RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/defunding_school_police.

Craziness now exits on an industrial scale but among all foolish ideas, none is stupider than trying to defund police departments, particularly where poor people, disproportionately African Americans, depend on policing. Yet, just when it seems that this insanity cannot get worse, it does, and the latest madness concerns extending defunding demands to include school police. The Klan’s Imperial Wizard must be thrilled by a policy that will further undermine the education of African Americans. Do anti-cop crusaders honestly embrace the Rousseauian fantasy that children naturally soak up knowledge if only left on their own? 

This defunding effort is not as preposterous as it might initially appear. Milwaukee schools have already terminated their relationships with the city’s police department while Portland. OR schools removed armed police officers from schools. Denver, Co has likewise banned police from its schools, a policy also enacted by Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN.  The LA school district cut $25 million in policing funds from its budget while in Berkeley the cut was 50%.  Declining municipal budgets may encourage yet more reductions especially if justified by “racial justice.”  

To understand this crusade, consider an article in Colorlines, a radical black magazine. “Black and Brown Students Are Organizing to Remove Police From Their Schools” outlines the campaign and notes this to be an ongoing quest. To quote:  

Law enforcement has had a brief yet abusive relationship with American public schools, spurring the terrorization of Black and Brown students and increased interaction with law enforcement at a young age. The rationale behind police in schools has always been for the “safety” of children. Yet, since police have shown up, the school to prison pipeline has strengthened, putting young children into the legal system and criminalizing their oftentimes normal behavior. (Italics added)

In resistance, youth and student organizers have taken to school board meetings and the streets to fight for the removal of police from schools in line with the national call to defund the police,,,

In other words, no rational reason exists for this policing since, allegedly, African Americans behave themselves, so policing just unfairly criminalizes innocent people of color, an argument identical to what Black Lives Matter activists insist — inherently racist cops routinely murder blameless blacks.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/margate-mosque-youth-bigotry-and-terror-joe-kaufman/

Izhar Khan is the imam of Masjid Jamaat Al’Mu-mineen (MJAM), the South Florida mosque associated with the ever-expanding Islamic Center of Margate. Khan, in the recent past, was charged by the FBI with helping to finance the Taliban, and MJAM currently promotes violence and bigotry against Jews, Christians, homosexuals, women and others. So how is it that parents would allow their children to be taught classes by Imam Khan and to use the MJAM facilities, as they have, unless these parents’ attitudes toward terror and bigotry are the same?

On June 22nd, the South Florida Muslim Federation (SoFlo Muslims), an umbrella group for South Florida’s many radical Muslim organizations, advertised on its Facebook page Wednesday ‘Seerah’ classes being taught by Imam Khan and MJAM – seerah, meaning biography or traditions of Prophet Muhammad. The classes were/are being taught to members of the South Florida Muslim Young Professionals (SoFloMoPros), a partner group to the Muslim Federation that claims to include “over 500 Muslim young professionals and graduate students.”

Having so many young and impressionable people being exposed to the teachings/indoctrination of Khan and MJAM is certainly a concern, but what is of much more concern is the fact that small children are also taking classes from Khan and the mosque.

On the homepage of MJAM’s website, one finds a photo depicting Khan handing out certificates to young boys donning MJAM t-shirts, as their smiling parents and siblings look on. According to the site, classes (‘Daily Youth Madrassahs’) for children led by Khan take place five days a week. The mosque claims to provide them with a “quality Islamic Education.” Given Khan’s terror-related history and MJAM’s present propagation of hate, one has to wonder what this quality education entails.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/soft-bigotry-low-expectations-rutgers-richard-l-cravatts/

A stunning letter written by Rebecca L. Walkowitz, the chair of Rutgers’ English Department, “Department actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter,” affirms how deeply academia is now in the thrall of racism hysteria, and particularly after the death of George Floyd under the knee of a brutal police officer in Minneapolis. The letter is steeped in the language of social justice, racial equity, white supremacy, and racial oppression, leading one to wonder why an English department—whose function is, nominally, the study of literature and the teaching of techniques of writing and composition—would craft its entire mission and curriculum around an slavish affection with an anti-racist, Black Lives Matter-inspired ideology.

When did it become the role or purpose of an English department—and especially in a public university—to make as a central feature of its teaching social issues which are only tangentially related to the subject matter? This is not a social justice department, or black studies department, or an institute or program that focuses on race, social issues, and activism. So the letter’s stated intention that the English Department will “stand with and respond to the Black Lives Matter movement . . . create and promote an anti-racist environment . . . and . . . contribute to the eradication of the violence and systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color members of our community,” seems wildly inconsistent with what is, and should be, the role of an English department.

