umbrage mode and supported a coalition of students, faculty, and administrators to attack the bakery publicly for “racism.” The college stopped doing business with the bakery.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/college-carnage/

The well-documented woes that plague our government-run k-12 schools are now infecting our colleges. Students are arriving at universities woefully unprepared with the skills that are needed to tackle the rigors of upper-level education.

Of late, the downward k-12 spiral is a result of the lengthy and absolutely pointless Covid shutdowns, as well as many schools’ penchant for drifting away from the traditional 3 Rs and focusing instead on a heavily politicized curriculum. As a result, student learning has taken a big hit.

A recent survey informs us just how dire the situation is. While 87% of college students answered that at least one of their classes was too difficult and that the professor should have made it easier, 64% said this was the case with “a few” or “most” of their classes.

On a similar note, American Enterprise Institute scholar Rick Hess reports that 64% of college students claim that they put “a lot of effort” into school. But of the students who answered that they’re putting in a lot of effort, “a third said they devote fewer than five hours a week to studying and homework – and 70% said they spend no more than 10 hours a week on schoolwork.”

Some colleges are even dumbing down their curriculum to accommodate struggling students. The English department at Rutgers announced that it will de-emphasize “traditional grammar rules” in its graduate writing program so as not to put students with poor English backgrounds at a disadvantage. In Kansas, universities may scrap their algebra graduation requirement because too many students are failing it. It is reported that about one in three Kansas students fails college algebra the first time around, and some need to take it several times before they pass, while others get so frustrated that they drop out altogether.

Politically, colleges are an abomination. John Ellis, professor emeritus and chairman of the California Association of Scholars, explains that in the past “there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople.”

But these days, the situation is exactly the opposite. It’s now the “professors who do what the small-minded small-town worthies used to do, shutting down analysis whenever it offends them, which is often.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/__trashed-4/

I went to Harvard. Once. Which is to say, I walked around the campus one day a long, long time ago during a visit to Boston. It was pleasant enough. It was almost as pretty as Wesleyan, Princeton, the University of Virginia, Duke, Chapel Hill, Michigan, Michigan State, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, Claremont, McGill, Cambridge, Leiden, Heidelberg, Tübingen, and at least a dozen or so other campuses that I’ve sampled over the years.

Harvard is, of course, the oldest American college. It’s also considered the pinnacle, the zenith, the acme of higher education in the United States. But why? Back when I was studying English at Stony Brook, an accreditation committee gave our department a higher rating than Harvard’s. But that didn’t matter in the slightest after you graduated. On the job market, a Harvard diploma was gold. Stony Brook? Ha!

No, Harvard is Harvard because it’s…Harvard. U.S. News and World Report, which presumes to list the “best colleges” year after year, admits that its ratings are based largely on reputation. Which makes no sense. Everybody knows what Harvard’s reputation is. The point of a rating should be to indicate whether or not a reputation is justified.

And the plain fact is that, no, the reputation of Harvard, at least when it comes to the humanities and social sciences, isn’t justified. And the same goes for the rest of the Ivy League, as well as for Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and all those boutique establishments like Oberlin and Swarthmore. Because these are the places where “woke” ideology has made the deepest inroads – and done the most damage.

On December 15, Claudine Gay, a political scientist who specializes in Critical Race Theory and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and who currently serves as Harvard’s Dean of Arts and Sciences, was selected to be the university’s next president, starting on July 1, 2023. The usual suspects cheered her appointment wildly, most of them celebrating her deep warmth and compassion and noting with glee that she would be Harvard’s second woman president and first black president. What a step forward for the oppressed!

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/takeover-russell-jacoby

In 1987 I published The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe which elicited heated responses. Only now do I see I got something wrong—as did my critics. Some had objected to a term I introduced, “public intellectual,” as redundant and misleading. Others rejected the main argument. I proposed a generational account of American intellectuals. For earlier American intellectuals, the university remained peripheral because it was small, underfunded, and distant from cultural life. The Edmund Wilsons and Lewis Mumfords earlier in the 20th century to the Jane Jacobs and Betty Friedans later saw themselves as writers and journalists, not professors. But I missed something, the dawning takeover of the public sphere by campus denizens and lingo.

What I called a transitional generation, the largely Jewish New York intellectuals, ended up later in their careers as professors, but usually they lacked graduate training. When Daniel Bell was appointed to the faculty of Columbia University in 1960, officials discovered that he did not have a Ph.D.—and bestowed it on him for his collection of essays (The End of Ideology). This incident indicates something of the commitment of these men—and they were men; they wrote essays for a public, not monographs or research papers for colleagues. This orientation was as true for a confrere of Bell, like Irving Howe, who also ended up as a professor without graduate training. He observed that like himself Bell did not want to write long-winded treatises; nor did they want to specialize or get pigeonholed. Or as Bell phrased it for all of them, “I specialize in generalizations.”

