RUTHFULLY YOURS

he racist, Leftist hotbed of Evergreen State College is spiraling out of control.

First, students threatened the safety of a professor who disagreed with an event that demanded whites not come to campus for a day. Then they were caught on video threatening administrators and shouting racist demands.

Did the school’s president contact the police and start issuing expulsions?

Nope. As Campus Reform reports, he rewarded the racist mob with HOMEWORK EXEMPTIONS:

Videos from Evergreen have since continued to leak, painting a chaotic portrait of campus in which protesters try to bully administrators into kowtowing to their demands, and in one case even tell the school’s president, George Bridges, to “shut the fuck up.”

…

“All of us are students and have homework and projects and things due. Have you sent an email out to your faculty letting them know?” one student protester asks, saying “what’s been done about that” and noting that she and her peers were participating in the meeting “on [their] own time.”

“It’s the first thing I’ll do. I have not done it yet, I will do it right now,” Bridges replies while one protester declares that professors “need to be told that these assignments won’t be done on time and we don’t need to be penalized for that.”

Later in the video, which appears to be taken after student protesters had submitted a list of demands to Bridges, one student declares that if Bridges were to avoid responding to the demands on deadline he would subsequently “need to pay for a potluck.”

Disgraceful.

Mr. Bridges, the correct answer is that students who commit crimes will be referred to authorities, and that students who have so little regard for academia are using up valuable space at your school and should withdraw.

The professor in question, Bret Weinstein, did nothing wrong. He disagreed with the event, and stated he preferred the way it had been handled in previous years when minorities voluntarily left campus to show just how vital they were to the school’s daily operations. So he is apparently a “progressive” himself, but just not extreme enough for the mob.

The snowflakes brook no disagreement with their opinions. Free speech doesn’t exist in their little bubbles. They aren’t open-minded, or tolerant, or liberal, or forward-thinking; they are old-fashioned, textbook totalitarians.

There’s now a proposal to privatize the school, removing all state funding, from Republican State Representative Matt Manweller. The bill will be introduced alongside a letter calling for an investigation into civil rights violations for intimidating an entire ethnic group off campus. Bravo.

That inchoate but pervasive ideology known as “Political Correctness,” a dogma that is enshrined in and enforced nowhere to the extent that it is in academia, truly is toxic. It is a poison that all decent people concerned with the future of Western civilization should resist with every fiber of their being.

If the latest happenings at Evergreen State College aren’t enough to convince any and every person who isn’t a leftist fanatic of this, then nothing else can.

Even before UC Berkeley, Evergreen should be extolled as the poster school for academic corruption, a picture worth the proverbial thousand words as to all that’s gone wrong with Higher Education. In the latest events at Evergreen we have on display the radical subversion of academia’s historical mission as the premiere civilizing cultural institution, for at Evergreen, it is now savagery that rules.

As it turns out, every year for the last several years, Evergreen would hold its annual “Day of Absence.” On this occasion, non-white students and faculty would stay home while white students and faculty would attend “anti-racism” seminars and the like. This year, however, someone decided to reverse the agenda by encouraging non-whites to come to campus and coercing whites to stay home.

Biology professor Bret Weinstein, himself a white leftist, protested the new arrangement through an email that he sent to a Rashida Love, the college administrator who organized this year’s “Day of Absence:”

“There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles…and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”

Weinstein continued:

“You may take this letter as a formal protest of this year’s structure, and you may assume I will be on campus on the Day of Absence. I would encourage others to put phenotype aside and reject this new formulation, whether they have ‘registered’ for it already or not. On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”

Weinstein even offered to come to campus to hold a discussion on race and evolution.

None of this, however, went over very well with those black students who were determined to keep whites off of campus. The militants videoed themselves harassing Weinstein, who calmly pleaded with them to engage in “dialectic,” not “debate” with him. In a debate, he noted, each party is “trying to win.” Dialectic, in contrast, transpires when each party listens to the other with the intention of trying to “discover what is true.” “I am only interested in dialectic,” Weinstein said, “which does mean I listen to you, and you listen to me.”

