RUTHFULLY YOURS

English literature undergrads at Cambridge University were warned about a lecture on two plays by William Shakespeare that would include references to sexual violence and sexual assault. The warnings were intended to give students who may be upset about those topics an excuse to miss the lecture.

Mary Beard, a professor of classics, called that approach “fundamentally dishonest.”

Independent:

Beard said previously: “We have to encourage students to be able to face that, even when they find they’re awkward and difficult for all kinds of good reasons.”

David Crilly, artistic director at The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, said: “If a student of English Literature doesn’t know that Titus Andronicus containts [sic] scenes of violence they shouldn’t be on the course.

“This degree of sensitivity will inevitably curtail academic freedom. If the academic staff are concerned they imght [sic] say something students find uncomfortable they will avoid doing it.”

Another Cambridge lecturer told Newsnight that trigger warnings had been added to the timetable “without discussion”, while another admitted they “self-censored” texts on their course to avoid causing offence to some students.

A Cambridge University spokesman said that the English Faculty did not have a policy on trigger warnings but “some lecturers indicate that some sensitive material will be covered in a lecture by informing the English Faculty Admin staff”.

“This is entirely at the lecturer’s own discretion and is in no way indicative of a Faculty wide policy,” they added.

Anyone who is “triggered” by fictional violence will not be able to function in the real world. But it hardly matters. Trigger warnings are not meant to protect students as much as they are used to protect faculty members. They are terrified of speaking about controversial subjects lest the school administration penalize them for it.

But really, now – Shakespeare? Perhaps someone might explain how anyone can get a degree in English literature without completely absorbing the Bard’s plays and sonnets. The plays themselves are retellings of legends and myths that most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries were familiar with. But from our perspective and the distance of time, the lessons and values that Shakespeare was highlighting represent the best that Western civilization has to offer.

And that’s the real problem, isn’t it? Trigger warnings aside, this is just another episode in the assault on our shared civilization. To destroy Western civilization means destroying the culture that nurtured it. Making Shakespeare unavailable is another nail in the coffin by those whose job should be to protect him.

During a “Bridging the Divides” forum at the University of Delaware on Tuesday, former vice president Joe Biden and Ohio governor John Kasich were asked about free speech on college campuses — and Biden had the far better answer.

“Liberals have a short memory . . . we hurt ourselves badly when we don’t allow speech to take place,” Biden said, according to a tweet from former CNN reporter Peter Hamby. “You should be able to listen to another point of view, as virulent as it may be, and reject it or expose it.”

Kasich’s answer? That he wouldn’t “let one of these hate speech speakers come.”

That was the wrong answer. Sure, Kasich may have been trying to come off as Sensitive Moderate Republican Guy, but he really came off as someone who doesn’t understand the responsibility that we all have as people who live in a country where our speech is free.

On the one hand, Kasich just may not understand how many people college students have tried to silence because they considered their views to be “hate speech” for a whole host of reasons. For example: Just last month, students at Berkeley tried to silence conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, claiming that he’s a “white supremacist.” (Note: Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew.)

On the other hand, though, is this: It doesn’t f&*%$#@ matter what a speaker says. As Biden said, students should be able to handle hearing all speech — even “virulent” speech — and know how to “reject it or expose it” if necessary. After all, that’s how it works in the real world.

Yep. Believe it or not, there actually are people out there in the real world who say hateful things. What’s more, they actually do have a constitutional right to say them, which means that anyone who gets offended cannot choose to deal with that offense by silencing it. They have to know how to deal with it in other ways, and we should be allowing students to practice and develop these skills while in school rather than forcing them to live in a bubble that stunts that kind of growth.

The truth is, we live in a place where hate speech is protected speech — and we’re very, very lucky that’s the case.

The alternative, after all, is living in a country where the government gets to decide what kind of speech is and is not okay . . . and you don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to see how that would be a bad thing.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/science-behind-implicit-bias-15527.htmlHeather Mac Donald joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss the dubious scientific and statistical bases of the trendy academic theory known as “implicit bias.” The implicit association test (IAT), first introduced in 1998, uses a computerized response-time test to measure an individual’s bias, particularly regarding race.

