RUTHFULLY YOURS

Upon learning that conservative speaker Ben Shapiro had been invited to campus, the University of Connecticut immediately offered its student body counseling services.

“We understand that even the thought of an individual coming to campus with the views that Mr. Shapiro expresses can be concerning and even hurtful and that’s why we wanted to make you aware as soon as we were informed,” stated a campus-wide email from associate vice president and chief diversity officer Joelle Murchison, according to an article in Shapiro’s Daily Wire.

According to the email, there hasn’t even been a “date, location or time” confirmed for the speech — but apparently the school still believed that it was necessary to start offering time for counseling now.

I like to think of myself as a sensitive person, but this is something that I simply cannot wrap my head around. There are a ton of people I can’t stand who are out there giving speeches every single day, and yet “the thought” of that has had absolutely zero impact on my mental health. It’s not “hurtful.” It doesn’t affect me. I have a life. I think it’s fine.

What’s interesting to me about this particular story is that it wasn’t even a group of students who ran to ring that “triggered” bell. (Although I’m sure that would have happened eventually.) This time, it was the school sending out a preemptive email, basically telling students that they should be upset. Talk of oversensitivity on college campuses is so often centered on the students-are-snowflakes narrative that people don’t realize how often it’s the school itself that’s prompting these sorts of things.

You would think science — like any field of study based on, you know, the truth — should be immune from the campus takeover by the Social Justice Warriors.

After all, science is simply the observation and discovery of facts. While we may argue about the results of a scientific study being definitive, we can’t just decide that, say, men and women are exactly the same because it makes someone feel better.

Just kidding. Of course science is now under siege by SJWs, because that’s what they do. For example, see the event being held at UC Santa Cruz titled “Research Justice 101: Tools for Feminist Science.”

Yes, “feminist science.” The event description reads:

Participants will be challenged to apply principles and practices of justice to their own work, interrogating questions such as: Who benefits? Who is harmed? Who is most vulnerable? … And ultimately, who do we do science for, and why? The workshop will conclude with practical skills and resources for participants to push their research communities to be more inclusive, equitable and attentive to social justice.

The event is being organized by an Los Angeles-based group titled — sigh — “Free Radicals.”

According to The College Fix:

The mission of the Free Radicals is to enact political and social change by advocating scientists “think through the hidden assumptions in their methodological approaches and challenges researchers to think more deeply about the political implications of their work,” its website states.

Got that? They want scientists to only undertake studies and only publish conclusions that will support a radical feminist worldview.

Testicular cancer is striking down many men in their prime, you say? Well, don’t you dare invest scarce research money into finding a cure — men already have too many advantages.

What Free Radicals and anyone else associated with this nonsense are arguing for is to ignore the pursuit of truth — even, to suppress it — and to only focus on making sure a certain political argument is supported. They don’t want science to find the truth, just to support “their truth.”

That’s in quotes, because modern Leftists like Free Radicals tend to support postmodernist thinking that argues there is no such thing as a universal truth — that everything is a matter of perception and social construction. They’re hoping to harness the field of scientific discovery to support this idea.

The University of Oxford has added extra time to maths and computer science exams because female students aren’t performing as well as their male counterparts.

Students sitting maths and computer science exams last summer were given an extra 15 minutes to complete their papers because “female candidates might be more likely to be adversely affected by time pressure,” according to a decision seen by The Daily Telegraph.

The number of male students achieving first-class degrees was double that of women before the change was made, the Telegraph reported. As a result, the department changed the goal posts in an attempt to help female students achieve better grades.

But while the change was implemented in order to help more women achieve first-class degrees, the added time simply helped more female students achieve 2:1 grades overall, with fewer women securing a lower class 2:2, according to the Telegraph.

Antonia Sir, an undergraduate representative of Oxford Women in Computer Science, told the Telegraph: “I am uneasy about schemes to favour one gender over another.

Are colleges colluding? The U.S. Justice Department wrote the National Association for College Admission Counseling Jan. 10 seeking information on its “ethics code.” The department’s aim is to determine whether colleges, through NACAC, may be violating antitrust law by seeking “to restrain trade among colleges and universities in the recruitment of students.”

It’s long been an open secret that American colleges engage in cartel-like behavior. Schools that are supposed to be wholly independent agree on when students can submit applications, when admissions officers must inform them of a decision (including a financial-aid offer), when students must accept or decline the offer, and when to let students off the waiting list. In response to an earlier Justice Department investigation, Ivy League schools in 1991 agreed to stop sharing information about offers of financial aid.

Colleges argue that this cooperation benefits applicants. Its purpose is “to provide access to college in a way that is transparent, is clear and easy to understand, in a way that parents and school counselors can understand how the process works,” Todd Rinehart, a University of Denver administrator who led the committee that rewrote the code last year, told InsideHigherEd.

