RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2022/03/26/a-nj-university-will-offer-masters-degrees-in-happiness-studies-n2605074

Centenary University in New Jersey announced the launch of a new degree program, a “Master of Arts in Happiness Studies.”

The program, which the school said is the first of its kind, will “explore the implications of happiness for individuals, the workplace, and our broader society” and will cost students $17,700. According to the university’s announcement, the program will launch virtually in the fall.

Centenary University President Bruce Murphy said in his announcement at the World Happiness Summit in Miami, Florida on March 18 to mark the United Nations International Day of Happiness that the program was designed to “promote well-being and resilience in the midst of current world stress.”

“This online, 30-credit graduate degree is an interdisciplinary program designed for leaders who are committed to personal, interpersonal, organizational, and societal happiness,” Murphy said. “Grounded in science and research, this new degree will study happiness and resilience to prepare graduates to make an impact in a wide range of fields.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/25/college-officials-the-most-witless-people-on-earth/

Day after day we read of cases in which a speaker was shut down on a college campus, a group was denied a forum or chased from the public square, or free inquiry was snuffed out because there might be words uttered or written that could “hurt” someone. Will the administrators and professors who refuse to punish this behavior, and even sometimes support it, ever understand that the invented grievances aren’t about offense but about having power over others?

Just this week, The College Fix reported that a University of Virginia student wrote in The Cavalier Daily that it was dangerous for former Vice President Mike Pence to speak on campus. In the mind of that student, ​​speech that bothers her is “not entitled to a platform.”

Earlier this month, The Fix covered the story of a black, female Christian scholar who won’t be returning to Christopher Newport University after spring semester because she tweeted an unapproved but entirely harmless opinion.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/diversity_at_annapolis.html

“The Naval Academy’s ODEI Mission web page states goals of making the Academy an “inclusive campus,” ensuring “equitable access'” and addressing the “challenges of underrepresented populations.”  This reads like political correctness at an institution where the real mission is to train combat leaders.  So, Admiral, please enlighten us.  How and why does your new diverse culture make our Navy a stronger fighting force?”

“Why” is a wonderful, troublesome, puzzling, and sometimes irritating word.  When asked by children, it often elicits a response of “because I said so.”  In other situations, it might cause us to think.  So when someone says, “Our diversity is our strength,” why does no one ask why?

If the statement means “diversity of thought,” who could disagree?  This country has practiced such for over 200 years.  It is central to the structure of our federal government, as 50 states govern in different ways that work best for their unique circumstances.  If it’s diversity of culture, there is no argument.  In an open society, it is almost a given.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/modern-day-brown-shirts-suppress-free-speech-yale-richard-l-cravatts/

As further confirmation that universities have devolved into islands of repression in a sea of freedom, some 120 Yale Law School students seriously disrupted a March 10th event. Sponsored by the Yale Federalist Society, the event featured Kristen Waggoner, lead counsel for the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), and Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association (AHA), appearing together on the panel to discuss (ironically, it turns out) free speech issues. 

Yale’s LGBTQ students had already mobilized their opposition to the appearance of Waggoner, particularly because ADF, they claimed in a flyer they distributed, “is an organization designated by the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] as a hate group” and that the Federalist Society’s invitation to Waggoner provided “a veneer of respectability [that] is part of what allows this group to do work that attacks the very lives of LGBTQ people in the US and globally.” Once it has been predetermined that the organization for which Waggoner is lead counsel was anti-gay, it no longer mattered what she would say at the event. The moral scolds at Yale Law School had already decided she should be canceled and forbidden from giving her opinions about anything at all.

Preventing someone with opposing views to even speak, to make his or her opinions known and heard by the campus community, means that the disruptors are so sure of their beliefs, so positive that their perception is the valid one, the only true one, that they are comfortable with suppressing the alternate beliefs and ideology of those whose speech they seek to silence. Students, even graduate law students, are certainly not omniscient nor do they know the single truths about a range of topics guest speakers bring into debates. Their experience is insufficient to make them credible arbiters of what may be said, and what must not be said, on university campuses. 

They do not have the moral right or intellectual capacity to gauge what is bad speech and what is good speech.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-to-discipline-the-yale-law-school-shout-down/

This time, it could be different. Typically, university administrators desperate to avoid disciplining students who silence visiting speakers downplay or deny the realities of shout-downs, deflecting public outrage until the heat dies down. Anything is better than meting out punishment to students who portray themselves as champions of disadvantaged minorities, or so most administrators think.

This is what is happening right now at Yale Law School in the aftermath of the March 10 shout-down of a Federalist Society panel that included a representative from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian legal organization devoted to the protection of freedom of speech and religious liberty. ADF’s faithful Christianity offended the about 100 law-student supporters of “transgender rights” who disrupted the event. Since that shout-down, Yale has issued misleading statements about the nature of its rules and the severity of what happened, all in the hope that discipline could be avoided. The need to dissemble is particularly great in this case, because Yale has perhaps the clearest, firmest, and most venerable requirements in the nation for sanctioning those who shout down speakers.

This time, however, it could be different. Although it has yet to be noted, Yale Law School’s “Rules of Discipline” allow any “member of the Law School” (which includes all Yale Law School faculty members and all Yale Law School students) to trigger an investigation and hearing regarding any alleged violation of Yale’s Law School Code. First and foremost in that code comes the obligation to protect “intellectual freedom.” According to Yale, intellectual freedom is necessary to preserve the “climate of calm” and “mutual respect” essential to the Law School’s life as a “house of reason.” All of this was clearly infringed by this month’s shout-down.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/an-open-letter-to-the-uconn-community/?fbclid=IwAR3jcJQbIoVFiEkNYkM3ALQ-VQFI3SASsi4dynSgBHB3o6XTMt4ql38X02o

To my fellow students and members of the UConn community:

Those of you who know me personally know that, throughout my nearly four years here, I have always been a staunch advocate for free speech.

