RUTHFULLY YOURS

Almost anyone who has been forced to sit through diversity training has probably thought, “What a complete waste of time.” No slideshow presentation is going to undermine one’s beliefs, so any real bigots taking it won’t be swayed, for one thing. For another, it takes time out of doing actual work in a pathetic attempt at indoctrination.

When Paul Griffiths, a professor of Catholic theology at Duke University, said what most of us happen to think about so-called diversity training, however, he stirred up a whole storm of social justice viciousness. The College Fix reports:

The professor of Catholic theology told his colleagues not to “lay waste your time” with the training, which he predicted would be full of “bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs”:

When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show. Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual. (Re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history; I hope you’ll keep that history in mind as you think about this instance.

Now he’s the subject of two disciplinary proceedings – one for “unprofessional conduct” and one for “harassment” – and he is reportedly resigning after the 2017-2018 academic year.

Rod Dreher at The American Conservative obtained documents related to the dispute over the weekend, reprinting a recent open letter from Griffiths to the DDS faculty and the February email chain that started his problems.

After his acerbic response, Griffiths’ dean Elaine Heath responded on the listserv that it was “inappropriate and unprofessional” for him to publicly “humiliate or undermine” his colleague who sent the invitation, Prof. Anathea Portier-Young:

The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.

And here I thought that discussing things was what academics actually did for a living when they weren’t teaching classes. How is it “unprofessional” to voice a dissenting opinion again?

Oh, right, Griffiths assaulted the social justice shibboleth of diversity training, which can never be permitted to stand.

Students at Florida’s Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college, were not excited to have two representatives from the Trump administration at their college commencement. Omarosa Manigault, an advisor to the president, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos addressed the crowd to discuss the legacy of the college’s founders and also to wish the graduates luck in their future endeavors. The audience booed and physically turned their backs on these speakers as an act of protest. The college president even defended the speakers, asking his students to hear their points of view. He wasn’t successful.

The New York Times interviewed five UC Berkeley Republicans on their experiences at the famously illiberal bastion of radical leftist intolerance.

“Founded in the 1960s,” the Times notes,

the Berkeley College Republicans have remained a small and tightknit club, today numbering a few dozen active members…

Berkeley’s Republicans have turned the tables on liberals at the campus, championing free speech and putting a conservative claim on one of the university’s proudest liberal legacies. Last month, the group and another conservative student organization sued administrators for what they said was discrimination against conservative speakers. They have co-opted the language of the left, portraying themselves as fighting intolerance. Not all Berkeley Republicans agree with their tactics — some describe it as unnecessarily provocative.

“We are almost like an exhibit or zoo animals,” said 20-year-old Naweed Tahmas, external vice president of the Berkeley College Republicans. “Whenever someone finds out I’m a Republican at Berkeley, they pick my brain. People are genuinely curious. Nonetheless, their image of a white, male Republican is shattered when they see me.”

“As a Republican on campus I am targeted frequently,” he continued. “I have been spit on on several occasions. I have had drinks thrown on me. I have been punched in the face… People assume we are racist, we are xenophobic. They attach labels to us that are not true.”

Eighteen-year-old Anastasia Pyrinis, a political science and economics major, said, “I think when people find out that I’m conservative there’s an underlying tone or expression I get, like: ‘How could you be? You’re supposed to be a Berkeley enlightened student. How could you dare be a conservative?’ It’s definitely something that puts distance between me and my peers, and I really don’t think it should.”

Economics and history major Patrick Boldea, 19, said, “You have a lot of professors who hold some very liberal views, and you can sometimes feel not necessarily marginalized, but like you’re being penalized when you express a more conservative view. Like in my sociology class, I wrote an essay on the good aspects of gentrification in San Francisco. I was very heavily criticized by my professor.”

He went on to say that, as a conservative on campus, “you feel like your viewpoint is not as valued. You feel somewhat uncomfortable, but it’s not unbearable or unmanageable.”

Maria Konakova, 20, linguistics and business: “I don’t agree with some of the things that Berkeley College Republicans do. Some of their moves, like having an animal-rights barbecue, where the main food that is sold is meat, that doesn’t seem to me like a rational thing to do. It seems like it was inflammatory.” Konakova also does not that the majority of liberal Berkeley students “are aggressive and intolerant.”

