RUTHFULLY YOURS

One restraint on economic growth is the increasing U.S. labor shortage, especially for jobs that require technical skills. Meanwhile, many college grads are underemployed and burdened by student debt. The Trump Administration is trying to address both problems by rethinking the government’s educational priorities.

President Trump directed Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta last week to streamline regulations to make it easier for employers, industry groups and labor unions to offer apprenticeships. Many employers provide informal apprenticeships for new workers, but the Labor bureaucracy regulates and approves programs whose credentials are recognized industry-wide.

About 505,000 workers are enrolled in government-registered apprenticeships. The programs typically pair on-the-job training with educational courses that allow workers to make money while honing skills in fields like welding, plumbing, electrical engineering and various mechanical trades. While construction apprenticeships are common, training programs are growing in industries like restaurant and hotel management.

Nearly all apprentices receive jobs and the average starting salary is $60,000, according to the Labor Department. That beats the pay for most college majors outside of the hard sciences. Last year’s National Association of Colleges and Employers survey estimated the starting salary of education majors at $34,891 and humanities at $46,065.

For decades the cultural and economic assumption has been that Americans will be better off with a college degree. This is still true overall, and economic returns to education have risen. This is especially true for those with cognitive ability who acquire skills in growth industries like software design or biological sciences. Politicians have responded by subsidizing college almost as much as they do housing—with Pell grants, 529 tax subsidies and more recently debt forgiveness.

Yet the politically inconvenient reality is that not every kid is cut out for traditional college, and those who struggle in high school may be better off learning a trade. Many without academic inclination or preparation often spend years (and thousands of dollars) taking remedial classes to compensate for their lousy K-12 education.

The six-year graduation rate for four-year colleges is 60% while the three-year graduation rate at community colleges is a paltry 22%. The Obama Administration response was to push even more subsidized student debt to force feed even more kids into college. Student debt doubled in the Obama years to $1.3 trillion, which will burden workers and taxpayers for decades.

Another problem is that few colleges and high schools teach vocational skills. The Labor Department Jolts survey of national job openings found more than six million in April—the most since Jolts began tracking in 2000. The vacancies include 203,000 in construction, 359,000 in manufacturing and 1.1 million in health care. These are not jobs that can be filled by Kanye West English deconstructionists. They are also typically jobs that can’t be supplanted by lower-wage foreign competition.

While employers subsidize most apprenticeships, the President has proposed spending $200 million to promote the programs. This would still be a drop in the $26 billion bucket (not including student loans) that Washington spends on higher education each year.

Two of the three SUNY Albany female students who fabricated a racial hate crime in Albany, NY, early last year have been sentenced for falsely reporting the incident. The third woman accepted a plea deal.

Ariel Agudio and Asha Burwell were sentenced Friday to serve “three years of probation, pay a $1,000 fine, and perform 200 hours of community service.” The two women had been facing up to two years in prison, but neither will have to spend a moment in jail. Alexis Briggs, the third woman, agreed to apologize and was sentenced to perform community service as part of her plea deal with the district attorney.

The three African American students had claimed that they were victims of a racially motivated attack while riding a CDTA/UAlbany bus back to campus from the bars in Albany on January 30 of last year.

Early that Saturday morning, Agudio, Briggs, and Burwell reported to the police that a mob of 10-20 white people punched and kicked them while yelling racial epithets:

After the alleged assault, at least two of the women took to Twitter and Instagram with their claims.

“I just got jumped on a bus while people hit us and called us the ‘n’ word and nobody helped us,” wrote one of the students.

“I got beat up by 20 people screaming racial slurs,” wrote another, later adding that “a whole bunch of guys started hitting me and my two friends.”

One of them also wrote on Twitter: “I begged people to help us and instead of help they told us to shut the (bleep) up and continuously hit us in the head.”

Cell phone video and bus surveillance cameras would later tell a different story. The women themselves had perpetuated the racial hatred and violence.

In the face of protests and a fake news media circus, New York-based blogger Rusty Weiss of the Mental Recession was one of the first to report that the incident was likely a hoax:

The incident sparked protests at the school.

Protesters, including members of the National Congress of Black Women and the Albany chapter of Black Lives Matter, showed signs of support for the women, demanding change in the form of hiring minority faculty and providing sensitivity training for University police.

Burwell and her fellow alleged ‘victims’ gave tearful speeches on campus.

SUNY Albany president Robert Jones, before having any of the facts straight and going solely on what he heard from Burwell and her companions, issued a statement saying he is “deeply concerned, saddened and angry about this incident.”

