RUTHFULLY YOURS

Colleges have been rocked by student protests, but now they’re launching a demonstration of their own in Washington against reductions to their tax subsidies. They’re throwing a tantrum because they may, at long last, have to rationalize their spending.

The IRS code contains about a dozen individual tax subsidies for higher education, all with disparate rules that the IRS describes in a 95-page brochure that makes academic prose look lucid. Parents and students can claim three different tax credits, deduct loan interest, and receive an exemption for some discharged loans and tuition assistance.

These dispensations are layered on top of low-interest federal loans (4.45% for undergrads), grants and loan-forgiveness programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the government will lose about 25 cents on every dollar of subsidized Stafford loans.

Colleges that have been riding this gravy train are howling that Republican House reforms repealing and consolidating their tax carveouts will raise tuition. But stripping down the subsidies might make students and parents more aware of costs and impel colleges to curb unnecessary spending.

Take the three tax credits, which the House bill proposes to combine into a partly refundable $2,500 American Opportunity Tax Credit that can be claimed for up to five years. This simplification would yield about $17.5 billion in revenue over 10 years and reduce the enticement for students to drag out their education. The Lifetime Learning Credit, which is part of the consolidation, can now be claimed indefinitely.

Despite suffering several public and humiliating reversals in various forums and venues, those pushing for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel have not dispensed with their pernicious campaign of hate. The latest outrage perpetrated by BDS activists occurred at McGill University, where a Jewish student and two non-Jewish students identified as pro-Israel were removed from their positions as directors of the Students Society of McGill University (SSMU).

At the end of his second year, Noah Lew, who is currently third year undergraduate student at McGill University, applied to serve as Director of the School’s student society. He was warned by others who had prior dealings with the SSMU, to keep his Jewish identity secret lest he sabotage his chances. This is the atmosphere that Jewish students and supporters of Israel must endure on a daily basis at McGill. The toxic environment is due almost exclusively to an active and vocal presence of BDS agitators on campus. Lew followed the advice and was elected as a board member. His “secret” was intact.

BDS provocateurs at McGill had relentlessly tried and failed to pass boycott resolutions against Israel. In fact, three attempts within an 18-month period were quashed. Finally, in June 2016, SSMU’s Judicial Board ruled that the BDS campaign and efforts to institute it at McGill ran counter to the McGill’s undergraduate student union constitution.

The Board’s ruling, which is called a “reference,” was then referred to SSMU’s directors for ratification. SSMU’s Board of Directors addressed the issue more than a year after the “reference.” Lew and other board members passionately advocated in favor of ratification and their arguments ultimately prevailed over the naysayers. The malevolent BDS campaign at McGill had belatedly come to an ignominious end; or so we thought.

King’s College in London is paying people £12 per hour to police speaking events on campus and take “immediate action” if they hear anything that might offend the audience.

The marshals also put up posters and hand out leaflets reminding all attendees that “this is a Safe Space.” Examples of speech that might violate the policy “could include derogatory comments about someone’s age, disability, marital or maternity or paternity status, race, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, gender identity, trans status, socio-economic status, or ideology or culture,” according to an article in the Telegraph.

In addition to their pay, the marshals also receive benefits such as free spin classes and free fruit.

The Telegraph reports that not one, not two, but three of these marshals were present when Jacob Rees-Mogg, a conservative member of Parliament, spoke there earlier this month. He was no fan of the policy.

“It’s absolutely weird to send marshals to check the content of the speech by an elected member of Parliament,” he said.

The school’s Libertarian Society has also launched a campaign against the marshals — and the group’s president, Georgia Leigha, claims that it has been “surprisingly” popular. But Momin Saqib, president of the university’s students’ union, still insists that the safe-space policy was simply “protecting” students and speakers.

Listen: I’m all for being sensitive, but this has got to be one of the most insane things that I’ve ever heard. For one thing, the list of things that apparently can qualify as “offensive” or “discriminatory” in our politically correct culture seems to be growing by the day — hoop-earring-wearing white girls, trying to make people like the Beatles, and the size of classroom chairs have all been added to the list within the last eight months alone.

It seems like it could potentially be quite difficult to get through a speech at King’s College without saying or doing something that the marshals might deem offensive. After all, just think about what kind of person would actually sign up to be “safe space marshal” in the first place. Most likely, these are people who have an obsession with safe spaces and microaggressions, and at least enough sanctimonious arrogance to actually feel that they have the authority to police other people’s speech — in other words, the kind of people who are generally the most ridiculous when it comes to declaring the innocuous unacceptable.

In the age of safe spaces and trigger warnings comes another new trend to the college repertoire: coloring books. This fall, campuses nationwide are offering coloring books to students to help them de-stress.

