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EDUCATION

Amnesty International’s Pseudo-Scholarship More lethal ammunition for the campus cognitive war against Israel. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/amnesty-internationals-pseudo-scholarship-richard-l-cravatts/

In May, while Hamas was firing more than 3000 deadly rockets from Gaza with the express purpose of murdering Jewish Israelis, members of academic communities around the world were falling over themselves to express their solidarity, not with the beleaguered citizens of the Jewish state again under attack, but with the genocidal psychopaths of Hamas and the Palestinian people they are said to represent.

The ideological enemies of Israel could not have been more pleased. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel, the odious organization which put out the original call for efforts to slander the Jewish state, as one example, noted gleefully that “300 academic departments, program centers, unions and societies worldwide [had] endorsed statements supporting Palestinian rights, and statements from individual scholars, staff, students and alumni have garnered more than 15,000 signatures in what the campaign describes as ‘an unprecedented wave of solidarity.’”

Using almost the identical language, laced with descriptions of “colonialism,” “oppression,” “occupation,” “ethnic cleansing,” “human rights,” and “violations of international law,” these academic statements—oozing out of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, CUNY, among many other universities — revealed a profound ignorance of history and fact, and attempted, unsurprisingly, to paint Israel solely as the party to blame for the condition in which the Palestinian Arabs now find themselves.

Connecticut School Asked Eighth Graders to List Sexual Preferences during Lesson on Consent By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/connecticut-school-asked-eighth-graders-to-list-sexual-preferences-during-lesson-on-consent/

Parents in Enfield, Conn. are outraged after a health class assignment asked eighth graders to list their sexual likes and dislikes and boundaries, according to a new report.

Documents obtained by the nonprofit group Parents Defending Education show students were subjected to a lesson called “Pizza & Consent” that told students, “we can use pizza as a metaphor for sex!”

“If you’re a vegetarian, but your friend is a meat-lover, sharing a pizza is going to bring up a lot of issues. You don’t know who you can share pizza with unless you ask!” the assignment said. “The same goes with sex! You have to check in with your partner(s) and ask for their preferences.”

The assignment features a blank pizza with space to share pizza preferences “in relation to sex.” Pizza toppings were likened to sexual likes and dislikes. The assignment used “kissing” and “giving oral” as examples of toppings students could choose for their pizza.

“Obviously, you might not be able to list all of your wants, desires and boundaries, but hopefully you’ll start feeling more comfortable about discussing them,” the assignment read.

The Deep State control of the education system By John Dietrich

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/the_deep_state_control_of_education_system.html

Progressive control of the U.S. educational system, operating secretly via entrenched bureaucrats and cooperating elected officials, has been exposed by incidents in Loudoun County, Virginia.  In other words, the Deep State rules the classrooms of America.

A major factor affecting the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election (and destined to affect the 2022 midterm elections) is the public’s reaction to progressive control of the educational system.  This control had been successfully concealed by the major media until an incident at a Loudoun County school board meeting made national news.  At this June 22, 2021 school board meeting, parent Scott Smith was arrested.

Smith was protesting the fact that his daughter had been raped in the girl’s bathroom on May 28 by a “transgender” student.  School officials’ first response was an attempt to cover up the incident.  School board member Beth Barts proclaimed, “Our students do not need to be protected, and they are not in danger.”  Superintendent Scott Ziegler claimed: “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”

Ziegler, who is paid $295,000 a year, intentionally lied to the public about this incident.  In fact, he was the creator of one of the records covering the incident.  On the day of the attack, he wrote school board members a note entitled  “CONFIDENTIAL School Incident.”  It stated, “This afternoon a female student alleged that a male student sexually assaulted her in the restroom.”  When this lie was exposed, he responded, “I regret that my comments were misleading and I apologize for the distress that error caused families.”  He added, “My heart aches for you and I am sorry that we failed to provide the safe, welcoming, and affirming environment that we aspire to provide.”

