RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mit-leads-the-way-in-reinstating-the-sat-admissions-policies-standardized-testing-college-students-11649185773?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

During oral arguments in a 2003 Supreme Court case about affirmative action at the University of Michigan law school, Justice Antonin Scalia told lawyers who were defending the school’s racially discriminatory admissions policies that they couldn’t have their cake and eat it too.

“I find it hard to take seriously the state of Michigan’s contention that racial diversity is a compelling state interest—compelling enough to warrant ignoring the Constitution’s prohibition of distribution on the basis of race,” Scalia began. “The problem is a problem of Michigan’s own creation. That is to say, it has decided to create an elite law school . . . [and] it’s done this by taking only the best students with the best grades and the best SATs or LSATs, knowing that the result of this will be to exclude to a large degree minorities.”

Scalia said that if Michigan wants to be an elite law school, that’s fine. But there are trade-offs involved if the school also wants to prioritize enrolling some predetermined percentage of underrepresented minorities for aesthetic reasons. “If [racial diversity] is indeed a significant compelling state interest, why don’t you lower your standards?” he asked. “You don’t have to be the great college you are. You can be a lesser college if that value is important enough to you.”

Last week, the highly selective Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faced with a similar dilemma, apparently chose to maintain its high standards. It became the first prominent school to reinstate the requirement that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores, a practice that MIT and many other colleges had abandoned during the pandemic.

https://amac.us/new-variant-of-the-crt-virus-social-emotional-learning/

Amid the national backlash over Critical Race Theory, gender theory, and other radical political and social doctrines being peddled in K-12 classrooms, parents are sounding the alarm over a new “variant” of left-wing instructional dogma: “social-emotional learning,” or SEL. While the term sounds innocuous enough, mounting evidence suggests that SEL curriculum is often simply a rebranding of the same dangerous and divisive ideologies that have dominated education headlines in recent months.

If you ask proponents of the concept, they’ll tell you that SEL is all about helping students grow into well-rounded adults who can manage their emotions and interpersonal relationships. Casel, one of the leading organizations that sells SEL programming to schools, defines it as “the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”

Much of the terminology that advocates of the doctrine use to promote SEL is drawn from the mental health field. The assertion is that when students are confident in themselves and their identities, they perform better in the classroom. As the Washington Post explained in a recent feature piece on SEL, “social-emotional learning seeks to treat children as human beings with feelings, life goals and even traumas, not just students learning to write essays and solve math problems.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/schools-push-radical-gender-ideology-under-guise-of-social-emotional-learning-parents-warn/?utm_

During the pandemic, Traci Spiegel’s son and most of his Howard County, Md., classmates received virtually no mathematics instruction for five months.

What little ineffective virtual instruction he did receive didn’t prevent his grade from plummeting from an A to a C. So when he returned to the classroom as a high-school freshman, he became incredibly frustrated that he and his peers were asked to spend 40 minutes every Monday on so-called social-emotional learning (SEL).

Instead of spending as much time as possible making up the ground they had lost in math and other subjects, they were taught how to avoid committing microaggressions, how to use pronouns, and how to avoid offending gay people, according to Spiegel’s son.

Since conservatives at all levels of government embraced the fight against critical race theory, dissenting parents nationwide know how to recognize and counter racially divisive curricula. But a broader suite of radical ideas, couched in therapeutic language, is quietly being advanced under the banner of SEL, parents whose children have been exposed to such programming told National Review.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/the-short-sighted-ignoble-lie-of-dei/

Universities nationwide mistakenly yield to a revolutionary minority of students arguing for ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ hoping to ward them off.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These three words are now the holy trinity of woke activists seeking to impose their ideology on institutions across the country. It’s worst at — though by no means exclusive to — universities. Ever since DEI-inspired protests at the University of Missouri caused that school’s president to resign in 2015 despite an absence of any wrongdoing, raging students, working hand-in-hand with activist administrators and sympathetic faculty members, have only grown more ambitious. Just this past November, at Coastal Carolina University, Steven Earnest was, at the behest of the school’s DEI committee, temporarily removed from teaching duties for uttering the following heresy (***Content Warning***): “I’m just sad people get their feelings hurt so easily.”

