RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-supreme-court-affirmative-action-racial-preferences

When the Supreme Court, in 2023, banned the use of racial preferences in university admissions, observers expected the number of black and Hispanic freshmen on elite campuses to fall and the number of Asian freshmen to rise. At many schools, however, that didn’t happen.

Admissions data reveal that Yale, Princeton, Duke, and several other highly selective schools enrolled fewer Asian students in their Classes of 2028—the first group admitted since the Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—than they did in their Classes of 2027. Black enrollment at these schools, by contrast, remained virtually unchanged.

In the run up to SFFA, these elite colleges repeatedly asserted that they could not maintain racial diversity on campuses without affirmative action. Sixteen prestigious colleges filed a joint amicus brief arguing that “no race-neutral alternative presently can fully replace race-conscious individualized and holistic review to obtain the diverse student body Amici have found essential to fulfilling their missions.” Several had advanced the same argument in amicus briefs filed in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger and 2016’s Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, earlier cases examining the use of racial preferences.

For more than two decades, universities claimed that socioeconomic preferences, geographic sorting, and other race-neutral alternatives could not achieve the same level of racial diversity on campus as could affirmative action. Yet the demographics of many schools’ Class of 2028 suggest otherwise. It raises an awkward question: Did America’s top universities mislead the Supreme Court then, or are they breaking the law now?

Consider data from an Inside Higher Ed database that tracks the demographics of the Classes of 2027 and 2028 at 31 highly selective universities. The database includes the first-year demographics for 13 of the 15 highly selective universities that alleged, in the SFFA amicus brief, that their campuses would lose racial diversity absent racial preferences. I’ve listed the demographics for 12 of those universities below. (The University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania were not included in the database. I chose to omit the California Institute of Technology because its data appeared unclear.)

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/07/retooling-schooling/

As I noted in January, the public school enrollment count for the 2023-24 school year showed that 9 of the top 10 and 38 of the 50 largest districts have lost students since 2019-20, while 31 of the 50 largest districts lost students between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school year, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report.

Now, there is more bad news. The results of a Gallup poll released Feb. 5 show that Americans’ opinions about the quality of public education in the U.S. continue to tank.

The percentage of adults who are dissatisfied with public education increased from 62% to 73% between 2019 and 2025, making the percentage of adults who feel satisfied with public education the lowest since 2001. (The report tracks Americans’ satisfaction across 31 aspects of U.S. society or policy, such as the military, health care, and crime, and it found that public education ranked 29th among those 31 areas.)

What can be done to change this sorry state of affairs?

First, we must change the way we pay teachers. Whereas private sector employees are paid via merit, K-12 educators rarely are, courtesy of the teachers’ unions. Instead, teachers are part of an industrial-style “step and column” salary regimen, getting salary increases for the number of years they work and for taking (frequently meaningless) professional development classes. Great teachers are worth more—a lot more—and should receive higher pay than their less capable colleagues. Of course, any suggestion to augment any form of merit pay, turning teachers into independent professionals, is a red flag for the teachers’ unions, which view educators as identical dues-paying automatons.

One significant loss for the teachers’ union occurred in Wisconsin when Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 became law in 2011. The measure all but eliminated collective bargaining for teachers and created a marketplace where school districts could compete for better educators by paying valued teachers more.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pro-terror-professors-targeted-in-freedom-centers-fall-campus-campaign/

Over the past year, headlines in mainstream publications and the legacy media have finally validated what supporters of the Freedom Center have long known—American campuses are awash in a crisis of Jew hatred and Hamas fetishism. From Columbia to UCLA, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to the University of Texas-Austin, last spring the public witnessed the hostile takeover of campuses by supporters of the genocidal Hamas regime.

Shouting such genocidal slogans as “Globalize the Intifada” and “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free” student protestors—aided by radical faculty members and coddled by university administrators—proudly established and defended zones that were effectively declared Judenrein—no-go zones for Zionists and supporters of the world’s only Jewish state.

Students belonging to Muslim Brotherhood-linked campus organizations including the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated Hamas’s barbaric October 7 massacre of innocent Israeli Jews and did not shy away from encouraging more bloodshed.

In every aspect of these macabre exhortations for Jewish genocide, these students were encouraged and led by university faculty members, in many cases highly celebrated tenured professors in the world of academia, who have gleefully championed the slaughter, mutilation, and rape of innocents as justified revenge on Israeli “colonizers.”

Determined to expose these Hamas apparatchiks, the Freedom Center published a lengthy and detailed report naming the ten most extreme pro-terror professors as “Hamas Loyalists” and documenting their statements and actions in support of the terrorist regime.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/tax-code-change-university-donations-scholars-academic-freedom

Every year, donors give billions of dollars to American colleges and universities. Some give for social or sentimental reasons, but most do so because they want to aid exceptional students, faculty, and research. Yet, far too often, these donations disappear into administrative costs and ideological projects that do little to advance real scholarship. At the same time, scholars who challenge the consensus within their fields, or simply hold opinions unpopular with their colleagues, frequently find themselves without support from their department or institution.

