RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/changing-subject-15950.html

As he moves to wreck New York City’s eight justly famed competitive-entry high schools, New York mayor Bill de Blasio implies he’s on a mission from God, but it seems more like a mission from the United Federation of Teachers. “Blessed are those who act justly,” the famously self-reverential chief executive declared at Harlem’s Bethel Gospel Academy Sunday, later returning to the theme to describe critics of his plan to impose entrance quotas on the eight schools: “I think scripture also tells us about the naysayers and the doubting Thomases,” he said. “Can I get an amen?”

Well, no. The mayor’s scheme needs to be seen for what it is—an effort to change the city’s public-school-performance conversation rather than a constructive public policy proposal. Plus, it’s a blatant pander to his political base—and a firm notice that a reelected de Blasio has no intention of turning away from progressive obsessions in favor of sensible governance. And he said as much Sunday. “I’ve got a new mandate from the voters. [And] I have a new chancellor who is focused on social justice.” The mayor might have added that the new chancellor, Richard Carranza, is focused on social justice to the exclusion of all else.

Following relatively brief and undistinguished stints heading the San Francisco and Houston school systems, Carranza arrived in New York in April, announcing that his top priority would be desegregating New York’s public schools. True to his word, he almost immediately attacked “wealthy white Manhattan parents” for, he claimed, blocking integration efforts—then instructed a critic to take “anti-implicit bias training.” Carranza has returned to the bias theme repeatedly, ignoring the central shame of the city’s schools: the thousands of students who graduate from its woeful high schools each year unable to do college-level academic work and—perhaps more significantly—incapable of performing in New York’s twenty-first-century economy, either.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/diversity-not-merit-15948.html

For decades, admission to New York City’s eight elite “specialized high schools” has been based strictly on a high-stakes test administered to the city’s eighth-graders. The meritocratic premise is simple: regardless of who you are or how much your parents make, if you hit a certain score on the test, you’re guaranteed a place in one of these high schools, all among the best in the United States. But if Mayor Bill de Blasio gets his way, New York will scrap this venerable system for one that is as close to a race-based quota scheme as constitutionally possible.

Progressives criticize the admissions test as an instrument of “segregation” because black and Latino kids are underrepresented among students accepted at schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. Indeed, in 2016, Stuyvesant had only 20 black students among a student body of more than 3,000. Brooklyn Tech, where de Blasio’s son went, is somewhat more racially diverse, with 14.8 percent black and Latino representation. But in a city where blacks and Latinos make up two out of every three public school students, black and Latino enrollment in the most elite secondary schools is undeniably thin—a direct result of student performance on the entrance test.

Yesterday, the mayor, backed by his new schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, announced that he plans to scrap the entrance test for the eight elite schools and replace it with a system offering admission to the kids in the top 7 percent of every junior school in the city. This change, according to the mayor, will make the schools “look like New York City” and answer the “demand for fairness” that supposedly rings across the five boroughs.