RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.bostonherald.com/opinion/editorials/2018/07/editorial_colleges_must_stop_coddling

College campus culture should be fair game for criticism. After all, college is very expensive and in many circles considered a compulsory rite of passage for young people.

More and more we hear stories of speakers being shut down by student protesters amid sometimes violent actions. Speakers running the political gamut from Ben Shapiro to Alan Dershowitz have been on the receiving end of angry mobs.

Yesterday’s college radical is today’s “social justice warrior” and their mission is to disrupt free speech whenever it does not conform exactly to their worldview. It happened at UMass Amherst in 2016 when Milo Yiannopoulos, Steven Crowder and Christina Hoff Sommers attempted to speak.

Whether it’s University of California, Berkeley, Middlebury College or Evergreen State University, there always seems to be at least one institution in the news associated with an attempt to thwart free speech.

Earlier this year, at Portland State University, when biologist Heather Heying made the point that women and men are biologically different, protesters in the audience screamed and excoriated her and tried to damage the sound system before they were removed. “We should not listen to fascism. Nazis are not welcome in civil society,” a protester said.

Year after year, our campuses seem to produce a bumper crop of loud and angry social justice warriors.

Yesterday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions took campus culture to task during a speech at Turning Point USA’s High School Leadership Summit in Washington.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/dartmouth-business-school-will-evaluate-applicants-based-on-niceness/

But wouldn’t jerks just lie and make up stories that make them seem like decent people?

Dartmouth’s business school has announced that it will judge its applicants partially on their “niceness.”

The Tuck School of Business will decide whether to admit applicants based on four criteria: smartness, accomplishment, niceness, and awareness, according to a post on Tuck’s official website.

A subsection on the school’s “Admissions Criteria” we page, titled “Tuck Students Are Nice,” states:

This is quintessential Tuck, where you cultivate a habit of kindness. You actively encourage, celebrate, and support others. But being nice does not mean you’re a pushover who always agrees and defers. Nice Tuck candidates exhibit emotional intelligence. You layer compassion onto courage, and challenge others tactfully and thoughtfully. You display both strength and vulnerability. You ask for help, and you help others. You’re positive and principled. You act with respect and integrity, even when it’s not convenient or easy. You show empathy for the diverse experiences of others, while also sharing your own. You recognize that your success and others’ success are interdependent, and generously invest in both. Being nice at Tuck means building trust through deep, genuine connections that endure for life.

In an effort to evaluate a student’s level of niceness, the list of essay questions on the school’s webpage includes this one: “Tuck students are nice, and invest generously in one another’s success. Share an example of how you helped someone else succeed. (500 words)” According to an article in The College Fix, the school is now also asking references about the applicants’ niceness.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/07/18/meet-the-texas-teachers-100000-club-7300-six-figure-educators-cost-taxpayers-903-million/#5716c31710ae

Do public schools in Texas pay $232,000 for coordinating PE classes? What about paying $340,000 to a high school music teacher and $127,000 to a librarian?

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found 7,327 Texas public school administrators, athletic directors, teachers, and other employees pulled down six-figure salaries costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion. In fiscal year 2017, superintendents earned as much as $450,000; “executive directors for assessment and compliance” received up to $302,820; and principals made as much as $313,870.

Using our interactive mapping tool at OpenTheBooks.com, quickly review (by zip code) every Texas educator who made a salary of $100,000 or more in 2017. Just zoom in, click a pin (zip code), and scroll down to see the results.

To see all 2017 Texas Education Agency payroll data at OpenTheBooks.com, click here.

Less than six percent of these highly compensated Texas educators were teachers. In fact, we found as many athletic directors and business managers (406) earning six figure salaries as teachers (407). Additionally, “educational aides” received up to $203,658; “assistant principals” made up to $202,115; “counselors” earned up to $186,092. What about those “athletic directors?” They received up to $155,156.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/at-upenn-movement-to-erase-campus-ties-to-slavery-heats-up/

New information about its 18th Century trustees sparks activism.