People showed support for the trio on Twitter using the hashtag #DefendBlackGirlsUAlbany. Meanwhile, the students who were falsely accused of a racist attack were ostracized and threatened. San Diego Chargers lineman Tyreek Burwell — Asha Burwell’s brother — tweeted a threatening message to a student whom she had named as one of the attackers. That individual reportedly left campus — at least temporarily — out of concern for his safety.

Public figures, including then-candidate Hillary Clinton, used the highly questionable incident for racial pandering:

All of the people who jumped on the Albany hoax bandwagon should be ashamed of themselves.

The allegations never passed the smell test to begin with, and began to unravel almost immediately. It is only one of hundreds of fake hate crimes that have have been documented in recent years. What makes the Albany bus hoax so egregious is the fact that the accusers were actually guilty of the crime they were projecting onto others — and those innocent lives were adversely affected.

The disgraceful episode should be kept in mind the next time an unsubstantiated report of a hate crime hits the news — especially if it occurs anywhere near a college campus — because the fake hate crime epidemic shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. CONTINUE AT SITE

Professors at the University of Washington-Bothell have started scheduling alternative after-sunset exams for Muslim students during Ramadan, so that Muslim students’ performance on exams won’t be impacted by their fast during the day.

UW-Bothell Professor of Biology Bryan White told PJ Media that he got the idea for the after-sunset exam from a Muslim student he had last year who did well in his class right up until the final exam, during which she scored “drastically lower” than normal.

When he talked to his student afterwards, she explained she had trouble concentrating on the final because she hadn’t eaten beforehand, since the exam was held during Ramadan. Professor White said he “felt horrible” upon learning this, especially since it hadn’t crossed his mind that any of his students were fasting.

“It was at that moment that I decided I wanted to do something different next year,” he said.

So this year, just a few days before final exams started, Professor White sent an email to his students, wishing them both a Happy Memorial Day and Ramadan Kareem (the first day of Ramadan), and alerting them to an additional exam possibility — the option to take the final at 10 p.m. instead of during the normally scheduled exam slot during the day.

Regardless of whether students were fasting for Ramadan, all students were invited to the after-sunset exam slot. “It was very important to me to give this opportunity to ALL of my students,” said Professor White. “I do not know all of the responsibilities and challenges that my students face, especially during finals.”

During the night exam, 11 Muslim and 12 non-Muslim students showed up to take the exam. Beforehand, Professor White’s colleague, Dr. Raina Hussein, showed up with snacks for the students. Hussein was able to be a role model to “the young Muslim students [and show] that it is okay to be proud of your religion,” according to White.

Students praised White’s decision in interviews with PJ Media.

For Jashan Kaur, a sophomore at UW-Bothell majoring in health studies, the after-sunset biology exam was a welcome option. “I’m not Muslim but I still decided to take the exam after sunset because I usually study at night,” said Kaur. CONTINUE AT SITE

At the collegefix.com site, one learns that at New York University, students demanded that “an entire floor of the mixed use building in the Southern Superblock plan be entirely dedicated to Students of Color, and another for Queer Students on campus.” At “Oberlin University, students have demanded ‘safe spaces’ for black students.” In 2016 at San Francisco State University, an “Afro-themed dorm floor” was created.

Leo Hohmann documents how “an Illinois college has defended its restriction of portions of a mandatory course to black students even though part of the stated goal of the class is to teach students ‘an appreciation for diversity.'” In an effort to achieve better graduation rates among black students, the University of Connecticut is “implementing a ‘bold’ new strategy to help boost its abysmal graduation rates for black males. The plan involves the clustering of 40 black male students in a portion of one dorm, no whites or Asians allowed, in what the university calls a ‘learning community.'” On the other hand, the University of Vermont “provides a safe space for white students to explore their ‘white privilege.'”

Walter Williams explains that since so many black college students are not prepared for college work, “for college administrators and leftist faculty, the actual fate of black students is not nearly so important as the good feelings they receive from a black presence on campus.” Williams asserts that it is a “gross dereliction of duty for college administrators to cave to these demands.”

Nevertheless, WeDemand.org has a “list of hundreds of ‘demands’ by black student movements at universities across the country. Many of the demands include calls for major reductions in white faculty and separate ‘safe spaces’ for black students.” At the University of Missouri, there was a demand for a “blacks only healing zone.” Whites were told to leave the room and meet somewhere else. In 2015, the Motley Coffeehouse at Scripps College maintained that it would be open “from 6-10 only for people of color and allies that they invite … to decompress, discuss, grieve, plan, support each other[.]”

