RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/philly_schools_add_muslim_holidays_by_cutting_jewish_one.html

Back when public schools were overwhelmingly Christian, scheduling religious holidays meant closing for Christmas and, in some places, for Jewish high holidays. As American school populations change, deciding for which religious holidays schools should close and on what basis becomes more complex.

According to Anti-Defamation League religious freedom counsel David Barkey, consistently with the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, “[p]ublic schools can’t close to observe a holiday, but can if there’s an appropriate secular reason. The reason usually is the level of absenteeism” that would hamper schooling.

Philadelphia’s Mayor Jim Kenney suggested a different standard in announcing the city’s decision to close public schools for Muslim holidays. Rather than focusing on practical need, Kenney explained: “Our city was built on the idea that … the city welcomes all to worship and practice the faiths of our culture or our choosing[.] … We have to take into account how society sometimes ostracizes and eliminates people from the mainstream[.]” In other words, schools should close on minorities’ religious holidays so their adherents feel accepted.

Sadly, Philadelphia’s approach to holiday closures fails both standards. Its public schools closed June 12, 2018, in time for Muslim students to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, beginning June 15. Without determining whether the numbers of practitioners necessitated the change, Philadelphia added Muslim holidays to its calendar to make Muslims feel welcome – and paid for it partly by reducing Jewish holiday observances, school district documents show. What’s more, the school district underhandedly failed to identify the reasons for the change.

Philadelphia Changes Its School Calendar

On May 31, 2016, Philadelphia school district superintendent Dr. William Hite announced: “I’m honored and proud to announce that the school district fully intends to honor the eid celebrations for the many Muslim students and staff that celebrate these holidays.” The 2016-17 academic calendar had already been finalized, Hite explained, so the holidays would be added in future years.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/math-can-cause-collateral-damage-to-society-professor/Some things in life are objective and rational, and that’s perfectly okay.

According to a new textbook written by a professor at the University of Exeter, learning mathematics can cause “collateral damage” to society because it “provides a training in ethics-free thought.”

“Reasoning without meanings provides a training in ethics-free thought,” Paul Ernest writes in “The Ethics of Mathematics: Is Mathematics Harmful?” — a chapter of his book The Philosophy of Mathematics Education Today.

In an abstract for the book, Ernest claims that although he does “acknowledge that mathematics is a widespread force for good,” “there is significant collateral damage caused by learning mathematics.”

According to Ernest, this “collateral damage” happens in three ways. First, he argues, the styles of thinking involved with mathematics are “detached” and “calculated” ones, which value “rules, abstraction, objectification, impersonality, unfeelingness, dispassionate reason, and analysis” — which he claims “can be damaging when applied beyond mathematics to social and human issues.”

The second problem, he explains, is that “the applications of mathematics in society can be deleterious to our humanity unless very carefully monitored and checked.”

“Money and thus mathematics is the tool for the distribution of wealth,” he writes. “It can therefore be argued that as the key underpinning conceptual tool mathematics is implicated in the global disparities in wealth.”

Finally, Ernest claims, “the personal impact of learning mathematics on learners’ thinking and life chances can be negative for a minority of less successful students, as well as potentially harmful for successful students.” Ernest continues to explain that math is often viewed as “masculine,” and that that can essentially make it difficult for women to deal with learning it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/humanities-education-harmed-by-faculty/

Fewer and fewer students choose to study the humanities these days and the main reason is that the field has been overrun by “progressive” notions. Those notions, of course, were introduced and spread by the faculty, eager to create lots of dedicated revolutionaries.

In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Mark Bauerlein examines the sad illness afflicting the humanities. Specifically, he looks at a recent statement put out jointly by the Association of American University Professors and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “The incapacity of the experts and professionals who wrote the statement to understand why their own diminishment has happened is abundantly in evidence,” he writes.

The learned folks who wrote the statement are utterly blind to their own role in the decline of this once-grand field of study.

This paragraph of Bauerlein’s nails the problem exactly:

Today’s liberal arts professors have a different relationship to their subjects. Joy, wonder, awe, and inspiration are missing. The professors aren’t merely uncomfortable with Paradise Lost and Parsifal. They vigorously point out the sexism and racism of those works. But they even denounce earlier practitioners in their own fields, too, the New Critics, for instance, for their backward notions. We were told that opening the canon to women and persons of color was a positive and happy development, but that was only part of the project. The professors also had to denigrate the tradition, a turn proven by the dismissive label ‘Dead White Males.’ They got rid of the honorific term civilization and replaced it with culture, and then with cultures, which, they believed, eliminates the implication of the old term that some societies are civilized and others are savage.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/alumni-from-elite-new-york-city-high-schools-unite-to-fight-admissions-changes-1529522342?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=1&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

As soon as Albany posted provisions that would eliminate the admissions test for eight specialized public high schools in New York City at about 10 p.m. one recent Friday, heads of the alumni associations of Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science began trading late-night emails and phone calls.

