RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2022/02/03/georgia-school-systems-blm-event-features-speaker-with-a-domestic-violence-charge-n1556056

Remember Dr. Tarece, the Gwinnett County, Ga. school board president whom I wrote about recently? Dr. Tarece holds some pretty far-left views, and she has put up some bizarre videos on her Tik Tok channel.

Well, the school system in DeKalb County, next door to Gwinnett, must have decided that they needed to keep up with the bizarre antics in Gwinnett. DeKalb County Schools is currently hosting BLM at School Week of Action, which is every bit as execrable as you can imagine.

An event on Wednesday featured speakers like Mawuli Davis, an Atlanta-area activist lawyer, and something called Hootdini. Topics included “Wealth Equity in the Black Community” and “For the People, by the People: The Unbalanced Judicial and Legislative Systems.”

The week also includes curriculum items like “The Truth About Voting,” in which middle and high schoolers learn “students will learn some common myths about voting today, think through who these myths might benefit, learn why these myths are incorrect and consider how people might ensure every eligible citizen has a chance to vote.”

I bet these students won’t learn how Georgia’s voter law — y’know, Jim Crow 2.0 — has actually increased voter turnout and made elections more secure.

In other words, DeKalb’s BLM at School Week of Action is a far-left fever dream.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/news-union-label-larry-sand/

In a recent press release, the American Federation of Teachers announced that it has launched a national partnership with NewsGuard, which the union informs us is a “leading anti-misinformation tool” which protects and champions legitimate journalism and fact-based reporting and “will help educators and their students navigate a sea of online disinformation.” AFT president Randi Weingarten claims that the deal will be a game-changer for the union’s 1.7 million teachers and the tens of millions of children and their families who are currently “drowning in an ocean of online dishonesty.” She adds quite melodramatically, “It is a beacon of clarity to expose the dark depths of the internet and uplift those outlets committed to truth and honesty rather than falsehoods and fabrications.”

But one look at NewsGuard’s lists outs them as leftist advocates, and nothing close to objective. Nine out of the 10 websites on NewsGuard’s “Ten Most Influential Misinformers” list for 2021 lean right, with NewsMax, TheGatewayPundit.com and The Federalist deemed the worst of the worst. On the other hand, “The Ten Top Trustworthy and Trending Sites” are all center- to far-left with NBCNews.com, The New York Times and The Washington Post ranked highest.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/promoting-grooming-and-sexualization-children-richard-l-cravatts/

Each year, public school libraries face angry parents and school boards upset with the presence of reading materials they find objectionable. These attacks on specific books have included classics such as often-banned Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (for its repeated use of the n-word), Catcher in the Rye (for what in today’s culture are its mild references to sexuality and its vulgarity), and other literary works whose value and reputation, despite occasional challenges, have made them logical additions to a school’s reading list.

Just last month, for example, The Mukilteo School Board near Seattle voted unanimously to remove Harper Lee’s classic examination of racism, To Kill a Mockingbird, from the required reading list for ninth graders because, as the American Library Association has noted, the book includes “racial slurs and their negative effect on students, featuring a ‘white savior’ character, and its perception of the Black experience.”   

Also last month, the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee made the troubling decision to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman, Maus, from the school system’s curriculum. In justifying its decision to remove the book, the Board claimed it was “because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide,” although the anthropomorphic characters in the novel are mice (Jews) and cats (Nazis), and the nudity in question referred, of course, to a naked mouse.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/diversity-still-politicized-after-all-these-years-bruce-thornton/

This term the Supreme Court will soon hear two challenges to affirmative action policies used in almost every university and college admissions and hiring procedures. These protocols have long been obvious violations of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.”

Yet ever since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978 green-lighted discrimination in admissions to further “diversity,” subsequent challenges to affirmative action policies in university admissions have ordered only cosmetic changes in various discriminatory practices, while leaving intact their legality and rationale.

Whether the current suit will yet again kick the can down the road, or finally end discrimination in higher education admission criteria, will depend on confronting the central begged question that since 1978 has justified affirmative action: the importance of “diversity” in improving educational outcomes.

But 44 years after Bakke, there still has not been a rigorous, empirically based definition of “diversity,” or demonstration of the “educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” as Justice Sandra Day O’Conner assumed in  Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), that create a “compelling state interest” justifying discrimination on the basis of race.

In contrast to “diversity,” real diversity is a timeless fact of human existence, based on numerous criteria such as culture, mores, language, religion, geography, political philosophies, social organizations, values, and economic status. Ethnicity, not “race,” is the basic unit of human identity, and it is comprised of  these elements. The “diversity” we talk about today is based on the superficial physical differences like skin color or hair texture, and duplicates the crude, reductive “race” categories of post-Darwinian “scientific racism” based on skin colors like “black,” “white,” “brown,” or the all-purpose, utterly vague and meaningless “person of color.” Ignored are the more important differences of culture and ethnicity. How people live is what creates their identities, not how they look.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/brown-universitys-woke-professors-battle-diversity-of-viewpoint/

One of the best places on campus for genuine intellectual discourse is being targeted by those who prefer left-wing conformity.

A mid the leftist-infused classrooms of Brown University lies a small, unassuming white building that houses the Political Theory Project (PTP). As an interdisciplinary research center committed to free inquiry and the free exchange of ideas, the PTP has been a haven for conservative and libertarian students for the past 19 years. But it’s not merely a “safe space” for the Right; it has, rather, fostered genuine intellectual inquiry for anyone interested in it.

