RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/how_whites_became_pariahs_in_academia.html

Likely you’ve never heard of Noel Ignatiev, yet he’s been influential in much of what is going on in culture and politics today.  A left-wing Jewish American author and historian, Ignatiev has been one of the main voices in helping shape and direct what is commonly called “Whiteness Studies,” a subset of Critical Race Theory, which is itself a subset of Critical Theory (basically Marxism by another name).

Normally, when one sees the word “studies” attached to anything, it tends to make anyone not fully enamored of Progressive thought cringe, if not contemplate (metaphorically, at least) getting out the pitchforks and torches.  It means something steeped in a Marxist-tinged ideological understanding of the world, which casts victims and perpetrators within a power-play framework that suits its ultimate vision of a Heaven on Earth once the perpetrators are vanquished from the scene.

As one might guess, in this particular iteration of “studies,” it is the so-called “white” person who has been cast as the villain.  As Ignatiev has said, “The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.  Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue in U.S. society, whether domestic or foreign.”

Defenders of Ignatiev’s views argue that he was simply being metaphorical.  “Whiteness” here is simply a social construct, not a reference to race or ethnicity.  This becomes harder to defend as one reads more quotes from Ignatiev and realizes that this isn’t just a social construct he has difficulty with; it’s actual flesh-and-blood human beings he sees as intrinsically evil and worthy of eradication.  When reading the following quotes, are you left with the conclusion he is merely speaking of a metaphorical, socially constructed system that he hopes to bring down, or is it something more than that?

https://www.city-journal.org/cuny–objective-testing

“Let’s face it: if more people were aware of how badly the school system performs, there’s no telling what might happen. So the three R’s must be replaced by the three D’s—distraction, deflection, and deceit. The integrity of the City University of New York is just the latest casualty in New York’ ongoing education tragedy.”

The City University of New York has announced plans to eliminate objective testing intended to determine which of its incoming students can do college-level work and which require remediation. Politico reports that CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez plans to move the university “away from high-stakes testing” while “reducing its reliance on placement tests students must take to determine whether they need remedial interventions.”

CUNY has been here once before—and the results nearly killed the university. Adjusted for euphemism, the decision points toward a reversal of 1990s-era reforms that pulled the university out of a long period of stagnation and decline. Abandoning testing would represent an effective return to so-called open-admissions policies from the 1960s and 1970s. Those allowed virtually anybody who could stumble through CUNY’s front door to enroll. Eventually, the university’s classrooms filled up with unqualified students, severely degraded the quality of education, and reduced the once-great university to a national laughingstock. CUNY’s rescue, a joint venture of then-governor George Pataki, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, and others, was not easily achieved—and it will doubtless take some time for the university’s new admissions policy to start showing damaging effects. But that’s just a matter of time.

The new policy is a huge win for teachers’ unions and unaccountable bureaucrats because it greatly relieves pressure on New York City’s public schools to do better. It was achieved with the silent acquiescence of Governor Andrew Cuomo, the only politician in the state who could have stopped it. Back in 2012, Cuomo declared himself the chief lobbyist for New York’s public school students, and for a while, he really was—promoting and protecting charter schools, strengthening accountability for teachers and school administrators, and—critically—supporting student-performance benchmarks. In recent years, though, he’s been silent, standing aside as the Albany legislature refused to allow New York City’s astonishingly effective charter school movement to expand; as hard-won teacher-accountability reforms were peeled away and discarded; and as the state Board of Regents moved to abandon its 150-year-old practice of proficiency testing of high school students statewide. And now CUNY is following suit, embracing a new open-admissions era.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bias-teams-welcome-the-class-of-1984-11565045215

Hundreds of American colleges have “bias-response teams” or similar mechanism for students or faculty to report bias incidents. These systems enforce political correctness and turn campuses into miniature surveillance states.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, I recently obtained and reviewed nearly 300 alleged bias incidents at 11 major public universities. The reports, which we asked to be scrubbed of identifying information for both the accusers and accused, reveal students who are perpetually offended and on the lookout for ideological heresy. Actual crimes such as vandalism or threats of physical violence are typically handled by campus police. In most bias reports, campus community members simply heard or saw something that made them mildly uncomfortable.

At the University of Utah, a male student was joking around with his friends in the library and complained that his computer battery was dying. His friend gave him a power cord, and, when it turned out to be incompatible with his computer, told the student to jam the cord into the power socket anyway. “That’s rape,” the accused student whispered loudly. “I’m not raping my computer.” A female student overheard and filed a complaint.

Supporters of bias-response teams argue they are harmless, since they typically cannot formally discipline anyone. “They do not shut down free speech or charge into classrooms to stop offensive statements from faculty members or students,” two professors, two administrators and a doctoral candidate argued in a June article for Inside Higher Education.

Yet schools often investigate the complaints, and the teams themselves can call the accused in to demand an explanation in front an administrator or a panel of “diversity” specialists. At the University of Illinois, law-enforcement officers sit on the bias-response board—making the body a literal speech police. Complaints go down in permanent, often public, records, which can effect future employment prospects. Most bias-response systems don’t offer any process by which the accused can clear their names.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/08/05/proposed-anti-israel-ethnic-studies-curriculum-in-california-has-jewish-community-on-alert/

Hostility towards Israel and its supporters across college campuses throughout the United States and beyond—well-documented for years—has been the focus of pro-Israel groups. Now the anti-Israel movement may be officially trickling down into the high school system of the largest state in America.

