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EDUCATION

Ohio State class teaches students to detect and respond to microaggressions, white privilege Amanda Tidwell – Ohio State University

Crossing Identity Boundaries’ course devoted to identity politicsOhio State class teaches students to detect and respond to microaggressions, white privilege – The College Fix
A class to be offered this spring at Ohio State University is an identity politics-based course that in large part is focused on teaching students how to detect microaggressions and white privilege.

The course is dedicated to social justice themes, and pledges to teach students how to “identify microaggressions,” define and address “systems of power and privilege,” advance notions of diversity and inclusion, and prioritize “global citizenship,” its description states.

“Crossing Identity Boundaries” aims to expand students’ “self-awareness” and help them develop “dialogue skills.”

Taking the course, offered through the Department of Educational Studies, is one way students can fulfill the university’s mandatory diversity requirement, and many sections are offered throughout the school year.

The course coordinator and instructors involved in teaching the class did not respond to requests from The College Fix seeking comment.

Part of the homework includes taking two “implicit bias tests,” and writing journals on prompts such as “power/privilege in your life” or calling on Christians to write about what it might feel like to be Muslim, or males on what it’s like to be female, and “reflecting on how this new identity would have impacted your day.”

One big part of the class is a microaggressions group presentation and reflective paper.

Milo Events Exposing The Violent Core Of The Left Destroying the facade of “tolerance” one campus at a time. Lloyd Billingsley

Last year Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos launched his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” on campuses across the United States. As it turned out, the tour did prove dangerous for Yiannopoulos and all supporters of free speech.

At Rutgers, where Yiannopoulos titled his lecture “How the Progressive Left Is Destroying American Education,” protesters smeared themselves with fake blood. “What they’ve demonstrated,” Yiannopoulos said, “is that they are incapable of being exposed to new ideas.”

At DePaul University, Black Lives Matter literally took over the event. Enraged activists harassed Yiannopoulos on stage and chanting “black lives matter,” “dump that Trump” and “build a wall.”

South Florida Gay News reported that “Florida Atlantic University is too dangerous for a ‘dangerous faggot.’” Student organizers “threatened to bring firearms to the talk or blow up the venue. Threats were also made to FAU students.” So Yiannopoulos was unable to deliver his speech about “How Feminism Hurts Women.”

Protesters issued similar threats at many colleges and the violence mounted a surge when Yiannopoulos brought his tour to California campuses. Those have long served as a sanctuary for political correctness, with official approval.

University of California President Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, is former Arizona Governor and Obama’s Department of Homeland Security boss. Napolitano considers statements such as “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” to be unacceptable “microagressions.” In that climate, UC students don’t want to hear different points of view from allegedly “controversial” speakers.

Under the politically correct regime, the default position is that such speakers should not be heard at all. So no surprise that soi disant progressives would deploy mindless violence against Yiannopoulos, who is on record that the campus “rape culture” is a myth. He is also critical of Islam, and the University of California maintains a Center for Race and Gender that includes “Islamophobia Studies.”

When the dangerous faggot tour showed up at UCLA, protesters blocked both entrances and taped up banners reading “Bruins Against Hate.” Other students duct-taped their mouths shut and paraded around with feminist signs. Inside protesters chanted “Build that wall.” As Ari Lieberman noted, radicals clashed with the police and a bomb threat forced evacuation of the building.

Undaunted, Milo Yiannopoulos continued the tour north to the University of California at Davis. Before he showed up, the Sacramento Bee called him and former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli, “two of the past year’s most divisive public figures.” Yiannopolous was identified as “gay” and aligned with “the ultra-conservative ‘alt-right’ movement.” He was on a “crusade” against “social justice warriors” and “has already ignited violent protests on multiple college campuses.” Actually, as across the nation, it was the leftist protesters who ignited the violence.

According to a Washington Post report, protesters threatened the lives of police and students alike, and menaced UC Davis property as well. Protesters shrouded their faces in bandanas and yelled “Get the fuck out of here! Stay the fuck out!” and even “You faggots!” Another yelled “Get these fascists out of here.”

The event did not come off, but Yiannopolous denied reports that the campus Republicans had made the call. As the videos confirm, the old-line establishment media failed to convey the extent of the violence.

Campus Republicans also invited Yiannopoulos to the University of Washington, the last stop on the Dangerous Faggot Tour. On January 20, inauguration day for president Donald Trump, the UW campus hosted the tour’s most bizarre event.

“One man was shot and wounded, several people were hit with paint and officers avoided flying bricks” the Seattle Times reported on January 20, when “Breitbart News editor and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos addressed a crowd.” An unnamed shooter reportedly turned himself in and the victim was initially unidentified.

