RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/stanford-student-union-graduate-workers

Graduate students enroll to teach, do research, and pursue knowledge, not to be conscripted into political organizations. Yet at America’s top universities, a new model of progressive campus unionism is rising—one that prioritizes progressive activism over workplace concerns like wages or benefits and coerces students into bankrolling causes many find deeply objectionable.

At Stanford University, the Graduate Workers Union—a local affiliate of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE)—has demanded the dismissal of teaching and research assistants who refuse to join or pay union dues or agency fees. In June, students who had not paid them, including myself, received an ominous email titled “Termination Request” from union leadership, urging administrators to fire graduate workers for nonpayment.

Rather than defending student choice, Stanford promised—in a 2024 collective-bargaining agreement that it signed to avert a strike—to treat union membership as a condition of employment for teaching assistants and research assistants. Because California is not a right-to-work state, the contract now makes union membership or fee payment a condition of employment. That means Ph.D. students can’t teach or conduct funded research unless they subsidize the union.

The majority of union dues collected by the student union go to the national body, whose agenda extends far beyond typical concerns like wages or hours. The UE, for example, was the first national union to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel in 2015. It also advocates for defunding police, taxpayer subsidies for “gender-affirming care,” and other controversial causes. Its website prominently features a “political action” tab highlighting protests and lobbying campaigns like the anti-Trump “No Kings” protest.

Objectors have a few legal outs, but these lack teeth. Federal law technically allows graduate students to opt out of full membership by paying “agency fees” under the Supreme Court’s Communications Workers v. Beck (1988). However, those fees are nearly identical to regular dues and still end up in union coffers.

https://www.thefp.com/p/in-defense-of-inequality

Earlier this week the University of Austin (UATX)—a new university, whose founding was announced four years ago in these pages—welcomed its second class of undergraduates. At the school’s convocation ceremony, UATX president Carlos Carvalho delivered an address you won’t hear at any other university: a defense of inequality.

Good evening—students, parents, and all the supporters helping us build the University of Austin. I am honored to be with you today at your convocation, at the most important and exciting university in America.

Thank you for trusting us with your education. We are thrilled to welcome you into the UATX family.

Tonight, as we gather on the threshold of America’s 250th anniversary, I want to share why this moment and UATX represent something essential about the American experiment.

Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, King George III formally declared Americans to be rebels and traitors. This dashed the colonists’ hopes for a peaceful reconciliation, and set the path to declare a new nation based on the proposition that all men are created equal.

But on the heels of America’s quarter-millennium since the Declaration of Independence, I want to do something a bit unfashionable: I want to defend inequality.

Of course, all men are created equal. But all men are not the same. We have unequal curiosity, unequal intellect, unequal talent, unequal courage, unequal drive, unequal achievement.

I want to defend this kind of inequality because I believe it is the most important way that UATX distinguishes itself, and because being honest about inequality is the most important way that UATX can help you be extraordinary.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/26/college-crackdown/

Diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates, race-based hiring, and safe spaces are just a few of the noxious turns that have become the standard in American colleges and universities in recent times.

Examples of universities practicing preferential treatment are countless. John Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, reports on a faculty job rubric he obtained from the University of Texas at San Antonio, which listed “female/URM” (underrepresented minority) as a scoring category.

Similarly, in an email he received from Northern Illinois University, a computer science professor shared the department’s search committee evaluation rubric, which scored applicants on their “diversity” and awarded points for those who were “non-male or non-Caucasian.”

But change is afoot.

On July 29, the Department of Justice sent a letter to all federal grant recipients reaffirming a core principle of American civil rights law: discrimination is illegal. The nine-page missive, signed by U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, lists several practices that constitute unlawful discrimination—many of which are common in higher education.

Shortly thereafter, a memo signed by President Trump instructed colleges receiving federal funding to submit admissions data to the Education Department to ensure they comply with the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court decision. Colleges are already required to provide specific data about the students they enroll. Now, they must also submit detailed information about those who apply.

The memo declares that “the lack of available admissions data from universities—paired with the rampant use of ‘diversity statements’ and other overt and hidden racial proxies—continues to raise concerns about whether race is actually used in admissions decisions in practice.”

The memo also states, “American students, parents, and taxpayers should have confidence that our nation’s higher education institutions are recruiting and training our next generations with fairness and integrity.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/25/no-more-coordinators-and-bloat-audit-colleges-for-civil-rights-instead/

Trump’s war on self-serving colleges and universities appears to be going well. Settlements from race and sex discrimination investigations have been reached with Columbia, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. However, one provision in these Resolution Agreements is a problem: the requirement that schools hire yet another bureaucrat on campus, often called a Title VI Coordinator. The idea comes from Title IX practice after Obama officials demanded that each school hire a Title IX coordinator to fight the phony sexual assault crisis. The idea was bad then, and it’s bad now.

