RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/19/chinas-growing-influence-on-campus/

The U.S. government has opened a multifront assault on the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration of American institutions.

Chinese companies that don’t abide by American securities laws will be delisted from U.S. stock exchanges under an executive order signed by the president. Another order prohibits federal workers’ pension funds from being invested in Chinese-controlled companies. Yet another keeps a growing number of companies, American and foreign, from doing business with Huawei, the Chinese telecom-cum-cyberespionage giant.

These moves follow a series of speeches by top administration officials outlining the threat the CCP poses to our way of life. 

Our government is pushing back, and there is no shortage of targets. The FBI has nearly 1,000 investigations in all of its 56 field offices involving China’s attempted theft of U.S. technology.

Corrupted Professors

University campuses are a major front in the war. 

The FBI arrested Charles Lieber, the chairman of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology department, for accepting millions of dollars from the Wuhan virology lab and then lying about it. 

A UCLA professor was convicted of taking CCP money to illegally send semiconductors with military applications to China. 

A University of Kansas professor hid the fact he was working full-time for a Chinese university while he was conducting federally-funded research here. 

One of the top researchers at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas didn’t reveal he was also being paid $14 million by a cancer institute in China.

The Department of Education told the University of Texas to turn over details of its relationship with the Wuhan virology lab (yes, that one!) and other Chinese institutions. Washington has put all universities on notice to disclose donations they receive from CCP sources (which would include any company or individual from the People’s Republic). Under the Higher Education Act, colleges and universities are required to report contracts or gifts of $250,000 or more from foreign sources.

https://www.city-journal.org/academia-systemic-racism

The lethal arrest of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May triggered widespread riots and a torrent of contempt for America from virtually every institution in the country. Businesses large and small, the education establishment, and the press rushed to condemn the country’s purportedly endemic racism, implicitly accusing the majority of Americans of destroying “black lives.” Banks and law firms pledged that hiring and promotions would now be even more race-conscious than before. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured forth from corporate coffers into activist groups; the corporate benefactors hoped to dismantle America’s white supremacy, they announced.

Colleges and universities also promised increased diversity spending, though in amounts dwarfed by those corporate outpourings. Nevertheless, the academic response to Floyd’s death and the ensuing violence will have the greatest impact on the nation’s future. Academia was the ideological seedbed for that violence and for its elite justifications; it will prove just as critical in the accelerated transformation of the country.

Fealty to “diversity” and denunciations of white privilege have been a unifying theme in academia for decades, of course. What’s different this time is the sheer venom of the denunciations. College presidents and deans competed for the most sweeping indictment of the American polity, rooted in the claim that blacks are everywhere and at all times under threat.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/3-jewish-students-forced-out-usc-student-daniel-greenfield/

Truman Fritz and Rose Ritch won the most votes in the race for president and vice president of the USC Undergraduate Student Government. Isabel Washington scored the most votes in the Senate race. Six months later, all three USC students were harassed into resigning.

The story of how that happened exposes the ugliness of campus bullying and anti-semitism.

Of the three USC student government leaders and one student who was next in the line of succession who were forced out, three were Jewish, one of them gay, and one was African-American. The cancel culture campaigns against them were led by Islamic students.

Three of the four students were targeted for supporting Israel.

Isabel Washington, a Jewish African-American student senator, was the first to be forced out after false accusations of “anti-black racism”, of holding “white supremacist ideologies”, and, of “Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian statements”.

Shaden Awad, an RA at USC, and apparently a supporter of American Muslism for Palestine, attacked Washington for her role at Hillel, a Jewish campus organization where Washington serves as the Jews of Color Co-Chair, writing “Even if all the orgs on campus that r Jewish r also Zionist That’s not an excuse For you to join That’s still blood on ur hands.”

“I didn’t join them bc they’re zionist. I joined them because I’m Jewish,” Washington replied.

A petition calling for her expulsion, with over 1,200 signatures, declares that “a woman with years of internalized racism, classism, and Zionism behind her should not be given the luxury of being a USC student”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/yale-discrimination.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20200813&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=headline&regi_id=2636639&segment_id=36042&user_id=2dfc89bd6c52e6103e5ac62f916a8f0d

The Trump administration said the university discriminated against Asian-American and white applicants. Yale defended its practices and vowed to maintain them.

The Justice Department on Thursday accused Yale University of violating federal civil rights law by discriminating against Asian-American and white applicants, an escalation of the Trump administration’s moves against race-based admissions policies at elite universities.

The charge, coming after a two-year investigation, is the administration’s second confrontation with an Ivy League school; two years ago, it publicly backed Asian-American students who accused Harvard in a lawsuit of systematically discriminating against them.

The department’s finding could have far-reaching consequences for the ongoing legal challenges to affirmative action, which are expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court. Some conservative groups have long opposed affirmative action, a tool born in the civil rights era, and a handful of states have banned such policies at public universities.

“There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination,” Eric S. Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, said in a statement announcing the Justice Department’s move against Yale. “Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocs fosters stereotypes, bitterness and division.”

The Justice Department said that Yale had violated Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action by using race not as one of many factors in deciding which applicants to invite to the freshman class, but as a predominant or determining factor in admissions — an effect that was multiplied for competitive applicants.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/faculty-demand-racism-star-chamber-princeton-richard-l-cravatts/

The death of a black man under the knee of a brutal policeman in Minneapolis sent shock waves of racial guilt throughout America, where protestors, led principally by Black Lives Matter, took to the streets to malign America’s troubled history with race and reignite the conversation about how to atone and pay for the country’s original sin of slavery and racial oppression. Not surprisingly, that same paroxysm of indignation immediately appeared on university campuses, which for decades had already been obsessing about and condemning what they perceive to be structural racism, a lack of sufficient inclusion and diversity, and both subtle and overt instances of racism that triggered minority students and supposedly hindered their attaining equity.   

