RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/forcing-jewish-students-malign-and-injure-israel-richard-l-cravatts/

As more evidence that maligning and seeking to weaken and destroy Israel is still common behavior on American college campuses, the student government of Pomona College successfully pushed through a resolution that would compel student clubs to participate in a boycott of targeted companies doing business with Israel. Claremont Colleges Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Claremont Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) sponsored the odious bill and the Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC) passed the resolution aimed at “divesting all ASPC funds from companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine, and banning future use of funds towards such companies.”

The resolution, revealingly named “Banning the Use of ASPC Funding to Support the Occupation of Palestine,” was not unique in targeting the Jewish state for divestment and boycott; other campuses have pushed through resolutions that call on their respective university administrations to divest from holdings in companies that do business with Israel or which somehow are “complicit in the occupation of Palestine.” When those student efforts to push for divestment are passed, university administrators have regularly rejected the demands, claiming, rightly, that such boycotts and targeted divestment are inconsistent with university policies and moral behavior by focusing solely on Israel.

The Pomona divestment bill, however, took the novel and troubling step of focusing the divestment on student funds for the college’s various student organizations, thereby sidestepping the inconvenient step of convincing administrators that seeking to punish Israel, and Israel alone, is a sound or reasonable policy in the first place.

This bill put the divestment activities in the hands of the students themselves so that the ASPC “will change its internal spending habits . . . by stopping . . . spending on items that knowingly support the Israeli occupation of Palestine or contributes to any companies on the . . . United Nations list . . . [of] companies involved in the creation of illegal Israeli settlements ‘in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.’”

https://hedgehogreview.com/blog/thr/posts/the-problem-with-western-religions-on

I knew I had to quit my job in the Chaplain’s Office at the small liberal arts school where I worked, but it took a long time to bring myself to do it. The workplace had become so toxic that it was affecting my well-being. I also knew that when I left my position as the Coordinator of Catholic Life would not be refilled. I wasn’t worried about myself. I would be fine. I was worried about the students I left behind. What would become of their thriving community? As I had discovered, the progressivism that has suffused the atmosphere of elite schools like mine does not always welcome religious students. Indeed, it makes it difficult for students to engage with religion in a serious way.

Like many other American colleges that were originally religious institutions, the one I worked in had become entirely secularized. Founded in the late 1800s by Congregationalists, the historical heirs of the Puritans, it had long ago thrown out its hymnals and removed the cross from its historic main building. In part because it still had a gorgeous chapel in the center of its campus to contend with, the college retained two full-time Interfaith Chaplains and a Chaplain’s Office. But even secular institutions such as this one recognized that religion remains a vital source of campus life, being, for many students, an important part of the college experience.

The Chaplain’s Office at this college received money every year from many sources, including the school’s endowed fund for Roman Catholic Studies. With a tiny bit of that money, the Chaplain to the College hired me to work part time as the Coordinator of Catholic Life. There was also a part-time Coordinator of Jewish Life and a dozen or so volunteers from various faith traditions. Catholics were the second-largest religious identity on campus after Jews, although the majority of students at the college claimed no religious affiliation at all.

When I took the job, I didn’t see my presence on campus as a Catholic campus minister as controversial or political. I am a liberal, a feminist, and myself a product of an “elite university.” Both culturally, and in terms of my expertise, I thought I would be a good fit for a progressive institution committed to helping students explore their various identities, whether in terms of gender, race, sexuality, or even religion.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/waste-fraud-and-abuse/biden-admin-gives-millions-grants-racial-equity-stem-education

National Science Foundation “seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM” with $30 million program.

The Biden administration is spending millions in grants through the National Science Foundation to address what the federal agency calls “systemic racism” in the country and to advance “racial equity” in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education.

“Persistent racial injustices and inequalities in the United States have led to renewed concern and interest in addressing systemic racism,” reads a synopsis of the Racial Equity in STEM Education Program on the NSF website. “The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) seeks to support bold, groundbreaking and potentially transformative projects addressing systemic racism in STEM.”

Although the grants are funded by the federal government’s primary source of support for basic science research, the agency emphasizes that proposals are to be developed by and reflect the perspective of aggrieved groups and individuals who perceive themselves as victims of undefined “inequities” assumed in advance to be caused by “systemic racism.”

