RUTHFULLY YOURS

A string of protests on college campuses that shut down events hosting conservative speakers has prompted universities around the country to pledge more tolerance for diverse opinions, but skeptics say they’ll believe it when they see it.

Johns Hopkins University announced Thursday a $150 million effort to “facilitate the restoration of open and inclusive discourse.”

The University of California, Berkeley, where protesters halted speeches by conservatives Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, is debating bringing in conservative faculty to broaden the spectrum of political discourse on campus.

About a dozen schools have signed on to a new doctrine from the University of Chicago that puts free speech above concerns about political correctness.

“I think there’s a lot of embarrassment on campuses, so some kind of statement from the top might have good-sounding words but actions speak louder than words,” said Jack Citrin, a professor of political science at Berkeley. “I’d like to see what happens the next time [conservative intellectuals] Charles Murray or Ayaan Hirsi Ali try to speak on a campus.”

Dr. Citrin is a member of the Heterodox Academy, a consortium of about 900 academics that aims to broaden the diversity of opinions on campus. This week the group released its second university rankings, which aim to measure just how well the most elite schools in the nation are faring in that regard.

The organization says its members come from across the political spectrum. The largest group (25%) consider themselves moderates, according to an internal poll of their members posted on their website.

Harvard University, which has repeatedly been in the crosshairs of free-speech advocates, was 103rd out of 106 schools in the Heterodox ranking.

Heterodox, which weighs schools’ regulations as well as the ratings of other first-amendment groups, cited Harvard’s history of censoring outside speakers, a blacklist on private clubs, fraternities and sororities, and a laminated “social justice” place mat handed out to students before winter break in 2015. The aim of the place mat was to help students prepare “for holiday discussions on race and justice with loved ones.”

Striking the balance between protecting both students and the First Amendment isn’t easy, said Ari Cohn, a director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He called it “advanced citizenship.”

But he also condemned university leaders for “wanting to have their cake and eat it too.” He pointed to the commencement address delivered by Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust in May.

“If some words are to be treated as equivalent to physical violence and silenced or even prosecuted, who is to decide which words?” she said.

A week later, Mr. Cohn said, the answer became clear: Harvard would decide. CONTINUE AT SITE

In an exclusive interview with The College Fix, venerable conservative Harvard University Professor Harvey Mansfield laments he is ‘not very optimistic about the future of higher education’ https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32311/

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Harvey Mansfield has been in higher education for a long time. In fact, he’s been a faculty member at Harvard since 1962. Yet, after all those years, the conservative professor of government isn’t hopeful about future of his trade.

“No, I’m not very optimistic about the future of higher education, at least in the form it is now with universities under the control of politically correct faculties and administrators,” he said.

His remark came during a 35-minute interview in April in his fourth floor office at Harvard, where the 85-year-old Mansfield lamented universities for losing their aspiration, describing them as bubbles of staunch liberalism ruled by faculties that have failed to make universities reach their potential.

‘Bubbles of decadent liberalism’

Once America’s pride, Mansfield argues universities are no longer the marketplace of ideas nor the bastions of free speech.

“Now [universities’] sole function seems to be to attack a free country and to try to narrow freedoms to privileges, for those who have been designated victims,” he says.

What universities have become are “bubbles of decadent liberalism,” that teach students to look for offense when first examining an idea.

“They don’t prepare you for the real world or for even an unreal world. They prepare you to be sort of lifelong college students,” he said.

Who’s to blame? Mansfield argues it’s a combination of administrations, students and faculties. However, he also puts most of the onus on his counterparts.

“I would put the blame primarily on the faculty because they could have their way and if their way was of a vibrant and remarkable university, they could have their way if they wanted it,” he said.

Too many professors, according Mansfield, give in and allow themselves to be cowed by deans and presidents that don’t want their faculty to make trouble. However, Mansfield himself hasn’t bought into the politically correct campus culture.

