RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274281/nyu-brademas-center-panel-claims-islamophobia-andrew-harrod

“Take a deep breath…This topic is heavy,” stated Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC) cofounder Namira Islam on June 26 at New York University’s (NYU) Washington, DC, center. Speaking on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s upholding of President Donald Trump’s temporary travel restriction, Islam’s panel presented “Islamophobia” as exemplary of an nonredeemable, bigoted America.

Alongside Vanessa Taylor, whose views I have previously discussed, Namira Islam, during the event “Beyond the Ban: Resisting Structural Islamophobia,” claimed that the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision “reflected a longer history of structural systems of oppression.” Considering “immoral policies” such as Trump’s falsely described “Muslim ban” prompted her to call upon the auditorium audience of about 40 to perform deep breathing relaxation exercises. These listeners included like-minded leftists including Institute for Policy Studies Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow Khury Petersen-Smith and National Religious Campaign against Torture Executive Director Ron Stief.

Islam’s jargon references to “undocumented [i.e. illegal alien] Muslims” and how in America “certain communities become white over time” reflected both the panel’s and MuslimARC’s sectarian ideologies. MuslimARC’s “Anti-Racism Guide for White Muslims” screams strident racial shibboleths with statements concerning how Americans “live in a society where all people are racialized from the time we are born.” White Americans “have been socialized as white people, with messages from our families, teachers, media and society about whiteness under an umbrella of white supremacy, both subtle and overt.”

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

Americans are keen supporters of higher education and Washington has traditionally generously concurred. But, in the 2020 presidential Democratic primary, several prominent potential nominees have endorsed once-unimaginable levels of government aid for college students. Elizabeth Warren, for example, recently announced that if elected she would spend $1.5 trillion (raised by higher taxes on the very rich) to eliminate up to $50,000 in student loan debt for those in household with incomes below $100,000 with smaller cancellations for households earning less than $250,000.  Her plan would also abolish tuition at all public colleges while offering government grants for non-tuition expenses. Meanwhile, a $50 billion fund would help financially struggling historically black colleges and universities (HBCU).

Some 42 million Americans would benefit, especially 75% of those with federal government-funded college debt. Washington would also encourage non-government debtholders to further eliminate student debt. What’s more, her plan would require an “annual equity audit” to ensure that low-income and students of color were proportionately represented in both admission and graduation. 

Warren’s plan ostensibly helps poorer students and minorities climb up the economic ladder into well-paying middle-class jobs, but left unsaid is that college professors and administrators would appear to be even greater beneficiaries. After all, cancelling student debt and free tuition at public colleges may help millions of American youngsters obtain diplomas and be debt-free, but the parchment hardly guarantees a good job. By contrast, opening the floodgates to BA seekers via government subsidies will, it would seem, create yet more academic jobs.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/22/your-tax-dollars-at-work-colleges-hire-army-of-high-paid-ineffective-diversity-officers/

A new study finds that diversity among college faculty didn’t budge from 2013 to 2017. But what the study really exposes is a much deeper problem: rampant waste at massively taxpayer-subsidized colleges and universities.

“Colleges and universities have not realized much progress toward ethnoracial and gender faculty diversity in recent years — the exception being a modest increase (between 1-2%) in tenured Asians across institutional types,” the study, published by the Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy, found.

Why does this matter? Because these institutions of higher learning have been dumping truckloads of money to build increasingly bloated diversity offices.     

Economist Mark Perry recently discovered that the University of Michigan has nearly 100 administrative positions devoted to diversity. More than two dozen of them make six-figure salaries. The Chief Diversity Officer makes almost $400,000. The total cost to the school: more than $11 million. That’s enough money, Perry calculates, to give more than 750 in-state students free rides.

The University of Texas at Austin has eight vice presidents in its Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, at an annual cost of $9.5 million. UC Berkeley has 175 diversity bureaucrats.

This year, Georgetown University created a new vice president position to oversee diversity at a school that already has: has an Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Affirmative Action, an Office of Affirmative Action and University Human Resources, a Diversity Advisory Board, a Center for Multicultural Equity and Access, a Working Group on Reporting Incidents of Intolerance, an Initiative on Diversity and Inclusiveness, a School of Medicine Office of Diversity and Inclusion, a School of Medicine Subcommittee on Faculty Diversity and Inclusion, a Law Center Office of Equity and Inclusion, a Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service, and others.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274299/celebrity-school-purges-conservative-teacher-and-daniel-greenfield

On the 5th of May, the American Freedom Alliance convened a conference on leftist radicalism. Before David Horowitz stepped up to the podium to discuss the threat of leftist extremism, Dr. Karen Siegemund, the president of the AFA, welcomed the attendees by speaking to our common values.

“Each of us here believes in the unparalleled force for good that is Western Civilization, that is our heritage, whether we were born here or not,” she said.

After Dr. Siegemund and Horowitz’s remarks, a panel discussed radicalism in the school system.

The day after this event, Dr. Siegemund was informed by Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles, the school where she had taught mathematics for four years and where she had studied as a child, that her contract would not be renewed because she had praised western civilization.

The conference, which had addressed leftist radicalism in educational institutions, had struck home.

“On Monday, I was informed that my teaching contract won’t be renewed because of my ‘widely publicized views,’” Dr. Siegemund said. “You know, I’d always known I was vulnerable – of course.  We on the right all know how vulnerable we are. But when it happens – when you actually become a victim, a casualty of this Long March, of the Left’s silencing tactics, it’s truly breathtaking.”