Academia’s “New Civics” vs. Traditional American Civics Political ideology replaces civics education. January 27, 2017 Jack Kerwick

The election of Donald J. Trump to the office of the Presidency of the United States came as a body blow to leftists. Actually, such was their arrogance—their certitude that their candidate couldn’t lose—that President Trump’s victory hit them more like a sucker punch.

Students and their professors at colleges and universities from around the country participated in “cry-ins,” entered “safe spaces,” cancelled classes and examinations, and organized demonstrations.

While the rest of the country looked incredulously upon this spectacle of presumably educated adults protesting the legitimate election of America’s 45th President, those of us who know a thing or two about the contemporary academic world were not in the least surprised by it.

And those academics who belong to the National Association of Scholars (NAS) know more than most.

The NAS recently released a report on the latest wave of anti-intellectualism to sweep the world of “higher education.” In “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics,” the NAS explains what it refers to as “the New Civics.” The latter “redefines civics as progressive political activism.”

While the New Civics styles itself “as an up-to-date version of volunteerism and good works,” the reality is that it stems from “the radical program of the 1960’s New Left [.]” Its “soft rhetoric” is designed to conceal its architects’ ultimate goals. First, they want to “repurpose higher education.” Secondly, adherents of the New Left want nothing more than to make students into joint enterprisers in “‘fundamentally transforming’ America.”

This dream of fundamental transformation that the left wants for students to make into a reality is fairly comprehensive. For starters, it involves “de-carbonizing the economy [.]” Yet it also involves “massively redistributing wealth, intensifying identity group grievance, curtailing the free market, expanding government bureaucracy, elevating international ‘norms’ over American Constitutional law, and disparaging our common history and ideals.”

Although leftist academics disagree amongst themselves as to how to prioritize the items on this agenda, they are of one mind that “America must be transformed by ‘systemic change’ from an unjust, oppressive society to a society that embodies social justice.”

The NAS report discloses how the New Civics plans to achieve its goals. It “hopes to accomplish” all of “this by teaching students that a good citizen is a radical activist….”

The New Civics “puts political activism at the center of everything that students do in college, including academic study, extra-curricular pursuits, and off-campus ventures.”

Flyers at U Kansas: ‘Make America Great Again’ is ‘Coded’ ‘Neo-Nazi Language’ By Katherine Timpf ???!!!!

Flyers have popped up around the University of Kansas campus warning students that “neo-nazis and hate groups will use coded language to avoid being called what they are” — and that “Make America Great Again” is an example of this language.

The flyers, which were obtained by Campus Reform, allege that “there has been a disturbing presence of neo-nazi and hate group recruitment taking place on campus.”

“Given the violent and dangerous nature of groups such as this, it’s imperative that we do not allow their presence to become normative,” the flyer states.

The flyer also encourages students to photograph, “remove,” and report any materials that they see from one of these “hate” groups around campus.

Now, I’m not ignorant of the fact that some of the people who voted for Trump did do so because they’re racist, but that doesn’t represent all of the people who did — or even most of them. Some did it because they’re pro-life. Some people did it because they felt that workers in the manufacturing sector have been ignored. All kinds of people voted for Donald Trump for all kinds of reasons, and to spread the idea that when you hear someone say “Make America Great Again,” they’re really saying “Pssssst! I’m a Nazi!” is completely insane.

What’s more, the content of these flyers actually works against what the people who posted them are trying to accomplish. First of all, absurd, haphazard “Nazi!” accusations only distract from the very real examples of racism and intolerance that do exist in our society. Second, a lot of people who voted for Trump did so because they were sick of an overly “PC” culture, sick of seeing people hurl accusations of racism and sexism at others over every little thing — and the kind of stuff that’s on these flyers will only encourage them to vote for him again.

According to Campus Reform, it’s not clear who is responsible for posting the flyers.

Radicalization in Public Schools Why We are Concerned by Maha Soliman

Radicalization is not only manifested through the use of violence, but also through desiring to live by and impose sharia law on society.

One reason for the increased popularity of sharia is the radicalization of second- and third-generation Muslims in Western societies.

The school board said it believes that the checks and balances put in place will ensure that the Friday sermons are not used for radicalizing Muslim students; however, as laws against “Islamophobia” become a reality in Canada, and attempts to raise a concern are labelled hate speech, one should not count on it. With the passing of time, vigilance will be abandoned and people who express concern will find themselves vulnerable to bullying and defamation if they try to address an issue or crack down on a violation.

Saied Shoaaib, a Muslim authority and expert on political Islam, points out that the dilemma for Western societies is that the only version of Islam available to them is the radical version, mostly in mosques and Islamic schools, and also in public libraries.

