RUTHFULLY YOURS

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a neighbor who revealed to me that, insofar as she would like to exercise her right to bear arms, she doesn’t consider herself especially “liberal.” For this reason, she would eventually like to leave our painfully blue state of New Jersey.

Yet during the course of our exchange, she also shared that her daughter is away at college. I responded: “I hope that she doesn’t come home hating you.” I was half-joking, of course, but only by half. It was then that I told her that, being an academic dissident, I make it my mission to inform otherwise uninformed parents of what their children can expect to experience during their time in today’s university.

A glance at a couple of recent events from two schools, one secular, the other Catholic, suffices all too easily to leave an indelible impression of the contemporary academy:

At George Washington University, just days after much of the Christian world celebrated Easter, a training session was held for faculty and students. The purpose of this “diversity workshop” is to expound upon the thesis that Christians “receive unmerited perks from institutions and systems all across our country.”

The seminar is titled: “Christian Privilege: But Our Founding Fathers Were All Christian, Right?!” According to the seminar description, Christians have “built-in advantages” over non-Christians.

Upon their completion of the workshop, participants should be able to “describe what is meant by privilege overall and white privilege especially;” “describe the role of denial when it comes to white privilege;” “differentiate between equality and equity;” “list at least three examples of Christian privilege;” and “list at least three ways to be an ally with a non-Christian person.”

Over at Providence College, a Dominican-founded, Roman Catholic institution, the school has succumbed to what Anthony Esolen, one of its former faculty members, characterizes as the “Totalitarian Diversity Cult.” Esolen is a practicing Catholic, a scholar who famously translated Dante’s Divine Comedy, who left Providence nearly a year ago because of what he insists is its abandonment of its Catholic Christian mission.

Below is the Freedom Center’s new pamphlet, “SJP: Neo-Nazis on Campus,” which sheds light on the extreme depths of Jew-Hatred promoted by the organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). As the pamphlet documents, members of SJP have been caught praising Hitler, calling for a second Holocaust and wishing death upon Jews — all while spreading the propaganda of the terrorist group Hamas, whose stated mission is to exterminate the world Jewish population. The pamphlet is part of the Freedom Center’s campaign, Stop University Support for Terrorists.

There are two components of the Palestinian war to annihilate Israel: terrorism and propaganda,” writes author Caroline Glick. The organizations that Palestinian terrorists have created and funded on American campuses, most particularly Students for Justice in Palestine, function as political and propaganda fronts for their parent organizations, which blow up pizza parlors and weddings in the Jewish state. The relationship between terror and terrorist propaganda is exemplified in the coalition of campus organizations which over the past fifteen years have employed funds from the terrorist party Hamas to launch an all-out political assault on the Jewish state and to create a climate of hatred towards Jews and students who support Israel on campus.

While Hamas operatives in the Middle East launch rockets at Israeli civilian targets and dig terror tunnels under Israeli kindergarten classrooms, their supporters at American universities have a no less sinister mission: to spread lies that portray Israel as a criminal state, and thus to justify its destruction. The terrorist movement on American campuses has inspired an outpouring of neo-Nazi hate by falsely portraying the Jews as “colonial-settler” occupiers of a fictional state called “Palestine.” Members of Students for Justice in Palestine even openly praise Hitler and wish for another Holocaust. Witness the following tweets from Nancy Salem who is an alumna of the University of Texas and was an SJP activist supporting the Hamas-inspired and funded Boycott Israel movement there.

“@DictatorHitler: How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough’ @PrincessLulllu @thearabgirl HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHA”

“@DictatorHitler: Gassed a Jew, I’m sweating #Heil’ OMG.”

“Have a safe trip Lulu. I love you baby girl! See you in 3 weeks! Kiss the Palestine ground for me and kill some jews! <3 #IMissYouAlready.”[1] Nancy is not alone. Yousef AlYassir, a student at the University of Houston who was a member of his high school’s chapter of the Muslim Students Association, shared his insights on twitter as well: “F**K THE JEWS F**K EM ALL KILL ALL THE JEWS ATTA BOY HITLER”

Mr. Wood, a senior at Williams College, is a former Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal.

‘White people need to be checked, Zach. End of discussion.”

I was talking with an Ivy League historian, a fellow African-American, about “white privilege.” I asked if his goal was to antagonize or to promote dialogue.

“Do you know who I am?” he demanded. “I’ve been helping black people longer than you’ve been alive. I’m telling you what I know: Lecturing these white kids is only the beginning.”

Is it really necessary to be so aggressive?