Oberlin College demanded that “space throughout the campus be designated as a Safe Space for Africana-identifying [sic] students.” At Harvard University, “[b]lack members of the class of 2017 decided to form an individual [graduation] ceremony.” According to the students, “[t]he separate graduation is an effort to highlight the aforementioned struggles and resilience it takes to get through[.]”

One is reminded of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson’s thesis, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” wherein the first lady-to-be “wondered whether or not [her] education at Princeton would affect [her] identification with the Black community.” Thus, Ms. Robinson argued “that the relative sense of comfort [respondents] may feel when interacting with Blacks in comparison to Whites (and vice versa) in various activities reflects the relative ease and familiarity the respondents feel with Blacks in comparison to Whites which, in turn, indicates the extent to which the respondents are personally attached to Blacks as individuals in comparison to Whites as individuals.” That such drivel was used in a Princeton thesis some 31 years ago explains why the race-obsessed presidency of Barack Obama is not a surprise.

As a lineal descendant of this line of thinking, it follows that “Courtney Woods, who is finishing a master’s degree in education policy and management from the Graduate School of Education, asserts that ‘Harvard’s institutional foundation is in direct conflict with the needs of black students. There is a legacy of slavery, epistemic racism and colonization at Harvard, which was an institution founded to train rising imperialist leaders. This is a history that we are reclaiming.'” Michael Huggins, who is graduating with a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, asserts that “[t]his is an opportunity to celebrate Harvard’s black excellence and black brilliance.”

America’s historic strength is not diversity, but an enforced commonality of value.

I attended one of the premier educational institutions in the United States in the nineteen fifties: P.S. 104 on the corner of 95th Street and Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It’s still there. But as Dr. Thomas Sowell said about one he attended in those years, it might be the “same building” but it’s not the “same school.”

Despite the fact that my wonderful grandmother was a native Swedish speaker P.S. 104 didn’t feel compelled to celebrate my “heritage” the way it would today. They taught me where Sweden was because we studied geography (and don’t we wish our children still did) but not to put too fine a point on it, they knew I wasn’t growing up in Stockholm. I had a friend whose father was a senior NCO at the Fort Hamilton Army Base a few blocks away and nobody went lyrical about how he, just by being black and therefore “different”, enriched our educational experience either. I had another friend whose father had flown a Focke-Wulf 200 multi-engine bomber for the Luftwaffe during WWII and it goes without saying that there wasn’t a chance in hell of anybody applauding his antecedents. Or for that matter the fact that another’s father was deputy something-or-other at the Yugoslav mission to the United Nations, another’s a survivor of the Holocaust or maybe just up from Puerto Rico with the family hoping to start a better life.

None of that mattered.

Instead the school simply thought it should do its job. Shape every kind of child white, black, brown, short, tall, skinny, kids with Coke-bottle glasses, kids dragging one leg behind them into useful citizens by teaching them how to read and write English well while at the same time having them master eight years of arithmetic, penmanship, history, and civics. And boy weren’t they lucky if they got to do just half that because most of us, the boys at least, would much rather be playing stickball or dangling a crab net off the sea wall in Shore Road Park.

Of course, in looking back I see that that principal (there were no administrators then) and those teachers did themselves proud, and that I loved them.

Flash forward fifty years. A long piece appears in The New York Daily News entitled: “We’re ready for real diversity.” It’s author is Shino Tanikawa a mother of two in public schools in Manhattan who has a completely different, but now very popular take on things. Below is an excerpt:

I also wanted my daughters, who are mixed race, to recognize and embrace their Japanese heritage, and not be ashamed of it as I was in my 20s (a rather stereotypical Asian response to a white-dominant society). For this to happen, I knew they needed to be in a racially diverse environment where they were not the only ones who are “different.”

I knew that public schools are where my children could meet and befriend people who are not like them; there aren’t many other places like that, even in a city known as a melting pot. So I sought out schools with diverse student bodies, and that’s what I got — though in this city, where kids tend to cluster by background, it wasn’t easy to find.

Mixing works. Both my daughters learned a great deal from attending elementary schools where classes had two grades or students with and without disabilities learning together.

What they learned does not show up in their test scores. Rather, they have the ability to see strengths in all people, particularly the ones society might label “difficult.” And they have humility about their status in this society.

‘Exploitation, domination and irrationality’https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/33448/

A class at University of Wisconsin-Madison studies how capitalism “generates harms” and “is irrational in ways that hurt nearly everyone,” according to a copy of the syllabus recently obtained through a public records act request by the MacIver Institute.

Berkeley-born and educated sociologist Dr. Erik Olin Wright, who teaches the graduate student course called “Class, State, and Ideology: An Introduction to Social Science in the Marxist Tradition,” goes on to instruct students on how to challenge capitalism.

