RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2019/07/12/us_universities_dangerous_lack_of_foreign_gift_transparency.html

Rachelle Peterson is the Policy Director for the National Association of Scholars.

Last month the Department of Education revealed it is investigating two universities, Georgetown and Texas A&M, for potential violations of foreign gift transparency laws. Federal law requires colleges and universities to disclose gifts totaling $250,000 from a single foreign source in a calendar year, but Georgetown and Texas A&M’s past filings “may not fully capture” their foreign receipts, the Department said in letters to the two institutions.

Both universities must now turn over documents regarding their gifts from Qatar and from two Chinese tech firms suspected of espionage, Huawei and ZTE. Since 2012, Georgetown has disclosed receiving $350 million from Qatar and Texas A&M $274 million. Neither has disclosed any gifts from Huawei or ZTE. Georgetown is also being asked to disclose gifts from Saudi Arabia and from Russia, including from cybersecurity company Kapersky Lab. In its original disclosure filings, it reported $6 million from Saudi Arabia and none from any source in Russia.

For years, colleges have been collecting foreign gifts—some with alarming strings attached—without bothering to follow federal law. My organization, the National Association of Scholars, helped blow the whistle on these violations in our 2017 report on Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes, which offer a unilaterally pro-China outlook and suppress academic freedom. Many Confucius Institutes brought in major donations to their host universities that never reported those gifts. In a separate report, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that 70% of colleges whose Confucius Institutes cleared the $250,000-per-year disclosure threshold failed to report those gifts in accordance with the law.

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

Many bar and dorm room conversations probably have centered on what colleges would look like if SAT scores were the sole criteria for admission. People have had their suspicions and cite anecdotal observations but now Georgetown University has quantitatively answered the question as least as far as elite universities go.

Anyone with a passing awareness of today’s college admission policies knows that the student makeup would change if academics were the sole criteria. How much they would change is the question. As to whether using just SAT scores — i.e. academic performance — is good or bad is another matter.

Back to the Georgetown report.

It claims the percentage of blacks and Hispanics would fall sharply from 19 percent to 11 percent. The whites student population would rise from 66 percent to 77 percent.  And surprisingly, Asian students would fall from 11 percent to 10 percent. The study goes on to say that many of the whites in these select college would lose their seats to other better qualified white students.  

 In other words, the student mix would change noticeably.

There are a number of reasons why higher academically performing students lose seats to others. There are legacy admissions and sport scholarships. Both these skew the college population downward on the academic scale especially when it comes to big money-making sports like football and basketball. However, the greatest factor is a commitment to racial diversity. College administrators will literally go to any length the prove they are ‘woke.’

Zero Hedge noted that black and Latino college enrolment is almost twice what it would be based on “merit” alone. And this is before the College Board introduces its so-called “adversity score,” which is specifically designed to increase the minority presence in universities, to accompany a student’s SAT result.

https://www.israpundit.org/why-is-there-so-much-saudi-money-in-american-universities/

One spring afternoon last year, protesters gathered on a sidewalk alongside a busy street in Cambridge, Mass. City buses rolled past. Car horns sounded. A few pedestrians paused briefly before continuing on their way. The location was 77 Massachusetts Avenue, in front of a limestone-and-concrete edifice that serves as the gateway into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The building’s lobby leads to a long hallway known as the Infinite Corridor and into the heart of one of America’s most vaunted academic institutions.

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, would be visiting the next day. The protesters, a mix of students and local peace activists, wanted his invitation revoked. They were opposed to the prince being welcomed as an honored dignitary and were calling attention to the Saudi state’s financial ties to M.I.T. — and to at least 62 other American universities — at a time when the regime’s bombing of civilians in a war in neighboring Yemen and its crackdown on domestic dissidents were being condemned by human rights activists.

Prince Mohammed, who is 33, became Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader in 2017, when he was named crown prince by his ailing father, King Salman. He was in the midst of an American tour and had already been to the White House to meet President Trump, who said, as they sat together in the Oval Office, that they had become “very good friends over a fairly short period of time.” The president thanked the prince for what he said was the kingdom’s order of billions of dollars of American-made military hardware. “That’s peanuts to you,” he quipped.