The University of Pennsylvania campus in West Philadelphia is a long and spiraling network of old buildings, crosswalks, and pedestrian bridges linking the Penn Library (where one may examine the papers of essayist Agnes Repplier) and the Kelly Writers House (where Susan Sontag once described the public reaction to her New Yorker essay on the September 11th attack in New York City). In the 1970s, the Penn campus was a major hangout of Ira Einhorn, founder of Earth Day and touted as a Philadelphia notable by city politicians until he was arrested for murdering and stuffing the body of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, inside a trunk in his Powelton Village apartment.

Outwardly, the Penn campus is a pretty quiet place, although in 2017 the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported that neo-Nazi posters were appearing on campus with messages like “Stop the blacks,” and “join your local Nazis.” While Penn has a policy that “no poster shall be prohibited or restricted solely on basis of content,” enough students were riled up to attract the attention of local media. Although the offending posters mysteriously disappeared shortly after their discovery, student activists covered the “LOVE” sculpture near City Hall with hundreds of anti-Nazi posters warning “We are ready to resist.”

But resist what? Neo-Nazi sympathizers in the City of Philadelphia are about as numerous as sub-groups of transgender Mennonites. If there are any neo-Nazis here, they are quiet basement dwellers who rarely make public appearances. The zero-to-none neo-Nazi activity in Philadelphia suggests that the “Nazi” posters were put up by leftists so that they would have something to protest against. False flag operations are common on the Left, since it is the Left that pushes for fascist, totalitarian interdiction of freedom of speech.

The Left, of course, also likes to espouse its calumny anonymously, because it is not interested in freedom or justice but rather seeks to control lives by government-enforced restrictions on freedom.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/war-over-campus-politics-matters/What happens in the academy rarely stays there.

Universities have become key battlegrounds in the American culture wars. Conservatives rail against “leftist monoculture” in academia, liberals decry the conservative “obsession” with college campuses, and the air is quickly filled with the heat of mutual recriminations.

Amid the crossfire, some liberal commentators have offered moderate and well-reasoned interpretations of academia’s troubles. They point out that although university faculties do lean overwhelmingly to the left, it’s quite rare for students to be “successfully” indoctrinated by their progressive professors. Others note that there already exists a certain degree of viewpoint diversity in some areas of academia, given the prevalence of right-leaning professors in, for example, economics and law departments. There’s some truth to such arguments, though I would maintain that many college environments are indeed stifling intellectual freedom. (A personal example: When I wrote an essay for my college paper defending the Western literary canon, I was promptly accused in print of having been “indoctrinated by white supremacy.” Needless to say, nobody enjoys being accused of such things.)

But another common view among many liberals holds that even if academia has an ideological-homogeneity problem, it is artificially amplified by the right-wing media’s addiction to covering the excesses of leftist university culture. Sure, this argument goes, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and hysterical breakdowns over Halloween costumes can be annoying, but they do not merit the relentless stream of conservative op-eds, Fox News segments, and right-wing-news stories condemning “liberal snowflakes” and “radical professors.” The social-justice mobs might be scary, but their influence is confined to a tiny sector of society: universities, and elite universities at that.

https://www.weeklystandard.com/andrew-ferguson/supreme-court-on-cue-yale-law-school-students-freak-out-about-kavanaugh?mod=article_inline

When President Trump announced last Monday that he had chosen Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy, his little speech rang out like a starter pistol. Instantly every activist, party hack, and ideological mainchancer bolted from the blocks, issuing petitions and press releases and formal statements with astonishing speed and at maximum volume. This includes Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Yale Law School, and a contingent of his fellow Yalies.

It took only an hour after Trump’s announcement for the law school’s flacks to announce the news that Trump had chosen one of their own: “President Donald Trump today nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh ’90 . . .” etc., etc. The rest of the school’s press release was a series of testimonials from acquaintances about Kavanaugh’s overall magnificence. One professor called him “a terrific judge.” Another said that “Kavanaugh commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers, judges, and justices.” A man with the impressive job title “John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence” summed up: “We are proud that he is our graduate.”

We? Speak for yourself, Herr Professor. By the next day a collection of not-proud and indeed horrified Yalies had posted a rebuttal to the school’s press release, with the title “Open Letter from Yale Law Students, Alumni, and Educators Regarding Brett Kavanaugh.” They were, they wrote, “ashamed of our alma mater.”

