RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/biden-admin-forces-professors-fall-line-radical-christiana-kiefer/

In American public colleges and universities, faculty are supposed to be able to guide their students towards a better understanding of truth, reality, and the world around them freely and in accordance with their own convictions. But as part of its effort to redefine “sex” in Title IX, the Biden administration is seeking to compel faculty and administrators at public schools to speak and act in violation of their deeply held beliefs about gender and sexuality.

The First Amendment guarantees that all Americans, including those who teach at public schools, have the right to speak and act in accordance with their deeply held beliefs—even if those beliefs are offensive to someone else. If the Biden administration gets its way, that right to freedom of speech will be in grave danger.

The administration is trying to change the definition of “sex” in Title IX to include “gender identity”—a seemingly small change. In practice, however, this change would compel professors, teachers, and administrators at public schools and universities to address and treat students based on students’ self-identified “gender identity,” whether by addressing students by their “preferred pronouns” or verbally affirming the claims of gender identity ideology. Professors, teachers, and administrators would be required to do this, even if doing so goes against their deeply held beliefs. Dissent will not be tolerated.

There have already been attempts to compel professors to sacrifice their freedom of speech at the altar of gender identity. As philosophy professor Nicholas Meriwether learned, it does not matter how beloved a professor is or how dedicated and excellent he is at his job—that counts as nothing if he happens to believe something that the current powers-that-be don’t like.

https://www.city-journal.org/radical-gender-theory-comes-to-the-heartland

Springfield Public Schools, the largest public school district in Missouri, has adopted a radical gender-theory training program that encourages teachers to believe that “gender is a universe” and to affirm sexual identities such as “non-binary,” “pansexual,” and “polyamorous.”

Last year, I reported on Springfield Public Schools’ critical race theory training program, which required teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix” and watch a video of “George Floyd’s last words.” But according to new documents obtained by the Southeastern Legal Foundation as part of a civil rights lawsuit, the district’s left-wing training program was not limited to racial ideology: administrators were simultaneously promoting the principles of radical gender theory to school employees.

The training program followed the basic narrative of academic-style gender theory: Western societies have created a “heteronormative” system that marginalizes racial and sexual minorities. To start, presenters led district employees in a “land acknowledgement” censuring white settlers for conquering North America. “As we begin our training, we want to acknowledge and honor the Native and Indigenous Peoples whose land we currently gather on. Springfield Public Schools is built on ancestral territory of the Osage, Delaware and Kickapoo Nations and Peoples,” the statement read. “In doing social justice work, it is important we acknowledge the dark history and violence against Native and Indigenous People across the world. In this work, we are committed to promoting, supporting and affirming all communities, especially those that are marginalized.”

Next, Springfield Public Schools told administrators and teachers that they must understand their “privileges” and identify their position within the “cycles of oppression.” In a “matching game,” the district provides a basic glossary for critical theory, explaining that some groups—i.e., straight, white, cisgender men—have “power” and “privilege” over others based on the categories of “race,” “gender,” “identity,” and “sexual orientation.” Teachers are then asked to classify themselves on a “social identities” wheel and account for their race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. All of these social hierarchies contribute to the “cycles of oppression,” which are reinforced by institutions and result in “anger, dehumanization, guilt, collusion, ignorance, self-hatred, stress, lack of reality . . . [and] internalization of patterns of power.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-invidious-racial-boxes-supreme-court-unc-affirmative-action-discrimination-oconnor-hispanic-asian-label-admissions-11661196819?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

Remember the liberal outrage over Sen. Jesse Helms’s “Hands” ad in his 1990 Senate campaign against Harvey Gantt? Some credit the ad for Helms’s come-from-behind victory.

The 30-second spot featured the white hands of a frustrated job applicant crumpling a rejection letter. “You needed that job,” the narrator says, “and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?”

The ad said Mr. Gantt, who is African-American, favored racial quotas. It was politics at its rawest, and Mr. Gantt accused Helms of trying “to divide people along the lines of race.” He denied he favored quotas.

Cut to 2022. The Minneapolis Public Schools have negotiated a contract with the teachers union that includes this language: “If excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.” In plain English, Deroy Murdock writes in the Daily Mail, it means “fire Whitey first.”

The Minneapolis contract is ugly stuff, but highly apposite as the Supreme Court prepares to hear lawsuits in October by Students for Fair Admissions accusing Harvard and the University of North Carolina of racial discrimination in admissions. In 1990, Helms’s ad was denounced as false and incendiary. These days the discrimination it highlighted is fast becoming standard practice, and not only in Minneapolis and at UNC or Harvard.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/anti-racism-and-common-sense/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fourth

A  short time ago, the National Museum of African American History sported a poster that most normal adults would describe as moronic if not blatantly racist. The poster purported to list indicies of “Whiteness,” such as hard work, individualism, objectivity, nuclear family, respect for authority, and delayed gratification. These weren’t presented as universal qualities to strive for regardless of race. Rather, these were  tools of oppression,  contributors to unfairness, and characteristics of white supremacy.