Therapy dogs, chocolate, Play-Doh, video games: Today’s college students are offered a variety of ways to cope with the stress of final exams.

At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, several different student groups offered various study breaks, including a Zumba class, a video game stress reliever, and a “Chocolate and Chocolate Labs” event, the Daily Pennsylvanian reports. Student organizers did not respond to The College Fix’s request seeking details.

An annual tradition at the University of Illinois offers students a “Reading Day.” “In place of classes, the university hosts a variety of non-mandatory events aimed at helping students study and de-stress,” the Daily Illini reports.

Penn State’s “De-Stress Fest” included origami folding, Wii gaming, “brain massage music” and more, according to the university’s website.

The University of Michigan offered Play-Doh and more in an event billed as a way to de-stress before final exams, according to its Facebook page. Other relaxers at the event included glitter bottles, Legos and dominoes.

At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, several different student groups offered various study breaks, including a Zumba class, a video game stress reliever, and a “Chocolate and Chocolate Labs” event, the Daily Pennsylvanian reports. Student organizers did not respond to The College Fix’s request seeking details.

An annual tradition at the University of Illinois offers students a “Reading Day.” “In place of classes, the university hosts a variety of non-mandatory events aimed at helping students study and de-stress,” the Daily Illini reports.

Penn State’s “De-Stress Fest” included origami folding, Wii gaming, “brain massage music” and more, according to the university’s website.

The University of Michigan offered Play-Doh and more in an event billed as a way to de-stress before final exams, according to its Facebook page. Other relaxers at the event included glitter bottles, Legos and dominoes.

At Temple University, its Student Activities group put together an all-inclusive “camping” event called Camp TU. Students had the chance to participate in de-stressing activities by zip-lining, scaling a rock wall, watching the movie “Anchorman,” or eating from one of seven food trucks, The Tab reports.

Christopher Carey, director of student activities at Temple University, told The College Fix via email that the offerings aided students in several ways.

An American University student has launched a website where people can sign up to have their ashes mailed to a Republican member of Congress as a way to protest the Republicans’ health-care bill.

Yes, seriously.

MailmetotheGOP.com, which was created by AU junior Zoey Jordan Salisbury last week, contains a simple “Send my ashes to the GOP” form with six questions: “First Name,” “Last Name,” “Email,” “Zip/Postal Code,” “Congressperson(s) to be mailed to,” and, finally, “Why will you die because of the Republican health care bill?”

“Will you die because of AHCA?” the homepage asks. “Let them know.”

According to an article in the Washington Post, the website already had hundreds of submissions as of Saturday. And although it isn’t clear how many of these people are actually intending to go through with sending their ashes to Republicans, Salisbury told the Post that she would be talking with estate planners and helping people who do want to go through with it to write their wills.

Now, I am certainly no fan of the Republicans’ health-care bill in its current form. After all, one reason that medical care has become so expensive is that it’s a market that’s almost entirely controlled by the government and big insurance companies, and this bill keeps it that way. What’s more, it could easily make some of the problems that have occurred under Obamacare even worse. For example: One reason that premiums have been rising under Obamacare is that the individual mandate has not done its job of convincing a large enough number of people to sign up. And the Republicans’ replacement for the mandate — allowing insurance companies to charge the people who have been out of the market more money if and when they do decide to re-enter it — is hardly going to solve this problem. It’s not rocket science: If you’re trying to convince people who have been out of the market to get into the market, charging those people more is not exactly the best way to convince them to do so.

But all legislation technicalities aside, the larger and more important point when it comes to people like Salisbury is that knee-jerk alarmist tactics against entitlement reform scare us away from finding the best solutions to problems — because it completely eliminates consideration of the solutions that come from the free market.

The idea that the only way people can get the things that they need is through the government is a false one.

