RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273588/teacher-rejects-president-trump-subject-students-sara-dogan

Sixth grade student Bella Moscato and her family have gone public after the middle schooler’s teacher assigned her class to write an essay on a person they consider a hero—and then rejected Bella’s proposal to write about President Donald Trump.

Bella is a student at Samoset Middle School, part of the Sachem Central School District located in Long Island, New York. According to the 11-year-old, who was interviewed with her parents by a local news channel, the teacher made no secret of her distaste for our current president.

That teacher, says Bella, rejected Trump as a subject of her essay “because he spreads negativity and says bad stuff about women.” According to Bella, this statement was made in front of the whole class as well as another faculty member. Her teacher then told her to pick a different individual to profile in her assignment.

“The thing I didn’t get is she was okay with someone doing Barack Obama, but not okay with doing Donald Trump. That’s what got me angry and I didn’t like that,” Bella explained.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/middlebury-college-students-upset-conservative-speaker/

Protecting students from views that make them uncomfortable on campus is really not going to do them any favors in the long run.

In a meeting last week at Middlebury College, administrators apologized to students who were upset that a conservative speaker had been invited to campus — and pledged to do more to prevent right-wing speakers in the future.

Audio of the meeting, which was obtained by The College Fix, features three administrators trying to calm students who were offended by the invitation of Ryszard Legutko, a conservative Polish politician whose views they described as homophobic and Islamophobic.

It’s important to note that Legutko’s planned April 17th speech had actually been canceled a few hours beforehand, with administrators citing “safety concerns,” and Legutko wound up simply giving a small, private talk in a political-science professor’s class instead. According to The Fix, it seems as though the students at the meeting did not know that this talk had occurred, because it had taken place the same time that afternoon as the meeting.

Obvious from the audio of the meeting, the fact that the college had essentially canceled Legutko’s appearance was not enough — the students believe that he should have never been invited in the first place.

“There is a distinct compromise of the students who felt marginalized on this campus or who put effort into this protest, or this combat effort, they feel like their academic freedom has been compromised because they are not capable of learning because their emotional state is so distraught or their emotional energy is just consumed by this,” one female student said.

https://www.city-journal.org/free-speech-camille-paglia

To appreciate the significance of recent events at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts and at the University of Arizona in Tucson, it helps to recall briefly some landmark moments in the College Administrator Hall of Shame.

Claremont McKenna College, October 2015: a Hispanic student writes a lachrymose oped denouncing Claremont’s “western, white, cisheternormative upper- to upper-middle class values” that, she says, make her and other minority admits feel out of place. The dean of students thanks the student for her oped and asks if she would be willing to meet with Claremont’s administrators to help them “better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold.” The phrase “not fitting the mold” was used by Claremont’s minority students themselves to describe their status; nevertheless, protests, hunger strikes, and marches engulf the campus, demanding the dean’s resignation for having described minority students as not fitting the school’s “mold.” The dean grovels before an angry group of students for over an hour, apologizing for her poor choice of words and promising to make amends. Claremont’s president Hiram Chodosh offers not one word of support for the dean, who soon resigns.

Yale, November 2015: a mob of minority students surrounds a respected Yale sociologist, Nicholas Christakis, and berates, screams, and curses at him for two hours. The students’ rage was triggered because Christakis’s wife, a child psychologist, had suggested in an email that Yale undergrads could choose their Halloween costumes without guidance from Yale’s diversity bureaucracy. One girl shrieks at Christakis: “Be quiet! . . . Who the fuck hired you? . . . You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!” When Christakis meekly disagreed with another student’s claim that free speech allows “violence to happen on this campus,” the student shouts back: “It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not . . . It’s not a debate.” Four Yale diversity bureaucrats silently observed the professor’s scourging from the edges of the mob without coming to his defense.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273555/gay-jamaican-immigrant-defends-israel-students-daniel-greenfield

In 1985, a twenty-year old Jamaican immigrant came to this country with $120 in his pocket. Thirteen years later, he had a PhD. Two years later, he had begun his career teaching at DePaul University.