“You know, I try to use my tenure. If you are a professor and you have tenure, you ought to use it to say things which politicians who depend on getting votes can’t say,” he says.

Universities don’t know why they exist

Mansfield argues that higher education isn’t sure anymore why education is higher than anything else. For him, the current state of higher education stems from the current conception of culture.

Speaking in philosophical and theoretical language, Mansfield said culture used to mean refinement. Today, he says it “just means the way a society happens to think and there’s no value judgement in it any longer.”

“With this, universities have lost their sense of aspiration, of providing direction or questioning or thought,” he said. “So I think this is a general malaise of higher education. It doesn’t know why it exists.”

Though, that isn’t the biggest change the government professor has seen in his more than half century in higher education. That belongs to the 1960s, and the conception of liberalism that decade ushered in.

“What happened then was students who were mostly liberal and the faculty who were mostly liberal turned against themselves. The late [1960s] was an attack on liberalism, not on conservatism,” he said.

He adds the 1960s led liberals away from being concerned with liberty, with them losing a sense of speaking for Americans and humans as a whole and instead focusing on particular groups, like blacks and women.

“So, the universal ideas were turned into ideas for promoting the tribe, a kind of section within our democracy,” Mansfield explained.

What it led to, he says, was the labeling of certain social groups as “officially designated victims.”

“We have a society now of officially designated victims plus the rest. In the recent election, I’d say the rest took notice and rebelled,” he said.

Only engineering prof got funding to redesign a class around social justice https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/33779/

The Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve University is offering students and professors thousands of dollars each to promote, research and advocate for social justice.

While the university says “social activism” has been a focus since its founding by an abolitionist, the seven-year-old institute – which is directly funded by the administration – has more recently started paying people to make this “hallmark” of Case Western Reserve a reality.li

Undergraduates can apply for up to $2,500 to support any research project related to social justice, and graduate students can apply for grants up to $3,500.

Professors who wish to redesign their classes to better promote social justice can also receive grants, to the tune of up to $2,500.

Tenured or tenure-track professors who can “demonstrate a long-term commitment to social justice” can also apply for up to $10,000 in grants to support a research project, as long as they can justify how it relates to social justice.

Their university-funded research can “uniquely shape both the university’s efforts to combat inequality and other local, national and global issues,” says the fellowships page.

“Social justice is defined as eradicating systems of power and oppression with the purpose of advancing fairness and equality through the redistribution of resources and opportunities and exalting human dignity and respect,” the application reads.

The funding is consistent with the mission of the institute, according to Lisa Kollins, the institute’s head administrator.

Barely a week goes by without our political atmosphere becoming more noxious and the rhetoric growing more heated. A recent incident at my alma mater, the University of Georgia, highlights the toxicity of today’s discourse, especially on the Left.

On May 11, someone at the Twitter account for the Young Democratic Socialists at the University of Georgia retweeted an article about a professor who said that Republicans in Congress should be rounded up and shot with, “This is absolutely outrageous. House Republicans should NOT be shot! They should be guillotined.”

The group has since deleted the tweet — and the rest of their account — but, fortunately for us, screen shots are forever.

Campus newspaper The Red & Black notes that the organization’s former leader claims the tweet was a joke (because the only jokes anyone can make today must come at the expense of conservatives):

According to David Littman, founder of the Young Democratic Socialists, the inflammatory tweet was intended as a joke and should not be taken literally.

“I wouldn’t have made that joke myself, but it is clearly and obviously facetious,” Littmann said. “As a strict pacifist, I believe that all violence is immoral, period. But it’s absurd to take the joke literally.”

For what it’s worth, Littman graduated from UGA in 2016 and is no longer affiliated with the organization.

According to a document on Rowan University’s official website, saying that “gender plays no part in who we hire” is a microaggression, and you should intervene and correct people if you hear them saying it.