They sprung into action to keep the test. They released a joint opposition memo. They dispatched a lobbyist to plead their case with state lawmakers. Brooklyn Tech alumni have sent legislators thousands of emails to argue for the test, says Larry Cary, a labor lawyer and head of the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation.

Their argument: The sought-after schools should be far more diverse but the proposed changes would introduce subjective measures and could admit students who aren’t prepared for the schools’ academic rigor.

Mayor Bill de Blasio is championing the bill, saying that using only one exam to select students has been an unjust barrier to talented black and Latino teenagers. The Democratic mayor, whose son graduated from Brooklyn Tech, wants to admit applicants based on a mix of course grades and state exam scores, so that the top 7% of eighth-graders from each middle school citywide would get offers. In time, by Mr. de Blasio’s estimate, about 45% of offers to these eight schools would go to black and Latino students, up from 9% now.

The measure is expected to be debated in the winter legislative session that usually starts in January. The alumni groups say they will devise a battle plan during the summer.

“We want to make sure we have a seat at the table to craft a viable solution that preserves the academic integrity of specialized schools,” said Christina Bater, president of the Bronx High School of Science Alumni Foundation.

Advocating to keep the test has brought together alumni associations from three high schools that have long been rivals, competing for who had the most chess trophies, robotics triumphs and science awards (Bronx Science has eight Nobel Prizes, Stuyvesant has four and Brooklyn Tech has two.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270501/prager-u-video-dangerous-people-are-teaching-your-prager-university

Dangerous people are filling the heads of young people with dangerous nonsense. Who are these people? They are what Jordan Peterson calls “the post-modernists:” neo-Marxist professors who dominate our colleges and universities. And here’s the worst part: we are financing these nihilists with tax dollars, alumni gifts and tuition payments. Time to wise up.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/harvard-discrimination-against-asian-american-students-obvious/

For decades, the population of Asian-American students at Harvard University has remained suspiciously stagnant, even as the general population of Asian Americans has exploded. Asian Americans tend to have higher rates of academic achievement — standardized-test scores, GPAs — than other racial groups. While the Asian-American undergraduate population at elite universities that do not take race into account in admissions has soared since the 1990s, it has hovered around 20 percent at Ivy League schools, which do consider race. Against the notion that Asian Americans are a monolith of high achievers, it should be noted that the term denotes a heterogeneous collection of people from all sorts of backgrounds. But the substance of this issue is not complicated: If not for discrimination on the basis of race, there would be far more Asian undergraduates at elite universities than there currently are.

Now a group called Students for Fair Admissions is suing Harvard, alleging that it engages in unconstitutional racial discrimination against Asians in its admissions process. Last week, the plaintiffs released devastating evidence to support their claim, including an analysis of the data of 160,000 applicants conducted by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono as well as a university review of the admissions process from 2013 that had been buried by the Harvard administration. The plaintiffs deserve to prevail in court; the grim state of affairs at Harvard is a direct consequence of the affirmative-action regime that reigns in this country.

Evidence shows the discrimination happens along two lines. First, Harvard evaluates applicants according to a “holistic” process that considers, in addition to their academic, extracurricular, and athletic achievements, “personal” qualities: whether they have demonstrated “humor, sensitivity, grit, leadership,” etc. Asian Americans consistently rank below others on the personality metric, despite the fact that admissions officials never meet most applicants. The internal review showed that Asian Americans were the only demographic group to suffer negative effects from the subjective portion of the evaluation. Second, even after the subjective criteria are taken into account, the university tips the scales further by adjusting for “demographics.” The specifics of this adjustment have been redacted by the university, but the review found that the share of admitted Asian students fell from 26 percent to 18 percent after it was made.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-is-too-discriminating-1529363694

The U.S. Supreme Court may soon have an opportunity to clarify its muddled jurisprudence regarding racial preferences in college admissions. Unlike the high court’s past cases on the question, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard involves a private university—but the same legal principles apply under federal civil-rights laws to any institution that accepts public funds.

In Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), the justices ruled 7-1 that the use of race in university admissions was permissible only if it was narrowly tailored to achieve “the educational benefits of diversity” and administrators had made a good-faith effort to consider race-neutral alternatives. In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, the court ruled in favor of the university in another appeal from the same case. Seemingly exhausted by the topic, the justices held 4-3 that Texas’ idiosyncratic admissions program satisfied the test. Fisher II was the first and only time Justice Anthony Kennedy has approved a use of racial preferences in college admissions. His opinion made clear that the key to surviving judicial scrutiny was “holistic” individualized review rather than quotas or other group-based screens.

Yet holistic review can facilitate discrimination by concealing a process that amounts to a quota. That’s what Harvard did when it devised this method to cap the number of Jews it admitted in the 1920s and ’30s. The university is now credibly accused of doing the same thing to Asian-Americans.

