RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/promoting-grooming-and-sexualization-children-richard-l-cravatts/

Each year, public school libraries face angry parents and school boards upset with the presence of reading materials they find objectionable. These attacks on specific books have included classics such as often-banned Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (for its repeated use of the n-word), Catcher in the Rye (for what in today’s culture are its mild references to sexuality and its vulgarity), and other literary works whose value and reputation, despite occasional challenges, have made them logical additions to a school’s reading list.

Just last month, for example, The Mukilteo School Board near Seattle voted unanimously to remove Harper Lee’s classic examination of racism, To Kill a Mockingbird, from the required reading list for ninth graders because, as the American Library Association has noted, the book includes “racial slurs and their negative effect on students, featuring a ‘white savior’ character, and its perception of the Black experience.”   

Also last month, the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee made the troubling decision to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman, Maus, from the school system’s curriculum. In justifying its decision to remove the book, the Board claimed it was “because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide,” although the anthropomorphic characters in the novel are mice (Jews) and cats (Nazis), and the nudity in question referred, of course, to a naked mouse.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/diversity-still-politicized-after-all-these-years-bruce-thornton/

This term the Supreme Court will soon hear two challenges to affirmative action policies used in almost every university and college admissions and hiring procedures. These protocols have long been obvious violations of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.”

Yet ever since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978 green-lighted discrimination in admissions to further “diversity,” subsequent challenges to affirmative action policies in university admissions have ordered only cosmetic changes in various discriminatory practices, while leaving intact their legality and rationale.

Whether the current suit will yet again kick the can down the road, or finally end discrimination in higher education admission criteria, will depend on confronting the central begged question that since 1978 has justified affirmative action: the importance of “diversity” in improving educational outcomes.

But 44 years after Bakke, there still has not been a rigorous, empirically based definition of “diversity,” or demonstration of the “educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” as Justice Sandra Day O’Conner assumed in  Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), that create a “compelling state interest” justifying discrimination on the basis of race.

In contrast to “diversity,” real diversity is a timeless fact of human existence, based on numerous criteria such as culture, mores, language, religion, geography, political philosophies, social organizations, values, and economic status. Ethnicity, not “race,” is the basic unit of human identity, and it is comprised of  these elements. The “diversity” we talk about today is based on the superficial physical differences like skin color or hair texture, and duplicates the crude, reductive “race” categories of post-Darwinian “scientific racism” based on skin colors like “black,” “white,” “brown,” or the all-purpose, utterly vague and meaningless “person of color.” Ignored are the more important differences of culture and ethnicity. How people live is what creates their identities, not how they look.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/brown-universitys-woke-professors-battle-diversity-of-viewpoint/

One of the best places on campus for genuine intellectual discourse is being targeted by those who prefer left-wing conformity.

A mid the leftist-infused classrooms of Brown University lies a small, unassuming white building that houses the Political Theory Project (PTP). As an interdisciplinary research center committed to free inquiry and the free exchange of ideas, the PTP has been a haven for conservative and libertarian students for the past 19 years. But it’s not merely a “safe space” for the Right; it has, rather, fostered genuine intellectual inquiry for anyone interested in it.

Now, however, the PTP is under a sadly familiar sort of attack from many of Brown’s left-leaning professors. These professors feel threatened by the PTP because the courses offered by the center, such as “Bleeding Heart Libertarianism,” “Capitalism: For and Against,” and “20th Century Political Economy” tend to offer a centrist or libertarian angle on issues that challenge the progressive orthodoxy on campus. Their criticisms of a bastion of free thought at Brown are misguided and should be rejected.

The Political Theory Project makes clear in its mission statement its commitment to viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech and expression. Thus, the PTP has sought to bring to campus through its Janus Forum Lecture Series ideologically diverse speakers to debate issues such as the extent of the threat of climate change, whether the U.S. should support Israel, and whether “rape culture” exists on campus. For years, the PTP has held free-flowing conversations at which participants sparred openly on contentious issues and debated controversial opinions. But rather than welcoming such exchanges, some students and professors have accumulated negative feelings toward the project that now spill over into open denunciation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/georgetown-laws-conservative-and-libertarian-students-rally-around-ilya-shapiro/

In an editorial today, we made the case that it would be egregious for Georgetown University Law School to fire Ilya Shapiro. Now, the school’s Conservative and Libertarian Student Association is coming to his defense. In a statement, the students warn, “Should the school end its relationship with Mr. Shapiro, expect a strong response from the conservative and libertarian students on campus who are increasingly questioning whether they are welcome at Georgetown Law and are getting tired of GULC’s double-standard in handling offensive out-of-class statements made by faculty.”

Full statement here:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/01/28/how_universities_will_sidestep_scotus_on_affirmative_action_147107.html

Embracing affirmative action is virtually a job qualification for university administrators. The same is true, alas, for faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences. They march in lockstep toward a society permanently categorized by race, all with the best of intentions but not the best of outcomes.

They aren’t just woke. Their eyelids are sewn open. They have no intention of snoozing if the Supreme Court rules their current admission policies are illegal. They will stand proudly in the schoolhouse door, protecting policies they believe promote “social justice” and “equity.”

