RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273835/harvards-insatiable-identity-politics-cannibals-michelle-malkin

I have no love for left-wing, Hillary-promoting Hollywood producer and accused #MeToo villain Harvey Weinstein. Nor am I a fan of those who perpetrated the cop-bashing “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” fiction involving social justice martyr Michael Brown. But I do strongly believe that a grave injustice has been committed by Harvard’s witch-hunt mobsters against a law professor who joined Weinstein’s legal team and had represented Brown’s family in a civil suit against Ferguson, Missouri.

Too bad Ivy League elitist bubbles have purged themselves of people with the backbone, integrity, and courage to end the madness.

Ronald Sullivan, faculty dean of the undergraduate dorm Winthrop House, was terminated from the honored position after hysterical student protesters condemned his decision to take on Weinstein’s case as “trauma-inducing.” Protests, sit-ins, temper tantrums, an online Change.org petition and even litigation by offended female students created pressure on the university for months. The administration sought to appease the mob with a “climate review,” no doubt hoping to quell the rebellion against Sullivan as the school year came to a close. No dice. Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana announced over the weekend that both Sullivan and his wife, Stephanie Robinson, co-faculty dean at Winthrop House, will be removed on June 30.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/a-typical-high-school-tells-a-larger-story-schools-are-now-dominated-by-the-feminist-agenda/

Recently, my wife Janice posted a video in her Fiamengo File series about an Ottawa school, Brookfield High, that had launched a ManUp campaign, complete with posters targeting males as prone to evil and females as innocent victims. “Judging from the displays,” she states, “Brookfield High goes out of its way to make girls feel welcome through positive messaging; boys, in contrast, are set apart to be lectured and shamed about male evil.”

The poster reads When you stand back and watch evil, you’re standing by it, “strongly reinforces the grim mood…The clear implication is that this boy…WILL encounter ‘evil’ at his school—not amidst the slutty girls who tempt him…but amidst the other boys who will supposedly do bad things to girls and condone violence.” The only way to be good, she summarizes, is for boys and men “to deny their own needs and to accept that their sex is uniquely responsible for evil. What a warped message for this school—and many others like it.”

https://www.city-journal.org/college-boards-sat-adversity-score

For decades, the College Board defended the SAT, which it writes and administers, against charges that the test gives an unfair advantage to middle-class white students. No longer. Under relentless pressure from the racial-preferences lobby, the Board has now caved to the anti-meritocratic ideology of “diversity.” The Board will calculate for each SAT-taker an “adversity score” that purports to measure a student’s socioeconomic position, according to the Wall Street Journal. Colleges can use this adversity index to boost the admissions ranking of allegedly disadvantaged students who otherwise would score too poorly to be considered for admission.

Advocates of this change claim that it is not about race. That is a fiction. In fact, the SAT adversity score is simply the latest response on the part of mainstream institutions to the seeming intractability of the racial academic-achievement gap. If that gap did not exist, the entire discourse about “diversity” would evaporate overnight. The average white score on the SAT (1,123 out of a possible 1,600) is 177 points higher than the average black score (946), approximately a standard deviation of difference. This gap has persisted for decades. It is not explained by socioeconomic disparities. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 1998 that white students from households with incomes of $10,000 or less score better on the SAT than black students from households with incomes of $80,000 to $100,000. In 2015, students with family incomes of $20,000 or less (a category that includes all racial groups) scored higher on average on the math SAT than the average math score of black students from all income levels. The University of California has calculated that race predicts SAT scores better than class.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273760/against-practical-knowledge-jack-kerwick

Given the mess that is today’s politicized college campus, students have even more reason to wonder, as they so often have wondered, why it is that they are being made to enroll in courses that at least appear to be devoid of all “practical” value. Why should a mathematics major have to spend a semester enrolled in courses studying philosophers and poets?