But the story changes for the next generation—my ’60s generation. In pose we were much more radical than previous American intellectuals.We were the leftists, Maoists, Marxists, Third Worldists, anarchists, and protesters who regularly shut down the university in the name of the war in Vietnam or free speech or racial equality. Yet for all our university bashing, unlike earlier intellectuals, we never exited the campus. We settled in. We became graduate students, assistant professors and finally—a few of us—leading figures in academic disciplines.

To be sure, this was not simply a series of individual choices. The conditions that funneled the transitional generation onto campuses were hard to resist. The life of the freelance intellectual, always precarious, had become virtually impossible.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/lincolnbrown/2022/12/19/everyone-gets-an-a-n1654760

Have you heard of New York City’s New School? Me either. Apparently, it is a very elite private university. According to the website, it is a place that “reimagines the future,” “interrogates justice and equity,” “cultivates new models of creative work,” and “creates more sustainable futures.” As far as the course catalog, it seems fairly straightforward in terms of its School of Design. Its liberal arts program offers classes such as “Outings in Queer Anthropology,” “Women in Post-Socialist Transformation,” and “Activist Anthropology: Toward Antiracism, Decolonization, and Anti-Oppression.” In other words, a school perfectly designed for overindulged, rich kids who are desperate to rid themselves of whatever guilt they have decided everyone has. And what do spoiled, rich kids do when they do not get what they want? They have tantrums, of course.

The New York Post reports that on Dec. 8, the students at The New School began a protest in solidarity with adjunct faculty who were striking for higher wages and a better healthcare package. That issue was resolved by Dec. 10, and yet the protest itself goes on. Somehow, the list of complaints has evolved into demands for better cafeteria food, a tuition freeze, and refunds for time lost during class, and that the president, vice president, and provost resign. They also want the president’s townhouse to be turned over to the student body. The protesters have yet to figure out what they will do with the property. Chief among the list of demands is that all students receive A grades for their fall semester classes and the removal of “incomplete” or “withdrawal” listings on grades. The New School told the Post, “The university supports peaceful free expression by our students, and we are listening closely to all of our students’ concerns. Faculty retain autonomy about how to conduct and grade their courses.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/white-students-are-prohibited-from-applying-to-this-unc-fellowship/

The public university dragged into court over its race-conscious admissions policy is now advertising a research fellowship that bars white applicants from applying.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—whose affirmative action program, along with that of Harvard University, is under review by the Supreme Court—sponsors the Fellowship for Exploring Research in Nutrition, which accepts applications exclusively from students who are “Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC),” according to the program’s website. Fellows earn thousands of dollars, live in on-campus apartments paid for by the university, and receive generous mentorship opportunities, including letters of recommendation.

“The field of nutrition is overwhelmingly comprised of white researchers,” an ad for the fellowship states. “Increased BIPOC representation in food policy research is critical for developing effective, equitable, comprehensive, and culturally competent policies that address nutrition-related health disparities.”

On Monday, the economist Mark Perry filed a complaint about the fellowship with the District of Columbia’s Office of Civil Rights. The complaint, which was reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, asks the office to investigate the university for “race-based discrimination.”

UNC Chapel Hill did not respond to a request for comment.

The program, which UNC Chapel Hill announced last week on its website, comes as UNC Chapel Hill and Harvard await a verdict from the Supreme Court over a lawsuit from Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit opposed to affirmative action. The group argues that both schools are violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans racial discrimination by the recipients of federal funds, and that UNC Chapel Hill, as a public university, is also violating the 14th Amendment, which bans racial discrimination by the government.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stanford-guide-to-acceptable-words-elimination-of-harmful-language-initiative-11671489552?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Parodists have it rough these days, since so much of modern life and culture resembles the Babylon Bee. The latest evidence is that Stanford University administrators in May published an index of forbidden words to be eliminated from the school’s websites and computer code, and provided inclusive replacements to help re-educate the benighted.

Call yourself an “American”? Please don’t. Better to say “U.S. citizen,” per the bias hunters, lest you slight the rest of the Americas. “Immigrant” is also out, with “person who has immigrated” as the approved alternative. It’s the iron law of academic writing: Why use one word when four will do?

You can’t “master” your subject at Stanford any longer; in case you hadn’t heard, the school instructs that “historically, masters enslaved people.” And don’t dare design a “blind study,” which “unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.” Blind studies are good and useful, but never mind; “masked study” is to be preferred. Follow the science.

“Gangbusters” is banned because the index says it “invokes the notion of police action against ‘gangs’ in a positive light, which may have racial undertones.” Not to beat a dead horse (a phrase that the index says “normalizes violence against animals”), but you used to have to get a graduate degree in the humanities to write something that stupid.

The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative is a “multi-phase” project of Stanford’s IT leaders. The list took “18 months of collaboration with stakeholder groups” to produce, the university tells us. We can’t imagine what’s next, except that it will surely involve more make-work for more administrators, whose proliferation has driven much of the rise in college tuition and student debt. For 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrative staff.