RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://lawliberty.org/one-cheer-for-president-morty-schapiro/

Morton Schapiro, President of Northwestern University, where I work, is getting widespread praise from outside the university for a statement rebuking violent and bullying demonstrators, including students. The demonstrators were calling for an end to the Northwestern University Police. In the process, they vandalized one of the main entrances of the university as well as stores in Evanston, thus ironically showing why police, both in the university and town, are necessary.

Schapiro’s statement was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal. It was held up as a model for other university presidents by arbiters of national discourse like David Brooks. Frederick M. Hess hailed Schapiro in National Review, running his encomium under the title, “Northwestern President Offers a Tutorial in Campus Leadership.”

The statement was indeed for the most part a very sound one. Schapiro called for those who broke the law to be held accountable: “An essential aspect of education is the discernment of actions and consequences. If you, as a member of the Northwestern community, violate rules and laws, I am making it abundantly clear that you will be held accountable.” 

He also called out the tactics of protestors who surrounded his home in the early morning hours calling him “piggy” and shouting expletives at him. While these protestors may not have been violating any laws (although there may be rules against loud noise in residential areas at that hour), they are violating the norms of a university, which contemplate that its denizens will engage in rational discourse, not abuse. This kind of behavior undermines the whole ethos of a university. It is not debate but intimidation. As Schapiro said:

If you haven’t yet gotten my point, I am disgusted by those who chose to disgrace this University in such a fashion. I especially condemn the effect of their actions on our friends, neighbors and other members of our community who are trying to sustain viable businesses, raise families, study and do research, while facing a global pandemic and the injustices of the world without losing their sense of humanity.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/college-board-to-end-partnership-with-chinese-regime-amid-concerns-of-foreign-influence_3565537.html

The College Board, a nonprofit organization that administers AP and SAT exams, said it will end its partnership with a Chinese government agency at the end of the year amid growing concern about the Chinese regime’s influence in the U.S. education system.

The decision follows an Oct. 26 letter from seven Republican senators to College Board CEO David Coleman asking him to explain the group’s financial relationship with Hanban, an office under Beijing’s ministry of education that’s responsible for overseeing Confucius Institutes around the world.

Confucius Institutes have been criticized for spreading Chinese propaganda and suppressing topics critical of the regime under the cover of a language and culture program.

The senators also asked whether the Chinese regime has influenced test development and guest teacher programs in the United States.

In its response, the College Board said it has received an annual grant from Hanban since 2006 to “support the teaching and learning of Chinese language and culture in U.S. schools,” but won’t continue that relationship with Hanban after their agreement expires at the end of this year.

“2020 is the final year in which the College Board will receive or pursue any grant funding from Hanban,” College Board Senior Vice President Elissa Kim wrote on Oct. 30.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-establishes-1776-commission/

This afternoon President Trump signed an “Executive Order Establishing the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.” The order marks an important step in Trump’s efforts to foster patriotic education.

The text is longer and more substantive than typical presidential EOs. It offers sharp criticisms of current educational trends, a definition and explanation of patriotic education, as well as a vision for how to realize it. Following Trump’s remarks at the White House Conference on American History, the president was criticized by some on the left both for favoring a simplistic view of patriotism and for trying to force a curriculum on schools in violation of local control. This EO refutes both criticisms.

Trump’s EO does offer strong criticisms of “polemics grounded in poor scholarship” that vilify “our Founders and our founding.” The president evidently has Howard Zinn and the 1619 Project in mind. “Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains,” the EO continues. The order rakes this approach over the coals for a time, then says, “Failing to identify, challenge, and correct this distorted perspective could fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-universities-lead-america-to-a-primitive-state-11604359918?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

In this election season it’s almost impossible to find pro-Trump bumper stickers or signs anywhere in my town. The reason is not lack of support but fear of vandalism, or worse: People nationwide have been physically assaulted and even threatened with loss of their livelihoods for no other reason than that they plan to vote as one half of the country does, and political goals are now commonly pursued by violent means. With this our civilization seems to be regressing to a more primitive stage of its development—a time when disputes were settled by force instead of rules, and before the First Amendment guaranteed the right to speak freely on the social and political issues of the day.

That’s bad enough in itself, but worse yet is that this social regression began on college campuses, of all places, before spreading to the national culture. On one-party campuses, radical-left faculty have established a political orthodoxy that student mobs enforce, and the political culture of the nation is poisoned as those students take home with them their professors’ habit of seeing opinions that differ from theirs as an evil not to be tolerated.

The left-wing political orthodoxy is also taking the place of traditional civics. Recent graduates know much less about U.S. government than older Americans do. In 2018 the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation gave a sample of Americans a test based on the exam for U.S. citizenship. Only 19% of people under 45 passed, while 74% of those over 65 did, meaning even elderly people who learned the material more than 40 years ago can summon it from memory better than recent grads. Similar studies have found a regression in knowledge of U.S. history. Today’s universities are presiding over a nationwide reversion to civic illiteracy. That’s a disaster for the country, but it suits campus radicals. A well-informed citizenry would hardly wish to be governed by people whose ideological kin have reduced so many countries to economic and political deserts.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/authors/vince_bielski_realclearinvestigations/

Using the hip-hop musical “Hamilton” in class is an example of how American history can be taught in untraditional ways, New York’s schools chancellor suggests.

While New York City considers sweeping changes to selective schools to promote diversity, it’s already revamping the curriculum to cater to the interests of low-income students.