It doesn’t have to be this way. A simple change to the tax code—making direct payments to faculty and graduate students tax-deductible, just like donations to universities—could strengthen scholarship, revitalize independent inquiry, and ensure that donors can directly support the people who matter most to our intellectual future.

The practice of institutional control over scholarly funding emerged at a time when direct payments were hard to process, and universities could be trusted to steward academic funding. Neither of these conditions holds today. Consider Amy Wax, a tenured University of Pennsylvania professor who was suspended last September for controversial remarks about race and immigration. Those who admired her teaching and scholarship, with its uncommon conservative perspective, would typically donate to Penn’s Law School, where she teaches. But this same law school has now withdrawn Wax’s research funds, undermined her tenure protections, and constrained her academic freedom. Donations to Penn’s Law School and the University of Pennsylvania were diverted, at least partially, towards the undermining of Wax’s academic freedom via a dubious, ideologically motivated disciplinary process. In this manner, universities can use institutional donations to subvert the viewpoint diversity that donors hope to foster.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/linda-mcmahon-confirmed-as-secretary-of-education/

During her confirmation hearing, McMahon described the DOE as an agency ‘in decline’ and announced her intention to ‘invest in teachers not Washington bureaucrats.’

The Senate confirmed former Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education on Monday evening.

Once the World Wrestling Entertainment CEO, McMahon was confirmed 51 to 45, along party lines. President Donald Trump appointed her to the position hoping that she would “put herself out of a job,” he has said, and that McMahon “wholeheartedly” embraces his move to weaken the department’s influence.

“President Trump believes that the bureaucracy in Washington should be abolished so that we can return education to the states, where it belongs. I wholeheartedly support and agree with this mission,” the now-secretary said in a letter to Democrats on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

McMahon served on the Connecticut Board of Education for two years and was on the Board of Trustees at Sacred Heart University for more than 16 years. In a statement announcing McMahon’s nomination in November, Trump called McMahon a “fierce advocate for Parents’ Rights.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/anti-israel-protesters-at-barnard-college-seize-academic-building-after-two-students-were-expelled/

Anti-Israel protesters at Barnard College seized an academic building Wednesday evening to protest the recent expulsions of two students who disrupted a Columbia University class about modern Israel’s history last month.

Video footage shows more than 50 protesters staging a sit-in outside the college dean’s office, where they beat drums and shouted through megaphones. The masked demonstrators chanted, “Every fascist state must fall.”

Columbia University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine are demanding that Barnard leadership immediately reverse the two expulsions, provide amnesty to all students disciplined for anti-Israel protests, give the group a public meeting with Dean Leslie Grinage and President Laura Rosenbury, and abolish the college’s disciplinary process.

Grinage agreed to meet with up to three protesters, according to a professor who tried to appease the crowd in the dean’s place. Before capitulating, Grinage apparently asked the mob permission to use the bathroom. The students then shamed her as she walked by the scene, according to a video.

Notably, Columbia suspended SJP in November 2023 after its members held unauthorized campus protests that made others feel threatened. The suspension was upheld by the New York state supreme court last fall, yet the group remains operational in practice.

The anti-Israel activists reportedly occupied Barnard’s Milbank Hall for several hours and assaulted security guards. The rowdy demonstration forced classes in that building to be cancelled, Jewish students posted on social media.

Columbia’s SJP cried victim, claiming Barnard security officers have “harassed and shoved several students” who were taking part in the unauthorized protest.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/26/uncivil-education/

hile Donald Trump’s effort to end the Department of Education is admirable, much else must be done to right the country’s wayward K-12 ship. One glaring issue that needs to be addressed is the ongoing far-left slant of school curricula.

A report by the Goldwater Institute released in late January shows how politically skewed our schools are. The policy organization’s Tyler Bonin states that Marxist Howard Zinn’s work is used in about 25% of American classrooms.

Zinn’s best-selling book, A People’s History of the United States, which is used in conjunction with the online “Zinn Education Project,” misinforms students and borrows from Karl Marx to present American history as a “conflict between capital and labor,” Goldwater discloses.

Zinn maintained that the teaching of history “should serve society in some way” and that “objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable.” When called on the carpet for writing a history book that played very fast and loose with the facts, the author freely admitted it, saying that his hope in writing the book was to create a revolution.

Well, at least Zinn was honest enough to admit he was a liar.

Here are just a few of Zinn’s suppositions: He resents Abraham Lincoln and the people of the northern states during the Civil War for “insufficient opposition to the institution of slavery.” He has “condescension toward those opposed to the spread of communism.” He also maintains a belief that “civil rights reforms have amounted to little more than window dressing amid a backdrop of ongoing, intractable systemic oppression.”

While students may now be experts in Marxist dogma, they are ignorant of real history. In 2024, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) conducted a national survey of college students that delved into their basic knowledge of American history and government and found that significant numbers of college students graduate without a basic grasp of the nation’s history and political system.

For example, 60% of college students could not correctly identify the term lengths of members serving in U.S. Congress, and 63% could not identify the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Importantly, these were multiple-choice questions. Hence, students didn’t have to recall John Roberts’ name, only recognize it. A majority of students believe that the Constitution was written in 1776 rather than 1787.