RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/19/who-will-be-americas-teachers/

The essential quality of a teacher, I have long believed, is the desire to share what he has found of the true or good or beautiful, or at least useful—which means that it will be good in an immediate instrumental way, serving some obvious human need or wholesome desire. The teacher says, “Come, look at this!” And he shows you the great painting of the Crucifixion by Andrea Mantegna (d. 1506), and the dramatic moment, set into the background of the work, not in the center but all the more arresting for its being understated, when the centurion looks upon Christ and says, “Surely, this was the Son of God.” He shows you not just what there is to see in the painting, but how to see. He gives you eyes.

The first time I listened to the polyphonic music of the Renaissance, I did not know what I had come upon. It was Thomas Tallis’ 40-voice motet, Spem in alium. I had expected a stanzaic hymn. This was just a verse or two from Scripture, set to music. I had expected a clear and single melodic line. This was a tissue of 40 melodic lines woven together simultaneously. I might as well have been a native of the jungles of Borneo, gaping at the turbine of a hydroelectric dam. I didn’t have a teacher to help me, at least not one I could speak to; it was instead Palestrina who “taught” me, by means of fewer and more immediately discernible polyphonic lines, what I was hearing, or what I could learn to hear, when I listened to Spem in alium. It happened while I was listening to the Creed in Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, and I heard three separate voices, each following right upon the other, singing the word simul simultaneously and not simultaneously, expressing musically the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. It flashed upon me that this was profoundly intellectual music, like the façade of a medieval cathedral. Palestrina gave me ears.

We need teachers with eyes and ears. We will not get them.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/17/hundreds-of-yale-students-protest-free-speech-event-featuring-progressive-and-conservative-speakers/

A free speech event hosted at Yale University that featured both conservative and progressive speakers was shouted down last week by over 100 far-left radicals from the university’s law school.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the panel was hosted on March 10th by the Yale Federalist Society, and featured Monica Miller of the left-wing American Humanist Association, and Kristen Waggoner of the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom. The purpose of the panel was to demonstrate that even two activists with such different political beliefs could agree on several things when it comes to the assault on freedom of speech in America today, as both groups had been involved in at least one Supreme Court case together dealing with violations of the First Amendment, when the Court sided with a Christian student in a Georgia university who was initially forbidden from preaching on campus.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/d-c-judge-suggests-yale-students-who-shouted-down-speakers-should-be-barred-from-clerkships/

A D.C. appellate judge urged colleagues to consider whether Yale University students who shout down speakers on campus should be be barred from clerkships, in an email to fellow judges published by lawyer David Lat on his Substack.

Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals emailed all Article III judges on Thursday, according to Lat, following news that about 100 Yale Law School students protested a panel discussion on civil liberties. The disruption of the panel event, hosted by the Yale Federalist Society, was reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

“The latest events at Yale Law School, in which students attempted to shout down speakers participating in a panel discussion on free speech, prompt me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted,” Silberman wrote in the email.

“All federal judges—and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech—should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified from potential clerkships,” Silberman added.

Several other judges replied to Silberman in an email chain.

“Thank you for your email. I couldn’t agree more,” wrote Judge John Walker of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, according to Slate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/03/imam-who-defended-honor-killings-and-sex-slavery-daniel-greenfield/

The great thing about being an Islamist in the Ms. Marvel era is that no matter what awful things they catch you saying, there will be no consequences. After some initial awkwardness, everyone will back away for a few months or a year… and then the party is back on.

When Bernie Sanders appeared with Imam Omar Suleiman, the Imam’s hateful views became an issue and the Sanders campaign temporarily backed away. These days you’ll find virtually no mention of it. Google is helpfully suppressing search results on the subject and so there’s a magical clean slate.

And now Suleiman’s going to be speaking at Oakland University on the challenge of being a Muslim in America. It’s tough when they won’t let you kill your daughters.

