RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/yale-princeton-covid-policies-are-hard-to-take-seriously

For anyone who believes that America’s elite institutions of higher learning are taken far too seriously — and I count myself among the believers — the last two years have been bracing. Of course I am referring to Covid policy, in particular the current efforts of Princeton and Yale to restrict the off-campus movements of their students in fairly radical ways.

This week Yale sent out an email laying out requirements for returning students. According to the Yale Daily News, there will be a campus-wide quarantine until Feb. 7, which may be extended. Furthermore, students “may not visit New Haven businesses or eat at local restaurants (even outdoors) except for curbside pickup.”

Meanwhile, in Princeton, the university issued this announcement on Dec. 27: “Beginning January 8 through mid-February, all undergraduate students who have returned to campus will not be permitted to travel outside of Mercer County or Plainsboro Township for personal reasons, except in extraordinary circumstances. … We’ll revisit and, if possible, revise this travel restriction by February 15.”

My first reaction, as someone who teaches at George Mason University in northern Virginia, is to be amazed that the life of the Yale campus and the life of New Haven can be so readily separated. If Yale truly has evolved to be a separate enclave, then that is a sign of trouble, pandemic or not.

My school is so integrated with the local community — including a large number of commuting students — that such a regulation would be unthinkable. Princeton at least is recognizing that the university and the town are pretty much inseparable.

My second reaction is that these two elite American institutions have lost their moorings. Can you imagine your school telling you not to leave the county? (Though Princeton sports teams are somehow exempted.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/california-has-kids-worshiping-aztec-gods-matthew-vadum/

California’s long-running descent into madness continues as its bizarre Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) now encourages public school students to pray to bloodthirsty Aztec deities.

The California State Board of Education approved the almost 900-page ESMC in March 2021, saying teaching children about the systemic racism that supposedly plagues America has never been more urgent, as Fox News reported at the time.

“The curriculum’s unequivocal promotion of five Aztec gods or deities through repetitive chanting and affirmation of their symbolic principles constitutes an unlawful government preference toward a particular religious practice,” Frank Xu, president of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, said months ago as his organization filed a lawsuit against the state.

“This public endorsement of the Aztec religion fundamentally erodes equal education rights and irresponsibly glorifies anthropomorphic, male deities whose religious rituals involved gruesome human sacrifice and human dismemberment.”

The legal action, Californians for Equal Rights Foundation v. State of California, was filed Sept. 3, 2021, in the Superior Court of California, County of San Diego, by attorneys from the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm focusing on religious freedom. The foundation is a non-profit civil rights organization headquartered in San Diego.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/two-american-crises/

Last January 6 was terrible. The ongoing abuse of our children in schools will do far more lasting damage.

A mericans are reflecting on two important crises this week. One, last year’s January 6 Capitol riot, was thoroughly investigated and its perpetrators are being severely punished. The other, the ongoing systemic abuse of our children by the Democrat-run education system, has been shrugged at, has gone wholly unpunished, and is barely acknowledged even as millions of us observe it in horrified disbelief that such hideous mistreatment can be official policy in the greatest country on earth.

One event was properly labeled something that must never be allowed to happen again, and it almost certainly won’t. (Because the Capitol Police will be prepared next time.) One event will continue every day, indefinitely, until Democrats finally get tired of subjugating our children and decide to stop.

The Capitol riot was a series of spectacular crimes that deserved spectacular punishment, as we at NR argued at the time. But what’s going on in schools is likely to do far greater long-term damage to America. The number of children being significantly harmed by nonsensical Covid restrictions such as closed schools, forced masking, forbidden talking at lunch, and canceled extracurricular activities vital for social, emotional, and physical development is in the millions. And how many young people are we killing by driving them into depressions from which there is no exit?

The invaluable David Leonhardt of the New York Times published this week a grueling summation of what pandemic restrictions — not the pandemic, which has more or less bypassed children — are doing to the youngest and most vulnerable among us. Every day our kids spend under this nightmare regime is a day of development that is lost forever. “Kids are resilient,” we tell ourselves. Are they? It seems to me something closer to the opposite is the case: Severe psychological traumas endured in childhood rarely disappear, and very often they mutate into major problems in adulthood. Psychologically speaking, kids are fragile. What kind of future are we building if we allow this horror to continue? It’s been nearly two years of this. How alienated, bitter, antisocial, and resentful are these kids going to be when they’re grown? We are poisoning our most valuable crop.

