RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/middle-schoolers-sexual-harassment-gender-pronouns

Three Wisconsin boys are facing sexual harassment charges from their middle school over accusations that they used incorrect gender pronouns on a fellow student.

“I received a phone call from the principal over at the elementary school, forewarning me; letting me know that I was going to be receiving an email with sexual harassment allegations against my son,” Rosemary Rabidoux, a parent of one of the accused, told Fox 11 News last week. 

“I immediately went into shock. I’m thinking, sexual harassment? That’s rape, that’s inappropriate touching, that’s incest” Rabidoux continued. “What has my son done?”

But none of the concerns Rabidoux had were at issue. Instead, her 13-year-old son, Braden, was accused of using incorrect pronouns to address another student at Kiel Middle School.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/george-washington-university-should-not-be-renamed/?utm_source=

A recent call by a GWU student to drop the American Founder’s name from the university is totally wrongheaded.

Several days ago, a fellow student of mine published an op-ed in the Washington Post that calls on our university, the George Washington University, to change its name. The op-ed plays into the recent trend of judging historical figures by the standards some hold today. It also indulges in contemporary platitudes by placing the blame for current university issues on “systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy.”

The author argues that the logical ways to move forward are by renaming the university (along with several other institutions at the school), by appointing an African-American president, by increasing enrollment of African-American students, and by implementing a “decolonized university curriculum.”

After acknowledging the absurdity of this article, it’s important to first address the main topic: removing President Washington’s name from our school. The main substantiation used here is Washington’s slaveholding. Slaveholding and the subjugation of others is unacceptable by any moral standard and is an understandable grievance. That being bluntly said, we cannot allow that to eclipse his legacy and his vision both for our country and our university. We cannot selectively and arbitrarily apply only that standard of moral decency to simply yield some political currency.

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that it was Washington’s desire for a university in our nation’s capital that inspired the founding of this school. Attempting to erase this man from our history does a great disservice even to the motives of those who are propagating this nonsense. Flawed as he may have been, the person who is almost single-handedly responsible for the erection and preservation of our republic still deserves to be recognized and is worthy of our admiration.

https://www.aier.org/article/rescuing-virtue-and-talents-amidst-the-war-on-tests/

On March 28, 2022, Stuart Schmill, Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced the school’s plan to restore the consideration of standardized tests to its undergraduate admissions process. A heavyweight bucks against the self-destructive path of attacking merit and standards. Will more follow suit? Or, is MIT’s rebellion too little and too late?

In his 1813 letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson laid out his vision for American meritocracy— “a natural aristocracy among men,” grounds of which “are virtue and talents.” This republic of merit separated the newly independent nation from the old world where artificial aristocracies “founded on wealth and birth” hindered the common good. Jefferson stipulated what it meant to have a merit-based education system that diffuses learning democratically and efficiently:

to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects to be completed at an University, where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.

The Test-Free Movement in a Historical Context

Forces within, from slavery to school segregations under Jim Crow laws to race-based admissions, have tried to corrupt the grand proposal of equality and merit. Like previous illiberal bargains to categorize students by race, the central focus of test-free admissions is also preoccupied with immutable features of the individual, under the fashionable banner of social identities, rather than observable academic performance. But unlike historical race-based practices that were rooted in bigotry and racism, arbiters of “equitable” college admissions in the modern era claim they are waging battles against the evil spirits of white supremacy, systemic inequities, and structural racism.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/reversing-dei/

MIT, caught in a bind, reintroduces standardized testing.

We wrote last November that MIT, our alma mater, “has caved repeatedly to the demands of ‘wokeness’, treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large.”  As has happened across academia, total commitment to DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—has become an article of faith, with an aggressive program of minority admissions part of the canon. MIT’s most recent initiative involves new hiring and programs devoted to:

understanding MIT’s Indigenous history and Native issues more broadly. Leadership in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS) and the History Section also helped us realize that it is past time for MIT to feature cutting-edge scholarship and educate our students in this rapidly expanding discipline.