The lawsuit was filed in 2014, but paused as Fisher played out. It picked up steam in August 2017, when the Justice Department opened its own investigation into Harvard’s use of race. This past April, after the department filed a “notice of interest” that cited the need to allow public access to the lawsuit’s filings, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that most of the evidence the plaintiffs had obtained in discovery could be made public. It was last Friday, in legal papers filed with a motion for summary judgment—a request that the judge rule against Harvard without a trial, based on facts not in dispute.

The plaintiffs argue that Harvard intentionally discriminates. “An Asian-American applicant with a 25% chance of admission,” the plaintiffs’ motion summarizes, “would have a 35% chance if he were white, 75% if he were Hispanic, and 95% chance if he were African-American.”

That’s not because Asians are weak in areas other than academics that might legitimately be considered in admissions decisions. Harvard’s own documents show that Asians have higher extracurricular and alumni-interview scores than any other racial group, and scores from teachers and guidance counselors nearly identical to whites (and higher than African-Americans and Hispanics). Yet admissions officers assigned them the lowest “personal” rating—an assessment of “positive personality,” character traits like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “courage,” and “kindness,” and whether the applicant has good “human qualities.” It’s reminiscent of the old stereotype that Jews weren’t “clubbable.”

The plaintiffs’ motion asserts that Harvard officials’ testimony “amounts to a confession” of racial balancing. Statistical analysis of public data by Duke economist Peter S. Arcidiacono, whom the plaintiffs hired as an expert witness, reinforces the suspicion that the school manipulates subjective criteria to maintain the same student-body composition regardless of shifts in the pool of qualified applicants. If the admissions office admits what it deems to be “too many” or “too few” students of any race it reshapes the next class as a remedy. The plaintiffs conclude that “Harvard has a desired racial balance and aims for that target”—an approach the Supreme Court has consistently said is improper since it first approved the limited use of race in admissions in 1978.

When shown evidence of this legerdemain at her deposition in this case, the director of college counseling at New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School (where Mayor Bill de Blasio has been trying to reduce Asian enrollment) broke down in tears over Harvard’s treatment of “my kids.” She rejected the notion that “the Asian kids are less well rounded than the white kid” and agreed with the plaintiffs’ lawyer that “it’s hard to think of anything other than discrimination that could account for this.”

Nor is Harvard’s use of race narrowly tailored to achieve any particular measure of diversity. The idea of “critical mass” of minority enrollment played a central role in Fisher, and in a pair of landmark 2003 cases involving the University of Michigan. But Harvard officials’ depositions show that, as the plaintiffs put it, “Harvard concedes that it has no interest in achieving critical mass and has never given the concept serious thought.” Citing redacted testimony from the dean of admissions, the plaintiffs conclude that “Harvard is adamant that racial preferences are indispensable to its mission—and always will be.” In other words, race isn’t just a “plus factor,” which would be acceptable under the Michigan precedents, but often the dominant consideration—which again the Supreme Court has held to violate the law. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270451/white-mythologies-campus-near-you-jack-kerwick

Traditionally, a classical liberal arts education had as its point and purpose the disinterested pursuit of truth and knowledge.

Yet most of today’s academics scoff at this mission as a “white mythology.”

The most recent example of this phenomenon comes from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, which offer the course, “White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions.”

The course is co-taught by a sociology professor, Kendralin Freeman, and anthropology professor, Jason Rodriguez. According to its description, the course “explores the history and ongoing manifestations of ‘white mythologies,’” which it characterizes as “long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm.”

In fulfilling its objective, “White Mythologies” will also examine “how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race.”

According to the watchdog organization, Campus Reform, Freeman and Rodriguez co-authored an article that featured in the journal, Whiteness and Education. In their essay, the two argue that “discourses” over the topics of “‘diversity’ and ‘intersectionality’ can undermine efforts to address racism [.]” Such “discourses” can also “protect white privilege” and “marginalize people of color.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/responding-to-the-bias-response-team-1529263974

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently promised to be “vigilant” in defending free-speech rights on campus, and last week the Justice Department followed through by scoring the University of Michigan for chilling speech.

Justice filed a statement of interest, similar to an amicus brief, siding with Speech First, a nonprofit that has sued the school on behalf of its student members. Justice says the university’s policies and practices “ban a broad swath of core protected speech based solely on ‘listeners’ reaction.’”

Speech First’s lawsuit takes issue with the university’s student code, which prohibits bullying and harassment but with only vague definitions of both. The university also operates a Bias Response Team, to which students can submit complaints accusing peers and professors of “bias incidents” that violate no law.

University of Michigan spokesman Rick Fitzgerald told the Chronicle of Higher Education that Speech First and Justice have “seriously misstated University of Michigan policy and painted a false portrait of speech on our campus.” The university hasn’t filed its legal response, so there’s “little more we can add at this point,” Mr. Fitzgerald told us last Wednesday.

But lo, last Monday the university updated the student code’s definitions of harassment and bullying, bringing them in line with Michigan state law. That decision “was accelerated” by the lawsuit, Mr. Fitzgerald admitted on the university website. The school also took down a web page in which the Dean of Students Office promoted the Bias Response Team and advised students that “the most important indication of bias is your own feelings.”