In 2019, a coalition of lefties, Islamists and anti-Semites at DePaul are demanding a safe space from him.

Dr. Jason Hill (pictured above) is a gay Jamaican immigrant who teaches philosophy and lectures about civil rights. But after defending Israel, DePaul student organizations, including Students for Justice in Palestine, a notorious anti-Semitic nationwide hate group whose members have praised Hitler and called for another Holocaust, United Muslims Moving Ahead (UMMA), an Islamist campus group, which invited a Muslim cleric who rationalized the murder of gay people, DePaul Socialists, and College Democrats, are demanding that a black gay professor undergo “racial sensitivity training”.

Also joining the local production of outrage theater is the Lambda Theta Phi fraternity.

The coalition of Hispanic frat boys, socialists and Islamists claimed that Dr. Hill’s defense of Israel and condemnation of Islamic anti-Semitism created “unsafe and uncomfortable spaces for everyone, especially Palestinian and Muslim students.”

How did Dr. Hill create an “unsafe and uncomfortable” space at DePaul? He used words. He expressed ideas. He wrote an article with arguments that the coalition doesn’t want to counter with its own ideas.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-get-fired-at-duke-11556133633

Zion Williamson isn’t the only star leaving Duke University after this academic year. But at least the basketball phenom is allowed to leave voluntarily to pursue an NBA career. A popular professor is being driven off campus for reasons that are not entirely clear.

After teaching for nearly two decades at Duke, Evan Charney was told last year by the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy that his contract would not be renewed after this academic year. He reports that he had not been warned about any problems with his teaching and was not told why he was being dismissed.

This week, as he prepares to depart, he describes what happened after he filed a complaint with Duke’s Faculty Hearing Committee. Unlike his Sanford colleagues, this outfit at least gave him some vague sense of why he was getting sacked:

Professor Charney’s tendency to provoke negative reactions, and perhaps harm, among some students in the classroom due to his confrontational teaching style—a style that had a tendency to be polarizing among students, particularly in a required Sanford course in which not all students could choose to have Professor Charney as an instructor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/professor-samuel-abrams-spoke-the-truth-he-still-pays-the-price/

Dissenters from campus orthodoxy often need a rare kind of personal fortitude.

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias — in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things — a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. “Liberal staff members,” he wrote, “outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most left-leaning group on campus.”

At the conclusion of his piece, Abrams made an argument that rang true to my more than 20 years of litigation experience — “ideological imbalance, coupled with [administrators’] agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas.”

This is exactly right. Administrators draft and enforce speech codes. Administrators are responsible for creating campus kangaroo courts. Administrators kick Christian student groups off campus, and administrators often take the lead in designing campus programming that features overwhelmingly progressive voices. While conservative media often focus their ire on random radical professors, administrators are busy engaging in the overwhelming majority of campus censorship.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/24/choosing-real-diversity/

“Schools and universities desperately need diversity – but diversity of thought and opinion, not a contrived structure that conditions, divides, and ultimately shuts down exposure to views that don’t line up with the current narrative.”

This nation’s most influential opinion-shapers tell us diversity is an unalloyed good, so self-evidently virtuous that it cannot be questioned. It’s simply a given that every decent person has to support diversity and even the slightest departure from the orthodoxy is heretical.

Universities have become the temples of diversity. They are so committed to the idea that they hand out millions in salaries every year to administrators charged with promoting inclusivity, equity, academic access, and a “welcoming environment” on school grounds. At the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, the 2017 payroll for its five diversity offices was $3.2 million, according to Campus Reform. Diversity administrators at the University of California, Berkeley, were paid $2.3 million that same year. The diversity-focused employees at the University of California, San Francisco, make more than $2 million a year.