“Sisters, you know what happens with a really jealous Dad? He kills you and he kills the guy,” a smiling Imam Suleiman told Muslim female college students at an Islamist youth event. “Even if they don’t have a man who’s going to be a real man, Allah has more than any man.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/double-standard-free-speech-vanderbilt-richard-l-cravatts/

On February 23rd, Vanderbilt’s Chabad hosted a speaking event by Rudy Rochman, who describes himself as a “Jewish & Israel Rights Activist,” “with the intention,” as Chabad put it, “of creating a productive conversation around the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the history of Judaism, and antisemitism.”

Rochman, who was a founder of Columbia University’s chapter of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) when he was a student there, is known to be a pro-Israel activist so his audience would naturally be anticipating that sentiment from him. Additionally, Rochman had recently traveled to Nigeria where he had been imprisoned for three weeks, and, as Chabad explained in an Instagram post after the event, Rochman used “his personal traumatic experience in order to call attention to the systemic antisemitism against the Igbo tribe in Nigeria.”

Normally, if someone is discussing bigotry against minority groups and human rights violations in third-world countries, he would enjoy commiseration by the virtue-signaling identity groups on campus, but not in Rochman’s case due to his Zionist identity and his vigorous defense of Israel.

To challenge his unforgivable support of what is alleged to be an apartheid, racist regime, some activist students, members of The African Student Union (ASU) and the Indigenous Scholars Organization (ISO) attended the event, seemingly with the express purpose to challenge and debate Rochman. “A group of roughly 30 students mostly all of color,” the ASU and ISO wrote in a statement after the event, “planned to attend the event and ask Rudy questions during the Q&A section as a form of protest.” [Emphasis added.] So, clearly, the students were expecting, and hoping, to be offended by Rochman’s speech, and so they were.

https://www.city-journal.org/kentucky-summer-camp-teaches-sex-liberation

The principles of queer theory have escaped from the college campus and made their way into a summer camp for children in rural Kentucky. Last year, a nonprofit coalition called Sexy Sex Ed organized a series of “Sexy Summer Camp” events targeted toward minors that included lessons on “sex liberation,” “gender exploration,” “BDSM,” “being a sex worker,” “self-managed abortions,” and “sexual activity while using licit and illicit drugs.”

The program is the brainchild of Tanya Turner, who calls herself a “femme, fat, queer, magical pleasure worker” who was raised by “a host of witchy women” in a “coven-like mountain matriarchy” and uses “crystals,” “sex toys,” and “tarot” in her teaching. She founded Sexy Sex Ed in 2012 and has run dozens of events across the Appalachian region, recruiting LGBTQ youth and working with a number of regional philanthropies, including the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, Southern Power Fund, Chorus Foundation, and Rise Healthy for Life, which is affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist church. According to the organization’s promotional materials, the purpose of Sexy Summer Camp is to teach “teenagers and people of all ages to openly discuss personal and political consent, sexual safety, and anatomy.”

https://www.city-journal.org/medical-school-accreditation-body-solicits-dei-initiatives

The University of California–Davis School of Medicine has developed a mandatory anti-racism course and introduced a webinar series with talks on “Addressing Structural Racism” and “Moving from Ally to Advocate.” At Louisiana State University Health Shreveport School of Medicine, faculty must undergo annual training on cultural sensitivity, diversity, and bias. The University of Minnesota School of Medicine collaborates on its curriculum with the Medical Education Reform Student Coalition (MERSC), an offshoot of the activist organization White Coats 4 Black Lives.

All these measures exist, at least in part, to help the medical schools meet their accreditation requirements. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accredits medical schools in the United States, and has long required schools to bolster student and faculty diversity and teach cultural competence. Increasingly, however, these requirements appear to carry more weight, as schools have implemented far-reaching diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies with the express goal of satisfying them.

The Oregon Health and Science University, ranked first in the nation for family medicine, was reaccredited in the summer of 2020, but the LCME found it “unsatisfactory” in the area of “faculty diversity.” In response, the school’s senior associate dean for education promised a “concerted effort and sustained commitment at the highest levels of the institution.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/wisconsin-teachers-instructed-to-hide-students-gender-identities-from-parents/

Teachers at a school district in Wisconsin are being instructed to hide their students’ changing gender identities from parents on the grounds that “parents are not entitled to know,” and that it is “knowledge that must be earned,” according to leaked training documents.

