RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/academia_bows_to_islamic_terror.html

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but not everyone shares in the cost.

Even fewer comprehend that the threat to our democracy is more likely to come from the internal erosion of our civic institutions than from external forces.

The most corrupting influence on our democracy is rooted in political correctness in our education system. Whereas there once was an emphasis on civic education as a means to imbue the citizenry with the values of the Constitution, that emphasis has long been diminished.

From elementary school through college, basic requirements in American history and civics have been replaced by political trendiness.

Consequently, it is not surprising that our educational system has produced generation after generation of college administrators who suffer from an embarrassing ignorance of the fundamental political values of the republic.

These present-day Gletkins (the character who embodied the ideology of Stalinism in Arthur Koestler’s classic, Darkness at Noon) have been suckled on a steady diet of political correctness, and so it follows that they are quick to trample basic liberty when it gets in the way of political expediency.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/499385-trump-rips-columbia-as-disgraceful-institution-after-study-showed

President Trump ripped Columbia University as a “disgraceful institution” in a new interview released Sunday after it released a study last week concluding thousands of lives could have been spared in the U.S. if shutdowns weren’t delayed.

Sharyl Attkisson asked the president about the study, which determined almost 36,000 deaths from COVID-19 through early May could have been avoided if social distancing and lockdowns had started earlier. 

The president called the fact that the university would issue the study “a disgrace” on the show “Full Measure.”

“Columbia is a liberal, disgraceful institution to write that because all the people that they cater to were months after me,” Trump said.

“And I saw that report,” he added. “It’s a disgrace that Columbia University would do it, playing right to their little group of people that tell them what to do.”

Trump cited his January travel ban on foreign nationals from China as evidence of his administration’s early actions, adding that he took “tremendous heat” for the decision at the time. 

Columbia University did not immediately return a request for comment.

The study focused on transmission in metropolitan areas and concluded that social distancing efforts reduced the rates of COVID-19 contraction. The research was conducted with counterfactual experiments, which researchers acknowledged are based on hypothetical assumptions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-college-testing-mistake-11590189601?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Thursday’s decision by the University of California regents to eliminate the SAT and ACT in admissions is a historic blow to excellence in higher education. Applicants to the largest university system in the U.S. will now be judged entirely on how well they can flatter admissions bureaucracies with coached personal statements, as well as high school grade-point averages whose meanings are obscured by grade inflation.

The UC started using the SAT in the 1960s to find talented students from modest backgrounds. As an exhaustive faculty senate report—ignored by university leadership—put it this year, “This original intent is clearly being realized at UC.” Yet diversity bean-counting has displaced the philosophy of merit and excellence that made the UC the envy of the world in the last century. The claim that math and reading tests discriminate against minorities (except Asians) easily won the day, never mind the evidence.

California’s political class is desperate to create a different racial makeup at the UC, and it sees testing as an obstacle. The SAT shines a light on failures and inequalities in California’s public K-12 school system. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend low-quality schools which because of unions are nearly impossible to reform. For California’s political class the convenient solution is to ban tests—concealing the achievement gap while congratulating themselves on a commitment to equity and inclusion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-colleges-have-accepted-6-billion-in-undisclosed-donations-from-foreign-governments-doe-probe-finds/

The Department of Education has discovered at least $6 billion in unreported donations to American universities from adversarial foreign nations, Townhall reported on Friday.

The DoE revealed its updates in a May 19 letter to Congress and a subsequent briefing to several ranking House Republicans who are conducting an investigation into the foreign funding of U.S. educational institutions.

The investigation was spurred by increasing reports of Chinese funding at U.S. educational institutions, including the prevalence of Confucius institutes on U.S. campuses. Confucius institutes are Chinese-government funded centers which ostensibly promote Chinese language and culture, but which U.S. agencies have warned spread propaganda for China’s government.

“Some [Institutions of Higher Education] leaders are starting to acknowledge the threat of foreign academic espionage and have been working with federal law enforcement to address gaps in reporting and transparency,” the letter from the DoE’s Office of the General Counsel reads. “However, the evidence suggests massive investments of foreign money have bred dependency and distorted the decision-making, mission, and values of too many institutions.”

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/21/multiple-universities-refuse-to-cooperate-with-federal-investigations-into-ties-to-china/

Several universities around the nation are currently under investigation by the Department of Education over their alleged financial ties to the Chinese government. A report published this week suggests that many universities are refusing to comply with a standard request to produce internal documents.

