RUTHFULLY YOURS

“If you’ve read Marx, there’s really no reason to read Howard Zinn,” notes author Daniel Flynn, but many have read Zinn’s million-selling A People’s History of the United States. As Rutgers history professor David Greenberg notes in a 2013 New Republic article headlined “Agit-Prof,” Zinn’s famous book is “a pretty lousy piece of work.” Even so, it gets great reviews within a circle of Marxist academics such as Eric Foner, leftist rockers such as Rage Against the Machine, and actors such as Matt Damon, who in Good Will Hunting tells his psychiatrist that A People’s History will “knock you on your ass.”

For Howard Zinn, America was evil and capitalism bad – except for his lucrative publishing deal, and prestigious professorship at Boston University. Zinn was pretty quiet about the Soviet Union and what he might have done during the Stalin-Hitler Pact, but Mao Tse-Tung’s China was the closest thing to a “people’s government.”

In 2010 Zinn passed away at 87 during a swim in Santa Monica. The New York Times noted that the “proudly, unabashedly radical” professor’s A People’s History of the United States, “inspired a generation of high school and college students to rethink American history.” Zinn’s handlers set about transforming the rotting corpse of his work into the keystone of America’s history curriculum.

“Howard Zinn is no longer just for washed up actors like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon,” wrote Daniel Greenfield in 2012. “His neo-Communist propaganda is being wedged deeper and deeper into the educational system, because teaching kids to hate America is the new education.” Zinn contended that the Constitution was devised solely to formalize the inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians, and the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful.

A protestor’s sign put it, ‘Rule of law = white supremacy, violence against [people of color], violence against immigrants.’ These were law students protesting the rule of law.

The latest “non-platforming” of a speaker at a purported academic institution happened to my good friend and sometime co-author Josh Blackman at City University of New York Law School two weeks ago, when he attempted to give a lecture on the importance of free speech on campus. As he wrote on his blog in an epic post accompanied by copious pictures and video, once publicity for the event began after spring break, enraged students began planning a protest.

When Josh asked his host, the president of CUNY’s Federalist Society chapter, why his classmates were up in arms, he got the explanation that “first, that this is a Federalist Society event; and second, they saw a few of your writings (specifically a National Review article praising Sessions for rescinding DACA and ACA), and instantly assume you’re racist; and third, our event being titled about free speech is reminiscent of events that claim free speech just to invite people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter.”

Indeed, that sentiment resulted in Josh being greeted with assorted signs. Some attacked him personally: “Josh Blackman you are not welcome here” and “Pronouns matter, Josh Blackman does not.” Others went after the Federalist Society, which some smeared was “founded to uphold white supremacy.” Still others took on the Constitution itself: “The First Amendment is a weak shield for white supremacy” and “The First Amendment is not a license to dehumanize marginalized people.”

It would be very tempting to dismiss this as a fluke, as something that’s not happening in your local schools or state, some crazy thing that only affects other people and other people’s kids. A radio host recently posted pictures of a textbook she says a friend’s Minnesota district is considering for Advanced Placement courses, which are typically the top students’ last U.S. history class ever.

This appears to be a forthcoming 2019 edition of an existing textbook from the global education publishing giant Pearson, whose materials are ubiquitous. The friend highlighted some sections that show clear bias against political conservatives, President Trump and his administration, and Americans of faith. Here are some transcriptions from those images.

In describing the rise of Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of the Ferguson, Missouri shooting: “The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupying army in the mostly African-American town.” In a section discussing President Trump’s cabinet, the book says “They were largely white males, more so than any cabinet since Ronald Reagan.” In a discussion of the nation’s politics after 2012, it says “Those who had long thought of the nation as a white and Christian country sometimes found it difficult to adjust” to secularization and an increase in people of other races. Elsewhere, it describes Trump’s “not-very-hidden racism.”

A section discussing the 2016 elections returns to these paranoid, highly politicized interpretations of some Americans’ decisions to vote for Trump:

Trump’s supporters saw the vote as a victory for people who, like themselves, had been forgotten in a fast-changing America–a mostly older, often rural or suburban, and overwhelmingly white group. Clinton’s supporters feared that the election had been determined by people who were afraid of a rapidly developing ethnic diversity of the country, discomfort with their candidate’s gender, and nostalgia for an earlier time in the nation’s history. They also worried about the mental stability of the president elect and the anger that he and his supporters brought to the nation.