Twice in the past year, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has placed posters on the campus of San Francisco State University, as well as at a dozen additional schools, exposing the links between the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and the Hamas-funded hate group, Students for Justice in Palestine. These poster campaigns took place last October and this May. Now the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a group known for supporting Palestinian terrorism and calling for the end of American aid to Israel, is charging that the Freedom Center’s posters are “racist, Islamophobic, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian” and create a “hostile environment” for Muslim and Arab students on the campus.

The Freedom Center’s posters are not aimed at Muslims but at terrorists. The posters placed on campus in October identified BDS activists who are supporting the Hamas-inspired and funded boycott movement. They also charged that the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine supports Hamas terrorists “whose stated goal is the elimination of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.” The Hamas charter states this goal explicitly and SJP receives funding and organizational support from a Hamas-funded front group, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). SJP also supports the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

A second poster placed on campus in both Fall and Spring depicts a gun-toting Hamas terrorist holding the strings of a puppet labeled “American Muslims for Palestine” which in turn controls a marionette labeled “Students for Justice in Palestine.” Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is described as “The chief sponsor of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities on campus.” Hamas is identified as “A terror organization pledged to wipe out Israel” (a goal explicitly stated in the Hamas charter) while AMP is the “Hamas-created chief organizer and funder of SJP.” All these statements are documented in the Freedom Center pamphlet: SJP: A Campus Front for Hamas Terrorists.

Even in the radicalized world of anti-Israel student movements, SFSU stands out for its extreme actions and rule-breaking and its pro-terrorist sympathies. In April 2016, when Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat appeared on campus, a mob from SFSU’s General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS)—an SJP surrogate—protested Barkat’s visit by shouting “Intifada” and chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!,” itself a call for the obliteration of the Jewish state, forcing the cancellation of his speech. When SFSU President Leslie Wong called tepidly for an investigation into the protestors who shut down Barkat’s speech, GUPS responded by asserting that this request “criminalize[s] anti-racist speech on campus.”

I was not expecting to hold my biology class in a public park last week. But then the chief of our college police department told me she could not protect me on campus. Protestors were searching cars for an unspecified individual—likely me—and her officers had been told to stand down, against her judgment, by the college president.

Racially charged, anarchic protests have engulfed Evergreen State College, a small, public liberal-arts institution where I have taught since 2003. In a widely disseminated video of the first recent protest on May 23, an angry mob of about 50 students disrupted my class, called me a racist, and demanded that I resign. My “racist” offense? I had challenged coercive segregation by race. Specifically, I had objected to a planned “Day of Absence” in which white people were asked to leave campus on April 12.

Day of Absence is a tradition at Evergreen. In previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus—a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning. This year, however, the formula was reversed. “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave the campus for the day’s activities,” the student newspaper reported, adding that the decision was reached after people of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”

In March I objected in an email to all staff and faculty. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles . . . and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away,” I wrote. “On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”

My email was published by the student newspaper, and Day of Absence came and went almost without incident. The protest of my class emerged seemingly out of the blue more than a month later. Evergreen has slipped into madness. You don’t need the news to tell you that—the protesters’ own videos will do. But those clips reveal neither the path that led to this psychosis, nor the cautionary nature of the tale for other campuses.

Evergreen is arguably the most radical college in the country—and while it does lean far to the left in a political sense, it is the school’s pedagogical structure to which I refer. Rather than placing students in many separate classes, most of our curriculum is integrated into full-time programs that may run the entire academic year. This structure allows students and professors to come to know each other very well, such that Evergreen can deliver a deep, personally tailored education that would be impossible elsewhere. When it works well, it is unlike anything else. Last week’s breakdown of institutional order is far from an indictment of our founder’s wisdom.

Rather, the protests resulted from a tension that has existed throughout the entire American academy for decades: The button-down empirical and deductive fields, including all the hard sciences, have lived side by side with “critical theory,” postmodernism and its perception-based relatives. Since the creation in 1960s and ’70s of novel, justice-oriented fields, these incompatible worldviews have repelled one another. The faculty from these opposing perspectives, like blue and red voters, rarely mix in any context where reality might have to be discussed. For decades, the uneasy separation held, with the factions enduring an unhappy marriage for the good of the (college) kids.CONTINUE AT SITE

University of California president Janet Napolitano stashed away $175 million in a secret slush fund while publicly beating the drum for tuition and fee increases. Napolitano interfered with state auditors, prompting UC students and workers to call for her arrest and Democratic legislators to demand her resignation. For their part, the UC regents publicly defended Napolitano, and it has now emerged how the regents responded to students and worker protests.

