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EDUCATION

Do Race Academics Matter? Timothy Cootes

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/01/do-race-academics-matter/

Brittney Cooper, a Professor of Gender and Africana Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, recently introduced herself via podcast to an audience much greater than your usual academic conference. The conversation topic, one that is always a bit short on cheer, was the depravity of white people, whom she described as “villains”. Her preferred method of dealing with these antagonists, and she expressed this with a good deal of vim, was “to take these motherf***ers out”. She sadly acknowledged the logistical constraints of this approach, but became noticeably chirpier when relaying the declining rates of white births in America, largely due, I understand, to poverty, addiction and other social maladies.

If Professor Cooper would like to shake off her lingering reticence towards the violent extirpation of whites, she should listen to the insights of Dr Aruna Khilanani, a psychiatrist recently invited to give a lecture at Yale University’s Child Study Center. The title of her speech, which handily calls for little elucidation, was “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind”. It’s difficult to select a favourite quote, but I would go with this one: “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step.”

Anti-White Racism at NYU Law By Andrew E. Harrod

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/antiwhite_racism_at_nyu_.html

In the United States, “if you’re white, leave; it’s really that simple,” announced Regan de Loggans, an activist with New York City’s Indigenous Kinship Collective, a “community of Indigenous womxn, femmes, and gender non conforming folx” who “denounce colonial power structures of leadership and blood quantum.”

Her belligerence captured the intersectional radicalism of the N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change’s 2022 colloquium on “Resisting Settler Colonialism,” a February 9 NYU Law School webinar at which she and allied activists and academics spoke.

Moderating the webinar, Georgia State University Law School professor Natsu Taylor Saito introduced the self-identified “two-spirit” de Loggans, whose preferred pronouns are “they/themme.” Saito described de Loggans as an “indigequeer agitator” involved in “decolonizing, indigenizing, and queering institutions and territorial practices.” De Loggans later declared that she is also an “anti-Zionist Jew” who “advocate[s] extremely for the liberation of Palestine.”

UC-Berkeley Gets Mugged by Environmentalists By Dan McLaughlin

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/uc-berkeley-gets-mugged-by-environmentalists/

Lots of things done by liberals and progressives sooner or later reach targets they were “never meant to” harm.
I am fond of citing Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.

3. The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

The old saw about a conservative being a liberal who has been mugged is a variant on Conquest’s First Law. Something similar is now happening to the University of California at Berkeley. One would think that Berkeley, of all institutions, cannot be outflanked from the Left, but in California, eventually, the bill for leftism comes to everyone. In this case, the state’s oppressive regime of environmental regulation is threatening Berkeley’s enrollment:

UC Berkeley, one of the nation’s most highly sought after campuses, may be forced to slash its incoming fall 2022 class by one-third, or 3,050 seats, and forgo $57 million in lost tuition under a recent court order to freeze enrollment, the university announced this week. The university’s projected reduction in freshmen and transfer students came in response to a ruling last August by an Alameda County Superior Court judge who ordered an enrollment freeze and upheld a Berkeley neighborhood group’s lawsuit that challenged the environmental impact of the university’s expansion plan. Many neighbors are upset by the impact of enrollment growth on traffic, noise, housing prices and the natural environment. The University of California Board of Regents appealed the ruling and asked that the order to freeze enrollment be stayed while the appellate process proceeds. Last week, an appellate court denied that request. The regents on Monday appealed that judgment to the California Supreme Court. . . . The furor has left 150,000 first-year applicants to UC Berkeley in the lurch, just a month before the campus is scheduled to send out admission offers.

Faced with a pincer movement from environmental activists, neighborhood NIMBYists, and an activist judge, Berkeley is . . . fighting them and bemoaning the outcome, insisting that the environmental impact is being overstated:

“This court-mandated decrease in enrollment would be a tragic outcome for thousands of students who have worked incredibly hard to gain admission to Berkeley,” UC Berkeley said in a statement. “If left intact, the court’s unprecedented decision would have a devastating impact on prospective students, university admissions, campus operations, and UC Berkeley’s ability to serve California students by meeting the enrollment targets set by the state of California.”

Even some Democrats are shocked into action when it’s Berkeley, not some rancher, on the receiving end of this, although it appears that the proposed solution may protect only the favored state university:

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said he would unveil legislation next week related to the state environmental law that was used by the Berkeley neighborhood group. He declined to release details but said the state law was never meant to stop public universities from expanding to meet student needs. “It’s outrageous that a court is dictating a student enrollment cap for UC,” he said. “That’s a complete overreach.”

