RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2024/08/08/the-professor-his-nemesis-and-a-scandal-at-oberlin-mohammad-jafar-mahallati-iran-islamism/

I. A Disappearance

On 28 November 2023, the profile of a tenured professor at Oberlin College disappeared from the school’s website. Only a day earlier, typing Mohammad Jafar Mahallati’s name into the site’s search box returned a page with an extensive biography and links to several of his posts and videos. His photograph was there, too: a bearded man with a greying hairline and a reticent smile that suited his title of Professor of Peace and Friendship Studies. Since 2007, he had been among the most prominent professors on campus.

A former top diplomat who had represented Iran at the United Nations from 1987–89, Mahallati had brought a certain metropolitan pizzazz to the small college, along with glamorous tales from his days of hobnobbing with a global who’s who of politicians and diplomats. Among academics, where consensus is hard to reach, nearly everyone remembers Mahallati as “magisterial.” If Shi’ism had a campaign ad made for the American consumer, Mahallati—who had swapped the Western suit and tie for the mandarin-collar blazer and shirt and drove a siren-red BMW around town—would be that ad.

Even the locals were smitten. The Iranian professor who had given them an annual Day of Friendship, complete with rainbow flags and peace t-shirts, was all the proof they needed that the George W. Bush administration was wrong to call Iran an evil state. With his arrival at Oberlin in 2007, he managed to infuse the humble small town with an air of cosmopolitan grandeur. And a few years later, he was appointed to the prestigious Nancy Schrom Dye Chair in Middle East and North African Studies. The chair’s namesake, Nancy Shrom Dye, was Oberlin’s president from 1994–2007, and it was Dye who brought Mahallati to Oberlin after she met him during two trips to Iran in the mid-2000s.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/sensitivity_training_from_the_left.html

Throughout the year, college instructors are required to have mandatory faculty training. This month it is “Disability Cultural Responsiveness for Faculty: Improving Communication and Understanding.” It was led by Sara Sanders Gardner, the autistic designer of Bellevue College’s Neurodiversity Navigators Program, established in 2011.

Consequently “autistic people prefer identity first language, i.e., “disabled, autistic” whereas parents and professionals often prefer person first language, i.e., “person with autism. Yet, according to Gardner whose pronouns are (they/them), the latter “is awkward syntax, separates the disability from a person, and shows a desire to be distant from the disability.”

In fact, “a push to treat autism as a cultural identity is challenging notions of it as a disorder.”

Unlike past training which promoted euphemistic language, now teachers are to avoid euphemisms such as “on the spectrum,” “differently abled,” “challenged,” or “diffability” because “embracing the word ‘disability’ and normalizing it as an aspect of identity has the potential to lead to positive psychological health outcomes.”

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is a national law that protects qualified individuals from discrimination based on their disability. This includes individuals with physical or mental impairments that limit major life activities.

According to Gardner, it is “not necessary to know the details of, or even the name of, a student’s disability to respond to, include, and communicate with them effectively.” Thus, words need to be used to “avoid a clinical relationship” — rather, it should be a “human relationship.”

Instead, one needs to consider “what barrier is the student experiencing and how can they be supported by recognizing their strengths?” For example, wearing glasses would indicate a disability concerning sight but no one really sees wearing glasses as a disability. But clearly some disabilities are not readily apparent. What is the effect on a person’s self-esteem? (As a side note, I have always admired how Israel incorporates autistic individuals into the military. Thus, a disability is turned into an asset.)

https://www.city-journal.org/article/american-association-of-university-professors-academic-boycotts

As students, professors, and administrators get ready to return to campus for what events both in the United States and abroad suggest will be another tumultuous year, the American Association of University Professors has decided to add fuel to the fire by announcing that it no longer categorically opposes academic boycotts. The decision by the once-august and respected organization is not surprising. After all, the AAUP is now led by a professor of journalism and media studies who a week ago used his official platform to call J. D. Vance “a fascist” and to claim that America’s colleges and universities are not in fact “ideological indoctrination centers.”

The AAUP was founded in 1915, in large part to “define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education.” In December of that year, in the first volume of its Bulletin, the AAUP promulgated a “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” which Keith E. Whittington in his outstanding new book You Can’t Teach That!: The Battle over University Classrooms describes as “provid[ing] the philosophical basis for a more robust understanding of academic freedom in the United States.” Twenty-five years later, the AAUP issued what remains to this day—after a few “interpretive” footnotes added in 1970—the most influential brief document on the subject: the “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” which, to quote Whittington, “stripped away the philosophical discussion that dominated the 1915 Declaration and honed in on a small number of key commitments that universities should make to their faculties.”

In late April 2005, the British Association of University Teachers voted to boycott two institutions of higher education in Israel, Bar-Ilan and Haifa Universities, a move that would bar all Israeli scholars who did not denounce “their state’s colonial and racist policies” from participating in conferences or engaging in joint research with British colleagues. Scholars around the world were outraged—even Jon Wiener, writing in The Nation, called it “a mistake”—and within just days, the AAUP’s “Committee A,” charged with watching out for academic freedom and tenure, released a strong statement, “The AAUP Opposes Academic Boycotts,” that warned of the “damage [to] academic freedom.” By the end of May, the AUT had reversed its position, and the following year, the AAUP published a piece titled “On Academic Boycotts” that states clearly, “In view of the Association’s long-standing commitment to the free exchange of ideas, we oppose academic boycotts” and “On the same grounds, we recommend that other academic organizations oppose academic boycotts.” The lead author of the piece was Joan Wallach Scott.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/14/the-dei-retreat-demise-or-disguise/

For months, skeptics of DEI mandates have celebrated as Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and even the Ivy League have rolled back DEI programs. The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action appeared to cool Americans’ re-infatuation with treating people differently according to race.