From Cambridge, Prince Mohammed’s travels would take him to California, where he rented the entire 285-room Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills and was the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by Rupert Murdoch and attended by numerous entertainment-industry grandees. In Silicon Valley, he met with Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, and other tech executives; in Seattle, he met with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief executive. Saudi Arabia was already an investor in Uber through its sovereign wealth fund, which is controlled by the crown prince, and Prince Mohammed was negotiating to buy a stake in Endeavor, the Hollywood conglomerate that includes the WME talent agency and the Ultimate Fighting Championship business.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/08/using-u-s-qatari-funding-duke-university-teaches-k-12-teachers-biased-info-islam/

Documents shed light on the workings of Duke University’s unique influence operation targeting the U.S school system with funds from a global terrorism supporter.

By accepting more than $111,000 from Qatar Foundation International to provide U.S. teachers anti-Israel training, Duke University is abusing its status as one of only 14 Middle East National Resource Centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education to provide guidance on curriculum materials and teacher training for K-12 Middle East studies.

From June 30 to July 5 on the Duke campus this year, “Dimensions of the Middle East” was an immersion program for grades 6-12 U.S. educators. Presented by the Duke Islamic Studies Center, Duke University Middle East Studies Center, and Qatar Foundation International, the institute trains 40 teachers who are hand-selected by QFI, according to a Duke University spokesman.

Qatar Foundation International (QFI), based in Washington, DC, is a subsidiary of the Qatar Foundation (QF), with direct ties to the Sharia-law government of Qatar. While QFI cuts a moderate, even scholarly image in public, its parent QF has been tied to supporting terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood. QFI partners with other elite universities for student outreach, but will resort to lawsuits to keep the financial details of these programs secret once the public begins to ask questions.

Documents received by the Haym Salomon Center shed light on the workings of Duke University’s unique influence operation targeting the U.S school system.

https://www.city-journal.org/richard-carranza-racial-bias

Speaking at a recent middle school graduation, New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said, “We’re going to move the agenda to serve our students, and people that have been very comfortable for a very long time doing absolutely nothing for the children that they’re supposed to serve are going to feel uncomfortable.” Talk like this is cheap, and Carranza’s approach—mandatory anti-bias training and charges that the opposition is racist—is deflection. He’s covering up his lack of a programmatic approach to school improvement and the mayor’s abandonment of any meaningful school accountability. 

Quality is distributed inequitably within New York’s school system, but not because of deep-seated racial bias among employees. Rather, it is the outcome of specific policies and programs that could be changed if the political will existed to do so. For 40 years, each of Carranza’s predecessors pursued policies that they believed would improve educational outcomes for the city’s low-income minority children. Some were successful, others less so, but all were dedicated to educational equity. Carranza speaks constantly of his experience as a minority, as though he were the first to hold the chancellor’s job in New York—but two-thirds of his predecessors dating back to 1978 were minorities, too.

Carranza does differ from them in one significant way: he has yet to articulate an approach to identifying the policies and people that stand in the way of meaningful school improvement. A generation ago, then-mayor Ed Koch’s first chancellor, Frank Macchiarola, centered his efforts around affirmations that “all children can learn,” and that “it is the responsibility of the public-school system to promote learning and equality for all children.” These statements, made in 1978, stood in direct conflict with the consensus among policymakers and social scientists that schools have little effect on student outcomes, relative to a student’s family background. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-education-horror-show-11562532467

The National Education Association held its annual convention this past weekend, and the Democratic presidential candidates made their pilgrimage to promise the teachers union more money—and even more money. One word we didn’t hear on stage was “Providence,” as in the Rhode Island capital city whose public schools were recently exposed as a horror show of government and union neglect.

Peeling lead paint, brown water, leaking sewage pipes, broken asbestos tiles, rodents, frigid and chaotic classrooms, and student failure were all documented in a 93-page review by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. The review was conducted in May at the request of the Rhode Island education commissioner, and it deserves attention nationwide as an example of government failure.