Lots of things done by liberals and progressives sooner or later reach targets they were “never meant to” harm.

‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ Staff and Anti-Israel Bias A poisonous environment that reflects a global phenomenon. Adam Milstein, James Jay Carafano and Elan S. Carr

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/university-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-staff-frontpagemagcom/

A recent Heritage Foundation study found strong anti-Israel bias in the social media posts of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) officials at colleges and universities throughout the United States. These officials criticize Israel far more frequently and far more severely than they do China. Their posts about Israel exceed those mentioning China by a factor of three, and almost all of their statements about Israel express condemnation, whereas nearly two-thirds of their comments on China convey praise.

These disturbing findings should surprise no one. U.S. campuses have become hotbeds of hostility toward the state of Israel as well as toward the idea of American exceptionalism, and in the radical religion of the campus, far-left professors are the priests and DEI officers are the choir.

This religion has its orthodoxies: America is systemically racist and defined by perpetual struggle of oppressed against oppressors; “white privilege”—for which Jews should be regarded as an exemplar—is a chief source of oppression, and status-based intersectional categories of victimhood confer both justness and entitlement. Under this neo-Marxist paradigm, there is no hint of irony when officials putatively devoted to fostering “diversity” and “inclusion” instead promote hostility toward Israel or regard as obnoxious the idea that the allegedly privileged Jewish people have a right to national self-determination in their ancient homeland.

Federal Judge James Ho Surprises Georgetown Law with Speech Defending Ilya Shapiro By Nate Hochman

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/federal-judge-james-ho-surprises-georgetown-law-with-speech-defending-ilya-shapiro/

Guest speaker scraps original remarks in favor of unequivocal statement on freedom of speech and declares, ‘I stand with Ilya.’

F ederal judge James C. Ho delivered a robust defense of Ilya Shapiro on Tuesday in a speech at Georgetown Law, which recently suspended the respected legal scholar over a poorly worded tweet.

“I stand with Ilya,” Ho declared.

The subject of his address was a surprise to the audience. The judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had been slated to give a lecture titled “Fair Weather Originalism: Judges, Umpires, and the Fear of Being Booed,” in an event organized by the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society. At the outset, according to prepared remarks exclusively obtained by National Review, Ho said he “was scheduled to talk” about originalism, “but I hope you won’t mind that I’ve decided to address a different topic today instead.”

Ho continued, “I’m going to spend my time today talking about Ilya Shapiro.”

Creating A George Floyd Scholarship Sends Black Kids The Exact Wrong Message By: Kendall Qualls

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/15/creating-a-george-floyd-scholarship-sends-black-kids-the-exact-wrong-message/

Kendall Qualls is a Republican candidate for Governor of Minnesota.

The constant push to virtue signal to the idol of social justice is causing some of our historically trusted institutions of academia, health care, and journalism to lose the public’s trust and is further splintering our nation. Minnesota seems to be in the epicenter of it all.

The Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota recently endowed a new scholarship to honor George Perry Floyd Jr. It’s the wrong decision and undermines the work of the civil rights movement and what we communicate to black American children across the country.

What happened to George Floyd was a travesty. But it is important we remain disciplined in acknowledging that tragedy. When honoring someone’s life in a scholarship at an institution of higher education, we should honor the sacrifice, achievement, and virtues of a person’s life.

With approximately 50 percent of black students graduating from Minneapolis public schools near the bottom of the country in achievement and approximately 80 percent of black children born in fatherless homes in the twin cities, the University of Minnesota should be lifting up models of character and achievement that convey hope and opportunity, not death and despair.

Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine After watching 100 hours of leaked video, we now fully grasp the danger of this ideology in schools. By Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-woke-indoctrination-machine-diversity-equity-inclusion-bipoc-schools-conference-11644613908?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. Until now, however, neither of us fully grasped the dangers of this ideology or the true motives of its practitioners. The goal of DEI isn’t only to teach students about slavery or encourage courageous conversations about race, it is to transform schools totally and reshape society radically.

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are honest, transparent and unfiltered—very different from how private schools typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.

The path to remake schools begins with the word “diversity,” which means much more than simply increasing the number of students and faculty of color—referred to in these workshops as “Bipoc,” which stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.” DEI experts urge schools to classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional change.

