RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-quit-georgetown-11654479763?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

After a four-month investigation into a tweet, the Georgetown University Law Center reinstated me last Thursday. But after full consideration of the report I received later that afternoon from the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action, or IDEAA, and on consultation with counsel and trusted advisers, I concluded that remaining in my job was untenable.

Dean William Treanor cleared me on the technicality that I wasn’t an employee when I tweeted, but the IDEAA implicitly repealed Georgetown’s Speech and Expression Policy and set me up for discipline the next time I transgress progressive orthodoxy. Instead of participating in that slow-motion firing, I’m resigning.

IDEAA speciously found that my tweet criticizing President Biden for limiting his Supreme Court pool by race and sex required “appropriate corrective measures” to address my “objectively offensive comments and to prevent the recurrence of offensive conduct based on race, gender, and sex.” Mr. Treanor reiterated these concerns in a June 2 statement, further noting the “harmful” nature of my tweets.

But IDEAA makes clear there is nothing objective about its standard: “The University’s anti-harassment policy does not require that a respondent intend to denigrate,” the report says. “Instead, the Policy requires consideration of the ‘purpose or effect’ of a respondent’s conduct.” That people were offended, or claim to have been, is enough for me to have broken the rules.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/06/the_left_despises_people_of_color.html

Under the guise of caring and concern, the Left continues its assault on Black people, aka People of Color.

First, it began with substandard education to Black children and the control of the school systems by the teachers’ unions, who shill for the Democrat party.

Not surprising, these very children could not compete academically because they were never given the basic tools to do so.  But the seed was planted fostering the implicit bias that Blacks were simply not capable of doing well.

So, the next step was to institute affirmative action.  After 60 years, it has been discovered, for example, that while these very students could have done well in second tier law schools, far too many could not compete in the elite schools and dropped out. 

The chaos that now describes American education has created ignorance of a magnitude that is terrifying.  Of course, it has affected the Caucasian students, but it has only worsened things for the Black students.

Obama speeded up the process of victimology when he decided that disparate discipline measures needed to be addressed.  Thus, if a child’s melanin level met the standards, that was all that mattered.  Behavioral problems, misdemeanors and felonies were simply glossed over as the misdeeds of these students were attributed to racism in America.

And now, the low expectations of soft bigotry rear their ugly head again as race-based grading systems will now be implemented in Illinois schools. Of course, it is a natural outgrowth of the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity programs that the Left has insinuated into school systems across the country. Achievement and merit have been eliminated but race rules the roost. 

https://news13now.com/2022/06/02/a-wake-up-call-for-public-education/

A recent national analysis contained a deeply disturbing finding that has generated little public discussion when it should be causing an outcry: Nearly 1.3 million students have left public schools since the pandemic began. Most states have seen enrollment declines for two straight years. In New York City, K-12 enrollment has dropped by an astounding 9%.

Given that state education funding formulas rely on student population numbers, a large reduction in students will lead to a corresponding reduction in school budgets. That’s the law of supply and demand. Otherwise, at this rate, the public will soon be paying teachers to lead half-empty classrooms.

The message to educators and elected officials could hardly be clearer: Too many public schools are failing, parents are voting with their feet, and urgent and bold action is needed. Until now, however, the only governmental response has been to spend more money — too much of which has gone to everyone but our children.

Since 2020, Congress has sent an additional $190 billion to schools, in part to help them reopen safely and stave off layoffs. But in many districts, union leaders resisted a return to in-classroom instruction long after it was clear that classrooms were safe. And by and large, remote instruction was a disaster. By one analysis, the first year of the pandemic left students an average of five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, with much larger gaps for low-income schools.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/bu-professor-reveals-weeks-new-thing-thats-racist-robert-spencer/

It costs $58,000 a year to attend Boston University, but don’t think that for all that money you’re going to get anything resembling, say, an education. No, Boston University today, like most other American colleges and universities, is dedicated to turning out thoroughly indoctrinated Leftists who will serve as reliable cadres in the fundamental transformation of American society that both Barack Obama and Joe Biden have promised us. That’s why BU employs someone such as Saida Grundy as an assistant professor: a racist apologist for rioting is just the kind of professor the universities want these days. Having one on staff is a big source of prestige.

This is clear from the fact that Grundy’s racist, pro-rioting remarks weren’t just statements she made as an individual, which BU tactfully ignored or even disavowed. Come on, man! This is 2022! On Wednesday, BU proudly tweeted video of Grundy speaking about the George Floyd riots, and saying:

If we’re gonna talk about George Floyd and really understand it, then we need to understand community reactions to it, and we often hear politicians, we hear civic leaders, from inside black communities and from outside of them as well. We hear President Biden say, “You know, I understand your frustrations but don’t destroy property.” Well, when you say that to black people who historically have been property, one of our greatest weapons against injustice was the looting of ourselves as property from the system of slavery. And what we see in communities is they’re reacting to the very racism of what we call property, right? So that’s why I think it’s very important for, you know, people who see reactions in communities to not judge and to not make assumptions about what is good and not good reactions. And not actually re-victimize communities by saying there’s an acceptable and a not acceptable way to react. Listen to them, and then we can say what these communities need.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ilya-shapiros-reinstatement-is-a-win-for-the-political-power-of-free-speech-but-a-loss-for-the-value-of-academic-freedom/

There are two ways to look at Georgetown University Law Center’s decision to reinstate Ilya Shapiro after a five-month investigation into a tweet. On the upside, Shapiro was not fired, and he will begin teaching at the law school, a visible symbol of vindication over cancel culture. That is a win for the good guys in terms of raw power: Georgetown clearly signaled, in its statement (reprinted in full below), that the dean would have preferred to fire him — whether due to the dean’s own animus or terror of his woke students — but did not feel at liberty to do so given the extensive publicity and the forces rallying to Shapiro’s defense. Thus, he was grudgingly retained with some excuses about technicalities (his tweet preceded his start date) and allowed to return — only after students are off campus for the summer. The cowardly timing suggests that the dean is hoping the whole thing goes away by the fall.