At American University on Monday, its counseling center provided coloring sheets in honor of Healthy Campus Week, noting on its Facebook page that adult coloring books “can help with a number of emotional and mental health issues.” Conditions cited include obsessive-compulsive, eating, anxiety and depressive disorders, as well as anger management and substance abuse issues.

“The time and focus that adult coloring takes helps the individual remove the focus from the negative issues and habits, and focus them in a safe and productive way,” the AU center stated.

Likewise, the University of Wyoming offers an “Art-Well” program, designed to “color your stress away,” its website states, adding “Coloring pages and colors are provided. We offer scheduled Art-Well times, but if you can’t make those, come to the Wellness Center Zen Den any time on your own.”

On tap at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is “StressLess Days.” Held monthly on Wednesdays, the university will provide coloring in addition to other “crafts and games” to help students unwind.

Event took place during university’s sexual assault awareness campaign

A public university recently offered its students a snack break featuring therapy dogs, coloring pages and Rice Krispies treats as part of the school’s campaign against sexual assault.

The Michigan State University event was part of the “It’s On Us: Fall Week of Action,” dedicated to teaching students how to respond to sexual assault, harassment and relationship violence.

The week’s activities also included yoga and training on microaggression and rape culture bystander interventions.

A flyer for the therapy dogs event stated “coloring pages,” Rice Krispies treats and Biggby coffee, a coffee company native to Michigan, would be doled out to attendees.

As for the bystander workshop, it was described on Facebook as “an interactive workshop that explores the various ways that upperclassmen can be active bystanders.”

“We will go over scenarios that students experience daily and the ways that intervention can help change our campus and end violence,” the description added. “We also cover topics such as microaggressions, rape culture, and campus climate.”

Several campus officials declined to comment on the week’s festivities: members of the University Activities Board as well as campus spokesman Jason Cody, who simply forwarded a press release on the week to The College Fix.

“The events this week are focused on gaining a better understanding of the issues of relationship violence and sexual misconduct on campus and empowering our community to take action,” stated Jessica Norris, Michigan State’s Title IX director, in the release.

Therapy dogs and snacks have been utilized elsewhere as part of student activities over the past year. At the University of Pennsylvania, a student group hosted a “Chocolate and Chocolate Labs” event as part of a campaign to help students deal with final exams, for example.

For decades, organizations and individuals have undermined our American education system by attacking our beliefs in a constitutional republic and our fundamental Judeo-Christian principles. These have been supplanted with a “multicultural” viewpoint, which has taken the place of traditional American perspectives and values with accommodation and appeasement of protected minorities depicted as victims of the dominant culture. Oil-rich Arab-Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia and its Muslim Brotherhood cohorts, have used multiculturalism to target impressionable youths in our public schools, promote Islam, and advance Islamic political agendas. Under the subterfuge of promoting a multicultural educational environment, these agents have replaced time-honored educational materials of American ideals and historical perspectives with anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Judeo-Christian, and pro-Islamic rhetoric.

This re-engineering of the education system to disproportionately highlight the virtues and contributions of Islamic ideology is part of “civilizational jihad,” the enemy’s term for the subversion of our society. It was defined in the 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” presented as evidence in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism trial. The document calls for the stealth takeover of North America through infiltration of all of society, with the ultimate goal of destroying the U.S. and turning it into a Muslim nation.

Over the past 40-plus years, this infiltration has occurred in education, with the Saudi royal family contributing billions in gifts and endowments to U.S. universities to spread anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda. Through creation of Middle East studies centers at top institutions of higher learning, the Saudis have influenced curricula and textbook content. Those involved include several Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and Islamist organizations, such as the Institute on Religion and Civil Values (formerly the Council on Islamic Education), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Institute of Islamic Information and Education (IIIE), the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), Saudi-endowed Islamic and Middle East studies centers, and others. Their activities within our public schools include seminars and training programs for teachers, textbook creation and editing, curriculum development, lesson plans, student worksheets, and instructional videos.

Saudi success comes mainly from exploitation of Title VI of the Higher Education Act, which authorizes federal grants to university programs, including Middle East studies centers. Title VI grantees must produce outreach programs for our nation’s educators, and pro-Islamic organizations have attained legitimacy by partnering with top universities. Using U.S. taxpayer-subsidized lesson plans and seminars for America’s K-12 teachers with the imprimatur of schools like Harvard, infiltrators easily integrated Islamic perspectives into the K-12 curriculum, avoiding public vetting and government oversight. Materials promoting Islam, denigrating Judaism and Christianity, and criticizing alleged American prejudice against the Muslim world insidiously made their way into American education. Some of the materials in use go so far as to blame America for terrorism and decry prejudice against Muslims in the U.S.