Despite scientific challenges to the test’s validity, the implicit-bias idea has taken firm root in popular culture and in the media. Police forces and corporate HR departments are spending millions every year reeducating employees on how to recognize their presumptive hidden prejudices.

Heather discusses the problems with implicit bias, the impact that the concept is having on academia and in the corporate world, and the real reasons for racial disparities in educational achievement and income levels.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops. Her article in the Autumn 2017 issue of City Journal is entitled, “Are We All Unconscious Racists?”

A recent West Point graduate, still serving in the U.S. Army, shocked admirers of the venerable American military academy with his candidly pro-Communist views. How could such an institution, founded on “duty, honor, country,” produce such a student?https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/18/on-the-corruption-of-the-military-academies/

A junior Army officer who states his anti-American opinions so openly may seem novel, but we should quell our surprise. After all, his views are indistinguishable from many of his peers at other distinguished universities. The craziness so common at other American college campuses is now demonstrated to have infected even our military service academies. We should not be surprised, but we are right to be outraged.

I have some experience here. I taught at the United States Air Force Academy from 1996 until 1999, and in addition I’ve taught at other civilian universities.

The Red Cadet scandal hurls a major national pillar—one that has manfully held out against much of the progressive revolution in politics—against the leading advocate of progressivism today, the universities. At stake is the question of the practical purpose of higher education and the ethos necessary to support it. Thus, the real focus of the recent condemnation of disciplinary standards by a former West Point faculty member and graduate was, in fact, the decline of the institution he had known, and not the repellent, even subversive views of a recent graduate. In his estimation, the academy has fallen away from its purpose.

The military, with its service academies—West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, and the Coast Guard Academy—have understood this purpose mostly implicitly: military officers must be loyal to the country. That’s why soldiers swear an oath to the Constitution. Alumni of other colleges may pledge financial support to their alma mater but no such serious and legally binding oath is expected of them.

To state the issue in dramatic terms: Does a distinguished general and scholar such as National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster belong more to the traditions of West Point and the military, or to those of the progressive academic world?

Yet, civilian universities today all too often require de facto oaths to the latest tenets of progressivism, from politically correct language (by which pronoun would you like to be addressed?) to suppression of robust debate. Graduates of these institutions may as well be goose-stepping in ever-tightening mental circles—a herd of independent minds, as it were. Whether in promising careers, personal fulfillment, or graduate school placement, the focus of these schools is on individual professional achievement. Even a the dubious focus on “leadership” at some institutions betrays a thoughtlessness about whom is being led and to what purpose.

Countering both formal and informal pressure from society at large, the service academies take great pains to produce men (and now women) with the character required to be officers. These institutions are vocational schools (until recently, they were engineering schools), but the vocation they train students to fulfill is not one meant merely to fulfill those students in their personal calling, it is a vocation that demands service to the nation. That requires qualities ignored, defined differently, or even defined contrarily by civilian institutions.

A century ago, colleges cared if your ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Now some are demanding that when universities admit black students, they give preference to descendants of those who arrived on slave ships. Black Students United at Cornell last month insisted the university “come up with a plan to actively increase the presence of underrepresented Black students.” The group noted, “We define underrepresented Black students as Black Americans who have several generations (more than two) in this country.”

After widespread criticism—including a student op-ed with the headline “Combating White Supremacy Should Not Entail Throwing Other Black Students Under the Bus”—the group backtracked, sort of. It apologized for “any conflicting feelings this demand may have garnered from the communities we represent.” But if the purpose of racial preferences is to promote “diversity,” as the Supreme Court has held, why don’t immigrants count?

The BSU argued that “the Black student population at Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish at Cornell, there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America.”

There’s a contradiction here. For years liberal writers have blamed black poverty and undereducation on racism—the experience of being more likely to be pulled over by police, to be looked at suspiciously in department stores, to be discriminated against in schools and the workplace.

But it doesn’t seem to be the case, at least not to the same degree, among immigrants. “The more strongly black immigrant students identify with their specific ethnic origins, the better they perform [academically],” Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld observed in their 2014 book, “The Triple Package.” CONTINUE AT SITE

In what has been called one of the worst academic scandals in history, the NCAA won’t be punishing the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for offering fake classes that benefited student athletes, because it couldn’t find any NCAA rules that were actually violated by the university.