Why MIT— long renowned for its math, science, and engineering education and research, and currently ranked #2 among all U.S. colleges and universities—needs to expand its focus to the “rapidly expanding discipline” of Native American studies is unclear. Among other things, MIT gave us the Mark 14 gunsight used by U.S. Navy ships during WWII, prominent participants in the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs, strobe photography, and the elucidation of the genetic basis of sickle-cell anemia, so one would think that it could allow other institutions to become leaders in championing politically correct social goals. However, MIT’s soon-to-depart president, L. Rafael Reif, has become DEI-obsessed. A search of the MIT website reveals at least 70 professors and staff directly related to promoting DEI, including six new Assistant Deans for DEI who were hired in a single day.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/another_sad_spectacle_at_duke_university.html

University commencement speakers took the stage this past weekend to advise students of the Class of 2022 now ready to join the real world.  I observed the commencement ceremony at Duke University, as my niece graduated magna cum laude.  As a Duke alumna myself, I was proud of her: half of her college experience was marred by extreme COVID lockdown policies, yet she remained focused, worked hard, and earned her accomplishments.  My extended family — which included several Duke grads and employees — settled atop Wallace Wade stadium, bracing unseasonably cold weather, awaiting the commencement speakers’ advice to the next generation. 

The featured Duke commencement speaker was General Motors CEO Mary Barra.  She spoke of five lessons from the kitchen table.  I appreciated her speech and humble advice, especially grateful that she did not receive the memo that the words “diversity” and “equity” are crucial features of modern-day academic discourse.  Unfortunately, her grounded advice will be overshadowed by the student commencement speech preceding it.

Prior to Ms. Barra’s speech, the chosen Duke undergraduate student speaker spoke of a “Duke Nation.”  The Duke senior described the idea that if a moat existed around Duke, “[Duke] could be its own tiny island nation like Cuba or Sri Lanka.”  “Cuba?” I thought at the time.  “Well, that probably isn’t a terrible comparison when you really think about the communist collectivism on campuses.”  The remaining speech contained citizenship metaphors, passport allusions, and a “world of experiences.”

This senior had an impressive résumé, including an impending Bachelor of Science degrees in statistical science and economics with a religion minor.  She had been an editor with the Duke student newspaper and a Young Trustee Finalist, had studied at the Ecologic Institute in Germany for a summer, and was a Duke Student Government senator, among other accomplishments, and she “is passionate about empowering women of color in STEM,” according to the commencement program biography.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-parents-say-no-to-anti-semitic-ethnic-studies-public-school-children-classroom-israel-anti-semitic-11652389663?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

A group of Jewish public-school parents and teachers filed a federal lawsuit Thursday challenging the adoption of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist curricular materials in Los Angeles public schools.

Last year California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring public-school students in the state to complete a course in ethnic studies to graduate from high school. He said it was needed because “students deserve to see themselves in their studies, and they must understand our nation’s full history if we expect them to one day build a more just society.” But the ethnic-studies movement has never been about representation or justice. A creature of 1960s radical left-wing activism, ethnic studies was from the start about attacking the U.S., capitalism and Zionism.

Advocates—including teachers union officials, public-school teachers and other ideologues—have formed the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, through which they hope to influence the teaching of ethnic studies in the state. The consortium, which disseminates teaching materials lifted directly from radical anti-Israel websites, rejects the idea that all cultures should be studied. It asserts that ethnic studies is about only four groups: Native Americans, black Americans, Chicanos/Latinos, and Asian-Americans/Pacific Islanders. That last group includes Arabs from the Middle East—but not Jews, who’ve lived in that same region for millennia.

The consortium’s materials—many of which have been taken offline in recent months—are filled with attacks on Jews and the Jewish state. They deny that Jews are indigenous to the Middle East and teach that Israel is a “colonialist” and “settler state” founded through “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.” They falsely define Judaism, teaching that “Zionism is distinct from Judaism” and that Zionism isn’t a Jewish religious belief but an invention of the “late 19th century.”

Tell that to the millions of Jews who end their Passover Seders with “next year in Jerusalem,” or end every Jewish wedding by breaking a glass to mourn Jerusalem’s destruction, or pray each day facing Jerusalem—or whose bible, prayer book and calendar have for thousands of years been filled with the yearning for a return of the people of Israel to sovereignty in the land of Israel.