RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://freebeacon.com/issues/harvard-hospital-taking-portraits-white-men/

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, is taking down its prominent display of its past medical legends because too many are white men.

Diversity and inclusion initiatives prompted the removal of 30 portraits from the hospital’s Bornstein Amphitheater because the paintings reinforce “that white men are in charge,” one professor said. The Boston Globe first reportedthe news, writing that past white male luminaries will be dispersed to “put the focus on diversity.”

Portraits that had hung in the amphitheater for decades will now be moved to less visible areas like conference rooms and lobby halls.

Dr. Betsy Nabel, the president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said she made the decision to get rid of white men after reading the minds of minority students looking at the portraits.

“I have watched the faces of individuals as they have come into Bornstein,” Nabel told the Globe. “I have watched them look at the walls. I read on their faces ‘Interesting. But I am not represented here.'”

“That got me thinking maybe it’s time that we think about respecting our past in a different way,” she said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-misery-in-missouri-1529103599

Indulging protesters can be expensive, as the University of Missouri is discovering three years after students successfully demanded the resignation of the president and chancellor. Last week the school said it will have to eliminate 185 positions on top of 308 cut last year.

Apparently fewer parents want to send their kids to a school where activism eclipses academics. Between the fall 2015 and 2017 semesters, freshman enrollment dropped by 35%. Lost tuition accounts for $29 million of the university’s current $49 million budget shortfall.

In response, Mizzou has had to lay off employees, decline to renew expiring faculty contracts, and leave positions unfilled after retirements. The university is also cutting back on travel and phasing out low-demand courses, among other austerity measures.

Mizzou claims more aggressive recruitment from neighboring states’ schools has contributed to the enrollment decline. And it says growing maintenance, research and personnel costs have contributed to the budget strain. But “we know the perception of Mizzou was a key factor in the difficulties we had over the past two years,” adds spokesman Christian Basi.

Much of the public outcry concerned free speech, and Missouri has tried to improve on that score. Since 2015, all campuses in the Missouri university system have adopted the Chicago Principles, which guarantee “the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge and learn.” But other speech policies at Mizzou remain ambiguous, earning it a mediocre yellow rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education that tracks free-speech on campus.

In May 2017, the university signed a $1.3 million contract for three years of outside PR help. This year it has spent $1.8 million on ads to recruit and enroll new students. The school has added $8 million to its scholarship budget and will decrease the cost of student meals and housing next year.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/14/indiana-teacher-i-was-forced-to-resign-because-i-wont-pretend-boys-can-be-girls/

An Indiana orchestra teacher says public school administrators gave him three options at the end of this school year: refer to students as the opposite sex, resign, or be fired. He decided to resign at the end of the school year because the school would not budge, but at a local school board meeting Monday pleaded to have his job back. The board voted instead to accept his resignation.

Local public officials have so far refused to publicly discuss the policies they put into place at the beginning of 2018 that John Kluge says led to his resignation in May. Brownsburg Community School Corporation, the district that employed Kluge, put out a transgender policy document in January instructing staff to call students by their chosen names and pronouns once they are so designated on school records. Kluge opted instead to address students by their last names to avoid either referring to his apparently several transgender students with pronouns and names of the opposite sex, or offending them by not doing as they wished despite its contradiction of reality.

That wasn’t good enough. At the school board meeting, students accused Kluge of saying that transgender persons “are not an actual human being” and “actively disrespect[ing]” them for not using opposite-sex pronouns to describe them.

“Mr. Kluge’s religious beliefs have absolutely no place in a public high school. I think what he believes is morally just conflicts with what not only I believe, [but] what my parents believe, what my psychiatrist, therapist and doctor believe and the school board believe are morally just,” said student Aidyn Sucec. Kluge’s beliefs are not merely moral, but also scientific. Scientifically, there are only two sexes. “Gender” is a linguistic term for a non-physical concept.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270460/ucla-students-file-criminal-complaints-against-edwin-black

Criminal complaints are now being filed by students following the belligerent disruption of a May 17, 2018 Students Supporting Israel [SSI] event at University of California Los Angeles. At least a half-dozen students announced they would visit the UCLA police department to file formal complaints reporting criminal disruption of a meeting, as well as disturbing the peace and conspiracy.

The move follows media disclosures that the UCLA was reneging on the public pledge by two chancellors in the Daily Bruin —bolstered by a statement for the record by a university spokesman — to refer the belligerent May 17 incident to prosecutors.

The disruption and nose-to-nose intimidation of the students attending the May 17 SSI event at UCLA was documented in a video, beginning at minute 41. Disruptors suddenly and loudly stormed into the room mid-session. One person tore down a flag, demonstratively pulled away a desk placard, and cursed threateningly close to the face of a panelist. With bullhorns, whistles, staged dancing, and slogan shouting, the event was shut down.

The Louis Brandeis D. Center, led by attorney Alyza Lewin, along with Director of Legal Initiatives Aviva Vogelstein and three law students in the UCLA Brandeis chapter, dispatched a letter to the university asserting that the disruption crossed the line into misdemeanor violations of the California criminal code. They cited Title 11, section 403 (which covers deliberate disruption of a public meeting —successfully used to convict the so-called Irvine 11), section 415 (which covers malicious disturbance of the peace), and section 182 (which forbids any conspiracy to violate the other sections).

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/13/campus-insanity-hits-high-school-teachers-protest-eurocentric-imperialism-world-history-class/

It’s idiotic to decide who is important to study based on what their skin and hair looks like rather than our available knowledge about their civilization and its effects on the world.

It may not be comfortable for parents to realize that their kids’ teachers are molded by an almost entirely left-wing credentialing cartel, but it’s been happening for decades and is now overtly politicizing K-12 history classes. This week high school teachers protested the College Board’s changes to its Advanced Placement world history classes, which thousands of high schools teach across the country every year.

“You cannot tell my black and brown students that their history is not going to be tested and then assume that that’s not going to matter. Right, the people in power in our country already are telling those same students that their history, that their present, that their future doesn’t matter. And by you making this decision, you are going along with that,” teacher Amanda DoAmaral told College Board Senior Vice President Trevor Packer at a conference this week.

Rather than pointing out to DoAmaral that it’s historically illiterate — not to mention possibly racist — to assume you know a person’s ancestry simply by looking at his or her skin color, Packer told her other parts of the curriculum could fit in her demands. The AP curricula changes teachers object to are primarily simply dividing world history into two classes because, as one might reasonably imagine, it’s difficult to thoroughly cover the history of the entire world in a single class. College Board frequently gets complaints about cramming too much into its courses.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-attack-on-educational-excellence-1528844469

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio stands 6½ feet tall but still managed to come up short last week. The progressive Democrat wanted to eliminate the entrance exam for the city’s eight elite public high schools to ensure that more black and Hispanic students were admitted. State lawmakers, citing opposition from Asian families, blocked the move. Good for them.

The number of available slots at these schools is fixed, and last year Asian students were awarded 52.5% of them, according to the city’s Department of Education. By contrast, whites comprised 28% of the total, while Latinos and blacks were 6.5% and 3.8%, respectively. You’ll find similarly lopsided racial and ethnic results in other large cities—Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia—where black and Latino students are underrepresented in academically selective public high schools while whites and Asians are overrepresented.

Asian families in particular fear that replacing an objective test with what amounts to a racial quota system would come at the expense of Asian children. Given that other schools and programs for high-achieving students around the country are being pressed to become more “diverse,” those concerns are understandable.After the Montgomery County school district in Maryland changed admissions standards for gifted-and-talented programs—by broadening the definition of “gifted,” among other adjustments—black and Latino acceptance rates ticked up while Asian admissions fell. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is an elite magnet school in Northern Virginia that also uses an entrance exam. The school’s acceptance rate matches Georgetown University’s (just 17%) and its student body last year was 2.2% Latino, 1.5% black and nearly two-thirds Asian. A 2017 profile of the high school in Washingtonian magazine noted that administrators are under constant pressure from outsiders to increase the number of black and Latino students by watering down the selection criteria. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/real-racism-isnt-in-trumps-twitter-feed-its-in-americas-elite-universities

There is real racism in America. It resides at elite institutions like Harvard, not President Trump’s twitter feed.

It has become commonplace for the mainstream media and Trump haters to accuse the president of being racist. Just recently, they found more fodder when President Trump commented on the firing of ABC star Roseanne Barr without condemning Barr’s racist tweet that started the controversy.

Instead, the president griped about ABC’s biased media coverage against him. Trump haters wasted no time to work up their outrage, accusing the president of stooping to a new low, and normalizing racism.

Since Trump declared his candidacy for president in June 2015, he has regularly said things that typical politicians do not say and believe they should not say. As a result, allegations of racism have followed him everywhere.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/bill-de-blasio-education-new-york-best-schools-destroyed/These are some of the last bastions of absolute meritocracy left in America.

Let’s take some of the best public high schools in the United States and tweak their admissions policies, argues New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. Instead of admitting students solely by merit, de Blasio says, they should accept the top 7 percent of students from every middle school in New York City.

Most of these middle schools are the educational equivalent of Superfund sites. De Blasio’s proposal makes about as much sense as Google announcing that henceforth 5 percent of its engineers will be graduates of Stanford, 5 percent of Harvard, 5 percent of Muleshoe State Technical College, 5 percent of Vidal Sassoon’s Hairdressing Academy, and 5 percent of Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. It’s as if the Golden State Warriors announced that in the interest of sportsological diversity, they will no longer ruthlessly screen for gifted basketball players but instead will set aside spots for one golfer and one bowler on next year’s starting five.

Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Tech, and five other specialized schools have a rich history of service as oases from the miserable norms that define most precincts of the New York City Department of Education. Stuyvesant’s graduates include four Nobel laureates, Eric Holder, David Axelrod, and Tim Robbins. Bronx Science, as it is known, boasts eight Nobel winners, more than any high school in the country, and six Pulitzer Prize winners.

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.