“Listen, I don’t give a damn. I’m not interested in negotiating with racists.”

I tried to close the conversation cordially, saying I’d have to reflect on the issue. But when I extended my hand, he looked at it, looked up at me, and then walked away.

Does white privilege exist? Sure. If you’re white and you excel at academic or other cognitively demanding endeavors, for example, the light of your success is never dimmed by speculation about whether you benefited from affirmative action.

White privilege has become the target of many initiatives in higher education. The goal, advocates say, is to fight racism and promote justice. Yet the practice often doesn’t seem constructive. In my college career, I’ve spoken to many peers and professors who insist adamantly that any conversation about race in America should begin and end with the accusation of white privilege. The aim seems to be to establish guilt, not build understanding.

As I see it, the main goal of discussing white privilege should be to promote a more complex and nuanced view of the world so that, for example, it would be difficult for one of my white peers to drive through the Washington neighborhood where I grew up and say: “What’s wrong with those people?” People of all races should aim to understand the range of attitudes and perspectives on race that make the issue a difficult one. CONTINUE AT SITE

Last month, a small group of protesters at Lewis & Clark College law school tried to shut down visiting lecturer Christina Hoff Sommers, a libertarian feminist critical of feminist dogma on “rape culture,” the pay gap and other issues. They chanted, shouted, played loud music and sang, “We will fight for justice until Christina’s gone.” Appalled commentators deplored the intolerance, but then came a spate of “nothing to see here” articles. Free speech on campus is doing fine, progressive pundits scoffed; it’s absurd to paint a few left-wing students as a danger to freedom when we face right-wing authoritarianism in government.

But it should be possible to be against more than one threat at a time. And the climate on college campuses in recent years is very much a threat to the principles of a free society.

The “no problem” argument is based mainly on a poll, the General Social Survey, which shows steadily rising support for allowing “offensive” speakers a platform, especially in the under-35 age group. But it’s not clear how relevant that survey is to present-day campus speech battles. Its examples of controversial speakers include a homosexual (absurdly dated) and an atheist (ditto). On the one item that is relevant to current controversies — allowing a speech by a racist — support has dropped, notably among young adults.

Another supposedly reassuring poll, the Gallup-Knight Foundation survey, found that 70% of students felt it was more important for colleges to have “an open learning environment” with diverse viewpoints, even at the cost of allowing offensive speech, than to create a “positive” environment by censoring such expression.

Only apologists determined to avert their eyes and cover their ears could deny with a straight face that higher education in America today nurses hostility to free speech.

Sporadic eruptions of that hostility have made the headlines. Last year, in early February, violent protests swept across the University of California, Berkeley against right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, causing the university to cancel his speech. In March, Middlebury College students disrupted a talk by the distinguished American Enterprise Institute social scientist Charles Murray and assaulted his host, Professor Allison Stanger, sending her to the hospital. In April, fear of more violence compelled UC-Berkeley to rescind an invitation to the acerbic conservative columnist Ann Coulter. Last fall semester, student efforts to shut down speech on campus skyrocketed.

Less overt forms of hostility to free speech on campus run deeper. Colleges and universities teach students that free speech is merely one among many values. Campus authorities encourage students to expect that schools will silence, or at least cordon off, offensive opinions. In the humanities and social sciences, professors routinely exclude from class discussion, syllabi, and departmental offerings ideas for which a good case can be made but with which they disagree.

Some want to believe that controversies over campus free speech are a tempest in a teapot. While acknowledging that walling off students from disfavored opinions for four or five years may instill bad intellectual habits, the optimists suppose that once these graduates take their place in the real world they’ll quickly discover that the Constitution provides broad protection for speech, including the expression of, say, conservative convictions that university majorities often deem appalling and degrading. The hope is that hostility to free speech nursed on campus stays on campuses.

The Trump administration is reportedly planning to scrap a controversial Obama-era education regulation that penalized schools for having disparate rates of discipline and turned school districts across the country into war zones.

The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice issued the federal directive jointly in 2014, warning public school districts receiving federal funding that they “could face investigation and funding cuts if they fail to reduce statistical ‘disparities’ in discipline by race,” the New York Post reported.

After Mayor de Blasio adopted the more lenient school discipline standards in early 2015, “more schools saw fighting, disrespect, drugs, gang activity,” said Max Eden, an education policy expert and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

While NYC school suspensions are down, crime has spiked in the city’s public schools, including major crimes such as robbery and arson, new NYPD data show. The current academic year has seen the first school murder in more than 20 years — a stabbing at a Bronx high school — and the first time a gun was fired inside a school in more than 15 years. What’s more, new state Education Department data reveal there were more rapes and other sex crimes at NYC public schools during the 2017-2018 school year than any year since 2007.

