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EDUCATION

My Cancel-Culture Nightmare Is Over After a four-month investigation, Georgetown concludes I wasn’t yet an employee when I wrote an errant tweet. By Ilya Shapiro

s://www.wsj.com/articles/ilya-shapiro-georgetown-twitter-kbj-cancel-law-school-supreme-court-appointee-twitter-free-speech-11654211044?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

My long public nightmare is over. Tomorrow I assume my duties as a senior lecturer at Georgetown University Law Center and executive director of its Center for the Constitution. A four-month investigation by the human-resources department and the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action determined that I wasn’t yet an employee when I posted a tweet to which some at the school objected (which the Journal covered from the beginning) and so wasn’t subject to the relevant policies on antidiscrimination and professional conduct.

It was an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone except perhaps the instigators of the Twitter mob that launched this tempest—particularly the first few days, which were truly terrible for me and my family. Although my administrative leave was paid, the uncertainty made it a roller coaster of emotions and instability, a personal and professional purgatory. I’m grateful to the many allies who supported my cause. I found out who my friends are, even if I would’ve preferred not to have had the need to know.

What I achieved was a technical victory but one that still shows the value in standing up for free speech in the face of cancellation. That’s so even when that speech is inartful, as I readily admitted was my criticism of President Biden’s decision to limit his Supreme Court pool by race and sex. Although I apologized for my poor phrasing—some advised “never apologize,” but I take pride in clear communication—I stand by my view that Mr. Biden should have considered “all possible nominees,” as 76% of Americans agreed in an ABC News poll, and that the best choice would have been Judge Sri Srinivasan, who is an Indian-American immigrant.

I’m relieved that now I’ll get to do the job for which I was hired in January. I’m confident that even without the jurisdictional technicality, I would’ve prevailed. After all, Georgetown’s Speech and Expression Policy provides that the “University is committed to free and open inquiry, deliberation and debate in all matters, and the untrammeled verbal and nonverbal expression of ideas.” There’s an exception for harassment, of course, but I wasn’t harassing anyone except possibly Mr. Biden.

In any case, I look forward to teaching and engaging in a host of activities relating to constitutional education and originalism. As befitting a center for the Constitution, all students and participants in my programs can expect to be accorded the right to think and speak freely and to be treated equally. A diversity of ideas will be most welcome.

Challenging SJP Chicago’s Lies and Toxic Radicalism The Freedom Center’s leaflets expose Jew-hatred. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/challenging-sjp-chicagos-lies-and-toxic-radicalism-richard-l-cravatts/

In yet another revealing example of its hypocrisy and obtuseness when assessing the consequences of its own behavior, the University of Chicago’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was again whining about being victimized by ideological opponents.

What was SJP’s complaint this time? In a letter to the editor in the university’s newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, SJP expressed its displeasure with the fact that on May 23rd, “the David Horowitz Freedom Center plastered more than 5,000 leaflets on and around campus demonizing Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students.”

Employing its tired tactic of whining that any effort by SJP’s critics is motivated by a desire to shut down any support of Palestinian self-determination, the letter preposterously suggested that the leaflets were posted on campus solely “in order to muzzle and disparage pro-Palestinian activism . . . .”

More absurdly, SJP claimed that the Horowitz Center’s “work aims to censor and misrepresent our academic production and to create an environment of surveillance and fear surrounding scholarship about Palestine.”

Colleges Are Creating Adult Children By Jack Wolfsohn

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/colleges-are-creating-adult-children/

College students are increasingly childish, unable to think for themselves, and follow the crowd rather than pursue their own interests, according to William Deresiewicz, a former professor at Yale University who discusses this in a recent guest post on Bari Weiss’s Substack Common Sense. They are ultimately unable to grow up. Students immediately turn to their professors for direction rather than confront issues themselves, he writes.

Deresiewicz borrows a term from one of his former students — “excellent sheep” — to describe the majority of the students he taught and those who populate elite college campuses today. He points out that despite the rise of campus wokeness, with its “radical-sounding sloganeering,” students are not becoming more creative and independent-minded. Deresiewicz stresses that excellent sheephood is really about acquiring more — more money, power, status, and connections — while claiming, to make oneself feel better, that one is doing it for altruistic reasons. This, he says, explains things like the alarming lack of protests against out-of-control tuition, strangulating pandemic policies, and many universities’ investments in China. 

While the campus protests of the 1960s challenged the authority of professors and campus administrators, Deresiewicz observes, protesters today do not demand more power from their higher-ups. In fact, they just put what they have been taught into action. Social-justice warriors lobby those in power to do their bidding for them. They are much more comfortable acting as the children rather than as the adults in the room. And those in authority accede to their demands rather than assert their dominance. They’re all on the same side, after all. Deresewicz states the reality bluntly: “College is now regarded as the last stage of childhood, not the first of adulthood. . . . Society has not given them any way to grow up — not financially, not psychologically, not morally.”

