RUTHFULLY YOURS

THANKS DPS!

Last week, Chancellor Carol Christ shared a back-to-school message outlining her goals for the campus. Today, she also sent a message to the campus community articulating her thoughts and Berkeley’s approach this academic year to free speech:
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Dear students, faculty and staff,

This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear: Public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections.

But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint — that we’re required to allow it — but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university. The philosophical justification underlying free speech, most powerfully articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail; any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority to determine which opinions are noxious or abhorrent. Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.

Berkeley, as you know, is the home of the Free Speech Movement, where students on the right and students on the left united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus. Particularly now, it is critical that the Berkeley community come together once again to protect this right. It is who we are.

Nonetheless, defending the right of free speech for those whose ideas we find offensive is not easy. It often conflicts with the values we hold as a community — tolerance, inclusion, reason and diversity. Some constitutionally protected speech attacks the very identity of particular groups of individuals in ways that are deeply hurtful. However, the right response is not the heckler’s veto, or what some call platform denial. Call toxic speech out for what it is, don’t shout it down, for in shouting it down, you collude in the narrative that universities are not open to all speech. Respond to hate speech with more speech.

We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space. These are not easy tasks, and we will offer support services for those who desire them.

This September, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos have both been invited by student groups to speak at Berkeley. The university has the responsibility to provide safety and security for its community and guests, and we will invest the necessary resources to achieve that goal. If you choose to protest, do so peacefully. That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor. We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.

We will have many opportunities this year to come together as a Berkeley community over the issue of free speech; it will be a free speech year. We have already planned a student panel, a faculty panel and several book talks. Bridge USA and the Center for New Media will hold a day-long conference on Oct. 5; PEN, the international writers’ organization, will hold a free speech convening in Berkeley on Oct. 23. We are planning a series in which people with sharply divergent points of view will meet for a moderated discussion. Free speech is our legacy, and we have the power once more to shape this narrative.

Sincerely,

Carol Christ
Chancellor

I grew up in Harlem in the 1960s and early ’70s. My brother and I attended a failing school where we were the only white students. My parents, both professors, supplemented our education at home, but we understood that our classmates were wholly dependent on the inadequate education the school offered. Even at that young age I perceived this as a terrible injustice.

Thirty years later, when I was again living in Harlem and ready to send my own son to school, those same schools were still abysmally low-performing. In 2006, when I opened my first charter school in Harlem, the district schools were still failing.

Today, there is a different story to tell about Harlem, and it is thanks to a school-choice movement that has given rise to dozens of high-performing charter schools. Today, almost half of the students in Central Harlem attend a charter school; in East Harlem, a quarter do.

The results of the 2017 New York state tests were released Tuesday, and my staff has been busy crunching the numbers. They demonstrate how transformative this development has been for Harlem residents. In Central Harlem, for example, the number of students meeting rigorous, Common Core math standards has more than doubled since 2013—from 1,690 to 3,703. Students attending charter schools account for 96% of that growth. Results for English language arts are similarly inspiring.

The highest performing charter schools, like Success Academy, have actually reversed the achievement gap. Black and Hispanic students from Central Harlem’s seven Success Academy schools outperform white students across the city by 33 points in math and 21 points in reading; low-income students outperform the city’s affluent students by 38 and 24 points in math and reading respectively.

Recently, the NAACP called for a moratorium on charter schools, claiming they created a system that was “separate and unequal.” Lily Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, made a similar argument at a summer gathering of her members. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten went so far as to say school-choice and charters were the “polite cousins” to Jim Crow segregation.

Given the incredible academic progress evident among Harlem’s charter-school students—and among low-income children of color attending charter schools across the country—these accusations are breathtakingly cynical, designed to protect a union-dominated system that has failed urban communities for decades.

To justify their arguments, Ms. Weingarten and others propagate the myth that charter-school successes have come at the expense of traditional district schools. But this claim has been disproved again and again. In New York City, for example, a comprehensive study found improved academic performance, safety, and student engagement at district schools with charter schools, particularly high-performing ones, located nearby or in the same building. CONTINUE AT SITE

As it happens, after the war, he became a college president and dealt with racially tinged spontanous outbreaks

With statues of Robert E. Lee being torn down all over, it’s fair to wonder how he would have reacted to today’s mob violence. As it happens, we have some sense of how he might react to spontaneous racially tinged violence because after defeat and reconciliation, he became a college president of what is now Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.

