RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/pentagon-secretly-institutionalized

In a Congressional hearing last spring, Gil Cisneros, then-Under Secretary for Military Readiness, announced that the Pentagon was closing its newly formed Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion within its K-12 school system and reassigning its controversial DEI chief after a ten-month internal investigation.

The Pentagon’s climb-down was a big win for OpenTheBooks.com. We had worked alongside whistleblowers, journalists, other investigative non-profits, and ranking members of Congress to expose alleged conflicts of interest, violations of military ethics policies, and radical ideologies being forced on the kids of servicemen and servicewomen.

Today, we are announcing Cisneros was actually faking. The radical curriculum was not dismantled. Instead, it was stealthily embedded into the lesson plans and classrooms throughout the entire school system.

The Pentagon, under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, is preventing details of their DEI policies from coming to light by abusing the Freedom of Information Act. They bamboozled the public with window dressing in Congressional hearings while forcing woke extremism on the roughly 70,000 children of our military service members.

It’s critical that taxpayers understand the scope of the DEI philosophy within the DoD’s schools – deployed servicemembers often have no alternative but to use the Pentagon-run school system, called the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA).

https://unherd.com/newsroom/jonathan-haidt-abolish-dei-to-save-academia/

Abolishing DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, Jonathan Haidt told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, on Wednesday.

Those words mark a dramatic departure for Haidt, who has been known as a restrained, moderate voice on the subject of cancel culture, identity politics and what he calls the obsession with “safetyism” that has gripped Gen Z in the past decade. Haidt, a professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” and founder of the Heterodox Academy, an academic organisation committed to the ideals of viewpoint diversity and academic freedom. 

On Wednesday the professor said that he no longer has confidence that universities can reform themselves. The reason for his volte-face: the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews. Indeed, the antisemitic eruptions on campus, and subsequent Congressional testimony of three elite university presidents who waffled on genocide, was “probably the most important turning point in the history of American higher education,” Haidt stated. 

Haidt characterised those events as the logical consequence of DEI, or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which emphasises one’s identity and encourages people to think in terms of power dynamics between the privileged and the oppressed. The professor described people who see the world exclusively through the lens of power dynamics as “monomaniacs,” and said they are the ones who run the campus DEI apparatus. 

He said he used to think that some parts of DEI might make sense, but now it’s clear that DEI does not work, and often makes things worse by exacerbating racial hostilities.

https://www.thefp.com/p/diversity-equity-inclusion-nebraska-john-sailer

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s College of Engineering might sound like one of the last places in higher education where you’d expect to find evidence of DEI orthodoxy influencing big decisions. Nebraska is a red state and UNL is a public school. Plus, you’d expect hiring at an engineering school to be based on, well, scientific criteria. 

But through a public records request, I reviewed every diversity recruitment report created by the school over the last four years. And I’ve discovered that even here, DEI has been central to hiring decisions. 

For example, in 2020, when the school set out to hire a professor of National Defense/Computer Network Security, the search committee made its priority clear: each candidate’s “diversity” score—assessing how well applicants understand things like “many intersectional aspects of diversity”—was given equal weight to factors like research and teaching experience. 

Another search in 2021, for a professor of Big Data/Cybersecurity, stated: “the weight of the ‘diversity’ scores were equal to the other scored areas that contributed to the candidate’s overall score.”

And applicants have been ruled out for failing to clear DEI hurdles. According to one report, from 2021, “a small number of candidates” in a search for a professor of thermal sciences “were eliminated based on absence or weak diversity statement.” In another case that year, three applicants for a role in environmental engineering “did not include diversity statements and were disqualified from the search.”

Per the college’s diversity and inclusion plan, which is still in place, the reports carry high stakes: a search that fails to show “a serious consideration” of DEI-related issues risks being canceled, resulting in no hire at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/islamic-indoctrination-101/

In the late 1990s, I was beginning the second semester of my freshman year at a small liberal arts college in Virginia. At this particular school, all first-year students were required to take a “freshman seminar.” This was a smaller class than the introductory “survey” classes that students typically took before declaring a major. Graded on the basis of in-class discussion and papers rather than exams, these were intended to provide students with an opportunity to focus in greater depth on a narrow topic and to hone their skills in research and writing. There weren’t too many options for such classes when I registered, but I managed to get a spot in a freshman seminar on the promising topic of “Music in Religion.” I wasn’t thinking of majoring in either field, but I’d been a Christian all my life and was interested in other religions. I’d also studied music theory and performance (voice and piano) for many years, so it seemed like a good fit.

There were six of us enrolled in the class. On the first day of class, we met the professor, an ethnomusicologist originally from Bosnia, and received the syllabus. We’d be studying music within two religious traditions – Islam, during the first half of the course, and then Christianity in the latter half. In addition to participation in class discussion, we would be graded on the basis of two papers: a text-based research paper that we would write at mid-term about music in Islam and a longer one making comparisons of the use of music in both traditions and drawing upon field-work that we’d do at a local Christian church of our choosing in addition to textual research that would be submitted at the end of the semester.

We were told to think of ourselves as “participant-observers” during our fieldwork, which is a methodological concept used within the field of anthropology. The idea was that we should be loosely participating in religious services in order simultaneously to make mental observations of those rituals and practices.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dartmouth-becomes-first-ivy-league-university-to-reinstate-standardized-testing-requirement/

Dartmouth College will restore its SAT requirement for admissions beginning with the Class of 2029, making it the first Ivy League university to reinstate the testing requirement after doing away with it after Covid.