Tony school in DC forces five-year-olds to parade around chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ for the cameras By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/tony_school_in_dc_forces_5_yearolds_to_parade_around_chanting_black_lives_matter_for_the_cameras.html

What is it about radical leftists and getting their hands on people’s kids?

Libs of Tik Tok (hat tip: Daily Wire and We Love Trump) found this one, posted on the ritzy Lowell School’s site, showing very small schoolchildren, all around age 5, marching in their masks, with signs chanting “Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter…”  I suppose we’re supposed to say, “Aw, aren’t they cute,” but the normal response is, Who is forcing them to do that against their will?

I remember singing “ring around the rosie” at that particular age.

What’s more, as a five-year-old in the ’60s, I remember seeing Black Panther and Symbionese Liberation Army violence, riots, and gun-waving parade-arounds, Charles Manson and his leftist fangirls, and hippies spitting at troops in airports, on the television set as a kid.  I recall viewing those things as vile, hateful, threatening, something never to get involved with.  More to the point, it would have been unthinkable to force any five-year-old at that time to go around chanting for those causes as they are for today’s similar ones.  It simply would not have been done.

But here we are today, with near-toddlers being forced to march and parade around for the cameras chanting for an organization that is characterized by its cause and effects — violence, burning cities, dead police officers, police defunding, zero response to 9/11 calls, and big death spikes in the black community based on unchecked violent crime, corporate kowtowing to the crocodile, and humongous piles of money engulfed in colossal corruption.

Parents Prevail Over K-12 ‘Bias Incidents’ Wellesley Public Schools amends woke policies after families sue.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/parents-prevail-over-k-12-bias-incidents-wellesley-public-schools-massachusetts-11644272316?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Score one more victory for the parental revolt against woke K-12 education. As part of a legal settlement on Monday, Wellesley Public Schools in Massachusetts agreed to amend practices that parents said excluded some students from events because of their race.

Last year the nonprofit Parents Defending Education sued in federal court on behalf of three Massachusetts families over Wellesley policies and practices that they said violated the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment and civil-rights law. The settlement looks like a solid win for the parents.

Wellesley’s “affinity groups” had held events aimed at specific races. School officials claimed no students or staff were excluded, but the families argued that isn’t what their children were told. The complaint quoted an email where a middle-school teacher said a specific “healing space” was “for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.”

Under the settlement, Wellesley agreed not to “exclude students from affinity-based group sessions or any other school-sponsored activities on the basis of race.” The district won’t identify events “as intended only for certain racial groups.” It “will provide notice” of affinity-based group sessions “to all grade-eligible students, regardless of their race.” Announcements will feature a disclaimer saying that “this event is open to all students regardless of race, color, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation.”

University of Minnesota Alums Protest Scholarship in George Floyd’s Honor “He was not a hero, but a drug addict and criminal.” Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/tuesday-university-minnesota-alums-protest-sara-dogan/

To mark the one-year anniversary of his death, the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota announced that they are endowing a new scholarship to honor George Perry Floyd Jr.—the drug addict and criminal who became famous through his death at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin.

“This is an important step for our community,” said Carlson School Dean Sri Zaheer, who added that the scholarship “will enhance the diversity of the student body and has a preference for black and African-American students as well as those who have financial need or are victims of police violence, for as long as they are underrepresented at the Carlson school.”

Dean Zaheer noted that at George Floyd’s memorial service, “Universities nationwide were called upon to create scholarships in his honor to help create a more just and equitable world,” and called Carlson’s scholarship a “clear message” of their intentions to promote racial justice. But does George Floyd—repeat criminal, drug addict, and unwitting martyr for a movement—deserve the immense honor of a scholarship in his name?

Bruce Hendry, a prominent alumnus of the University of Minnesota, is one of many who object to the honor their alma mater has bestowed on Floyd. Hendry has devoted significant time and resources to the betterment of the University, both serving on the Carlson Board of Overseers for 10 years and joining the university’s “Century Club” which consists of those who gave more than $100,000 to the University more than twenty-five years ago. 

