RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dont-care-free-speech-ilya-shapiro-treanor-georgetown-cancel-pc-culture-censorship-campus-11644167414?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Mr. Hasnas is a professor of business and law at Georgetown and executive director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics.

“In the absence of damage awards, university administrators won’t act against their own interests merely to uphold an abstract commitment to free speech. The threat of such awards would make universities like Georgetown put their money where their mouths are.”

Georgetown University’s law school violated its own speech policy last week when it placed Ilya Shapiro, a newly hired administrator, on leave over a tweet that offended some students. Why do universities make grandiloquent commitments to freedom of speech, then fail to honor them? It isn’t so much an issue of ideology as a problem of incentives.

Georgetown’s policy states that speech “may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived.”

Yet that’s what happened when Mr. Shapiro tweeted that the candidate he viewed as “objectively” most qualified for the Supreme Court “alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.” The dean of Georgetown Law, William Treanor, announced that Mr. Shapiro’s comment was “at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law” and ordered “an investigation into whether he violated our policies and expectations on professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment.”

Regardless of Mr. Treanor’s political views, he has every reason to do this. University administrators get no reward for upholding abstract principles. Their incentive is to quell on-campus outrage and bad press as quickly as possible. Success is widely praised, but there is no punishment for failing to uphold the university’s commitment to free speech.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/the_jewish_question_has_come_to_america_.html

There has never been in America a Jewish Question, at least, not until now.

America was built on the idea of a universal identity and a tolerance of differences. From the evolution of a liberal Protestant theology to George Washington’s embrace of the Jewish community, America — unlike Europe — did not see the Jews as strangers in its midst, as a people apart, or as a group whose identity stood at variance with others.

In America, there was no compelling desire for society to define the Jew. In Europe, Karl Marx, himself born a Jew and later a convert to Christianity, wrote an anti-Semitic screed, On the Jewish Question. Later Thomas Mann, who might be called a Philo-Semite, authored a lengthy essay with a similar title because the subject haunted Germany and Jews needed a defender.

Europe was consumed, if not obsessed, with the Jew in its midst.

While America had no shortage of anti-Semitic customs and displays of bigotry, Jews were well integrated into American society from the founding of the Republic until the great waves of Eastern European immigration began crashing on America’s shores and brought a different kind of Jew to its attention.

Nonetheless, Jews defined themselves. There was bigotry, hatred, and gentlemen’s agreements, but American intellectuals did not feel compelled to define the place of the Jew in society. To do so would have been contrary to America’s primary values.

America might not have uniformly adhered to its primary values, but its aspiration to embrace those values led to Jewish acceptance that never occurred in Europe even to this day.

But that has now changed and is the biggest threat to Jewish existence since the Klan almost took over the Democratic Party in the early 1920s.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/ilya-shapiro-has-exposed-the-rot-within-georgetown

Perhaps the only good to come out of Georgetown Law School’s ridiculous response to the Ilya Shapiro controversy is that it has exposed the deep cultural rot within the university and its student body.

This week, Dean Bill Treanor announced he had placed Shapiro on administrative leave over a tweet in which Shapiro criticized President Joe Biden’s decision to consider only a black female nominee to the Supreme Court. Subsequently, a group of students held a sit-in to air their concerns about Shapiro. The meeting quickly devolved into a broader discussion about why Shapiro was even hired in the first place, which led to a condemnation of the school’s Center for the Constitution, which Shapiro was hired to help direct.

“Why was it created?” one student asked, adding that the originalist views of the center’s director, Randy Barnett, make it “seem like [the center] has done more harm than good.”

“You can do as much diversity training as you want with staff,” the student continued, according to National Review. “But I feel like that Center has a certain ideology … so I really want you to defend why we really need it, beyond, like, you know, free speech, and beyond diversity of opinion. I really want us to think critically about why we still need it.”

Another student demanded that Treanor offer a “reparations” package to black students who might be harmed by Shapiro’s hiring. Free meals, excused absences, and a place to cry were some of the things the student said this package should include.

“Is there an office they can go to?” she asked. “I don’t know what it would look like, but if they want to cry, if they need to break down, where can they go? Because we’re at a point where students are coming out of class to go to the bathroom to cry. And this is not in the future. This is today.”

And that’s not all. Students who have defended Shapiro, and even students who have stuck up for their peers defending Shapiro, are being bullied into silence by others on campus.

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: