RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/html/plot-against-merit-13667.html

THIS IS A COLUMN FROM 2014! THE PLOT HAS THICKENED WITH THE ADVENT OF THE NEW CHANCELLOR RICHARD CARRANZA WHO PLANS TO CHANGE ALL STANDARDS FOR ADMISSIONS TO ELITE PUBLIC SCHOOLS…..RSK

In 2004, seven-year-old Ting Shi arrived in New York from China, speaking almost no English. For two years, he shared a bedroom in a Chinatown apartment with his grandparents—a cook and a factory worker—and a young cousin, while his parents put in 12-hour days at a small Laundromat they had purchased on the Upper East Side. Ting mastered English and eventually set his sights on getting into Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of New York City’s eight “specialized high schools.” When he was in sixth grade, he took the subway downtown from his parents’ small apartment to the bustling high school to pick up prep books for its eighth-grade entrance exam. He prepared for the test over the next two years, working through the prep books and taking classes at one of the city’s free tutoring programs. His acceptance into Stuyvesant prompted a day of celebration at the Laundromat—an immigrant family’s dream beginning to come true. Ting, now a 17-year-old senior starting at NYU in the fall, says of his parents, who never went to college: “They came here for the next generation.”

New York’s specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant and the equally storied Bronx High School of Science, along with Brooklyn Technical High School and five smaller schools, have produced 14 Nobel Laureates—more than most countries. For more than 70 years, admission to these schools has been based upon a competitive examination of math, verbal, and logical reasoning skills. In 1971, the state legislature, heading off city efforts to scrap the merit selection test as culturally biased against minorities, reaffirmed that admission to the schools be based on the competitive exam. (See “How Gotham’s Elite High Schools Escaped the Leveler’s Ax,” Spring 1999.) But now, troubled by declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools, opponents of the exam have resurfaced. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a civil rights complaint challenging the admissions process. A bill in Albany to eliminate the test requirement has garnered the support of Sheldon Silver, the powerful Assembly Speaker. And new New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son, Dante, attends Brooklyn Tech, has called for changing the admissions criteria. The mayor argues that relying solely on the test creates a “rich-get-richer” dynamic that benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive test preparation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-boardrooms-need-reform-1528652211

I recently resigned as a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania and an overseer of its law school to protest the shameful treatment of law professor Amy Wax. Her career-threatening offense was to state that in her experience with black students over 17 years at Penn, few had performed in the top half of their class. Penn Law’s dean, Ted Ruger, declared her in error but refused to provide evidence. For dissenting from politically correct orthodoxy, Mr. Ruger forbade Ms. Wax to teach her much-admired first-year course in civil procedure—for which the university gave her an award in 2015.

Since I quit, I have received an education in why universities can trample free expression with impunity. My letter of resignation was printed in full in the student newspaper and excerpted on this page. I received well over 150 supportive messages from, among others, trustees, students, law school professors and alumni. One was from Judge Ray Randolph, a 1969 law graduate who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “You . . . have disgraced an institution I had admired throughout my professional career,” Judge Randolph wrote, addressing Dean Ruger.

Mr. Ruger, meanwhile, directed his fundraisers to tell alumni that his treatment of Ms. Wax was “fairly common”—a brazen falsehood. No Penn professor’s teaching responsibilities had ever been changed or limited for speaking out on public issues. He also claimed that Penn Law did not “mandate” ethnic diversity in selecting applicants for law review, traditionally an anonymous, merit-based process. That was misleading, since Penn now encourages a subjective statement from law-review applicants, which is intended to reveal their identity and tip the ethnic scales rather than reward academic excellence.

Other than me, not a single Penn trustee, overseer or professor wrote publicly about Ms. Wax’s treatment or resigned in protest. Nobody in the university community has an incentive to speak out, and everyone seems afraid to do so. Professors fear retaliation; students worry about social ostracism. I sent my letter of resignation to Angela Duckworth, the Penn psychologist and author of the celebrated 2016 book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.” She and I met last year when I accepted the university’s Distinguished Alumni Award and had a lively email correspondence. She did not respond to my resignation email.

https://www.weeklystandard.com/terry-eastland/the-balancing-game
Investigating discrimination at Harvard.

