RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dismantling-leftist-indoctrination-on-campus

Americans rightly see former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as an intellectual lightweight who ascended to her position because academia now values identity over merit. Gay was the avatar for the governing ideology of American higher education. Until Gay’s downfall began with the now-infamous congressional hearing in December 2023, campus diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) commissars saw their positions as morally and administratively unassailable. Even after her ouster, Gay’s colleagues have every right to feel secure in their posts. Sure, Americans, acting through their elected representatives, can exert enough pressure to get Harvard’s president replaced. But with so many anti-Semitic ideologues inside and outside DEI bureaucracies, whacking a mole or two won’t make a systemic difference, right?

Wrong. Americans can decide in 2024 whether to allow our universities to remain structurally anti-Semitic. Consider the case of Middlebury College. Last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that shortly after Hamas murdered more than 1,000 Israelis, raped an untold number of women, and beheaded babies on October 7, 2023, Jewish students at Middlebury asked the college to host a vigil for the victims. Shockingly, Middlebury refused to permit the students to hold the event in the campus chapel, refused to provide police protection, asked them not to display Israeli flags, and insisted that they not identify the victims as Jewish. All in the name of “inclusivity.” (The vigil ended up being held outside.)

Shortly thereafter, Middlebury provided access to the chapel and police protection for an event titled, “Vigil for Palestine.” It began with a sectarian Islamic prayer and featured remarks from Middlebury’s vice president of equity and inclusion, Khuram Hussain, who conveniently did not attend the Jewish vigil. The director of StandWithUs’s Center for Legal Justice, the legal arm of the well-known Jewish advocacy organization, told the Free Beacon that “the Middlebury administration seems to think they’re off the radar and can get away with the disparate treatment of Jewish students because everyone is focused on Harvard.” The center filed a federal Title VI civil rights complaint, arguing that “there’s not just a hostile environment for Jewish students; the administration also seems to be directly complicit.”

THE $20 MILLION COST OF DEI AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.
Last week we launched our investigation highlighting that the University of Virginia – a public institution funded by the taxpayers – was sinking $20 MILLION every year to pay 235 staffers in roles related to far-left Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) philosophy.

(DEI is a race-essentialist, neo-Marxist world view that creates division based on skin color, perceived privilege, gender identity and an oppressed-oppressor model).

Those millions went to professors, administrators and student employees – 235 of them – in overlapping departments. Aside from the official DEI Department, there’s an Equity Center, an office for Multicultural Student Services, and plenty more.

Our investigation spread like wildfire. Elon Musk tweeted “wow” replying to our findings. The U.S. House subcommittee on Higher Education and the Workforce Development cited it.

Additional coverage included:

Jesse Waters’ Primetime and The Ingraham Angle at Fox News Channel (2 million viewers each)
nightly news segments and my five minute interview aired on the 200 ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox local affiliates of Sinclair Broadcast Group (1.4 million viewers)
my interview at Newt Gingrich podcast; Men’s Journal Everyday Warrior Podcast
my interviews on local Virginia talk radio in Charlottesville and across the state
Washington Examiner; Washington Times; Instapundit; Real Clear Politics; The Federalist; American Thinker; and many more.
Our story led coverage across the nation and aired on FOX News Radio Rundown with Tomi Lahren, a comprehensive story at the Daily Mail, and on the editorial page of The New York Post.

Thursday, Washington Examiner investigative journalist Gabe Kaminsky published a stunning follow-up.

Just days after October 7, UVA Professor Tessa Farmer offered students extra credit to attend an event hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine.

(A group that had openly cheered the vicious attacks, and its chapter at Columbia University was eventually suspended for threatening rhetoric).

READ: U of Virginia DEI Staff Privately Downplayed Professor’s Pro-Hamas Rally Extra Credit Offer.

Kaminsky published the emails from DEI staffers. What did students and taxpayers receive for our $20 MILLION annual investment into their payroll?

Confusion about how to respond. An obvious lack of moral clarity. Not one of the DEI staffers lamented promoting an event from a radical group.

I sat with Gabe this week to discuss the waste of tax dollars that’s been sunk into this mess – for which students and taxpayers deserve some answers and recourse.

VIDEO: THE COST OF DEI AT UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA WITH INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST GABE KAMINSKY

Virginia is for Lovers is the popular state tourism catchphrase – but on campus, the university seems to be for conflict and division.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/columbia-university-professor-jeffrey-sachs-u-s-is-complicit-in-israeli-genocide-in-gaza/

Columbia University’s Director of the Center for Sustainable Development said Sunday that U.S. support for Israel makes America complicit in genocide.

Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia professor and Harvard-educated climate activist, joined Al Jazeera‘s “The Bottom Line” this weekend to discuss Hamas’s war on Israel, which he said could end if the United States stopped supplying munitions to its longtime ally.

“Of course, what the government of Israel doing, is unconscionable. World opinion is united against Israel,” Sachs said. “The problem is the United States remains complicit in these war crimes because it’s traditional in U.S. politics that politicians show no space between the United States and Israel.”

“It is, I think quite likely, that the International Court of Justice is going to find that Israel is in violation of the genocide convention. And does the United States want to be complicit in genocide?” he added. “This is a pretty straightforward question.”

Sachs called Israel’s campaign in Gaza “absolutely inhumane,” and blasted Israeli Defense Forces for destroying universities, mosques, and hospitals — civilian hideouts Hamas terrorists are known to take cover in. Nations should also resume and increase funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), a Palestinian aid agency that houses thousands of Hamas affiliates, Sachs added.

“UNRWA does heroic work in a war zone,” he said. “And it has lost a huge number of staff to this war. Israel targets the United Nations. Israel uses the United Nations as its punching bag, and UNRWA has taken the brunt of this.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/14/teacher-pay-half-truths-and-reality/

Benjamin Franklin once famously quipped, “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” Today, however, we can alter that to “death, taxes, and a slew of myths about teacher pay.”

Leading the half-truth brigade, on March 4, a headline in My eLearning World read, “New Teachers Are Earning 20% Less Than They Were 20 Years Ago.” The piece informs us that if starting salaries for new teachers had kept pace with inflation over the last 20 years, a teacher just starting out would currently be making $53,303 per year. Instead, using data from the National Education Association, the website asserts that the average annual income for a new teacher is $42,844.

The California School Boards Association laments that California teachers make more than the national average but less than a living wage.

A National Center for Educational Statistics table shows that, using constant dollars, the average teacher salary in 2022 was $66,397, compared to $72,050 in 2010.

However, the above assertions are essentially meaningless when assessing what teachers really make. As Just Facts notes, in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher in the U.S. made $66,397 in salary but received another $34,090 in benefits (such as health insurance, paid leave, and pensions) for a total compensation of $100,487.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/columbia-professor-who-spoke-out-against-antisemitism-on-campus-now-under-investigation-by-administration/?utm_

Shai Davidai, an associate professor of business at Columbia University who has become a leading voice against antisemitism on college campuses, is the target of a university investigation that he believes is politically motivated, he told National Review Friday.

“I received a letter from the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action several weeks ago, first informing me that there is an investigation,” Davidai said. “Then, later, my legal counsel identified a few glaring holes and omissions in that letter, so they responded. When I received the more detailed letter with more specifics about what is being investigated, it became clear that the entire investigation is about my advocacy on social media.”

Davidai told NR that the university gave him a list of specific social-media posts on specific dates that prompted the investigation, all of which he said were about “student organizations that support Hamas and support the Houthis and that are using antisemitic chants in unauthorized protests.”

He first spoke publicly about the investigation in a Friday morning post on X, writing that it “is a clear act of retaliation and an attempt to silence” him. In the written statement he shared, Davidai wrote that “Jewish students at Columbia have been locking themselves in their dorm rooms to avoid being assaulted.”

https://nypost.com/2024/03/06/opinion/critical-race-theory-is-the-new-segregation-across-schools-nationwide/

Since the public became aware of critical race theory a few years ago, it’s subverted almost every aspect of America’s fabric. 

In operative terms, CRT, a neo-Marxist dogma, reduces every interaction between individuals into a collectivist conflict, between the oppressor race (the guilty villain) and oppressed race (the righteous victim). 

And the kids are not well. 

CRT is not just a war on kids — it’s actually a war on the entire Western civilization as characterized by the Enlightenment values of individual agency and freedom. 

Even at the Department of Defense’s K-12 schools for the children of US service members, CRT indoctrination was found to be so divisive and toxic that the organization responsible for it, the Education Activity Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, was shut down — though this indoctrination remains in use, and the DEI office was caught last month reincarnated as the DEI “Steering Committee.” 

The collectivist race reductionism of CRT indoctrinates kids — even young ones still “reading” picture books — to despise all whites as privileged oppressors and rally to all blacks as helpless victims.

Beginning in full force next year in California but already introduced in some locations, for example, the state’s recently mandated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum instructs kids that they belong to either the oppressor group or the victim group, due only to their individual race.