“Perception truly is now reality, and our enemies know it,” asserts Steve Fondacaro, an American military expert. Israel and the West are engaged in what is “fundamentally an information fight,” in which Palestinian Arabs have mastered the technique of controlling the propaganda narrative. Their success has been so pervasive in crafting the language we use in discussing the conflict, we often are not even aware of how inadvertently we advance their agenda.

Soviet ideology is responsible for helping shape Palestinian Arab strategy, notes historian Joel Fishman. Words are designed to elicit hatred, disgust and contempt. Terms like racist, fascist, oppressor, apartheid nation, occupier, usurpers of Arab lands, and Israel as the obstacle to peace are accepted by large segments in the West, particularly in Europe, as an accurate description of the Jewish state.

Israel’s legitimacy is further undermined by the process of “reversal of culpability,” which uses false indictments and historical analogies. Goliath becomes David, and David becomes Goliath. Israelis are accused of committing “genocide,” thus “Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews.”

This pernicious labeling is also used by “self-hating Jews,” and Jews highly critical of Israel. In this toxic environment, even staunch supporters of Israel err in the terms they use. Here are just a few examples:

West Bank: For thousands of years, the area was recognized as Judea and Samaria, part of the Jewish people’s ancestral heartland. On April 24, 1950, Jordan annexed its 2,270 square miles, and the West Bank became the name used to describe the territory. Only Great Britain and Pakistan recognized this changed status. During the Six Day War in 1967, Jordan lost control of Judea and Samaria.

Using the term West Bank instead of Judea and Samaria, obscures the ancient historical and religious connection of the Jews to this area, and implies that Jordan has the legitimate right to rule the region. Judea’s boundaries, which are defined in The Jewish War by Flavius Josephus, was part of the ancient Kingdom of Judah, the Southern Kingdom. Samaria was part of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, the Northern Kingdom.

A review of Jewish religious and secular sources will provide a profound appreciation for the importance and centrality of Judea and Samaria to the Jewish people.

Legally, the territory remains disputed. When a peace agreement is reached notes Eugene Rostow, a legal scholar and former Dean of Yale Law School, Israel must withdraw her “armed forces ‘from territories’ she occupied during the Six-Day War—‘not from ‘the’ territories nor from ‘all’ the territories, but from some of the territories, which included the Sinai Desert, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.”

This has not stopped resolutions calling for withdrawals from “all” the territories, which are defeated in the Security Council and the General Assembly.

Settlers and Settlements:

David Friedman, the American Ambassador to Israel, recently said, “They (Israelis) are only occupying 2 percent of the West Bank.”

The movement to extend transgender rights and awareness continues its push to determine how people speak. Third-person pronoun usage has become a major subject of contention in the last year, with the passage of laws that seek to govern how people refer to one another. The New York City Commission of Human Rights (NYCCHR), for example, declares that “individuals have the right . . . to be addressed with their preferred pronouns and name without being required to show ‘proof’ of gender.”

The range of “preferred pronouns” has expanded widely recently, with the introduction of a new set of pronominal terms, complete with their own declensions. The NYCCHR, in its guidance on municipal anti-discrimination law, explains that “ze and hir are popular gender-free pronouns preferred by some transgender and/or gender non-conforming individuals.” The guidance further explains that “intentional or repeated refusal to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun, or title” is a violation of human rights law, which can lead to significant fines. “Ze” and “hir,” incidentally, are only two examples of the dozens of new pronouns invented in the last few years, including “ae/aer,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” “per/per,” yo/yo,” and “ve/ver,” among others.

Transgender advocates insist that nobody is in danger of getting jail time for misidentifying trans-people; rather, the law is meant to raise consciousness about the issue. “Our guidance encourages people to ask transgender and gender non-conforming individuals how they would like to be addressed,” says New York City Human Rights Commissioner Carmelyn Malalis. “The law is meant to address situations in which individuals intentionally and repeatedly target transgender and gender non-conforming people with this type of harassment.” The commission fails to specify, though, how many instances of such misidentification would constitute intentional and repeated harassment.

A new California law, the Gender Recognition Act, allows people to designate their gender as “nonbinary”—meaning that they “may or may not identify as transgender, may or may not have been born with intersex traits, may or may not use gender-neutral pronouns, and may or may not use more specific terms to describe their genders, such as agender, genderqueer, gender fluid, Two Spirit, bigender, pangender, gender nonconforming, or gender variant.” The Golden State has also required nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to “use a resident’s preferred name or pronouns after being clearly informed of the preferred name or pronouns.”

Pushing further, some advocates object to the idea that pronoun choice is even a question of preference. The student health center at UC-Davis clarifies that “a common misconception or trend these days is to say PGPs for Preferred Gender Pronouns. However, for many people, their pronouns are not preferred, they are mandatory.” As anti-discrimination law tends to follow the steepest path downstream, it’s not hard to imagine legislators soon regarding designation of pronoun choice as “mandatory,” with the appropriate penalties for those contravening the new norm.