CRT/anti-racism training tells little white kids that they’re privileged and/or oppressors by virtue of their race. Common sense counsels that such training will almost necessarily yield negative outcomes, some of them severe.

There was a time in the recent past when the vast majority of adults — regardless of race, educational attainment, or economic background — intuitively grasped that such instruction is galactically stupid, immoral, toxic, false, and destructive. A majority might still think so, even if they’re too cowed to say it.

But that doesn’t appear to include a majority of today’s so-called “elites,” many of whom support and promote such instruction. This portends ill for our society, which seems to be sprouting ruptures in social cohesion by the minute. Indeed, less than 20 years ago, before the germination of anti-racism  training, Gallup reported that 74 percent of white Americans and 68 percent of black Americans thought race relations were good. By July 2021, those numbers had cratered to 43 percent and 33 percent, respectively. Some of that decline may be attributable to discrete events such as the Michael Brown and George Floyd incidents and the media narratives surrounding them.  But the steady harangue of idiotic — and sometimes evil — CRT/anti-racism/DEI training surely contributes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/arizonas-campus-disaster-can-be-stopped/

The woke rebellion against America’s founding principles continues to advance on all fronts. Nowhere is this truer than at America’s universities, the source and stronghold of the cultural revolution. The pushback against the illiberalism of our universities — their betrayal of their own first principles — has so far been a paltry thing. Supposedly, this is because higher education is shielded by academic freedom in a way that K–12 education is not. But that is not the reason we have failed. The truth is, opponents of the woke revolution have barely begun to do what they can to restore liberal education to America’s academy.

The greatest abdication of all is our failure to reform universities by way of trustees (also called regents or governors). University boards of regents can do almost anything. Yet most often they do nothing but rubber-stamp the decisions of administrators. That has to change right now, and it needs to change first in Arizona.

Boards of regents at public universities are responsible to the people of their state. Regents are appointed by governors, and sometimes by legislatures, too. In a few states, regents are selected by popular vote. Yet almost never do we see the appointment of university trustees become an election issue. Well, trustee selection needs to be an election issue right now in Arizona. Here’s why.

Arizona’s public universities have turned themselves into leaders in the national movement to indoctrinate students in the tenets of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). The showpiece of this campaign is Northern Arizona University’s (NAU) move to require four — count ’em, four — diversity courses for graduation, all of which must be grounded in “critical theory,” the neo-Marxist system that produced critical race theory, critical legal theory, and still more entries in the grand campaign to neo-Marxitize pretty much everything.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/new-jersey-parents-who-protest-leftist-agenda-robert-spencer/

Public schools even for the youngest children are becoming playgrounds for the woke, featuring drag queens, transgender closets, Critical Race Theory and more, but if you say a word about it, the National Education Association (NEA) will destroy you. That is the message of a new YouTube ad from the NEA’s New Jersey chapter. According to Fox News Thursday,  “the ad flips back and forth between colorful photos of teachers with students and black-and-white photos of parents, arguing that the latter are trying to fuse politics with education.” Which, of course, the hard-Left, thoroughly politicized NEA itself would never ever do.

The NEA ad declares: “When extremists start attacking our schools, that’s not who we are. People who only want to fight to score political points should take that somewhere else.” Attacking our schools? Are parental mobs storming schools, taking teachers hostage, and destroying every rainbow banner in sight? Are administrations walking to their cars every afternoon in fear that some parental sniper will make it the last walk they’ll ever take? Are angry parents entering classrooms during school hours and ripping the LGBT propaganda out of unwary students’ hands?

None of that is happening, of course, and nothing like it. What the NEA would have us believe is happening was made clear in September 2021, when the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote to Old Joe Biden, claiming that “NSBA believes immediate assistance is required to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety…. As the threats grow and news of extremist hate organizations showing up at school board meetings is being reported, this is a critical time for a proactive approach to deal with this difficult issue…. As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/has_wokism_scared_black_students_away_from_college.html

According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Black student enrollment in American colleges and universities has declined dramatically in the past ten years, 24 percent in fact, from 2.5 million students in 2010 to 1.9 million in 2020.

Prior to that ten-year period, argues Chronicle reporter Oyin Adedoyin, “The story of Black college students in the USA was a narrative of success.” Judging only by numbers, Adedoyin is right. Black population on campus grew nine-fold from 1966 to 2010. The decline since 2010 puzzles administrators given the thousands of DEI officers they have hired and the myriad enticements they have offered to Black students.

Although Adedoyin offers no overarching reason for the enrollment drop, the reader willing to wade through her tortured logic and butchered prose may find an explanation that Adedoyin herself did not seem to notice.

