RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/26/no_lux_145831.html

The fathers of Yale University, founded more than three centuries ago, chose as their motto Lux et Veritas – “Light and Truth.” Well, it looks like the Lux just went out at Yale. And Veritas? We’ll come back to that later. 

It seems that the Yale Corporation has just learned what successful communist regimes have always known: free speech and free elections are dangerous to the establishment. 

In recent years, the board of this venerable institution has been governed largely by . . . Yale University. Typically, Yale handpicks its slate of candidates. However, a token exception in the rules has permitted alumni to petition the university to nominate a candidate for the slate. It’s a rigorous process, requiring so many alumni signatures – more than 4,000 this round – that few made it onto the ballot.  

In the 2021 elections, such a candidate was Victor Ashe, Class of 1967. Ashe, a former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, and ambassador to Poland, is something of a conservative – and, horrors, a known donor to Republican political campaigns. He was supported by alumni committed not only to him but also to fielding independent candidates in future years. Ambassador Ashe managed to win enough support to make it onto the official slate. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/rallying-support-terror-and-denouncing-israel-woke-richard-l-cravatts/

As Israel and Hamas crafted a cease-fire to end two weeks of military activity in which both Gazans and Israelis have died, student governments and faculty members at many universities have issued statements of support. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, this support was not for the region’s only thriving democracy and American ally, Israel, but for Hamas, the designated terror group which rules over Gaza and speaks for the Palestinians and whose lethal use of more than 3000 rockets raining into southern Israeli towns with the object of killing Jewish civilians actually instigated the current escalation of conflict.

Tellingly silent as rockets were launched indiscriminately by Hamas into southern Israeli towns with the express purpose of murdering Jews (each of which rocket, incidentally, representing a war crime), these virtue-signaling students and faculty only became indignant at the violence and body counts once Israel was forced to protect its citizenry by defensive action to suppress Hamas’s lethal aggression.

At the University of Michigan, as one troubling example, the university’s Central Student Government published a statement in which Israel, not Hamas, was accused of “inhumane, international war crimes,” an ongoing process of “ethnic cleansing and apartheid” by Israel that is “a continuation of the displacement of indigenous Palestinians since the Nakba [the Arab’s term, “catastrophe” for the creation of Israel].”

In language the echoes the sentiment of Israel-haters everywhere, the Michigan statement apparently suggests that Israel is not a legitimate country at all. While anti-Israel individuals regularly refer to the existence of a country called Palestine—while no such country ever existed and does not exist now—they still consider Israel to be illegitimate, a colonial enterprise constructed on the stolen lands of an indigenous people. So the current conflict between Hamas and Israel, in their minds is immoral and unlawful. “This is not a ‘conflict,’” the statement reads, “but emblematic of Israeli settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid” so if the Jewish state is illegal, Israel’s efforts at self-defense are therefore not justifiable.

In a May 12th “Statement by Palestine Student Groups at Harvard University on Violence Against Palestinians,” students similarly denounced Israel, wishing to “acknowledge and express our outrage at the latest wave of Israeli state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians. [which] follows years of systematic oppression and ethnic cleansing committed by the State of Israel.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/05/23/texas-legislature-bans-critical-race-theory-from-public-schools-needs-to-pass-1836-project-bill-n1449095

Late Saturday night, the Texas Senate passed H.B. 3979. That bill would ban critical race theory from classrooms in the state’s public schools.

It states:

No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall be required to engage in
training, orientation, or therapy that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex.

(6) No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall shall require, or make part of a course the following concepts: (1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (2) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (3) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; (4) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex; (5) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex; (6) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; (7) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or (8) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a members of a particular race to oppress members of another race. (h-3) No private funding shall be accepted by state agencies, school district, campuses, open-enrollment charter schools, or school administrations for the purposes of curriculum development, purchase or choice of curricular materials, teacher training, or professional development pertaining to courses on Texas, United States, and world history, government, civics, social studies, or similar subject areas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/critical-race-theory-americas-classrooms-clare-lopez-0/

[Part 1 & 2 of this series can be read :

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/institutionalizing-critical-race-theory-clare-lopez/

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/critical-race-theory-americas-classrooms-clare-lopez/

This is Part 3 of a multi-part series on the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in America’s schools. While earlier articles explained how the ideological foundations of CRT are rooted in Marxism and were promulgated by Marxist intellectuals operating out of the leftist faculty lounges of American academia, today’s essay will delve into some of the specific elements of CRT curricula now to be found within Ethnic Studies programs across the country.