This put him in charge of restless males during their years of peak testosterone, and at a politically charged historical moment, to boot.

While he was a college president, a number of his students were involved in altercations with African-Americans in a nearby town. Once, an African-American shot and nearly killed a student. The students, nearly all veterans, talked of lynching. Lee put a stop to that with a few judicious words. Two other incidents illustrate the point: one of his students, without provocation, grabbed and insulted a civil rights activist. Lee expelled the student. A few others attempted to break up a political gathering of African-Americans. Those involved were also expelled personally by General Lee. When asked what the rules of the college were, he had but one rule: “Be a gentleman.”

We can see from his actions that Lee would not have approved of the violence that occurred in Charlottesville or was seen recently on campuses. But Lee was not a social injustice warrior. Robert E. Lee expected his students to be orderly and courteous in a changing world. He did not tolerate disorder. He also focused his students’ education on those courses that had applications in the practical world – engineering, business, journalism. I think it is fair to speculate that he would have seen no sense in parents spending their life savings on a gender studies degree.

Obviously, we live in different times, but instead of shunning the man, college presidents today would do well to consider his example.

A Clemson University professor took to Facebook recently to voice his contempt for Republicans in a post that called all members of the GOP racists, according to screenshots of his personal page.

“All trump supporters, nay, all Republicans, are racist scum,” Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing Bart Knijnenburg wrote in an Aug. 16 Facebook post, reports Campus Reform, which obtained a screenshot of that sentiment and many others.

The professor also posted on Facebook:

“This society is aggressively structured to make cis white males succeed, at the expense of minorities,” Knijnenburg continued, though he didn’t stop there. In another post, Knijnenburg equates President Donald Trump, Trump voters, the GOP, and Steve Bannon to “Nazis,” the “KKK,” and the “Alt-right,” declaring that they are “all racists.”

Additionally, Knijnenburg explicitly endorses violence in one post, stating, “I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy. Violent or non-violent. This needs to stop, by any means necessary. #PunchNazis” …

In a shared photo from a page titled, “Crapitalism,” President Trump is quoted as saying, “George Washington was a slave owner… Are we gonna take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?” The meme concludes, “You’re g*dd**n right,” while Knijnenburg captioned the photo, “What I was thinking, too.”

The professor has yet to respond to Campus Reform’s request for comment. Click here to read the whole article.

Racial, gender courses face faculty and financial shortfalls

Cornell University’s ‘identity-based programs’ are struggling to attract enough professors and receive enough funds to continue.

“Identity studies programs like [Feminine, Gender and Sexuality Studies] and ethnic studies programs like Asian-American Studies have battled numerous problems in recent years, leaving them struggling to match the demand of growing enrollments,” reports The Cornell Daily Sun.

Students at Cornell have lobbied the administration to address the problems plaguing “ethnic and identity based programs,” the Sun reports.

The funding and instructorship problem means that “some students are left unable to pursue classes in identity-related programs and the programs themselves cannot expand.”

Enrollments in “Feminine, Gender and Sexuality Studies” courses have nearly doubled in the last three years, the Sun reports. Many of the slots in these courses are snatched up by upperclassmen, who are able to sign up earlier than freshmen and sophomores.

“Now we’re reserving 10 spots in the intro FGSS courses for the first-year students,” says FGSS director Durba Ghosh, “but that’s still not enough.”

From the piece:

Five faculty members are jointly appointed in FGSS and other departments, according to Ghosh. So far, the program has been able to hire three tenure-track faculty members since 2010.

“While the faculty in the program feel stretched in our ability to staff all the courses we would like to offer, we have not been restricted as much as other departments and programs,” she said.

Ghosh said the college has “done very little hiring” in recent years. She did note that this is soon to change.

“I learned on Friday that the Arts college has increased the number of positions it will fill in 2017- 2018, due, in part, to some new hiring initiatives,” Ghosh wrote in an email in late July.

The College of Arts and Sciences is planning to hire a new faculty member in FGSS and Africana Studies, according to Ghosh.

However, Chowdhury believes there is more work to be done.

“My number one thing would be to hire more people,” she said. “But if they’re doing that, I’m happy to hear that. My only concern is that the administration would hire someone and then be like, ‘we’ve done our job, that’s enough.’”

One particular program highlights the dearth of faculty members in identity courses: Cornell’s “LGBT Studies” program has “no faculty members” appointed to it.