The night of the protest, May 17, CBS News reported, “the regents threw a $15,199 party at San Francisco’s elegant Palace Hotel for 59 people – a $258-a-head event also billed to the university.” Back in January, the night before they voted to raise tuition, the regents hosted a $17,600 banquet, one of many such events in recent years.

While planning to jack up tuition 28 percent in 2014, the regents threw an $8,000 party, and the year before, during a financial crisis, they blew $15,600 on a feast. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Napolitano’s office has reimbursed the regents for more than $225,000 in dinner parties since 2012. What the regents have to celebrate remains unclear to many observers.

State auditor Elaine Howle not only uncovered the president’s $175 million slush fund, she also questioned the performance of the regents in their oversight of Napolitano’s office. The state auditor recommended that the legislature could increase accountability by taking over the regents’ job. True to form, the regents found no fault whatsoever with president Napolitano.

“There has been no criminal activity and no slush funds,” according to regent Sherry Lansing, a former movie executive. She blasted “distortions” in the media, hailed Napolitano’s “wisdom and integrity,” and proclaimed, “her leadership has been incredible.”

Regent Bonnie Reiss, an attorney who produced president Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration ceremony, complained of “salacious” newspaper headlines. Press descriptions of a “slush fund,”

Reiss explained, “hurt my heart.”

Regent Norm Pattiz was “delighted when I found out we had a chance to have Janet Napolitano as our president and was “still delighted” after the audit. Last year during a commercial, Pattiz asked television writer Heather McDonald, “Wait a minute — can I hold your breasts?” and referred to his hands as “memory foam.”

It has not emerged whether Pattiz exhibited similar behavior at any of the lavish regents’ parties.

The Daily Bruin, a UC student publication, has described Pattiz as a “porn connoisseur” and called for him to resign. Handyman Pattiz has not done so, and is “still delighted” with Janet Napolitano.

The former Department of Homeland Security boss disputes the $175 million slush fund and is sticking to her guns on the tuition and fee increases. Part of the campus assessment fee, she told the Daily Bruin, goes toward paying off UCPath, an upgrade for the UC payroll system. UCPath was supposed to cost $156 million but after spending $327 million over four years, UC bosses now estimate a final cost of $504 million.

In US academic tradition, university administrators choose commencement speakers they believe embody the zeitgeist of their institutions and as such, will be able to inspire graduating students to take that spirit with them into the world outside.

In this context, it makes perfect sense that Ayman El-Mohandes, dean of the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy at City University of New York (CUNY), invited Linda Sarsour to serve as commencement speaker at his faculty’s graduation ceremony.

Sarsour embodies Mohandes’s values.

Mohandes’s Twitter feed makes his values clear. His Twitter feed is filled with attacks against Israel.

Mohandes indirectly accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of wishing to commit genocide. Netanyahu, he intimated, wishes to “throw the Arabs in the sea.”

He has repeatedly libeled Israel as a repressive, racist, corrupt state.

Mohandes has effectively justified and legitimized Islamic terrorism and the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza. The Islamic terrorist assault against Israel, led by Hamas from Gaza, is simply an act of “desperation,” he insists.

By Mohandes’s lights, Hamas terrorists are desperate not because they uphold values and beliefs that reject freedom, oppress women and aspire to the genocide of Jewry and the destruction of the West. No, they are desperate because Israel is evil and oppressive.

Who could Mohandes have chosen to serve as his commencement speaker other than Sarsour, given his positions? Sarsour, the rising star of the Democratic Party, not only shares Mohandes’s values and positions, she has taken those common values and positions and amplified them on the national stage.

Georgetown University Professor Jonathan Brown, already notorious for past scandalous comments justifying Islamic slavery (including rape), only worsened his reputation with a recent May 8 lecture. Before about 90 listeners filling Georgetown’s small Riggs Library, the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) director clinically explicated disturbingly dark Islamic political doctrines.

