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EDUCATION

If You Worked for the Trump Administration, You’re Not Welcome at Harvard Young totalitarians now demand that speakers pass their ideological litmus test. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/if-you-worked-trump-administration-youre-not-richard-l-cravatts/

With the intellectually arrogant but now regular behavior common on university campuses, Harvard students last week circulated an open letter to President Lawrence Bacow and Harvard University deans and leadership proposing that Harvard take proactive measures to prevent Trump administration officials from securing appointments, fellowships, or speaking opportunities on campus.

Clearly indignant at the prospect of someone who worked for an administration they have loathed since inauguration day in 2017, the tendentious students expressed their grave concern “about the impact of the actions of this administration on fundamental democratic institutions.”

Even though these students obviously have found nothing of redeeming value in anything positive the Trump administration may have accomplished, their primary justification for calling for preventing “Harvard [becoming] a temporary home for officials from the outgoing administration” is Trump’s current legal challenge to the November 3rd election and the campaign’s claims that voter fraud and irregularities in many states should be challenged in court. That process, of course, is perfectly legal and is the constitutionally-permitted right of a candidate to launch, especially in an election like this one—with razor thin margins, new voting practices, mail-in balloting as a result of the pandemic, and evidence of blatant fraud and voting irregularities, just as it was in 2000 when the Gore campaign challenged the voting results for 36 days after election day.

Nevertheless, the Harvard students have no time to wait for an audit and full accounting of the November 3rd election, claiming that Trump’s failure to have already conceded eradicates completely his entire record as president, including all of those individuals who made up his administration.

“Most notably, in actively undermining faith in the electoral process and in refusing to concede the 2020 election,” the student’s letter reads, “the Trump administration has trampled norms of free and fair elections and peaceful transfer of power that have defined our republic for over two centuries. These norms are crucial to the global well-being of democratic institutions.”

Biden’s Student Loan Bailouts: Bad Economics, A Regressive Tax, And A Moral Hazard

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/11/24/student-debt-bailout-bad-economics-and-a-cynical-giveaway-to-the-wealthiest-americans/

Joe Biden has so many bad ideas that dealing with them all is a little like swatting flies in a molasses factory in July. One bad idea that’s getting media coverage right now is student loan forgiveness, a favorite among progressives. It’s a classic Democratic proposal: It helps the rich and the elites, and then hands the bill to working Americans.

An alliance of 236(!) leftist groups and teachers’ unions — or do we repeat ourselves? — recently urged Biden to erase student debt as one of his first acts as president, assuming of course he wins. Both Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, thought to have significant clout in Biden’s inner circle, want government to wipe away as much as $50,000 of debt per student.

So-called progressives are no doubt concerned that recent polling shows surprising support among millennials for Republican ideas. What better way to get them back on board than to show your socialist bona fides and win future elections than by forgiving student debt?

As Warren recently tweeted, “Student loan debt is holding back a whole generation from buying homes, starting small businesses, and saving for retirement – all things we rely on to grow our economy. Executive action to #CancelStudentDebt would be a huge economic stimulus during and after this crisis.”

Leftist academics compulsively indoctrinate their students By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/leftist_academics_compulsively_indoctrinate_their_students.html

A Cambridge University professor can’t resist telling students that he thinks a brain parasite is why people voted for Trump.

Leftist college professors leak hatred out of their pores. No matter the subject, they return obsessively to bashing Trump specifically and conservatives generally. Dr. Robert Asher, a Zoology Professor at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (England), and a Huffington Post contributor, is a perfect example. In introducing students to his course, he can’t resist throwing in his belief that a highly-damaging brain parasite is why people vote for Brexit or Trump.

To appreciate what Asher said, you need to know about the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, long recognized for affecting cats. A few years ago, though, researchers realized that it affected humans as well. Even people without cats can get it from contaminated food and water, contaminated utensils, contaminated (unwashed) fruits and vegetables, and infected organ transplants and blood transfusions.

In healthy people, toxoplasmosis feels like a bad flue. In people with weakened immune systems, it can cause seizures and lung problems. Pregnant women can also transfer it to the fetus, which often leads to stillbirths or miscarriages. If the fetuses survive, they can have serious, lifelong health problems such as seizures or liver and spleen damage.

What distinguishes Toxoplasmosis from other parasites is that it can cause severe mental disorders and behavioral problems:

Infection by the parasite Toxoplasma, which affects about 33% of world population, is associated with an increased risk of several mental health disorders, the most strongly with schizophrenia. [snip] The typical symptom associated with toxoplasmosis was anxiety, and the typical toxoplasmosis-associated disorders were autism (OR = 4.78), schizophrenia (OR = 3.33), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (OR = 2.50), obsessive compulsive disorder (OR = 1.86), antisocial personality disorder (OR = 1.63), learning disabilities (OR = 1.59), and anxiety disorder (OR = 1.48). Toxoplasmosis could play a substantial role in the etiopathogenesis of mental health disorders and its association with schizophrenia is the second strongest association, after autism.

