RUTHFULLY YOURS

A radical Drexel University professor who once wished for “White Genocide” for Christmas and hoped to “Abolish the White Race” is under fire again. This time, he said he wants to “vomit or yell about Mosul” after someone gave their seat to a uniformed soldier.https://heatst.com/culture-wars/giving-up-a-seat-for-a-soldier-makes-pro-white-genocide-drexel-prof-want-to-vomit/?mod=sm_tw_post

Drexel professor George Ciccariello, currently a visiting researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, shocked his online followers after he complained about an act of appreciation for a soldier.

“Some guy gave up his first class seat for a uniformed soldier. People are thanking him. I’m trying not to vomit or yell about Mosul,” he tweeted.

Senior Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter slammed Ciccariello, saying: “You tried not to vomit or yell? No, you just sat there quietly like a little bitch. Ignored, irrelevant, wishing you were a man.”

“Because you’re a douchebag?” tweeted prominent conservative Ben Shapiro.

This isn’t the first time the Drexel professor has been criticized. Last December, he tweeted how “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide.” Dexel investigated the issue and ended up releasing a statement claiming the professor’s tweets fall under the category of “protected speech” and that he wouldn’t lose his job.

Ciccariello, meanwhile, brushed off the backlash, insisting it was just a joke because “White isn’t a race” and blamed white supremacists for trying to make his tweets into an issue.

The professor has made a near-habit of posting inflammatory tweets on social media. He once tweeted “Abolish the White Race” and claimed that Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof “simply put into practice what many white Americans already think.”

He has also claimed that the murder of some 4,000 white people during the Haitian Revolution was a “good thing.”

When Chester Evans Finn, Jr., a former United States Assistant Secretary of Education, observed in 1989 that university campuses had become “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” he was anticipating a troubling and prevalent trend now poisoning academia, namely, the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barraged with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service to the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.

This is the tragic and inevitable result of a decades of grievance-based victimism by self-designated groups who frame their rights and demands on identity politics and who have been successful in weaponizing this victim status to stifle debate. In the space of the past two months, for example, tendentious and morally self-righteous progressive students, and some faculty, 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.

At Middlebury College, in one of the most astonishing examples, Charles Murray, political scientist, libertarian, and author of the controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, was verbally assaulted by a crazed audience of students intent on shutting down his planned speech—a crowd that eventually physically surrounded Murray and a Middlebury professor, Allison Stanger, and shoved them with sufficient force that she was hospitalized. “Your message is hatred, we cannot tolerate it,” the intellectual thugs screamed out.

At NYU, Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice Media and the host of The Gavin McInnes Show on Compound Media, was showered with pepper spray by agitated and raucous protesters before his scheduled February 3rd speech.

Ezra Levant, conservative political activist, writer, and broadcaster, had to endure a similar experience at Canada’s Ryerson University in March when protesters set off alarms, pounded on doors, and continuously interrupted his speech while chanting, “no Islamophobia, no white supremacy.”

A California college professor who had one of the more notorious classroom meltdowns following the election of now-President Donald Trump last November has been honored with a Faculty of the Year award, an honor she has declined.

After a student surreptitiously recorded Orange Coast College human-sexuality professor Olga Perez Stable Cox calling Trump a “white supremacist” and his election “an act of terrorism,” his video went viral, sparking a nationwide debate about how much political commentary is appropriate in the classroom.

Caleb O’Neil, the student who videotaped Cox’s rant, shared the recording with the Orange Coast College Republicans club’s president, Joshua Recalde-Martinez, who posted it online. OCC announced it would suspend O’Neil in February for violating rules against recording class discussions without permission, but after the 19-year-old filed an appeal and threatened to sue, the board of trustees announced it would cancel the punishment.

The university had originally planned to suspend O’Neil until at least the fall of 2017, also putting him on disciplinary probation and requiring him to write a letter of apology to Olga Perez-Stable Cox, the professor he recorded. But after convening a special meeting, the board of trustees voted Wednesday to lift O’Neil’s punishment, also saying they would not take action against Cox.

Now the college wants to honor the professor who called Trump’s election “an act of terrorism” with a prestigious award.

Doug Bennett, executive director of the Orange Coast College Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times that Cox was notified of the award last week, “but she declined to accept and did not want to participate in related activities.”

The annual honor is typically received during a public ceremony, and the winner addresses the graduating class during commencement.

The Costa Mesa college didn’t make a formal announcement about Cox winning the award, Bennett said, but students heard rumors about her nomination and began sharing information on Facebook.

OCC’s Professional Development Committee chooses the winner of the award. The committee consists of faculty members, classified staff and past recipients of the award.

Any student or faculty member can recommend a member of the faculty for the honor. The committee then gives nominees credit for their involvement on campus and evaluates their methods of teaching.

The committee does not plan to select another recipient for this year’s award, Bennett said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Starting next fall, English majors at Harvard will be required to take a course in authors “marginalized for historical reasons.” Those “reasons” include “racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity,” the English Department’s chairman, James Simpson, told the Harvard Crimson.

Campus agitation for an identity-based curriculum is by now drearily familiar. But Harvard’s recent mandate goes further, creating a new literary typology: On one side are the marginalized authors; on the other, authors who, by implication, may have benefited from “racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity.” Academia has already furnished unlettered students with excuses aplenty to ignore the greatest works of Western civilization. Now they’ve got another one.

