RUTHFULLY YOURS

What took them so long? That was our first question when we heard the latest news about the distinguished University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. Last summer, Professor Wax created a minor disturbance in the force of politically correct groupthink when she co-authored an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.”

What, a college professor arguing in favor of “bourgeois” values? Mirabile dictu, yes. Professor Wax and her co-author, Professor Larry Alexander from the University of San Diego, argued not only that the “bourgeois” values regnant in American society in the 1950s were beneficial to society as a whole, but also that they were potent aides to disadvantaged individuals seeking to better themselves economically and socially. “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake,” Professors Wax and Alexander advised.

Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Such homely advice rankled, of course. Imagine telling the professoriate to be patriotic, to work hard, to be civic-minded or charitable. Quelle horreur!

Wax and Alexander were roundly condemned by their university colleagues. Thirty-three of Wax’s fellow law professors at Penn signed an “Open Letter” condemning her op-ed. “We categorically reject Wax’s claims,” they thundered.

What they found especially egregious was Wax and Alexander’s observation that “All cultures are not equal.” That hissing noise you hear is the sharp intake of breath at the utterance of such a sentiment. The tort was compounded by Wax’s later statements in an interview that “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans” because “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.”

Tenure used to protect professors against termination for anything short of criminal behavior. In today’s PC climate, however, it’s no match for administrators who want to get rid of someone who’s said things they dislike. Violations of vague “harassment” policies are the weapon they employ.

That’s what Louisiana State professor Teresa Buchanan discovered in 2015 when she was terminated over her tendency to use coarse, blunt language. Even though she was a good teacher (she taught in LSU’s school of education), the administration decided to fire her after some complaints from students and an outsider. Objections from the faculty senate, which opposed Buchanan’s firing, made no difference.

With the assistance of FIRE, Buchanan took her case to court, but lost when the district court judge dismissed her complaint. I write about the case in this Martin Center article.

I have never been a great fan of tenure, but universities that have it should not undermine it with terminations for speaking in ways that offend “progressive” ears. Faculty (tenured or not) shouldn’t have to worry that the next thing they say or write will upset one of those people on campus who are looking for excuses to drop the ax on their perceived ideological enemies.

Students at several Chicago and Boston-area universities awoke this week to find their campuses papered with posters exposing members of Students for Justice in Palestine as neo-Nazis and supporters of anti-Israel terrorism. The posters were designed by the David Horowitz Freedom and were placed in the early morning hours on the campuses of Harvard University, Brandeis University and Tufts University in the Boston area and at the University of Chicago and DePaul University in Chicago.

The posters reveal comments that student activists affiliated with SJP have made on social media praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and calling for the extermination of the Jews.

These statements include:

“How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough”

“Wow White Jews are so entitled LMFAOOO Please die.”

“Had to write about a leader for DCL class. Wrote about Hitler. Cuz he’s a boss.”

A second poster exposed Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of SJP, as an anti-Semite and supporter of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas. Bazian recently came under fire for an anti-Semitic tweet which featured a caricature of an Orthodox Jew with the caption “MOM LOOK! I IS CHOSEN! I CAN NOW KILL, RAPE, SMUGGLE ORGANS & AND STEAL THE LAND OF PALESTINIANS *YAY* ASHKE-NAZI.” He has also openly called for an intifada, or violent uprising, in America.

A third poster depicts the organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as a puppet of Hamas terrorists. As has been revealed in recent congressional testimony, Students for Justice in Palestine is a campus front for Hamas terrorists. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestrated and funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and otherIslamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. Hamas is a State Department-designated terrorist organization whose explicit goals, as stated in its charter, are the destruction of the Jewish state, and the extermination of its Jews.

It seems that it’s impossible to pass through a single week without hearing about multiple outrages in academia. And it seems just as obvious that the most obscene of these outrages tend to unfold at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning.

Take, for instance, the University of Pennsylvania. Penn is an Ivy-league school located in the city of Philadelphia. It has recently been in the news because of “controversial” comments made by one of Penn’s veteran faculty members, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law, Amy Wax.

Back in September of last year, Wax appeared on The Glenn Show, the on-line podcast of Brown University professor, Glenn Loury. During their exchange over some of the deleterious consequences of those race-based preferential treatment policies favoring black student applicants, Wax shared with her host—who is black—some of the observations that she’s made over the duration of her career at Penn.

“Here’s a very inconvenient fact, Glenn: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the first half of my required first-year Civil Procedure course.”

Wax and Loury were discussing what’s come to be known as the “mismatch” effect of so-called affirmative action: In their eagerness to satisfy their quotas for black students, colleges and universities wind up mismatching students with institutions. So, Penn, say, recruits black students that, while they would’ve performed excellently at a second-tier school, lack competitiveness at an Ivy-league school. This move on the part of the first-tier schools in turn has ramifications that affect the whole available pool of black students, mismatching them with institutions throughout the entire system.

A powerful conservative perspective is essential to ensuring students, including liberals and progressives, obtain the greatest benefit from their education https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/43408/

In the late 1990s, a group of conservative students convened at Claremont McKenna College to create a new political journal at the Claremont Colleges. They aspired to inculcate an “appreciation for the privileges and obligations of citizenship in a free society,” and to mount a full-throated defense of conservatism both on campus and beyond. Thus was born the Claremont Independent.

Today, more than 20 years since our founding, it is striking to reflect upon how far the Independent has come since those quiet beginnings. We started as a print publication—the internet era was yet to arise—circulating copies on our campus in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Today, the Independent is an award-winning national media outlet with tens of thousands of online readers; and we cover a Claremont campus that is now a raging hotbed of progressive activism.