The ongoing demand for the accommodation of Muslims in Western societies is a situation worth understanding. In the documentary “The Third Jihad”, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, an American Muslim who dedicates his life to fighting radicalization, explains that it is a cultural jihad that is meant to destroy our society from within — slowly and gradually to impose the sharia way of life.

On January 10, 2017, I attended the Peel District School Board’s meeting where recommendations for allowing Muslim students to write their own sermons (khutbah) for congregational Friday (Jumma) prayers in public schools were received. For more than 15 years, students were allowed to pray in the school but not in a congregational setting. In June 2016, the Jumma prayer was officially adopted but the students were only allowed to read from a list of pre-approved sermons.

Mississauga is one of three cities in the Peel region and the sixth largest city in Canada with high ethnic diversity and a population nearing one million. One of Mississauga’s calls to fame is that it is home to at least eight members of the “Toronto 18” — the first terrorist cell uncovered in 2006 and that aimed to create an Al-Qaida type of operation in Canada. Some of the 18 attended public schools: Saad Khalid, for example, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for pleading guilty to a single count of acting “with the intention of causing an explosion or explosions that were likely to cause serious bodily harm or death or damage property”. He was known to have attended the Meadowvale Secondary School. There, he had started an Islamic Club and, in the lecture hall, had led Friday prayers, which he attended with fellow arrestees Fahim Ahmad and Zakaria Amara. If people like Khalid are the champions of organizing Jumaa prayers and Khutbah in their schools, it is no wonder that pre-scripted sermons were the way to protect public safety while allowing Muslim students still to practice their faith.

Fordham University Rejects SJP SJP’s goals “clearly conflict with…the mission and values of the University.”Sara Dogan (Bravo Fordham!!!!)

In a rare but promising decision, Fordham University in New York has elected not to allow the formation of a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine on campus, citing the conflict between SJP’s emphasis on “polarization rather than dialogue” and its support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

In a leaked email, Keith Eldredge, Dean of Students at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, wrote:

After consultation with numerous faculty, staff and students and my own deliberation, I have decided to deny the request to form a club known as Students for Justice in Palestine at Fordham University. While students are encouraged to promote diverse political points of view, and we encourage conversation and debate on all topics, I cannot support an organization whose sole purpose is advocating political goals of a specific group, and against a specific country, when these goals clearly conflict with and run contrary to the mission and values of the University.

There is perhaps no more complex topic than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it is a topic that often leads to polarization rather than dialogue. The purpose of the organization as stated in the proposed club constitution points toward that polarization. Specifically, the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel presents a barrier to open dialogue and mutual learning and understanding.

In a statement announcing their vote to approve the club, United Student Government at Lincoln Center acknowledged the need for open, academic discussion and the promotion of intellectual rigor on campus; however, I disagree that the proposal to form a club affiliated with the national Students for Justice in Palestine organization is the best way to provide this. I welcome continued conversation about alternative ways to promote awareness of this important conflict and the issues that surround it from multiple perspectives.

Dean Eldredge’s email correctly points to several highly problematic facets of SJP’s mission and strategy including its policy of rejecting the “normalization” of relations with any pro-Israel individuals or groups, which stands in blatant opposition to the spirit of open discussion which liberal arts universities aim to foster. This policy has led SJP to reject overtures of cooperation from pro-Israel groups, even when the two organizations are agreed upon a common issue.

At San Diego State University, for instance, the pro-Israel campus group Students Supporting Israel (SSI) attempted to co-sign a petition to make the campus more inclusive for Muslims after a Muslim student was assaulted on campus. SDSU-SJP refused to allow SSI to co-sign the petition claiming that it “didn’t serve the interests of the community.” According to members of SSI, “Out of the over 30 organizations that had signed the document, SSI was the only organization to be excluded from the statement.”

The Problem with ‘Sanctuary Campuses’ – Universities con students into acting against their own best interests By Michael W. Cutler,

Open borders activists and immigration anarchists have, since the Carter administration, tried to blur the distinction between illegal aliens and lawful immigrants. These social justice warriors portray themselves as “immigrants’ rights” activists regardless of the legal status of foreigners.

As I’ve mentioned in previous Social Contract articles, President Carter issued an edict that all Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) employees stop referring to aliens illegally in the United States as “illegal aliens” per se, but refer to them as “undocumented immigrants.”

The motive for this terminology directive was not “political correctness,” but to achieve the Orwellian goal of creating a lexicon of “Immigration Newspeak” to obfuscate the truth and confound any effort to have an honest discussion.

