RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/24/race-based-illness-at-the-best-of-the-best/

It looks like the long persecution of Professor Joshua Katz by his employer Princeton University has come to an end. The Washington Free Beacon reported last week that the school president “passed his recommendation that Katz be stripped of his tenure and fired to the university board of trustees,” and the board rubber-stamped it Monday. The whole episode nicely exemplifies the cowardice and incompetence of the liberals who run elite institutions in the United States today. 

The ostensible cause of the termination is a relationship Katz had with a student many years ago, an impropriety that was handled and closed long before the current controversy began. In truth, this current situation has nothing to do with Katz’s private history. The older matter is a false pretext for his termination. Katz’s current sin originates far from the Princeton campus, on the website Quillette, where on July 8, 2020, he published a piece called “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor.” 

That word independence should clue you in immediately to the danger Katz risked when he wrote the essay, for few personality traits are more ruinous in the academic habitat than that of one’s willingness to dissent, to go one’s own way, to gainsay conventional wisdom. For all of the humanities professoriate’s praise of “speaking truth to power,” it is a profession populated by timid conformists with fearful sensibilities. Few fields in the world exert and police their dogmas more vigilantly than does that of our tenured wordsmiths. Katz was doing what all of them pretend to do but don’t—and so he had to pay. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ohio-school-districts-transgender-guidelines-instruct-teachers-to-socially-transition-students-without-parental-consent/

In recently developed K-12 “transgender guidelines” circulated among principals and school counselors, the Olentangy Local School District in Ohio instructs teachers to begin the social transitioning of non-gender conforming students without parental consent.

The guidelines, obtained by non-profit Parents Defending Education, would advise teachers and staff on how to treat students who identify as a member of the opposite sex, though it’s not clear whether they’ve yet been issued to teachers. The guidelines have implications for record-keeping, addressing students, and communicating with parents, and touch on bathrooms/locker room access and overnight school trips.

“A student’s transgender status or gender assigned at birth is not considered directory information and therefore cannot be released without prior consent,” the document reads. It demands that school staff “not disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender status to others, including parents and other staff, unless legally required to do so,” according to a copy of the document released

Superintendent Mark Raiff writes in an email, obtained by PDE, that “the guidelines were shared following the issuance of new guidance from the US Department of Education and US Department of Justice so that our principals and school counselors were apprised of the most recent developments.”

“As far as board policy, the guidelines support and do not supersede the board policies referenced within the document that prohibit harassment or discrimination based on gender identity,”  he adds.

Staff and faculty are to refer to students by the “name and pronoun requested by the student or parent that matches their gender identity,” according to the guidelines. While district administration, staff and faculty are “required to maintain legal name and gender assigned at birth on all legal documents and permanent records” until “provided with a legal name change,”  anything “not considered an official school document should feature the student’s preferred name,” it says.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pronoun-police-middle-schoolers-sexual-harassment-title-ix-nine-mispronouning-transgender-lgbtqia-free-speech-pronoun-11653337766?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

For most people, the term “Title IX investigation” calls to mind allegations of rape, groping, unwanted sexual advances or a pervasive pattern of verbal abuse. Think again. Wisconsin’s Kiel Area School District, in deep red Manitowoc and Calumet counties along the western shore of Lake Michigan, has uncovered a new form of harassment. On April 25 they accused three eighth-grade boys of sexual harassment—and launched a Title IX investigation—for something called “mispronouning.” These children used “her” to refer to a classmate who wants to be called “them.”

It’s easy to dismiss this as bizarre. You won’t find mispronouning in the Wisconsin statutes or U.S. code. It hardly resembles the egregious aggression that we associate with harassment. It doesn’t, in and of itself, constitute conduct “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to education” as Title IX law on harassment requires. But the stain that such a charge could leave on these boys’ reputations and the harm inflicted upon their futures is real.