It seems fair and just to refer to people as they present themselves and wish to be addressed. It would be rude to call a transman “Miss” just to make a point, and within reason, going along with whatever benign fiction people might have cooked up about themselves is simply good manners. “Preferred-pronoun” usage, however, is a bridge too far, and not just because it’s impossible to expect everyone to memorize lists of declensions of made-up words. The pronoun debate is also an effort to force us to change the way we talk about people who are not actually present: when we speak of “he” or “she,” we are almost always talking about someone who is not there. When speaking face-to-face, the only pronoun we commonly use is “you.” It’s considered improper to use third-person pronouns in the presence of their subjects; hence the old saying, “‘She’ is the cat’s mother,” meant to admonish against using the pronominal form instead of the individual’s proper name, if he or she is present. Insisting that we refer to absent people according to made-up vocabulary words upon threat of punishment is to interpose political ideology into conversation under force of law. It deputizes all listeners or interlocutors as surveillance agents in the name of gender equality.

Free people can think of and present themselves in just about any manner that they wish; nowadays, they have more latitude to do so than ever before. This should more than suffice. Anything further is fantasy, enforced by thought police.

Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal and project director of the NYC Initiative at the Manhattan Institute.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/we-need-to-talk-about-transgenderism/20418#.WfhFN4gpCUk

When, eventually, enough time has passed for people to consider the current period with some objectivity, surely one thing that will intrigue them most is the shift that has taken place in our understanding of gender. The existence of two distinct categories, men and women, once taken for granted as biological fact, can no longer be assumed. The trend, particularly among young people, is to question whether their gender identity corresponds to their sex. Sex is now considered nothing more than an arbitrary designation, an act of violence performed at the moment of birth. Instead, in the media, in schools and universities, gender fluidity is celebrated and those bold enough to transition and make their biology conform to their new sense of themselves are applauded.

The practical impact of this new belief in gender as non-binary and fluid is felt everywhere. Schools have introduced gender-neutral uniforms and are now busy building new gender-neutral toilet facilities. Time is spent discussing which changing room boys who now identify as girls should use after PE lessons and which gender-neutral pronouns teachers should use to address pupils. At university, women’s colleges admit male students who have ‘taken steps to live in the female gender’. Male rapists who transition after sentencing can be moved to women’s prisons. The Church of England offers renaming ceremonies to parishioners unhappy with the sex they, presumably, think God allotted them at the moment of conception. Debates about how passports and the UK’s national census should accommodate gender fluidity are ongoing. Mermaids, a UK taxpayer-funded transgender charity, was, until last week, advertising ‘same day’ cross-sex hormone treatment for children.

What’s truly remarkable is that this disregard for biology and overturning of social convention is occurring with such little debate. Teenagers, swept along with the current fashion, or young adults with a history of mental illness, are not questioned but affirmed by schools and therapists. Challenging someone’s decision to change gender, advising caution and delaying hormone therapy is seen, by transgender campaigners, as an offensive denial of an individual’s right to exist. As a result, there has been little public discussion of the profound impact new attitudes towards gender are having on society more broadly, on what it might mean for the continued existence of single-sex schools and women-only spaces such as hospital wards and prisons, on whether money spent converting toilets in small schools could be better spent elsewhere. There is little discussion of what it means to be a man or a woman in today’s society.

Attempts to discuss transgender politics are closed down. Last month, feminists trying to meet to consider the government’s Gender Recognition Act, had to change venue after protests were threatened. At the meeting point to share the new location they were attacked by trans activists. Discussion was shut down with physical violence. At Cambridge University, the renowned feminist activist and founder of Black History Month, Linda Bellos, had her invitation to speak withdrawn when it came to light she planned to question ‘some of the trans politics… which seems to assert the power of those who were previously designated male to tell lesbians, and especially lesbian feminists, what to say and what to think’. Bellos had not said anything controversial. Like the feminists wanting to discuss the Gender Recognition Act, she hadn’t been given the chance. Even the prospect of raising questions was enough to have Bellos disinvited.

Elsewhere, research into the experiences of individuals who transition from one gender to another is being shut down. James Caspian, a psychotherapist who specialises in working with transgender people, hoped to study people who had undergone gender-reassignment surgery but then regretted transitioning, a group he was increasingly coming across in his work. Bath Spa University initially approved Caspian’s research but when he failed to recruit enough participants, and so broadened his proposal to include people who had transitioned to men but subsequently reverted to living as women without reversing their surgery, Bath Spa’s ethics committee rejected his proposal and he could no longer continue with his research.‘The fundamental reason given was that it might cause criticism of the research on social media, and criticism of the research would be criticism of the university. They also added it’s better not to offend people’, Caspian has said. In other words, his research was rejected for being ‘politically incorrect’. CONTINUE AT SITE