California: Incubator of CRT in America

As described in this author’s May 7, 2021 article, “Critical Race Theory in America’s Classrooms”, the incubator for many of these educational concepts was California. There, the State School Board and legislature have wrestled with development of a so-called “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” (ESMC) for years. The essential purpose of that curriculum is to inculcate California students with a divisive, racist view of American society based on oppositional distinctions drawn among various ethnic groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino-Chicano Americans, Native Americans, and Caucasians/whites. Coursework, class lectures, Power Points, and textbooks already in use set all the other ethnic/racial groups against whites. This is classic Marxist, Saul Alinsky-style propaganda whose ultimate objective is violent revolution based on an uprising of the “oppressed” vs the “oppressors”. Spread now throughout the U.S. school system, such indoctrination already is yielding the results methodically instigated by enemies of the state who seek a communist revolution in this country.

Let’s look at some of the specifics: how traditional academic rigor is systematically being dismantled and what are some of the elements of the CRT and Ethnic Studies curricula currently in use in American classrooms.

CRT In Schools Around the Country

What is happening at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia is illustrative. A magnet school founded in 1985 as a place for gifted students, “TJ” as it’s called ranked #1 in the country for 2021 according to U.S. News and World Report. Criteria for those rankings include “performance on state-required tests, graduation, and how well they prepare students for college”. The school also boasted a 99.8% graduation rate, as of September 2020.

But no longer. After a unanimous vote by all twelve Fairfax County school board members, TJ will no longer admit students based on academic achievement and a tough entrance exam. It seems that some 70% of the student body at TJ in the 2020 school year were Asians. This has now been deemed unacceptable by the Fairfax County Schools system because competition with such highly gifted students – who typically score in the top 2 percent of high school students nationwide with average IQ levels ranging from about 120-160 – was just not fair to lower achieving students of other ethnic backgrounds. Admissions tests will henceforth be scrapped in favor of a lottery draw from among students who post at least a 3.5 GPA. The objective is not to continue TJ’s record for academic excellence but to draw in more students of African American and Hispanic background, even if their scholastic performance doesn’t match up to that of their Asian counterparts. After all, it’s diversity of skin color that counts most now, not ensuring that America continues to produce the best and brightest engineers, inventors, and scientists in the world.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/education/553668-cutting-costs-and-cultivating-free-speech-will-put-higher

As a 25-year affiliate professor of surgery, as well as a former member of a liberal arts college’s Board of Trustees, higher education has been a long-term concern of mine. The critical task of preparing the next generation of Americans to become leaders is one of the utmost importance. Now, as the ranking member of the House Education Committee Higher Education and Workforce Investment Subcommittee, I am honored to lead on initiatives that improve American colleges and universities.

It is the overwhelming consensus that the cost of college tuition is far too high. At the end of the 4th quarter in 2020, federal student loan borrowers owed $1.57 trillion. This tremendous burden is second only to outstanding mortgage debt. More troubling, the rising cost of tuition in America has far outpaced the rise in the price of other consumer goods in the past 30 years. There are several reasons for this.

Salaries for compliance officers, diversity coaches, and all kind of other administrative staff — which I more appropriately term “administrative bloat” — have soared in recent decades. Between 1993 and 2007, these costs jumped by 61.2 percent compared to an increase of only 39.3 percent in academic instructional costs. Although most students may not use many of the unnecessary amenities offered at colleges and universities, they still foot the bill for it. Cutting these costs would save students money. There are also many new majors that offer little, if any, chance of future employment. While classes in those disciplines may be beneficial for a broad education, they do not need to be majors. Higher education has lost their way on how to spend students’ monies responsibly. This reckless spending spree needs to cease.

https://nypost.com/2021/05/22/columbia-prep-students-parents-reel-from-porn-liter

Parents at the posh Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School are outraged they were never told of a fourth “R” being added to the curriculum: raunch.

In addition to the usual reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic, the school this month launched lessons on porn — without informing families or allowing them to opt out, parents fumed.

When juniors at the $47,000-a-year Manhattan school showed up for a health and sexuality workshop, most thought it was “just going to be about condoms or birth control,” a student told The Post.