Harvard Needs Merit-Based Admissions A Supreme Court decision could force colleges to move away from affirmative action and create true diversity on campus. By Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-needs-merit-based-admissions-college-supreme-court-decision-policies-race-11654116449?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

The Supreme Court, in its next term, will render a decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, which will determine the legality of Harvard’s race-based affirmative-action program. The plaintiff’s claim that, by creating a floor for certain racial and ethnic groups in its admissions, Harvard created a ceiling for Asian-Americans. The result is that Asian-Americans who are academically qualified become victims of discrimination.

If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, as many experts believe it will, Harvard and many universities around the country will have to continue their quests for increased racial diversity without violating the specific terms of the decision.

The time has come, however, for universities to abandon their efforts to achieve superficial, artificial diversity based on race. The coming decision would provide American schools with an opportunity to develop admission criteria based on academic achievement and potential—while abolishing such non-merit-based criteria as legacy status, athletics, geography and other nonacademic preferences. There would be resistance to getting rid of these advantages, but it could be done.

UPenn Med School Leaders Turn on Former Dean over ‘Racist’ Affirmative-Action Criticism By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/upenn-med-school-leaders-turn-on-former-dean-over-racist-affirmative-action-criticism/

Senior administrators at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine recently leveled a reputation-destroying accusation at a former colleague who was, up until a few years ago, a member in good standing of America’s elite medical community.

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb had a long, distinguished career in medicine that culminated with his being appointed professor emeritus and associate dean of curriculum at Perelman. He retired from his role as associate dean in 2019 but retained his emeritus title. That honor and the career that made him worthy of it weren’t enough to earn him the presumption of good faith from his former colleagues.

Goldfarb’s offense? Publicly questioning whether racial discrimination is as pervasive in medicine as the conventional elite narrative suggests. Responding last week to a study which suggested that systemic racism explains why minority medical residents tend to receive worse performance evaluations than their white peers, Goldfarb asked: “Could it be they were just less good at being residents?”

The drag-queening of America’s children By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/the_dragqueening_of_americas_children.html

In 2015, drag queens reading in libraries suddenly became a “thing.” While I see these men as grotesque appropriations of womanhood, they were sold as cute, sparkly people who make reading fun. Once the camel’s nose was in the tent, drag queens performing for children started appearing everywhere, not just in libraries where weird parents intentionally bring their children, but at nightclubs and across schools where children are captive audiences. It’s become so endemic that Libs of TikTok has put together a seemingly endless thread of such appearances.

Back in the early 1990s, some men I knew when I worked in San Francisco performed as part of a Drag Queen acapella group. Unlike many of the drag queens parading around today, these guys were actually talented performers, so I enjoyed the first show I attended. By the second show, though, I’d had enough. While some songs were clever parodies of pop culture issues, way too many were obsessed with gay sex (in more detail than most people should ever want to know), fecal matter, and STDs. That’s when I realized that people who define themselves by non-traditional (some might say deviant) sexuality, tend to obsess about that sexuality and, moreover, seem to have stopped developmentally at the “poo-poo is funny” stage of humor (around 3 years old).

Armed with that knowledge, I’ve found very disturbing the number of drag queens swarming children’s reading rooms. Were my kids still small, I wouldn’t want them under the tutelage of someone whose entire identity revolves around his genitals and what he does with them. However, when parents objected, they were schooled as “transphobes” and “homophobes” and, of course, most backed down.

So, the drag queens have continued to dig their way into children’s lives. It’s not just at libraries. The big children’s entertainment media companies are on board. Andrew Levitt, an untalented drag performer but highly talented self-promoter, inveigled his way into Nickelodeon, appearing on the children’s show Blue’s Clues and You and singing about LGBTQ identities in a video aimed at children. And now Disney+ has Levitt urging little children to celebrate gay pride and drag queens with him.

U. Chicago SJP Condemns Pro-Israel Newsletter as ‘Hate Speech’ Attempting to censor the truth while promoting genocide. Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/u-chicago-sjp-condemns-pro-israel-newsletter-hate-sara-dogan/

In a brazen and unintentionally ironic letter printed in the Chicago Maroon, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of Chicago condemned the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s distribution of a newsletter on campus exposing the terrorist associations of SJP and the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and urged university officials to thwart future attempts to distribute alleged “hate speech.”

The University of Chicago was recently named as one of the Top Ten Jew-Hating Colleges and Universities in a report published by the Freedom Center, and there was no shortage of evidence to support their place on that list.

UChicago SJP recently published an art zine titled “Cheers to Intifada,” referring to the violent Palestinian uprisings during which Jewish citizens of Israel were slaughtered because they were Jews. The zine contained violent imagery including a graphic of two lit Molotov cocktails raised in a toast under the heading “Cheers to Intifada.”