“Core to this funding opportunity is that proposals are led by, or developed and led in authentic partnership with, individuals and communities most impacted by the inequities caused by systemic racism,” specifies the agency. “The voices, knowledge, and experiences of those who have been impacted by enduring racial inequities should be at the center of these proposals, including in, for example: project leadership and research positions, conceptualization of the proposal, decision-making processes, and the interpretation and dissemination of evidence and research results.”

The NSF stipulates that research funded by these grants should be designed to produce predetermined outcomes that benefit those engaged to conduct the research. 

“The proposed work should provide positive outcomes for the individuals and communities engaged and should recognize people’s humanity, experiences, and resilience,” according to the program description.  

A synopsis on the government’s grants.gov website shows $30 million will be awarded to an expected 45 grantees beginning in July.

Since President Biden took office, the NSF has awarded millions in grants related to equity, diversity and inclusion, a review of government spending by Just the News showed.

https://www.city-journal.org/scoreless-admissions-set-minority-students-up-for-failure

Admissions officers around the country can hardly contain themselves. With their schools seeing record numbers of applications and acceptances for minority students, they are taking a victory lap in the media.

“It is safe to say this is the most broadly diverse accepted class in the long history of Dartmouth,” Lee Coffin, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid at the school, told the Wall Street Journal. At Dartmouth, 48 percent of accepted students identify as black, indigenous, or other people of color, and 17 percent are the first in their families to attend college.

At New York University, this year’s class is about 29 percent black or Hispanic, up from 27 percent last year; it also includes 20 percent first-generation students, up from 15 percent. MJ Knoll-Finn, NYU’s senior vice president for enrollment management, sees the situation as historic. She told the New York Times: “You could tell the story of America through the eyes of all these young people, and how they dealt with the times, Black Lives Matter, the wave of unemployment and the uncertainties of the political moment, wanting to make a difference.”

Applications at Harvard were up 43 percent over last year, and the percentage of black students admitted went from 14.3 percent to 18 percent. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, enthused: “We have the most diverse class in the history of Harvard this year, economically and ethnically. . . . This is an incoming group of students who’ve had experiences unlike any experiences first-year students have had in the history of Harvard or history of higher education.”

The celebrations may have come too early. Many of these admissions decisions, administrators say, happened because their schools went “test-optional.” Dropping the requirement that students submit SAT or ACT scores meant that admissions officers could rely only on grades, essays, and recommendations. Thus students with lower scores may have been more willing to apply to schools they otherwise would have considered a reach.

Despite the shift of public opinion against them, SAT scores remain fairly good predictors of not only how well students will perform in college but also the difficulty of the classes they’ll take. “Students with high test scores are more likely to take the challenging route through college,” University of Minnesota psychologists Nathan Kuncel and Paul Sackett maintain.

Too often, young people admitted to demanding colleges wind up switching to easier, less remunerative majors. According to researchers at the University of Texas–Austin, “More than a third of black (40%) and Latino (37%) [STEM] students switch majors before earning a degree, compared with 29% of white STEM students.” While the authors of that study suggest that the reasons for this discrepancy are social rather than academic, the truth, as Purdue University researcher Samuel Rohr discovered, is that “a higher aggregate score on the SAT helped predict the retention of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and business students.” He concluded: “For every point increase in SAT, there was 0.3% increase in retention.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/southlake-says-no-to-woke-education-11620426330?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The takeover of higher education by critical-race theory may be a fait accompli, but some parents won’t surrender K-12 education without a fight. That’s the message voters in the Dallas suburb of Southlake sent last weekend.

The May 1 special election became a referendum on efforts to impose critical-race theory on the curriculum and practices of Carroll Independent School District. The district’s diversity council developed the so-called “cultural competence action plan” after several students were caught on video uttering racial slurs.

The plan called for the district to hire an equity and inclusion director, encourage students to report each other for microaggressions, and revise the curriculum to make it more woke, among other changes.

Parents rejected this indoctrination effort, judging by the election results. School board candidates Cam Bryan and Hannah Smith vocally opposed the proposal and won 68% and 69% of the vote, respectively. Southlake Families, a political-action committee opposed to the plan, backed two city council candidates and a mayoral candidate. All three won with about 70% of the vote.