Perhaps, but the code also serves to ensure that colleges cannot get an “unfair” advantage over one another. What if one school decided to allow applications before the NACAC-decreed Oct. 15 start date? What if it was so impressed by an application it sent an admission offer the following day? The student would save months of work filling out applications and hundreds of dollars on application fees. But the other colleges would be out of luck.

What about the way colleges agree on what it means to apply “early decision”? Students promise they’ll enroll in a school no matter what other offers come in and risk being blacklisted if they back out. Katharine Fretwell, dean of admission and financial aid at Amherst College, told U.S. News in 2016 her school and about 30 other colleges share lists of students admitted through early decision—and of those who subsequently decided not to attend. CONTINUE AT SITE

Over the last decade, programs to accommodate students with disabilities have been installed at most institutions of higher education, spurred largely by government mandate. Like George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind Act, with Title I provisions to aid the disadvantaged, the thinking is that no student should be left behind owing to disability. This measure is a subset of the “social justice” movement that seeks to equalize job and social outcomes irrespective of talent, competence, personal input, and professional responsibility.

Nobody wants to de-privilege the disadvantaged or the suffering. The disability fetish, however, has adversely affected the performance of the average student, created enormous difficulties for teachers, and complicated administrative procedures to the point of functionary chaos.

I have recently examined an accommodation document issued by a university, which I won’t name. The data are stunning. Student A requires extended time for assignments and exams. Student B requires a word-processor with spell- and grammar-checker. Student C must not write more than one exam per day. Student D requires one day between exams. Student E requires “mind maps” (i.e., cheat sheets). Student F needs N.C. (noise-canceling) headphones to prevent distraction. And so on all the way down the alphabet. Indeed, even as I write, a professor at the University of Guelph has been suspended for allegedly chastising an anxiety-disability student.

There are at least six obvious problems with the disability regime of the modern university, listed here in random fashion.

First, there is the problem of invisible disabilities, which far outnumber physical ones. When is test anxiety, for example, anything but a normal occurrence, and why should it be classed as a pathology requiring accommodation? We have all been through this and survived.

Though many disabilities may be genuine, the opportunity for suddenly developing a qualifying infirmity is immense and has undoubtedly been taken advantage of by the thousands. A number of disabilities can easily be faked; in addition to test anxiety, there are agoraphobia, depression, bipolarity, panic attacks, “struggles with mental health” – and those that aren’t deliberately manufactured may still be more a matter of interpretation than a measurable impairment.

“In the fall of 2016,” New York University professor Michael Rectenwald recently told The Daily Caller, “I was noting an increase of this social justice ideology on campuses, and it started to really alarm me. I saw it coming home to roost here at NYU, with the creation of the bias reporting hotline, and with the cancellation of the Milo Yiannopoulos talk because someone might walk past it and hear something which might ‘trigger’ them.”

Rectenwald, himself a leftist, created an initially anonymous Twitter account, @antipcnyuprof, to speak out against that ideology and the “absolutely anti-education and anti-intellectual” classroom indoctrination he was witnessing, as well as the collectivist surveillance state that the campus was becoming, as students were urged to report each other for the sin of committing microaggressions.

In October of that year, he outed himself as the man behind the controversial Twitter account, and “all hell broke loose.” He swiftly found himself the target of shunning and harassment from his colleagues and the NYU administration. In true Cultural Revolution fashion, several colleagues in his department in the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group published an open letter declaring him guilty of incorrect thinking. “The thing that is interesting here is that they were saying that because I don’t think like them, I am sick and mentally ill,” Rectenwald said to the Daily Caller.

Instead of kowtowing to the campus totalitarians, Rectenwald declared himself done with the Left in a February 2017 tweet (“The Left has utterly and completely lost its way and I no longer want anything to do with it.”) and has gone on to become an even more fervent defender of free speech and academic freedom. He has appeared often in conservative media to discuss those issues and the harassment he has received from the Left.

Recently Rectenwald even filed a lawsuit against NYU and four of his colleagues for defamation. He consented to answering some questions for FrontPage Mag about his conflict with the NYU ideologues.

Mark Tapson: A year ago on Twitter you wrote, “Goodbye to the Left, goodbye.” Can you describe your intellectual journey from “left-liberal activist” to outspoken “deplorable” and what drove that seemingly sudden transition?

Michael Rectenwald: In hindsight, I think that the transition was less sudden than it might have appeared. I had gone from a left-liberal activist to a left communist before I became “deplorable.” I narrate the history of the transition in my book, discussed below. But I’ll tell something of the transition here.

It all started with a book called “P is For Palestine”

The left wing mob at Columbia is targeting a nearby business for believing Israel has the right to exist. How progressive.

Campus Reform reports:

Students, profs boycott bookstore for supporting Israel

More than 170 members of the Columbia University community have signed onto a petition calling for a boycott of a local bookstore for affirming Israel’s right to exist.

The petition takes aim at Book Culture, a locally-owned independent bookstore that also sells textbooks. In response to backlash from a local synagogue after the store began selling P is For Palestine, a book that praises “intifada,” the owners of Book Culture released a statement acknowledging the violence perpetrated against Israeli civilians during the Palestinian uprisings known as the first and second intifadas.

