RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-12-15-goodnight-poor-harvard

Yesterday I got two emails from Harvard University, as I presume all other Harvard alumni also did. There’s big news: the Presidential Search Committee has announced who will become the next President of the University. It’s Claudine Gay, currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the largest constituent piece of the institution. She will become President on July 1, 2023, when current President Larry Bacow steps down (after only five years).

Have I heard of this person before? More on that in a bit.

But first some of the gushing praise from the official University publicity:

Claudine is a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence, to championing both the value and the values of higher education and research, to expanding opportunity, and to strengthening Harvard as a fount of ideas and a force for good in the world. . . . As her many admirers know, Claudine consults widely; she listens attentively; she thinks rigorously and imaginatively; she invites collaboration and resists complacency; and she acts with conviction and purpose. . . . Claudine’s own scholarship and teaching have focused on aspects of democracy—political participation, voting behavior, public opinion, and the interplay of race, ethnicity, and politics in America.

And that’s barely a tenth of it. I’m sorry I can’t give you a link to the whole thing; but then, I certainly would not recommend wasting your time reading it.

But where have I come across this name before? Somehow I remembered seeing it on Instapundit, and with a quick search there I find this brief post from April 17, 2022. The link goes to a Substack article by a guy named Chris Brunet, formerly of the Daily Caller, who has gone out on his own at Substack under the name Karlstack. Brunet apparently makes a specialty of exposing corruption in academia, and he is all over the case of Ms. Gay. His April 17, 2022 post has the title “The Curious Case of Claudine Gay.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/equity-rears-its-ugly-head-in-academic-publishing/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

The leftist obsession with “equity” is showing up all over. Some people insist on ending blind auditions for orchestral openings on the grounds that it’s more important to get a “better” racial mix of musicians than to identify the best ones. And this same mindset is now showing up in the world of academic publishing. It has always been the case that submissions were evaluated “blind” — that is, without the reader knowing anything about the writer.

Now there’s pressure to change that. Daniel Buck writes about this disturbing (but hardly surprising) development in today’s Martin Center article.

In an article for Inside Higher Ed, one academic argues for open reviews. This author, Kim Manturuk, had brought together a conference to discuss instructional practices best suited to the pandemic era. To her shock and horror, a few papers authored by Christians made it through the double-blind review process. Whereas the ancient Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides recommended we “hear the truth, whoever speaks it,” Manturuk, a modern-day Pharisee, suggests we hear the truth only when it is spoken by the ideologically pure.

So, just as with student admissions, merit is no longer the key to success. Papers are to be evaluated based on the characteristics of the writers and tossed aside if those characteristics somehow indicate that the paper isn’t aligned with “proper values.”

Buck argues that this development takes our universities back to the days of the Inquisition.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/catherinesalgado/2022/12/12/half-naked-drag-queen-teaches-kid-to-twerk-in-nyc-as-parents-watch-calmly-n1652899

Here’s your daily reminder that radical leftists are living in a different universe: a video has surfaced of a drag queen shaking his almost-naked behind in kids’ faces, teaching a young girl to twerk as parents placidly watched, some of them smiling, at a recent New York City “all-ages” drag show. What is wrong with American parents?

Libs of TikTok shared the disturbing video clip on Twitter:

The effort to sexualize and pervert children as young as possible continues at a roaring rate. American Girl has a book now encouraging puberty blockers and transgenderism for little girls, even as a recent New York Times report revealed the serious long-term side effects of puberty blockers on kids. A new study just showed that there is a “surge” in irreversible “transgender” surgeries for teenaged girls soon after de-transitioner Chloe Cole said she would be suing the medical professionals who performed the girl’s double mastectomy when she was still a minor. And Project Veritas released a video on Dec. 7 of the dean of students at an elite Chicago private school boasting about how he had an LGBTQ+ “Health Center” come in and teach his underaged students about “queer sex” and other perversions.

