RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/05/17/trans-dogma-has-taken-over-our-schools/

A baroness gave a talk to sixth-form students at a private girls’ school a few weeks ago. Afterwards, one girl was surrounded by a large group of her fellow pupils. They shouted, screamed, swore and spat at her. She escaped, but then collapsed, unable to breathe properly.

The word ‘bullying’ is thrown around lightly nowadays. Children see themselves as victims of bullying if they feel left out. Bosses who put staff under pressure to meet deadlines stand accused of bullying. Mostly these are just unpleasant experiences. But a pupil being targeted, surrounded, sworn and spat at by her classmates is surely a clear-cut case of bullying.

So in this instance, we might have expected teachers – fully trained-up in all the latest anti-bullying guidance – to intervene and put a stop to the targeted girl’s misery, yes? We would have expected her to be looked after and her tormentors punished, right?

But no. That’s not how things actually played out at all. Rather than being supported by her teachers, the targeted pupil – the girl surrounded by the baying mob – has been ‘driven out’ of school. And rather than her tormentors being punished, they have been treated as victims. Incredibly, the school’s headteacher reportedly apologised to the sixth-formers involved for ‘failing to maintain a “safe space” and for being seen to spend so much time giving support to [the bullied student]’, who by this point had been ‘isolated to the library’ for her own safety.

The heretical pupil in question apparently committed a crime so morally heinous that the spitting and swearing were considered an almost justifiable response. Following the baroness’s talk on ‘transphobia in parliament’, the girl at the centre of the row dared to question the orthodoxies of gender identity. She even had the temerity to suggest that sex may be biological and immutable. These thought crimes led her to be branded a transgressor who deserved punishment.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/princeton-preparing-to-fire-tenured-professor-for-opposing-far-left-activists/?utm_

Classics professor Joshua Katz, one of the few academics who spoke out against the extremist mobs that formed in the wake of the George Floyd slaying, has been targeted for loss of tenure and firing by Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber, according to a report by Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium.

Katz ran afoul of the hard left after he wrote:

The Black Justice League, which was active on campus from 2014 until 2016, was a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands. . . . Recently I watched an “Instagram Live” of one of its alumni leaders, who—emboldened by recent events and egged on by over 200 supporters who were baying for blood—presided over what was effectively a Struggle Session against one of his former classmates. It was one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed, and I do not say this lightly.

Katz added, “the BJL went after one fellow black student with particular vigor, verbally vilifying her in public at every possible opportunity, calling her all sorts of unsavory epithets and accusing her of  ‘performing white supremacy.’ Other students, as well as faculty and administrators, were accused, without evidence, of being ‘racists’ and ‘white supremacists.’”

Because Katz has tenure, he (at least in theory) can’t be fired for ideological nonconformism, but Sibarium suggests Eisgruber has found a pretext: bringing up a long-settled question of a consensual sexual relationship with a student more than a decade ago. Professors are barred from dating undergraduates, but Katz was already disciplined for this after an investigation in 2018, and agreed to take a year of unpaid leave as punishment.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/biden-administrations-assault-charter-schools-bruce-thornton/

Almost 40 years ago, the report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Reform appeared. It documented the failure of public schools to teach the foundational skills and knowledge necessary for a good education.

The ensuing controversy led to various reform movements, most hampered by powerful teachers’ unions and the educational bureaucracies. One bright spot was the growth of charter schools, which enjoy autonomy from the state and federal regulations that serve entrenched professional interests at the expense of students. “School choice,” also anathema to Democrats, aims to give parents the ability to  move their children to charter schools. This reform is particularly important to minority parents whose children are often trapped in failing public schools.

Both of these reforms have been regularly attacked by a Democrat Party that carries water for the Ed. Inc. establishment, which is one of the Dems’ most lucrative sources of political contributions. So it’s no surprise that Biden’s Ed. Department has issued new regulations designed to cripple charter schools’ autonomy by putting them further under the thumb of unionized public schools.

If these regulations are left unchallenged, one of the best options for helping parents escape “woke” politicized curricula and pedagogical incompetence will be weakened, accelerating our public schools’ already dangerous transformation from educational institutions into political propaganda factories.

One change in the regulations, concerning start-up funds for new charter schools, is so egregious that several Democrat Senators have signed a letter in protest of the changes. As The Wall Street Journal reports,

The Senators take issue with the requirement that schools applying for the money provide evidence of charter demand and declining enrollment in district schools. “This would empower federal reviewers to ignore state and local decisions to authorize new public charter schools,” they write. The requirements could “make it difficult, if not impossible,” for charters to access the federal funds.

There’s another problem with the “community impact analysis.” According to Jared Polis, the Democrat [sic!] governor of Colorado, this rule would give “anonymous grant reviewers in Washington the ability to veto parent, community, district and state efforts to open a new school.” You know there’s a problem when Democrats, the party of centralized, intrusive technocratic power, are speaking up for local autonomy in deciding what benefits people’s children.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-5-14-harvard-progressives-covering-up-for-their-systemic-racist-friends

It has been obvious for quite a while that pandemic-induced school closings and extended remote learning were going to have substantial negative effects on development among K-12 students. Equally obvious has been that Democrat-controlled jurisdictions — which include essentially all of the major cities with high concentrations of poor and minority students in the education system — have indulged in the longest school closures and the most remote learning. Clearly, this would lead to major negative results for the poor and minority students in these jurisdictions, particularly as compared to the students in places where schools mostly remained open for in-person learning.

