RUTHFULLY YOURS

What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes, and censorship have to do with higher learning?

American universities want it both ways. They expect unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else.

Colleges still wear the ancient clothes of higher learning. Latin mottos, caps and gowns, ivy-covered spires, and high talk of liberal education reflect a hallowed intellectual tradition.

In fact, today’s campuses mimic ideological boot camps. Tenured professors seek to indoctrinate young people in certain preconceived progressive political agendas. Environmental-studies classes are not very open to debating the “settled science” of man-caused, carbon-induced global warming – or the need for immediate and massive government intervention to address it. Grade-conscious and indebted students make the necessary ideological adjustments.

Few sociology courses celebrate the uniquely American assimilationist melting pot. Race, class, and gender agenda courses – along with thousands of “studies” courses – have been invented. A generation of politicized professors has made the strange argument that they alone have discovered all sorts of critical new disciplines of knowledge – apparently unknown for 2,500 years – to ensure that graduates would be better educated than ever before.

Universities have lost their commitment to the inductive method. Preconceived anti-Enlightenment theories are established as settled fact and part of career promotion. Evidence is made to fit these unquestioned assumptions.

Two unfortunate results have predictably followed.

Roberta Flack, years earlier, sang what has become the Europeans theme song, “Killing Me Softly.” Despite the reported wilding spree of at least a thousand North African refugees who groped women at the New Year celebration in Cologne, Germany, despite allegations of two rapes, despite condemnation by Prime Minister Merkel, the mayor of the city has requested that women monitor their “code of conduct.” Apparently German authorities will contest to their last breath that tolerance dedication will not yield. This is the tolerance that kills, softly at first and violently in time.

What Germany represents is a continental death knell in which tolerance trumps personal safety and even survival. Compassion is the sentiment of the day. Yet it is hard to imagine inviting one million citizens into the country who are not assimilable with many on the public dole. This is one of those rare moments in history when people are paid for bad behavior.

Much of the chaos Germany now endures was predictable. After all, many Muslim men treat woman as inferior, mere objects for their sexual delectation. The Koran endorses the proposition that a woman has half the rights of a man in any legal proceeding. Nonetheless, the compassion crusade goes on.

A German “education expert” proposed Wednesday that Arabic becomes a mandatory subject in German schools to enable refugees and Germans to coexist.

Thomas Strothotte, president of Kühne Logistics University and a renowned voice in education issues, told Die Zeit that society as a whole would benefit and “keep up” with a new reality from becoming increasingly multicultural. Strothotte has served as president at several German universities and founded two private schools in the city of Magdeburg.

“We would appreciate being a country of immigration and multiple languages,” Strothotte said. “Refugee children need to learn German and German children Arabic.”

Strothotte believes increased understanding of Arabic will have positive effects on Germany culturally, economically and politically.

Strothotte is not the first to call for Arabic classes in the German curriculum. Christian Wiesenhütter, deputy chief executive for the Berlin Camber of Commerce, called Arabic a new “world language” back in 2013, long before the Syrian refugee crisis was on the horizon. Strothotte primarily wanted to boost German business with the idea.

“We must finally acknowledge that Arabic is a world language,” he said. “We have to stay on pace.”

In face of intense criticism from alarmist scientists, Dr. John Christy went to great lengths in a Tuesday congressional hearing to detail why satellite-derived temperatures are much more reliable indicators of warming than surface thermometers.

“That’s where the real mass of the climate system exists in terms of the atmosphere,” Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama and Alabama’s state climatologist, said in a Wednesday hearing before the House science committee.

“When a theory contradicts the facts” you need to change the theory, Christy said. “The real world is not going along with rapid warming. The models need to go back to the drawing board.”

Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, the committee’s chairman, convened a hearing on the implications of President Barack Obama’s recent United Nations deal in Paris, which agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Christy doesn’t think signing onto a U.N. deal is good for Americans, and challenges the very data politicians and environmentalists rely on to push green energy policies.

To understand just how depraved today’s college campuses are, compare the treatment of two professors – one defending a Western, pro-American democracy (Israel) and the other suspected of supporting this century’s most gruesome Islamist terror organization, the Islamic State (“ISIS”).

Julio Pino, an associate history professor at Kent State University, is currently under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security for potential ties to ISIS.

Pino’s jihadist leanings include possible threats against the U.S. government and virulently anti-Israel rants. In 2002, he praised a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber who had killed two people in Jerusalem, saying that the teen had “died a martyr’s death in occupied Jerusalem, Palestine.”

In a 2014 open letter to “academic friends of Israel,” Pino published an unhinged and anti-Semitic invective: “I hold you directly responsible for the murder of over 1,400 Palestinian children, women and elderly civilians over the past month…[w]hile The Chosen drain the blood of innocents without apologies you hide behind the mask of academic objectivity, nobility of research and the reward of teaching to foreign youth – in a segregated university, of course.” Pino closed the letter with: “Jihad until victory!”

Despite decades of hateful and extremist statements, Kent State reportedly gave Pino multiple awards, including the Faculty Excellence Award in 2010, 2003, 2000 and 1996, along with the Professional Excellence Award in 1999 and 1997.

Schoolchildren as young as 13 in Brighton, England were told to fill out a government survey that asked them to pick out their gender (or genders) from a list of 25 options.

Yes — gender or genders.

Among the options were “tri-gender” (having exactly three genders,) “gender fluid” (having your gender change over time,) “demi-boy/demi-girl” (someone who is only partially male/female,) and “all genders” (which would be an infinite number because gender is obviously a spectrum.)