For those unaware, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause ban discrimination based on race—the former applies in the private sector (so to private schools), while the latter applies to governmental action (so to public schools). Meanwhile, Title IX is the Congressional ban on sex discrimination in federally funded education, which is to say, most colleges and universities. Already, schools complete paperwork assuring the federal government that they comply with these civil rights laws. In fact, student loan money is conditioned on this paperwork, called the Program Participation Agreement or “PPA.”

While many Americans see race-based civil rights laws as protecting minorities, the laws are actually written broadly to protect all citizens. They ban discrimination “on the basis of race,” for example. So those protected also include citizens of European descent, or what are now called “whites” (though Irish and Italian Americans used to feel pretty different), as well as those of Jewish ancestry.

The President’s most high-profile Title VI investigations have been of Harvard and Columbia Universities, stemming from campus protests over Middle East conflicts. The protests targeted and threatened Jewish students, prompting Title VI complaints. When libraries and classrooms were taken over, educational access was compromised.

The Resolution Agreements are generally good news, as lawful, peaceful protests can continue provided Jewish students are not the target or intimidated by a hostile environment directed at them. Many of the agreements require schools to pay fines for past oversights and to be more vigilant about possible threats to educational access in the future.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/classroom-disorder-student-learning-schools-discipline

Since at least 2022, the education world has been preoccupied with the “teacher exodus”: a troubling trend of teachers quitting at record rates. Though attrition has eased somewhat since its pandemic peak, it remains stubbornly high. Deteriorating classroom conditions are a big reason. Teachers cite chronic student misbehavior as the top source of stress and burnout, ranking it above workload and even pay.

Longtime educator Ben Foley is one of many who found the situation unbearable. After more than two decades teaching middle school in California, he resigned midyear, worn down by classrooms that had descended into chaos. He described the daily environment as “anarchic,” with students routinely ignoring basic instructions, roaming the room, throwing things, and roughhousing. Foley likened the experience to “death by a thousand cuts,” explaining that “for every request I make, several kids flat-out defy it.”

Foley blamed the breakdown on lax discipline practices introduced under Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), a widely adopted framework for managing student behavior. In debates over weak school discipline, PBIS often escapes scrutiny, overshadowed by its more politically charged cousin, restorative justice. But PBIS is no less problematic; it simply masks its anti-punitive bias behind uncontroversial goals like improved data collection and clearer communication. It’s also far more widely used than restorative justice and has been a fixture in school discipline policy for decades—backed by a dedicated, taxpayer-funded center run by the U.S. Department of Education.

When I began asking teachers about PBIS, I heard no shortage of complaints. Educators described how it drove disruptive classrooms, undermined their authority, and made effective teaching nearly impossible. Yet when I spoke with PBIS trainers and reviewed official materials, the disconnect was striking: trainers insisted that the teacher accounts didn’t reflect the structured framework they endorsed. It quickly became clear that PBIS is complex and highly adaptable, with implementation varying widely from school to school. To understand how one discipline model can produce such divergent outcomes, we need to examine what PBIS is, where it came from, and how it rose to dominate school discipline in the United States.

PBIS is designed to promote positive student behavior—and, ideally, to reduce the negative kind. Trainers emphasize that PBIS is a management system, not an intervention. It doesn’t mandate specific behavior expectations or consequences for misconduct; instead, those decisions are left to each school’s discretion, with PBIS offering tools to manage and assess them. Still, the framework strongly encourages rewarding positive behavior over punishment, and newer versions take ever-firmer stances against punitive measures.

PBIS operates through a three-tiered system, with each tier offering increasingly targeted support for students struggling with behavior. Tier 1 is universal: school leaders set conduct expectations for all students. While full implementation includes all three tiers, many schools—and most PBIS studies—focus only on Tier 1, due to limited resources. Tier 2 provides extra support for students who don’t respond to the universal approach, using tools like regular staff check-ins. Tier 3 delivers individualized strategies for students with the most serious behavioral challenges. This layered model is also used in related frameworks like the Multi-Tiered System of Supports and Response to Intervention.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-admissions-data-memo-universities-race-discrimination

In a memorandum to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon last Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that for the first time, universities receiving federal financial assistance will be required to report data on applicants, admits, and enrollees by race to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The memorandum, entitled “Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions,” is the Trump administration’s latest and most comprehensive effort to enforce Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a 2023 Supreme Court decision that banned the use of racial preferences in university admissions. These data are expected to include students’ GPAs and standardized test scores, which will be pivotal to assess compliance with the ruling. Going forward, both the government and American families will be able to point to these data to show evidence of potential discrimination.

“It should not take years of legal proceedings, and millions of dollars in litigation fees, to elicit data from tax-payer funded institutions that identifies whether they are discriminating against hardworking American applicants,” said McMahon in a press release. “We will not allow institutions to blight the dreams of students by presuming that their skin color matters more than their hard work and accomplishments.”

