RUTHFULLY YOURS

As more than six million high-school students do every year, I sat down to take the College Board’s SAT exam on Dec. 3, 2016. The test was going well until I reached the essay question, which asks students to assess how an author of an article supports his claims.

The basic concept was easy enough, but I was surprised by the source our essay was supposed to be based on. We were asked to analyze a February 2014 Huffington Post article supporting the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act. The author: New York’s junior senator, Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, who had recently introduced the legislation.

It wouldn’t be appropriate to have an SAT essay question using an article from a conservative blog about reasons to ban late-term abortion. And it is equally inappropriate to force students to focus their attention on a one-sided argument from one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate.

The exam made clear that the “essay should not explain whether you agree with” the article. It should only “explain how the author builds an argument to persuade.” Still, why would a controversial political topic be selected for this evaluation? Why a divisive, partisan issue? We would have had the same educational benefit if the SAT provided an article about banning laptops in school. Maybe the SAT essay should follow the rule of topics that are appropriate for dinner conversation: no religion, politics or sex.

The SAT is an assessment tool and not a mechanism to promote a political agenda to millions of impressionable students. This article might be the only point of view some students ever hear about paid leave, and they are required not only to read it but to restate its central arguments. Educators know that writing down facts is an effective way to retain information. Students should be memorizing algebraic equations, not arguments for progressive labor policy.

Data from the Federal Election Commission show that College Board executives have an overwhelming preference for Democratic candidates. The College Board also spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that a prominent Democratic senator’s piece was chosen, but I’m not convinced. (A spokeswoman said that “College Board is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization.”) CONTINUE AT SITE

Over the weekend Yale announced that the university will rename its undergraduate Calhoun College to expunge the memory of John C. Calhoun, the 19th-century South Carolina statesman. Yale says it is acting in the name of social justice amid campus protests, but the school’s timing is awkward. This erasure arrives while liberals are increasingly turning to Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification to justify anti-Trump resistance.

Calhoun was antebellum America’s foremost intellectual defender of slavery, and his political theory was aimed at upholding the rights of political minorities, especially states. He argued that a minority could veto the will of a “numerical majority” if its interests were threatened. Progressives are deploring the Great Nullifier’s racism even as they revive his legal concepts for their present-day advantage.

Coastal states are now lining up to thwart or otherwise undermine President Trump’s policy agenda. Take the more than 200 sanctuary cities whose mayors, police chiefs and sheriffs openly defy federal immigration enforcement. Some jurisdictions like Chicago even refuse to report illegal aliens in custody for violent felonies. Mr. Trump has vowed to strip these cities of federal funds, and San Francisco sued to overturn this executive order, claiming “a severe invasion of San Francisco’s sovereignty” that “violates the Tenth Amendment.”

Meanwhile, New York’s Eric Schneiderman, the state Attorney General, published guidance to law enforcement in January that informs them about their “Tenth Amendment protections.” He notes: “The federal government cannot ‘compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program,’ or compel state employees to participate in the administration of a federally enacted regulatory scheme.” These documents don’t cite Calhoun’s “Disquisition on Government,” but they could.

California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom has suggested using state environmental laws to prevent the feds from building a border wall with Mexico, despite the supremacy of federal immigration law. Governor Jerry Brown has said the Golden State will take over atmospheric research if Washington interferes. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellites. We’re going to collect that data,” he said.

Some of the rowdier Californian progressives even want to secede from the U.S., a desire Calhoun would have applauded. There’s even a #CalExit campaign to get a secession initiative on the ballot. Maybe the beleaguered federal forces can retreat to Alcatraz to hold off shelling from the San Francisco artillery of the Progressive States of America.

Tallahassee, Fla.

Something curious happened at a Black History Month program held at Florida A&M University last week. An actress portraying African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) praised someone with a demographic profile eerily similar to Betsy DeVos, who earlier that day was confirmed by the Senate as education secretary. As the program unfolded, it became easy to see why the performer decided to speak up.

When Bethune started her Daytona School for Negro Girls in 1904, the education establishment had little interest in seeing young black children receive good instruction. So she looked elsewhere for help. Bethune reached out to James N. Gamble, son of the Procter & Gamble co-founder and a regular vacationer in Daytona. Bethune told Gamble she wanted more than money. She needed someone who would share her vision for giving underprivileged black children more opportunities.

Gamble was so impressed with Bethune and her students that he bought into her vision—wholeheartedly. He not only became the chairman of Bethune’s school, but enlisted the support of other wealthy businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller.

The influx of financial resources helped. Bethune had previously made school desks out of discarded boxes and crates, and ink for pens out of elderberry juice. But outside funding didn’t solve everything.

During her performance last week, Ersula Odom re-enacted the story of how Bethune and her students huddled one night in their schoolhouse as an angry mob of Ku Klux Klan members assembled outside. Suddenly, the voice of one schoolgirl pierced the darkness, singing the comforting hymn “God Will Take Care of You.” When Bethune and the other students joined in the resounding chorus, the Klansmen realized that they were up against forces they dare not cross. Sheepishly, they turned and walked away.