Reporting in the national media on the election has predictably portrayed the landslide election result as a victory for bigotry. “A school district tried to address racism, a group of parents fought back,” CNN proclaimed. A Dallas Morning News story featured a tweet claiming that Southlake had “doubled down on racism and White supremacy in their local election.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rhodes-scholarship-turns-against-its-legacy-of-excellence-11620412428?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Rhodes Scholarship stood for more than 120 years, through cataclysm and world war, as a symbol of individual excellence. But since 2019, under the shadow of a supposed reckoning with racism, the scholarships have been corrupted from within.

Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), the imperialist and financier who founded the scholarship, wanted Rhodes Scholars to be “the best men for the world’s fight.” The Rhodes Trust rewarded those who survived a withering competition with three years at Oxford University, all expenses paid. (Women were made eligible in 1977.)

Neither Rhodes nor many of those who over the decades benefited from his bequest would recognize the Rhodes Scholarship today. The scholarship, in the words of Edgar Williams, a former warden of Rhodes House, was “an investment in a chap.” A much-admired ideal was the German Rhodes Scholar Adam von Trott zu Solz, who was hanged for his role in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler.

While at Oxford, I studied Hannah Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism and the Russian language and traveled to the Soviet Union. Classmates studied Arabic and Chinese and became respected experts in their fields. The U.S. Rhodes Scholars in 2021, however, were praised not for worldliness but for their demographics. Twenty-one of the 32 winners are “students of colour” and one is “nonbinary,” according to the Rhodes Trust’s announcement. More important, diversity is often their preferred academic specialty, along with sexual harassment, racism and the status of prisoners. The winners are described as “passionate” or motivated by “fierce urgency.” The notion that Rhodes Scholars are defenders of universal values and destined to have careers that benefit their countries has been replaced by training them for conflicts with their fellow citizens.

Elizabeth Kiss, warden of Rhodes House, wrote that the Rhodes Trust today rejects Rhodes’s goal of educating young men for a civilizing mission as “wrong and obsolete.” Oxford itself, she writes, is a place where “racism in all its forms—structural, overt and implicit—remains rife.”

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

This is Part 2 of a multi-part series on the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in America’s schools, usually as part of a broader Ethnic Studies program. Already present in public, private, and charter school classrooms, CRT is a dangerous Marxist ideology that serves to indoctrinate students with racial identity, divisiveness, and animosity. The immediate objective of this deeply harmful curriculum is to incite hatred among our children based on intrinsic characteristics like skin color. The ultimate objective is revolution to destroy America’s Constitutional Republic by methodically shredding our First Things Principles: individual liberty, government by consent of the governed, but most especially equality of all in human dignity before the rule of law.

In the first Part of this series, we set out the fundamentals of CRT, its origins among Marxist intellectuals and basis in Bolshevik ideology. The reason that CRT has made such inroads into American academia is rooted in the 20th century realization that a revolution based on class divisions would not work very well in a society based on free market capitalism where opportunity and upward mobility are available to all who are willing to apply talent and hard work to achieve individual goals. Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s “Long March Through the Institutions” therefore took the place of a quick, violent Lenin-style uprising and race the place of Marx’s class divisions. America’s schools, teacher’s unions, textbooks, and students became top priority in the campaign to extend Marxist infiltration throughout the rest of society.

Indeed, as Alex Newman has written, “Understanding that future generations are the key to building political power and lasting change, socialists and totalitarians of all varieties have gravitated toward government-controlled education since before the system was even founded.” The arrival of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist academics from Goethe University in Frankfurt Germany, in the U.S. in the early 20th century marked the first foothold for communist ideology in the U.S. education system. Welcomed into Columbia University in New York in the 1930s, Frankfurt School operatives set about promoting a suite of concepts explicitly designed to undermine traditional American principles. Founded in Hegelian and Marxist premises, Frankfurt School thinkers pioneered the ideology of Critical Theory. In simple terms, Critical Theory attacked basic societal norms by characterizing them as nothing more than means by which a dominant, minority, bourgeois class ruled over the masses comprising the rest of the population. People were divided into “oppressors” and “oppressed”. Material well-being was the myopic lens through which Marx and his devotes viewed society. For them, the solution to abolishing inequality in material well-being was revolution, the only legitimate means by which they see history progressing into the future.

