RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-free-speech-rebirth-at-berkeley-1544226807

The University of California at Berkeley reached a settlement Monday with campus conservative groups who had sued over its speaker policy. This agreement helps conclude an ugly chapter in the university’s history and goes a long way toward restoring its free-speech reputation.

After much-publicized controversies involving protests and controversial speakers, the College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation sued Berkeley in April 2017. They claimed the university was relying on an “unwritten and unpublished policy” that gave administrators broad discretion to “restrict the time, place, and manner of any campus event involving ‘high-profile speakers,’” including on the basis of the speaker’s viewpoint. Their main concern was that administrators would impose security restrictions or fees so extreme that they would reinforce the heckler’s veto.

We’ve seen no hard proof that a secret policy existed. But it’s fairly obvious why these conservatives feared Berkeley wouldn’t have the guts to protect their rights. The chancellor’s office installed a $9,000 emergency exit for staffers to escape disruptive demonstrators. And the university hit rock bottom in February 2017, when it cancelled a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos after masked agitators threw Molotov cocktails and caused $100,000 of damage.

Carol Christ became chancellor in July 2017, and unlike predecessor Nicholas Dirks she has refused to reward protestors’ threats and antics. Last fall she spent $600,000 on security to ensure Ben Shapiro could speak unimpeded. Berkeley has since hosted Heather Mac Donald, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Rick Santorum, Dennis Prager and other conservatives— at no cost to the student groups who invited them.

In Monday’s settlement, Berkeley reaffirms that it won’t consider a speaker’s viewpoint in deciding on the time, date, place or security for an event. Students can host speakers for free in classrooms or student government-run facilities. And if student organizations choose to use auditoriums or bigger campus venues, security costs will be determined based on criteria listed in a newly published fee schedule.

The settlement sets the expectation that Berkeley will treat speakers and students equitably and transparently. Even better, it sends a message that protestors can’t use the threat of mayhem to price Berkeley’s conservatives out of exercising their First Amendment rights.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272160/conservatives-triumph-over-free-speech-hating-uc-matthew-vadum

Conservatives scored a major legal victory against UC Berkeley which has agreed to compensate Young America’s Foundation and Berkeley College Republicans for trampling the First Amendment rights of conservative speakers and students on its campus.

“Young America’s Foundation is thrilled that, after more than a year of UC Berkeley battling against the First Amendment rights of its own students, the University finally felt the heat and saw the light of their unconstitutional censorship,” said YAF spokesman Spencer Brown.

“YAF’s landmark victory for free expression—long squelched by Berkeley’s scheming administrators who weaponized flawed policies to target conservatives—shows that the battle for freedom undertaken by YAF on campuses nationwide is a necessary one.”

The Trump administration previously weighed in on the side of the campus conservatives who argued UC Berkeley’s restrictive policies violated First Amendment free speech rights and the equal protection and due process guarantees in the Fourteenth Amendment.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest on behalf of the two groups. The department “will not stand by idly while public universities violate students’ constitutional rights,” Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand said at the time.

UC Berkeley’s hostility toward free speech is well-established. The school appears in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE) annual list of the ten worst colleges for free speech. Berkeley has a “yellow light speech code rating” from FIRE because it restricts speech, denies students accused of misconduct the “right to challenge fact-finders,” and denies students accused of sexual misconduct the right to counsel.

The administration at UC Berkeley only pretended to adhere to the First Amendment’s speech protections. When conservatives have been scheduled to speak on campus, the administration typically didn’t forbid their appearances. Instead, it made the speeches inconvenient to the point of impossibility, for example, forcing students to use venues a mile off campus or at times when students couldn’t attend. Berkeley also often required non-leftist groups to hand over thousands of dollars to defray security costs, a requirement not rigorously or consistently imposed on left-wing speakers or groups.

An aggressive crackdown on non-leftist speech came after Berkeley officials—emboldened by an Antifa mob blocking a Feb. 1, 2017 campus appearance by firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos—decided to formalize viewpoint discrimination in the school’s policy on speakers.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/06/heres-happened-canadian-run-off-campus-defending-speech/

More than a year ago, a Canadian academic publicly sought to promote open inquiry and freedom of expression in response to concerns Canadian universities were restricting these rights. Some students at this person’s institution protested, charging all manner of evils, and drawing all manner of far-fetched comparisons. The institution sought to administer disciplinary measures for the breach of political correctness.