But history should temper our optimism. Some recent policy changes look less like a full-fledged rout and more like a strategic maneuver.

Take, for instance, the universities that have recently abandoned mandatory diversity statements from job applicants. For decades, hiring committees have used such statements as a tool to discriminate against right-of-center viewpoints and white or Asian applicants. 

Now, MIT and the Harvard Department of Arts and Sciences have scrapped diversity statements. Some critics of the practice seem to take this move as a sincere change. The New York Times quoted the former dean of the Harvard Medical School as saying “the large, silent majority of faculty who question . . . these diversity statements — these people are being heard.” Likewise, some observers called MIT’s move a “watershed moment.”

But, as Hamlet warned, “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” The Harvard deans themselves claim they’re ditching the requirement because it doesn’t work, not because these policies are wrong or illegal. They said diversity statements are “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and “confusing” to international candidates.

And the Harvard deans still want to consider candidate “efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” They will now use two statements: a “service statement” about how an applicant has strengthened academic communities and a “teaching and advising statement” about how an applicant has fostered an open learning environment.

MIT’s move appears more genuine, at least on the surface. MIT President Sally Kornbluth issued a statement recognizing that these statements “impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.” The MIT decision is also university-wide and supported by MIT’s general leadership. But even here, we should not let optimism overrun skepticism. President Kornbluth herself confirmed that MIT remains committed to DEI by other means.

This Fall will mark two years since the far-left DEI programming at the Pentagon’s K-12 schools became a national controversy.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com spearheaded the oversight and detailed reporting.  

Congressional inquiries and heated public hearings ensued, followed by a claim from the Department of Defense (DoD) that they’d closed their DEI offices for good.  

Said “closure” of the DoD’s DEI offices was a lie by omission.  

Our final report on DoDEA schools, released last month, illustrated that although the DoD closed the DEI department, they replaced it with a secret steering committee to inject DEI ideology across the entire school system serving 70,000+ students.

Furthermore, the DoD secret committee was using so-called Social Emotional Learning to ask kids about their emotional state, engage in private chats with them (hidden from parents) and record the data in perpetuity using technology like Google for Education.

Finally, the secret committee’s teacher training materials made claims about “antiracism” and critiqued mainstream holidays like Thanksgiving. Teachers participated in online discussions that devolved into struggle sessions about white privilege and how-to’s on transmitting this worldview to children.  

Thankfully, leaders in Congress, especially Reps. Elise Stefanik, Jim Banks, and the House Armed Services Committee, take this matter seriously.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-trustee-solution-for-higher-education

Conservatives who have witnessed higher-education reforms fail to stop the spread of political correctness have good reason to be dismayed. There is, however, a promising tactic available to them right now, at least in some states, that requires little manpower and no extra cost. All it takes is a determined governor plus a few individuals experienced in academic politics and practice. Consider Florida.

In December 2022, a staffer in the office of Governor Ron DeSantis asked if I would serve as a trustee of New College of Florida, the small honors college in the state system founded in Sarasota in 1964. I agreed, as did Christopher Rufo, Charles Kessler, Matthew Spalding, and, later, Ryan Anderson. By the time of our first board meeting in late January 2023, word of our appointment had spread, and dozens of news stories fashioned a narrative: conservative vandals ruin liberal arts gem. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the hall with megaphones and placards, while 200 students, professors, parents, and activists crowded inside to deliver public comment laced with invective. 

What happened next provided a lesson for the Right: a few conservatives and a strong governor can enact genuine reform—if they exploit the proper power center. Over the next several months, amid faculty and administrator hostility, media attacks, censure from scholarly associations, nonstop lawfare, and reproofs from politicians (California governor Gavin Newsom even came to Florida to commiserate with protesters), we fired the president and general counsel, hired a new president, ended DEI operations, denied early tenure to five candidates, abolished the gender studies major, recruited donors and new professors (sometimes over faculty opposition), and steered curricular revisions in a classical direction.

https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-california-gender-law-newsom

Child predators follow a common playbook: target the victim, gain their trust, fill a need, and, crucially, isolate the child from her parents. For several years, this has also been standard California state protocol with regard to schoolchildren questioning their gender identities. On Monday, this scheme became law.

The “SAFETY Act,” AB 1955, signed by California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, legally forbids schools from adopting any policy that would force them to disclose “any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent.” Schools may not, as a matter of policy, inform parents of a child’s new gender identity unless the child volunteers her approval. The law also prohibits schools from punishing any school employee found to have “supported a pupil” hurtling down a path toward risky and irreversible hormones and surgeries.

The law effectively shuts down the local parents’ rights movement in California by eliminating its most important tool: the ability to organize at the community level to stop schools from deceiving them. No longer can families hope to convince their school boards to require schools to notify parents that their daughter, Sophie, has been going by “Sebastian” in class; that her teacher, school counselor, and principal have all been celebrating Sebastian’s transgender identity; that they’ve been letting her use the boys’ bathroom and reifying the sense that she is “really a boy.” 

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the law supports the priming of minor children for a secret life with a new gender identity. This includes having school-aged children participate in sexualized discussions and make identity declarations with school faculty, which are often actively hidden from the child’s parents. Elon Musk called the law “the final straw” for families and announced his intention to move both SpaceX and X, two of California’s most prominent tech companies, out of the state as a result. “The goal [of] this diabolical law,” he tweeted, “is to break the parent-child relationship and put the state in charge of your children.”