The French and English school set up and run by the Kabbaz family took as its motto, Cogito ergo sum or I think, therefore I am. These days, the radicalized institution has become hostile to the independent thinking that it claims to inculcate in its students. And to the cultural heritage of its origins.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/josh-hawley-takes-aim-at-higher-ed/

Over on the home page I have some thoughts about the true nature of the student-debt “crisis” and some ideas for how to deal with it. Coincidentally, today Josh Hawley announced some very relevant reforms.

Per his press release:

SEN. HAWLEY: BREAK UP HIGHER EDUCATION MONOPOLY, PROVIDE MORE OPTIONS FOR CAREER TRAINING

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is introducing two pieces of legislation this week that will expand federal aid for people pursuing vocational education and will put higher education institutions on the hook for students unable to repay student loans.

It’s an odd definition of “monopoly” that encompasses a sector with thousands of competing options, but okay: Higher ed is pretty dysfunctional and these reforms target two big problems with it.

Hawley’s first bill will “make more job-training and certification programs, like employer-based apprenticeships and digital boot camps, eligible to receive Pell Grants through an alternative accreditation process.” This is a good idea. There’s no reason we should be subsidizing college to the exclusion of other ways to learn important skills.

His second bill requires “colleges and universities to pay off 50 percent of the balance of student loans accrued while attending their institution for students who default, and forbids them from increasing the cost of attendance to offset their liability.”

The idea of a “money-back guarantee” for college isn’t crazy; it forces schools to take responsibility for their students’ outcomes, rather than accepting students who don’t have the skills to graduate, collecting tuition for a few years, and then sending the kids along poorer, indebted, and lacking a credential.

But I’m not sold on the idea of forbidding colleges “from increasing the cost of attendance to offset their liability.” I’m not sure it’s possible to enforce such a rule — and while higher ed in general is inefficient, I’m not sure it’s possible for every college to shoulder a new liability without raising its prices at all. Further, if tuition hikes resulted from this legislation, they would basically “price in” half the school’s default risk, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2019/07/12/universities-in-race-to-the-bottom-as-grade-inflation-runs-rampant/#fbfe4ba67ed3

Universities appear locked in a race to the bottom as soaring numbers of students get top grades in their degree courses.

More than a quarter of students now get the highest classification, almost doubling in under a decade, according to new figures.

And an education watchdog has warned that much of the increase is unjustified, leading to fears that universities are lowering standards in an attempt to attract more students.

The proportion of students awarded first class honours – the highest possible – at English universities has risen from 16% in 2010/11 to 29% in 2017/18, according to new analysis by the independent Office for Students (OfS).

Much of the increase is unexplained by factors such as entrance qualifications or student characteristics, the OfS found, with 13.9% of the rise unaccounted for.

The pattern was also widespread across universities, with 94% of 148 higher education providers having a statistically significant unexplained increase in the proportion of students awarded first class degrees.

https://spectator.org/noura-erakat-recounts-

“Ideal with a lot of mental health stuff because of this. I have so much anxiety,” fretted Rutgers University Professor Noura Erakat while discussing her anti-Israel activism at Washington, D.C.’s Busboys and Poets restaurant on K Street. Given Erakat’s ludicrous views on the Arab-Israeli conflict, one might indeed question her mental health. But the like-minded audience of 100 at the June 20 event for her latest book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, found her unfounded, revisionist history to be on the level.

While introducing Erakat, Busboys and Poets founder Andy Shallal noted proudly that the packed event room bore the name of Communist Israel-hater Angela Davis. Moderating the discussion was Khury Petersen-Smith, an Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) fellow and an organizer of the “2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine,” the slogans for which include the trite “Zionism is racism.” Fittingly, Rasha Abdulhadi, a leftist poet and self-described “queer Palestinian Southerner,” read one of her poems.

The audience included a who’s who of anti-Israel leftists, such as Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin and Phyllis Bennis of IPS, an event co-sponsor. James Cobey and Zeina Azzam, well-known activists from Washington, D.C.’s local anti-Israel scene, attended. Erakat gushed that being “in the company of movement family” made this event her book-tour favorite.

https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/EsEmmi

Much has been written about the attacks on free speech, especially at universities and colleges. Speakers with conservative viewpoints are routinely banished from important venues, denied attendance, picketed, or subjected to the “hecklers’ veto.” At the University of California Berkeley and other campuses where conservative speech has been met with disorder, activists have justified it because, they claim, “speech is violence.” Gone is adherence to the maxim of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “If there be time to . . . avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Speakers must be held accountable for their words, to be sure. But sometimes “accountability” is ideological and unfair. Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers discovered this when, at an academic conference in 2006, he speculated about the preponderance of men working as professors of mathematics and physical sciences at elite universities. Although Summers acknowledged that women confronted barriers such as discrimination and disproportionate family responsibilities, he hypothesized that there might be other factors, like men’s superior performance in tests measuring mathematical ability. Summers was vilified and ridiculed, and eventually resigned.

Another example of caving to mob rule at Harvard was the law school’s decision to strip law professor Ronald Sullivan, Jr., of his position as faculty dean of a college residence hall. The reason? Some students felt “unsafe” because Sullivan represented Harvey Weinstein against charges of sexual misconduct. As Sullivan put it, “Unchecked emotion has replaced thoughtful reasoning on campus. Feelings are no longer subjected to evidence, analysis or empirical defense. Angry demands, rather than rigorous arguments, now appear to guide university policy.”