You might think I’m referring to University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, the renowned proponent of free speech and author of the best-selling “12 Rules for Life,” but I’m not. There’s another Canadian doing similar, important work reverberating through the country’s academic institutions, and she’s increasingly going viral.

That person is former Wilfrid Laurier graduate student Lindsay Shepherd, who recently offered me an interview.
A Hauntingly Familiar Story

Shepherd’s battle with the liberal academic panopticon began shortly after she joined the master’s program in Cultural Analysis and Social Theory at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) in September 2017. On November 1, 2017, during a first-year undergraduate class Shepherd was teaching, she showed two clips from a public Canadian television channel. The first featured Peterson, who has been an outspoken opponent of Canadian laws that mandate the use of transgender pronouns.

A heated discussion among the students followed the videos. Later, a student approached an LGBTQ support group, which then filed a complaint with the university’s Diversity and Equity Office. That office requested a meeting with Shepherd on November 8.

Shepherd secretly recorded the meeting, which turned into an interrogation. During the 40-minute circus, university staff (who acknowledged her “positionality” regarding open inquiry), accused of her having created a “toxic climate for some of the students” by playing the clips and approaching the topic neutrally.

One professor even compared the pronoun debate to discussing whether a student of color should have rights. He also called Peterson a member of the “alt-right” and compared playing a clip featuring Peterson to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.” Peterson’s perspective was also rejected as “not valid,” as, apparently, not all perspectives are up for debate.

Shepherd released the recording to Canadian media. Not long afterward, WLU’s president, Deborah MacLatchy, apologized, as did Nathan Rambukkana, a professor and Shepherd’s academic advisor, who was the main antagonist in the meeting. MacLatchy said the meeting did not “reflect the values and practices to which Laurier aspires.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/pitzer-college-professors-vote-to-end-schools-partnership-with-the-university-of-haifa/

The majority of Pitzer College faculty voted on November 8 to end the school’s study abroad partnership with the University of Haifa in a boycott, divest, sanctions (BSD)-inspired move.

The University of Haifa is the only university in Israel where Pitzer students can study abroad, according to the school’s website. Each year, a handful of Pitzer students take classes taught in English at the school.

According to the Pitzer newspaper, the partnership has existed as early as 1980. Student Ari Sherman, after visiting Haifa through Pitzer, wrote in April 1980 that not only did he enjoy his visit, but that he now calls the country of Israel “home.”

With the recent vote, it appears that partnership will come to an end. While it’s unclear how many faculty attended the meeting for the vote, 172 faculty are listed in the Pitzer directory. The voting information is sealed.

While the vote wasn’t public, at least one student government official attended.

Three days later, students published a resolution on the issue, urging Pitzer to keep ties with Haifa and claiming the vote maliciously singled out Israel and failed to involve other campus stakeholders.

“Only the University of Haifa study abroad program was called into question… marking a departure from [considering] a program on its merits but rather forwarding a clear political agenda,” says 55-R-04, authored by students Isaiah Kramer and Brendan Schultz.

Neither student could be reached by PJ Media. Pitzer University spokeswoman Anna Chang did note that the partnership is still “ongoing” at least till the end of the academic year while the campus community mulls it over.

Dozens of pro-Israel and Zionist nonprofits made statements denouncing the vote, as reported by Jackson Richman of the Jewish News Syndicate.

“The vote to suspend Pitzer College’s study-abroad program with the University of Haifa is a despicable effort by the faculty to impose their hateful anti-Semitic, anti-Israel political agenda on students,” said Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272113/pro-israel-students-stare-down-hamas-backed-sjp-matthew-vadum

More than 200 pro-Israel activists picketed what Haaretz described as the “largest ever pro-Palestinian student conference held at UCLA,” letting members of the Hamas-backed anti-Semitic hate group Students for Justice in Palestine know that their radicalism and violence against Jews and Israel supporters will no longer go unchallenged on campus.

Groups supporting Israel gave the campus Left a taste of its own medicine. Turn-about is, after all, fair play.

Students Supporting Israel (SSI), Reservists on Duty (RoD), and other pro-Israel groups came together in Los Angeles to protest a recent weekend conference. Literature documenting the role of Students for Justice in Palestine as a front for the terrorist organization Hamas was provided by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC). The DHFC literature documented the fact that the Hamas-funded, anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement on campus is a terrorist operation, created by Hamas, funded by Hamas and advancing Hamas’ chief political operation: the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) claimed 500 people registered for the conference, which was titled, “Radical Hope: Resistance in the Face of Adversity.” When it announced the conference, the group bragged about disrupting pro-Israel events, stating, “Other instances of our perseverance include disruptions of pro-war, Zionist, and racist guest speakers.” The anti-Semitic SJP’s agenda is demonizing Israel spreading genocidal lies about its creation, and justifying Hamas terrorist attacks on civilian populations.

