RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/free-speechs-death-spiral-in-academia/

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse just released their fourth annual College Free Speech Rankings of the free speech cultures of 248 of America’s largest and most prestigious campuses.  “Students entering college this fall can expect new friendships, all-night study sessions, dining hall food — and a culture of conformity and censorship,” FIRE said in announcing the rankings. “A new survey of more than 55,000 students across the country shows that most attend colleges that don’t value free expression.”

FIRE Director of Polling and Analytics Sean Stevens warned that with every passing year, “the climate on college campuses grows more inhospitable to free speech. Some of the most prestigious universities in our country have the most repressive administrations. Students should know that a college degree at certain schools may come at the expense of their free speech rights.”

FIRE’s rankings put Harvard University at the bottom of the list. In fact, “Harvard is by far the worst school in the country for free speech. It is the only school with an ‘Abysmal’ rating.” The University of Pennsylvania ranked as the second worst institution of higher learning on the list from a free speech perspective. The University of South Carolina, Georgetown University, and Fordham University rounded out the bottom five, with ratings of “Very Poor” or “Poor.”

The factors examined in determining the free speech rankings included student responses, the school policies that regulate student expression, disciplinary procedures, and “how schools responded to deplatforming attempts, which seek to prevent speakers from expressing themselves.”

Alarmingly, at the schools ranking in the bottom five, attempts at deplatforming had a disturbing 81% success rate. This means that these schools were quite willing to tolerate disruptive and even violent tactics as acceptable forms of protest to stop controversial speakers, particularly conservative ones, from proceeding with their campus speeches.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/harvard-doesnt-need-free-speech/

Harvard, consistently ranked as one of the world’s best universities, has just been rated the worst for free speech in the United States. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), which compiled the rankings, described the state of free speech at Harvard as ‘abysmal’.

This news is surprising, since in April over fifty Harvard academics formed a Council on Academic Freedom dedicated, in its words, ‘to promoting free enquiry, intellectual diversity and civil discourse’ on campus. The Council’s formation marked a milestone in official recognition of the problem of free speech, mainly for conservative professors. The psychologist Steven Pinker and Lawrence H. Summers, former advisor to President Clinton, are both members. So why does Harvard’s reputation continue to decline?

Having just finished a year at Harvard, I would say there’s a fairly simple explanation. It is misleading to speak of a free speech problem when Harvard doesn’t really need free speech in the first place. The purpose of America’s elite universities, for decades, has been to serve as hitching posts for the elite. Most people are there to climb the ladder and get a well-paid job. Once you understand this, you can see why a university which professes to champion enquiry, tolerance and diversity ends up doing the exact opposite. 

The purpose of America’s elite universities, for decades, has been to serve as hitching posts for the elite

For starters, Harvard’s student body remains stubbornly homogeneous. Ten per cent of graduating seniors identify as conservative, versus 70 per cent liberal. Diversity of race and gender have improved – but these are relatively easy to achieve when affirmative action privileges wealthy black students, and girls outperform boys at high school. 

https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-regime-strikes-back?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1248321&post_id=136864574&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8t06w&utm_medium=email

The fight for New College of Florida has taken another turn. Earlier today, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into the Sarasota-based university, where I serve as a trustee, for alleged “discrimination on the basis of disability.”

The investigation stems from a complaint by unnamed “students, faculty, and staff” alleging, in part, that the college’s trustees and administrators violated civil rights law by removing “gender neutral” signage from bathrooms, defunding the DEI and gender studies programs, and “misgendering” the former DEI director, who uses “ze/zir” pseudo-pronouns.

This is a brazen attempt to subvert the democratic governance of New College and entrench left-wing ideological programs under the guise of civil rights law. Although the complaint is wholly without merit, this does not mean it will automatically fail. The Biden Administration has demonstrated repeatedly that it is willing to weaponize the federal law enforcement apparatus against school board parents and other conservative reformers.

We are ready for the fight. When Governor DeSantis appointed the new board of trustees, he told us: “If the media isn’t attacking you, you’re not doing your job.” The same could be said of the Biden Administration.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/schools-of-the-state/

We have all gone through it as children. The joys of summer fade, the weather cools, the days get shorter, and the school doors swing open. For most kids – and I was certainly one of them – it is not a time of joy.

