RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cowardice-and-courage-at-middlebury-11555714489

Students at Middlebury College gave the school’s administrators a lesson this week in the difference between cowardice and courage when dealing with a controversial speaker.

Recall how in March 2017 protesters at the private Vermont liberal-arts college shut down a speech by Charles Murray, injuring professor Allison Stanger in the process. Partially in response to that fiasco, Middlebury’s political science department founded the Alexander Hamilton Forum, which promotes free speech. The forum planned to host a speech this week by Ryszard Legutko, a Polish member of the European Parliament.

Mr. Legutko has criticized multiculturalism and gay marriage and, following the usual pattern, some students launched a petition claiming he “has built his career off of homophobic, xenophobic, racist, misogynistic discourse.” They called for the political science department and Middlebury’s Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs to rescind co-sponsorship of the speech. They also planned to demonstrate.

But there was an unusual footnote to the protest. On a Facebook page to plan the demonstration, student organizer Taite Shomo wrote: “It is absolutely, unequivocally not the intent of this protest and those participating in this protest to prevent Legutko from speaking. Disruptive behavior of this nature will not be tolerated.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273523/high-school-students-assigned-tabulate-privilege-sara-dogan

Parents in the community of Saratoga Springs, New York are up in arms after a shocking assignment that asked students to tabulate their “privilege” by adding or subtracting points for their race, gender, religion, appearance, disability status, and other factors was given to students at a public high school.

The “Privilege Reflection Forms” were given to students in a business class at Saratoga Springs High School, apparently with the approval of school administrators who considered it a useful tool to enlighten students on their relative status in society. According to the worksheet provided, students were told to calculate how privileged they are by adding or subtracting sums for possessing different attributes.

For instance, Caucasian students completing the form are directed to add 25 points for being white, whereas African-American students are told to subtract 100 points for being black. Males are told to add 25 points whereas females are told to subtract 50 points. Nor does the lesson stop there. Straight students are told to add 20 points for the privilege they derive from that status, while gay students are told to subtract 150 points. And if a student identifies as transgender, they are supposed to deduct a whopping 500 points.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/extremely_nondisruptive_middlebury_college_students_disrupt_freespeech_speaker_.html

Ironically, the speaker they shut down really did risk his life in a communist country in the name of free speech.

On March 2, 2017, Vermont’s elite Middlebury College made national news when some of its students barred writer Charles Murray from speaking, because of a book (The Bell Curve) he’d written 23 years earlier. It was bad for public relations, and in response, the college initiated a new program in its political science department, “The Alexander Hamilton Forum” intended “to engage scholars and thinkers with diverse points of view, including points of view that are uncommon at elite colleges.”

On April 17, 2019, Middlebury College was compelled to cancel one of The Alexander Hamilton Forum’s premier events. This time, leftist opposition was directed at Polish author and politician Ryszard Legutko, and focused on his alleged “homophobic” comments from 2011 (though Legutko had been invited to address intolerance by the Left in liberal democracies, not homosexuality).

On the Middlebury protesters’ Facebook events page, remarks such as this were postedL “Ryszard Legutko is a f*cking homophobe (and racist and sexist),” the protest is advertised as “EXTREMELY NON-DISRUPTIVE.” Yet within minutes of the cancellation, those who silenced Legutko disingenuously posted: “We are reiterating that it was never our intention to shut this event down, nor prevent the speaker from speaking.” In an interview with local media, “Jason Duquette-Hoffman, assistant director of the Center for Community Engagement at Middlebury College, agreed. “I think [protesters] were very clear that that was not their intent….’ ”

https://quillette.com/2019/04/16/a-college-president-makes-a-stand-for-academic-freedom/

At Quillette we hope David Yager’s moral leadership becomes a turning point in the defence of free thought. We raise our glasses to him and to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.

What happens when university students call on authority figures to censor students or staff at institutions of higher education? At Yale such students have been awarded prizes, at the University of Missouri they’ve been successful in forcing administrators to resign, at Claremont they were able to force their president to implement a long list of demands, and at Evergreen State College a throng of students were allowed to take control of the campus while harassed faculty sought refuge off-campus. At other colleges around America, and even on campuses in the U.K., Canada and Australia, university administrators have met illiberal student mobs with a parade of mealy-mouthed platitudes and prostrations. This pattern of weakness has been dismaying for all people who value academic freedom and open inquiry. This week, however, a line has been drawn by David Yager, President of Philadelphia’s University of Arts (UArts). In response to students calling for the censorship of Camille Paglia—one of the most admired humanities scholars in the world—he articulated a full-throated defence of intellectual freedom, showing administrators of supposedly superior universities what real leadership looks like.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/16/why-are-women-under-represented-in-physics/

Six months ago CERN hosted a workshop on “High Energy Theory and Gender.” Nearly all the contributors to this and previous workshops on the same topic endorsed the view that gender imbalances in physics, particularly in the higher echelons, are predominantly due to sexual discrimination. The following phrases appeared in the presentations: “men mobilize their masculinity supporting…men in ways that advance careers,” “evaluators tend to favor men,” “scientific quality is a gender social construction,” “practically all women share the same kind of sad and unfair experiences since the beginning of their scientific career,” and physics is an “oppressive ambient.” One attendee claimed that only the military has a higher rate of sexual harassment, although she didn’t say which country’s armed forces she was thinking of.

