RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://americanmind.org/salvo/dont-say-it-an-interview-with-amy-wax/

American campuses have become the last place to find open debate about controversial matters.
Editors’ Note

Last December, Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, raised hackles on the Left when she appeared on Glenn Loury’s podcast to discuss the topic of American identity in an age of mass immigration from non-Western countries. Professor Wax’s comments prompted a round of denunciations and demands that she be suspended from her duties at the University of Pennsylvania. The following is a lightly-edited transcript of a conversation between Amy Wax and Alexander Riley from February of this year.

Alexander Riley: There is much going on in the current effort to cancel you at Penn Law. As is clear from the facts of the case here and in previous situations where you’ve faced pressure from your institution for perfectly defensible statements, important questions about tenure and academic freedom are at issue here. What does freedom of academic inquiry mean, and what does tenure protect, if a professor cannot present cases that might make someone somewhere unhappy?

Amy Wax: Nobody wants to talk about what’s most interesting about this. I did a podcast recently with Gad Saad and we discussed some of this on a meta-level. We were talking about how academia operates. I think there is a growing divide between academia—where less and less real intellectual life takes place—and what’s happening extra-academically, in think tanks and in online sites such as podcasts and Substack. There are now all sorts of fora and places of contact in which there’s a real exchange of ideas and you can talk about things like what I was talking about with Glenn Loury on his podcast.

We have a very large number of Asians who are capable, whose families are strong and who are pretty traditional in their personal conduct, but whose values are totally non-Judeo-Christian, completely foreign to us. At what point do we become South Asia? At what point do we become India, which is a failed state, by the way. Nobody wants to ask, “Why do Asians vote Democratic?” People have emailed me to say “Well, why do Jews?” That’s a good question too!

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2022/04/25/angry-moms-vs-lgbtq-groomers-in-spicy-glendale-school-board-meeting-n1592514

The 2022 “year in review” specials should feature the angry moms of school board meetings. The army of moms standing up against the sexualization of their children by groomer teachers is a defining moment in the culture wars this year. It is happening again in Glendale, Calif. at the Glendale Unified School District, and the board there got an earful at their last meeting after a third-grade teacher, Tammy Tiber, was caught teaching LGBTQ sexuality to 8-year-olds three days a week.

The teacher played several videos for her 8-year-old students that addressed “queer kid stuff,” “pride parades,” “love is love,” and a lesson on Stonewall. One of the videos (below), called Talking to Kids About Pride Month, was pretty disturbing.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/proof-that-georgetowns-cancel-mob-doesnt-believe-its-own-rhetoric/

Yesterday, I reported that Georgetown Law is hosting Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet and writer with a long history of antisemitic comments, on campus this Tuesday. El-Kurd has claimed that Israelis “harvest organs of the martyred” and “feed their warriors our own”; attacked Jews — including non-Israeli Jews — for “ethnically cleansing,” “colonizing,” “lynching,” and “Kristallnachting us in real time”; repeatedly denied that Jews are indigenous to the region; glorified the Second Intifada and called it “psychotic” to call for Palestinians to be peaceful; and written of Israeli forces: “I hope every one of them dies in the most torturous & slow ways. I hope that they see their mothers suffering (not that these conscienceless pigs would care). I hope these terrorists get what they deserve tenfold.” In audio clips from a speech at Arizona State University earlier this month, El-Kurd appeared to joke that Jews “control the media” and can be heard saying: “I suspect some apartheid lovers are here . . . if you heckle me you will get shot.”

El-Kurd’s scheduled appearance at Georgetown Law, however, is particularly ironic for a number of reasons. To the backdrop of the school’s apparent commitment to academic freedom for left-wing antisemites, professor Ilya Shapiro was famously suspended for a tweet criticizing the Biden administration’s use of racial preferences in Supreme Court nominations. He’s been on administrative leave since late January. The suspension came on the heels of an anti-Shapiro campaign on Twitter and by campus activists, in which the school’s Black Law Students Association (BLSA) circulated a petition and held a sit-in calling for Shapiro’s ouster over his “apparent prejudice.” The Georgetown Law dean, Bill Treanor, promptly capitulated and subsequently showed up to address the activist sit-in personally. At the sit-in, Treanor informed BLSA leaders that he was “appalled” by the “painful” nature of Shapiro’s tweets and promised to “listen,” “learn” and ultimately “do better,” adding that — while “the university does have a free speech and expression policy” — he wanted to “draw a line between conservatism and things that are racist.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/florida_takes_another_brilliant_step_towards_righting_wrongs_in_education.html

Florida has been on a roll, doing one thing after another to clean up its education system.  In the past year, it passed a bill blocking universities from censoring (conservative) political views; banned communist-controlled Confucius Institutes from campuses; mandated that high school students learn financial literacy; banned Critical Race Theory in public schools; and, of course, passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, preventing teachers from instructing their five- to eight-year-old students about sexuality.  What also happened last week was that Florida got a new law limiting tenure at Florida’s public universities.

Tenure — permanent job security for college and university professors who have managed to maintain their jobs for a certain period — is a relatively new concept.  It began in 1940, when the American Association of University Professors created a Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure holding that academic integrity requires that professors must be free from the fear of firing.

