RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/stanford-law-school-political-correctness-intolerance-conservative-views/here’s a growing intolerance of conservative views.

Nestled in the heart of what is now Silicon Valley, the Leland Stanford Junior University was, for much of its hundred-plus-year history, lightly regarded as a playground for the idle rich. To the extent that Stanford bore any resemblance to its aspirational cousins on the East Coast, it was to their previous incarnations as polite finishing schools for those who made their money the old-fashioned way — that is, by inheriting it.

All of this began to change during the 1960s with the advent of the modern semiconductor industry. Although this development was largely a fortuitous coincidence, some combination of luck and shrewd decision-making soon tied Stanford’s fortunes to the trajectory of its now-prosperous environs. The results, of course, are nothing short of breathtaking. The undergraduate college regularly boasts the nation’s lowest acceptance rates, and both the graduate business school and the law school likewise rank at the very top of their respective fields.

But all is not well on a campus where many T-shirts bear Stanford’s unofficial mantra that “Life Is Good!” Last year, former provost John Etchemendy warned publicly of a threat from within — a “growing intolerance” that has manifested as a sort of “political one-sidedness.” His admonition was, predictably, politely ignored. However, my experience at Stanford Law School suggests that, if anything, Etchemendy has understated the scope and the scale of the challenge that elite universities now face.

At Stanford Law School, no more than three of approximately 110 full-time faculty publicly identify as conservative or libertarian. (By way of contrast, Stanford Law School touts on its webpage 23 full-time faculty under the inartful rubric of “minority.”) As a consequence, many of my classmates will graduate having never engaged with a law professor whose worldview and convictions track those of nearly half the voting public.

President Trump’s vow to change a “rigged system” helped propel him to victory over stodgy supporters of “liberal” and “conservative” non-alternatives. His Department of Justice has sided with Asian-Americans claiming discrimination in admissions at Harvard and, again on their behalf, expressed interest in the possibility of antitrust violations in early admissions to elite schools.

As the putatively Chinese proverb has it, one picture is worth a thousand words (or even a whole article). This graph depicts the issue:

Source: Althea Nagai, “Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions,” Center for Equal Opportunity, May 22, 2018.

Displayed are the percentages of Asian-American undergraduate students at California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, from 1980 to 2015, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics of the Department of Education.

Do elite universities in America discriminate against Asian-Americans and establish a quota in the form of a ceiling on their numbers? The graph above (the only one among the thousand or so words here) shows a plateau for MIT and Harvard against the results at Caltech, where undergraduate Asian-American enrollment has risen over 40 percent Caltech does not practice affirmative action (forbidden by the California constitution, courtesy of Proposition 209).

Thankfully, the plan didn’t work.

A STEM professor at the University of Akron in Ohio was trying to boost his female students’ grades — just because those students are women.

On Monday, the professor, Liping Liu, sent an email to students letting them know that three groups of students may see their grades raised a “level or two,” according to a screenshot of the email that was posted on Reddit.

The screenshot has since been removed because it contained recipients’ email addresses, however, a redacted copy of it was provided by a student to Campus Reform. It stated:

The following categories of students may see their grades raised one level or two:

1) Female students (it is a national movement to encourage female students to go to information sciences)

2) Students who had earned scores in exams (especially final exams) demonstrating a higher performance than their calculated ones

3) Students who attended class but missed reporting attendance (as long as I can tell)

Liu told The College Fix that he was well aware that his attempt to raise women’s grades could be “questionable,” but that he decided he wanted to “test the water” anyway and see if the grade raises might “attract female students into future classes.”

In a win for sanity, however, the plan didn’t work. The Fix reports that an administrator contacted the publication to say that Liu’s idea was “unacceptable,” and that no one’s grades would be raised.

This is an outrage, but it is common nationwide: the Daily Caller News Foundation reports that Mountain Ridge Middle School in West Virginia is “instructing junior high students to write the Islamic profession of faith ostensibly to practice calligraphy.” Students are made to write out the Shahada, which states: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

This is exactly what I warned about in my book, Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance, in the chapter “The Mosqueing of the Public Schools.”

In order to convert to Islam, one says the shahada. Saying the shahada makes you a Muslim. The shahada is what is on the black flag of jihad.

No non-Muslim student should be forced to write or say the shahada without the qualifier “Muslims believe that…” This is because it is a statement of faith. If the school exercise is requiring students to write it, it should be clear from the wording of the exercise that this is Islamic faith, not the student’s faith. That distinction has been glossed over in many, many school textbook presentations.

