RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2020/03/06/ive-been-fired-if-you-value-academic-freedom-that-should-worry-you/

“I followed all of the protocols of academia. I published articles in peer-reviewed journals. I shared my ideas, always politely, on Twitter, and I encouraged people to debate me and to criticize my ideas. And I was fired. If it can happen to me, then it can happen to any academic who challenges the prevailing views of their discipline. You may disagree with everything I believe, say, and write, but it is in everyone’s interests that you support my freedom to believe, say, and write it.”

…….Until a week ago, I was a tenure-track assistant professor at a small college. Then I was fired. And although I am but one professor at one small college in one small town, I want to persuade you that, if you care about free speech and free inquiry in academia, you should be alarmed by my termination. My troubles began in October 2019 when I was invited to address an evolutionary group at the University of Alabama. I had decided that I would discuss human population variation, the hypothesis that human biological differences are at least partially produced by different environments selecting for different physical and psychological traits in their populations over time. I planned to defend this view as most consistent with a Darwinian understanding of the world.

My first day in Tuscaloosa was uneventful. On the second day, I visited a class and had an enjoyable discussion with students about various topics, including human evolution and social signaling. I was then supposed to meet professors and students for lunch, but instead my guide delivered me to an empty room where I received a number of texts from my host: The professors had found my RationalWiki entry, which accuses me—inter alia—of writing “racist bullshit for the right-wing online magazine Quillette.”

Notwithstanding its name, which indicates a commitment to thought and reason, RationalWiki is a highly partisan and tendentious site which its authors use to mock and defame their political opponents.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/3/3/faculty-support-warren-president/,

Amy L. Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

These schools serve only a fraction of Americans, but they raise $44B a year through endowments and guzzle mightily from the federal trough.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-donors-must-abandon-their-ivy-league-alma-maters/?utm_source=ntnlreview&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=amconswap

Academia ought to be in crisis right now, as Americans increasingly doubt the value of a college education.

Pollsters at Gallup found that the percentage of persons regarding a college degree as “very important” has dropped from 71 percent in 2013 to 50 percent today. The National Association of Scholars issued a recent, damning report that presents universities as dominated by a progressive social justice agenda which distorts teaching and research and presents a one-sided picture of our national problems.

Critics have also faulted the academy for a dramatic increase in elaborate bureaucracies, expensive new buildings, and unproven programs. These developments have driven up costs, which in turn has burdened many students with heavy loans that contribute to economic distress and inequality. Yet universities continue to command generous public and private support. State and federal governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on university programs, infrastructure, and subsidized student loans and grants. This money is not evenly distributed. In 2016, out of over 3,000 universities offering four-year degrees and about half as many two-year colleges nationwide, 20 institutions accounted for over 30 percent of federal spending, with 100 universities garnering 80 percent of the total. Various proposals have been floated to reduce the degree of public support for colleges and universities and thereby force higher education to be more accountable, responsive, and thrifty. These austerity arguments have so far had little effect.

Money from non-governmental sources is also a vital revenue stream. Selective colleges and universities (defined as those that turn away most of their applicants) are especially dependent on generous contributions from alumni and big donors to fund elaborate infrastructure, extensive programs, and lavish amenities. These features are in turn used to attract top student and faculty talent to their ranks. Universities, and especially elite ones, regularly receive large gifts and generous grants from alumni, foundations, and wealthy individuals.

Such support has increased steadily in recent years. In the fiscal year ending in June 2017, four-year colleges and universities raised $43.6 billion from personal, individual, and voluntary gifts, marking a 6.3 percent increase from the year before. Highly ranked and already well-endowed institutions take in the largest sums, with schools like California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and Harvard University each receiving hundreds of millions annually. Wealthy individuals give the most. The top 10 percent of donors account for over 90 percent of the dollars raised, with the size of the average gift growing steadily since the 1980s.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/01/the-1619-project-and-its-critics/

Peter W. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars.

Nikole Hannah-Jones ought to step up, be courageous, and debate the historians with whom she disagrees. They’re waiting. All historical claims, particularly those with as wide-reaching and radical ramifications as these, must be discussed and scrutinized by trained scholars.

The 1619 Project—the New York Times campaign launched in August 2019 to transform American history into a tale of racial oppression and nothing but for the last 400 years—has attracted a great deal of critical attention. Much of this attention has come from professional historians who are nonplussed by the numerous misstatements of fact, the disappearance of key historical events, and the forced march of polemical interpretation that the Times attempted to hang on American history.

The dissenting historians themselves have found various outlets to express their views. Among the most intriguing of these platforms has been the World Socialist Website, which has featured interviews with such luminaries as Gordon Wood, university professor at Brown University, and James McPherson, professor emeritus of U.S. history at Princeton University.

The socialists, upset with the Times for preferring racial grievance to class grievance, rounded up other prominent historians, including Victoria Bynum, James Oakes, Dolores Janiewski, Richard Carwardine, and Clayborne Carson, to express their critiques of the Times’ fanciful attempt to rewrite history.

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

Our public education system is bipolar.  Its reformers are manic, but the test scores are depressed.