The instruction was part of several recent staff development sessions for teachers in the Eau Claire Area School District in central Wisconsin that focused on safe spaces, gender identity, microaggressions, and oppression. According to one of the trainers, parents who disagree with their kids about gender identity issues are guilty of a form of “abuse.” The trainers also encouraged the teachers to be activists: “to vote, to demonstrate, to protest.”

Critics of the training sessions called the instruction “blatant disregard for the parents and guardians of our community’s children,” and they said it sends the message that schools are in control of children, not parents and families.

The fight over teacher training in Eau Claire is the latest skirmish in the national debate over the role of schools in promoting activism, and teaching “woke” concepts about race, gender, and sex.

The training sessions were held in late February, hosted by diversity and multiculturalism staffers from the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. The training was first reported by the conservative media group Empower Wisconsin, and by Parents Defending Education, a national nonprofit that fights classroom indoctrination and activists agendas in schools.

One of the slides in the training session reads, “Remember, parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned. Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student.”

As part of the discussion on the topic, Chris Jorgenson, director of UW Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center, said that “teachers are often put in terrible positions caught between parents and their students. But much like we wouldn’t act as stand-ins for abuse in other circumstances, we cannot let parents’ rejection of their children guide teachers’ reactions and actions and advocacy for our students.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/big-money-behind-push-1619-project-education-mary-grabar/

Many people have become aware of how Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Technology and Life nonprofit foundation influenced the 2020 elections.

But few are aware of how his company, Meta, and other far-left companies are also underwriting 1619 Project educational indoctrination programs for future voters. Taxpayers help subsidize these efforts. Those who profit are the world’s largest publisher, Penguin Random House, and the global media company, the New York Times, whose newspaper has the second-highest circulation in the nation.

The New York Times, a for-profit company, had its product promoted by a nonprofit company, the Pulitzer Center, which designed the prepackaged curriculum and pushed it, unvetted, into 3,500 schools immediately after the 1619 Project was published as a special issue of the August 18, 2019, New York Times Magazine. Coincidentally, Sam Dolnick, New York Times assistant managing editor, sits on the board of the Pulitzer Center. The Pulitzer Center also posts promotional materials, such as editor Jake Silverstein’s op-ed touting the 1619 Project books and webinars on teaching the 1619 Project, where subscriptions for the newspaper are pushed to teachers.

Penguin Random House, which published The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, a picture book, and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a pseudo-scholarly, 500-page neo-Marxist expansion of the magazine (copyright held by the New York Times) also enjoys the services of the Pulitzer Center to market its books to educators and librarians, and to fight laws intended to keep it away from students.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/why-george-washington-university-must-oppose-chinese-communist-oppression/

It seems like a no-brainer, but on one American campus, critics of a campaign against a tyrannical regime charge racism.

I n early February, posters criticizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for their subjugation of the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hong Kongers emerged on the campus of George Washington University. The posters, put up anonymously and highlighting the CCP’s reprehensible actions, soon turned controversial.

Student groups complained to university president Mark Wrighton that the posters were offensive and depicted racist caricatures. In a leaked email, Wrighton responded by saying that he too was “personally offended” by the posters. This email received significant press coverage, leading to a statement from Wrigthon in which he clarified his prior ignorance of the posters’ true meaning and reaffirmed his and the university’s commitment to free speech.

Throughout this time, I, along with a number of other students and student groups, have been pressuring the university to divest all of its endowment holdings from companies that enable the CCP’s genocide and persecution of the Uyghur people. Without the exposure of this initial email, we would never have known the extent of the uphill battle we face with the administration.

Universities are supposed to be forums of open and free exchanges of ideas and opinions. On too many campuses across the country, we’re seeing free speech and expression discouraged and even stifled.