Democrat Party leadership supports all this insanity, too — for instance, Joe Biden called restrictions on transgender “treatments” for children “immoral,” and Gov. Laura Kelly (D-Kansas) used taxpayer dollars to fund “an all-ages Halloween drag show,” according to Breitbart.

There is an all-out culture war specifically targeting children as Democrats try to make perversion the norm.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/this_is_what_kids_are_learning_nowadays.html

Anthony Gonzalez is a student in high school.

There was a time in America when schools did the job they were supposed to do.

“Transgenderism” indoctrination did not exist. Schools made sure to prepare the future generation to succeed in the real world.

However, that has now changed. Flash forward to the twenty-first century, and you will find that kids are learning about “drag queens” as well as the idea that men can be women and women can be men.

These people are sick! This societal corruption is psychologically, and at times, physically, hurting our children.

This is what Democrats want for your children. Think about that.

Project Veritas recently went undercover to expose this horrible ideology being taught in schools.

Veritas found that Joseph Bruno, a dean at a private school in Chicago, was publicly bragging about the fact that his students were learning about passing around sex toys and noticing the differences between lubes and spit.

Bruno concluded, “That’s a really cool part of my job.” 

Really? Folks, this is not normal, nor should it be acceptable societal behavior. This is truly an ignominy that no one should support. The idea that children are being taught a very gruesome sexual ideology is abhorrent.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/teaching-that-grammar-is-racist/

If you’ve wondered what the literal face of an evil left-wing Woke Supremacist looks like, look no farther than the face of Marta Schaffer. She seems like an ordinary, nerdy woman, does she not? Do not be beguiled. She is a California English teacher who teaches her students that grammar is part of White Supremacy. Her goal as an educator is to “undermine that B.S.”

According to the news report, Schaffer fights white supremacy by alerting her students to, and teaching them about, the overemphasized importance of grammar usage and writing rules. She uses her social media posts on Tik Tok to sell an even wider audience on the idea that proper grammar and syntax are part of the White supremacy she claims is an entrenched part of our culture. She maintains that she teaches the rules that “we actually use to communicate instead of the made-up rules that White supremacy created for when we write papers and stuff, which is what scholars call the language of power.”

She is a profound advocate of academic essays written by African American students using African American Vernacular English, otherwise known as “AAVE” language.

She worries that standard usage of theses statements in writing assignments, proper citation of sources (which we must remember is a preventative measure against plagiarism), and transition words like “however” and “therefore” are coterminous with misogyny, white supremacy, and colonization.

The non-sequiturs involved in her line of reasoning do nothing to help her case. And yes, she is a tenured high-school teacher.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-death-of-liberal-education-and-the-birth-of-the-woke/

Last fall I taught my last class, ending a teaching career that began in the fall of 1977. During that time I watched as higher education deteriorated under the pressures of leftist ideology, rank careerism, bureaucratic inertia, and philistine utilitarianism. The humanities––English, foreign languages, philosophy, history, the arts––have been particularly corrupted.

Worse, liberal education, the passing on of the traditions, foundational ideas, and collective wisdom of the West, has been virtually banished from most of our schools and colleges. Universities, with a few exceptions, no longer ground students in liberal education, and teach them “to know the best that has been known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other consideration whatsoever,” as Matthew Arnold put it, and  “through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”

Those days are gone. Today our educational institutions are grubby, rent-seeking businesses, and propaganda organs for illiberal, incoherent ideologies based on the “higher nonsense” that has captured “higher education,” and from there trickled down into K-12 schools. No wonder the majority of the products of those failed institutions, like Generation Z, support letting murderers go free, censoring speech that challenges their “stock notions and habits,” joining the anti-carbon “green” cult, and subjecting children to drag-queen shows and inappropriate sexual curricula.

