RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/17/ied-explodes-on-mits-campus/

Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, seems to be everywhere these days, from the White House to the boards of directors at Fortune 500 companies and to admissions and hiring policies at universities. We prefer to reverse the acronym, because IED – as in improvised explosive device – seems more apt, given the IED explosion in creating administrative bloat, invasive control of speech, and what used to be called “affirmative action.”

In a recent talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a speaker characterized the zeitgeist thusly: “Diversity is being invited to the dance. Inclusion is being asked to dance. And equity is sharing in the planning of the dance.” But for MIT and other academically rigorous universities and programs, the goal has always been to develop the brightest minds for the betterment of humankind in all fields of endeavor, not to create social butterflies.

MIT does not “invite” participants, because it is tantamount to a science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM”) Olympics. You compete feverishly to get in. You must be highly self-motivated to participate once there in absorbing every possible iota of knowledge and technique in your field of study. And it defies reality to assert that intellectual capacity and specialized aptitude are evenly distributed to allow equal contributions. The same applies to other higher education programs committed to advancing knowledge through its students and faculty. The dance metaphor for these schools is a gross distortion that reeks of the entitlement mentality of many in today’s younger generations.

In fact, the very assumption that there is a significant educational benefit of identity diversity is questionable for these academically rigorous schools, just as the Olympics are focused only on athletic excellence and have retained their exalted status as a result. Intellectual diversity, which is not the within the purview of IED departments, is what fosters advancement of knowledge. In any case, the similarities and intense focus among those students who are truly qualified tends to make identity diversity largely inconsequential in comparison. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yale-and-harvard-law-schools-unrank-themselves-u-s-news-and-world-report-rankings-college-heather-gerken-11668726298?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Yale and Harvard law schools said this week they will no longer participate in the annual law-school rankings published by U.S. News & World Report. Readers may see no one to root for in a showdown between elite schools and the higher-ed ratings complex, but there’s a point to be made about what appears to be a flight from merit and transparency at these schoo

Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken in a statement this week called the U.S. News rankings, which have long influenced the perception of prestige, “profoundly flawed.” Yale has “reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession. As a result, we will no longer participate.” Harvard Law School quickly followed, and on Thursday UC-Berkeley Law pulled out.

The U.S. News rankings have plenty of shortcomings, though being run by a “for-profit magazine,” as Yale swiped in its statement, isn’t one of them. Dean Gerken says the U.S. News methodology penalizes law schools that send students into public-interest fellowships, and that its metrics on student debt don’t account properly for loan-forgiveness programs. Berkeley also noted a per student expenditure rating that pushes tuition prices up and is not a proxy for an excellent legal education.

But Dean Gerken gave away the game when she wrote: “Today, 20% of a law school’s overall ranking is median LSAT/GRE scores and GPAs. While academic scores are an important tool, they don’t always capture the full measure of an applicant. This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford expensive test preparation courses.”

This sounds like cover for a desire by Yale to be free to admit students with lower test scores in service to diversity, but without taking a hit to its exclusive reputation. Yale has long been No. 1 in the U.S. News rankings.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/resistance-is-necessary/

Parents must do everything they can to stop CRT.

The teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in classrooms across America has raised the ire of parents—and for good reason. CRT’s principal claim is that America is systemically racist and incapable of racial justice. It is a wholesale ideological assault on the American experiment and rejects our founding principles—namely, that “all men are created equal” and should be treated as such under the law. Its ubiquity concerns parents, specifically, and citizens, generally, who object to this vision.    

The standard response by CRT apologists to parental pushback is to dissemble. They claim CRT is not really what its critics say it is, and that even if it is, CRT is not being taught in schools. But, even if it is being taught in schools, CRT is a necessary means to understand and interpret America’s racial past, present, and future. This strategy of obfuscation has been successful, because evidence of CRT’s spread in American schools has been largely anecdotal. Until now.   

A new Manhattan Institute study gives the lie to this narrative. The study asked “a nationally representative sample of 1,505 18- to 20-year-old Americans” whether they have been taught CRT and related concepts. The answers are troubling. Sixty-two percent of students report being taught that America is a “systemically racist country”; 57 percent report learning that “white people have conscious biases that negatively affect non-white people”; and 67 percent report hearing that “America is built on stolen land.” Among the students surveyed, 82.4 percent attend public schools.   

Ideologically, CRT is uniquely subversive, because it corrupts our future citizens. Its dissemination in public schools threatens the survival of the American regime.   

Preparing Students for Citizenship

The U.S. Supreme Court has explained that the “role and purpose of the American public school system” is to “prepare pupils for citizenship in the Republic.” The public school system, the Court has reasoned, is essential to “the preparation of individuals for participation as citizens, and in the preservation of the values on which our society rests.”