RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Letter From An Ivy League Admissions Dean – WSJ By James Freeman

Brown University in Providence, R.I. houses one of the country’s most selective undergraduate colleges. The Brown Daily Herald, a student-run newspaper, cites Dean of Admission Logan Powell in reporting that the school received a record-high 32,724 applications this year, and admitted just 8.3% of applicants.

Among those lucky few is the daughter of a Journal reader who is still trying to make sense of a letter the family received this week from Mr. Powell. Our reader’s bright daughter had already received news of her acceptance when a letter arrived that was addressed to her “Parent/Guardian.”

Oddly, the note referred to the accepted student not as “she” but as “they.” Dean Powell’s letter also stated that our reader’s daughter had no doubt worked hard and made positive contributions to “their” school and community. Our reader reports that his perplexed family initially thought that Brown had made a word-processing error. That was before they listened to a voice mail message from the school congratulating his daughter and referring to her as “them.”

We’ve read about the literacy crisis in the U.S. but would not have guessed that the problem extends to Ivy League administrators. An item on Brown’s website announcing Mr. Powell’s 2016 hiring reported that he had previously served at Bowdoin, Harvard and Princeton—and also noted that he would be overseeing a staff of 38 people at Brown. One would think that at least some of them are familiar with pronouns.

It turns out that the errors were intentional. Brown spokesman Brian Clark writes in an email that “our admission office typically refers to applicants either by first name or by using ‘they/their’ pronouns. While the grammatical construction may read as unfamiliar to some, it has been adopted by many newsrooms and other organizations as a gender-inclusive option.” Our reader figured as much. “Mind you, our daughter has always been clear what her biological gender and identity is — she’s a woman,” he reports. He believes the school “wants to make it clear that only left wing extremists are welcome at Brown. Fine with us — good riddance.”

The letter from Dean Powell included a total of four short paragraphs, including this one: “And now, as we invite you to join the Brown family, we encourage you to allow [daughter’s name] to chart their own course. Just as you have always been there, now we will provide support, challenge and opportunities for growth.”

Nearly a complete stranger, Mr. Powell is writing a short, error-filled letter to parents claiming that his organization is fit to replace them. No doubt the “Brown family” with all its “thems” and “theys” can offer a wealth of valuable educational opportunities. But anyone who buys the line that competent parenting is part of the package has probably never set foot on campus.

Something alarming is happening on campuses, fueled by tendentious and morally self-righteous progressive students, and some faculty, who have displayed a shocking disregard for the university’s cardinal virtue of free expression, deciding themselves who may say what about whom on their respective campuses—and purging from campuses those ideas they have deemed too hateful, too unsafe, too incendiary to tolerate or to allow to be heard.

Until now, these champions of the aggrieved have been less than transparent in both their motives and intentions, disingenuously asserting that their efforts to suppress the speech of those with opposing conservative views is done to protect perceived victim groups. Ideas which are contrary to these social justice warriors’ acceptable worldview are dismissed as contemptible—not even worthy of being debated—or are neutralized and debased by designations which characterize it as ‘hate speech’ because it is, depending on the victim groups attacked, racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, or homophobic. So sure of their righteousness and ideology are they that they do not even try to hide their preconceived notions and evident bias against ideas they have decided are beyond the pale or unworthy of being given voice.

Feelings, not ideas, are what count; emotionality now trumps rationality.

The defective rationale for the thuggish substitution of the suppression of other people’s speech for what is supposed to be two-sided academic dialogue was just revealed at Wellesley College, where both students and, unusually, faculty publicly articulated the shocking notion that only certain speech is to be permitted—namely, those ideas which promote and support progressive liberal views—and that opposing views, and the conservative speakers who utter them, are not even deemed worthy of being able to share their ideas on the Wellesley campus.

In an astoundingly facile editorial in the April 12th issue of the Wellesley News, the paper’s editors responded to recent debates over free speech on that campus, precipitated, somewhat ironically, by a series of lectures as part of Wellesley’s Censorship Awareness Week, during which one controversial speaker, Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, critiqued the notion that American campuses are awash with sexual assault. In her book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, in fact, Kripnis asserted the view that, “We seem to be breeding a generation of students, mostly female students, deploying Title IX to remedy sexual ambivalences or awkward sexual experiences, and to adjudicate relationship disputes post-breakup — and campus administrators are allowing it.”

That opinion was apparently intolerable to Wellesley’s students, and some faculty, who refused to acknowledge Kripnis’s notions, theories that contradict their preconceived worldview that men are predatory and women have to be protected from them, something she describes as “neo-sentimentality about female vulnerability.”

Virulently anti-Trump professors — by which I mean “most professors” — feel pretty invincible. After all, when a video recently surfaced of a professor comparing the election of Trump to a terrorist attack, the student filming it got punished.