This is not an unreasonable question. Nor should we expect for students to think otherwise given our culture’s emphatic, indeed, dogmatic, insistence that the only type of knowledge worth having is “practical” knowledge, i.e. knowledge that regularly lends itself to uses from which one can expect substantive (typically monetary) dividends.

Nevertheless, just a moment’s reflection on daily life readily puts the lie to the conventional wisdom that “useless” knowledge isn’t worth possessing, for such awareness reveals that it is wholly inaccurate to describe much of what human beings value, and what they value most, as “practical.”

Whether it is love, compassion, honor, or honesty, it would be a gross injustice to characterize the worth of these virtues in terms of their “practical” value. The relationship between friends, say, is not a mutually advantageous transaction, a “practical” arrangement that serves the interests of both parties. And millions of human beings don’t spend endless hours on social media perusing the posts of “friends,” followers, and strangers alike because they think that the knowledge that they’re deriving from doing so is going to serve a “practical” purpose.

One resolutely non-practical, “useless” activity in which people tend to relish (even if they aren’t always so good at it) is that of conversation. This undeniable fact about the human situation supplies faculty with an answer to this common inquiry among students: A classical liberal arts education is necessary because in being exposed to a variety of disciplines, students are becoming conversant with the several voices that compose the civilization to which they belong.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273779/stossel-video-academic-hoax-frontpagemagcom

In his new video, John Stossel focuses on Academic Hoax, unveiling how three people conducted what they call a ‘grievance studies’ experiment. They wrote fake papers on ridiculous subjects and submitted them to prominent academic journals in fields that study gender, race, and sexuality. Don’t miss it!

https://nypost.com/2019/05/18/harvard-is-failing-its-students-by-allowing-them-to-live-in-a-fantasy-world/

There is a reason you don’t let inmates run your asylum, allow your toddler to eat candy for dinner or tell the Labrador retriever sitting behind the wheel of your car, “OK, Duke, I guess you drive.” Those who are, mentally speaking, a few slices short of a loaf don’t get to make grown-up-people decisions. This brings me to Harvard undergraduates.

In the softest and most spoiled generation of humanity ever to exist (they feel threatened by Halloween costumes and the existence of Ben Shapiro; their forebears endured World War II and Vietnam and even riding bikes without helmets), the softest and most spoiled corner must be the Harvard student body, those little princelings and princesslings who have more expectations about how the world should accommodate their whims than Louis XIV. Last week, a handful of these toddler-brained undergrads got a distinguished Harvard dean fired for doing his job.

That dean, Ronald Sullivan, holds an outside job. He is something called a “lawyer.” Lawyers, as everyone but screaming Harvard kids knows, are a vital element of the justice system. In Professor Sullivan’s case, he is a defense lawyer, meaning he defends people who will sometimes turn out to be guilty. Sullivan’s past clients include the family of Michael Brown, on whose behalf he brought suit against Ferguson, Mo.; and Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end who committed suicide in 2017 while serving a life sentence for murder.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-and-unimproved-sat-11558048986

News of affluent parents scamming to get their kids into top universities has again stoked complaints that college admissions are rigged. To level the socioeconomic field, the College Board now plans to assign students an “adversity score” on their SAT admissions tests. This demographic handicap may instead fuel more public cynicism and harm middle-income kids.

The College Board’s new adversity score will include 15 variables such as a student’s neighborhood crime rate, housing values and poverty. These variables will feed into an algorithm with weights assigned to each variable. Out will pop a score that students won’t be able to see or challenge before it goes to colleges.

Some schools have been seeking ways to quantify student socioeconomic challenges, and the adversity score would be superior to the blatant use of race. It could also help them compare similarly situated students. High-performing low- and middle-income students could likewise benefit from being compared to peers with similar means.

Yet the new score will make college admissions even less transparent. Notably, the variables that go into the score will be based on census and proprietary College Board data. So the scores won’t take into account individual circumstances and character, which is supposed to be the purpose of “holistic” admission assessments.