Defunding the Ivy League in the Name of Freedom of Speech? A UPenn Professor says that’s the way to go. Thom Nickels

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/defunding-ivy-league-name-freedom-speech-thom-nickels/

A friend who works at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts told me that the atmosphere there regarding freedom of speech is so repressive that expressing her political opinions at work would be asking to be fired. The grip of Progressive Leftism at UArts is so strong she made me promise not to write anything about our conversations concerning the school.

For several years now students at UArts have been trying to remove tenured professor and renowned critic Camille Paglia from the University. Paglia, who has been teaching at UArts since 1989, came under fire in May 2019 when she delivered a lecture on sexual issues and western art despite threats and a petition from Leftist students not to do so. When Paglia refused to cancel the lecture, the leftist students demanded a post-lecture talk-back with themselves acting as Grand Inquistors.

Paglia’s refusal to agree to a talk-back caused the students to demand that UArts fire her and find “a queer person of color” as a replacement. The militant lefties also had another surprise. Forty minutes into Paglia’s lecture, they set off a fire alarm, in effect killing the remainder of the program and forcing the evacuation of the building. While UArts administrators refused student demands that Paglia be fired, since that incident Paglia has kept a low profile and has refrained from any further public talks on school property. 

By now their names are legion: Candace Owens, Patrick Buchanan, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, David Horowitz, Anne Coulter, and a host of other conservative speakers have all been targets of leftist students whose only wish is to silence divergent voices. The worst part of this phenomenon, besides the obvious free speech violations, is the intimidation factor that may cause intellectually curious students to opt out of attending a talk by a conservative because of the ugly atmosphere generated by the progressive brown shirts.

David Bernstein in his 2004 book, You Can’t Say That, describes how leftist activists begin the vivisection of their victim: first come the social-media call-outs, after which they strong arm authority figures [university administrators] to impose an outcome—censorship—in their favor.

George Washington University Pres Vows to Go After Anti-China Posters Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/02/george-washington-university-pres-vows-go-after-daniel-greenfield/

Criticism of China isn’t just verbotten in Hollywood or the NBA, but universities, which serve as a Chinese Communist espionage tool, are increasingly banning criticism of the Communist dictatorship even as they celebrate the most extreme hatred of America and Israel.

The latest case comes from George Washington University where President Mark Wrighton responded to posters criticizing China’s human rights abuses in the context of the Olympics by apologizing and threatening those who had put them up.

“Please know that I am personally offended by the posters. I treasure the opportunity to work with talented people from all over the world, including China…. we are working to have all of these offensive posters removed as soon as possible. I, too, am saddened by this terrible event and we will undertake an effort to determine who is responsible.” he reportedly wrote.

The terrible event in question not being China’s human rights abuses, but the posters.

The Man Who Replaced Bakke By Abraham H. Miller

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

Allan Bakke was U.S. Marine Corps officer and a NASA engineer. At age 35, he decided to go to medical school and applied to the University of California, Davis. He was rejected.

Bakke had a GPA of 3.51 and a 3.45 in the sciences. On the quantitative part of the MCAT, he scored 94 and exceeded that score with a 97 in the sciences.

Despite these outstanding qualifications and consideration that should have been given to him as a veteran, Bakke was rejected not once but twice.

The medical school accepted 100 students each year and set aside 16 slots for minorities. Bakke learned that lesser qualified minorities had been admitted in preference to him and sued the Regents of the University of California.

The court ordered Bakke admitted and said that the university had erred in creating an impermissible quota. But the court then, in a convoluted statement, said that while quotas were impermissible, race could be one of many factors that could be considered in admissions.

Why Colleges Don’t Care About Free Speech It’s incentives more than ideology, and there’s a simple fix. By John Hasnas

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.