Below is the complete list, from which instructed students to “choose as many as [they] want:”

Male

Female

Girl

Boy

Tomboy

(Young) woman

(Young) man

There are a number of significant challenges in higher education today, including rising costs, diminishing returns, and the stifling effects of runaway political correctness on academic inquiry. That being said, it’s not all bad news. In fact, there are a number of hopeful, emerging trends that promise to create new and expanded opportunities for students while fostering a healthier campus intellectual climate:

1. Declining Number of Applicants – The number of college applicants peaked in 2009… around the same time the number of jobs for graduates bottomed out. What a disaster! Since then, due to demographic realities, the number of graduating high school seniors has declined and, with it, we have a smaller applicant pool in higher education. It is now becoming a buyer’s market for college applicants, and colleges are struggling to fill their freshman classes. This increases the applicants’ admission chances as well as their negotiating power for financial and merit aid awards.

2. Increasing Number of Jobs for Graduates After the worst job market for young adults since the Great Depression, graduates finally have reason for optimism. Thanks to the aging of the Baby Boomers and their shift into retirement, the labor market is starting to open up for young people. According to The Wall Street Journal, incomes for the newest batch of graduates are now the highest in over a decade, while unemployment rates are falling quickly. Also, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that employers plan to hire 11% more college graduates this year than last.

3. Tuition Discounting. After years of runaway tuition price inflation, completely disconnected from the rest of the economy and supported by mushrooming levels of student debt, market forces are finally starting to exert some influence at some schools. Institutions are offering all-time-high tuition discounts to encourage students to enroll and, for the first time in recent memory, we’re starting to see good old-fashioned price competition breaking out among some consumer-minded schools. Now, that’s refreshing!

Sergeant Schultz Knows Everything

“I know nothing!”

That was Sergeant Hans Schultz’s favorite and well-known refrain in Hogan’s Heroes, which ran on CBS from 1965 to 1971. In the linked clip, he adds, “I was not here! I did not even get up this morning!”

Suppose you had a chance to chat with the real-life Sgt. Schultz’s in Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark. The “interfaith” dialogue would go something like this, after you’ve reported a crime committed by a Muslim.

Sgt. Schultz will claim that he knows everything, he was there, and that you should go back to sleep and pretend nothing ever happened. You were not raped by a Muslim or a gang of Muslims. You did not have your head kicked in by a gang of Muslims. You were not robbed by a Muslim. Or stabbed, or groped, or spit on by a Muslim on a train or on the street. Or even raped and then disfigured by a Muslim. Or by a “refugee,” or by an “immigrant.”

All right, Sgt. Schultz would concede. All or one of those things happened to you. There’s no denying the facts, is there? But if you fought back, and used illegal means such as pepper spray to deter your assailant, then you must be punished. Your fighting back is evidence of bigotry, or racism, of being anti-Muslim or anti-Islam or anti-immigrant. Of your lack of patriotism! Those states of mind are illegal, as well, and must be corrected.

You must allow yourself to be raped, robbed, and spit on. It’s your duty to submit to the diktats of Islam. You must submit to Sharia. Horridly primitive system, yes. But, who are we to judge? You may not survive the experience, but it’s an issue of sacrifice. Of self-sacrifice for the greater good. For the nation. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Germany, even Italy – all of our lily-white societies, have a duty to be invaded and assaulted by Muslims and others. We have a duty to relieve the suffering they endured in the countries from which they came. We have no right to assert that our morals and our society are superior to the cultures of the immigrants. We have no right to impose them on immigrants, even here. That is the height of cultural hubris and civilizational imperialism. Okay, so the perpetrator was Somalian. And he hates whites, even though Sweden was not a party to the downfall of Somalia. Or Ethiopia. I’m a little foggy on the history of that part of the world. So what?

The University of Kentucky is offering a course titled “Taco Literacy: Public Advocacy and Mexican Food in the U.S. South ” where students will examine the social and racial issues surrounding tacos.

Or, as the course’s website puts it, “how food literacies situate different spaces, identities, and forms of knowledge.”

“This class allows our students to explore the issues of immigration, inequality, workers, intercultural communication, and literacy through the prism of food,” the course’s professor, Steven Alvarez, told Vice.

This existence of such a course isn’t surprising; tacos are a very controversial subject these days — and plenty of people have gotten into trouble for handling the (apparently) sensitive issue in an (apparently) insensitive way.

A few examples:

In 2013, Northwestern University’s Hispanic/Latino Alliance wrote a letter warning students not to eat tacos on Cinco de Mayo because that could make some students feel “unsafe.”

In 2014, California State University – Fullerton’s chapter of Alpha Delta Pi sorority faced “serious sanctions” from the school for hosting a Taco Tuesday event where students wore sombreros because that’s “culturally insensitive attire.”

The University of Southern California hosted a “Consent Carnival” where it taught students that there’s a five-step process they must follow before kissing someone in order for it to not be considered sexual assault

In fact, the checklist also states that following these steps just once is not enough. No, you have to follow them every time you kiss someone, even if you’ve kissed them before.

The exhibit, called “Kissing Booth,” offered students Hershey’s kisses glued on to little white pieces of paper with the words “what exactly does it mean to . . . ‘consent’ to a kiss?” and the following five steps:

Affirmative: We’re really excited to share this kiss with you and we’re letting you know!

Coherent: We’re present and able to recognize exactly what’s happening when we give this kiss to you.

Willing: We made the decision to give you this kiss ourselves, without pressure or manipulation from you or anybody else.

Ongoing: Should you come back for another kiss, check in to see if we’d still like to give you one.

Mutual: Sure, we offered you a kiss, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept it. Coming over to our table doesn’t forfeit your right to say no.

So, in other words: If you are kissing someone, but stop for a half a millisecond to breathe, you have to step back and say “can I kiss you again?” before continuing.

How reasonable and normal and romantic!