The term “alien” is not a pejorative. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the term alien simply means, “Any person, not a citizen or national of the U.S.”

Open borders advocates eschew the term “alien” because it provides clarity to the issue of immigration. Con artists are masters of obfuscation. By using the term “undocumented immigrant” to describe illegal aliens, it becomes a simple matter for immigration anarchists to accuse advocates of effective immigration enforcement of being “anti-immigrant.”

Before we go any further, it is critically important to understand that there are three distinct ways that aliens may be subject to removal (deportation) from the U.S.

1. Aliens who gain entry into the U.S. illegally—either as stowaways on a ship or running our borders—are obviously subject to removal.

2. Aliens, who are lawfully admitted as nonimmigrants (temporary visitors) become illegal aliens when they violate the terms of their admission. This includes remaining after their authorized period of admission, accepting unlawful employment, or, in the case of foreign students, failing to attend the schools where they were admitted to attend or otherwise failing to maintain their status as a student; and

3, Aliens who are lawfully admitted for permanent residence may live and work in the U.S. forever. However, such immigrants, upon conviction for serious crimes, may be subject to deportation (as may nonimmigrants), even if they have not overstayed their authorized period of admission.

When aliens run our borders they do not, as the open borders advocates claim, “enter undocumented.” That term can only be found in the “Immigration Newspeak Lexicon.”

Aliens who run our borders and evade the inspections process enter the United States without inspection.

‘Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain’ Leftist activists try to deflect blame for fheir own campus Jew-hate. Richard L. Cravatts

In early December, a bipartisan Congressional bill, H.R. 6421/S. 10, the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” took on a long-overdue task, namely, increasing “understanding of the parameters of contemporary anti-Jewish conduct and will assist the Department of Education in determining whether an investigation of anti-Semitism under title VI is warranted.”

“Jewish students,” the bill accurately noted, “are being threatened, harassed, or intimidated in their schools . . . including through harassing conduct that creates a hostile environment so severe, pervasive, or persistent so as to interfere with or limit some students’ ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by schools.”

The Department of Education had been alerted before to the distressing situation of resurgent anti-Semitism on university campuses, but previous evaluations of Title VI violations were imprecise and “did not provide guidance on current manifestation of anti-Semitism, including discriminatory anti-Semitic conduct that is couched as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist.”

This was all too much for critics, including the morally tendentious, malignant group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), who immediately condemned the intent of the bill, attaching to a December 8th press release two letters with signatures from 60 Jewish Studies “scholars” and some 300 “concerned” Jewish student activists, respectively.

Clearly oblivious to the current scourge of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic campus activism (in which they have, not coincidentally, been active and complicit), JVP and these faculty and students derided the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act as misguided and dangerous, not because it provides a tool for finally being able to identify instances where anti-Semitic speech and behavior has infected campus communities, but because they believe, seemingly irrationally, that Jewish students are actual and potential victims, not of Leftist and Muslim student groups (as they clearly and demonstrably are), but of Right-wing extremist groups, emboldened, they contend, by the election of Donald Trump in November.

The campus war against Israel, promoted relentlessly and virulently for some 15 years now, has been fueled and given life, not by the occasional Nazi-loving skinhead living in his mother’s basement and living on the fringes of society without a substantial base of like-minded fellow travelers, but by student-funded, highly visible, and vocal on-campus groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (with 220 chapters nationwide) and the Muslim Student Association (with over 600 chapters). Jewish Voice for Peace, along with Open Hillel, J Street U, and other pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel groups, frequently join forces with these virulent groups on campuses to stage Israel Apartheid Weeks, construct mock apartheid walls, and sponsor hate-Israel events, seminars, courses, speeches, and boycott and divestment resolutions—all of which appear promiscuously on campuses around the country, and which are, significant to the Antisemitism Awareness Act, the primary source of the hostile environment Jewish students experience, especially, as often happens, when anti-Israel, anti-Zionist radicalism morphs into anti-Semitism.

These perpetrators of anti-Israel agitation have been leading a virulent campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel for years now, and it is astonishing that JVP and these meretricious scholars and students ignore all the factual and shameful chronology (of which they have been central fomenters and cheerleaders in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign), and instead are trying to perpetuate the fantasy that the true threat to Jewish students and other Israel supporters is from the Left’s perennial boogeymen, the lunatic fringe of white power extremists who these willfully-blind activists believe, and want others to believe, are the chief perpetrators of anti-Jewish bigotry.