A new ethnic-studies curriculum under proposal by the California Department of Education is being widely condemned by pro-Israel and Jewish groups, California lawmakers and activists for its “blatant bias against Israel.”

“The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum is deeply troubling—not only for its shocking omission of any mention of Jewish Americans or antisemitism or its blatant anti-Israel bias and praise of BDS, but for its clear attempt to politically indoctrinate students to adopt the view that Israel and its Jewish supporters are part of ‘interlocking systems of oppression and privilege’ that must be fought with ‘direct action’ and ‘resistance,’” Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder and director of the California-based AMCHA Initiative, told JNS.

California lawmakers have begun to raise alarms over the proposed curriculum, the result of a 2016 law calling for the creation of a model ethnic-studies curriculum by the state’s board of education.

The proposed curriculum is currently going through public comment and is expected to go through revisions, followed by being approved next year by the board.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/senator-josh-hawley-reveals-the-nasty-truth-behind-confucius-institutes/

They function as organs for dissemination of Chinese Communist propaganda.

Chinese-government-sponsored Confucius Institutes are “a tool for China to spread influence and exercise soft power,” “a known threat to academic freedom,” and “a danger to our national defense and security,” says Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) in a letter sent last week to the University of Missouri and Webster University. Both institutions host Confucius Institutes, campus centers that teach Chinese language and culture and are funded and partly staffed and overseen by the Chinese government. Hawley urges the universities to “reconsider” those relationships.

Hawley’s conclusions aren’t just his own personal notions. He cites FBI director Christopher Wray, who for the last year and a half has publicly warned colleges about Confucius Institutes. Just last week Wray testified, in response to questioning from Hawley, that Confucius Institutes are “part of China’s soft power strategy and influence” because they “offer a platform to disseminate Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to encourage censorship, to restrict academic freedom.”

Hawley cites Li Changchun, a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party, who famously declared Confucius Institutes “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” He cites North Carolina State University, which canceled an event with the Dalai Lama under pressure from its Confucius Institute. And he cites the fact that ever-increasing numbers of American colleges and universities — now 24 of them — have cut ties with their Confucius Institutes. (Hawley also cites an article I wrote, based on my 2017 report Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education.)

Hawley’s concerns, well grounded and substantial, are nothing surprising. What is surprising are the reactions of Mizzou and Webster. After several years of growing evidence that Confucius Institutes are all-round a bad deal for colleges, they are doubling down in defense of their Confucius Institutes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/computerbased_teaching_of_remedial_english_skills_just_doesnt_work.html

College administrators and pedagogues, confronted with the incontrovertible signs of intellectual miasma among their students and perhaps unconsciously aware that they have raised a generation of toffee-nosed misfits and incompetents, have responded by installing a plethora of writing and language courses, mainly of the digital variety. They believe that computer instruction in grammar and syntax will redress the balance by teaching students how to write and think.

The evidence shows otherwise. Nonetheless, many teachers continue to support the online language project as a boon to students who need to amend their so-called “writing skills.” These teachers, many of whom are former colleagues, claim that student reading practices and writing abilities actually improve thanks to three-hour classes in which postulants stare into computer screens, interminably scrolling away, nimbly surfing the Net and sending email messages to one another.

The claim is disingenuous and needs to be put in context. Though some instructors deal with second-language students for whom Web-based drills are pro forma, native-born students have also been subjected to the same laboratory practices with little or nothing to show for them. Many write and speak as if they were indeed of foreign extraction — this is no hyperbole — and their academic work, in tandem with the expression of their ideas, is often, like, you know, embarrassing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274412/muslim-evangelism-goes-public-minnesota-lloyd-billingsley

“After a petition was sent around by activists, asking the school district to reduce ‘racism,’” William Krumholz reports in Alphanews, “the district brought in a group run by Dr. Muhammad Khalifa to conduct an ‘equity survey.’”  This took place in the Eastern Carver County School District in the city of Chaska, Minnesota, with a population of approximately 25,000. 

Dr. Muhammad Khalifa is Associate Professor of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota. He earned his Ph.D. in “educational administration” at Michigan State University. Khalifa’s group, Adjusted Equity Solutions, and the affiliated Culturally Responsive School Leadership Institute, Krumholz wrote, “sells its services, which focus on bias recognition education and training, to schools.” The Eastern Carver district and superintendent Clint Christopher, “awarded Khalifa’s AES $52,250 over a two-year period to conduct the equity survey and provide certain follow-up services.”

Dr. Khalifa’s “Islamophobia and Christian Privilege,” materials urge the district to “recognize that Islamophobia is one of the most widespread, rapidly growing, and tolerated types of oppression in school and society today.” This requires the school to “identify discourses and practices of Christian privilege and White privilege” and Christian privilege “is not only having major Christian holidays and Sundays off, and Christian trappings in school.”

The materials urge the district to “discuss with your staff how you have been implicit – directly or indirectly – in Islamophobic practices,” and “complete annual equity audits.” Dr. Khalifa  wants “speak outs” for Muslim students, and the protection of “Muslim female dress.” The district is also to “celebrate contemporary Muslim accomplishments and personalities, Kunta Kinte, Muhammad Ali, Keith Ellison, Yusef Lateef, John Coltrane, Malcolm X, Mahershali Ali, etc.”

As Dr. Khalifa’s materials explain, “Islam is not a religion in the sense that Western Europeans separated faith from other aspects of life.” Dr. Muhamad wants the district to “support causes connected to the Muslim community,” and “use staff, school space, student activities, and even financial resources – to advocate for causes important to student inclusion and belongingness.”