My parents grew up in the former Soviet Union, where they did not have the luxury of condemning the oppressive regime that governed their lives, and where they had the word “Jew” stamped under Nationality in their passports, defining who they could and could not be under a system of institutionalized discrimination. They fled to the US as refugees in the nineties so that I might have a chance at a better life. I have never taken this for granted. I was raised to speak up against injustice, and it’s been a part of who I am for as long as I can remember.

Like many of you, I have taken immense pride in being a part of a diverse and vibrant community here at UConn. Our university promises to encourage freedom of expression through civil discourse, stating that “debate surrounding discussion of difficult and controversial subjects is a key component to our university.” Throughout my nearly four years here, I’ve seen the administration deliver on this promise, voicing its support for many minority groups and encouraging tolerance among the student body.

However, in light of a recent series of experiences on campus, I am forced to call into question the University’s commitment to this promise and my fellow students’ understanding of it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/new-stasi-central-connecticut-state-university-jay-bergman/

Last month, in a statement issued by its Office of Equity and Inclusion, Central Connecticut State University established a new policy designating faculty, administrators, and nearly all other employees as “mandated reporters.” In that capacity, they are required to report to this office any information they come across pertaining to “gender-based discrimination.”  Infractions indicative of such discrimination range from “sexual misconduct” – a capacious concept that at other universities has included jokes told within earshot of persons who consider them sexist – to “dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking.”  And to ensure that every instance of discrimination is rooted out, persons reporting it can do so anonymously.

The statement establishing this policy raises more questions than it answers.  First, and most obviously, it fails to include any definition of “gender-based discrimination,” or any indication of its limits.  Can such discrimination manifest itself in speech as well as in action?  If it did, could any punishment by the university be reconciled with its stated commitment to academic freedom, and to the right to free expression guaranteed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and in Article I, Section 5 of the Connecticut State Constitution?

Other aspects of this new policy are no less problematic.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/florida-aims-end-sexualization-children-larry-sand/

“In Florida, 33% of eighth graders are proficient in reading and 20% of the state’s residents over the age of 15 are illiterate. As such, maybe it’s time that the schools start focusing on what they have been traditionally mandated to do, and give up their warped social engineering game plan.”

The stories are jaw dropping, infuriating, and plentiful. The school district in St. Paul, MN is partnering with an organization that offers LGBTQ-affirming curricula for students as young as three years old. In Idaho, an 11-year-old girl was coached by her Coeur d’Alene school into a sex change without notifying her parents. As reported by Abigail Shrier, the California Teachers Association held a conference in October 2021, where it advised teachers “on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.”

Sadly, the above is just a drop in the perverse bucket. Stories abound nationwide of teachers and school administrators doing things to students that would be unheard of just a few years ago. In response, the state of Florida is fighting back.

https://americanmind.org/features/parents-rights/the-right-can-win-on-parents-rights/

Following Trump’s lead, a grassroots movement has forced the GOP to fight.

“There’s no such thing as other people’s children,” proclaimed the advocacy group “Together Rising” recently on Twitter. This was in response to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s bill protecting parents’ rights, denying schools the ability to instruct children in sexual orientation and gender identity prior to the fourth grade. This was an outrage to leftists, who ludicrously designated the bill “Don’t Say Gay” and furiously demanded to continue teaching every child—including yours—about every kind of sex.

It has always been an assumption among leftists that experts, rather than parents, ought to be in charge of child-rearing. They used to say it more subtly: “It takes a village,” they would murmur, with winsome smiles. But in recent decades, this faux rhetoric has given way to a much more direct attack. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” said former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, during a pivotal race this year in which President Biden campaigned on his behalf.

Frustrated by the general public’s hesitancy to embrace new, increasingly bizarre ideologies at a moment’s notice, woke elites have found it necessary to assert their power over children with more urgency. Attorney General Merrick Garland labeled concerned parents “domestic terrorists” this year, using the administration’s favorite catch-all accusation to subject dissidents to the full force of the law. Marx’s old demand to abolish the nuclear family has come back in vogue, popularized most notably by Black Lives Matter. Other examples of anti-parent hostility abound.

https://www.city-journal.org/diversity-is-a-smokescreen-in-college-admissions

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two more cases challenging the use of race as a criterion in college admissions, as has allegedly happened at Harvard University (a private institution) and the University of North Carolina (public). On the surface, the argument turns on whether the desire for a diverse student body trumps many laws and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibit discrimination and guarantee equal protection to all. The question applies to virtually all universities because they are either public or accept government money.

The main argument in favor of discrimination in admissions is that diversity enhances the educational experience. But is it true that a student body needs to parallel, even roughly, the demographics of the general population to ensure that students are exposed to people from diverse backgrounds? In fact, we would argue that the very process of using affirmative action—read: “discrimination”—to enhance the numbers of designated identity groups can contribute to the tribalization of the student body rather than helping it cohere into a harmonious whole. Furthermore, even after receiving an affirmative action boost, minority students sufficiently qualified for a given university are already likely to have similar backgrounds to non-minority students, thus limiting the diversity of viewpoints and experiences that affirmative action allegedly enhances.