The judge in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University has set a trial date of October 15. SFFA is the student group alleging—it filed its complaint more than three years ago—that the university discriminates in admissions against Asian-American applicants. Most observers expect the case will go to the Supreme Court, not least because of the question it asks: Why are Asian-American applicants to Harvard and other elite schools less likely to be admitted than less academically qualified whites, blacks, and Hispanics?

Coincidentally, the Center for Equal Opportunity has released a study of enrollment data trends for three selective schools—Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Tech­nology, and, yes, Harvard. Authored by Althea Nagai, a research fellow at CEO (where I have an affiliation), the paper bears the ironic title—not one the suing students would fail to cheer—“Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions.”

Caltech doesn’t use racial references to admit students, while both MIT and Harvard do. Asian-American applicants to colorblind Caltech have proved so well qualified that they now win more than 40 percent of the seats in a class. Asian-American applicants to MIT and Harvard are no less qualified than those accepted by Caltech, and yet they are awarded many fewer seats than in the California school.

At MIT, says Nagai, after years of increases in the number of Asian-Americans admitted, a high-water mark of 29 percent was reached in 1995, after which the school saw a slow decline to 26 percent, where it remains today. At Harvard, Asian-American undergraduate enrollment increased to 21 percent in 1993 before dropping over the next few years to the level sustained since, which is roughly 17 percent.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/09/thinking-small-in-the-age-of

The academic Left thinks big when it comes to

#TheResistance. It thinks big in mounting symbolic protests such as the 2018 March for Science, the 2017 Women’s March, or the 2014 People’s Climate March. Grandiosity is never too grand. But when it comes to the substance of teaching and learning, the academic left prefers to think small. Small courses on small topics are the trend. These are followed by small academic requirements for small intellectual goals.

The Left’s taste for intellectual smallness is a relatively new thing. No one would accuse Marx or his 20th-century followers of harboring small intellectual designs. What has happened to turn the revolutionary class to a preoccupation with paper bags and plastic water bottles? What turned the rightful heirs of the Great Terror into the apostles of microaggressions? Why has the vanguard of world history and multiculturalism suddenly settled into a fascination with the equivalent of collecting intellectual lint?

Partly this has happened because the academic Left is scared. Having completed its long march through the institutions, it has noticed that fewer and fewer people are accepting its rule. College enrollments peaked in 2011 at 21 million in 2011 and are now down to 18.8 million in fall 2017, and will drop again this fall. This has prompted colleges and universities to redouble their marketing. They are trying to entice more “adult learners,” more international students, more illegal immigrants, and more and more academically under-qualified students to enroll. Generally, that means pitching programs tailored to the interests and abilities of busy adults, nervous illegals, and bewildered blockheads.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/objectivity-among-white-mythologies/Some progressives believe that the most important thing in any situation is to inject identity politics.

A course that will be taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges next year will teach students that “objectivity” and “meritocracy” are examples of “white mythologies” and “social constructs.”

“This course explores the history and ongoing manifestations of ‘white mythologies’ — long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm against which the peoples of the world are to be understood and judged,” states the description for the class, which is titled “White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions.”

“Students will explore how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race, and as justifications for colonial interventions, slavery, and the subordination of women,” the description continues.

As crazy as this story may sound, this is far from the first time that we’ve seen this kind of thinking on a college campus. In April of 2017, a group of students at Pomona College wrote a letter to the school’s outgoing president claiming that “the idea that there is a single truth . . . is a myth and white supremacy.” Also last year, a professor at Pennsylvania State University–Brandywine argued that “meritocracy” is a “whiteness ideology.” This year, two University of Denver professors claimed that scientific objectivity works to “spread whiteness ideology.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/universities_marking_down_students_for_using_banned_gender_terms.html

Gender madness is being enforced with the iron fist of bad grades at some of Australia’s leading universities. Natasha Bita of the Courier-Mail of Brisbane reports:

Queensland’s top universities all demand that “inclusive language’’ be used in essays, assignments, lectures and conversation, in “nanny state’’ policies rubbished yesterday by an angry federal Education Minister.

Other words – including “she”, “man”, “wife” and “mother’’ – are also off limits at some universities.