“We regret that we did not fully appreciate the political or communal ramifications of the children’s book, P is for Palestine, by Dr. Golbarg Bashi, nor did we anticipate the pain and distress it has caused in our community,” the statement began.

The owners of Book Culture also sought to dispel any misconceptions that they may support terrorism against Israelis, and further noted that they “support Israel’s right to exist” and “do not endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.”

This statement angered members of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, who subsequently launched a petition to boycott Book Culture, urging the owners to retract their statement of support for Israel and reaffirm support for “marginalized voices in literature.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Far-left provocateur Anita Hill spoke to a student group at the University of Connecticut. This despite Hill’s participation in the “high-tech lynching” of an African-American nominee for the Supreme Court.

In response to this partisan provocation, college administrators are offering counseling for folks who may be threatened or triggered.

The email reads, in part, “In the meantime, please utilize the many campus resources available to you should you want to talk through your feelings about this issue, including my office, the Cultural Centers, the Dean of Students Office, and CMHS, if necessary.”

UCONN should be lauded for taking proactive steps to ensure that potentially offensive speech is met with responses of maturity and tolerance, especially given the speaker’s history of making uncorroborated and unproven accusations against an African-American man seeking appointment to the highest court in the land.

Except that’s not what happened at all. Anita Hill was feted at UCONN’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Convocation. According to the UCONN website,

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Living Legacy Convocation featuring Anita Hill
Thurs, Jan 18, 1:00 pm
MLK Living Legacy Convocation

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Living Legacy Convocation provides the opportunity for the UConn community to acknowledge that, in spite of the passage of time, through actions we are all accountable for making Dr. King’s dream a reality. Through this annual program, it is our goal to showcase a message of humanity, hope, understanding and the need for continuous learning as a community committed to inclusion.

We are proud to welcome Anita Hill as the speaker for this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Living Legacy Convocation to be held on January 18, 2018 at 1 pm in the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts.

Please join us for an inspiring afternoon.

Believe it or not, the trigger warning email wasn’t sent to inoculate students against the far-left provocateur.

Year-over-year wage growth for high-school graduates outpaced wage growth for college graduates in each quarter of 2017

Americans with only a high-school diploma are seeing faster earnings growth than their highly educated counterparts, as employers in low-wage industries hungrily search for workers to fill job openings.

In the fourth quarter of 2017, median weekly earnings for workers 25 years and older with only a high-school diploma rose 2.3% from the same period a year earlier, new Labor Department data show. Meanwhile, pay for Americans carrying a bachelor’s degree edged up just 0.8% from the fourth quarter of 2016.

The trend has been ongoing, with year-over-year wage growth for high-school graduates outpacing wage growth for college graduates in each quarter of 2017.

Jed Kolko, chief economist at job site Indeed, said the outsize pay growth for the least educated workers underscores the impact of a tight labor market on workers who largely hadn’t shared in the gains.

“As the labor market has tightened, more opportunities are opening for people with less education, less experience, and firms are competing more to hire people who they would not have fought as hard for a couple years ago,” Mr. Kolko said.

Those wage gains also at least partially reflect rising minimum wages, which increased in 21 states, plus the District of Columbia, in 2017.

Though quarterly earnings data are volatile, the longer-term trend for the least educated workers shows swift gains over the course of the economic expansion. Earnings growth for Americans without a high-school diploma was weak early in the recovery, which began in mid-2009. In the third quarter of 2017, earnings growth since the end of the recession for this less-educated group rose above growth for those with a bachelor’s degree and higher.
CONTINUE AT SITE

On Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos kicked off the New Year by calling for a rethink of the federal approach to education that has failed over both Republican and Democratic administrations. Sounds good. But to her list of questions that never even get asked, we’d add: Does collective bargaining by teachers help or hurt students?

Two Cornell academics— Michael Lovenheim, an associate professor of policy analysis and management, and Alexander Willén, a doctoral student—have recently completed a study that tries to answer it. In “A Bad Bargain: How teacher collective bargaining affects students’ employment and earnings later in life,” the professors conclude: “We find strong evidence that teacher collective bargaining has a negative effect on students’ earnings as adults.” Given that 34 states since 1959 have mandated collective bargaining with teachers and only seven prohibit it, the finding is also a call to reform.

The study compares outcomes for students in states that mandate collective bargaining before and after the collective-bargaining requirement was imposed to outcomes for students over the same period in states that did not require collective bargaining. It also adjusted for the share of the student’s state birth cohort that is black, Hispanic, white and male.

Students who spent all 12 years of their elementary and secondary education in schools with mandatory collective bargain earned $795 less per year as adults than their peers who weren’t in such schools. They also worked on average a half hour less per week, were 0.9% less likely to be employed, and were in occupations requiring lower skills. The authors found that these add up to a large overall loss of $196 billion per year for students educated in the 34 states with mandated collective bargaining.