That’s progress! The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is justly crowing at the win. The cry-bullies and rage-mobbers failed because they were resisted. They prefer to work in the darkness, and they fear the light.

The bad news: This was a win for outside pressure, not for internal reform. The law school’s statement validating the mob’s whining contains obvious warnings that political statements disliked by left-leaning students or administrators will be a firing offense. There is not a shred of acknowledgement that academic freedom is actually valued by the law school. The process — 122 days in limbo — was punishment in itself. The message here is clear: Stay in line, or you will go through the same thing — and if you’re not as prominent and respected as Ilya Shapiro, and supported with as much vigor by enough friends of free speech, you may not survive as he did.

s://www.wsj.com/articles/ilya-shapiro-georgetown-twitter-kbj-cancel-law-school-supreme-court-appointee-twitter-free-speech-11654211044?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

My long public nightmare is over. Tomorrow I assume my duties as a senior lecturer at Georgetown University Law Center and executive director of its Center for the Constitution. A four-month investigation by the human-resources department and the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action determined that I wasn’t yet an employee when I posted a tweet to which some at the school objected (which the Journal covered from the beginning) and so wasn’t subject to the relevant policies on antidiscrimination and professional conduct.

It was an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone except perhaps the instigators of the Twitter mob that launched this tempest—particularly the first few days, which were truly terrible for me and my family. Although my administrative leave was paid, the uncertainty made it a roller coaster of emotions and instability, a personal and professional purgatory. I’m grateful to the many allies who supported my cause. I found out who my friends are, even if I would’ve preferred not to have had the need to know.

What I achieved was a technical victory but one that still shows the value in standing up for free speech in the face of cancellation. That’s so even when that speech is inartful, as I readily admitted was my criticism of President Biden’s decision to limit his Supreme Court pool by race and sex. Although I apologized for my poor phrasing—some advised “never apologize,” but I take pride in clear communication—I stand by my view that Mr. Biden should have considered “all possible nominees,” as 76% of Americans agreed in an ABC News poll, and that the best choice would have been Judge Sri Srinivasan, who is an Indian-American immigrant.

I’m relieved that now I’ll get to do the job for which I was hired in January. I’m confident that even without the jurisdictional technicality, I would’ve prevailed. After all, Georgetown’s Speech and Expression Policy provides that the “University is committed to free and open inquiry, deliberation and debate in all matters, and the untrammeled verbal and nonverbal expression of ideas.” There’s an exception for harassment, of course, but I wasn’t harassing anyone except possibly Mr. Biden.

In any case, I look forward to teaching and engaging in a host of activities relating to constitutional education and originalism. As befitting a center for the Constitution, all students and participants in my programs can expect to be accorded the right to think and speak freely and to be treated equally. A diversity of ideas will be most welcome.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/colleges-are-creating-adult-children/

College students are increasingly childish, unable to think for themselves, and follow the crowd rather than pursue their own interests, according to William Deresiewicz, a former professor at Yale University who discusses this in a recent guest post on Bari Weiss’s Substack Common Sense. They are ultimately unable to grow up. Students immediately turn to their professors for direction rather than confront issues themselves, he writes.

Deresiewicz borrows a term from one of his former students — “excellent sheep” — to describe the majority of the students he taught and those who populate elite college campuses today. He points out that despite the rise of campus wokeness, with its “radical-sounding sloganeering,” students are not becoming more creative and independent-minded. Deresiewicz stresses that excellent sheephood is really about acquiring more — more money, power, status, and connections — while claiming, to make oneself feel better, that one is doing it for altruistic reasons. This, he says, explains things like the alarming lack of protests against out-of-control tuition, strangulating pandemic policies, and many universities’ investments in China. 

While the campus protests of the 1960s challenged the authority of professors and campus administrators, Deresiewicz observes, protesters today do not demand more power from their higher-ups. In fact, they just put what they have been taught into action. Social-justice warriors lobby those in power to do their bidding for them. They are much more comfortable acting as the children rather than as the adults in the room. And those in authority accede to their demands rather than assert their dominance. They’re all on the same side, after all. Deresewicz states the reality bluntly: “College is now regarded as the last stage of childhood, not the first of adulthood. . . . Society has not given them any way to grow up — not financially, not psychologically, not morally.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-needs-merit-based-admissions-college-supreme-court-decision-policies-race-11654116449?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

The Supreme Court, in its next term, will render a decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, which will determine the legality of Harvard’s race-based affirmative-action program. The plaintiff’s claim that, by creating a floor for certain racial and ethnic groups in its admissions, Harvard created a ceiling for Asian-Americans. The result is that Asian-Americans who are academically qualified become victims of discrimination.

If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, as many experts believe it will, Harvard and many universities around the country will have to continue their quests for increased racial diversity without violating the specific terms of the decision.

The time has come, however, for universities to abandon their efforts to achieve superficial, artificial diversity based on race. The coming decision would provide American schools with an opportunity to develop admission criteria based on academic achievement and potential—while abolishing such non-merit-based criteria as legacy status, athletics, geography and other nonacademic preferences. There would be resistance to getting rid of these advantages, but it could be done.