RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/12/former-professor-at-emory-university-admits-to-covering-up-chinese-donations/

A former professor at Emory University pled guilty on Monday to filing false tax returns after he failed to report over $500,000 in donations from the Chinese government, as reported by the Daily Caller.

Professor Xiao-Jiang Li received at least half a million dollars from the Chinese government over a six-year period from 2012 to 2018, which he allegedly received as income while working at two Chinese universities, according to the Department of Justice. He was paid as a result of the Chinese government’s “Thousand Talents Program,” a recruitment program that preys on some Americans and often violates American financial law.

After pleading guilty to the felony charges, Li was sentenced by a U.S. District Judge to a year of probation and a fine to the IRS of just over $35,000.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jeff-reynolds/2020/05/11/beijings-outposts-chinese-propaganda-centers-alive-and-well-at-american-universities-n389834

As the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic continues to cause misery across the globe, it’s important to know how China spreads its propaganda. American universities have continued to ignore warnings by U.S. intelligence officials about Confucius Institutes. These centers, funded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), continue to operate on dozens of campuses across the United States, despite Congressional actions to block domestic funding to them. Intelligence officials say they are little more than propaganda centers operating to produce positive news about the CCP.

Campus Reform published a report and interactive map showing where the Confucius Institutes still operate:

CIA reports obtained by The Washington Free Beacon further revealed, “The [Chinese Communist Party] provides ‘strings-attached’ funding to academic institutions and think tanks to deter research that casts it in a negative light. It has used this tactic to reward pro-China viewpoints and coerce Western academic publications and conferences to self-censor. The CCP often denies visas to academics who criticize the regime, encouraging many China scholars to preemptively self-censor so they can maintain access to the country on which their research depends.”

While legislation signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018 resulted in about a dozen U.S. colleges shuttering Confucius Institutes on campus, those closures were largely the result of their loss of funding, rather than concerns for the country’s national security.

And now, nearly two years after that legislation became law, more than 75 Confucius Institutes are still in operation in the U.S., most of them on college campuses. From Maine to Florida to Kansas to California, these centers claim to educate American students about Chinese language and culture, and administrators who run the campuses on which they operate appear to believe the same country that claims to have fewer coronavirus deaths than the U.S, despite its population being more than three times the size of the U.S. population.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/freedom-center-shillman-fellow-sues-censorship-joseph-klein/

Dr. Jason Hill, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, filed a lawsuit on April 20, 2020 against DePaul University for its outrageous attempt to silence him with defamatory accusations, demonization and intimidation. The lawsuit, filed in the Circuit Court in Cook County, Illinois, arises from a Faculty Council resolution passed last year condemning Professor Hill for his writing of a strong pro-Israel op-ed published in The Federalist. Dr. Hill’s op-ed article is entitled “The Moral Case For Israel Annexing The West Bank—And Beyond.” The lawsuit also names interim provost Salma Ghanem and Scott Paeth, a professor of religious studies who led the campaign for the passage of the resolution when he was serving as the president of the DePaul Faculty Council.

Dr. Hill, a tenured professor, was not fired – this time. But his persecutors denied him due process, trashed his reputation, harassed him, and attempted to chill his future expression of opinion on topics considered too controversial for the snowflakes on the DePaul University campus. Dr. Hill’s complaint seeks an award of damages to vindicate his contractual and due process rights, clear his name, and compensate him for the pain, humiliation, and mental distress that the defendants inflicted upon him with their censure resolution and other actions.

Dr. Hill’s complaint alleges that the defendants “have subjected Dr. Hill to unlawful racial discrimination in that as an African-American they expect him to adhere to the opinion that African-Americans whose ancestors were slaves must view the Palestinians as an enslaved race and the Israeli government as a slave regime.” He was singled out, the complaint says, as “the only member of DePaul’s faculty ever to have been subject of a Faculty Council resolution for publicly expressing opinions of any sort, much less regarding actions of the Israeli government concerning Palestinian residents of the territories in the West Bank and Gaza.” According to the complaint, Dr. Hill suffered a loss in the number  of classes he was assigned to teach and in the number of students enrolled as “the intended result of the unfair campaign of harassment against him.” He also received “anonymous threats of physical violence that DePaul has refused to punish or meaningfully investigate.”

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

Convincing Americans that there is no such thing as truth defeats the very foundation of the American idea.

Many Americans today go far beyond simply rejecting the ideas of the American founders, the claims of the Declaration, and the Constitution.  They reject the very idea of truth.  These Americans were taught in American universities that there is no such thing as truth, that truth is an outmoded concept, that we now live in a post-truth reality.  The belief that the concept of truth is outmoded is no longer confined to academia.  It has invaded the world outside academia and won a great victory there; the Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as the Word of the Year for 2016.

And a great victory it is.  Convincing Americans that there is no such thing as truth defeats the very foundation of the American idea.  The Founders, famously, founded America on certain truths, truths they declared to the world were not only true, but self-evidently true: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”  Self-evident truth occupies the first place and also the highest position among the declarations of the Declaration of Independence.  “Created equal” and “unalienable rights” and all the rest follow along after that bold opening claim.

The Founders certainly believed they built on the rock of self-evident truth.  But if there is no such thing as truth, then there can be no such thing as a self-evident truth, and everything the Founders declared and established can simply be dismissed.  There is no need to try to understand the thinking of the Founders — not even by professors of constitutional law.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/08/disappearing-liberals/

Anyone who writes about higher education and criticizes the pernicious effects of the Left is likely to receive an anguished letter. Usually, the writer proclaims himself to be a proud member of the Left who agrees with the criticisms of the academy, but he believes that one shouldn’t use words like Left or progressives to describe the enemies of intellectual freedom. Use those off-putting, polemical words and you’ll drive away useful allies from the fight to restore higher education.