The phrase is just one of many on the official “Tool: Interrupting Microaggressions” handout, which contains a list of microaggressions, a method for “Third Party Intervention,” and a “Communication Approach.”

“Gender plays no part in who we hire” is listed as a “microaggression” under the subhead “Myth of Meritocracy.” The suggested way to intervene, according to the document, would be to say: “How might we examine our implicit bias to ensure that gender plays no part in this and we have a fair process? What do we need to be aware of?” (Because that’s a really normal way to talk.)

Another example of a microaggression, according to the document, is to say to a black person, “Why do you have to be so loud/animated? Just calm down.” Now, the fact that that is actually being defined as a “microaggression” seems pretty absurd to me. If anything, this anti-microaggressions guide seems like it is engaging in some microaggression itself by implicitly suggesting that only black people are inappropriately loud. I mean honestly — if someone were to say something like “Why are black people so loud?” then of course that would qualify as being racially offensive, but how can making a race-neutral statement telling someone to “calm down” be considered racist? Should no one ever tell anyone who is not white to “calm down,” no matter the situation, for fear of being branded a bigot?

Well, if you hear someone telling a person who happens to be black to “calm down,” you should intervene, the guide advises, and say: “It appears you were uncomfortable when ___said that. I’m thinking that there are many styles to express ourselves. How we can honor all styles of expression — can we talk about that?”

Here’s the thing, though: Could you imagine someone actually doing that? I don’t know about you, but if someone ever felt the need to interrupt one of my conversations to babble on about how he was “thinking that there are many styles to express ourselves,” I’d have a hard time deciding between giving him the stink-eye and asking him if he needed medical attention because he was acting so erratically.

This story was previously covered in an article at Campus Reform.

Mere days after a Bernie Sanders supporter shot Congressman Steve Scalise and two black members of his police detail, a Connecticut professor posted a Medium article on Facebook declaring: “Let Them F*cking Die.” The professor went on to write that white people are “inhuman a**holes” who still prop up a “white supremacy system,” so black people should not help them if their lives are in danger.

“I’m fed the f*ck up with self identified ‘white’s’ [sic] daily violence directed at immigrants, Muslim, and sexual and racially oppressed people,” Johnny Eric Williams, associate professor of sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., posted on Facebook Sunday, Campus Reform reported. “The time is now to confront these inhuman a**holes and end this now.”

How should the allegedly oppressed “end this now”? Another post explained that. “It is past time for the racially oppressed to do what people who believe themselves to be ‘white’ will not do, put end to the vectors of their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system,” Williams added in another post, including the hashtag #LetThemF*ckingDie.

On Thursday, Williams also posted a Medium article by that very title, which lamented that black Capitol Police officers who were assigned to Scalise’s detail had acted to protect him. The article, posted under a pseudonym, advocated letting white people die, as a form of combatting white supremacy.

What does it mean, in general, when victims of bigotry save the lives of bigots?

For centuries, black people have been regarded as sub-human workhorses whose entire purpose is to serve white people’s whimsies.

For centuries, queer people have been regarded as sub-human degenerates whose whole existence was an anathema to cisgender heterosexual people’s off-hand sensibilities.

The article attacked even the idea of morality as a tool for the immoral to oppress the moral. “They, these white/cisgender/heterosexuals, have created entire systems, philosophies, and values in which goodness, peace, and benevolence are virtues — but only, always, in other people. In themselves, though, it is only ever pretense.” CONTINUE AT SITE

While some high-school students spend the summer playing video games or hanging out with friends, other teens have different plans — and many of them are learning how to become social justice activists through college-sponsored summer programs.

Next month, Brown University will play host to one of these programs, a “Leadership and Social Justice” class geared towards students as young as 15.

Taught by Caitlin Murphy, a social studies teacher with a history of teaching kids social justice, the class vows to teach students “the tools and theory needed to become successful activists” and to fight for “social justice” in the realms of LGBTQ and immigration rights, among others.