Over the last two years, universities have gone above and beyond to evade the Court’s ruling. They’ve added racially coded essay prompts to their applications, eliminated standardized testing requirements, and incorporated racial proxies, such as whether a student comes from a single-parent household, as considerations in the admissions process.

Some institutions have been strikingly bold in their defiance. Take, for example, Johns Hopkins University, which in the 2023-2024 admissions cycle asked applicants to “tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc.) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual and how that influenced what you’d like to pursue in college at Hopkins.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/justice-department-letter-racial-discrimination-university-hiring

On July 29, the Department of Justice sent a letter to all federal grant recipients reaffirming a longstanding principle of American civil rights law: discrimination is unlawful. The nine-page memo, signed by Attorney General Pamela Bondi, lists several hiring practices that constitute illegal discrimination—many of them ubiquitous in higher education.

For years, I’ve reported on race-based hiring in academia. I’ve repeatedly found that American universities act with impunity. As a professor once told me, “every day, the universities wake up and break the law.” It’s not surprising, then, that universities have embraced virtually every practice that the DOJ deems illegal. That could mean serious consequences. The DOJ’s announcement offers “best practices” that will help institutions avoid “the revocation of federal grant funding.” If the department enforces its guidance, America’s institutions of higher education face a massive reckoning.

One practice that the DOJ lists as unlawful is “[p]referential treatment.” This occurs when an employer gives benefits to “individuals or groups based on protected characteristics in a way that disadvantages other qualified persons.” Any institution that “prioritizes candidates from ‘underrepresented groups’” violates the law.

https://lite.aol.com/news/story/0001/20250807/9fe070750d31879b24800032a013659d

Colleges will be required to submit data to prove they do not consider race in admissions under a new policy ordered Thursday by President Donald Trump.

In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against the use of affirmative action in admissions but said colleges may still consider how race has shaped students’ lives if applicants share that information in their admissions essays.

Trump is accusing colleges of using personal statements and other proxies to consider race, which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The role of race in admissions has featured in the Trump administration’s battle against some of the nation’s most elite colleges — viewed by Republicans as liberal hotbeds. For example, the new policy is similar to parts of recent settlement agreements the government negotiated with Brown University and Columbia University, restoring their federal research money. The universities agreed to give the government data on the race, grade point average and standardized test scores of applicants, admitted students and enrolled students. The schools also agreed to be audited by the government and to release admissions statistics to the public.

Trump says colleges may be skirting SCOTUS ruling

Conservatives have argued that despite the Supreme Court ruling, colleges have continued to consider race.

“The persistent lack of available data — paired with the rampant use of ‘diversity statements’ and other overt and hidden racial proxies — continues to raise concerns about whether race is actually used in admissions decisions in practice,” says the memorandum signed by Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/06/righting-our-sinking-educational-ship/

Public education in our country is struggling, and many proposed solutions are of no help whatsoever. First, too many people in the field are fixated on race. For example, many education schools partner with the Racial Justice in Early Math teaching fellowship, whose one-year program “helps kindergarten teachers better understand the intersection between racial justice and early math.”

Sung Yoon, who teaches kindergarten and first grade in Washington, participated in the program in 2023–2024. He said the fellowship changed his approach to teaching. Yoon reported that when he told friends and colleagues about the fellowship, a typical response was, “So you think math is racist?” He would clarify, “No, that’s not what this is about. It’s about how we teach math and dismantle the white supremacy that has been embedded since the dawn of time.”

On the other side of the country, New York City might elect a race-obsessed mayor in November. Currently a New York State Assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani has supported legislation to eliminate the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test—the only merit-based standard used to admit students to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, three of the top high schools in the country. These schools have graduation rates above 99% and college placement rates over 90%. Mamdani and his allies say they want to boost diversity, but replacing merit with subjectivity doesn’t fix inequality—it just lowers standards. The real problem isn’t admissions tests; it’s the K-8 schools’ failure to prepare students properly.

Mamdani has also co-authored a bill that allocates $8 million in taxpayer money to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) teacher hiring programs. These funds prioritize demographic quotas over merit. Meanwhile, New York’s teacher workforce is already diverse: a 2023 report showed that 42% of teachers identify as Black and 29% as Hispanic—figures that exceed those communities’ representation in the city’s overall population.

And then there are the money grubbers, and no one is better at this than Vermont’s socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. He has introduced legislation to address the “teacher pay crisis in America” and ensure that all public school teachers earn a “livable and competitive wage that is at least $60,000 a year and increases throughout their career.”

This is nonsense. Just Facts examined teacher pay data and found that, in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher in the U.S. earned $66,397 in salary and received an additional $34,090 in benefits, including health insurance, paid leave, and pensions, totaling $100,487 in overall compensation.