Biden Ain’t for the Kids On education issues, trouble looms if Biden becomes president. by Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/20/biden-aint-for-the-kids/

At the risk of stating the obvious, the country’s political future is murky. If Joe Biden withstands the onslaught of ballot fraud challenges and becomes POTUS 46, it’s anyone’s guess as to how he will govern. Or for how long. As a dementia-riddled man with no cures for the ailment on the horizon, his decisions will most likely be made by a cadre of handlers, advisors and cabinet members. And in the not-too-distant future, he will likely cede the reins to Vice-President Kamala Harris. But for now, I will briefly examine the educational direction Biden plans to take, and it ain’t pretty.

The first troubling sign came when the Biden-Sanders Task Force was created before Biden became the Democrats’ candidate. This motley crew included former National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a proud socialist. This spend-happy, anti-school choice group advised Democrats to triple current Title I funding for disadvantaged students, “fully fund” the federal law for students with disabilities and kill the popular D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

All the above and so much more is now on the table. His Secretary of Education could very well be one of the aforementioned union leaders, replacing Betsy DeVos, who bore no love for the unions and top-down D.C. decision making. I doubt Weingarten will be the one, as she would have to give up two-thirds of her $600,000 a year salary, and what amounts to a job for life to accept the position. Eskelsen García, on the other hand, was termed out as NEA boss earlier this year and is now a free agent. The position could also to go Elizabeth Warren, who as a former Harvard professor with progressive cred, would fit the bill as the anti-Betsy. But any of the three candidates (and anyone else) would have to get the blessing of the (probably Republican) Senate.

Elite Schools Are the Most Problematic on Speech:By Samuel J. Abrams

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/20/elite-schools-are-the-most-problematic-on-speech/

Northwestern University is in the midst of significant protests and violence surrounding the “NU Community Not Cops” movement, which intends to march every day until the school abolishes its university police. University president Morton Schapiro has condemned the violent student activity, which has disrupted businesses and local neighborhoods, defaced property, and violated laws and university standards. Students have “moved well past legitimate forms of free speech,” Schapiro says, rightly.

This is no isolated incident, however. Disruptions and violent incidents often appear to be more common at elite schools – not just Northwestern but others such as USC, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, and Claremont McKenna College, to name a few.

Thanks to the new 2020 College Free Speech Rankings from RealClearEducation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and research firm College Pulse, empirical evidence confirms this suspicion. The rankings are based on the largest study of student attitudes about speech to date, sampling some 20,000 students. It turns out that students enrolled in the country’s most elite schools are appreciably more willing to shut down speech and expression with which they disagree than the overwhelming majority of college students at non-elite schools.

These tendencies appear to have some correlation with general political views. Almost three-quarters (71%) of those students in the most prestigious universities (the top ten schools, based on U.S. News rankings) identify as liberal, with only 15% calling themselves conservative. The numbers look notably different as school ranking levels decline.

At schools ranked between 50 and 99 on the U.S. News scale, 51% of students are liberal, compared to 26% conservative. Conservative students are much harder to find at Harvard, in other words, than at the University of Minnesota. Forcomparison, 28% of Americans in general presently identify as conservative.

Surprise: The “Smartest” People Are Actually Painfully Stupid Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-11-17-good-news-science-is-back

If you were lucky enough to attend America’s premier academic institution, Harvard University, you would receive most days, as I do, the Harvard Gazette. The Gazette generally cloaks its pieces in the mantle of “news”; but really its principal function is to find ways for us Harvard people to congratulate ourselves on how brilliant we are, while at the same time heaping scorn and derision on the the ignorant deplorables who are always getting in the way of our plans to perfect the world.

You only need to read a few of these things before you start to realize that what might seem like the very “smartest” people — the ones with the fanciest degrees and the fanciest professorships at the fanciest universities — are actually painfully stupid.

Anyway, today’s Harvard Gazette arrives with some joyful news: Science is back! After four dreadful years of the “anti-science” Trump, we are now going to see, with Biden, the restoration of “science” to its rightful place in the formulation of public policy. This news is right there in the lead story, headline and sub-headline: “Is science back? Harvard’s Holdren says ‘yes’/Ex-Obama adviser says, unlike Trump, Biden and Harris will embrace factual analysis.” From the first paragraph:

[T]he incoming Biden-Harris administration has moved quickly to reinstall science as a foundation for government policy after four years of a president who disdained accepted scientific wisdom on subjects from wildfires to hurricane tracks, climate change to COVID-19.

Students Call on Harvard to Ban Trump Officials from Speaking, Holding Positions on Campus By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/students-call-on-harvard-to-ban-trump-officials-from-speaking-holding-positions-on-campus/

Harvard University students are calling on the university to ban Trump officials from giving talks or holding positions on campus over concern “about the impact of the actions of this administration on fundamental democratic institutions.”

In an open letter circulating online for signatures, students write to President Lawrence Bacow and Harvard University deans and leadership that they are hoping to get ahead of the tradition of “Harvard [becoming] a temporary home for officials from the outgoing administration.”