Amit Deri of Reservists on Duty said his group demonstrated using flags and signs provided by DHFC outside the conference from the Friday it began through Sunday, Nov. 18. RoD is an Israeli nonprofit created by Israeli reserve soldiers who wished to combat the BDS movement and anti-Semitism.

“From the moment the SJP conference began, they were not given a moment’s quiet,” Deri said.

“This is the first time that so many pro-Israeli organizations are collaborating and are able to raise an effective demonstration at the annual conference of SJP at UCLA,” he said. “SJP were afraid to get their heads out of the hall where the demonstration took place.”

“If we will be strong enough on every campus, SJP will not dare to be violent against Jewish students!”

https://www.thecollegefix.com/columbia-universitys-facing-
THE COST OF ATTENDING COLUMBIA IS $74, 173.00 PER YEAR…. THE CHE GUEVARA T-SHIRTS COST AN ADDITIONAL $33.50…..RSK

Survey features overwhelmingly liberal respondents

Researchers at Columbia University recently conducted a study on white people exploring “how Americans who identify as white or partially white think about their racial identities.”

The project, called “Facing Whiteness,” surveyed over 800 white people in three communities across the country. Researchers asked participants many questions including if they have received any benefits from being white and if they would change their race given the opportunity.

The project took place in Richmond, Virginia, Battle Creek, Michigan, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Researchers lived in these communities for a month, during which time they “participated in and observed local life,” attending church services, visiting local businesses, going to political meetings and interviewing white residents.”

In an email to The College Fix, Samuel Lutzker, project coordinator at Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics, said that the project “explores race through filming candid conversations with white people in which they discuss their racial identity.”

Data on the project’s website shows that upwards of 50 percent of respondents identified as liberal, with less than 20 percent identifying as conservative. Lutzker said researchers made an effort to reach out to people from across the political spectrum, though ultimately most of the participants were left-leaning.

Lutzker said that there were “two primary reasons for the underrepresentation of conservative participants in our sample.”

“The first reason is a lack of trust in academic institutions, particularly universities that are sometimes labeled as liberal. This lack of trust is exacerbated by the current adversarial political climate. As such, we had to build trust over time with our conservative participants in a way that we generally didn’t need to with liberal participants,” Lutzker said.

“The second reason is that conservatives often had a different understanding of our project than liberals. Whereas liberals tended to see a project asking white people to discuss their own race as a means to improve their own self-understanding and race relations, conservatives often thought that race wasn’t important to talk about or even that our project was further perpetuating racism.”

“If we had had more time in each location, we would have liked to build more trust with conservatives,” he added.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-med-school-

The medical school claims defining sex as an ‘immutable condition determined at birth’ is ‘medically inaccurate,’ but won’t say how.

Earlier this month, Harvard Medical School released a statement condemning the Trump Health and Human Services Department’s move to explicitly define sex “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” Yet since releasing the statement, the medical school has refused to clarify why specifically it opposes the proposed rule, and the school has also refused to divulge what it teaches its medical students about biological sex.

The College Fix acquired a copy of Harvard’s full statement via email wherein the school claims that defining sex as an immutable characteristic is, among other things, “medically inaccurate.”

“Harvard Medical School is staunchly opposed to any efforts by federal agencies to limit the definition of sex as an immutable condition determined at birth. This definition would be overly simplistic, medically inaccurate and antithetical to our values as healthcare providers.”

“Moreover, it demonstrates blatant disregard for federal civil law protections of transgender people,” the statement continues. It promises that the medical school “will be unwavering in safeguarding the rights of individuals regardless of sex, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”

Despite the strong stance taken in this statement, Harvard Medical School has been outright unwilling to answer any questions about its position on biological sex. Repeated emails asking if the medical school equates gender with sex and whether they instruct their obstetricians to not identify babies as male or female for fear of being “medically inaccurate” were ignored outright.

Gina Vild, a spokeswoman for the school, initially provided The Fix with the full statement, but she stopped responding to further emails seeking clarification on the school’s position.

The Fix proceeded to reach out to the medical school for a comment with further emails, phone calls, and online form submissions. Nobody from the school responded.