But these days, it can be downright depressing. The hysterical pandemic-related school shutdowns, notably, have done far-reaching and long-lasting damage. Released in July, “Education’s long COVID:2022–23 achievement data” reveals stalled progress toward pandemic recovery. As former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Bruno Mano explains, “The assessment provider NWEA reports that students in grades three to eight lost ground in reading and math during the 2022-23 school year. On average, they need four more months in school to catch up to pre-pandemic levels ….”

This assessment aligns with the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results. The scores on the reading and math tests administered in October-December 2022 showed the steepest declines ever recorded since the tests were first administered.

The bad news doesn’t end with academics; student mental health is also deteriorating. A CDC analysis declares that from April 2020 to October 2020 – when the pandemic first peaked, and the shutdowns were in full swing – the proportion of mental health-related visits to emergency departments rose by 24% over pre-pandemic levels for children aged 5 to 11 and by 31% for children aged 12–17. “By April 2022, 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of children seeking school mental-health services compared to pre-pandemic levels.”

One of the attempted fixes for the various student problems wasthe American Rescue Plan, which saw the feds throw $190 billion at the problem. But a 10-month examination by The 74 shows that many districts haven’t used the funds with the urgency intended. Some have barely tapped monies that advocates say are “critical for academic recovery, while others have pumped millions of dollars into major classroom additions, upgrading athletic fields, and other expenditures unrelated to the pandemic.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/01/oklahoma-city-school-district-hires-drag-queen-elementary-school-principal-once-arrested-for-possessing-child-porn-and-illicit-drugs/

A “drag” performer arrested 22 years ago for possessing both child pornography and illicit drugs has been hired to be the school principal of an Oklahoma City elementary school, and the school district is defending its decision.

Dr. Shane Brent Murnan, 52, the new elementary school principal at John Glenn Elementary, had his personal devices confiscated by police in 2001 on suspicion of possession of child pornography, V1SUT reported on Substack. Almost 20 years later, he was investigated for another crime, according to a 2020 court filing.

Police arrested the then-30-year-old in August 2001 after a Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) search recovered four deleted images of children engaged in sex acts, according to court records. Police also found 6 grams of marijuana in his home. Murnan, at the time, was a fifth-grade teacher at Stillwater’s Will Rogers Elementary School. After the arrest, school officials suspended Murnan and he resigned in May 2002.

“From there, some unexplainable legal wrangling began in which Payne County Special Judge Phillip Corley ruled that prosecutors had not proven Murnan had possessed child pornography, claiming it could not be definitively proven the children in the photos were underage,” V1SUT reported.

Payne County prosecutors appealed Corley’s decision and prevailed in the Payne County Appeals Court.

In direct contradiction to the earlier ruling, Appeals Court Judge Dave Allen stated in his decision: “It is clear from a review of the pictures that they do represent child pornography”.

Later on, however, Payne County District Judge Donald L. Worthington reversed the reversal, dismissing the child porn charge.

Payne County prosecutors gave up, choosing not to appeal. In the end, it appears there was never any disagreement about the existence of the pornographic photos on Murnan’s computer, yet the charge was dropped. Was this a behind-the-scenes plea agreement to allow Murnan to accept only the drug charge (marijuana) and retain his teaching certificate?

Murnan’s record was expunged in October of 2003 after his short probation period on the drug charge.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/caltech_joins_lesser_colleges_in_lowering_admissions_requirements.html

The dismantling of academic standards continues apace.

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the elite science and engineering university, is altering its admissions requirements in an effort to make access to the ultra-competitive institution more “equitable.”

Therefore, it is no longer requiring applicants to have already taken calculus, physics and chemistry in high school. 

According to the Los Angeles Times, prior to this decision, Ashley Pallie– Caltech’s executive director of undergraduate admissions– began to question whether the requirements were unfair to students from less advantaged backgrounds. Ergo, Caltech dropped its calculus, chemistry, and physics requirements, as long as applicants could supposedly prove their academic chops otherwise, such as through taking an online course.

Call me a skeptic, but this seems “problematic,” as the wokesters are wont to say, especially for an engineering school.

So the dismantling of standards continues apace. Liberal arts schools eschew previously popular classical courses like Western Civilization and Western Literature. Debate and rhetoric are now all but extinct, having given way to more progressive disciplines like women’s studies and gender race theory.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-do-not-co-parent-with-the-government-justice-descovich-education-rights-d9609fc6?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Tina Descovich found herself surrounded by “Muslim dads.” The scene was a school-board meeting late last year in Dearborn, Mich. Local parents were angry about sex-themed books at the school library, which they regarded as “pornography.”