The course appears to be a kind of advocacy boot camp.

During the course, students will be asked to “engage in various hands-on workshops and simulations, such as identifying an issue, developing a realistic timeline, publicizing a campaign, engaging the press, catering to an audience, and choosing effective tactics,” according to the course description.

Students will also be asked to develop a “Social Action Plan” with the help of their teachers, a detailed game plan on how they can fight for social justice once the program concludes and the students return home.

While the course description says it’s perfect for students who are already activists, students who don’t have a background in social justice advocacy shouldn’t be discouraged. “Students who hope to become activists” are invited too.

The class is part of Brown University’s Leadership Institute for high school students, which has been hosting leadership programs for teens since at least 2010.

Recent alumni who took other courses through Brown’s Leadership Institute — not the new one focused explicitly on social justice — praised the program in interviews with PJ Media.

Peter Prastakos, who just graduated high school and will be headed to Yale University in the Fall, credited the program for inspiring him to create an environmental club at his high school. “I always knew I wanted to do something related to the environment,” Prastakos said.

During the program, he worked alongside his instructors to devise a plan for an environmental club at high school, and when he got back to his high school the following year, he put his plans into action. CONTINUE AT SITE

San Francisco State University leftists, who dominate that university, as per the left’s modus operandi, will allow only certain minorities it deems acceptable their “rights” while trampling on the rights of others – minorities, majorities, or just sincere non-identity-obsessed students. SFSU’s administration has, at most, passively accepted this state of affairs while often enabling the suppression of the rights of some in the face of violence by leftists.

And now, one minority group that has suffered in silence for years has said, “Enough! We have rights too and we’re demanding them!” No, not by counter-violence but by a lawsuit.

San Francisco State University Accused of Pervasive Anti-Semitism in Groundbreaking Federal Lawsuit Filed by Students and Members of the Jewish Community

A group of San Francisco State University students and members of the local Jewish community today filed a lawsuit alleging that SFSU has a long and extensive history of cultivating anti-Semitism and overt discrimination against Jewish students. According to the suit, “SFSU and its administrators have knowingly fostered this discrimination and hostile environment, which has been marked by violent threats to the safety of Jewish students on campus.” The plaintiffs are represented by a team of attorneys from The Lawfare Project and the global law firm Winston & Strawn LLP.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and also names as defendants, the Board of Trustees of the California State University System, SFSU President Leslie Wong and several other University officials and employees, alleges that “Jewish students at SFSU have been so intimidated and ostracized that they are afraid to wear Stars of David or yarmulkes on campus.”

The lawsuit was triggered following the alleged complicity of senior university administrators and police officers in the disruption of an April, 2016, speech by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat. At that event organized by SF Hillel, Jewish students and audience members were subjected to genocidal and offensive chants and expletives by a raging mob that used bullhorns to intimidate and drown out the Mayor’s speech and physically threaten and intimidate members of the mostly-Jewish audience. At the same time, campus police – including the chief – stood by, on order from senior university administrators who instructed the police to “stand down” despite direct and implicit threats and violations of university codes governing campus conduct.

A Marxist professor at Syracuse University just called on lunatics to come and kill us. “We almost have the fascists on the run,” she said from her Twitter account, @danaleecloud, “come down to the federal building to finish them off.” By “fascists” she means people like you and me who oppose Sharia law, and by “finish them off” she likely means death. This is what Robert Spencer has been saying since he was poisoned. The left dehumanizes us with violent rhetoric so it will be easier to kill us. They don’t want to challenge our ideas. They want to end our lives, and they are willing to do it by any means necessary. I don’t think they care if it’s a mentally ill person or a jihadi who does the killing, as long as we’re taken out. They themselves say, “The only good fascist is a dead one,” and it’s going mainstream. Plays in the park depict long, drawn-out scenes of Trump being stabbed to death. Kathy Griffin holds the president’s severed head. Rap videos play out the assassination of Trump. In fact, the whole concept of assassination has been normalized by the mainstream media.
“These people don’t think they’re killing someone they disagree with. They think they’re killing Hitler.”