According to a report by the College Fix, several universities and colleges that are under investigation by the Department of Education are refusing to release internal documents that may contain evidence of undisclosed financial grants from the Chinese government.
The report claims that lawyers for several universities refused to comply with a request to produce documents, arguing that they were entitled to privacy under “Freedom of Information Act exemptions and legal privileges.” A letter from the Department of Education did not name the universities and colleges that have refused to comply with the request for documents.

Department of Education General Counsel Reed Rubinstein believes that many American universities and colleges have been compromised by foreign governments, China being one of the primary governments in question.  “However, the evidence suggests massive investments of foreign money have bred dependency and distorted the decision making, mission, and values of too many institutions,” Rubinstein said.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/15/the-coming-upheaval-in-education/

There is no way to sugarcoat it. The economic impact of COVID-19 will take its toll on education funding. The National Education Association is in full freak-out mode, “calling for an additional $175 billion to stabilize education funding—the $30.7 billion authorized thus far is not nearly enough.” The California Teachers Association echoes the $175 billion figure and adds that it should be part of a $1 trillion pay-out in the next CARES Act.

Referring to the 2008 recession when class sizes increased and teachers were laid off, United Teachers of Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl insists, “We cannot go back to that.”

We are currently the second-highest spending nation in the world, pouring more than $700 billion a year into education. Where do the unions think the additional billions of dollars are supposed to come from? Capital gains, withholding, corporate, and sales tax revenues are going to take a huge hit, and you can only print so much money before it becomes worthless. 

As such, education is going to have to make do with less. The question then becomes, how best to manage the cuts?

https://pjmedia.com/columns/mark-ellis/2020/05/15/the-lost-schoolchildren-of-covid-3-n394488

They dart out from places where you least expect to see them. Where you’d only expect to see them over the summer months. By the time the summer vacation period begins next month, they will have already had an equivalent amount of time off from school. Some are saying that school may not even start up in the fall.

If Portland schools open in September, an opening not yet scheduled, the children will have been out of school for six months, give or take. If school doesn’t resume in September, the kids will have fallen into a deep chasm of unschooling.

They are the lost schoolchildren of COVID. Yesterday, I saw one up in a tree.

While their parents responsibly socially-distance at home, or go to work in essential jobs, these children are living a life they have never experienced, a spring season without school.

Noon on a Tuesday, you hear them on the streets, in the yards. It’s homeschool recess, while their mothers prepare lunch. At seven o’clock each evening, when the neighborhood comes out of shutdown to bang drums and shake tambourines in tribute to first responders (and remind each other that “life” goes on), the kids dutifully appear, gawk at the spectacle, then disappear back into the hedges like Children of the Corn.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-therapeutic-campus

Before the coronavirus pandemic, before shelter-in-place orders, there was the campus safe space. Students claimed that they needed protection from perceived threats to their emotional well-being. College administrators were only too happy to comply, building up a vast edifice of services to respond to students’ alleged emotional trauma. Last year, Yale University created a safe space that will set the industry standard for years to come. Call it the college woke spa, though its official title is the Good Life Center. Featuring a sandbox, essential oils, massage, and mental-health workshops, the center unites the most powerful forces in higher education today: the feminization of the university, therapeutic culture, identity politics, and the vast student-services bureaucracy. While other colleges may not yet have created as richly endowed a therapeutic space as the Good Life Center, they’re all being transformed by the currents that gave it birth, currents visible even in the reaction to the coronavirus outbreak.

“I don’t know anyone [at Yale] who hasn’t had therapy. It’s a big culture on campus,” says a rosy-cheeked undergraduate in a pink sweatshirt. She is nestled in a couch in the subsidized coffee shop adjacent to Yale’s Good Life Center, where students can sip sustainably sourced espresso and $3 tea lattes. “Ninety percent of the people I know have at least tried.” For every 20 of her friends, this sophomore estimates, four have bipolar disorder—as does she, she says.

Another young woman scanning her computer at a sunlit table in the café says that all her friends “struggle with mental health here. We talk a lot about therapy approaches to improve our mental health versus how much is out of your control, like hormonal imbalances.” Yale’s dorm counselors readily refer freshmen to treatment, she says, because most have been in treatment themselves. Indeed, they are selected because they have had an “adversity experience” at Yale, she asserts.