Instead, it was something called “Pornography Literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn,” taught by Justine Ang Fonte, who’s the director of Health & Wellness at another elite prep school, Dalton.

The often-explicit slide presentation and lecture by Fonte to the 120 boys and girls included lessons on how porn takes care of “three big male vulnerabilities”; statistics on the “orgasm gap” showing straight women have far fewer orgasms with their partners than gay men or women; and photos of partially-nude women, some in bondage, to analyze “what is porn and what is art.”

Justine Ang Fonte claims her teachings stem from the social theory “intersectionality”, a component from critical race theory.
Twitter

Fonte’s presentation, some of which was seen by The Post, included a list of the most searched pornographic terms of 2019, including “creampie,” “anal,” “gangbang,” “stepmom” and more.

One slide cited various porn genres such as “incest-themed,” consensual or “vanilla,” “barely legal,” and “kink and BDSM” (which included “waterboard electro” torture porn as an example).

“We were all like, ‘What?’” a female student said. “Everyone was texting each other, ‘What the hell is this? It’s so stupid.’ Everyone knows about porn. The worst part of it was that it took place not long before the AP tests and I had to miss both my AP classes for this.”

One part of the porn presentation involved something called the “marketability of Only Fans,” the hot new app used mostly for sex work. One slide included a photo of a pretty young woman who appeared to be promoting OnlyFans-type work.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/22/nikole-hannah-jones-at-the-summit/

Nikole Hannah-Jones was having a very good year. She reached the summit on April 28, when it was widely reported that she had been appointed with tenure, effective July, to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The news came a week after the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced Hannah-Jones was among some 259 “outstanding individuals” elected to the Academy in 2021. She led the list of eight chosen in “Journalism, Media, and Communications.” 

A year ago May 4, Hannah-Jones won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Between those bookends, she has been invited to present numerous prestigious lectures at universities and other august venues. She received the George Polk “special award” in 2019 after receiving it in 2015 for “radio reporting” for “The Problem We All Live With.” She also received a 2015 Peabody Award for “The Case for School Desegregation Today.”

Of course, she was also a 2017 recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” fellowships for “reshaping national conversations around education reform.”

But her appointment to a named chair at the school from which she received her master’s degree in 2003 had to be among the sweetest distinctions. She was being recognized as a top figure in her chosen profession. 

But on May 18, the bottom fell out. 

The Fall

That day the UNC-Chapel Hill’s board of trustees took the unusual step of refusing to grant Hannah-Jones tenure. The board offered her an alternative: a five-year appointment as a “professor of practice,” with the option of a tenure review down the road. In higher education parlance, this would be a “probationary appointment.” In Hannah-Jones’ world, it might be called a humiliation. She sees herself as one of the most authoritative voices in journalism today. The news that she would still have to prove herself worthy of a tenured academic appointment must have hit her hard.

Be that as it may, it certainly hit the American higher education establishment hard. “The Tenure Denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Craven and Dangerous” roared Silke-Maria Weineck, a University of Michigan German professor in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle also features an essay by staff writers Jack Stripling and Andy Thomason, who explain, Hannah-Jones’ “‘1619 Project’ Is a Political Lightning Rod. It May Have Cost Her Tenure.” Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed headlines her account “A Blatant Intrusion.” She leads with a quote from an anonymous source who says UNC’s trustees acted under “pressure.” 

I would hope so. If there were ever a time when university trustees should be called upon to live up to their responsibilities to maintain the integrity of academic appointments, this was it.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/texas-senate-passes-bill-that-ban

The Texas state Senate passed a bill Saturday that prohibits schools from mandating the teaching of critical race theory (CRT).

House Bill 3979 doesn’t mention CRT by name, but apparently aims to ban the controversial quasi-Marxist ideology in public and open-enrollment charter schools.

According to the bill text, teachers, administrators, or employees from state agencies, school districts, and open-enrollment charter schools are prohibited from teaching students that one race is inherently superior to another race or sex or that an individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, by virtue of his or her race or sex.

A teacher “may not [be] compelled to discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs” in social studies curriculum in Texas history, U.S. history, world history, government, civics, social studies, or similar subjects, according to the bill.

If teachers choose to discuss the above topics, they must explore those topics from diverse and contending perspectives and can’t give deference to any one perspective.

The bill also requires the State Board of Education to adopt civic education to help students’ understanding of the moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American, U.S. history and tradition, and the founding documents of the United States.