The Real War on Science: Identity Politics By Andrew Follett

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-real-war-on-science-identity-politics/

Emphasizing wokeness over true scientific inquiry will turn humanity’s pursuit of scientific truth into little more than an exercise in demagoguery.

T he best way to stop racial discrimination is to directly enshrine it into law via affirmative action in universities, according to the head of a major scientific journal.

“As science struggles to correct systemic racism in the laboratory and throughout academia in the United States, external forces press on, making it even more difficult to achieve equity on all fronts—including among scientists,” claimed an editorial in Science’s latest issue. It continued, “The dismantling of race-conscious admissions [to colleges] would deal another blow to equity in science.”

The editorial, titled “Science needs affirmative action,” was authored by none other than Science’s editor-in-chief: Washington University medicine and chemistry professor Herbert Holden Thorp.

Science is the most influential general-topic scientific journal, alongside its rival Nature. The prestigious peer-reviewed outlet boasts a weekly readership of almost 270,000 people and has been published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1880.

Thorp claims affirmative action “gives deserving students a chance that they might not otherwise have, adding excellence to the higher education system. It also acknowledges that not all students have an equal opportunity to excel at objective measures like standardized tests and grades, and it levels the playing field by giving students and universities the chance to spotlight other important attributes and factors in the admissions process.”

Down with Sabra? The Harvard Hummus Protests By Carine Hajjar

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/down-with-sabra-the-harvard-hummus-protests/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

That’s right, Harvard students are protesting . . . hummus.

Students in Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) are demanding that the Mediterranean spread made by Sabra be taken out of dining halls because of ties to the Israel Defense Forces. This is merely one — albeit the creamiest — of many instances of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)-style protests against Israel on college campuses across the country.

The Harvard Crimson reported that on Tuesday, students gathered in Harvard Yard holding signs that say “Why does your hummus taste like apartheid?” and chanting “Don’t buy products laced with hate, Sabra funds a racist state.” Stickers on Sabra snack cups in dining halls say something similar (picture provided by a student at Harvard):

The QR code takes you to a document that states that Strauss Group, the company that co-owns Sabra with PepsiCo, has “openly and proudly admitted to funding the Israeli army.” Strauss Group is the largest food company in Israel. Sabra itself is headquartered in White Plains, N.Y. (I’ll quickly add that the linked document suggests “moral alternatives” to Sabra, including Cedar’s Hummus. Oh please, Cedar’s? Too much lemon if you ask me. I’ll also add that my Lebanese food snobbery leads me to look askance at Sabra too . . . but I digress.)

Strauss Group sends food and care packages to the Golani Brigade in the IDF. To pro-Palestine activists at Harvard, this amounts to the sponsorship of murder.

Dartmouth Republicans secure free speech — by fleeing campus By John Klar

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/dartmouth_republicans_secure_free_speech__by_fleeing_campus.html

In an ongoing embarrassment for Dartmouth College, the once-venerable institution has repeatedly demonstrated that it is unable — or more likely, ideologically opposed — to allow students the free speech that once breathed air on its “Live Free or Die” campus.

The school’s student Republican organization has found the Dartmouth doors increasingly closed to any effort to discuss the anti-American ideology with which Dartmouth has surreptitiously polluted every aspect of campus life and curricula.  Thugs and criminals rule Dartmouth now, so the Dartmouth Republicans wisely arranged for their latest speaker — nationally acclaimed author James Lindsay — to speak off campus, where free speech is not (yet) verboten.

Dartmouth bureaucrats claim they favor free speech, while they elevate the rights of permitless, foul-mouthed, speech-silencing protesters over those of a peaceful student organization with a permit.  The nation first watched this disgrace when Madison Cawthorn spoke at Dartmouth, and hateful children screamed anti-police epithets to intimidate attendees.  But at least that event went forward, under security reminiscent of inner-city or prison policing.  The college feigns concern over security but has clearly demonstrated it has no concern about assaults on speech liberties.

The Dartmouth Republicans tried yet again, with national speaker Andy Ngo.  This time Dartmouth College canceled the event, claiming vague threats by far-left criminals who appear to have organized with campus Antifa (and perhaps college professors who hate America) to stifle opinions that expose the filth of their hateful cult.  The college silenced Ngo just an hour prior to the event, claiming that students’ free speech rights were protected because they were allowed to proceed remotely by Zoom.  Dartmouth officials claim that this “separate but equal” discrimination was merited by the criminal threats: Dartmouth favors criminals over the tuition-paying students whose rights it throttles.