The professor was talking about the March Against Sharia events last Saturday. Syracuse was one of dozens of cities that held a rally to oppose the worst Islam can get. I hosted the New York City one, which was organized by gay conservative Paxton Hart. The reason Sharia was chosen was to erase any ambiguity about what we’re here to protest. Whether there should be a moratorium on Muslim immigration is debatable. The assimilability of Islam is also a controversial subject. By going way out to the edge of religious extremism, we thought we found something everyone can agree on. We were wrong. Hundreds of protesters showed up in New York to “Drown us out,” as they put it. They said our event had nothing to do with Sharia and was all about hatred of Muslims. I honestly think they would have said the same thing if we had done a rally against child rape gangs. They held up huge pictures of the stabbing victims in Oregon as if Jeremy Christian was one of our guys (sorry, but he was a Bernie Bro just like the man who shot Steve Scalise). Islam apologist Dean Obeidallah made the same mistake and tweeted to me, “Saw ur last anti-Sharia rally on the train in Portland last week where 2 were killed-will ur people be killing more soon?” Some of us went over to speak to the protesters and explain that Jeremy was a deranged man who stabbed people because they were demanding he not offend Muslims. In other words, they died of political correctness. They threw piss at us (again) and we beat them up.

When I got to the stage, I did the first half of my talk as a sexist pig who loved Sharia law. I said women are terrible drivers and with Sharia, you don’t have to worry about broads driving ever again. I said it’s awesome because you get to punish your wife if she doesn’t want to blow you. You make her sleep on the couch and if she still refuses, you get to beat the shit out of her. I also said Sharia is cool because you don’t have to hear women bitching about rape all the time. She has to get tons of witnesses and even then her testimony is worth only half what a man’s is. Finally, I said I get too horny walking down the street and can’t concentrate, but if we could cover up these chicks we could focus on just hanging out with the guys. I bombed, obviously, but that was the point. Like a true martyr, I used one big bomb to prevent future bombs.

Students at the University of Pennsylvania will learn to confront their “denial and unconscious bias” surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and other minority statuses during a new course offered this summer.

The class, “Diversity and Inclusion: Strategies to Confront Bias and Enhance Collaboration in 21st Century Organizations,” will be co-taught by Dr. Aviva Legatt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey Floyd, an organizational psychologist who works in leadership development.

“In the workplace, it is inevitable that difference between individuals will cause conflict—whether explicit or beneath the surface,” the course description says. “Denial and unconscious bias will prevent issues from being addressed.”

While decades of pop-psychology has argued that unconscious bias is a major influence on how white people treat black people, or how heterosexual people treat the gay community, new research has actually found scarce evidence to prove this link.

Gregory Mitchell, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, reviewed the most current research on the issue earlier this year and concluded:

Seventeen years after introduction of the [test that measures unconscious bias], only a handful of studies have examined the influence of implicit bias on real personnel decisions, and those studies have provided inconsistent and at best weak evidence that implicit bias has any impact on employment decisions.

So, why is this Ivy League class predicated on an outdated theory that has been criticized by numerous researchers in the last few years? Good question.

Nevertheless, eager students will learn to fight their “denial and unconscious bias” through a number of tactics in the class, including through writing personal reflections about their own biases and talking to their classmates about them.

While Professor Legatt declined to share a copy of the syllabus with PJ Media, she previously co-taught an online course dedicated to “Optimizing Diversity on Teams,” which taught business leaders “specific strategies to get buy-in for their diversity initiatives” and how to fight the “biases that can harm these efforts.”

During the course, Legatt identified a variety of ways that “hidden bias” can creep up in the workplace, such as “offering to help women when the help is not asked for” and giving women easier, “less-challenging,” work assignments. CONTINUE AT SITE