This is in West Virginia, not Baghdad. And it’s a problem not just in West Virginia – it’s a national problem.

Rich Penkoski, the father of a Mountain Ridge student, contacted me and explained the situation further. He sent me the packets the school gave out for the Jewish and the Christian lessons and commented:

Notice no bible verses, no reciting the 10 commandments or the Lord’s prayer. No practicing writing in Hebrew (not even the 10 commandments) as compared to the Islamic packet.

Why on Earth would Yale invite Hillary Clinton, the whiniest woman on the planet to speak at its commencement? Did the administrators not have advance knowledge of her psychosis? Her address to Yale grads was all about her: her loss, her anger at those who did not vote for her. She is, without a doubt, the sorest of sore losers.

Hillary quoted Dickens when bemoaning the constitutional crisis she herself has created by inventing the Trump-colluded-with-Russia hoax. She is the person who colluded with Russia in numerous ways. It was Hillary who saw to it that the U.S. sold twenty percent of our uranium to Russia. She is the one who benefited financially, to the tune of $145M, from that deal. She is the one who commissioned and paid for the fake dossier on Trump and then had her like-minded felons in the Deep State use it to spy on the Trump campaign and probably everyone within it. It was she who was and is affiliated with Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie, the law firm that facilitated much of the skullduggery perpetrated on her behalf. It was she who sabotaged Bernie Sanders during the primaries. And looking back, it was she who made a mess of Libya and is responsible for the deaths at Benghazi. The complete list of her failures and crimes against the nation is too long to include here.

Mrs. Clinton and her husband are the most corrupt people in U.S. history to dominate a political party. They have become fabulously wealthy by selling access to U.S. government favors and via other unscrupulous schemes. And still she whines. She wanted more; she wanted the presidency and believed with absolute certainty that it was hers for the taking.

Hillary is clearly convinced that her defeat in the 2016 election was a near-death blow to American democracy. In her view, Trump’s victory is an assault on our republic. She is still furious at all the deplorables who did not vote for her. She has no concern for those of us who are victims of and are outraged at the senseless crimes committed by illegal aliens protected by sanctuary cities or the businesses shut down by the tyranny of the diversity police.

Dear Grads: How can you make an impact on this world? Michael Keaton told Kent State students, “I’m Batman.” Ronan Farrow encouraged Loyola Marymount’s class of 2018 to “trust that inner voice.” Human-rights lawyer Amal Clooney told Vanderbilt grads last week, “Courage is needed more than ever.”

Maybe you’re looking for something less vacuous than warmed over “Wizard of Oz” themes? If so, put down your JUUL vape pen, unplug from “Fortnite,” tuck in your “I Am the Change” shirt, and listen up. Scale or bail.

Many of you graduates think you want socially conscious careers—giving back, fighting injustice and making a difference. “Well, you know, we all want to change the world.” You want to reduce inequality, end poverty, comfort the homeless, expand human dignity. Guess what? Me too! But you’re going about it the wrong way.

Some 44% of millennials believe they do more to support social causes than the rest of their family, according to the 2017 Millennial Impact report. If you’re volunteering at shelters or working for most nonprofits, that’s all very nice, but it’s one-off. You’re one of the privileged few who have the education to create lasting change. It may feel good to ladle soup to the hungry, but you’re wasting valuable brain waves that could be spent ushering in a future in which no one is hungry to begin with.

There’s a word that was probably never mentioned by your professors: Scale. No, not the stuff on the bottom of your bong or bathtub. It’s the concept of taking a small idea and finding ways to implement it for thousands, or millions, or even billions. Without scale, ideas are no more than hot air. Stop doing the one-off two-step. It’s time to scale up.

I hear you talking about food deserts and the need for urban eco-farms to enable food justice. You certainly have the jargon down. You can hoe and sickle and grow rutabagas to feed a few hungry folks, but then it’s really all about you. A better option: Find a way to revamp food distribution to lower prices. Or reinvent how food is grown and enriched to enable healthier diets. Call it a Neo-Green Revolution.

Ms. Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America, which has more than 1,200 chapters on college and high school campuses.

Free speech is out of fashion on college, university and even high school campuses, and pro-life students are hit especially hard. Putting aside any feelings about the issue of abortion, consider that pro-life students increasingly find their ability to make their case suppressed by fellow students and administrators. With more than 1,200 college and high school chapters, Students for Life of America works daily addressing obstacles to student speech. Among them:

• Vandalism and theft of displays and signs. Defacing displays like a Cemetery of the Innocents, set in remembrance of lives lost to abortion, occurs regularly, and was captured on video recently at the Miami University of Ohio. Chalking is a popular way to express thought peacefully. Recently a California State University, Fresno, professor was required to pay $17,000 and undergo free-speech training for destroying student pro-life chalk messages and encouraging his students to do the same.