Capitalism is an oppressive system, according to the syllabus, and “should therefore be criticized from the point of view of the interests it harms — especially the interests of the working class, but also other social categories whose interests are harmed.”

The course explores the “full range of harms and forms of injustice associated with capitalism. These critiques can be broadly grouped under three rubrics: exploitation, domination, and irrationality,” it states.

Mere critique is not the end goal of this course, however, but societal and institutional transformation. Its purpose, according to the nearly 80-page syllabus, is to teach Marxism as an “emancipatory social science,” that is to “fulfill the goal of generating critical social scientific knowledge relevant to the task of challenging systems of oppression.”

“Ultimately the point of Marxist social science is to generate theoretical knowledge relevant to the practical task of transforming the world in ways that increase the possibility of human emancipation,” the syllabus reads.

Though the end goal of “human emancipation” is not specifically delineated, Dr. Wright assigns his own work, Envisioning Real Utopias, for this section of the course. He also plans an end of term retreat weekend in Upham Woods featuring academic sessions on “Real Utopias,” complete with a gourmet potluck.

A 2012 bio on Wright by the American Sociology Association states that “real utopias,” according to the scholar, include “participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil; the production cooperatives of Mondragon, Spain; and even the collective self-organization of Wikipedia.”

As for the syllabus, nowhere does it offer the opposing view that capitalism is beneficial.

Though there is a section titled “American Exceptionalism,” the syllabus does not use this term in its traditionally positive sense, but rather subverts it, arguing that “the U.S. working class is unique, or ‘exceptional,’ in never having even formed durable electoral vehicles of its own to wage policy struggles in the state.”

Dr. Patton is the president of Middlebury College and a scholar of South Asian history, culture and religion.

In my inaugural address as the new president of Middlebury College a year and a half ago, I spoke of my hope to create a robust public square on campus. I said that I wanted Middlebury to be a community whose members engage in reasoned, thoughtful debate openly and without fear, where we are resilient in argument and generous to those we disagree with, and where the conversational circle expands to take in more and more people. I had no illusions about how difficult and messy it might be to achieve these goals, but I also had no doubt that we needed to pursue them.

We experienced a hard test of these aims in early March, when student demonstrators at Middlebury shut down a speaking event featuring the political scientist Charles Murray. A rash of similarly disturbing incidents on other campuses this spring has reminded us of the fragility of the principle of free expression and why all of our institutions, but especially our institutions of higher learning, must be vigilant in safeguarding it.

At Middlebury’s commencement last month, as I shook the hands of 550 graduating seniors, it was difficult to overlook the challenge that lies before them. These young people—our newest alumni—are a remarkable group, full of promise and hope. But the unfortunate reality in America today is that they are embarking on their life’s journey at a moment when our nation is sharply divided—politically, economically, culturally, and in seemingly every other way. As historian Jon Meacham said to our graduates in his commencement address, “A decade and a half into the 21st century, what do we love in common? The painful but unavoidable answer is: not enough.”
It was precisely this dynamic of polarization that played out when Charles Murray came to Middlebury. Students from a conservative campus group, the American Enterprise Institute Club, had invited him to talk about his 2012 book “Coming Apart,” which explores the roots of class division in white America. In publicizing the event, the students had cited the need for vigorous discussion and asked the community to listen to Dr. Murray and challenge his ideas. His 1994 co-authored book, “The Bell Curve,” which linked race with IQ, has long been the focus of controversy and served as the backdrop for how many on campus saw the event.

A number of groups at Middlebury were upset by the prospect of Dr. Murray’s appearance and asked the administration to cancel the event. In the spirit of a robust public square, we thought it was important to allow students and others in the community to engage with Dr. Murray about the issues on their minds.

Students protested when Dr. Murray took the stage. They prevented him from speaking and went on to disrupt attempts to continue the program, including a question-and-answer session moderated by Prof. Allison Stanger, via video feed—a backup plan that we had created to ensure that the talk could continue even if it was disrupted in the hall. Later, when Dr. Murray, Prof. Stanger and a Middlebury administrator left the building, a crowd of about 20 people, most of them outsiders but some students as well, physically confronted them and surrounded their car. Prof. Stanger was injured in the melee.

Like many at Middlebury, I was deeply upset by these events. As a community of learners, we must extend the same privileges and rights of speech to others as we would ask others to extend to us. Given my call for more resilient conversations and debate, the disruption of Dr. Murray’s talk was especially disheartening.