“Very little visible student learning was going on in the majority of classrooms and schools we visited—most especially in the middle and high schools,” the report says. “Our review teams encountered many teachers and students who do not feel safe in school. There is widespread agreement that bullying, demeaning, and even physical violence are occurring within the school walls at very high levels.”

No surprise, then, that only 5% of Providence eighth graders on average scored proficient in math in the 2015 through 2017 school years. That compares to 21.3% in Newark, N.J., where students have similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Low-income students in Worcester, Mass., not far away, were twice as proficient as those in Providence.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/05/a_delusive_assurance_that_all_is_well_on_campus_140713.html

For many decades, defenders of liberal education — not only conservatives — have been warning the public about colleges’ and universities’ hostility to free speech. If the warnings are unsound, why has controversy persisted? If they are sound, why hasn’t the problem been corrected?

One tranquilizing possibility explains away the problem: Malcontents there will always be. The boundaries of free speech are inherently uncertain and always fluctuating. Free speech, and debate about free speech’s limits, are welcome on campus. Controversy only persists because of outside agitators ignorant of university culture and determined to extract partisan advantage by misrepresenting campus life to a polarized public.

But the persistence of the criticism is also consistent with an alarming possibility: Universities’ determination to regulate speech and curtail dissent is entrenched on campus; unfree speech is entwined with the structure of university governance; and censorship, both open and covert, serves the interests of the huge and self-reproducing progressive majorities that dominate university administration and the professoriate. Consequently, higher education is exceedingly resistant to reform.

The question is of special concern because all of our other freedoms are bound up with free speech, which enables us to contribute to and learn from public debate, hold officials accountable, and associate with others to advance our private interests and the public good. The security and vigor of free speech depends in turn on the lessons about liberty of thought and discussion taught — both in the classroom and through the norms and rules that constitute the educational enterprise — by our schools, not least institutions of higher education.

The president of Columbia University says not to worry, all is well. In last month’s Atlantic, in an article headlined “Free Speech on Campus Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You,” Lee Bollinger asserts that First Amendment norms are evolving as they have throughout American history. And he offers his assurance, as a free speech scholar as well as a university president, that higher education is standing fast in its commitment to present both sides of the argument. “At Columbia and at thousands of other schools across the United States,” he writes, “controversial ideas are routinely expressed by speakers on both the left and the right, and have been for decades.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/intellectual-dark-web-quiet-revolution/

A group of mostly young writers challenge the Left’s excesses.

The dominant assumption in conservative circles is that college campuses are left-wing echo chambers with little room for dissenting opinion. But this assumption misses a host of previously apolitical or liberal college students who are voluntarily seeking out conservative thought as an alternative to the contemporary liberal-arts curriculum.

The leading figures of this movement, known colloquially as the Intellectual Dark Web, are a loose assortment of young intellectuals who have gained notoriety for articulating opposition to some aspect of what they see as the porous narratives of identity politics, The IDW has become an industry of sorts — Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan are wildly popular — and it is leading something of a quiet grassroots insurgency against campus intelligentsia throughout America. As a collective, the IDW provides college students with an alternative to the intersectional narrative that is the foundation of the contemporary progressive belief system. Identity politics is not gospel, they say, and it is not mandatory to accept its premises as unquestionable truth. To be sure, so far there is no readily available evidence that demonstrates the ubiquity of this movement, but the explosive popularity of many IDW members — particularly among young people — makes it difficult to conclude that their influence is not significant.

At first glance, it may be difficult to identify any uniform ideological trait they all share. The IDW contains religious conservatives and liberal atheists alike; its diverse cohort includes traditionalists, rationalist liberals, gay comedians, libertarian potheads, and others. Jonah Goldberg wrote last year that members of the IDW are unified only by their objection to the corrosive dogmas of trendy discourse and by the fact that they have all provoked the ire of those who espouse them.

Yet this new class of intellectuals serves for many as the new gatekeeper to the Right. Through them, many college students — myself included — have found their way to Edmund Burke. And to the convert whose access to the conservative tradition came through this cohort of thinkers, it is no coincidence that, despite the variety of political beliefs espoused by individual members of the IDW, they often lead many of their followers to a more traditionalist conservatism.