The students and staff she interviews, like so many other campus activists in recent years, speak of college life as affectionately as Solzhenitsyn spoke of life in the gulags. This is not a good marketing strategy, “Every single day looks like a combat to be acknowledged,” Adedoyin writes, summing up what she hears. A former prof elaborates, “We’re put into these white areas, and we really feel marginalization and lack of help.”

Adds Skye Jackson, an activist at Brown University, “It simply is exhausting to stroll by way of the hallways and really feel like you’ll be able to’t (sic) be who you actually are because of structural racist programs put in place in opposition to college students of colour (sic).”

Then there is the question of whether all this struggle and stress is worth the cost, however reduced that cost is for students of color. “Affordability is a good barrier for African People,” a Wright State alum gripes. “And, after all, we’re all the time the final employed, first fired nonetheless.”

https://www.thecollegefix.com/freshman-orientations-push-dei-propaganda-over-free-speech-nationwide-survey-finds/

Free speech conversations ‘strikingly absent’ from most freshman orientations, and DEI topics covered 7.37 times more than free speech issues 

Almost all — 91 percent — of university freshman orientation programs across the country emphasize diversity, equity and inclusion topics, a recently released investigative report found.

By contrast, free speech and viewpoint diversity topics are only mentioned in about 30 percent of orientation programs, and are often “strikingly absent” from the conversation, the Speech First survey found.

Speech First, a 4-year-old nonprofit that advances free speech on college campuses through advocacy and litigation, obtained the results by filing Freedom of Information Act requests to over 50 public universities asking for freshman orientation materials.

The group found DEI topics are covered in “3.71 times more orientation slide material, 4.9 times more orientation handout material, and 7.37 times more orientation video material” than free speech topics.

Speech First Executive Director Cherise Trump told The College Fix that the process of developing the report, which took nearly a year to finish, was “wrought with delays, excuses, additional fees, and redactions.”

Many universities were reluctant to comply with the Freedom of Information Act requests. While 51 universities ultimately complied, 3 universities—Arizona State University, Colorado State University-Fort Collins, and University of California-Berkeley—did not respond.

Examples of orientation DEI issues highlighted by Speech First include a Northern Kentucky University orientation video that labels the phrases “Where are you from?” and “I don’t see race” as microaggressions and a James Madison University PowerPoint featuring 34 slides on diversity, power and oppression.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/enormous-amounts-money-continue-flow-bottomless-larry-sand/

Spurred by the Covid panic, schools have been the recipient of ungodly sums of money. And it’s not as if the beast was starving before. To put things into perspective, the U.S. spends about $800 billion on national defense, more than China, Russia, India, the U.K., France, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Japan combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. America now spends even more on k-12 education, with an outlay of about $900 billion dollars a year, which includes an additional $122 billion from the Covid-related American Rescue Plan. While we have a military that is second to none, our education spending does not lead to a similar result. Our annual education outlay is second highest in the world, trailing only Norway. But in achievement, we are in the middle of the pack. For example, the 2018 rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, has the U.S. 36th out of the 79 countries that participated in the math test, which is given to 15-year-olds.     

So where does all this money go?

Not much for the kids. In fact, Over 80% of it goes to salaries and benefits for teachers and other employees.

Maybe the money will help alleviate the teacher shortage?

Hardly. The teacher shortage writ large is non-existent. Using data from a National Education Association report, Mike Antonucci writes that  there were 48,985,186 students enrolled in the nation’s public school system in 2021, about 256,000 fewer than in 2012. But school districts hired an additional 276,000 instructional staff during the same period. He adds that student enrollment fell 2.4 percent in the U.S. from fall 2019 to fall 2020, falling in every state and the District of Columbia, yet 17 states added teachers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/parent-sues-school-over-transgender-brainwashing-matthew-vadum/

California parent Jessica Konen is suing her local school district for secretly indoctrinating her 6th grade daughter into the cult of transgenderism, convincing her to change her gender identity, all while urging her not to discuss the situation with her mother because she could not be “trusted.”

The behavior of these woke teachers matters not only because parents – as opposed to the government – are supposed to be in charge of raising their own children, but also because transgenderism is a treacherous ideology that threatens the very underpinnings of both our society and Western civilization as a whole.

It is not about homosexuality or bisexuality, which Americans have become increasingly tolerant of in recent years. Many Americans are even supportive of transgender people when they are consenting adults, but they do not support groomers’ efforts to force impressionable children to renounce their birth sex and pretend to be something they are not. The rise of groups such as Gays Against Groomers, whose members are aghast at reports of little kids being forced to attend drag queen performances, shows that plenty of gays recognize it is wrong to push transgender ideology onto children.

It is about totalitarian thought control. The advocates of transgenderism, backed by the Biden-Harris regime, would force Americans to recognize an individual’s professed gender identity even if it doesn’t match the person’s birth sex. Forcing people to say things they know aren’t true is the essence of totalitarianism.