Now, however, the PTP is under a sadly familiar sort of attack from many of Brown’s left-leaning professors. These professors feel threatened by the PTP because the courses offered by the center, such as “Bleeding Heart Libertarianism,” “Capitalism: For and Against,” and “20th Century Political Economy” tend to offer a centrist or libertarian angle on issues that challenge the progressive orthodoxy on campus. Their criticisms of a bastion of free thought at Brown are misguided and should be rejected.

The Political Theory Project makes clear in its mission statement its commitment to viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech and expression. Thus, the PTP has sought to bring to campus through its Janus Forum Lecture Series ideologically diverse speakers to debate issues such as the extent of the threat of climate change, whether the U.S. should support Israel, and whether “rape culture” exists on campus. For years, the PTP has held free-flowing conversations at which participants sparred openly on contentious issues and debated controversial opinions. But rather than welcoming such exchanges, some students and professors have accumulated negative feelings toward the project that now spill over into open denunciation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/georgetown-laws-conservative-and-libertarian-students-rally-around-ilya-shapiro/

In an editorial today, we made the case that it would be egregious for Georgetown University Law School to fire Ilya Shapiro. Now, the school’s Conservative and Libertarian Student Association is coming to his defense. In a statement, the students warn, “Should the school end its relationship with Mr. Shapiro, expect a strong response from the conservative and libertarian students on campus who are increasingly questioning whether they are welcome at Georgetown Law and are getting tired of GULC’s double-standard in handling offensive out-of-class statements made by faculty.”

Full statement here:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/01/28/how_universities_will_sidestep_scotus_on_affirmative_action_147107.html

Embracing affirmative action is virtually a job qualification for university administrators. The same is true, alas, for faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences. They march in lockstep toward a society permanently categorized by race, all with the best of intentions but not the best of outcomes.

They aren’t just woke. Their eyelids are sewn open. They have no intention of snoozing if the Supreme Court rules their current admission policies are illegal. They will stand proudly in the schoolhouse door, protecting policies they believe promote “social justice” and “equity.”

Their tactics to evade the court are surprisingly simple. Since admissions tests leave traces of discrimination, they’ll drop them. Having ditched these useful standards, university bureaucrats can sit behind closed doors, choose the applicants they favor, reject those they don’t, and leave no pesky evidence they are violating the law. Asian Americans, Jews, and other disfavored groups won’t have a record to show their test scores are systematically higher than favored groups, who are now being admitted despite their scores. To misquote Martin Luther King, universities are looking at the color of applicants’ skin, not the content of their academic qualifications.

Universities aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether affirmative action is constitutional. They already taking preemptive steps, designed to keep their current practices in place, this time without leaving fingerprints. Some 1,700 colleges and universities have already made SAT and ACT test scores optional for admission.

Why have universities dropped standardized tests? Not because these tests are biased or because they fail to predict academic performance (their primary purpose). Quite the contrary. The tests have been assiduously scrubbed to prevent cultural or racial bias, as they should be, and they are recognized as valuable tools to match students with the colleges where they are most likely to thrive academically.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/harvards-diversity-disgrace-harvard/

In 2014, the non-profit Students for Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging discrimination against Asian Americans in its admissions process — discrimination resulting from Harvard’s stated commitment to “a diverse class.” After defeats at the District and Court of Appeals level, the suit has arrived at the foot of the United States Supreme Court. The case will be argued in the 2022 term. Harvard’s reputation is not all that’s at stake. The case threatens to bring down the entire system of race-based affirmative action that dominates college admissions.

Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see why Students for Fair Admissions believe they have a case. According to 90,000 pages of Harvard admissions data, an Asian-American student must score 450 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a black student with the same qualifications. Harvard, despite being an academic institution, also scores for “personality,” and consistently gives Asian Americans the lowest ratings. Without discrimination, Asian Americans would make up 43 percent of the Harvard student body, according to Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research. In the years before the filing of the 2014 suit, Asians were between 15 and 20 percent of the student body.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_supreme_court_should_reject_racial_preference_in_college_admissions.html

The Supreme Court is going to hear two cases about racial preference in college admissions that allegedly discriminates against Asian students.

In the 1978 Bakke decision, the Supreme Court said race could be a factor in admissions, but as anyone who is sat through an academic committee meeting knows, when race is a factor, it is the only factor.

Even though the Supreme Court in Bakke said that a set-aside for admissions, or quota, was impermissible, colleges and universities routinely use racial quotas masquerading as goals.

The consequence has been that highly qualified Asian students are rejected on trivial and subjective data, such as leadership skills and self-confidence, to increase the proportion of less qualified blacks and Latinos.

How do Asian students achieve high academic status and participate in a range of extracurricular activities while lacking in leadership, self-confidence, and other personality traits? The answer is that when it comes to Asians, the subjective evaluation process is a farce designed to discriminate against them.

Race-based admissions are not the exception but the rule. And no one but diversity, inclusion, and equity experts conducting so-called cultural audits has profited from this policy.

Colleges and universities are run by a professional class of bureaucrats. And if anything, members of bureaucracy know that the very essence of their work is their own survival.