The problem here in the U.S. was that, although the free-market capitalist system featured large differences in wealth between the most-successful and the least-successful, the opportunity to rise from humble beginnings up through economic classes was here for the taking by anyone. So, this is where Critical Race Theory comes in: a wedge issue other than class had to be found and exacerbated. Enter Ethnic Studies, in which CRT plays a central role, with narratives like ‘systemic racism’, ‘white privilege’ and everything else that so dominates the U.S. education system today as well as every other institution, from faith communities, to government, media, the military, and popular culture.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/04/the-immense-education-investment-fraud/

As reported by the estimable Just Facts, federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. spent $1.02 trillion on education in 2019. This breaks down to $7,945 for every household in the country. It’s worth noting that these figures do not include land that is purchased for schools and other facilities, some of the costs of durable items like buildings and computers, and unfunded liabilities of post-employment non-pension benefits (health insurance e.g.). Here in California, when all costs are considered, the state spends over $20,000 per pupil.

But for Joe Biden, a trillion isn’t nearly enough. In March the President, or whoever is handling him these days, rolled out a $1.9 trillion “federal relief package” which includes $126 billion for schools. What the teachers unions and its allies in the media call an “investment” is really nothing more than the ongoing pillaging of taxpaying Americans who are already facing debt of gargantuan proportions. 

Then last week, Biden piled on with the American Family Plan, a $1.8 trillion giveaway which includes $554 billion for education—payments in-full for community college and preschool, to address the (alleged) “growing teacher shortage,” and a host of other “investments”—a word that appears in some form 58 times in the plan’s fact sheet.

While educrats drool, many with a firm grip on reality are horrified at the government’s tax antics. As policy writer Brad Polumbo points out, tuition at the average community college for an in-district student is just $3,770. “But it’s even less than that for students who qualify for existing grants and financial aid, which cover nearly all the expenses.” Polumbo goes on to say that the majority of students of who attend community college end up dropping out, and research has shown that those students who actually pay for their own schooling tend to work harder and get better grades.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/03/the-death-spiral-of-academia/

On March 1, Eric Kaufmann published a remarkably detailed and comprehensive study of bias in academia, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.” Kaufmann’s writing is a product of California’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a small think tank set up to do research forbidden in today’s Academy. His research uncovering rampant leftist political bias in publication, employment, and promotion in the academy—and discrimination against anything right-of-center—qualifies as that kind of work.

In the academy, the free interchange of competing ideas creates knowledge through cooperation, disagreement, debate, and dissent. Kaufmann finds that the last three are severely suppressed and punished. This repression’s pervasiveness may be a death sentence for science, free inquiry, and the advancement of knowledge in our universities.

I am led to that dire conclusion because there doesn’t appear to be any way for universities to prevent it. No solution can arise from within the academy, as it self-selects lifetime faculty that are largely left-wing, making promotion of dissidents highly unlikely. Kaufmann demonstrates profoundly systemic discrimination by leftist faculty against their colleagues who disagree with them politically.

It is important to note that Kaufmann concentrates primarily (but not exclusively) on the social sciences and humanities, in part because that’s where most previous research applies. Data for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) are not as common. There is no a priori reason to believe, however, that these fields are unaffected by systemic biases influencing entire institutions. Sure, one can make the argument that math is apolitical, but one can’t say the same for the many branches of science that now have considerable and controversial policy implications. Even a casual reading of the “educated” literature on environmental science and climatology reveals profound politicization.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-7-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#7: University of Minnesota

In an effort to “deconstruct and decentralize whiteness,” the University of Minnesota’s Center for Practice Transformation and School of Social Work recently presented a “12-step program” to make white students aware of their innate “white supremacy.”  This allegedly “anti-racist” course is the ultimate apotheosis of racism, telling whites that as a sole result of their skin color they endorse and promote racist beliefs and policies. 

The course is presented in the form of an online “webinar” titled “Recovery from White Conditioning.” The official program description explains that “The Model of Recovery from White Conditioning, a derivative work based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, is rooted in love and accountability. It involves white people, working in our community to transform violent legacies of whiteness into healthier, white, anti-racist community…” The AA community has notably rejected this usurpation of their 12-step format for an “anti-racist” crusade.

The webinar is led by therapist and clinical supervisor Cristina Combs, a white woman who states that the program “is designed for white people to challenge and support each other to accept our responsibility for dismantling white supremacy, as it lives in us and around us.”

This is the very definition of racism—telling a group of white people that solely because of the color of their skin, white supremacy “lives in us.”