The intersectionality of fools by Dominic Green On the disparagement of Israel at American universities.by Dominic Green

Over the last decade, the numbers of Chinese and Indian students at American universities have substantially increased. At the same time, faculty and students have campaigned to boycott China and India over the status of Tibet and Kashmir, to reject Chinese and Indian funding, and to shun collaboration with individual Chinese and Indian researchers. There have been organized assaults upon Chinese guest speakers and propaganda campaigns inciting students to purge universities of Chinese or Indian “influence,” including that of American citizens with a Chinese or Indian background. When students of Indian background object, they are informed that, wittingly or not, they are part of a global Hindu conspiracy.

Of course, none of this has happened. It is almost inconceivable that any of it would happen. All of this, however, has been directed against the State of Israel, and against American Jewish students, since the inception of bds, the campaign for “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” against the Jewish state. This dubious selectivity is one unique aspect of bds. Another is the scale of its ambition. Generally, the introversions of Social Justice stop well before the water’s edge. There are global issues, most notably and vaguely the environment, but bdsis the only form of campus activism to attack a single state internationally—and a single group domestically.

bds activists seek to curtail the freedom of others.

bds seeks to transform the atmosphere of university intellectual and social life, in order to effect changes in government and business policy. bdsactivists seek to control the intellectual environment, to create a “safe space” for the indoctrination of a biased and often false view of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus, the practice of bds tends towards the abuse of free speech, in that bds activists frequently seek to curtail the freedom of others.

bds uses strategies of exemplary stigmatization, intended to demonize the State of Israel and its supporters. Inevitably, and often by design, such intimidatory strategies include charging American Jews as complicit with the “racist” and “colonialist” Israeli state, or with “neoconservative” policies at home. While the freedom of speech of Jewish and pro-Israel students is bds’s primary target, its strategies aim to curtail the freedom of speech of all students and faculty.

The bds campaign models itself after the Anti-Apartheid Movement against white minority rule in South Africa. The bdsMovement was initiated at Ramallah in July 2005, in a joint appeal by some 170 Palestinian unions, political groups, professional associations, and “popular resistance committees.” The Palestinian groups called, in an artfully vague wording, for Israel to withdraw from “all occupied Arab lands”; to recognize the “fundamental rights” of Arab Israelis, who are purported to live under apartheid; and to comply with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948, which called for the “right of return of Palestinian refugees” to what is now Israel, and which, as a non-binding resolution, has no legal weight.

Safe Spaces for Fascists Campus free speech was replaced with fascism. Daniel Greenfield

Hammers, broken windows and fights. That’s what a safe space for free speech looked like at UC Davis.

Safe spaces are places where everyone who isn’t a safe space fascist feels unsafe. The more safe spaces a campus has, the less freedom of speech the students and faculty dare to enjoy.

UC Davis has a great many safe spaces.

The University of California institution has safe spaces for illegal aliens (the Undocumented Student Center) and for asexuals (the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Resource Center) which hosted a “Tampon Tea Party.” It has segregated safe space housing in Campbell Hall for black students and the Women’s Resources and Research Center will provide safe spaces and “Mind Spa Services” for anyone offended by Christian views on abortion.

But all the safe spaces were about making life unsafe for everyone who wasn’t a left-wing fascist.

A visit to UC Davis is a descent into an Orwellian dystopia obsessed with controlling everything with “resource centers” providing ready resources for censorship.

The LGBTQIA Resource Center’s posters warn students against saying, “You guys”. The Women’s Resources and Research Center responded to a pro-life student event with “Report Hate and Bias” cards and attempts to prevent pro-life flyers from being distributed. The “leaders of the African Diaspora on the UC Davis campus” demanded a policy “targeting anti-blackness.” SJP and MSA did its own share of terrorizing Jewish students and silencing speakers while maintaining a safe space for their brand of hate.

UC Davis was named one of the top ten anti-Semitic universities in the country. It ran the board in all four categories. Disruptions of pro-Israel speakers and chants in support of terrorism are routine. Pro-Israel students said that the administration was too afraid to stand up to the anti-Semitic fascists.

When Trump won, it really all came apart. Crowds of marchers chanted, “F___ Trump.” The UC Davis riots were part of a frightening phenomenon. The phenomenon struck again when Milo Yiannopoulos and Martin Shkreli tried to speak on campus. The “Dangerous Faggot Tour” event ended with fights, at least one arrest, thrown hot coffee, allegedly smashed windows and wielded hammers, and, eventually, a canceled event courtesy of the heckler’s veto.

Instead of addressing the atmosphere of politically correct intolerance, UC Davis Interim Chancellor Ralph J. Hexter spoke in generalities. Before the event, he had released a letter stating, “As a public university, we remain true to our obligation to uphold everyone’s First Amendment freedoms.”

But UC Davis neglected that obligation when it gave in to the safe space censorship of left-wing fascism.