The zine was also rife with anti-Semitism including an image of a pig wearing a policeman’s hat with a Jewish star on it. Poems in the publication promoted ancient blood libel tropes against Jews such as one describing a fictional Polish teenager, understood to be Jewish and part of the IDF, who holds Palestinians captive while shooting “perverted bullets shot with animalistic lust yearning to rape bodies.”

The student government at Chicago published a statement promoting the anti-Semitic BDS movement against Israel and used genocidal language calling to “free” Palestine “from the river to the sea,” a call to annihilate the entire state of Israel along with its Jewish citizens.

God Bless America: Land That I Loathe?By Jack Wolfsohn

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/god-bless-america-land-that-i-loathe/

Memorial Day is an occasion to remember those who sacrificed to give and preserve for us the nation and its blessings that we enjoy today. Unfortunately, a segment of our population is increasingly failing to appreciate what it has been given. This growing lack of patriotism among young people does not bode well for our future.

Our institutions of higher education are exacerbating the crisis. The Brown Opinion Project conducted a poll April 20–22 that asked undergraduates at Brown University, where I am a rising senior, the following question: “Do you think America is the greatest country in the world?” A mere 12.9 percent answered yes, while 74.7 percent answered no (10.9 percent said they were unsure). While these findings reflect the feelings of students at one admittedly very liberal university, it is difficult to maintain hope for America’s future if it is any indication of what the leaders of tomorrow are thinking.

Students’ increasingly cynical views of America come as no surprise when one notices what they are being confronted with on their college campuses. The University at Buffalo’s Intercultural and Diversity Center held an event last year called “The Real History of Thanksgiving” in order to highlight America’s homegrown holiday’s “whitewashed history” and “the impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous people.” This past January, literary theory and cultural-history professor Tao Leigh Goffee of Cornell University tweeted that capitalism is rooted in slavery, writing, “Chattel slavery transformed modern finance into what it is, and thus every subsequent act of financialization must be understood as a racializing one.” Many colleges host and praise the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, which presents an inaccurate version of American history focusing on slavery as not just the centerpiece of America’s Founding but also the very reason for the American Revolution. Some professors teach the tenets of the project outright in their classrooms. The fact that Hannah-Jones’s work is celebrated on campuses is disturbing and another way in which students receive anti-American messages.

Can America’s Colleges and Universities Be Saved? Some key reforms could restore accountability in higher education, making colleges affordable and focused on actually educating students. By David Randall

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/28/can-americas-colleges-and-universities-be-saved/

American colleges and universities continue to lose students steadily.

The latest statistics confirm their continuing decline. Here’s some headline numbers:

The number of total enrolled postsecondary students declined 3.3 percent year-over-year, the most significant rate of decline in enrollment since 1951. This number has declined nearly 10 percent since 2010, from 21 million to 19 million.
College enrollment totaled 15.9 million undergraduate students nationwide in Fall 2020, a 4.3 percent decline year-over-year. This number has declined more than 12 percent since 2010, from 18.1 million to 15.9 million.
Full-time college enrollment has declined more than 11 percent since 2010, from 13.1 million to 11.6 million.
Community college enrollment declined by 10 percent in 2020 alone. California’s community colleges lost 17 percent of their total, about 300,000 students, between Fall 2019 and Fall 2021.
Men are barely 41 percent of students enrolled in college, they are six percentage points less likely to complete college than women, and the hemorrhage of male enrollment continues unabated.
The proportion of college-age Americans (18-29) enrolled in higher education has been declining since 2016.
Seventy-five nonprofit colleges and universities have closed or merged since 2016, more than one percent of the total.

In other words, the structural crisis in higher education that the National Association of Scholars (NAS) diagnosed early in the COVID pandemic, in our Critical Care recommendations, continues to afflict American higher education. America’s colleges and universities cannot staunch their bleeding, no matter how many transfusions of taxpayer dollars they receive from the federal and state governments.

The Unraveling of Education in America The bad news from the education industrial complex just keeps on coming. Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/unraveling-education-america-larry-sand/

It’s no secret that education in America has been in bad shape for some time, and now, low student proficiency has been exacerbated by the hysterical response to the Covid outbreak. Most recently, the results of a Harvard University study, which investigated the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty, have been released.

Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and D.C., the researchers found that “shifts to remote or hybrid instruction during 2020-21 had profound consequences for student achievement. In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in-person, “there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools in math (and less widening in reading).”

Another study, by curriculum and assessment provider Amplify, examined test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states and found a spike in students not reading at grade level, with literacy losses “disproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades (K-2).” The report also found that minority children suffered disproportionate learning loss. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “During the last normal school year, only 34% of black and 29% of Hispanic second graders needed intensive intervention to help catch up. This school year 47% of black and 39% of Hispanic second graders have fallen this far behind on literacy, compared to 26% of white peers.”

And distressingly, a longitudinal study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds that kids “who don’t read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than proficient readers,” and “for the worst readers, those [who] couldn’t master even the basic skills by third grade, the rate is nearly six times greater.”