As Ira Stoll explains in a article for Reason, the OMG-we’re-all-gonna-die attitude that we’re hearing from opponents of Obamacare repeal sounds a lot like the “warnings . . . against throwing poor mothers and children off welfare and into the streets” that we were hearing from opponents of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996. But what actually wound up happening? As Stoll notes, it was far from the gruesome carnage that the alarmists had predicted. Some of the welfare recipients started working, others turned to charities to receive the services that they had been receiving from the government, and “infant mortality, crime, and domestic violence all declined” — leading Stoll to conclude that “some mix of government and market-based solutions will no doubt similarly rise to meet the needs of those who had been receiving health insurance coverage via the Obamacare exchanges or Medicaid expansion.”

Black students at Harvard University are holding their own graduation ceremony away from white students in what BET says is “the first of its kind” and “took nearly a year to plan.”

One of the graduates who helped plan the blacks-only graduation, Michael Huggins, said, “This is an opportunity to celebrate Harvard’s Black excellence and Black brilliance. It’s an event where we can see each other and our parents and family can see us as a collective, whole group. A community.”

However, Huggins ensures this segregated event is anything but segregation:

“This is not about segregation. It’s about fellowship and building a community. This is a chance to reaffirm for each other that we enter the work world with a network of supporters standing with us. We are all partners.”

The BET notes that Harvard reports a 96% graduation rate for its black students “who remain in school for an average of six years.” This ceremony is modeled after blacks-only ceremonies held at Stanford, Temple, and Columbia.

Another black graduate, Courtney Woods, told The Root, “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.”

Over 125 graduate students are registered for the ceremony and were able to raise $27,000 to cover the costs and a reception. The Root notes:

The ceremony, which will focus on graduate students, comes at a time when the experiences of many black students, undergraduate and grad, on college campuses in America have been marked by incidents of overt racism, microaggressions, passive racist comments, and the marginalization of minority experiences in both reading assignments and learning materials.

Remember, kids, there is no “overt racism” in segregating as long as it’s not a whites-only ceremony.

Recently, conservative author Ann Coulter canceled a speech at UC Berkeley because of Berkeley’s ham-handed response to radical students’ threats. In February, Berkeley had been the scene of violent riots that prevented a Breitbart News editor, Milo Yiannopoulos, from speaking. Berkeley is the nation’s leading public university, according to US News, and ironically, it was the birthplace of the free-speech movement of the 1960s.

Berkeley professor and former secretary of labor Robert Reich has concocted a conspiracy theory that avers that Yiannopoulos himself was responsible for the riots. However, Reich needs to explain how the supposed conspiracy has traveled back and forth between Berkeley, California and Middlebury, Vermont, where in early March rioting students physically injured Professor Allison Stanger, who was accompanying IQ expert Charles Murray to his car after demonstrators prevented him from speaking.

Fox News has reported that in anticipation of further riots, police from 40 schools have taken part in special response training.

Despite ongoing campus intolerance and violence, over the past few weeks I have participated in campus debates and discussions at Brooklyn College, where I teach, and at Lafayette College, where I gave an invited talk as part of the Wilson lecture series. Both institutions are dominated by left-oriented faculty and students, yet the interactions that I witnessed were respectful, collegial, and enlightening.

At Brooklyn College I have run a lecture series funded by the John Templeton Foundation and administered by the Institute for Humane Studies. My speakers have included Donald Trump’s executive vice president, George H. Ross, who was co-star of The Apprentice; Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Committee; and two economists, Oren Levin-Waldman and William T. Alpert, respectively of Metropolitan College and the University of Connecticut, who took different positions on the minimum wage issue. Students who are critical of Trump, who are opposed to the activities of the National Right to Work Committee, and who are in favor of a minimum wage were able to debate vigorously, rationally, and respectfully both with the speakers and with each other.

At Lafayette, I discussed my research findings concerning the preponderance of Democratic and left-oriented faculty in elite universities. Both left-oriented and conservative students debated with me and each other in a lengthy question-and-answer session. All three of the Brooklyn College events as well as the Lafayette event went overtime, and the students expressed enthusiasm for ideas without rancor.

What’s the difference? Why are elite institutions like Berkeley and Middlebury ridden with intolerant extremism and violence, with a leading faculty member attempting to rationalize such violence with a conspiracy theory?