Perhaps tenure made sense when Nazis (who were socialists) were using political brute force to purge German campuses of anybody who stood against their socialist totalitarianism.  However, tenure makes less sense in America when college and university professors, who are almost entirely socialist, use academic brute force to indoctrinate students and stop people who are not hard left from getting hired.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/top-ten-jew-hating-colleges-and-universities-sara-dogan/

On college campuses across America, hatred and bigotry directed against Jews is at an all-time high. It is now almost commonplace for swastikas to appear in university halls and restrooms or scrawled on Jewish fraternity houses. Hundreds of chapters of the Hamas-funded terrorist support group, Students for Justice in Palestine, hold events promoting anti-Semitic speakers who spread terrorist propaganda, describing Israel – created the same way Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq were created—as a “settler-colonial state” that engages in “ethnic cleansing.” Under the influence of these terrorist-supporting hate groups, university departments have lined up to endorse statements incorporating the same genocidal lies.

Under pressure from Students for Justice in Palestine and other campus groups including the Muslim Brotherhood-created Muslim Students Association, student governments across the nation are promoting the Hamas-created Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and its sister movement, the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, efforts reminiscent of the Nazi boycotts of the past. The goal of these boycotts is to isolate and economically strangle the world’s only Jewish state and the Middle East’s only democracy.

In the rare instances when pro-Israel speakers are invited to campus, they are met by mobs shouting slogans such as “Intifada!”—a call for a new violent uprising against Israel—or “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free”—a call to destroy the entirety of the Jewish homeland. America’s universities have become a new fount of Jew hatred which then leeches into the broader culture.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/the-folly-of-english-teachers-who-oppose-reading/

The National Council of Teachers of English wants to ‘decenter’ book-reading and essay-writing as the fundamentals of English class. This is a mistake.  

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has proclaimed that it is time “to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Apparently, they don’t teach irony in English classes anymore.

The argument in the statement isn’t new. At the turn of the century, John Dewey, a central figure in progressive education, argued that the industrial revolution necessitated a “new education.” Now, the NCTE argues that “as society and technology change, so too does literacy,” and so we English teachers must focus on videos, gifs, memes, and other media.

They absolutely shouldn’t, though. Society might change, but the cognitive architecture of our brains does not. We need explicit instruction, repeated practice, phonics, a broad base of knowledge, and models to read and reason clearly. As they did centuries ago, students must grapple with rigorous, thematically rich texts to develop the capacity for critical thought, just as anyone must strain against weights to build muscle.

Similarly, technology changes, but great ideas don’t. When I was a student, blogging and Myspace were the hot new technologies. Anything I could teach my current students about the use of social media or software will be outdated by the time they mature. However, the wisdom in great literature and the warnings and exemplars found in historical texts are timeless.

Ultimately, the insular focus on present issues and contemporary media within the NCTE statement is self-defeating. If anything, to face the challenges of the future, students will need the lessons of the past. If we value self-control with social media, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the perfect warning against enslavement to passions. If we want eloquence, students need models in beautiful prose. If we want them to identify bias, they must familiarize themselves with the arguments and first principles that occur over and again throughout time.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/22/panic-at-st-vincent/

On April 9-11, the Center for Political and Economic Thought (CPET) at St. Vincent College held a conference on “Panic, Policy, and Politics.” I was an invited speaker.

When I first read the proposed schedule, I saw that nearly half the presentations focused on the panicked response to COVID. That made sense, and was a welcome correction to the one-sided embrace of COVID policy in academia and the media. My own talk was on financial panic, of the sort that hit the United States in 2008. Other presentations addressed information manipulation, Big Tech, and education in the context of madness and hatred.

I did wonder at one title, that of David Azerrad’s talk: “Black Privilege: Racial Hysteria in Contemporary America.” Black privilege, in the form of racial preferences in education, employment, and even speech, seemed to me the product of purposeful thought, activism, and indoctrination over decades, not panic. How would this talk fit within the conference theme?

As things turned out, it fit extraordinarily well. Azerrad’s talk was the only one that generated something like panic.

St. Vincent’s administration sent an armed guard to Azerrad’s presentation, and only his. After the talk, the administration hastily forbade CPET from publishing the videos of all the presentations. They relented a few days later in the face of outcries over academic freedom. Still, the college dean was required to publish a Soviet-style “regret” that more or less labeled Prof. Azerrad a bigot. One of the college’s trustees gave an interview to the local paper calling the talk “rage-inducing.”

https://nypost.com/2022/04/20/critical-race-theory-advocates-are-gaslighting-americans-for-power-and-profit/

America’s supposed racial divide has a class element that we are all supposed to ignore. But for the past two years, I couldn’t ignore the number of media outlets and supposed intellectuals who have discarded the legitimate concerns of the middle class because they, the elite, supposedly know what’s best for us and our children.

The anti-racism movement has come to Main Street, and no one asked for its arrival.

The average American isn’t very ideological because that is a luxury most Americans can’t afford when they’re trying to make ends meet and support their families, unlike the economic and intellectual elite. Men and women who have made their entire careers hypothesizing about the makeup of America never actually listen to Americans.

We recoil listening to their conception of American life for all races. Then the ideologues gaslight us, claiming we fight it because of our hatred of the truth rather than our disgust for radical elitists who find pleasure in telling us how to behave.

Anti-racists use race as a weapon for compliance and domination over the sensibilities of good people. Their intention is to hyper-racialize Americans by having you see all aspects of life through the prism of race — including education for your children. If you are white and choose to resist, you are labeled a white supremacist, and if you are black and resist, you are labeled a sympathetic character for a white-supremacist society. The only solution in their eyes is compliance, not dialogue.