The city is embracing “culturally responsive-sustaining education,” an approach that’s growing in popularity with hopes that it will help close the achievement gap for black and Latino students. Advocates say the current curriculum can turn off these students who can’t, for example, identify with the content of classics like “Moby-Dick.”

The revised curriculum will put students’ culture at the center of it. In other words, give them assignments that draw on their history and experiences and they’ll be inspired to learn. While the approach may make intuitive sense, researchers point out that it hasn’t been rigorously studied to see if it improves outcomes for students.

Speaking at a middle school last year, Chancellor Richard Carranza said using the Broadway musical “Hamilton” in class is an example of how American history can be taught in untraditional ways, according to a media report. “Hamilton” tells the story of the Founding Father using hip-hop and rap.

“If students refuse to read Shakespeare, we say there is something wrong with them,” says Professor David Kirkland, who served on the mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group. “But what if they will read other books, and in the process, learn to read? Let’s move with the student.”

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/11/keywords-hoist-petard

Perhaps we ought to have included “chickens” and “roost” among the keywords as well. For many years now, woke administrators, professors, and other activists at all the toniest colleges have been like the parade of flagellants in The Seventh Seal: skirling in public about their sins, above all their institutional or (as we have lately been taught to say) their “systemic” racism. Their cries are accompanied by the demand for alms—$50 million at Yale to support “diversity,” $100 million at Brown for kindred exercises in political penance, and so on.

On September 2, Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, made a major contribution to this emetic genre. In an open letter to the university “community,” he beat his breast about America’s overdue “profound national reckoning with racism.” He didn’t exclude his own university. Indeed, he beat himself harder as he bemoaned Princeton’s long history of “intentionally and systematically exclud[ing] people of color, women, Jews, and other minorities.” Nor, according to him, has that history ended. “Racist assumptions from the past,” President Eisgruber sobbed, “remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”

His confession did not go unnoticed. On September 16, the Department of Education sent President Eisgruber a letter. The letter minutes an interesting discrepancy. Since Christopher Eisgruber became president of Princeton in 2013, the university has received more than $75 million in taxpayer funds. It has also “repeatedly represented and warranted to the U.S. Department of Education . . . Princeton’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” What’s Title VI? Among other things, it’s the law that stipulates that no institution receiving federal funds may discriminate against anyone because of “race, color, or national origin.”

https://www.city-journal.org/northwestern-univ-president-schapiro-stands-up-to-rioters

Since June, a group of Northwestern University students has demanded that the school disband its campus police force and sever ties with the Evanston, Illinois police department. On Saturday, October 17, their protests became unruly. Members of NU Community Not Cops (NUCNC) sprayed anti-cop graffiti on private and public property, broke a window at the local Whole Foods market, set at least one trash can on fire, and burned a school banner. The following Monday, Northwestern’s president denounced the violence in the most unequivocal of terms—and was himself promptly denounced as a racist for having done so. But the president, Morton Schapiro, to his enormous credit, has neither apologized nor backed down on his refusal to abolish the campus police department.

The Northwestern episode is doubly instructive. Schapiro is one of the most woke college presidents in the country. Yet he has done something that almost no Democratic politician or progressive opinion leader has dared do with such forcefulness: draw a bright line between Black Lives Matter protests and violence. Had Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris been as unhesitating in their condemnations of this year’s murderous race riots, the country might have avoided the worst of the anarchy.

But Schapiro is to a considerable extent the architect of his own problems. Over the last several years, he has pandered to the maudlin identity politics that lead students at the most prestigious colleges in the country to think of themselves as oppressed. The ongoing conflict at Northwestern should remind college presidents everywhere that they feed the beast of adolescent narcissism and self-pity at their peril.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/28/the-dojs-lawsuit-against-yale-is-how-to-win-the-culture-war/

For the first time in decades, the diversity bureaucrats dividing the country on the basis of race, class, and sex are worried about losing federal funding and being sued.

In a Bengali poem, one verse roughly translates to “the maddening rage of a caged impotent.” It fits the left’s reaction to the Trump administration’s executive order banning critical race training in federal departments and lawsuit against Yale University for discrimination against white and Asian applicants.

For a long time, the overwhelming majority of sane, hardworking people had to endure being ruled by a handful of ideologues and their crackpot theories, in a long march continued unopposed. Bafflingly, for decades there was zero substantive pushback among Republican lawmakers, even from ostensibly conservative presidents. That has now changed. Whoever takes up the mantle of post-Trump conservatism, things are not going back to meek subservience.

The U.S. Department of Justice has sued Yale for discriminating against Asians and white applicants in undergraduate admissions. The lawsuit argues that qualified Asians and whites are discriminated against in favor of black applicants, and are likely to only win one-quarter of admissions compared to lesser qualified people based solely on race, in what the DOJ considers to be affirmative action.

https://www.peaceandtolerance.org/

On Monday, November 2, the Palm Beach County Public School Board will be holding a hearing on whether to terminate or re-hire William Latson, the former principal of Spanish River High School, who was fired after being caught saying that the Holocaust was not actually a crime. This will be our last chance to make sure that a man with such anti-historical, anti-Semitic delusions is kept out of a position of educational authority over developing minds — and does not receive a cent more of taxpayers’ money.

We call upon all concerned Palm Beach residents to attend the meeting in person, and tell the committee why terminating this man’s contract and not re-hiring him.

If you can come, please register as a speaker at the hearing by emailing Lauren Gross of the Gross Family Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust at LAGpalmbeach@gmail.com.

If you do not live in Palm Beach, you can call the board’s office and leave a polite voice message at (561) 434-8000; please also email these a