In conjunction with Cambridge University Professor Philip Sheldrake, a Christian, the American Muslim convert Brown slavishly addressed “Power: Divine and Human—Christian and Muslim Perspectives” in a manner hardly flattering to Islam. He noted that “in the Quran, God’s power is the superlative of all superlatives, it is total, absolute, and without exception.” Correspondingly, the “word that the Quran uses over and over to refer to human beings” is the “slaves of God.”

“The power of God,” Brown elaborated, “we ponder as his slaves” and in Islam “mortal reason must remain apart from Him.” Islam’s ninth-century Mutazilites had argued that “God was constrained by justice and was unable to do evil . . . yet this school of thought was and remains a decidedly minority one.” By contrast, mainstream Sunni Islamic thinking concluded that “God is not constrained by justice, because God is justice.”

The detached Brown elaborated that the Quran’s imperious divinity “historically . . . gave birth to a worldview in which power was a main idiom of formatting society and framing relations.” “In the Islamic worldview there is a hierarchy of power that was not moral or metaphysical, but essentially functional.” “Life is not egalitarian . . . because people have different abilities and talents and because they must fulfill different functions.” In the Quran, for example, (feminists should mark his words) “God has ‘favored men over women’ not in any moral or absolute sense, but because he created two different genders with complementary capacities.”

Brown explained how literally Islam’s “master-slave relationship between God and man is reflected in the structure of ordered subordination amongst mankind.” “Although the Quran repeatedly urges Muslims to free their slaves and even commands it as expiation for certain sins, the Holy Book takes the existence of the slave-master relationship for granted” as a “structural feature in that world.” Ominously for non-Muslims, “when Muslim scholars speculated on the theological ideology of slavery as a condition, they settled on it being a punishment for disbelief, since the only people that Muslims could enslave were non-Muslims.”

One would think that a graduation ceremony, where family and friends assemble to celebrate the grand passage from the youthful dependency of college to the presumed self-sufficiency of adulthood, would be marked by joy, rather than expressions of infantile behavior that should have been harnessed and unlearned some 20 years earlier.

Sadly, such was not the case at the Notre Dame commencement last Saturday where a small group of graduates (along with some of their parents) walked out of the proceedings in protest of Vice President Mike Pence.

Consider: they were not protesting anything the vice president said. They didn’t bother to stay to hear what he had to say. Preemptive non-listening is a favorite tactic of the radical left. Had they stayed, they would have heard Pence say: “Notre Dame is a campus where deliberation is welcomed, where opposing views are debated, and where every speaker, no matter how unpopular or unfashionable, is afforded the right to air their views in the open for all to hear.”

Why did they leave? According to their press release, the protestors said they were expressing solidarity with “marginalized people,” adding that “Mike Pence’s policies target the most vulnerable groups in our society.” The organizers also cited Pope Francis’ “call upon the world… to support Syrian refugees, to acknowledge and respect the humanity of sexual minorities and to bring down all walls that separate us…”

Perhaps these students missed the Catholic doctrinal teachings on the most vulnerable group in our society: unborn children. According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: “As a gift from God, every human life is sacred from conception to natural death. The right to life is the first and most fundamental principle of human rights….”

So, one must wonder how it is that among the protest’s organizers were leaders of Planned Parenthood and the Indiana Reproduction Justice Coalition, who attacked Vice President Pence for his longstanding views on the sanctity of life, a fundamental Catholic doctrine.

The protestors selective citing of the pope also extended to Catholic teachings on marriage and those “sexual minorities” the students were invoking. Recall that Pope Francis disappointed the LGBT community in his issuance last year of a report in which he affirmed the longstanding Catholic doctrine on the subject of homosexuality and marriage: “…only the exclusive and indissoluble union between a man and a woman has a plenary role to play in society as a stable commitment that bears fruit in new life…(w)e need to acknowledge the great variety of family situations that can offer a certain stability, but de facto or same-sex unions, for example, may not simply be equated with marriage.”

The pope cited the 2015 report of the synod of Catholic bishops saying, “There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”

And while the pope called on the church to provide “respectful pastoral guidance” to those experiencing “same sex attraction”, he stated clearly that from the church’s viewpoint, “God’s will” means people should not act on such attractions.

Oops. Protestors must have missed that class? In other words, these graduates justified their objections to Pence’s presence as the commencement speaker at a major Catholic university for mirroring Catholic doctrine.