RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/cancel-culture-spells-demise-academic-freedom-lloyd-pettegrew/

Many academics of the libertarian or conservative bent have learned from experience that it is better to keep one’s thoughts and voice to oneself. We self-sensor reluctantly and only out of necessity. In these troubled academic times rank no longer has its privileges regarding first Amendment rights on campus. Failure to follow publicly the progressive academic orthodoxy can bring one trouble in the form of being canceled.

Before canceling became de rigueur on campus and throughout the academy, opposition was largely confined to voicing opinions in the academic public square. With the rise in the popularity and power of neo-Marxism, canceling has become the new academic armament. Neo-Marxism emanated from Marxist theory in the 1970’s and 80’s as a framework for explaining the repressive functions of the capitalist state; its adherents could be found in political science, philosophy and public policy. Fifty years later it has birthed young scholars from economics to medicine and the STEM subjects, who think nothing of censoring or discarding people and texts they find objectionable.

The Neo-Marxist cancel culture has been most readily demonstrated in the violent protests against visiting campus speakers like Charles Murray, Christina Hoff Summers, Ben Shapiro, Heather Mac Donald and myriad others. Even in academic meetings like the American Political Science Association, U.C. Berkeley Law Prof. John Yoo, who had served in the George Bush Justice Department, was disrupted while speaking. As contradictory as it may seem, even an ACLU executive was prevented from speaking at two different university gatherings.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/alex-newman-false-history-taught-in-schools-incite

The history taught in public schools is “a complete and total reversal of reality” and the root cause of the civil unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis that has spread across the nation, said Alex Newman, an author, and award-winning international journalist.

President Donald Trump said during the Independence Day celebration at Mount Rushmore on July 3, “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains.”

“The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions,” Trump said.

“He hit the nail right smack on the head. That’s what I’ve been arguing for years,” said Newman, co-author of the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

“Now, when i say [what’s been taught is] a complete and total reversal of reality, that’s what i mean,” he told The Epoch Times‘ “Crossroads” program. “It’s not hyperbole, that’s not exaggeration.”

He said what defines American people as Americans are principles enshrined in the country’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and that everyone is endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights,” Newman said.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/english-departments-ideological-thrall-identity-richard-l-cravatts/

In July, the English Department of the University of Chicago posted an odd statement on its website. In response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the supposed “thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence,” the department announced that, “For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.” What is the motivation for the targeting of that particular area of study now? The statement, in the tortured language academia is so adept at generating, explains that English as a discipline “has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction and anti-Blackness,” and is “responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why.”

Apparently, the Chicago faculty believe that it is part of the mission of the English Department to mobilize its intellectual resources to address social problems and that the work of “undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere,” as the statement pretentiously proclaims.

While some observers lauded the department’s decision to focus graduate study on Black Studies, critics, including University of Chicago’s own president, Robert Zimmer, were quick to question a department committing itself to a political movement and activism supporting it. “[S]ome members of the University community have expressed concern that the exclusive disciplinary commitment effectively represents a political test for admission,” Zimmer wrote, in responding to the controversy, and “[t]he idea or even implication that there would be a political criterion applied to admission to our doctoral program would be incompatible with the fundamental principles of our University.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/disgusting-professorial-teachings-walter-williams/

The ugliness that we have recently witnessed including rioting, billions of dollars of property destruction, assaults, murders and grossly stupid claims about our nation has its origins on college campuses. Two websites, College Reform and College Fix, report on the despicable teachings on college campuses across the nation. Let us look at some of it.

In response to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s tweeting that he supports “citizen soldiers” in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a black professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science declared that “they have deputized all white people to murder us.”

Jesse A. Goldberg, professor in the English department at Auburn University who teaches classes in African American literature, American literature and composition wrote a now-deleted post on Twitter, “f—- every cop. Every single one.” Goldberg added, “The only ethical choice for any cop to make at this point is to refuse to do their job and quit.”

Eddie Glaude Jr., a Princeton University professor and chairman of the Department of African American Studies said that when it comes to policing in America “Black people still live under the slave codes.” Glaude’s tweet came in response to news that Jacob Blake was handcuffed to his hospital bed after being shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Glaude added:

“Placing shackles around the feet of Jacob Blake amounted to a physical reminder that he was still, no matter the protests, a n——r in the eyes of these policemen.”

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-treason-of-the-educational-class?token

Bad ideas owe their advance into mainstream thinking not just to bad people but also to otherwise decent people going along with such notions out of cowardice or other weakness.

