RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/09/penn-state-retracts-statement-saying-conservative-voices-are-important/

Penn State University recently made a surprising statement about intellectual diversity, only to retract it after outrage from left-wing students.

“Dear conservative students. Your viewpoints are important,” the announcement read, referencing the isolation and self-censorship many conservative students experience on left-wing campuses. According to the schools Director of Strategic Communications, it was part of a statement aimed at creating a supporting and inclusive environment for students.

A survey conducted at the University of North Carolina found that over two-thirds of conservative students self-censor themselves in the classroom.

The message of inclusivity was swiftly met with fire by left-wing students who, according to the school newspaper, “found the Tweet harmful towards students of color and ignorant of the systemic issues that oppress people of color in the United States today.” A number of the offended students statements were then published in the Collegian, where the message was called “disgusting” and a “humiliation for communities of color.”

https://quillette.com/2020/07/08/a-declaration-of-independence-by-a-princeton-professor/

In Congress, on July 4th, 1776, came the “unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” Signed by 56 men, many of whom were considered national heroes just a few minutes ago, it opens with a long and elegant sentence whose first words every American child knows, or used to: “When in the Course of human events…” In Princeton, New Jersey, on July 4th, 2020, just two hours after my family and I sat around the festive table and read the Declaration aloud in celebration, a group of signatories now in the hundreds published a “Faculty Letter” to the president and other senior administrators at Princeton University.

This letter begins with the following blunt sentence: “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America.” One important difference between the two documents might wrongly be dismissed as merely cosmetic. In 1776 there were “united States” but there was not yet the “United States”; in these past two months, by contrast, at a time when we are increasingly un-united, “black” has become “Black” while “white” remains “white.”

I am friends with many people who signed the Princeton letter, which requests and in some places demands a dizzying array of changes, and I support their right to speak as they see fit. But I am embarrassed for them. To judge from conversations with friends and all too much online scouting, there are two camps: those cheering them on and those who wouldn’t dream of being associated with such a document. No one is in the middle. If you haven’t yet read it, do so now. Be warned: it is long.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/09/penn-state-retracts-statement-saying-conservative-voices-are-important/

Penn State University recently made a surprising statement about intellectual diversity, only to retract it after outrage from left-wing students.

“Dear conservative students. Your viewpoints are important,” the announcement read, referencing the isolation and self-censorship many conservative students experience on left-wing campuses. According to the schools Director of Strategic Communications, it was part of a statement aimed at creating a supporting and inclusive environment for students.

A survey conducted at the University of North Carolina found that over two-thirds of conservative students self-censor themselves in the classroom.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/campus-culture-seizes-the-streets-11593973851?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

How did radical ideas like abolishing or defunding the police move from the fringes to official policy seemingly overnight in cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York? And after George Floyd’s killing by police touched off protests, why did so many prominent journalists and intellectuals rationalize looting and violence? For an answer, look to the nation’s politicized college campuses.

A well-known professional standard for college professors warns against “taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own.” That statement, from the American Association of University Professors, dates from 1915 but is still in force.

Most campuses have similar rules of their own. Yet across the country, these categorical prohibitions are now ignored. Academia has become politicized from top to bottom.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/_the_devils_pitchfork_seeking_the_origin_of_our_present_troubles.html

The progressivist campaign to destroy America is three-pronged, the tines of the devil’s pitchfork, namely: de-individuation, de-historicizing, and what I’m tempted to call pre-eminent domain (the power of the state to take more than one’s physical property). In other words, it is a war against three intimately related phenomena: self-governing personhood, historical memory, and the possession of property, whether intellectual or private property as understood by John Locke.1 Thus our ideas are no longer our own but state-injected bromides, history has been co-opted in the service of a political fantasy, and ownership is the prerogative of the state.