University of Queensland students have complained about academics docking marks for using the word “mankind’’ in essays.

A politics student was penalised for using the grammatically correct pronoun of “she’’ to describe a car.

“People are losing marks for using everyday speech because it’s not gender-neutral,’’ the student, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Courier Mail yesterday.

“I lost marks because I used ‘mankind’’ in my assignment, and I referred to a car I owned as ‘she is my pride and joy’.’’

A science student also lost marks for using “mankind’’ in an essay about the philosophy of scientific method.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/hillary-clinton-harvard-speech-alexander-solzhenitsyn-was-better/Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard speech was infinitely wiser than Hillary Clinton’s recent remarks at Yale.

Most commencement addresses, truth be told, are neither memorable nor meaningful. Filled with platitudes and banalities about the unmatched accomplishments and unlimited promise of each year’s crop of new college graduates, the predictable speech thankfully fades away as quickly as the moment passes, pleasantly recalled but rarely recollected.

Yet every once in a while, a commencement address comes along that has something to say and deserves to be remembered and reread, again and again.

Consider Hillary Clinton’s address recently at Yale University’s annual Class Day. Between jokes about the 2016 election (she says she is still “not over” the loss), the former senator, secretary of state, and presidential nominee spoke intently of the “full-fledged crisis in our democracy” brought on by her unnamed former political opponent.

Clinton warned the enthralled graduates that “there are leaders in our country who blatantly incite people with hateful rhetoric, who fear change, who see the world in zero-sum terms.” The inexorable result is that our fundamental rights, civic virtue, freedom of the press, and even facts and reason are “under assault like never before.”

Following the Yale tradition of sporting silly headgear for Class Day, Clinton pulled out a Russian ushanka cap to underscore her point, surrendering subtlety along with any gravitas she had left. Then came the cliché: The Class of 2018 had “already demonstrated the character and courage that will help you navigate this tumultuous moment.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270382/video-antifa-public-school-teachers-frontpagemagcom

Editor’s note: Below is Sean Fitzgerald’s new video exposing Antifa radicals in America’s public schools and their efforts to indoctrinate students with their violent ideology.

C-Span’s Brian Lamb interviewing Yale historian John Gaddis, May 28:

Brian: What is it like inside of Yale talking about Donald Trump?

Gaddis: It can’t really be done on a rational basis most of the time. within the university—a university like Yale, the feelings are so visceral, it is hard to have any conversation that does not say predictable things. . . . Anybody who tries to say something less than predictable is apt to be disregarded. People do not try. It is almost that way with students, but not quite as much. I think we are in a kind of bubble, like many places on the coast are. One of the things we have tried to do in the summer, with our grand strategy students—we have always built in what we call a summer odyssey somewhere. . . . The exotic climes we have been now pushing with our students are simply America. How many of you have taken a road trip across America? Surprisingly few. We are financing road trips across America for Yale students with the encouragement to stop in small towns and stay there. . . . They write this up as their projects. It is very simple. We just ask them, write about what you saw, write about what you heard. They can draw their own conclusions from this. . . . It is just our small effort to try to break down some of the isolation that somehow the elite universities have locked themselves into, the bubbles into which they have placed themselves.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/progressive-education-today-1528326470

‘It’s like the [Education Department’s] motto is, ‘If it’s not broken, break it.’” So said state Assemblyman Jeff Dinowitz, in an apt summary of plans by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to diminish standards at eight high-performing public high schools.

Mr. Dinowitz, who was quoted in the New York Post, is a proud alum of the Bronx High School of Science. In America’s largest school system, where most children are failing proficiency tests in math and reading, only a modern progressive such as Mr. de Blasio could think the solution is watering down standards at the schools where students are achieving.

The mayor is alarmed because Asian students are disproportionately doing far better than black and Latino kids. At Manhattan’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School, for example, 2.8% of students are Latino and 0.69% black. But 72.9% are Asian-American.

The disproportion is similar at other high-achieving New York City schools where admission is determined by an achievement test. Mr. de Blasio’s solution requires taking seats at these elite schools from Asian or white students and giving them to less qualified black and Latino children who may not be prepared for the academic demands. Either he’s setting these students up to fail, or he’ll have to ruin the schools by dumbing down their standards.