• A tax on speech in the form of selectively assessed security fees. When a Students for Life chapter at the University of Michigan invited Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King to speak, the school sent the students a bill for more than $800. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys intervened, noting: “The government may not charge speakers for the security costs driven by listeners’ response to that speech.” CONTINUE AT SITE

“Islamophobic Muslims”? Such is the surreal conclusion of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (IPSU)’s 2018 American Muslim Poll, which was presented before about forty at Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club on May 1. This piece of propaganda attempts to downplay uncomfortable realities recognized by American Muslims themselves.

Advising the report’s authors was Islamism apologist John Esposito, founding director of Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), ISPU’s partner in the study. The ACMCU’s “Islamophobia”-fighting Bridge Initiative funded the survey and its new “Islamophobia Index.” Bridge Initiative senior research fellow Arsalan Iftikhar, formerly of the Hamas-derived Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), attended the panel event, as did Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, the CATO Institute’s “libertarian for sharia.”

ISPU director of research and Esposito protégé Dalia Mogahed entered the realm of sheer fantasy in discussing the report’s findings on Muslims and violence. She highlighted the report’s outdated, ludicrous claim that “[m]ost American terrorist fatalities are at the hands of white supremacists.” America’s steady death toll from jihadists has clearly refuted this canard.

Mogahed offered a flagrantly misleading assessment of the poll statement “Most Muslims living in the United States are more prone to violence than other people.” She fretted over this claim receiving high approval from Muslims themselves (18 percent agreeing), surpassed only by white evangelicals at 23 percent, while the general public averaged 13 percent. The report baselessly attributes such welcome self-criticism to media “dehumanization of Muslims,” resulting in “internalized stigmatization” and the aforementioned “Islamophobic Muslims.”

On Sunday, Hillary Clinton gave the graduation speech for Yale College, a speech with no less than six not-so-veiled complaints about her loss in the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

“Let me just get this over the way, no I’m not over it,” Clinton declared at one point during the speech. Talk about an understatement. Her resentment pulsed from the entire address. Yale was her alma mater, where she went to law school, and yet it seems she had more to say about Trump and the 2016 election than she did about Yale or its graduating class.

Here are six particularly memorable gripes.
1. Congratulations … to delinquent voters.

After thanking the college for inviting her, Clinton began her speech by congratulating the Yale Class of 2018. Even in this, she slipped in a disparaging remark about the voters who failed to get her elected.

“Most of all, congratulations to the Class of 2018. I am thrilled for all of you, even the three of you who live in Michigan and didn’t cast your absentee ballots in time,” the former presidential candidate quipped.

Were this the only remark about the election, it could be discounted as a joke. Alas, it was but the first of a long train wreck of petty sore loser accusations.
2. The hat.

Referencing the hats at the graduation ceremony, Clinton said, “So I brought a hat too, a Russian hat, right?”

She pulled out a black ushanka with the iconic hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union and held it up in her left hand. Raising it to her head, Clinton could not quite bring herself to put it on.

“I mean, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” she quipped.

Mr. Struppa is president of Chapman University.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing lately, throughout the academy and in the news, about donations the Charles Koch Foundation has been making to universities. In the heat of the debate, many details of these donations have been described inaccurately or distorted purposefully. But after the allegations, irate commentaries and internal academic battles, the actual outcome of opposition to these gifts is to limit the academic freedom the protesters claim to champion.

I am president of Chapman University, a midsize private institution in Southern California. We recently received a $15 million grant to establish an institute dedicated to challenging the perceived tension between economics and the humanities, reintegrating their study in the spirit of Adam Smith. The institute is the brainchild of my distinguished colleague Vernon Smith, a Nobel laureate in economics, and his collaborators. Appropriately enough, the institute is called the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, where “Smith” refers to both Adam and Vernon.

The institute is doing exciting and innovative work, offering a curriculum that infuses the humanities with desperately needed energy. I was thrilled to see the enthusiasm among students taking courses developed by the institute.

Yet the Smith curriculum and the faculty who devise it have come under attack because one-third of the $15 million gift came from the Koch Foundation. The criticism, led by the “UnKoch My Campus” organization, takes a familiar tone: The Koch brothers are trying to infiltrate the university so they can dictate curricula and research priorities. Ultimately, the critics’ complaint is that the gift is a challenge to academic freedom.