In an email to the university community, Dartmouth president Sian Beilock wrote that the decision to reimplement the standardized test was made in response to a faculty study which found that “standardized test scores are an important predictor of a student’s success in Dartmouth’s curriculum” regardless of a “student’s background or family income.”

Professors involved in the review included Elizabeth Cascio, Bruce Sacerdote, and Douglas Staiger of the economics department and Michele Tine of the sociology department, Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Lee Coffin told the Dartmouth.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/05/california-school-spends-250k-on-woke-kindergarten/

An elementary school in the San Francisco Bay area of California spent a staggering quarter of a million dollars in federal funds on a program to implement self-described “woke” ideas in kindergarten.

According to Fox News, Grassbrook Elementary School in Hayward, California spent $250,000 to enlist the services of a for-profit organization called “Woke Kindergarten,” with the intent of training teachers to indoctrinate students with far-left ideas. But two years after the program was initiated, student test scores at the school have gotten even worse.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that over the last two years, math and reading scores have dropped by 4%. Less than 12% of all students at the school can read at their grade’s level, while less than 4% can do math at their grade’s level.

In response to the report, Hayward Unified School District Superintendent Jason Reimann defended the decision to enlist the controversial group, claiming that the purpose of hiring “Woke Kindergarten” was not to improve test scores, but rather to boost attendance. He said that it was a success in that regard, claiming that attendance at the school has gone up by 20%.

“Helping students feel safe and whole is part and parcel of academic achievement. I get that it’s more money than we would have liked to have spent,” Reimann said in a statement.  “We are in favor 100% of abolishing systems of oppression where they hold our students back. What I do believe is we should pick providers based on their work and how effective they are.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/02/indoctrination_versus_education_or_a_disgraceful_school_district_versus_a_wise_teacher.html

A California school district teaches its students LGBTQ+ ideology, racism, and antisemitism, while a teacher helps a smart student learn how to think.

For 250 years, education in America meant reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with peripheral subjects such as the Bible (in early America), history, civics, and science. During those years, with a mostly literate, numerate population, we were a stunningly successful nation. Now, in leftist-controlled school districts across America, reading, writing, and arithmetic have been supplanted entirely by leftist values, such as LGBTQ+ ideology, racism, and antisemitism. It’s Maoism, with ideology supplanting reason. Two items on the internet today highlight the difference.

On the Maoist front, the Daily Mail reports that an elementary school in Hayward, California, part of the San Francisco Bay Area, using federal taxpayer funds, has shifted its entire focus from education to indoctrination. The outcome for the children is tragic:

A Bay Area Elementary School has spent $250,000 on a ‘Woke Kindergarten’ program only to see its student’s literacy and numeracy rates plunge.

The ‘Woke Kindergarten’ program states its mission as an ‘abolitionist early learning ecosystem’ that trains teachers to uproot white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression which are barriers to learning.

After spending the federal money on the program Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward saw numeracy among its 474 students fall to a new low of just 4 percent and literacy just 12 percent.

The scores, recorded last Spring two years into Woke Kindergarten’s three-year contract, represent a 4 percentage decline in each category.

The school also remains on the state’s lowest-performing level on the Comprehensive School Improvement list and has a lower rate of attendance than before the program was introduced.

If you go to the linked article, you’ll see that the program focused on such hard-left topics as defunding Israel to “rebuild Palestine,” abolishing the police, and supporting so-called transgenderism. In addition, a third-grade teacher has been encouraging kids to “disrupt whiteness” and to imagine America’s and Israel’s annihilation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/supreme-court-allows-west-points-race-conscious-admissions-policy-to-continue-for-now/?utm_source=recirc-

The Supreme Court will allow West Point to continue considering race as part of its admissions decisions as a lawsuit over the policy plays out.

On Friday, the Court rejected an emergency appeal that sought to axe the inclusion of race-conscious admissions as the military academy makes admissions decisions for its Class of 2028.

The unsigned order said the decision “should not be construed as expressing any view on the merits of the constitutional question.”

The lawsuit comes after West Point and other military academies were left out of the Court’s ruling in June that ended affirmative action in admissions at other colleges.

The Court ruled then that the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the six-justice majority that, “The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”

https://www.dailywire.com/news/harvard-hosts-gathering-to-breathe-and-heal-event-to-help-students-grieve-claudine-gays-ouster

The Harvard Divinity School’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging hosted a “Gathering to Breathe and Heal” event on Thursday to help students grieve the resignation of disgraced former President Claudine Gay.

“For this gathering, we will create a space for us to discuss and process the departure of our former president, Claudine Gay,” the office wrote in a newsletter announcing the event, obtained by The Daily Wire. The event was intended to give participants the opportunity to “gather to breathe and to heal.”

Gay was forced to resign from her position last month amid allegations of plagiarism in various academic works that came to light while she was already under immense pressure for her failure to address the rise of antisemitism on campus.

The newsletter stated that many students are feeling grief upon their arrival to campus.

“This grief and loss may be connected to our personal lives; national and global unrest, harm, and violence; storms and natural disasters; or these increasing times of tension and divide on our campus and in our communities,” it said. “For many of us, this grief and loss also includes the resignation of former President Claudine Gay after her short tenure.”