Bipolar disorder is a serious condition afflicting nearly six million Americans.  Unfortunately, it’s also a metaphor for our public schools. Symptoms of mania include rapid speech, grandiose ideas, and wild spending sprees.  Education “reformers” exhibit all three.

The so-called reformers of education have been rapidly and frenetically speaking seemingly forever. TED Talks and TEDx Talks and podcasts and workshops and panels and keynotes and in-service sessions and slide shows. Many, many slide shows.  It’s a lot of talking.  

Reformers have been writing rapidly and frenetically too.  As of this writing, an Amazon book search for “education reform” reveals over 20,000 titles. Google provides 272 billion results.  “Scholarly articles” for education reform yields 3.1 million sources. 

Seemingly everybody’s been published on the subject, many people with little or no experience teaching children.

When I began teaching, some of the grandest of grandiose ideas were playing out, like open space classrooms. Teachers were finally driven to distraction and erected bookshelves and crates, anything to block out other classes.  Dividers went up, and soon rooms were evident.  

Whole language was being phased out as the preferred method of teaching reading, but it left me facing a string of high-school students over a span of several years who could not spell.  Millions of students across the country were victims of the “reading wars.”

https://www.bookwormroom.com/2020/02/27/its-unsurprising-that-ivy-league-colleges-churn-out-dangerous-leftists/

“…….

Ivy will also insinuate itself into your doors and windows, your vents, and your shutters. It will climb your walls, destroy your grout, pull down your bricks and siding, tear down your gutters, and generally wreak havoc everywhere it can go. All the while, the leaves continue to have that pretty, decorative ivy look. Even as it’s destroying everything it touches, it manages to look attractive.

In addition, every tendril has a gazillion roots and the vines have a habit of breaking off just as you think you’re about to pull a whole root system out successfully. Thus, no matter how much you manage to destroy above ground, you know you’ve left more vines and roots underground where they are unreachable. This means that it’s virtually impossible ever to rid yourself of ivy. All that you can do is maintain vigilance and attack it when even a single leaf appears anywhere.

It occurred to me today as I was struggling with the ivy destroying my planting beds, trying to tear down my bricks and gutters, strangling my other plants, and resisting my best efforts to track down every root and tendril that there is no difference between ivy and American socialism.

If socialists are confined to urban cocktail parties and a few university faculty lounges, they can be innocuous and even decorative and interesting. However, once you set them free, they destroy everything they touch.

On the surface, they might be grandmotherly figures like Elizabeth Warren (if you like nagging, pushy grandmothers), or perky little boys like Pete Buttigieg, or funny, crazy uncles like Bernie, but underneath they’re putting out tendrils that swamp and destroy everything. They entangle themselves in America’s institutions and eventually destroy them.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/02/panel-at-u-michigan-blames-western-colonialism-for-gender-violence-among-immigrants/

“Gender Violence, Immigrant Vulnerability and the State: A Symposium”

Do you ever just sit back and marvel at the left’s ability to come up with things like this?

The College Fix reports:

In the latest example of higher education victimology, a panel at the University of Michigan discussed on Monday how Western colonialism is culpable for gender violence in the immigrant community.

According to The Michigan Daily, UM women’s studies professor Debotri Dhar, organizer of the “Gender Violence, Immigrant Vulnerability and the State: A Symposium” event, claimed that “residual ideals from the colonial era have resulted in immigrants of color being framed as burdens on the state” which contribute to “immigrant vulnerability and gender violence.”

Dhar added that in our current “very politically divisive” atmosphere, the situation surrounding immigrants, “our most vulnerable individuals,” can be overlooked.

https://www.hudson.org/research/15764-oxford-should-keep-homer-and-virgil-on-the-syllabus

The Oxford Student, the largest student newspaper of the nearly thousand-year-old teaching institution, reported in mid-February that the classics faculty has recommended that Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid be removed from the literae humaniores, an undergraduate program in ancient literature, history, and philosophy. The program has been criticized because of the difference in scores between male and female students, as well as because of differences in how much previous training its students have had in classical languages. This is an absurd standard. What will be taught if equality of grades between the sexes becomes the standard of choosing course material? The classics faculty would solve the grade-difference issue by shedding two of Western civilization’s core works.

A student studying classics at Oxford opposes removal of the two epic poems and is gathering signatures for a petition to end debate on their future at Oxford. Note that cutting off debate on difficult issues is not restricted to American universities.

The Oxford Student quotes the student’s objection to Homer-exit. It means, he says, that “Oxford would be producing Classicists who have never read Homer and never read Virgil, who are the central authors of the Classical tradition and most of Classical literature, in one way or another, looks back to Homer and interacts with the Iliad.”

It’s worse than that. Homer and Virgil are fundamental not only to classics majors or students who will eventually teach classics to other students. Homer, by himself, is the keystone of Western literature.

The Iliad is a story about human passions: anger, pity, remorse, compassion, revenge; men’s relations to forces greater than themselves; war and its horrors (and it is very horrible in Homer’s supremely elegant lines); and the beauty of art and nature. It is a complex and deeply insightful exploration of the soul, human fate, and immortality.