The most important tool in this demolition has been the dishonest idea of “diversity” created out of thin air by the 1978 Bakke decision. The legalization of Constitutionally forbidden discrimination in university admissions and hiring put the weight of federal power behind illiberal identity-politics. As a corollary to the increasing numbers of “protected” classes eligible for affirmative action, there was soon spawned attacks on liberal education for being the products of “dead white males”––not just irrelevant for contemporary students “of color,” but absolutely toxic in their promotion of the defining principles of a peculiarly destructive, racist, imperialist, colonialist Western Civilization, global history’s most heinous villain.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/an_english_teacher_proudly_hates_the_english_language.html

English is a glorious language that has developed over a thousand years, borrowing from every other tongue as it goes, and developing strict rules to maintain maximum coherence. It is spoken around the world and is, therefore, the language of money and power. But to a White, middle-aged leftist English teacher, the English language she’s responsible for teaching to all students, regardless of race, color, creed, etc., is nothing more than an ugly White supremacist means of controlling people

More than any language in the world, English is a portmanteau language—that is, it has cheerfully borrowed from every language with which English speakers have come into contact, creating a language of unusual richness and beauty. Over the millennia, it has absorbed myriad tongues into its Germanic core: Latin, Greek, the Romance languages, French, Hindu, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Swahili, and more. In this, it differs greatly from other languages. The French, for example, are proud that their language has calcified.

Over the same time, it has developed grammar rules that are intended to ensure the utmost clarity when communicating. Take, for example, one of my favorites, which is the rule against dangling or misplaced modifiers. There is a huge difference between “The girl in the red bathing suit watched a seagull flying by,” and “The girl watched a seagull flying by in a red bathing suit.”

I also like the rules saying that the wise writer avoids passive voice. Which sentence do you prefer? “The dog played with the child’s ball” or “The ball of the child was played with by the dog.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/video_watch_a_trans_demiboy_nonbinary_explain_her_pronoun_lesson_for_5th_graders.html

You know a video is alarming when you receive texts and emails from several people, all pointing to it as the perfect example of what leftists are doing to America’s school children. In this case, a self-identified “trans demi-boy non-binary” speaks matter-of-factly about how she uses classroom time when she has complete control over the children to teach them about imaginary “gender identities” and pronouns. Parents need to get outraged, and there’s at least one group that exists to help parents channel that outrage into successful political action.

At Saturn Street Elementary School, which is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the fifth-grade teachers is a woman named Skye Tooley. Her home page at the school’s website has a small picture of a young, green-haired person wearing a t-shirt saying “trans resistance.” That’s the first hint to parents that their child is going to be indoctrinated, rather than educated. Tooley also signs her introductory statement as “Mx. Tooley” (which I always read as meaning “mixed up”) and adds “Pronouns: they/them.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/sacrificing_academic_excellence_on_the_altar_of_equity.html

One of the four dissenting judges in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger case, which resulted in the allowance of race quotas in student admissions, was Justice Clarence Thomas, a descendant of slaves and himself a beneficiary of affirmative action. Outraged by the patronizing attitude of teachers and classmates, and driven by the values of hard work, merit, and pride instilled in him by his grandfather, he had come to believe, over the course of his inspiring life, that quotas are demeaning.

“The Constitution abhors classifications based on race,” he wrote in his dissenting opinion, “not only because these classifications can harm favored races, or are based in illegitimate motives, but also because every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provisions of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all.”

Against such eminent good sense, a deranged ‘woke’ agenda of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) is sweeping the country. This obsession with victimhood, with its unending demand for compensatory benefits, erodes self-respect and self-reliance, and perpetuates a culture of expecting and making do with government handouts and hand-me-downs. It is the antithesis of the pursuit of excellence.

DIE policies are also threatening to destroy America — traditionally a powerhouse of innovation — by destroying top public schools that nurture the talent, merit, and persistence of the gifted and inspire creativity and imagination. The race-blind admission requirements of these schools — standardized entrance exams, high GPAs, and a record of rigorous coursework — are under attack from the false narrative that they are designed to exclude racial minorities and that merit per se is racist.