RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/01/warning-from-a-cancel-culture-cassandra/

Modern traditional and social media, in all of their multiplying and increasingly malevolent forms, provide replete evidence of our collective failure in recent decades to raise children properly. The end of scoring and the efflorescence of “everybody’s awesome” trophies that praise mere participation in order to boost self-esteem have created a generation (and more) of young people who, though demonstrating few actual skills, think themselves excellent at everything. Helicopter parenting and the swaddling of the young straight up through college and beyond has left these same young people without sufficient coping strategies or knowledge of the world. 

The abandonment of college curricula and speakers’ lists to the strident demands of the most mulish among them has denied them the true value of education. Such education can only really proceed if all parties understand that the primary flow of knowledge must pass from the teachers and to the young people; too many students today make demands about what they will study, when they should instead shut up and gratefully learn the things that people with more wisdom and experience than they yet have think they should know.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-chapel-hill-chancellors-moment-of-opportunity/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

Carol Folt abruptly resigned as UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor last year after the turmoil over the statue of a Confederate soldier. She took the side of the students who sought its removal, and left voluntarily.

Folt has been replaced by Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, formerly the dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences. He was recently interviewed by the Martin Center’s Shannon Watkins. It sounds like he could do some good.

Most important, he apparently understands that the university has a problem with intolerance for viewpoints that don’t align with leftist ideas. To that end, Chapel Hill has begun the Program for Public Discourse. Guskiewicz says that it is “focused on our students gaining an appreciation of viewpoint diversity, intellectual diversity, [and] bringing speakers in who sit at certain places along the ideological spectrum.” That’s a step in the right direction. But the acid test will come if far-left students decide to prevent a speaker they dislike from speaking. If Chapel Hill has an incident like that at Middlebury College, will the guilty students get off with just a slight reprimand?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/another_pandemic_known_as_social_justice.html

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has produced a report titled “Social Justice Education in America.”  Written by David Randall, it defines, describes, and delineates many of the destructive and deceptive ideas behind the innocent-sounding social justice programs that have mushroomed in American institutions of higher learning.

According to this December 2019 report, “in the last twenty years, a generation of academics and administrators has transformed higher education into an engine of progressive political advocacy.”  Identity politics plays a major role in how social justice will be administered.  Social justice activists work to increase the “state’s coercive power” to decide who will get their fair share concerning employment, housing, income, health care, leisure, political power, property, social recognition, and wealth. 

Consequently, social justice buzz words such as food justice, educational poverty, and health equity aim to increase state power “to tax the citizenry to fund progressive spending priorities.” If social justice warriors deem it, then any alleged privilege must be eliminated so that “identity groups defined by categories such as class, race, and gender” will not be oppressed. 

To achieve their aims, universities are watering down requirements in order to attract more women and minorities. This portends “disastrous [repercussions] for scientific innovation and American competitiveness” not to mention the care of sick people.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/coronavirus_may_kill_noxious_classroom_leftism.html

“Because parents and taxpayers are paying for higher education, Kirk is right that they should have a chance to see what academics such as Bugden are doing. At a guess, roughly half the population, especially taxpayers, will find it illuminating to see where their money is going.”

Leftism started creeping into American colleges and universities beginning in the 1930s. In the 1960s, it blossomed into the Free Speech and Anti-War movements. By the 1990s, it had morphed into censorious political correctness. And in the 2000s, America’s institutions of higher education had turned into hard-left organizations with huge administrative staffs, most of whom seemingly were dedicated to ensuring that students graduated directly into the arms of the Democrat Party.

This post isn’t the place for “chapter and verse” evidence about the overall leftism in academia. The old Encyclopedia Britannica probably wouldn’t be long enough. However, here are a few data points to support the claim that there’s a leftist tilt in academia.

First, Republican are almost extinct on campuses:

An extensive study of 8,688 tenure-track professors at 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. published by the National Association of Scholars found that the ratio of faculty members registered as Democrats compared to those registered Republican is now a stunning 10.4 to 1. If two military colleges that are technically described as “liberal arts colleges” are removed from the calculations, the ratio is 12.7 to 1.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/donors-should-contribute-less-to-universities-and-more-to-scholarship-that-reflects-donors-values_3279173.html

The degeneration of American colleges and universities into socialist political action committees has been widely reported.

We have seen how once-fine institutions of higher education favor politically correct courses and projects while disfavoring Western Civilization and traditional scholarship. We have seen how colleges punish dissenting students and faculty and drive conservative and libertarian speakers off campus.

Over the past decade, the problem has become distinctly worse. One reason is that the small coterie of moderate and conservative professors has gotten smaller. Some promising young scholars are denied university jobs. Others obtain jobs only at lesser institutions that have neither the motivation nor the resources to support serious scholarship. Others are denied promotion or persecuted into leaving academia. Some retire. Still others depart to join policy centers called “think tanks.”

Think tanks are independent, non-profit research institutions scattered throughout the United States and Canada. The better ones maintain their integrity by refusing to accept government money.

Think tanks offer an attractive opportunity to donors who wish to contribute to the advancement of learning, but are opposed to the far-left agenda prevailing at most colleges and universities.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/16/covid-closures-expose-insidious-effects-of-michelle-obamas-school-lunch-program/

Reexamining the community eligibility program, which has created a middle-class entitlement program while teaching kids all the wrong lessons, should be the administration’s to-do list. Its deep reach is just one more flawed government approach now exposed by the current public health threat.

As schools shut down across the nation over fears of the COVID-19 illness, it appears that administrators are less concerned about how to educate children and more worried about how to feed them. A basic parental task—making sure your child has breakfast and lunch during the day—like so many aspects of family life, has been relegated to government bureaucrats thanks in large part to Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

Signed into law by Barack Obama in 2010, the bill initiated a massive overhaul of the nation’s school lunch program. The first lady’s pet project imposed restrictions on salt, sugar, and saturated fat content in an effort to slim down America’s youth. Nonfat dairy like skim milk replaced whole milk; whole grains replaced white flour. Some schools reported rations on pickles for sandwiches while students were caught smuggling in salt packets to make unappetizing meals more edible. Nearly a decade later, there is no evidence the costly and burdensome effort had any impact on childhood obesity rates.

But one part of the bill has met, even exceeded, its intended outcome: The expansion of taxpayer-subsidized meals to millions of American children and teenagers.

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), enacted nationwide in 2014, allows entire districts rather than individual families to apply for “free” or reduced-price meals based on low-income rates in the area. If at least 40 percent of the students in a district qualify, every student in the district is then entitled to a free breakfast, lunch, and snack.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/09/whiteboard-girl-harassed-for-expressing-conservative-views-at-university-of-chicago/

The University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics asked students to participate in a digital initiate called “I vote because” on March 2. Students wrote on a whiteboard a brief reason why they vote, but one student was singled out for her conservative beliefs.

Evita Duffy, daughter of former Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., wrote, “I vote because the coronavirus won’t destroy America, but socialism will.”

Duffy received intense backlash from her classmates, including threats and personal attacks. Classmates called her racist, xenophobic, and told her she deserved to be bullied.

“Fellow students attacked my character, my intellect, my family, my appearance, and even threatened me with physical violence, using foul and offensive language,” Duffy wrote in an op-ed at the Chicago Maroon. “I was called a racist and a xenophobe. Some compared me to animals. Others declared that they would personally stop me from voting, and many defended the personal attacks, saying I deserved to be bullied and that I don’t belong at the University of Chicago on account of my beliefs.”