RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/18/georgetown-library-bans-offensive-books/

Georgetown University officials removed and banned “all but a few books” from the McCarthy and Reynolds libraries that students have deemed “offensive,” Breitbart reports.

According to a report by the College Fix, Georgetown University officials have removed hundreds of books from campus libraries after students argued that they were riddled with bigotry and the extremely vulnerable students found them unacceptable and offensive.

Student Alexandra Bowman said she noticed a book “prominently featured a Native American on its cover” and therefore she complained to the administration. Shortly thereafter, Georgetown’s Reynolds and McCarthy libraries were almost cleared out.

“While some were simply raucous crime noir murder mysteries representative of the literary and cultural time in which they were written, other books included extremely problematic and damaging elements, including the glamorization of rape, including that of underage girls,” Bowman said in a short comment. “Completely naked women of all races were frequently featured on these books’ covers. Further, many books fetishized young nonwhite women.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/18/indiana-professor-suspended-for-calling-police-on-disruptive-black-student/

A professor at Indiana’s Ball State University was suspended for the remainder of the academic semester after he called the police to his classroom to remove a disruptive black student, ABC News reports.

Professor Shaheen Borna, who teaches marketing, reportedly asked the student, Sultan Benson, to move to another seat after displaying disruptive behavior. When Benson refused to move, Borna called the police, and Benson left the classroom after two officers arrived.

Benson claimed without evidence that he was singled out for his race, and added, again without proof, that he “feared for his safety” at the sight of the police officers. Following Borna’s suspension, Benson said that the punishment was “just the bare minimum,” and demanded “justice.”

However, many faculty members at the university expressed their support for Borna and his actions, with 30 of them writing a letter to the university’s student newspaper, The Daily News, explaining that Borna’s actions were justified by the “Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities, Appendix Q,” which deals with “Responding to Disruption in the Academic Setting.” According to this clause, a professor has the right to ask that a disruptive student leave the classroom, and if they refuse to leave, then the next required step is to call the university police.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/education-department-investigates-harvard-yale-foreign-funding/

The Department of Education cracks down on alleged foreign funding of Yale and Harvard.

L ast week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Education had opened investigations into Harvard and Yale for allegedly failing to disclose billions in donations from foreign governments. The department claims that American universities received as much as $6.5 billion in unreported gifts from countries including China and Saudi Arabia.

Foreign governments use donations to influence the work of professors and gain access to intellectual property. China’s Thousand Talents Plan, which figures into the investigation, has funneled money to 3,000 university faculty members. In return, Beijing requires them to turn over intellectual property to which they have access, as well as to sign agreements preventing them from disclosing the results of work conducted under Chinese patronage. Meanwhile, Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes, which ostensibly support Chinese studies in the U.S., have reportedly engaged in censorship and espionage of American students and professors.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires universities to disclose foreign contributions exceeding $250,000. If Harvard and Yale failed to comply, that indicates either a disregard for the law (which was enforced only loosely before Trump took office) or a tacit acknowledgment that the funding compromises the integrity of the institutions. In any event, it is clear that American universities do not see themselves as American.

That is not entirely surprising. Harvard and Yale were founded prior to the American Revolution. Primarily focused on ministerial training, they were colleges that educated American leaders but had no strong connection to the government. Universities were considered citadels of knowledge independent of their societies. Since they did not conduct scientific research for roughly the first two centuries of their existence, Harvard and Yale had only an indirect impact on the American military and economy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/saving-higher-education-student-constitutional-rights-truth-in-lending-standards/

Start by guaranteeing students’ constitutional rights and holding schools to truth-in-lending standards.

D espite the denials of universities boards, administrators, and faculty, American higher education, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, is a hopeless mess. What basis is there for such a harsh diagnosis?

One, a college education is far too expensive. Nearly 45 million young Americans owe $1.5 trillion in student loans — a staggering sum unmatched in American history. Millions have either defaulted on their loans or are able to pay only the interest and are making no progress on the principle.