After chatting with Ms. Descovich for a few minutes, a Dearborn dad realized she was a founder of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit parents’ rights group that came into being on Jan. 1, 2021. He shook his head and told her she didn’t “seem like a racist at all.”

“That’s because I’m not,” she replied.

With its dogged focus on school reform, hostility to teachers unions and opposition to Covid shutdowns and mandates, the group is hated on the left and typecast as far-right—or worse—by much of the media. I speak with Ms. Descovich, a 49-year-old mother of five, at Moms for Liberty’s headquarters here, between Miami and Jacksonville. Seated with her is Tiffany Justice, 44, the group’s co-founder and a mother of four. The modest office has no external signage to identify its occupants. Both women have received such a deluge of threats—by email, voicemail and even handwritten letters—that there’s a deputy at the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office whose main job is to review each one. “Someone calling himself Satan writes to me every week,” Ms. Descovich says wryly. “He lives in Denver.”

A more influential antagonist is the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, founded in 1971, has a storied history of fighting the Ku Klux Klan via civil lawsuits and cooperation with law enforcement. The media uncritically describe it as a civil-rights group, even though in recent decades its has shifted its focus to smearing conservative organizations as hate groups.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/01/democrats-and-republicans-have-been-talking-about-school-reform-for-years-while-everything-has-gotten-worse/

On education, both Republicans and Democrats are out of ideas as schools continue to crumble.

One important takeaway from the first Republican presidential primary debate was that every candidate shared lackluster views on education.

The GOP has not developed a coherent position on this crucial issue. Sure, they have a few talking points: They want to abolish the Department of Education, break up teachers unions, protect children from leftist radicals, and implement some kind of school choice. But this doesn’t come close to a comprehensive vision of an issue that affects all Americans and will largely determine the trajectory of the country’s future. 

Assuming the candidates received their wishes, how would this work out? In all likelihood, this would mean that the federal government would save billions of dollars by offering fewer grants to needy college students and underprivileged schools. Teachers in all states would lose their leverage in negotiating a fair wage and better working conditions. And a whole new industry of education scammers would crop up to con unwitting parents out of their school vouchers.

These ostensible “reforms” could be made without such negative outcomes — and I’ve argued for some of them myself — but only if the reformers did their homework and took the time to understand how these systems and processes worked. 

Unfortunately, the Democrat Party is even worse on education.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/30/parents-revolt-against-trans-missionaries/

As I noted recently, fads aren’t always harmful things. Nehru jackets, lava lamps, and mood rings may have set you back a few bucks, but that was the extent of it. Some fads, like the various eating disorders that were with us in the 1970s, were recognized as dangerous and treated as mental health problems. Today, though, becoming transsexual is treated simply as a lifestyle decision.

But as Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist, points out, “Trans is clearly identifiable as a fad, comparable to preceding fads, or ‘transmissible psychological diseases,’ like outbreaks of alleged multiple personality disorder, hysteria, self-mutilation, and anorexia. The typical victim is a young female with an underlying neurosis that seeks a socially acceptable form of expression. These forms of expression vary with the times.” Peterson goes on to say that the current trans fad will be viewed as we now view lobotomies. 

These days, 5.1% of adults younger than 30 claim to be trans or nonbinary, and this is being used as a political cudgel by many with a nefarious agenda. In reality, a staggering 99.4% of the population does not have the physical traits that cause someone to become transgender, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, an LGBTQ advocacy group. The 0.6% of the adult population who are truly gender dysphoric – a condition that causes extreme distress – certainly deserve empathy and respect.

Unlike most fads, the trans variety is being promoted in our government schools, and many of them try to conceal the student’s condition from parents. In fact, as of now, 1,040 school districts across the country have adopted policies instructing or encouraging faculty and staff to keep students’ gender identities a secret from parents, according to Parents Defending Education. Those 1,040 districts include 18,335 schools and a whopping 10,712,558 students. It should come as no surprise that 593 of the districts are in California.

To put it bluntly, California is predominantly run by power-hungry extremist individuals who don’t give a rip about parents or the sanctity of the family unit, and it is very difficult for traditional moms and dads to exert power on the state level. Hence, the local school board is the place where parents can find allies in their quest to stave off the trans-missionaries. And in July, Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) in San Bernardino County, with 32,000 K-12 students, got the ball rolling. The district banned Pride flags in the classroom and requires that staff tell parents when a child is using a name or pronouns that don’t match the sex determined at birth.