The ruling means no UNC athletes will be punished, and the university will not lose any of its championship titles. UNC basketball coach Roy Williams has always maintained that the sports program never did anything wrong.

While the NCAA admitted that there was academic fraud over 18 years in the African Studies program, it determined that it did not have the power to punish the university.

Greg Sankey, commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, said the NCAA could not prove that the courses were “solely created, offered and maintained as an orchestrated effort to benefit student-athletes”—despite the fact that many student athletes did benefit from the courses. The infractions committee, he said, was powerless to punish the university for classes offered to all members of the student body and not student athletes in particular.

The ruling is not altogether unexpected, but that does not soften the blow for those who think UNC should be held to account by the NCAA for academic fraud.

“The public is definitely going to hammer the N.C.A.A. if they don’t do something,” Joshua Smith, the assistant athletic director for compliance at Eastern Illinois University, told The New York Times. “You’re looking at bogus classes. The N.C.A.A. wants to take back their reputation that they really are academically focused first, putting the student ahead of the athlete, and this is an issue where they can do that.” However, he said, “if you look deeper, it’s difficult to say what bylaw exactly comes up that they should be punished for.”

North Carolina has said that the fraud was confined to its academic side, over which the N.C.A.A. has no claim. Though convenient, this stance is consistent with profoundly held principles of scholarly independence. North Carolina even has cited N.C.A.A. President Mark Emmert, who in 2015 said, “It’s ultimately up to universities to determine whether or not the courses for which they’re giving credit, the degrees for which they’re passing out diplomas, live up to the academic standards of higher education.”

This defense also plausibly lines up with the facts in the case (the athletics counselors, for instance, worked for the College of Arts and Sciences, not the athletic department).

As reported in The New York Times:

The scheme involved nearly 200 laxly administered and graded classes — frequently requiring no attendance and just one paper — over nearly two decades. Their students were disproportionately athletes, especially in the lucrative, high-profile sports of football and men’s basketball. They were mostly administered by a staff member named Deborah Crowder. In many cases, athletes were steered to the classes by athletics academic advisers.

The scandal was so serious that the university’s accreditation body briefly placed the institution on probation.

In its latest notice of allegations, which is the N.C.A.A. equivalent of a lawsuit or indictment, the N.C.A.A.’s enforcement staff pointed to the high enrollment of athletes in the classes — nearly half, according to the university-commissioned investigation led by Kenneth L. Wainstein — and emails in which advisers requested spots for athletes.

U.N.C. had contended that the case was fundamentally academic in nature, and that athletics staffers were at most tangential to it. They cited instances in which similar misconduct was alleged at Auburn and Michigan, and the N.C.A.A. did not act. CONTINUE AT SITE

Colleges and universities have become flashpoints for the most heated culture war conflicts of the day. Our former institutions of higher learning are now the sites of anarchic violence against the few conservative speakers who manage to get invited on campus. With a Republican in the White House, academics with a far leftwing bias indoctrinate students more aggressively than ever before. Some of those same professors, and timid school administrators, are under literal siege from radicalized minority students demanding racial payback for perceived oppression. Instead of allowing their worldviews to be expanded by the campus diversity they claim to value so highly, students wail about racist and sexual “microaggressions” and retreat into segregated safe spaces. Universities have degenerated into circuses of irrationality and radicalism.

How did it come to this? To answer that question, you can do no better than to read David Horowitz’s The Left in the University – volume eight of, and the latest addition to, his series of collected writings titled The Black Book of the American Left. Horowitz, of course, is the former radical leftist-turned-conservative, the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of many books, including the recent New York Times bestseller Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America.

The Left in the University addresses what Horowitz describes as “one of the underappreciated tragedies of our times: the successful campaign of the left to subvert the curricula of collegiate institutions and transform entire academic departments and schools—including Schools of Education—into doctrinal training centers for their social and political causes.” This successful campaign arguably has done more to steer America toward the left’s goal of “fundamental transformation” than any other strategy of cultural Marxism.