The Lone Star State’s lower chamber passed the bill on May 11 but will have to approve it again in alignment with revisions made by the state Senate.

CRT—which espouses the idea that race is not natural, but socially constructed to oppress and exploit minorities—is an offshoot of the quasi-Marxist critical theory social philosophy that was promoted by the Frankfurt school of thought.

Then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning CRT training in federal agencies in September 2020, with the White House describing it as “anti-American propaganda.”

However, the socialist ideology has been embraced by President Joe Biden and his administration. Biden reversed Trump’s September 2020 executive order after entering the White House and pushed CRT training on all fronts.

The Biden administration’s efforts triggered widespread pushback from federal and state Republican lawmakers, conservatives and related organizations, and parents.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-america-is-flunking-math-education

Among all human endeavors, mathematics stands alone in terms of its beauty, universality, and innumerable applications. Though its role is often obscured by esoteric language, mathematics is behind almost all of humanity’s major advances in science and engineering.

Bridges stand, planes fly, rockets carry us into space, and MRIs can see into our brains thanks to precise mathematical calculations performed by powerful computers, invented by mathematicians such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann. Behind tasks performed by computers—predicting the weather, performing complex financial transactions, or encrypting billions of messages each day—lie sophisticated mathematical algorithms. Artificial intelligence, for example, is but a happy marriage between powerful computers and abstract mathematical models that sort and analyze massive amounts of data.

Before our discipline became the universal global enterprise it is today, great mathematical discoveries passed from ancient civilizations to medieval ones and then to modern ones. One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.

The United States became the dominant force in the mathematical sciences in the wake of World War II, largely due to the disastrous racist policies of the Third Reich. The Nazis’ obsession with purging German science of what it viewed as nefarious Jewish influence led to a massive exodus of Jewish mathematicians and scientists to America. One of them was Albert Einstein, whom Time magazine would declare Person of the Century in 1999. Science in Germany hasn’t returned to its former glory to this day.

The quality of mathematics research in the United States today is the envy of the scientific world. This is a direct result of the openness and inclusivity of the profession. David Hilbert’s ‘‘mathematics knows no races’’ is the living motto of the community of American mathematicians. Indeed, academic institutions in the United States have thrived largely because of their ability to attract talented individuals from around the world. The availability of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) professionals, highly trained in mathematics, has been crucial to our success as a nation. 

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/public_affairs/2021/05/06/skewed_history_textbook_coverage_of_early_america_and_the_new_deal_775956.html

Bottom Line: Six reviewers critique portions of five popular history and civic textbooks, finding that, despite some good qualities, they contain serious flaws. Overall, these textbooks fail to lay out a coherent historical framework, offer a truncated understanding of political theory, exhibit a bias in favor of a progressive interpretation of history, minimize the importance of religion (especially Protestantism), favor New Deal economics, and devote insufficient attention to the formation of republican virtue among students.

National Association of Scholars director of research David Randall, along with professors and scholars Bruce Frohnen, Kevin Gutzman, Jason Ross, Amity Shlaes, and William Pettinger, review portions of five popular textbooks used in history and civic education.

The textbooks under discussion are:

“American History,” 2018 edition, HMH Social Studies
“United States History,” 2016 edition, Pearson
“United States History and Geography,” 2018 edition, McGraw Hill
“The Unfinished Nation,” Ninth Edition, McGraw Hill
“America’s History,” Ninth Edition, Bedford St. Martin’s

Though the scholars worked independently, they found that the same general problems permeated each textbook. In straightforward and even-keeled prose, they catalogue problems such as too much graphics impeding student learning. They also found that the textbooks favor a progressive version of U.S. history, minimize the influence of religion – and Protestantism in particular – and feature a reductive understanding of political theory (for example, offering two-dimensional, flat sketches of Enlightenment thought and the tenets of New Deal-era liberalism). The textbooks also seem to agree with the presuppositions underlying New Deal economics. Finally, they neglect the importance of character formation, an especially glaring problem because students need to be taught the virtues of republican self-government.

In order to improve history and civic education in the United States, the reviewers argue that students need better textbooks that, in David Randall’s estimation, are “fair-minded, fact-based, and not subject to ideological bias.” Through the publication of this report, NAS aims to provide guidance to school boards and significantly improve the College Board’s standards.