The Harvard English major imposes few substantive demands: a one-semester survey spanning the millennium from 700 to 1700; a semester of poetry; a course that serves as a vehicle for immigration and postcolonial themes; and one semester of Shakespeare. After that, students are on their own, free to fill out their credits with random classes in literature, theory, creative writing, or “related courses” outside the English Department.

In other words, Harvard, like virtually every other college today, eschews any responsibility for ensuring that students are systematically exposed to the landmarks of the literary canon and that they understand the evolution of literary forms. For Harvard to add a requirement in “marginalization” signals that the faculty considers it important enough to override the department’s laissez-faire philosophy.

It is unclear, though, how the prestigious status will be conferred. How will the faculty decide whether an author has been marginalized because of “patriarchy,” say, rather than because she wasn’t that good in the first place, or because literary tastes have changed? There were female novelists and pamphleteers in the 19th century who have disappeared from view. Is that sexism, or simply the judgment of time? Does Oscar Wilde qualify as marginalized? “Heteronormativity” may have made his final years miserable, but it had no effect on the boundless success of his plays.

Literary reputations rise and fall—for white men as for everyone else. England’s first poet laureate, John Dryden, was once regarded as the heir to Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. Today, at least in the U.S., he is barely read. Likely explanations are that neoclassical verse has fallen out of favor and that few modern readers have the contextual knowledge to understand his satires. Why do similar explanations not hold for “marginalized” authors?

Moreover, given the historical disparities in educational opportunity, it is wrong to assume that all groups should be proportionally represented in the literary pantheon. For centuries, only European males (with few exceptions) received the rigorous training in the Classics that provided the materials for literary creation.

The reasons to study literature include linguistic beauty and insight into the human condition. Being “marginalized” is not one of those reasons, nor should an author’s sex and race count for or against him. If a great work happens to be unknown, that is another matter, one that has nothing to do with social justice. CONTINUE AT SITE

Charles Murray was not met with riots when he showed up to speak at NYU last Friday, as he had been at Middlebury College a few weeks before. Still, his reception hardly served as a model for campus discourse. Security was beefed up, and his hosts, a student group affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, had to restrict access to the event. A small crowd showed up to protest Murray’s presence — and to hurl insults at attendees and the university itself.

In response to what occurred at Middlebury, the speech’s venue was moved to an underground room in NYU’s Torch Club, and tickets had to be reserved ahead of time, angering many who had hoped to gain admission in order to protest.

The protest was an unimpressive showing. Demonstrators numbered about 20 and brandished signs with such inane slogans as “No Eugenics on Campus — Fight Fascism.” They chanted about Murray but also directed opprobrium at NYU for permitting his visit. Pairing Murray’s alleged prejudice with that of the university, a chant of “How do you spell ‘classist’? N-Y-U!” rang out as I stood waiting to get through security, and many signs accused Murray of racism. Indeed, NYU’s Faculty of Color Caucus wrote a letter indicting Murray’s talk as “hate and fear under the guise of scholarship and free speech.”

The strongest condemnation of Murray focused on his supposed view of the poor as an underclass deserving of their situation. One student, Shirish Sarkar, told me: “Charles Murray is the latest in a long line of people that have been pushing this sort of eugenics-based poverty myth, where there’s a correlation between intelligence and poverty.” The Faculty of Color Caucus summarized Murray’s book Coming Apart, on which the talk was based, as “[blaming] poor whites for their own poverty.” Those of us who listened to what Murray had to say in his talk in fact heard him sharply reprove the out-of-touch elite that had smugly abandoned the working class and poor to their fate.

As Murray entered the Torch Club through a side door, flanked by security, his talk began with shouts of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” faintly echoing from above ground, outside of the restaurant. He referred to the hullabaloo only with an opening joke that it was all wasted on a talk that will make listeners think, “That’s it?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-ivy-leagues-admission-bias-a-trade-secret-1490740763

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s dispiriting decision last year in Fisher v. University of Texas, which upheld the use of racial preferences in college admissions, Gallup released some encouraging poll results. More than 6 out of 10 white, black and Hispanic respondents said they disagreed with the ruling. And 7 in 10 people—including 76% of whites, 61% of Hispanics and 50% of blacks—said colleges should admit applicants based “solely on merit.”

Of course, the Supreme Court’s job is to interpret the commands of the Constitution, not opinion surveys. Still, the polling results are a reminder that the courts and the college administrators who cheered the ruling are much bigger fans of racial double standards than are the general public—even those who supposedly benefit from race-based affirmative action.

But the Gallup poll also illustrates how our national discussion of racial preferences in higher education has gotten so dated. Nowhere mentioned in the survey—and only glancingly referenced in the Fisher majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy—are Asian-Americans, though they are the country’s fastest-growing racial group and have become increasingly fed up with their treatment at elite colleges.

“The old paradigm of affirmative action being about white versus black has been completely upended,” says Edward Blum of Students for Fair Admissions, a group that opposes racial preferences. “California, Arizona, Texas, Florida—these are states that are becoming majority-minority, multiracial, multiethnic. We’re competing as different racial and ethnic groups that really have less and less meaning in our multiracial and multiethnic society.”