So imagine Fresno State professor Lars Maischak’s surprise last week when his tweet demanding President Trump be hung was reported to law enforcement by Fresno State’s president:

Though Maischak did not respond to Campus Reform’s initial inquiry on the matter, he did try to clarify his comments on Twitter, saying that while he “did not intend to harm Mr. Trump” nor “wish for anyone else to harm Mr. Trump by way of an assassination,” he does think “given the nature of [Trump’s] regime, that he will be held accountable for his crimes in a court, and that historical precedent suggests that a death sentence is inevitable, if democracy prevails.”

Now, however, Campus Reform has been informed that university President Joseph Castro promptly alerted multiple federal agencies to the tweets after becoming aware of them, and has been in “regular contact with federal authorities” over the past several days.

“President Castro said that the university alerted the FBI, Secret Service, and Homeland Security as soon as it became aware of the comments made by Dr. Maischak on Twitter,” Director of Communications Kathleen Schock told Campus Reform. “He went on to say that the university been in regular contact with federal authorities. There are no other details we can disclose about those communications.”

The tweet in question from Maischak’s now apparently deleted Twitter account read:

To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance #DeathToFascism

I spend a lot of my time reporting some crappy news about school administrators. President Castro’s decision to adhere to the law is a welcome change and should be applauded.

It can be argued that Maischak didn’t spell out his desire to assassinate the president — that’s for the investigators to decide. However, his claims that he doesn’t want someone else to assassinate Trump rings hollow considering what he also expressed last week: CONTINUE AT SITE

The University of California-Davis’s student senate voted to allow the removal of the American flag from its meetings.

Saying “patriotism is different for every individual,” the senate voted to make displaying the flag optional.

Any idiot can see where this is headed.

Fox Insider:

Pete Hegseth pointed out that the senate appeared to say that there would be instances where the flag’s presence was inappropriate.

“We’ve got patriotism triggering people now,” Campus Reform reporter Cabot Phillips remarked.

In a statement, Student Senator Jose Antonio Meneses further clarified that the flag was not banned from meetings, but only had its mandated presence lifted.

Phillips said the vote was not an isolated incident, recalling a situation in New Mexico where a student was forced to remove a flag from his dormitory window.

Does anyone doubt that some snowflake will call for the flag’s removal? The student senate thought they were being clever in hiding their intent behind sophistry, but if there isn’t at least one member of that body who will complain about displaying the flag, I’ll be shocked.

The problem isn’t so much that one or two people will object to displaying the flag. It’s that there will be intimidation to force others to go along with it. That’s the true fascism on the loose on college campuses – the forced acceptance of a minority viewpoint through intimidation and threatened ostracizing of anyone who disagrees.

Anyone who feels uncomfortable about a national symbol that has stood as a beacon of liberty and freedom for the truly oppressed people of the world is probably too sensitive to survive outside a university setting. Most of them will be unable to live on their own and will end up living with their parents or marrying someone who will be forced to care for them.

Black men don’t do Latin. Or do they?

It may not be surprising to learn that a charter school named Boys’ Latin still offers courses in this dead language. But it is surprising to learn that this is an all-black school in an iffy part of West Philadelphia, and Latin isn’t merely an option here. It’s a requirement.

Turns out, too, that the young men of Boys’ Latin have become pretty good at distinguishing their ad hominem from their ad honorem. This month the school received the results on the introductory level National Latin Exam, a test taken last year by students around the world. Among the highlights: Two Boys’ Latin students had perfect scores; 60% of its seventh-graders were recognized for achievement, 20% for outstanding achievement; and the number of Boys’ Latin students who tested above the national average doubled from the year before.

“I invite anyone who doubts what this does for our students to come to a graduation and watch 100 black boys sharply dressed in caps and gowns and proudly reciting their school pledge in Latin,” says the school’s chief executive officer, David Hardy. “Not only is this an unexpected sight, it defies the low expectations society puts on young black men.”

The traditional arguments for studying Latin are well known. More than half of English words have Latin roots, so students who learn Latin improve their vocabularies and linguistic skills. In addition, the discipline of studying Latin—the logic, the structure, the rigor—helps train young minds to think more clearly and systematically.

All these arguments Mr. Hardy accepts and occasionally invokes himself. But for him Latin is also a way of addressing the most wretched fact of today’s Philly school system: Only 8% of young black men who graduate from one of the city’s public high schools will go on to a four-year college degree, according to a December 2015 longitudinal study called “From Diplomas to Degrees” by Drexel University’s Paul Harrington and Neeta Fogg.

Now, any columnist who notes the racial disparities in education, especially when coupled with a call for the parents of poor minority children to have more options when it comes to schools, invariably receives mail that begins like this: “I have been an educator in the public schools for more than 20 years, and you are badly underestimating the reason [bad families, poverty, IQ, whatever] these kids aren’t learning.”

Translation: Black children, or at least inner-city black children, are ineducable. Needless to say, Mr. Hardy and his merry band at Boys’ Latin hold a contrary view. In February they helped launch a campaign called #blackdegreesmatter to highlight why college, and the higher lifetime earnings it generally brings, is so vital for young black men. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266432/least-diverse-place-america-prager-university

What is the least diverse place in America? It’s the institution that most actively seeks racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural diversity: the college campus! Colleges want students to look different, but think the same. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, explains.