In an attempt to go beyond mere anecdotes and measure the amount of discrimination, I did a bibliometric analysis using a public database of publications, references, authors and hiring decisions in fundamental physics world-wide over the past 50 years. CERN maintains this database, but nobody had used it for this purpose before. Certainly, none of the hosts of the “High Energy Theory and Gender” workshop had used it to test their claims.

The results that came out of this study did not fit the discrimination narrative.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/campus-free-speech-turning-point-university-of-arizona/

Amid the weekly cavalcade of campus horrors, it’s easy to miss a story that will mark a major turning point in the campus free-speech crisis, whether for good or ill. The growing confrontation at the University of Arizona over students who disrupted a Career Day presentation by Border Patrol agents is not your run-of-the-mill campus outrage. Instead it’s that rare case where student disruptors are facing real consequences for their actions. This is in significant part because of a new Arizona law strengthening discipline for such disruptions. If the university holds fast and the disruptors pay a price for silencing others, the move will carry national implications. Yet if the growing rebellion by anti-free-speech students and faculty at UA gets its way, the university will back down, the border patrol will be permanently barred from campus, and the university president could lose his job. That would be a disaster for free speech, and would mark a new and dangerous turn in America’s campus crisis.

Before taking the measure of the stakes in this battle, we’ve got to review the precipitating incident.

On March 19, a UA student named Denisse Moreno Melchor noticed a pair of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the school. “I was like, ‘Get out,’ and started chanting and disrupting that space until they left,” she told the school paper the next day. The March 19 event that Melchor had — in her own words — disrupted, was a Career Day presentation being given by two border-patrol agents to the school’s Criminal Justice Association. You can see from videos originally taken by Melchor and reposted here that a she is hurling insults at the officers through a door, continuously calling them “murderers,” the “murder patrol,” and an “extension of the KKK.” As the officers are distracted by the chanting, some of the students in attendance move toward the door to help secure the scene.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/our_expensive_manipulated_public_high_schools.html

The idea of spending one’s way out of educational problems did not begin with New York’s recently appointed chancellor, Richard Carranza. It can be traced to Jonathan Kozol, whose first bestseller on education came out in the 1960s. Kozol was an educational reformer who emerged as a critic of education after he spent less than a painful year teaching 4th grade in the Boston public schools. As Kozol matured as an educational reformer, he shifted away from harping on the racism of the white teachers, as he did in his first book, Death at an Early Age.

A later book, Savage Inequalities, advanced a different view. Under this view, the new reformers propose to make teachers and principals accountable by ending tenure (tenure has been weakened but is still in place in New York City) and inspired reforms such as implementing new ways of rating teachers (Danielson rating system) and implementing the small high school movement. The last initiative was undertaken by Deborah Meier and then driven by the Coalition for Essential Schools and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Teacher unions got on board with the idea that inner-city schools fail not because of the racism of the teachers, the premise of Kozol’s first book, but because they have less money to spend than more successful suburban schools.

Students at New York’s Barnard College and Columbia University play-acted last week as residents of Ferguson, Mo., chanting about police racism and brutality. I hope they had fun: They got six Barnard security officers, who did nothing wrong, placed on administrative leave pending investigation.

Columbia senior Alexander McNab, who is black, entered Barnard late Thursday night, according to a report in the Columbia Daily Spectator. Barnard is a women’s college affiliated with Columbia, whose students are required to show ID to enter the closed campus after 11 p.m. Mr. McNab refused. He strode past security and ignored them on the winding path to the university’s crowded Milstein Center, where five officers cornered him as other students recorded soon-to-be-viral videos. At first, the videos showed, officers held Mr. McNab by the arms. After he protested loudly, two of them lightly pinned him to a cafe counter. He screamed: “Take your hands off me!” The officers released Mr. McNab after 20 seconds, at which point he finally showed his student ID. An officer verified it, and the confrontation ended.

The officers were white and the student was black—and that was enough to cue the Ferguson script. On Friday the Barnard student-government executive board issued a statement: “This incident reflects systemic racism and police brutality against Black people throughout our nation.” Protesters took to campus to chant: “No justice, no peace / F— these racist police!”

https://quillette.com/2019/04/14/the-problems-with-americas-best-teacher

A question central to Plato’s Republic is “What should we teach our children?” Judging from the parents I’ve talked to, this question is not getting the consideration it deserves. Parroting a common conservative refrain regarding what some believe schools teach, a colleague referred to them as “liberal-producing factories.” Thankfully, that’s not quite the case. While the teaching profession as a whole leans left, most educators are aware of their bias and, with varying degrees of success, try to push against it. Unfortunately, this is not true of the programs that train the nation’s school staff.

I received a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the premier schools of education in the country, occasionally nudging out Columbia and Harvard for the top spot in U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of education programs. In reality, it was a series of graduate courses that featured various arts and crafts projects.

To their credit, the faculty seek to ameliorate legitimate and pressing concerns that our schools face: racial disparities, stagnant scores that are falling behind other countries, defective spending structures, high teacher turnover, and a host of other problems. However, they promote a philosophy of education that is effective at exposing these problems but impotent to solve them. The root issue is that the three elements of a progressive worldview I discuss here—restorative justice, contemporary literary theory, and an antipathy to intellectual diversity—result in an education that questions all systems but fails to offer students a coherent alternative.