The Obama-era school discipline policy received fresh scrutiny in the wake of the Parkland school shooting when critics said it prevented police from using available tools that could have stopped it.

According to an instructor at Columbia University, eating a vegan diet can help fight racist violence.

The adjunct lecturer, Christopher-Sebastian McJetters, made the comments during a lecture for Cornell Students for Animal Rights, according to the Cornell Daily Sun.

“I want to talk about the psychology that goes into why we do this, the way that we do this, and the ways that animal violence and exploitation manifests itself outside of our food system,” he said.

According to McJetters, “what we do to other animals informs how we treat one another on this planet, and it is always — always — someone who doesn’t have institutional power, and they’re usually brown.”

“Whiteness has analyzed us and decided that we are not worthy of our individual selves and our individual bodily autonomy and that we get to be objectified and used,” he said. “Both of us, black people and animals.”

McJetters’s perspective is particularly interesting to me because lately I’ve been seeing people complain that aspects of veganism are racist. In January, a sociologist claimed that veganism had strong connections to “white masculinity” because the male vegans she interviewed used facts rather than emotions to explain the reasons behind their veganism. That same month, two professors wrote an article about how Beyoncé’s support for veganism “reproduces existing patterns of discrimination and inequality.”

On Monday, students at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) protested to demand the school’s on-campus health center provide transgender drugs, which it stopped providing last spring.

The on-campus student health center had briefly provided hormone replacement therapy (HRT) under Dr. Annamaria Kontor, who was fired last May for exceeding her authority in providing these drugs. Kontor had reportedly ignored several notices urging her to stop the practice.

“HRT is not a luxury that people just want — they need this. It’s a medication,” Natasha Amadasun, a student at the protest who identified as non-binary and transgender but does not take HRT, told the Democrat and Chronicle. Amadasun works at the Q Center, an LGBT establishment on campus.

“A lot of students come into the Q center with questions (about access) and we can’t really help them because we don’t have much information,” Amadasun, who goes by the pronoun “they,” told the paper.

Since the on-campus center no longer provides HRT, students who identify with the gender opposite their birth sex go to either Trillium Health or the University of Rochester Medical Center, both of which have long wait lists and can be difficult to access without vehicles, the Democrat and Chronicle reported.

Kenji Vann, a biological woman identifying as a man, reported on relying on parents and friends to drive him to Strong Memorial Hospital for HRT appointments. Having hormone treatments available on campus “would be so much more convenient for scheduling,” Vann said.

“Students are tired of waiting and feeling kind of invisible, especially on a campus with such a large queer presence,” Taryn Brennan, president of the LGBT group OUTspoken, which organized the protest, told the Democrat and Chronicle. The protest also complained about the policy on gender-neutral bathrooms on campus, and demanded more accessible information for LGBT students.

Perhaps ironically, RIT has a reputation for championing LGBT identities, including offering “gender-inclusive” housing.

Despite this stance, the school insisted that Dr. Kontor did not have the proper authority to provide HRT. In a letter firing Kontor, Dr. Wendy Gelbard, the college’s associate vice president of Student Health, Counseling and Wellness, wrote, “The Student Health Center’s practice prohibits prescribing hormone therapy for the purpose of gender transition.”

Gelbard later repeated that administering and monitoring HRT for the purpose of gender transition was “beyond the scope of practice of the Student Health Center.” She also wrote that Kontor had ignored several notices not to provide hormone therapy to transgender students — notices Kontor denied receiving. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hampton Middle School has a problem.

The school in Hampton, Georgia managed to make national news twice in one week.

A sixth-grade teacher from the school was caught on tape ranting against Trump’s slogan of Make America Great Again. “Maybe he’s talking about it was great during segregation in the ‘60s. Is that what he’s talking about?”

“He must be talking about when it was great for Europeans,” Johnetta Benton sneered. “Because when it comes to minorities, America has never been great for minorities.”

Josie Orihuela , the Cuban-American student who tried to argue with her teacher, was told that she had no right to complain because her European ancestors have killed millions.

The teacher, who was supposed to be talking about Black History Month, also claimed that all Americans were illegal immigrants who had stolen the land. “When you say immigrants are killing folks, that’s us. That’s you, you, you, you and you,” she said, pointing at the different students, including Josie.

Josie had been named after her grandfather, who had fled Castro’s Cuba, and had Cherokee ancestry.