The boys’ parents first heard about the charges when they received a call from the district that their sons were about to be charged with sexual harassment under Title IX. There had been no prior warning or discussions with the families about pronoun use at school, nor did the district initially explain what the boys had done to warrant being investigated for a violation of federal law. When the families were finally informed that the alleged sexual harassment—the boys’ potential federal offense—was “using incorrect pronouns,” terror quickly turned to bewilderment. “Is this real? This has to be a joke,” thought Rose Rabidoux, one of the parents.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/state-farm-abandons-lgbtq-childrens-book-program-after-whistleblower-email-leak/?utm_

State Farm, the household-name insurance company, has abandoned its program to distribute LGBTQ-themed books to teachers, community centers, and libraries, explicitly targeting children as young as kindergartners, after a media exposé based on a whistleblower email caught the company by surprise on Monday.

In an email to all State Farm agents and staff members sent just hours after multiple news outlets revealed the book initiative, Victor Terry, chief diversity officer and vice president of public affairs, announced the cancellation of its collaboration with GenderCool, an organization that promotes LGBTQ teaching via speaking events, mentorship programs, DEI/HR consulting, and advising for parents of transgender children.

“State Farm’s support of a philanthropic program, GenderCool, has been the subject of news and customer inquiries. This program that included books about gender identity was intended to promote inclusivity,” the email, obtained by Libs of TikTok, read. “We will no longer support that program.

“Conversations about gender and identity should happen at home with parents. We don’t support required curriculum in schools on this topic. We support organizations providing resources for parents to have these conversations,” Terry wrote.

The original program was supposed to recruit hundreds of agents and staff volunteers to “help diversify classroom, community center and library bookshelves with a collection of books to help bring clarity and understanding to the national conversation about Being Transgender, Inclusive and Non-Binary,” according to the January 2022 email, obtained by Consumers’ Research, which surfaced Monday.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/another-bit-of-academic-foolishness/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

The perceived need among academics to pander to “underrepresented” groups is insatiable. Consider the invented term “Latinx.”

In today’s Martin Center article, Garion Frankel does so and regards it as “failed academic activism.”

Frankel, himself of Hispanic origin, writes, “Every time I receive an email from Texas A&M asking me to take part in a ‘Latinx’ group or activity, it makes my blood boil. It’s another example of the paternalistic panderings of the academic elite. It’s humiliating. Latinx’s similarities to Orwell’s Newspeak (intentionally ambiguous language used to spread political propaganda) have been well-documented, as has academia’s general lack of cultural awareness. But universities’ commitment to the word goes deeper than merely pandering to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. If DEI were the only goal, universities would treat Latino college students as people rather than as potential assets.”

The purpose of this bit of linguistic nonsense is to try to create more students with a revolutionary spirit. That’s always foremost in the minds of “progressives.” Fortunately, it seems to be a flop.

Frankel explains, “The reason Latinx is failing where Chicano succeeded is simple. While the Chicano movement saw academics turning student activists towards the very real problems affecting millions of people with similar backgrounds and values, today’s academics are asking people to change the way they talk and how they see themselves in order to cater to the desires of an extremely small minority of Latinos.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/princeton-targets-a-dissenting-professor-joshua-katz-christopher-eisgruber-11653086208?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Everyone knows American universities are dangerous places these days if you dare to express unpopular views. But Princeton University’s handling of classics professor Joshua Katz is still shocking for its procedural double jeopardy.

This week brought grim news for Joshua Katz, a classics professor who drew ire on campus in 2020 after criticizing a faculty letter on race relations. The Journal reported Thursday that Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber has asked the university’s trustees to fire Mr. Katz, who has tenure. The official complaint is a procedural charge, based on Mr. Katz’s supposed noncompliance in an investigation into his relationship with a student.

Princeton found in 2018 that the professor had maintained a consensual sexual relationship with an undergraduate student more than a decade earlier. Mr. Katz was suspended for a year without pay. Yet the university opened a new investigation of his conduct after Mr. Katz publicly criticized a faculty letter on race relations in 2020.

His colleagues decided the second time around that Mr. Katz hadn’t been fully forthright in the first investigation, and concluded that he could be punished again. The dean of faculty insists that Mr. Katz’s politics “is not germane to the case.” And if you believe that, you have been living in a cave off-campus.

Yet Mr. Eisgruber claims the proposed firing has nothing to do with political speech.

Mr. Katz became a target the moment he criticized a statement signed by hundreds of his colleagues that called for radical changes to Princeton’s policies on race and employment. In the weeks after George Floyd’s murder, the faculty authors sought specific concessions for nonwhite professors, including “course relief and summer salary.”