Universities have for decades upped their tuition and services higher than the rate of annual inflation. Yet they deny they have any responsibility for the staggering student debt, even though the encumbrances have altered the U.S. economy, culture, and demography. One of many reasons youth are marrying later, delaying child-rearing, and unable to buy a home is that so many of them are burdened well into their late twenties and early thirties with student-loan debt, on average over $30,000 per student. Again, the university more or less shrugs, insisting it has no responsibility for this collective national disaster that it helped create

The student-loan crisis could be alleviated if universities, not the federal government, were the co-signers of the loans, which would make them share with students the moral hazard of loan repayment. Instead of spending superfluously on “diversity and inclusion” czars and entire castes of non-teaching facilitators, universities would have incentives to lower non-teaching costs. It would be in their own financial interest to ensure that students could minimize debt by graduating within four years, and also to invest in job placement for their graduates, so they could move into the full-time workforce months after finishing school.

Two, universities have no methods to analyze whether students are, in fact, better educated after they graduate than when they enrolled. While most colleges still demand to see applicants’ standardized SAT or ACT scores, so they can judge the relative quality and significance of their high-school grade-point average, they allow no such audits on the efficacy of their own four-year course of study.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/spring-2020-madness-college-campuses-jack-kerwick/

The first academic semester of 2020 has only recently gotten underway, and colleges and universities around the country seem to be competing with one another in a feverish race to prove which is most committed to advancing the prevailing leftist dogma of the day.

The College Fix, a student-led campus watchdog publication, is an excellent resource for anyone interested in keeping apprised of the current scene in academia. It’s a particularly invaluable source for parents who are considering investing tens of thousands of dollars into their children’s “education.”

Consider:

At Dartmouth College, an institution that charges $75,000 a year in tuition, students have recently had their classes interrupted by a “Green New Deal” activist. A young woman to whom, out of “courtesy,” The Dartmouth Review refers simply as “Katie,” has spent months disrupting lectures for the purpose of promoting the causes—like the Green New Deal, as well as “free” education and Medicare for all—advanced by the Sunrise Movement and the New Hampshire Youth Movement (NHYM) by which she’s employed.

The NHYM is affiliated with the Sunrise Movement. Unsurprisingly, both are doctrinaire left-wing organizations. “Katie” insists that students are to support only those politicians who “support our values.” As to the nature of those values, there is no doubt, to judge from the card that “Katie” disseminates to students.

There is space on the cards in which students are to supply not only their personal contact information, but, by way of checking off a series of boxes, indicate their political priorities. “I’m voting on February 11th for…” is listed at the top. Beneath that are the following issues: “Immigrant Justice;” “Racial Justice;” “Green New Deal;” “Free College for All;” “Voting Rights;” “Medicare for All;” “LGBTQIAP + Rights;” “Affordable Housing;” “Reproductive Rights;” and “Other.”

“Katie,” in other words, campaigns for the Democratic Party in both college classrooms and campus buildings. In doing so, she violates Dartmouth’s anti-solicitation policies. The latter demarcates a public space on campus for activism.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/criminalizing_dissent.html

DPS NOTE: Off the wall intolerable. The left has gone fascist: Cancel culture gets police powers and goes after Jewish student at UMass Amherst

Louis Shenker, a 21-year-old junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,  just wanted his MAGA hat back from the graduate student who ripped it off his head on campus. He wore the hat to a December 6, 2018 protest organized by the university’s graduate student union against Trump and local police. Video shows that when Louis, who is 5’6’’ and 140 pounds, arrived wearing the MAGA hat and holding a large sign, he was immediately surrounded by a hostile mob of older grad students cursing at him and calling him a white supremacist. A woman lunged from the mob and snatched Louis’s MAGA hat. Careful not to get caught on camera hitting Louis with their hands, they instead mobbed him like a colony of enraged penguins, using their bodies to push him from all sides, occasionally pecking at his head with their cardboard signs, and chanting in unison: “THE PEOPLE, UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED.”