A big new Report out from the Center for Educational and Policy Research at Harvard (and other institutes with similarly long names) now confirms the facts that we all knew were coming. The Report is titled “The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic,” and has a date of May 2022. The lead author is Dan Goldhaber. This is a very large and well-funded study. It relies on data collected from some 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states.

Two things about the Report stand out: (1) The large extent of the negative effects of school closures and remote learning, particularly in what the authors call “high poverty” districts, which effects are at the highest end of what anyone might have expected, and (2) The extreme lengths to which the Report goes to avoid pointing the finger of blame where it needs to be pointed, which is toward the politicians and bureaucrats — essentially all Democrats — responsible for the excessive closures in the high-poverty districts, and on the teachers unions that control the schools and back the politicians in those jurisdictions.

The May 5 issue of the Harvard Gazette contains an interview with Thomas Kane, Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard and second author of the Report, that gives an idea of the extent of the damage inflicted on poor and minority students by the school closures and remote learning.

https://christopherrufo.com/laying-siege-to-the-institutions/?mc_cid=b3e343d61f&mc_eid=9bde3e8efb

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on April 5, 2022, during a two-week teaching residency at Hillsdale as a Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism.

Why do I say that we need to lay siege to our institutions? Because of what has happened to our institutions since the 1960s.

The 1960s saw the rise of new and radical ideologies in America that now seem commonplace—ideologies based on ideas like identity politics and cultural revolution. There is a direct line between those ideas born in the ’60s and the public policies being adopted today in leftist-run cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago.

The leftist dream of a working-class rebellion in America fizzled after the ’60s. By the mid-1970s, radical groups like the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground had faded from prominence. But the leftist dreamers didn’t give up. Abandoning hope of a Russian-style revolution, they settled on a more sophisticated strategy—waging a revolution not of the proletariat, but of the elites, and specifically of the knowledge elites. It would proceed not by taking over the means of production, but by taking control of education and culture—a strategy that German Marxist Rudi Dutschke, a student activist in the 1960s, called “the long march through the institutions.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/30/rescuing-socrates/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

Roosevelt Montás, defender of the Western canon

New York City

‘I knew I was going to drop a grenade in the meeting,” says Roosevelt Montás, with a smile, during a conversation in his office in Hamilton Hall at Columbia University on April 7. He’s referring to an address he gave four years ago in Aspen, Colo., to a gathering of presidents and provosts from colleges and universities. He delivered a message that they probably didn’t want to hear.

“Our students often seem ill informed about the implications of their own political positions and are drawn, unthinkingly, into illiberal and bigoted stances,” said Montás in Aspen. “Our undergraduate curricula have not been educating our students for the life of free citizenship.” He excoriated his audience of left-leaning academics for their abandonment of the old-fashioned liberal arts.

Montás made his remarks behind closed doors. (He prepared a text, but apparently there’s no recording.) Word of his performance nevertheless spread. Eventually he came to the attention of a top editor at Princeton University Press. “I kept hearing his name,” says Peter Dougherty, now editor at large there.

The two men met for lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, where they hatched a plan for Montás to write about his beliefs in a book that is one part autobiography and one part polemic — and whose recent publication marks the rise of a powerful and unexpected voice on behalf of liberal-arts learning. At a time when many of the loudest voices in higher education condemn everything traditional as a manifestation of systemic racism and regard the canon of great books as the polluted products of dead white men, Montás offers a simple but disarming counterclaim: “I’m not the face of white supremacy.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/nina-merrick-unholy-alliance-lloyd-billingsley/

“For decades a collective farm of mediocrity and failure, the government education monopoly now serves the left as a one-stop indoctrination center. Call it the disinformation inherent in the system.”

“Critical race theory has become one of those hot-button issues that the Republicans and other disinformers, who are engaged in disinformation for profit, frankly have seized on,” said Nina Jankowicz at an October 29, 2021. Profiteering was going on, but not by those Jankowicz accused.

In September, 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote to Joe Biden claiming that parents who complained about critical race theory indoctrination were engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Days later, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo on “threats of violence” against teachers and school board members.

Parents who complained about critical race theory were guilty of “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crime” and Garland wanted to deploy the FBI, DOJ and Department of Homeland Security against the parents. As it turned out, the critical race theory profiteer was a member of Garland’s own family.

Garland’s son-in-law Xan Tanner is co-founder, board member, and president of Panorama Education, a vendor of surveys on the “social and emotional climate.” Last October, Panorama recommended that teachers read “Teaching Toward Freedom,” an essay by Weather Underground alum Bill Ayers.

“You should know that the system you’ll be joining hates Black and Brown and poor kids,” Ayers wrote. “I have factual evidence that the system is organized to miseducate these children, and it includes the shameful lack of resources, enforced racial segregation, the dumbed-down and Eurocentric curriculum accompanied by a stifling top-down pedagogy, and arcane rules and routines that result predictably in social shaming and widespread exclusions.” And so on.