RUTHFULLY YOURS

President-elect Donald Trump selected Betsy DeVos to be his secretary of education, putting a well-known Michigan philanthropist and school-choice advocate in charge of the agency tasked with promoting student achievement.

Ms. DeVos, 58 years old, a former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman, would be the second woman named to join the Trump administration. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was announced earlier on Wednesday as Mr. Trump’s choice to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

“Together, we can work to make transformational change to ensure every student has the opportunity to fulfill his or her highest potential,” Ms. DeVos wrote Wednesday on Twitter, adding that the “status quo” in education is “not acceptable.”

The post is subject to Senate confirmation.

She is chairwoman of American Federation for Children, a Washington-based group that advocates for the use of school vouchers and scholarship tax credit programs. Ms. DeVos’s husband, Dick DeVos, was the Republican nominee for Michigan governor in 2006. The DeVos family, heirs to the Amway Corp. fortune, are major donors to Republican Party candidates and conservative causes.

Ms. DeVos, a prominent charter-school advocate, would enter the office at a time when traditional public schools are fighting charter schools for students, as enrollment drives state and local funding. Some school districts, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, have reported losing thousands of students and millions of dollars.

Charter schools, publicly funded campuses that are mostly privately run, are the fastest-growing educational option. Enrollment in charters rose 219% from 2004 to 2014 to more than 2.5 million students, while school-district enrollment dropped by 1%, according to an analysis of the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Advocates for charters, which are usually not unionized, have often clashed with teachers unions.

In an effort to push gender-neutral bathrooms on campus, students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are participating in a “sh–t in” by occupying restrooms in an administrative building.

Involving over 220 students, the “sh–t in” is currently being led by Amherst’s Gender Liberation Union. Throughout the week, students will be occupying bathroom stalls.

In an interview with HuffPo, “sh–t in” organizer Justin Killian, a gender and sexuality major (yes, that’s an actual thing) at Amherst, said the protest is about changing cultural aversions towards gender-bathrooms since Massachusetts law allows people to go into whatever bathroom they choose.

“We have legal protections in Massachusetts that allow people to use any bathroom they feel comfortable with,” Kilian explained. “But having the legal ability doesn’t mean cultural ability.”

“We want a third space that does not have cultural or gender surveillance,” she said.

Killian also said the administrative caved within two days, providing everything on their list of demands.

“The administration agreed to our progressive benchmarks within two days.” Kilian said proudly. “Hormones are now available at Health Services. Before, you had to drive two hours to get them.”

As students filed back to campus this Fall, the anti-Israel hatefests began. At the University of Michigan on Rosh Hashanah, Jewish students heading to services encountered a mock “apartheid wall” plastered with anti-Israel propaganda and a protestor garbed as an IDF soldier harassing passing students. On the wall was written “CTRL + ALT + DELETE,” the combination of commands needed to restart a PC, implying that Israel should be destroyed and the land should be regenerated as Palestine. At Portland State University, the student senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution supporting a genocidal and Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolution against Israeli companies. The resolution stated that “the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land has been entrenched since 1948.” At CSU Long Beach, a flier for a Jewish Studies course on Israel’s history and culture was defaced with the message “not a valid course. Israel is occupied territory.” The words “modern State of Israel” were also crossed out and overwritten with “occupation of Palestine.”

The common thread in all these incidents is the Hamas-funded, anti-Israel hate group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) which held its annual conference November 4-6 at George Mason University, a public campus in Fairfax, Virginia. In spite of the barrage of evidence—including recent congressional testimony—that SJP is a campus front for Hamas and an instigator of Jew hatred, George Mason opened its doors to the group, providing resources and facilities to the terrorist-supporting campus organization.

SJP purports to be a standard campus cultural group, but in reality it is a pro-terror organization which receives funding and educational support from anti-Israel Hamas terrorists for the purposes of destroying Israel and committing genocide against its Jewish population as is dictated by the Hamas charter.

As described in the Freedom Center’s recent pamphlet, Students for Justice in Palestine: A Campus Front for Hamas Terrorists, SJP’s pro-terror campaign is guided and funded through a Hamas front called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and other Islamic “charities” which were previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. AMP was created by Hatem Bazian, a pro-Hamas professor at UC Berkeley who is also the co-founder of SJP. AMP provides funding and leadership to SJP chapters across the nation, enabling them to promote the Hamas agenda.

Since Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton on November 8, college campuses across the nation expanded their “safe spaces” for students and faculty whose world had been turned upside down by this historic election.

In at least three respects, the Great Meltdown of 2016 is a truly tragic commentary on the state of higher education today:

First, it reveals the dominance of a single left-leaning ideology at an institution that is supposed to be a free marketplace of ideas. It goes without saying, after all, that no safe spaces would’ve been created or would have needed to have been created had the election gone the other way.

Second, the hyper-emotionality accentuates the intellectual flaccidness that prevails at the one place that is supposed to exist for the sake of instilling into the next generation intellectual virtue, men and women with strength and toughness of mind.

Third, the Great Meltdown betrays the stunning arrogance on the part of just those people—professors—whose calling to a life in education requires the cultivation of humility. Given that students were just as unprepared as were their teachers for even the possibility that their candidate could lose proves that neither have they been acquiring the virtue of humility while in college.

The College Fix, a campus watchdog publication run by students, is a national treasure. Here are some of the happenings in the academic world from last week that it reports:

At Converse College, an all-female institution, students organized “silent protests,” walked the campus in tears, and posted pictures of themselves crying on Snapchat. At least one professor held off on giving a midterm exam, and another told her students that the day after Election Day was the worst day in American history second only to September 11, 2001.

The President of the college, Krista Newkirk, issued an email to the campus community in which she expressed her sadness that “once again our young girls and women have failed to see the shattering of that glass ceiling and the first female president of the United States” (How much would you be willing to bet that no such email was sent when Barack Obama prevented Hillary Clinton her chance of shattering that glass ceiling in 2008?)