Even though a university campus is the least likely place where students or faculty confront actual racism, from the moment they step foot on campus, students are tutored on how, even at some of the most elite educational institutions in the world, they are oppressed, intimidated by bigotry, hindered by systematic and structural racism, and even subject to unconscious, invisible, and latent racism. As if to confirm that universities remain petri dishes of racism, virtually every university has set up fiefdoms of administrative offices of inclusion, diversity, and equity dedicated solely to ferreting out any incidence of racism, bigotry, or bias and helping minority students to see themselves as perpetual victims of both real and imagined racism.

Leading the way in this relentless pursuit for this ever-present racism, Princeton’s Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity leads a bloated and costly fiefdom of oppression which includes a Senior Associate Director for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, an Assistant Director for Equity Compliance, an Equity and Diversity Specialist, a Director for Institutional Equity and EEO, an Equity and Diversity Specialist, not to mention three University Investigators mandated, one would assume, to ferret out bigotry and oppression.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/10/cotton-to-higher-ed-loosen-up-or-lose-your-money/

This is how bad higher education has gotten: Republican Senators who worry about federal overreach and don’t wish to harm large institutions in their own states have decided that colleges and universities have fully abandoned their Ivory Tower mission and can only be repaired from the outside. The remedy is called the “Campus Free Speech Restoration Act,” which was introduced by Tom Cotton. Stanley Kurtz explains the salient elements of the Act here. 

The proposal is simple. “Under CAFSRA,” Kurtz writes, “public colleges and universities that promulgate restrictive speech codes, so-called free-speech zones, and other unconstitutional speech policies will lose their eligibility to receive federal student loans and grants through the Higher Education Act.” Private universities will face lesser scrutiny, required only to disclose their rules for free speech and adhere to them or else face lawsuits.

That’s it: Protect free speech or the federal faucet is shut off. College leaders will have a decision to make. They can maintain illiberal practices such as the sequestered free speech zones (which cabin free speech to postage-stamp areas of campus and have even led the ACLU to protest them) and thereby see federal dollars disappear, or they can dismantle those practices and keep the money coming. They can revise their speech codes to fit the First Amendment and lose no funding, or they can maintain those codes and suffer at the bottom line.

The law has several provisions that Kurtz enumerates regarding complaint procedures and review processes, the role of the U.S. Department of Education, etc. that might slow down its passage. A few Republican legislators may claim discomfort with federal intrusion into state and private entities, although massive federal subsidies to higher education happen all the time and, currently, support these unconstitutional practices. Democrats likely will oppose it for the obvious reason that higher education has become a liberal stronghold and pipeline. The censorious campus has worked very well for the Left. Democrats won’t want to change it.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/07/kick-the-1619-project-out-of-schools/

America needs to get the “1619 Project” curriculum out of its schools. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has introduced a new bill that would go a long way toward that goal—the Saving American History Act of 2020 (SAHA 2020).

The New York Times introduced The “1619 Project” last August. The “1619 Project” mainstreamed the anti-American ideology of a new generation of woke activists, who have graduated from college radicalism to careers in progressive institutions such as the Times. The “1619 Project” seeks to rewrite American history with the claim that it is based on slavery and oppression, rather than on liberty and democracy, in order to delegitimize the American republic. 

The “1619 Project” claims to be “revisionist” history—but many of the best scholars of American history swiftly demonstrated that it was nothing more than a shabby, fact-free polemic. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning mastermind of the “1619 Project,” recently admitted that the effort never had a historical basis—and never even intended to be history. 

“I’ve always said that the ‘1619 Project’ is not a history,” Hannah-Jones said in a series of tweets. “It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.”

Nevertheless, the “1619 Project” has had a profound impact on America’s schools. 

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/woke-colleges-are-assembly-lines-conformity

Don’t be fooled by universities’ incessant chatter about “diversity.” Most are poster children for ideological conformity and proud of it. The faculty, students, and administrators know it. Indeed, many welcome it since their views are so obviously right and other views so obviously wrong. They believe discordant views are so objectionable that no one should express them publicly.

What views are now considered beyond the pale? They almost always involve ordinary political differences. We are not talking here about direct physical threats. Those are already illegal, and universities rightly deal with them. They don’t have to face neo-Nazi marches. Nor is anyone advocating such noxious ideas as genocide, slavery, or child molestation. Speech about those subjects might be legal, but virtually nobody is making the case for them. That is not what the fight for freedom of speech on campus is about. It is about the freedom to voice—or even hear—unpopular views on topics such as merit-based admissions, affirmative action, transgender competition in women’s sports, abortion, and support for Israel.

These are perfectly legitimate topics, and students ought to be free to hear different ideas about them. They are hotly contested topics in America’s body politic. That’s how democracies work. Not so on college campuses, where the “wrong views” are not just minority opinions. They are verboten, and so are the people who dare express them. Challenging this repressive conformity invites condemnation, severs friendships, and threatens careers. It is hardly surprising that few rise to challenge it.

Worse yet, university leaders seldom do. They have a fundamental responsibility to defend open discourse, and they have largely abdicated it. Shame on them. Instead of defending the free expression of unpopular views, they condemn them and flaunt their own virtue. That’s what Princeton’s president Christopher Eisgruber did when he attacked classics professor Joshua Katz, saying Katz had not exercised free speech “responsibly” when he allegedly gave a “false description” of a Black student group. Katz’s own department condemned him, too, though the university finally decided the professor would not be formally punished. They will save the ducking chair for another day.