Not content with making a course in African-American literature a requirement in the English curriculum, every aspect of the pedagogy and instruction is suffused with layers of obsessive victimology and racism, including sponsorship of workshops that seek to “cultivate critical conversations for Writing Program instructors around the disproportionate impacts of covid-19; state power; racism; violence; white supremacy; protest and resistance; and justice.” 

What is the theory here? That familiarity with and concern for racial justice is the single topic on which students should focus their writing. That knowledge of these highly-charged, political issues is necessary for clear and cogent writing? What if students who enroll in courses taught by these indoctrinated professors have alternate views about race, or Black Lives Matter, or the existence of white supremacy, or the legitimacy of protests, violent or otherwise? Are they allowed to express those views? Can they vocalize and write about a different view of race? Clearly not.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-survived-cancellation-at-princeton-11595787211?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Now is the time to debate with renewed vigor existential questions of what counts as justice and how to fashion an equitable society. But the stifling of dissent is impeding the search for answers and driving people who disagree still further apart. Because students like to push boundaries and professors like to argue, colleges and universities are a crucible.

Take the university where I teach, Princeton. The campus—or at least the online campus, in the age of the coronavirus—has been in uproar since early July over a letter of demands to the administration signed by hundreds of my faculty colleagues, and especially over my response to that letter. I was immediately denounced on social media and condemned publicly by my department and the university president. At the same time, the university spokesman announced ominously that the administration would be “looking into the matter further.” On July 14, the Journal’s editorial board commented: “Princeton is demonstrating how a lack of leadership enables the cancel culture.”

It is therefore gratifying to report that Princeton’s leadership has done the right thing. I learned recently that I am not under investigation. The story of how I survived cancellation should be of interest to others, since I have no doubt that many more people, from once-obscure professors to public figures, will be vilified and in some cases materially punished for thought crimes.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/noah-rothman/the-racism-of-anti-racist-education/

Amid an aggressive campaign by teachers unions to prove that the work public-school teachers do is so essential that they cannot be allowed to do it, it would seem an inopportune time for the New York Times to mount an attack on those schools. But that is what it plans to do—at least, implicitly, and only in the most socially acceptable of ways: by attacking the white parents of white students, who make up a plurality of public-school enrollees.

“[W]hen we look at how our schools are failing, we usually focus on who they’re failing: Black and brown kids,” the Times noted in announcing a new podcast series contemptuously entitled “Nice White Parents.” Indeed, we usually ask that question because those are the demographics public schools are failing—a condition that has gotten worse in the age of distance learning (an objective assessment rendered by no less a source than the New York Times itself). “If you want to understand what’s wrong with our public education system,” the podcast’s pitch continues, “you have to look at what is arguably the most powerful force in our schools: White parents.”

In truth, they’ve got a point, though not the one they’re intent on making. A national effort to purge from the American political landscape even the subtlest remnants of racist thought long ago captured the primarily white educational establishment. “Anti-racism” may be relatively new to the American political vocabulary, but it’s been an objective America’s educators have pursued for some time. Unfortunately, the forms this well-meaning mission has taken look to a skeptical observer like marginally more benign forms of racism.

For example, English grammar is now racist. Or, translated into the inscrutable language of the academy, the expectation that minority students should be as competent as their white counterparts in the syntax and morphology of the written word is an outgrowth of internalized racial constructs.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/sacrificing-children-progressive-politics-bruce-thornton/

California governor Gavin Newsom along with other states has ordered schools to be closed to in-person instruction this fall. Against the wishes of the majority of parents, millions of students will continue to be cooped up at home, trying to learn from “virtual” curricula with hit-and-miss instruction and support. An educational system mediocre in the best of times has now descended into a dystopian world redolent of the old Soviet Union: Teachers pretend to teach, while students pretend to learn.

Education, our most important social institution already long corrupted by ideological fads and deteriorating standards, is heading for complete collapse in order to serve the political and pecuniary interests of the progressive technocracy: Removing Donald Trump and the Republicans from power so that the Democrats can achieve their long-term goal of “fundamentally transforming” the United States. Children are just collateral damage.

Of course, these decisions to sequester the cohort least vulnerable to the virus are being sold as the result of “science” and a concern for “safety.” But across the world evidence from real science shows that kids in school pose little danger to themselves or others. Hence the American Academy of Pediatricians “strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.” As this spring’s experience in educational sequestration has shown, the AAP continues,

Lengthy time away from school and associated interruption of supportive services often results in social isolation, making it difficult for schools to identify and address important learning deficits as well as child and adolescent physical or sexual abuse, substance use, depression, and suicidal ideation. This, in turn, places children and adolescents at considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality. Beyond the educational impact and social impact of school closures, there has been substantial impact on food security and physical activity for children and families.