This new volume collects nearly four dozen essays written from 1993 to 2010, presented chronologically and divided into five sections. Part I frames the book’s subject with an edited introduction to Horowitz’s controversial 2005 book, The Professors. Part II recounts his experiences on college campuses and observations on the decline of academic discourse in the five years prior to creating an Academic Bill of Rights, which lobbies for the right of students to be presented with professional, fair-minded instruction – not indoctrination – from their professors. The campaign for this Bill of Rights, and the attacks against it by biased educator organizations and tenured faculty, are the subjects of Parts III and IV.

Part V covers the uproar sparked by The Professors and by another book Horowitz wrote about political bias in the university, Indoctrination U. It details more of his efforts to convince the academic community of its obligation to maintain professionalism and objectivity in the classroom. The book concludes with an epilogue presenting Horowitz’s plan for reforming universities and for re-establishing standards of scholarship and instruction in the classroom.

Some of the essay titles alone are enough to capture the lugubrious sense of the university’s degeneration into leftist indoctrination centers since the 1960s: “The Decline of Academic Discourse,” “Campus Repression,” “What Has Happened to American Liberals?”, “The Orwellian Left,” “Intellectual Thuggery,” “What’s Not Liberal About the Liberal Arts,” “Intellectual Muggings,” and “The End of the University as We Have Known it.”

What is captured in such hard-hitting, personal essays from David Horowitz is the process that underlies the left’s successful ideological siege of higher education and the subsequent brainwashing of our youth. This is exemplified by a recent poll which revealed that fully 44% of American college students believe that so-called “hate speech” – the left’s catch-all label for offensive speech which conveniently includes any ideas with which they disagree – is not protected by the First Amendment. This perverse misunderstanding of free speech has been adopted even by conservative students, disturbingly. The result is that we are very nearly at a tipping point beyond which most adults will not consider our most precious freedom to be worthy of preserving. That can be attributed almost entirely to the influence of academia.

If you follow free-speech controversies for any length of time, you’ll understand two things about public opinion. First, an overwhelming percentage of Americans will declare their support for free speech. Second, a shocking percentage of Americans also support censoring speech they don’t like. How is this possible? It’s simple. “Free speech” is good speech, you see. That’s the speech that corrects injustices and speaks truth to power. That other speech? The speech that hurts my feelings or hurts my friends’ feelings? That’s “hate speech.” It might even be violence.

A new survey of college students demonstrates this reality perfectly. Conducted by McLaughlin & Associates for Yale’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program, the survey queried 800 college students attending four-year private or public colleges, and the results were depressingly predictable.

First, the “good” news. Students claim to love free speech and intellectual diversity. For example, 83 percent agree that the First Amendment needs to be “followed and respected.” A whopping 84 percent agree that their school should “always do its best to promote intellectual diversity,” including by protecting free speech and inviting controversial speakers to campus. Similarly, 93 percent agree that there’s value in listening to and understanding “views and opinions that I may disagree with.”

But that’s not good news at all. It’s simply evidence that in the abstract students will claim to be open-minded. They’ll claim to value different views — right until the moment they really get offended. For example, 81 percent agree with the statement that “words can be a form of violence.” A full 58 percent of students believe that colleges should “forbid” speakers who have a “history of engaging in hate speech.”

And what is hate speech? The definition the students liked was staggeringly broad. Two-thirds agreed that hate speech is “anything that one particular person believes is harmful, racist, or bigoted.” They further agreed that hate speech “means something different to everyone.”

Given these realities, it should come as no surprise that large numbers of students believe that interruptions or even violence are appropriate to stop offensive speech. Almost 40 percent believe that it’s “sometimes appropriate” to “shout down or disrupt” a speaker. A sobering 30 percent believe that physical violence can be used to stop someone from “using hate speech or engaging in racially charged comments.”

It’s a small consolation that a slight majority of students say that they have not felt intimidated out of expressing their views — but this means that, in institutions allegedly dedicated to critical thinking and open inquiry, almost half the student respondents indicated they were indeed intimidated.

Survey findings like this should serve as an alarm bell every bit as important as the shout-downs and attacks that dominate the headlines. Naysayers and defenders of the status quo on campus will argue that the censors represent a mere fringe, that our campuses are still more free than critics suggest. That may be true on some campuses, but these poll numbers indicate that the so-called radicals are perhaps more mainstream than we’d like to admit.