Based on such stories, it’s easy to assume that university administrators have lost their minds. The now-commonplace and well-funded DEI departments on campuses, which are consistent sources of identity-based propaganda, certainly give that impression. But in reality, the vast majority of statements and initiatives from such departments are half-baked, designed to quell the shrieks of a frothing, vocal minority — the one that’s actually in charge.

Unfortunately, this minority is not confined to academia. Its aims have spread elsewhere, including to the legal sector, helped in part by its proximity to academia in the form of law school.  As Aaron Sibarium has written, the American Bar Association has recently acquiesced to the woke aims of a petition from 176 law-school deans, including the likes of UChicago and Yale. Now, the ABA requires students to receive “education on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism” for accreditation purposes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/ditching-college-larry-sand/

One of the numerous reverberations of the Covid pandemic and our overwrought response to it is that many young people are now skipping college. For students who graduated from high school in 2020, college enrollment was down 21.7% compared with the prior year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. And importantly, if a student doesn’t go directly from high school to college, he is much less likely to ever attend a school of higher learning. Men notably, in increasing numbers, are forsaking college. The Clearinghouse reports that at the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, and men just 40.5%.

While much of the media has descended into pearl-clutch mode over the recent college exit, a reset has been long overdue. In fact, the push for universal enrollment is relatively new. In 1960, just 7.7% of adult Americans held college degrees, but 60 years later that number jumped to 35%. Writing on the subject in 2017, the late Walter Williams reported that about “1 in 3 college graduates have a job historically performed by those with a high-school diploma or the equivalent.” Williams, citing Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, goes on to say that the U.S. was home to “115,000 janitors, 16,000 parking lot attendants, 83,000 bartenders and about 35,000 taxi drivers with bachelor’s degrees in 2012.”

Most universities are just not properly preparing young people for the job market. In Harvard Business Review, tech guru Michael Hansen writes that a recent poll of Americans who graduated from a community or four-year college in the past five years showed that 19% reported that “their college education experience did not provide them with the skills needed to perform their first post-degree job. Additionally, more than half (53%) of these college graduates have not applied to an entry-level job in their field because they felt unqualified, and …42% felt unqualified because they did not have all the skills listed in the job description.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-deep-dishonesty-of-dont-say-gay/

“The entire controversy hinges on this sentence: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

Wonder why they don’t call it the ‘Don’t Teach Kindergartners about Gender Dysphoria’ bill?

 T here’s a good reason why nearly every major media outlet and the entire left-wing punditry keep referring to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — rather than, say, the “Don’t Teach Kindergartners about Gender Dysphoria” bill. Any honest debate on the matter would almost surely be a political loser for Democrats.

Let’s turn to the Washington Post’s Philip Bump as our straw man, since his columns offer unfailingly misleading descriptions of conservative positions. Bump argues in a recent piece that Disney had publicly come out against the Florida bill because it “understands that American families don’t look the way they used to.” Of course, anyone who has read the law knows it has nothing to do with how families look or don’t look. There are absolutely no restrictions inhibiting anyone from talking about their family. Bump is compelled to discuss the acceptance of gay couples and adoption, and bring up fringe GOPers, because otherwise he might accidentally mention that the law merely prohibits adults in schools from teaching prepubescent kids about sexuality and transgenderism against the will of their parents.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2022/03/26/a-nj-university-will-offer-masters-degrees-in-happiness-studies-n2605074

Centenary University in New Jersey announced the launch of a new degree program, a “Master of Arts in Happiness Studies.”

The program, which the school said is the first of its kind, will “explore the implications of happiness for individuals, the workplace, and our broader society” and will cost students $17,700. According to the university’s announcement, the program will launch virtually in the fall.

Centenary University President Bruce Murphy said in his announcement at the World Happiness Summit in Miami, Florida on March 18 to mark the United Nations International Day of Happiness that the program was designed to “promote well-being and resilience in the midst of current world stress.”

“This online, 30-credit graduate degree is an interdisciplinary program designed for leaders who are committed to personal, interpersonal, organizational, and societal happiness,” Murphy said. “Grounded in science and research, this new degree will study happiness and resilience to prepare graduates to make an impact in a wide range of fields.”