“American children are in crisis,” Leonhardt baldly and accurately states, citing sagging test scores, a spike in demand for emergency treatment of children, a 51 percent increase in suicide attempts leading to ER visits by teen girls, and anecdotal evidence of an increase in misbehavior by pupils in school. Yet some 2,200 schools are closing this week all over the country — in Atlanta, Cleveland, and some New York City suburbs. In Chicago, in-person classes are canceled. In Massachusetts, the largest teachers’ union is calling for school closings.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yales-anonymous/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

The Yale Daily News granted anonymity to a Chinese student who published a column on Peng Shuai’s disappearance by the Chinese Communist Party. The student paper’s editors explained why they published the piece that way:

Editor’s Note: The News has granted the author of this piece anonymity due to a risk to their family’s safety. The author is a University student with family in China who might be harmed by the piece being published with the author’s name. As a policy, the News does not accept anonymous submissions. However, we believed this piece could not be published without guaranteeing the author’s anonymity.

It’s an important piece that, fitting in with other recent events, deserves attention:

As a concerned Yale student, who has to remain anonymous for fear of putting those I love in danger, I’m writing to you so that she won’t be forgotten. We won’t forget her. And I want to tell you what I think #WhereIsPengShuai is really about. If we trivialize Peng Shuai’s allegations as just another social media hashtag, what she did will be for nothing…

The Yale endowment needs to divest from China. The track record of the CCP has made it more than clear that every dollar of investment in China is unethical, until the CCP is willing to positively respond to, and act on, allegations by Peng Shuai and many others. Despite having a significant Chinese portfolio, which includes top-earning tech companies like Tencent and JD.com, the Yale Investments Office currently has no publicly available ethical policy specific to China or a review of its ethical implications.

There are two critical points to take from this.

First, a counter-CCP campus divestment movement is taking shape, and this piece serves as a reminder of its significance. In October, Catholic University of America’s student government voted to support the school’s divestment from firms implicated in the Uyghur genocide, leading school officials to pledge to take steps toward that goal.

Rory O’Connor of the Athenai Institute, the group coordinating a nationwide boycott campaign, told me at the time that his organization is targeting a number of other schools across the country in the coming months.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/04/dei-must-die/

Researchers extraordinaire Jay Greene and James Paul have released a series of three carefully crafted studies on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that detail many aspects of the harmful scheme. In a nutshell, the authors find DEI to be “counterproductive and politically radical.”

The part of the study that examines DEI’s effects on elementary schools is particularly damning. It looks at school districts with at least 15,000 students, of which there are 554, and finds that schools with Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs) “actually have larger gaps in achievement between black and white students, Hispanic and white students, and non-poor and poor students than districts without CDOs. And those gaps are growing wider over time. This pattern holds true even after controlling for a host of other observable characteristics of those districts.”

The authors explain that the gaps occur because CDOs “are more focused on promoting a political agenda than they are on finding effective educational interventions.” And that political agenda includes advancing policies that typically exacerbate achievement gaps, such as eliminating gifted programs and advanced math classes “while selecting English and Social Studies content for its political orthodoxy rather than educational quality.”

Why would such a bad idea be such an easy sell? Because when you dress up the words, they can sound good, at least to true believers. But in reality, it’s a nightmare for all concerned, except of course for the “progressive” elites who financially benefit from the racket.

One part of the study deals with the anti-Semitic nature of DEI. Interestingly, Greene and Paul compiled Twitter feeds of 741 DEI officials at 65 universities and find “605 tweets that bash Israel and just 28 that praise the Jewish state.” They add that 62 percent of the tweets that reference China were favorable.

When it comes to educational malfeasance, California, as usual, does its best to be the national leader. In fact, there are potholes galore on Equity Road in the Golden State. For starters State Superintendent of Public Instruction and Indoctrinator-in-Chief Tony Thurmond hired Daniel Lee as the state’s first “superintendent of equity.” But shortly thereafter, Politico revealed that Lee, a psychologist, life coach, and self-help author, is also a Pennsylvanian, and was given a job that was never publicly posted by the California state Education Department. Apparently being buddies with Phony Tony was enough to land Lee the $180,000 a year job. When asked if others were interviewed for the job besides Lee, Thurmond replied, “I can’t recall.” If nothing else, Thurmond is living proof that cronyism is alive and well in California.

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

For years now, the educational establishment and the Democrat Party have colluded to damage pride of accomplishment within the black community.  Now that the Democrat Party is essentially a Marxist outlet, the drive for weakening American children’s education is on full display. In fact, “dumbing down education [is the] key to dismantling America.” It is the communists’ dream to destroy the American dream. 