Meanwhile, several schools in the University of California system are requiring math professor candidates to include a “diversity statement” in their applications, listing “past and/or potential contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

To wonder in 2019 why so much effort is being expended on programs that have zero academic value is to be a subversive. Still, it’s a fair question.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-yale-diversity-means-more-of-the-same-11556058975

Yale President Peter Salovey announced a major expansion of the school’s diversity bureaucracy this month, providing a case study in how not to lead a respected institution of higher education.

The pretext for this latest accretion of bureaucratic bloat was a May 2018 incident in a graduate student dorm. Sarah Braasch, a 43-year-old doctoral candidate in philosophy, called campus police at 1:40 a.m. to report someone sleeping in a common room, which she believed was against dorm rules. Yale administrators knew Ms. Braasch had psychological problems and that she had a history of bad blood with the sleeping student, Lolade Siyonbola, a 35-year-old doctoral candidate in African studies. But because Ms. Braasch is white and Ms. Siyonbola is black, the administration chose to turn the incident into a symbol of what Mr. Salovey called the university’s “discrimination and racism.”

Yale leaders immediately announced a slew of new initiatives: “implicit bias” training for graduate students, grad-school staff and campus police; instruction in how to run “inclusive classrooms”; “community building” sessions; a student retreat to develop the next phase of equity and inclusion programming. Despite this flurry of corrective measures, Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, Yale’s secretary and vice president for student life, ominously declared there was still “much more to do.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/04/22/persistence_and_political_correctness_at_amherst.html

Sometimes in the culture wars, the identity-politics camp leans so far to a politically correct extreme that liberals and conservatives alike reject it. Or so it would seem. A recent episode at Amherst College is worth examining less as a defeat for political correctness than a tactical retreat illustrating that the cult of identity politics on campus shows little sign of weakening.
Withdrawn from circulation, but why?
www.scribd.com

What happened is this: Last month Amherst’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion sent all 1,850 or so students at the elite western Massachusetts school an attractively produced 36-page brochure called the Amherst Common Language Guide, with definitions of “key diversity and inclusion terms.” Its clear emphasis: “Marginalized groups” were being oppressed by what the document called the “cisheteropatriarchy” — a system of domination by straight white men – through racism, sexism, oppression, hegemony, and exploitation.

Within hours of the guide’s release, a member of the Amherst College Republicans leaked the brochure to the conservative Daily Wire website, which pronounced it “something out of ‘1984.’ ” A crescendo of ridicule from conservative websites and blogs followed.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273539/federal-grant-financed-anti-semitic-song-u-no-daniel-greenfield

“This is my anti-Semitic song,” Tamer Nafar declared.

The setting was the UNC-Chapel Hill. And this was the moment that, “Conflict over Gaza: People, Politics, and Possibilities”, a conference of UNC and Duke University’s notoriously pro-terrorist Middle East departments went, beyond its expected implicit anti-Semitism to explicit anti-Semitism.

The Gaza conference, with a roster of speakers from anti-Israel groups, at least one of which has been accused of funneling money to Hamas institutions, was true to form. The BDS speaker disagreed only over how much to boycott Israel. The conference was full of posters glamorizing violence. And the books on sale were even more explicit in their defense of anti-Semitic Islamic terrorism against Jews.

A journalist for The Tower picked up a copy of “Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide” and read its claim that, “Intrinsically and religiously Hamas could not be anti-Jewish.”

But Nafar’s “anti-Semitic song” was the moment that put the Gaza conference on the map of hate.

UNC Chapel Hill and Duke’s Middle East Studies departments were already notoriously hives of hatred. In February, UNC’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies brought in Linda Sarsour, who has frequently clashed with the Jewish community and is a supporter of the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader, to speak. In April, Duke’s Israel Apartheid Week had featured support for the PFLP, an anti-Semitic terrorist group responsible for the murders of Jews, and calls for the destruction of Israel.

And Steven Salaita, who had declared that, Zionism was “transforming anti-Semitism from something horrible into something honorable”, had spoken at UNC Chapel Hill.