Their tactics to evade the court are surprisingly simple. Since admissions tests leave traces of discrimination, they’ll drop them. Having ditched these useful standards, university bureaucrats can sit behind closed doors, choose the applicants they favor, reject those they don’t, and leave no pesky evidence they are violating the law. Asian Americans, Jews, and other disfavored groups won’t have a record to show their test scores are systematically higher than favored groups, who are now being admitted despite their scores. To misquote Martin Luther King, universities are looking at the color of applicants’ skin, not the content of their academic qualifications.

Universities aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether affirmative action is constitutional. They already taking preemptive steps, designed to keep their current practices in place, this time without leaving fingerprints. Some 1,700 colleges and universities have already made SAT and ACT test scores optional for admission.

Why have universities dropped standardized tests? Not because these tests are biased or because they fail to predict academic performance (their primary purpose). Quite the contrary. The tests have been assiduously scrubbed to prevent cultural or racial bias, as they should be, and they are recognized as valuable tools to match students with the colleges where they are most likely to thrive academically.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/harvards-diversity-disgrace-harvard/

In 2014, the non-profit Students for Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging discrimination against Asian Americans in its admissions process — discrimination resulting from Harvard’s stated commitment to “a diverse class.” After defeats at the District and Court of Appeals level, the suit has arrived at the foot of the United States Supreme Court. The case will be argued in the 2022 term. Harvard’s reputation is not all that’s at stake. The case threatens to bring down the entire system of race-based affirmative action that dominates college admissions.

Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see why Students for Fair Admissions believe they have a case. According to 90,000 pages of Harvard admissions data, an Asian-American student must score 450 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a black student with the same qualifications. Harvard, despite being an academic institution, also scores for “personality,” and consistently gives Asian Americans the lowest ratings. Without discrimination, Asian Americans would make up 43 percent of the Harvard student body, according to Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research. In the years before the filing of the 2014 suit, Asians were between 15 and 20 percent of the student body.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_supreme_court_should_reject_racial_preference_in_college_admissions.html

The Supreme Court is going to hear two cases about racial preference in college admissions that allegedly discriminates against Asian students.

In the 1978 Bakke decision, the Supreme Court said race could be a factor in admissions, but as anyone who is sat through an academic committee meeting knows, when race is a factor, it is the only factor.

Even though the Supreme Court in Bakke said that a set-aside for admissions, or quota, was impermissible, colleges and universities routinely use racial quotas masquerading as goals.

The consequence has been that highly qualified Asian students are rejected on trivial and subjective data, such as leadership skills and self-confidence, to increase the proportion of less qualified blacks and Latinos.

How do Asian students achieve high academic status and participate in a range of extracurricular activities while lacking in leadership, self-confidence, and other personality traits? The answer is that when it comes to Asians, the subjective evaluation process is a farce designed to discriminate against them.

Race-based admissions are not the exception but the rule. And no one but diversity, inclusion, and equity experts conducting so-called cultural audits has profited from this policy.

Colleges and universities are run by a professional class of bureaucrats. And if anything, members of bureaucracy know that the very essence of their work is their own survival.

https://www.nysun.com/national/harvard-president-defiant-in-admissions-fight/91981/

Harvard is holding firm in its fight to use race in its admissions process, the university’s president announced in an email delivered yesterday to students, alumni, and faculty on Tuesday. The missive from Lawrence Bacow came just one day after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to that very policy.

Mr. Bacow wrote that he wished the Supreme Court “would have decided differently,” but his note makes clear that Harvard will do nothing differently absent a high court order.

The future of how America’s oldest university chooses its students will be decided not in faculty lounges in Cambridge, but in judicial chambers in Washington, D.C. As the Sun has reported, the high court looks set to decide the future of college and university admissions after elevating cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

Mr. Bacow struck a defiant note in response to the dramatic legal development, maintaining: “Our admissions process, in which race is considered as one factor among many, makes us stronger.” He promised to “defend with vigor” that approach against “narrowly drawn measures of academic distinction.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/26/virginia-governor-youngkin-opens-tip-line-for-parents-to-report-teachers-who-teach-critical-race-theory/

On Monday, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.) announced that his office would be opening up an anonymous tip line for Virginia parents to report teachers and schools that they believed to be teaching curriculum that includes Critical Race Theory (CRT).

As reported by The Daily Caller, Youngkin made the announcement during an interview on the John Fredericks Show, with Youngkin saying that parents “can send us an email at helpeducation@governor.virginia.gov.”

“We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations that will help us be aware of things like privileged bingo, be aware of their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia and we’re going to make sure that we catalogue it all,” Youngkin continued. “It gives us great insight into what’s happening at the school level and that gives us further ability to make sure that we’re rooting it out.”

Youngkin was referring to a recent incident where Fairfax County Public Schools assigned students to play a game called “privilege bingo,” where students were told that they had inherent “privilege” if they were White, male, Christian, cisgender, or the child of a member of the military, among other factors.

Since his inauguration on January 15th, Youngkin has taken numerous actions to eliminate CRT from Virginia’s schools, which was one of his signature promises on the campaign trail last year. His first executive order after taking office called for the end of “the use of inherently divisive concepts – including Critical Race Theory – in public education.”