“We write to you now, in advance of the conclusion of the Trump administration, extremely concerned about the impact of the actions of this administration on fundamental democratic institutions,” the letter reads. “Most notably, in actively undermining faith in the electoral process and in refusing to concede the 2020 election, the Trump administration has trampled norms of free and fair elections and peaceful transfer of power that have defined our republic for over two centuries. These norms are crucial to the global well-being of democratic institutions.”

It continues: “A complete disregard for the truth is a defining feature of many decisions made by this administration. That alone should be enough to draw a line.”

A Book for Our Times: Peter Wood’s 1620 Skewers 1619 Project By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-book-for-our-times-peter-woods-1620-skewers-1619-project/

I can think of no book more deserving of a review in The New York Times—or less likely to receive one—than Peter Wood’s just-published 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. More than a powerful refutation, Wood’s 1620 is a withering appraisal and deadpan skewering of the 1619 Project as a cultural phenomenon. That ill-starred journalistic project is the purest and most perfect example of woke. The cultural revolution of 2020 will always rightly be associated with the 1619 Project of The New York Times. Not for nothing did project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones cheerfully embrace the term “1619 riots.”

Many young Americans believe that slavery was a novelty in world history—an exclusively American innovation. That misapprehension is abetted by the 1619 Project. Wood thus begins with a quick tour of New World slavery prior to 1619. Among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, captive enemies were kept for their labor, for the sport of torture, and in a few cases for what Wood calls “almost industrial level” human sacrifice, not to mention cannibalism.

Long before 1619, the Spanish and Portuguese used slavery to extract forced labor from native peoples. Eventually, they abolished the enslavement of native Americans in favor of something closer to serf-like dependence. Certainly, the Spanish and Portuguese imported slaves from Africa (where slavery was also common), sometimes putting them in charge of indigenous slaves. Those African overseers often discharged their task with brutality. When a party of Spanish conquistadors out to subdue what is now Florida were shipwrecked, they themselves were enslaved by the indigenes. Most died in short order. Slavery was a world-wide human norm.

Indoctrinating Students to Hate Whiteness Racial self-flagellation on campus. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/indoctrinating-students-hate-whiteness-richard-l-cravatts/

Since the unfortunate deaths of George Floyd and a number of other black individuals in interaction with law enforcement, campuses across the country have been roiled by paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over race, white police racism and purported attendant brutality, and the alleged existence of endemic racism in society and its major institutions—including, specifically, universities.

In fact, there is so little actual racism on American campuses that race-obsessed grievance activists have had to invent new, previously unseen sources of racism. Thus, suddenly campus buildings named for benefactors from hundreds of years ago are denounced because the donors had owned slaves. Whole campuses are considered illegal and purloined because they supposedly sit on lands previously inhabited by indigenous peoples. Statues of campus notables with a shady past have to be moved, torn down, or shattered. At Princeton, as one notable example, the public mea culpa over the supposed prevalence of racism on its campus by President Christopher L. Eisgruber was so public that it actually resulted in a surprising investigation for possible violations of federal antidiscrimination law (under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) against the university by the Department of Education.

Identifying anti-black racism was the first step in elevating and asserting that racism existed in a systemic, endemic, and institutional way. But was what was also important was to not only elevate blacks by recognizing their longstanding oppression, but then by making whites feel guilty about their so-called white privilege and their intended or unintended roles in continuing racism against blacks.

Orchestrating Hatred SJP’s toxic campus campaign of bias toward Jews. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/orchestrating-hatred-sjps-toxic-campus-campaign-richard-l-cravatts/

In September, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights reached a settlement with New York University for the school’s apparent discrimination against its Jewish students, based on a student’s complaint that “the university discriminated against students of Jewish descent, on the basis of their national origin, by failing to respond appropriately to incidents that created a hostile environment for Jewish students at the university.”

When President Trump signed a 2019 executive order that instructed government agencies to be guided by “the non-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitism adopted on May 6, 2016, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA),” it empowered the Education Department to use Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to withhold funding from any schools that allow discrimination on campuses based on “race, color, or national origin.” And Trump’s executive order expanded the language of Title VI so that Jews, recognized as having a distinct national origin or ethnicity, now enjoy protection as a group.

The IHRA definition, which includes “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” is also critical to Title VI enforcement because it includes the notion that denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their historic homeland, Israel—in other words, anti-Zionism—manifests itself as a contemporary form of anti-Semitism. On campuses where anti-Israel activists regularly excoriate the Jewish state, deem it illegal, wish for its destruction, malign its supporters and slander them as Zionists, racists, and perpetrators of an apartheid regime in the name of Zionism, it is obvious that campus anti-Semites have frequently been able to mask their actual anti-Semitism with what they claim is merely “criticism of Israel.” In fact, Adela Cojab Moadeb, the student who filed the NYU complaint, confirmed that “[m]uch of the discrimination we faced, if not all, was propagated by anti-Zionists on campus.”

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a similar Department of Education complaint was just filed on behalf of the school’s Jewish students who have endured “an unrelenting campaign of antisemitic harassment,” a situation caused by the administration’s failure to provide “a discrimination-free academic setting” despite having been put on notice of the “developing hostile environment.”