I think it is appropriate to use the Left or progressives­ to criticize the enemies of higher education. But these letters require a thoughtful response. Why are those words appropriate?

My answer is a combination of No True Scotsman, Self-Definition, and Times Have Changed.

Let’s start with Times Have Changed.

The generation of academics on the Left that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s largely consisted of old-school liberals, who prized Western civilization and intellectual pluralism, and a small, illiberal minority—the illiberal Left—who hated both.

That generation witnessed the academy’s radicalizing transformation from the 1960s to the 1990s, to become ever more the creature of the illiberal Left. Yet when this generation retired, the illiberal Left was still in the process of achieving dominance within the academy. As late as the year 2000, the illiberal Left had not fully supplanted the old school liberals in higher education.

The changes within the academy were drastic enough from 1960 to 2000, but the changes in the 20 years since have been even more revolutionary.

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

Rutgers University founded in 1766 is one of only nine colonial colleges established before the American Revolution.  The alumni boast many who were predominant in the revolutionary founding. Inclusion and access began in 1867 when Kusakabe Taro was the first Japanese student to enroll in a U.S. college.  In 1892 James Dickson Carr was the first African-American to graduate from Rutgers and in 1918 the New Jersey College for Women was founded on the campus.

Currently, at the Rutgers Department of Education Graduate Studies a move is afoot to “advance narratives of achievement and success in higher education among Latinx/a/o students.  So according to Dr. Nichole Garcia, “a Mexican and Puerto Rican woman of color”

we need to understand the differences in the distinct groups that make up the Latinx/a/o community.  Once we do, we will be better positioned to meet the diverse needs of these different groups by creating programming to ensure the success of all students and allocating funds [emphasis mine].

Garcia wants to investigate “why Latinx/a/o are the largest ethnic population, but experience some of the lowest college completion rates.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/dumb_and_dumber_in_michigan_education.html

The state’s social justice warriors don’t allow coronavirus crisis to go to waste.

On April 1st Gretchen Whitmer wiped out the rest of the K-12 school year.  Teachers remained on the payroll, of course, and each of Michigan’s 587 school districts was tasked with implementing an on-line program.  In East Lansing the plan meant an end to letter grades; instead students will receive a “CR” (for credit) or an “I” for incomplete.

Ironically, the district’s social justice warrior school board president has sparked a near revolt by administrators and fellow board members for having the audacity to suggest that “credit” or “incomplete” isn’t fair.  Erin Graham presented evidence that East Lansing schools would be an outlier by nixing grades.

About two hours into the unusually tense meeting, (board member Terah) Chambers questioned the whole discussion, suggesting that we are all facing much more pressing issues with record levels of unemployment and food insecurity. She suggested the conversation was focusing on the privileged.

But Graham argued that a lack of a letter grade could affect more than college-bound students, affecting students who may want to join the military or take on entry-level positions in health care. In these cases, grades could determine eligibility, pay grade, and benefits, and disadvantages could compound over time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/american-universities-must-stop-covering-for-the-chinese-community-party/

Too often, links to the Communist ideology supporting the Chinese regime’s pernicious actions are omitted in higher education.

To the degree that the misdirection and inaction of China’s Communist government have been discussed in this pandemic, it is worth asking what the COVID-19 crisis has to do with Communism and its underlying ideology of Marxism-Leninism.

According to the dominant narrative in much of U.S. higher education today, absolutely nothing. A well-documented left-wing bias in colleges and universities, particularly in those considered elite, produces students who are poorly prepared to recognize such behavior. Compounding the problem, history plays a smaller role in secondary education than it once did, and civics has all but disappeared.

Today in academia, one is far more likely to hear about the depredations of capitalism than the ravages of Communism. Calling oneself a Marxist has long been trendy. One recent poll concludes that four in ten Americans support some sort of socialism or socialist policies. Another poll concludes that one-third of Millennials support communism. A 2016 survey found that Karl Marx is more likely to be assigned as a class text in U.S. universities than Adam Smith.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2020/05/05/a-modest-proposal-for-opening-universities-some-faculties-should-remain-closed-n388408

“The main influence undermining academic work is discrimination based on ideological bigotry, given special preferences and benefits based on gender, race, sexuality, disability, and illegal alien status. Replacing academic disciplines are grievance studies programs, with the discrimination manifested also in segregated dining, housing, and ceremonies. This has all been engendered by a set of neo-Marxist models of society dividing everyone into evil oppressors and innocent victims, and jettisoning academic considerations for gender, racial, sexuality advocacy. Academic responsibility has been almost universally betrayed by colleges and universities in favor of so-called “social justice.” 

The Chinese coronavirus has closed North American colleges and universities or at least chased students and staff off of campuses. These institutions wait breathlessly to reopen, to bring students and their tuition payments back to campus. But how will campus crowds fare without social distancing, and how can social distancing be implemented in large classes, cafeterias, and administrative offices?

Perhaps the “old normal” or “all or nothing” model is not workable for the foreseeable future. Of course, there is much about the “old normal” that was not workable in any serious academic sense, but this was not the result of an exogenous influence, but the result of internal evolution. Here I am not speaking primarily of the gargantuan expansion of administrators in relation to professors and students or the gross inflation of tuition costs riding on government loans to students.