The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released this week, offer little to celebrate. Political leaders and education advocates are struggling to find evidence that their preferred policy—whatever it might be—is having much impact on student performance. Progress has stalled in recent years, and results at the state and national level are far below where most education policymakers thought they would be by now. Despite the efforts of George W. Bush, many children are still being left behind; despite the efforts of Barack Obama, the race to the top didn’t produce many winners.

Administered to a representative sample of youngsters, the NAEP is a rigorous test, the only instrument we have to make valid comparisons across states—and some major local school districts—and to track nationwide progress over time. The test sets a high bar for achievement: it defines “proficiency” as mastery of challenging subject matter, as distinguished from grade-level proficiency (good enough to pass). The NAEP results reveal that slightly more than a third of the nation’s eighth-graders were proficient in reading and math in 2017. These numbers have moved up slowly: since 2003, math proficiency is up five points, to 34 percent, and reading is up four points, to 36 percent. But the average eight-grade math score is currently 16 points below proficiency, while the average reading score falls 14 points short—discouraging figures, though better than 2003. If improvement continues at this glacial pace, it will be 45 years until the average eighth-grader is considered proficient in mathematics and 49 years for an average eighth-grader to achieve reading proficiency.

We should not be surprised by the NAEP findings, as they align with trends in college completion. Nationally, 84 percent of high school students graduate, and of those, about 70 percent enroll in a two- or four-year college. But college-completion rates are just 60 percent for four-year colleges and 30 percent for two-year colleges. Overall, only about 30 percent of the students who start out in the American K-12 system complete a college degree by age 25. Students who plan to complete college should be scoring at the NAEP’s proficiency levels by eighth grade; two-thirds are not doing so.

When members of Columbia’s Students Supporting Israel campus group set up a memorial booth on April 11th, for Holocaust Remembrance Day, honoring the 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, the memorial was disrupted by the screaming chants of anti-Israel protesters.

The table for the commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day had testimonials from Holocaust survivors as well as memorial candles laid out. After an hour in which Jewish students shared the stories of holocaust survivors, a large group of anti-Israel protests gathered across the plaza from the SSI table.

INCIDENT REPORT

Students Supporting Israel at Columbia University
Incident Report on Harassment and Violations of University
Policies and State and Federal Rules by the Students for
Justice in Palestine (SJP)

As one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher
education, Columbia University has an obligation both to its
students, and faculty constituency as well as the broader American
academic community to foster and protect nuanced and
constructive dialogue on complicated issues affecting New York, America and the world.
Unfortunately, groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP)
and Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) have monopolized the conversation on
campus relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict and have systematically maligned, harassed and
silenced groups like Students Supporting Israel (SSI) and other pro-Israel voices on campus, who
provide alternative — and critically important — views on these issues, in clear violation of their
rights under both Columbia rules and regulations, and U.S. law.

I’m a student at Mount Holyoke College, a women’s liberal-arts school, which last weekend hosted the 2018 Women of Color Trailblazers Leadership Conference. Keynote speakers included National Women’s March founders Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour.

As president of the Mount Holyoke College Republicans, I was looking forward to this event, billed as a “discussion.” I was excited to engage the ideas presented by these far-left figures and cover the event on my online publication, Lone Conservative.

But outside the conference venue, I was greeted by signs prohibiting photography and recording. Audience members weren’t permitted to ask questions directly to the speakers. Instead, we had to write them on note cards, and only preapproved questions would be answered during the 15 minutes dedicated to Q&A. Some discussion.

As I walked in, I could feel my peers glaring at me—a familiar enough experience for an outspoken Republican on a campus full of leftist women. But I was surprised that only about 75 people showed up, in a room that can hold up to a thousand.