As the debate over Critical Race Theory has emerged, Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., explains “the insidious nature of this radical new ideology now being taught to American schoolchildren and the myriad ways in which public school students are being groomed to carry out the agendas of the Left.”  It is also ultimately the pathway to pit white people against black people.

Candace Owens clearly articulates what is happening.

“…they’re trying to teach a Marxist ideology.’ Hard academics such as learning science and mathematics subjects are being replaced.

‘They’re learning how to hate white people. They’re learning how to hate their country, and this is problematic for the future. What they’re trying to do is guarantee that they have an ignorant group of people that vote based on emotion. It’s a Democrat long-term strategy, and it’s finally coming into fruition.’

And in perfect lockstep, the latest example can be found in the Arlington County School Board in Virginia, which has introduced a proposal that would eradicate the traditional grading system. 

The justification for this change is that “certain basic standards — like having late penalties — could potentially harm poor and minority children who they claim may not have access to resources necessary to complete assignments on time.” Or “students should not be graded on homework assignments because the fear of making mistakes will have a negative impact on their learning process.”

This comes as no surprise as the Left tightens its rapacious control over every aspect of society.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/campus-struggle-sessions-matthew-vadum/

Ritualized humiliation and self-abasement are becoming the norm for those in higher education who defy the campus enforcers of wokeness.

In a scene out of Communist China’s Cultural Revolution, current law professor Jason Kilborn and former college administrator Jodi Shaw — both white people — are the latest victims of mandatory reeducation at the hands of the race-weaponizing radicals who run the academy.

This disturbing move in the direction of normalizing academic brainwashing comes as things go the opposite way for parents nationwide who, thanks to well-publicized examples of arrogant leftist educrats’ damaging public admissions, are making great strides attacking critical race theory (CRT) at the local and state levels.

But taking on school boards over CRT doesn’t help Kilborn, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. He has been ordered by his employer to endure mandatory reeducation as punishment for using an abbreviated version of a racial slur in a legal hypothetical about race-based employment discrimination on an exam. The issue was whether the information concerned in the hypothetical was work product.

Students whined that the use of the term, even with 5 of its 6 letters redacted, was hurtful, and the school’s Black Law Students Association demanded that Kilborn be fired.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/thursday-happy-un-woke-year-larry-sand/

Watching teachers unions, government school honchos, the media, etc., deny that Critical Race Theory (which makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life, categorizing individuals into groups of oppressors and victims) is taught in our schools reminds me of that memorable scene from an otherwise forgettable movie, A Guide for the Married Man. A husband gets caught by his wife in bed with another woman, and he simply denies it. And he does so, vociferously and repetitiously to the point that his wife actually starts to believe him.

A typical example of this gaslighting is “Who is Behind the Attacks on Educators and Public Schools?,” posted earlier this month by the National Education Association on its website. The union claims, “Small groups of radicalized adults, egged on by…bad actors, have been whipped into a furor over…the false notion that children are being taught ‘critical race theory.’” At the same time that NEA is denying that CRT is taught, the union published its Racial Justice in Education Resource Guide, in which teachers are advised how to directly address issues such as white supremacy, implicit bias and acknowledging how race influences their work.

In November, an American Enterprise Institute report definitively showed “how legacy and education media refuse to acknowledge the hard evidence — numerous clear examples of CRT curriculum taught to students, a CRT pledge on a state website, and the political implications of parents speaking out about CRT at school boards.” And just last week, John Murawski at RealClearInvestigations gave us abundant evidence that CRT does indeed exist in our schools. One of the myriad examples he gives is Manuel Rustin, a high school history teacher, who helped oversee the drafting of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. He discloses “Ethnic studies without Critical Race Theory is not ethnic studies. It would be like a science class without the scientific method. There is no critical analysis of systems of power and experiences of these marginalized groups without Critical Race Theory.”

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-democrats-education-lunacies

On Meet the Press Daily last week, Chuck Todd featured a small item about the 23 Democrats not planning on running for re-reelection to congress next year. Todd guessed such a high number expressed a lack of confidence in next year’s midterms, and his guest, University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato, agreed. “This is just another indicator that Democrats will probably have a bad year in 2022,” said Sabato, adding, “They only have a majority of five. It’s pretty tough to see how they hold on.”

On the full Meet the Press Sunday, Todd in an ostensibly unrelated segment interviewed 1619 Project author and New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about Republican efforts in some states to ban teaching of her work. He detoured to ask about the Virginia governor’s race, which seemingly was decided on the question, “How influential should parents be about curriculum?” Given that Democrats lost Virginia after candidate Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Todd asked her, “How do we do this?”

Hannah-Jones’s first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he’d just said, but because of a “right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated.” This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science.”