The letter, which is twice as long as the press release, is a masterpiece of pure scold. The signers criticize the “press release’s focus on the nominee’s professionalism, pedigree, and service to Yale Law School.” What the hell, they ask, do professionalism and pedigree have to do with anything? Especially when “the true stakes of his nomination” are so high? Kavanaugh’s nomination is an “emergency,” they tell us, and the school’s implicit embrace of him raises a “disturbing question: Is there nothing more important to Yale Law School than its proximity to power and prestige?”

Disturbing or not, it’s the kind of question that answers itself. And the answer is no sir, there is not—absolutely nothing whatsoever. The reason Yale Law School exists is to convey its “students, alumni, and educators” as close as possible to power and prestige. You can’t charge $255,000 for a law degree unless you throw in a healthy portion of P&P. This is why all those people who signed the open letter went to Yale and not to Oklahoma City School of Law. Nothing against OKC. I’m sure it’s terrific.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270679/affirmative-action-ropes-bruce-thornton

A case is currently under litigation that however it is decided, will likely reach the Supreme Court. There the diversity industry may face a challenge that brings the institutional racism of affirmative action and its baleful effects to an end.

In 2014, an organization called Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard University for excluding Asian students who were far better qualified than other applicants who had been admitted. Last November the Justice Department opened an investigation into Harvard’s admission practices, and is threatening to sue the university, throwing its support behind the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs have viewed admission records through discovery, and want them publicized because the evidence for arbitrary and discriminatory evaluations is so obvious no trial is necessary. More recently, the Trump administration has rescinded Obama’s 2011 rule advising universities to use race as a criterion in admissions. Finally, the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy creates an opening for a Constitutionalist judge who will not, as Kennedy has serially done, subordinate the law to politics or social engineering.

Such portents are heartening, for race-based policies of the last forty years have rested on a preposterous justification on the basis of “diversity,” the “compelling state interest” used to violate principle and law. Indeed, the word recurs like a mantra in Supreme Court decisions. In the 2016 Fisher vs. University of Texas case, for example, Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion wrote, “It remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/save-the-sat-writing-test-1531074658

Princeton and Stanford last week became the latest schools to drop the SAT essay requirement. The College Board made the section optional in 2016. Skeptics will applaud this essay’s demise as a return to a test that measures real aptitude. But the essay, introduced in 2005, turned out to be useful. Ditching it is another plan by colleges to make all standards of admissions subjective and easily rigged.

The writing test began in 2005 in order “to improve the validity of the test for predicting college success,” according to the College Board. A pilot program found that “scores on the new SAT writing section were slightly better than high school grades in predicting first-year college grades.”

There were problems with the exam. One MIT professor found students were rewarded for sheer length. Another criticism was that it wasn’t graded on accuracy. Students could make factual errors, or make things up.

In 2014 the College Board revised the essay test, asking students to read a passage and then answer a question with a persuasive argument using evidence from the text. Test-takers, their parents and guidance counselors criticized this new approach as well. There was too little time. It stressed students out. It raised the cost of preparation and of the test itself.

Princeton cited cost as its reason for eliminating the exam. But taking the essay part of the test adds only $14 to the registration fee, and poor kids can get waivers.

It is true that 25 minutes is not much time to write an essay, but one can discern a few things about a student’s command of grammar, vocabulary and logic from three paragraphs. True, grading a writing test is more subjective than scoring a multiple-choice test. But writing is a real skill, and colleges should measure it.

https://nypost.com/2018/07/03/trump-to-revoke-obama-era-guidelines-on-race-in-college-admissions/

The Trump administration is set on Tuesday to revoke a series of Obama-era guidelines that encourage considering race in the college admissions process as a means of promoting diversity, according to a report.

Two sources told the Wall Street Journal that the move comes as the Justice Department investigates whether Harvard University illegally holds Asian-Americans to a higher standard in the admissions process.

The guidelines — put in place during the Obama administration in 2011 and 2016 — laid out legal recommendations that Trump officials argue “mislead schools to believe that legal forms of affirmative action are simpler to achieve than the law allows,” the paper reported.

Anurima Bargava, who led civil rights enforcement in schools for the Justice Department during Obama’s presidency, disagreed with that assessment, saying the documents simply offered guidelines to schools looking to continue using affirmative action legally.