It is clear that the entire sensibility of the age, and certainly of the coming era, has changed dramatically, not only as the result of the onslaught of lethal political and cultural viruses like democratic socialism, “social justice,” postmodern relativism and radical feminism, but of the “Information Revolution” and its carrier, the Internet, in particular the social media platforms run by a cabal of corporate oligarchs. The ideological trifecta appears to be irresistible:

The contours of the reflective and stable self, as mediated in the family and local communities, are disintegrating by the day. As I’ve written previously, the individual, in the classic sense of a coherent center of cognitive awareness and moral responsibility, actuated by the conviction of individual responsibility for self, family, and nation, has become the relic of a vanishing tradition. The inclination is to identify with presumably benevolent but actually savage abstractions. In today’s ‘enlightened’ world, the pastoral fantasy — aka socialism — a dead idea embalmed with the illusion of vitality, has once again assumed massive and destructive proportions. The thinking, self-aware, common-sense individual is its prey, persuaded or coerced to surrender his autonomy to the false comfort of an all-embracing collectivism that spares him the anxiety of choice and risk.
Genuine scholarship is almost extinct and historical memory seems to malinger in a condition of permanent lockdown. There are many ways to abolish history: toppling and defacing cultural monuments (as we see happening today); re-writing the historical record (Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States2 or the New York Times’ 1619 Project, for example); and replacing the faculty of intellectual curiosity regarding origins — the historical imagination — with rote-learned slogans and dogmatic teachings, the program of modern education from kindergarten to graduate school. What we are observing is a chronosectomy in progress.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence/

The media blitz during these last several weeks revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and defaced a monument to African-American veterans of the Civil War, many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or college.

Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name “Gettysburg”? Could they even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?

Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident, loud, and self-righteous. But the media blitz during these last several weeks of protests, riots, and looting also revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

Many of the young people on the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s. But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their grandparents — survivors of the Great Depression and World War II.

How can so many so sheltered and prolonged adolescents claim to be all-knowing?

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2020/06/30/universities-commit-to-racism-n587609

One of the famed universities in the world, Cambridge University, knows which side it is on. When one of its lecturers tweeted, “White lives don’t matter,” and then “Abolish whiteness,” the university defended her, and then promoted her to the rank of professor. When another instructor tweeted “White lives matter,” his contract was terminated. The anti-white lecturer was a female of color, while the instructor who thinks white lives matter was a white male. White males, as woke “social justice” activists tell us, are wrong, they are oppressors, and inherently toxic racists. Females, especially females of color, are deemed to be victims of white male oppression, and are always right. 

Is there a word for thinking about people of different races differently? Ratism, raverism, ragusism? What about for treating people of different races differently? Discresionism, depressionism, deterentism? Whatever you want to call them, Cambridge University has them down pat, and so does every other university in North America and Western Europe. Racism has become official policy in every university, policed by the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” commissars who command thought and re-educate or exile dissidents, and by the woke politicians who give them their marching orders. And discrimination in favor of preferred categories of people is the new standard of “justice.”

Professors and administrators who speak out against woke orthodoxy are attacked and hounded out of their jobs by “social justice” warriors. The Michigan State University Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation was summarily fired for daring to question the benefits of diversity and the costs of canceling merit in science. Anyone today daring to recommend “colorblind” admissions and hiring, or saying “all lives matter,” is immediately labeled a RACIST! and fired. Only “correct” speech is acceptable to woke academics and cowardly administrators. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-reverses-ban-on-single-sex-student-organizations-following-bostock-ruling/

Harvard has announced it will lift a blacklist on unrecognized single-sex student organizations, including fraternities and sororities, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County.

That ruling decided that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay or transgender employees from discrimination due to their sexual orientation. Harvard in 2016 instituted a blacklist of some single-sex student organizations by denying scholarships and other opportunities to members of those organizations.

The blacklist “was adopted for the purpose of counteracting overt discrimination on the basis of sex—specifically, the exclusion of Harvard College students from social organizations because of their gender,” Bacow wrote in a statement on Monday. However, fraternities and sororities subsequently brought a lawsuit against the university in the U.S. District Court in Boston.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/06/315-college-deans-tell-applicants-academics-daniel-greenfield/

If you thought that the modern campus was a warren of safe spaces, radical politics, and neutered learning, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Here’s a statement by 315 college deans hot and fresh off the Harvard site about their priorities for incoming students.

This statement was developed in collaboration with admissions leaders and has been endorsed by leaders at more than 315 institutions across the United States. It describes what college admissions offices value and expect—and don’t expect—from students during the pandemic.

I’ll just give you the bullet points to show off the new normal.