The censorship of any thinking which conflicts with the orthodoxies of identity politics is increasingly destroying the western university as the crucible of reason, along with its core purpose to advance knowledge through the free play of evidence, ideas and argument.

This closing of the western mind is now taking place inside schools too. In America, high-school officials are increasingly imposing censorship and speech regulation.  A Vermont district has fired a school principal, Tiffany Riley, for writing on Facebook that she didn’t agree with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. As the legal commentator Jonathan Turley writes:

Shortly after that posting, Mount Ascutney School Board held an emergency meeting to declare that it is “uniformly appalled” and that Riley was “tone deaf” for making such a statement. In what should now be a major free speech case, the Board unanimously voted to fire Riley, citing her “denigrating, derogatory, or contrary to the movement for social equity for African Americans, including the Black Lives Matter movement.” 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/10/23/jewish-students-at-u-of-i-file-complaint-with-education-department-over-anti-semitism-n1082348

Jewish students at the University of Illinois-Urbana have filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education over the school’s handling of anti-Semitic harassment on campus. The complaint was filed last March, with a supplemental memorandum submitted in June and a letter in October. It was filed with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

Brandeis Center President Alyza Lewin said in a statement, “In the face of continuous stall tactics and almost no action from the university, we decided to publicize our efforts.”

Jewish Journal:

The complaint argued that Jewish and pro-Israel students have been subjected to a hostile campus climate over the past five years from anti-Semitism on both the right and the left. The complaint alleges that while the university has taken some action to address the campus climate, their “efforts have been wholly inadequate. In fact, in some cases, UIUC staff members were complicit in fostering this hostility and discrimination.”

The complaint proceeds to list 23 anti-Semitic incidents that have occurred on campus since 2015. Among the incidents were several instances of swastika graffiti, the UIUC Chabad Center for Jewish Life’s menorah being vandalized four times between 2015-17, and rocks being thrown at the window of a UIUC Jewish fraternity in 2017. In the latter incident, the police said they couldn’t do anything because there weren’t any suspects.

One incident involved the vice-chancellor.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/administering_truth_in_our_schools.html

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth is responsible for falsifying historical events and advancing government-approved versions of the ‘truth,’ such as ‘2 + 2 = 5’ and ‘War is peace.’ The ministry, the propaganda wing of the government of Oceania, one of the fictional superstates in the novel, uses ‘doublethink’ and ‘newspeak’ to obscure, distort or even reverse the meaning of words.

That was a fictional dystopia. But a few current examples will leave no doubt that the Orwellian manufacture of ‘truth’ is very much a salient feature of the American educational system.

Last week, the Palm Beach County School Board, FL,  voted four to three to reinstate William Latson, a former principal of the Spanish River Community High School, Boca Raton, who had emailed a parent: “I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee.” His dismissal of  the most well-documented genocide in history, and in a school with the largest Jewish student population in the country at that, caused shockwaves and resulted in his suspension.

In 1994, the Florida Legislature passed the Holocaust Education Bill (SB 660), mandating  lessons of the Holocaust to be part of the public-school curriculum. It said the Holocaust must be taught as “a uniquely important event in modern history, emphasizing the systemic and state-sponsored violence, which distinguish it from other genocides.”

Despite this, Latson was selective in teaching Holocaust material, saying, “I work to expose students to certain things, but not all parents want their students exposed, so they will not be and I can’t force that issue.” This was beyond belief for many in the community: the principal was implying not only that whether the Holocaust happened was open to interpretation, but also that the study of the topic was optional.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/21/top-u-s-universities-caught-underreporting-funding-from-china-other-foreign-adversaries/

A new report released by the Department of Education shows multiple U.S. universities accepted funding from China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other “foreign adversaries,” but did not report all they received.

The findings, reported by the Associated Press, are part of an ongoing investigation by the department spurred by the Trump Administration to crack down on foreign theft of intellectual property, research, and technology in higher education. “Potential enforcement against specific institutions” will come from the Department of Justice.

While the U.S. requires universities to “disclose gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more from foreign sources,” the report suggests that 12 schools of “the nation’s largest and richest universities have aggressively pursued and accepted foreign money,” including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown.

Together, the universities reportedly failed to “disclose a combined $6.5 billion in foreign funding that was previously unreported.”

According to the report, many of the universities maintained financial relationships with previously identified national security threats such as Chinese tech company Huawei and another which “had ties directly to the Chinese Communist Party.”

The department also denounced “rapidly expanding their foreign operations and relationships,” by some institutions including the Ivy League university Yale, which admitted failed “to submit foreign funding reports for the years 2014 to 2017.”