Amid a national debate about due process and fairness in campus Title IX adjudications, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently observed, “there’s been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and that’s one of the basic tenets of our system, as you know: everyone deserves a fair hearing.” Few academics have more powerfully made these criticisms than Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, whose 2015 Chronicle of Higher Education essay lambasting Title IX’s application to campus sexual-assault and harassment allegations prompted a university Title IX investigation—against Kipnis herself. Though Kipnis was exonerated, the investigation was a form of punishment, since professors normally aren’t questioned by lawyers hired by their school as the result of publishing in their area of expertise. The experience prompted Kipnis to write Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, which explores how Title IX has come to threaten the rights not only of accused students but also of faculty.

One chapter of Unwanted Advances took readers inside a Northwestern University sexual-assault and harassment hearing against philosophy professor Peter Ludlow. Though the university cleared Ludlow of his sexual-assault charges, it found him guilty of sexual harassment, and he resigned. Kipnis lawfully obtained the university’s investigative file and about 1,000 text messages between Ludlow and one of his accusers, a female graduate student.

The graduate student, Lauren Ledyon-Hardy, was a Kipnis critic before the book appeared, twice criticizing her in op-eds in which she charged Kipnis with violating the Northwestern faculty handbook by writing an “alarmingly inaccurate” essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education. She further denounced Kipnis’s “repugnant moral and political views” and hailed the parties who filed Title IX complaints against the professor as “pretty reasonable”—without revealing that she was speaking of herself. Ledyon-Hardy’s conduct exemplifies Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen’s concern that “Title IX is too often conscripted to serve purposes antithetical to the education of citizens in a democracy, in which disagreement, dissent, or disapproval should lead to argument, not to an infinite loop of institutional investigation.”

After Unwanted Advances appeared, Ledyon-Hardy turned to the courts, alleging that Kipnis’s book was defamatory and improperly disclosed private facts. Her complaint faulted Kipnis for falsely portraying her as excessively “litigious”—a complaint that Ledyon-Hardy ironically sees as remediable through a federal lawsuit. The lawsuit’s core, which focused on Ledyon-Hardy’s disagreement with how Kipnis presented evidence, threatens both academic freedom and investigative work about Title IX. Yet U.S. District Court Judge Jack Blakey has greenlighted the suit. The judge tipped his hand when he allowed Ledyon-Hardy to litigate under a pseudonym—despite her previous op-eds, signed with her real name, criticizing Kipnis. (Kipnis and her publisher, HarperCollins, have filed a response to the complaint, and discovery has commenced in the case. The next stage, absent a settlement, would be motions for summary judgment before the district court.)

Springtime means rebirth, baseball, and . . . new stories about how 99.89 percent of college-graduation speakers are certified lefties. Those of us with opposing viewpoints are left with few options; most of us just suck it up, grin, and sit there — although the grinning part is becoming more of a challenge. You see, our side of the aisle is not so easily agitated into social-protest mode. Still, it would be refreshing to hear at least one college president come clean in his commencement remarks. Just put it all out there for (progressive) mass consumption. To wit:

Hello, everyone . . . Happy Graduation!

Four years of relentless indoctrination is now complete. Most of you no longer trust markets, capitalism, or your parents. You are now officially social-justice warriors; you truly “Feel the Bern.” Accordingly, our job is done. But before you leave for the real world — a hate-filled place without safe spaces, speech codes, Play-Doh, warm cookies, and coloring books to help you “recuperate” from dissenting points of view — a few words of review, and caution.

In the good-news department, our annual giving goal of $1 billion was easily surpassed last year. The school’s endowment is now $59 billion, which means only a 6.5 percent tuition-rate increase for next year! For this good fortune, I can only thank the deity that I am forbidden to mention by name under threat of ACLU lawsuit. So thanks to this unnamed deity for maintaining such high demand for our elite degree among so many of your status-seeking but naïve parents.

More good news: We are excited to announce the construction of what our faculty are calling “Fascist City.” This complex will consist of a number of poorly constructed buildings that our students will be encouraged to destroy whenever a conservative speaker arrives on campus. In this way, our young activists can meet and riot at a central location with no fear of police brutality. Further, our faculty have agreed to purchase and supply bricks (for throwing) free of charge. I also want to thank the newly salaried student government of our very own campus political party, “Bernie’s Young Socialists,” for contributing fire-resistant protest signs (so they may be repurposed). One can never be too environmentally conscious when protesting “the man”!