“Get the f**k out of here, you shouldn’t be in an anti-racist march!” screamed the hat thief. A soft-spoken professor in the crowd warned Louis: “It’s actually dangerous for you to come by yourself like that.” As the protesters began to march and Louis tried to keep up while pleading for his hat, many of them, including several graduate student union members dressed in United Auto Workers gear, elbowed Louis into walls, lampposts, and other obstacles. “You act like a Nazi, you’re going to get treated like a Nazi,” a female protester yelled at the Jewish grandson of Holocaust victims.  Louis left without his hat.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/13/hateful-anti-zionism-at-duke-university-press/

Duke University Press has a long history of promoting antisemitic views masquerading as academic scholarship. Their authors have compared Israelis to Nazis, and have updated antisemitic blood libels by alleging that Israel specifically targets Palestinian children to maim them and then profits from their incurred disabilities.

As I previously wrote in 2018, seven members of Duke University Press (DUP)’s Editorial Advisory Board signed initiatives related to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, and a number of Duke University Press editors publicly support the BDS movement. Duke University Press is recognized by some as the “publisher of choice” for those who support boycotting Israel.

Now, in early 2020, Duke University Press is signaling once again its commitment to targeting Israel by promoting an editor who is a self declared anti-Zionist, and who publicly uses language that many find offensive, antagonistic, and hateful.

In late January, Joshua Gutterman Tranen became Assistant Editor, and will be directly assisting Ken Wissoker, who is the Editorial Director. With this promotion, Tranen reports that he is now responsible for acquiring books for publication. The day before Tranen announced his promotion, his Twitter profile prominently stated he is an “anti-Zionist” working at “@dukepress.” The same day Tranen announced his promotion at Duke, he changed his Twitter profile by removing “anti-Zionist.” He did not, however, clean up his past tweets.

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https://quillette.com/2020/02/13/yale-against-western-art/

For decades, Yale offered a two-semester introductory sequence on the history of Western art. The fall semester spanned the ancient Middle East to the early Renaissance; the spring semester picked up from the High Renaissance through the present. Many Yale students were fortunate enough to take one or both of these classes while the late Vincent Scully was still teaching them; I was among those lucky students. Scully was a titanic, galvanizing presence, combining charismatic enthusiasm with encyclopedic knowledge. When the lights went down in the lecture hall, the large screen behind him, on which slides were projected, became the stage on which the mesmerizing saga of stylistic evolution played out. How did the austere geometry of Cycladic icons bloom into the full-bodied grandeur of the Acropolis’s Caryatids? Why were the rational symmetries of the Greek temple, blazing under Mediterranean light, replaced by the wild vertical outcroppings of the Gothic cathedral? What expressive possibilities were opened up by Giotto’s fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel?

Such questions, under Scully’s tutelage, became urgent and central to an understanding of human experience. Trips to the Yale Art Gallery supplemented his lectures, where it was hoped that in writing about an object in the collection, students would follow John Ruskin’s admonition that the “greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.” I chose to analyze Corot’s The Harbor at La Rochelle, being particularly taken by the red cap of a stevedore, one of the few jewel colors in a landscape of silken silvers and transparent sky blues.

By 1974, when I enrolled at Yale, its faculty had long since abdicated one of its primary intellectual responsibilities. It observed a chaste silence about what undergraduates needed to study in order to have any hope of becoming even minimally educated; curricular selections, outside of a few broad distribution requirements, were left to students, who by definition did not know enough to choose wisely, except by accident. So it was that I graduated without having taken a single history course (outside of one distribution-fulfilling intellectual history class), despite easy access to arguably the strongest American history faculty in the country. Scully’s fall semester introductory art history course has been my anchor to the past, providing visual grounding in the development of Western civilization, around which it is possible to develop a broader sense of history.

But now, the art history department is junking the entire two-semester sequence, as the Yale Daily News reported last month. Given the role that these two courses have played in exposing Yale undergraduates to the joys of scholarship and knowledge, one would think that the department would have amassed overwhelmingly compelling grounds for eliminating them. To the contrary, the reasons given are either laughably weak or at odds with the facts.