I realize some people think Mrs. DeVos should be disqualified from public service because she supports giving students more opportunities, including the option of attending faith-based schools where such hymns are often sung today. But I see in Mrs. DeVos echoes of James N. Gamble—another Midwestern Protestant Republican with a family fortune from a cleaning-products company. Like Gamble, Mrs. DeVos has given generously to help disadvantaged kids receive a good education, and she has fully bought into a philosophy that places the needs of children ahead of the interests of the education establishment.

That’s something that should give pause to all of the new education secretary’s detractors—especially those who last Friday stood in a schoolhouse door to block Mrs. DeVos from entering.

Mr. Mattox is director of the Marshall Center for Educational Options at the James Madison Institute.

During his talk at Georgetown University, Jonathan A.C. Brown condemned slavery when it took place historically in America and other Western countries, but praised the practise of slavery as it happened in Muslim societies, explained that Muslim slaves lived “a pretty good life”, and claimed that it is “not immoral for one human to own another human.” Regarding the vexed matter of whether it is right or wrong to have sex with one of your slaves, Brown, who is director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, said that “consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex”.

No mob of anti-sharia people has gone to Georgetown, torn up telephone poles, set fire to things or smashed up the campus, as mobs did at Berkeley.

Milo Yiannopoulos has never argued that the Western system of slavery was benevolent and worthwhile, and that slaves in America had “a pretty good life”. He has never argued against consent being an important principal in sexual relations. If he had, then the riots at Berkeley would doubtless have been far worse than they were and even more media companies and professors would have tried to argue that Yiannopoulos had “brought the violence upon himself” or even organized it himself.

Sometimes the whole tenor of an age can be discerned by comparing two events, one commanding fury and the other, silence.

To this extent, February has already been most enlightening. On the first day of the month, the conservative activist and writer Milo Yiannopoulos was due to speak at the University of California, Berkeley. To the surprise of absolutely no one, some of the new anti-free speech brigade attempted to prevent the event from happening. But to the surprise of almost everyone, the groups who wish to prevent everyone but themselves from speaking went farther even than they have tended to of late. Before the event could even start, Yiannopoulos was evacuated by security for his own safety. A mob of 150 people proceeded to riot, smash and set fire to the campus, causing more than $100,000 of damage and otherwise asserting their revised version of Voltaire’s maxim: “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to your death my right to shut you up.”

When conservative activist and writer Milo Yiannopoulos was due to speak at the University of California, Berkeley on February 1, a mob of 150 people proceeded to riot, smash and set fire to the campus, causing more than $100,000 of damage. (Image source: RT video screenshot)

The riots at Berkeley caused national and international headlines. Mainstream media, including Newsweek, also attempted to do their bit for an event they would ordinarily deride as “fake news.” Following a segment on CNN, Newsweek ran a piece by Robert Reich, the chancellor’s professor of public policy at Berkeley and a former Clinton administration official, arguing that “Yiannopoulos and Brietbart [sic] were in cahoots with the agitators, in order to lay the groundwork for a Trump crackdown on universities and their federal funding.” This conspiracy theory would involve Yiannopoulos arranging for 150 masked fanatics not merely to trash a campus on his orders, but to continue to remain silent about it in the days and weeks after the event.

In Newsweek, Reich wrote, “I don’t want to add to the conspiratorial musings of so many about this very conspiratorial administration, but it strikes me there may be something worrying going on here. I wouldn’t bet against it.” And so, a tenured academic made an implausible as well as un-evidenced argument that his political opponents not merely bring violence on themselves but actually arrange violence against themselves.

All of the violence and all of these claims were made in February in the aftermath of a speech that never happened. But consider how little has been said and how little done about a speech that certainly did go ahead just one week later at another American university — not by a visiting speaker but by a resident academic and teacher.

On February 7, at the University of Georgetown, Jonathan A.C. Brown, the director of the entirely impartial Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown, gave a 90-minute talk entitled “Islam and the Problem of Slavery”. Except that the white convert to Islam, Jonathan Brown, apparently did not think that there is a particular problem with slavery — at least not when it comes wrapped in Islam. During the talk (which Brown himself subsequently uploaded onto YouTube) the lecturer condemned slavery when it took place historically in America, Britain and other Western countries, but praised the practice of slavery in Muslim societies. Brown explained how Muslim slaves lived “a pretty good life”, claimed that they were protected by “sharia” and claimed that it is “not immoral for one human to own another human.” Regarding the vexed matter of whether it is right or wrong to have sex with one of your slaves, Brown said that “consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex” and that marital rape is not a legitimate concept within Islam. Concepts such as “autonomy” and “consent”, in the view of the Director of the Alwaleed Center at Georgetown, turned out to be Western “obsessions”.