Our independence—we take no money from any of the Claremont Colleges—has permitted us to hold administrators and campus activists accountable through tough reportage and sharp opinion editorials. We have taken Title IX coordinators to task for serious alleged violations of the rights of students to impartial adjudication of sexual assault cases; have uncovered sexist and anti-gay tweets from, ironically enough, the (now-former) director of the Claremont Colleges’ LGBTQ center; and have covered the shutdown of conservative speakers on campus, including, most notably, pro-police scholar and Black Lives Matter critic Heather Mac Donald last April.

Gary Fouse is retired from the Drug Enforcement Administration (1973-1995). From 1998-2016, he was an adjunct instructor of English as a Second Language at the University of California at Irvine Extension. During the last ten years of that period, he was an activist fighting anti-semitism at UCI as well as other UC campuses. He has his own blog (Fousesquawk) at http://garyfouse.blogspot.com, which deals with national and international issues from a conservative perspective.

‘….Last week, I received a standard, template response from the public information office at Golden West College in response to my letter to their administration complaining about the conduct of Golden West staff in trying to silence questions about Islam from the audience at their Islam 101 event on March 14. It was an event to which campus cops were actually called in order to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws. Here is the response:

We have received your comments and appreciate your voiced concerns. As you know, Golden West College recently opened a scheduled class to the public which included a presentation and opportunity to engage in questions and answers. The event was intended to be an introductory educational overview of Islam as part of an intercultural program for students in the class. We understand that the presenters and audience members have varying views about the effectiveness of the event. We are regretful that when campus security was called to help ensure the safety of the environment, that anyone may have felt uncomfortable, singled out, or discouraged from expressing their opinions.

We work hard to ensure that faculty and staff on campus treat others with dignity and engage in respectful interaction with others. We fully support free speech and the right to express diverse thoughts. We are apologetic that the event did not serve the intended purposes for all. We remain committed to the inclusive values and mission of Golden West College. Thank you.

Not even a name was attached to this letter (email). And whoever wrote this response had the gall to state, “We fully support free speech and the right to express diverse thoughts. ”

And yet, campus police were called in because they didn’t like certain questions.

Protests against free speech in the name of free speech have become the political flavor du jour. Although the MSM tends to avoid covering these unseemly episodes, anyone with a computer and the interest to go with it can witness online these totalitarian irruptions at universities, colleges and libraries across the continent: Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley, Jordan Peterson at Queen’s University, Heather Mac Donald at Claremont-McKenna, Gavin McInnes at DePaul, Charles Murray at Middlebury, and so on ad vomitatum. But one gets a different perspective — obviously more immediate, more appalling — when one is present at these public displays of doctrinaire belligerence and repressive violence so dear to the Left. One cannot shake a sense of disbelief and moral shock, at least at first.

Just the other day and not for the first time, I experienced this feeling of helpless rage and moral incredulity when my wife Janice Fiamengo was invited by a newly formed undergraduate group, the University of Ottawa Students for Free Speech, to give a lecture titled “Is the University about the Pursuit of Truth or about Protecting Approved Ideologies” at the Ottawa Public Library. When we arrived, we found the doors blocked by a crowd of Antifa offshoots calling themselves, variously, the Revolutionary Student Movement and Ottawa against Fascism, pre-programmed automatons wearing masks, carrying placards and blaring slogans through bullhorns. One of these slogans was paradoxically apt: No Platform for Hate. No Debate.

The tuition at those schools now averages $75,000.00 per year for the total re-education of students into group think “progressives” incapable of debate or respect for dissenting opinions. rsk

The odds of getting into Harvard and other elite universities are slimmer for students who apply in the regular pool than for those who apply in early rounds.

This harsh reality will be driven home when Harvard, Yale, Penn and other Ivy League institutions release their regular-decision admission notices Wednesday evening: Large proportions of their incoming first-year classes were locked in months ago under early-admittance programs.

High-school seniors desperate for a leg up in the brutal competition for spots at selective colleges have increasingly been applying through binding early-decision or more flexible early-action programs, rather than meeting Jan. 1 application deadlines and waiting until spring for an answer.

The admission rate for early-round candidates, who typically learn their fates in December, is often two or three times that of regular applicants. Harvard last year admitted 14.5% of early-action applicants and about 3.3% of regular-decision applicants. At Yale, those rates were 17.1% and 5%, respectively. Many institutions fill 40% or more of their incoming classes with early applicants.

Dartmouth College expects students admitted through its early-decision process to make up nearly half its first-year class next fall. The school received 2,270 early applications, compared with roughly 20,000 in the regular cycle. Early-decision applicants make up 53% of Northwestern University’s current freshman class, and just over half at Vanderbilt University.
​The Early Bird Gets AcceptedIvy League schools take a much higher shareof applicants during early-admission rounds.Admission rates for class of 2021Source: the schools*Columbia’s admission rate combines early- andregular-round admission figures.
Early admitRegular admitBrownColumbia*CornellDartmouthHarvardPrincetonPennYale0%102030

“It’s staggering,” said Brennan Barnard, director of college counseling at the Derryfield School in Manchester, N.H. This year, 62 of his 65 seniors submitted an application by Dec. 1 and about three-quarters of the class had an acceptance coming out of the early rounds. Many apply early not necessarily because they are attached to one particular school, but because they fear missing out on the chance to get in somewhere, he said.

Students see schools’ single-digit acceptance rates, worry about their chances and apply early, perpetuating the rush for another year, says Stephen Friedfeld, chief operating officer at Newton, Mass.-based admission-consulting firm AcceptU.

Early-round applicants are either accepted, rejected or deferred to be reconsidered in the general pool. CONTINUE AT SITE