The college immediately asked independent investigators to give us an impartial account of what happened. They reviewed photographic and video evidence, interviewed a number of eyewitnesses and gathered other statements and accounts. Their work provided the basis for disciplinary proceedings under the college’s long-established, community-based judicial procedures. The college charged a number of students with violating policies that prohibit disruptive behavior at community events and that call on students to “respect the dignity, freedom and rights of others” and forbids “violence or the use of physical force.”

The Community Judiciary Board (which is made up of students, faculty and staff members) heard the most serious of these charges, made the final determination of wrongdoing and assigned sanctions. Neither I nor anyone in the senior administration had the authority to impose penalties unilaterally.

A University of Iowa professor argued that the appreciation of beauty inspired by the “white marble” of classical statuary supports white supremacy today.

“The equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe; it’s a dangerous construct that continues to influence white supremacist ideas today,” Sarah Bond, assistant professor of classics, wrote in an article for the art blogazine Hyperallergic.

Bond noted that “many of the statues, reliefs, and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted,” so the “white marble” seen in such art today is an accident of history, not the intended look. Marble “was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture.” So it was “carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white, and brown, among other colors.”

The professor pointed to various excellent museum shows like the “Gods in Color” exhibit to emphasize that these statues were originally painted, not marble white.

But Bond went even further, arguing that the misconception of original statues being marble white has supported — and still supports — white supremacy. “The equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe,” the professor noted. “Where this standard came from and how it continues to influence white supremacist ideas today are often ignored.”

The professor attacked “most museums and art history textbooks” for showing “a predominantly neon white display of skin tone when it comes to classical statues and sarcophagi.” This “neon whiteness” creates “a false idea of homogeneity — everyone was very white! — across the Mediterranean region.”

Bond pointed to the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who formed the foundation for art history. Winckelmann argued that the Apollo of the Belvedere — a Roman white marble copy of a Hellenistic bronze statue — is “the quintessence of beauty.” The classics professor suggested that Winckelmann’s preference for men over women might reveal a homosexual identity, and that his taste in art bolstered “white male supremacists.”

Bond also referenced the Dutch anatomist Pieter Camper, who measured human facial features to create the racist “cephalic index,” which was used by the Nazis to support notions of Aryan superiority.

Operating off of this history, the classics professor drew some debatable connections to modern white supremacy. She mentioned the group Identity Europa, which uses “classical statuary as a symbol of white male superiority,” which seems plausible.

But then Bond smuggled in an attack on a prominent Republican congressman. White marble statuary “also continues to buttress the false construction of Western civilization as white by politicians like Steve King,” the professor argued.

Here, Bond went too far. King has been attacked for defending Dutch politician Geert Wilders and tweeting, “We can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies.” He later explained that his remarks were about culture and not race. Even so, liberals twisted his statements to make them seem racist.

Besides the attack on King, Bond also mentioned one example of racial disparity resulting from the misconception of classical art as idolizing “white marble.” According to the Society for Classical Studies, only 9 percent of all undergraduate classics majors were minorities in 2014, and only 2 percent of classics faculty were not white. CONTINUE AT SITE

Crown Point High School officials refused to allow graduate Jacob Dalton Stanley to wear his Marine dress blues to the Class of 2017’s graduation ceremony Tuesday at the Star Plaza Theatre.

According to the Times of Northwest Indiana:

Stanley, who graduated in December and joined the U.S. Marines, completed boot camp Friday and flew home for his high school graduation. He practiced with his classmates during the day and was reportedly told by high school Principal Chip Pettit that he would not be able to wear his uniform during commencement.

Stanley wore his uniform anyway, and school officials would not allow him to receive his diploma at the ceremony. His name was listed on the graduation program, but officials did not read his name among the graduates.

Stanley’s classmate, graduate Leann Tustison, told the Times the school’s decision to block the newly minted Marine was “absolutely ridiculous.

“He’s in the military putting his life on the line for us,” Tustison said.

“It’s unacceptable that he was not allowed to walk across the stage. If he wants to walk across the stage in his uniform that he worked so hard for and earned, he should have the right to do that. That’s his achievement. They honored other people’s achievements whether they were in triathlon or other activities,” she continued.

“If his achievement is joining the armed forces, he should have been able to do that. The students were outraged. There were some students who were going to walk in solidarity with Jake. It was a disgrace.”

Numerous other students who spoke with the news site agreed with Tustison.

“It was despicable that he wasn’t allowed to wear his uniform. We should be proud of that as Americans. He should have been able to wear his military uniform,” Crown Point graduate Jessica Janda said.

Folks online overwhelmingly sided with Stanley, and lashed out at school officials for the decision.

Stanley declined to comment about the situation, but issued a statement through the 9th Marine Corps District, Naval Station Great Lakes, according to NBC Chicago.