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EDUCATION

Jonathan S. Tobin Can academia make room for honest scholarship on Israel?

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/can-academia-make-room-for-hone

The smearing of scholars for publishing a journal that examined misleading attacks on the Jewish state exposes the intellectual dishonesty of academic Israel-bashers.

The old joke about academia is that the arguments in the faculty lounges are so nasty because the stakes involved are so small. That’s often true about most things that go on in the narrow world of intellectual specialists, who guard their university department fiefdoms with jealous ferocity. They conduct their scholarly wars with publications that are written in academic jargon that is virtually indecipherable to the general reader. Their feuds are epic in their bitterness, but happily of little concern to the rest of society, which can easily ignore the doings of this tribe of underpaid and generally disgruntled people who have earned the right to have the letters Ph.D. after their names.

But there are some academic arguments about which the rest of us would do well to pay attention. One such is the brawl that has started among the members of the Association for Israel Studies, in which a number of members are outraged that some AIS scholars have published a journal devoted to the topic of how language is used to delegitimize Zionism and the State of Israel. The special issue of the Summer 2019 edition of Israel Studies was titled “Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict.”

The New and Unimproved SAT The college test’s ‘adversity score’ may foment more cynicism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-and-unimproved-sat-11558048986

News of affluent parents scamming to get their kids into top universities has again stoked complaints that college admissions are rigged. To level the socioeconomic field, the College Board now plans to assign students an “adversity score” on their SAT admissions tests. This demographic handicap may instead fuel more public cynicism and harm middle-income kids.

The College Board’s new adversity score will include 15 variables such as a student’s neighborhood crime rate, housing values and poverty. These variables will feed into an algorithm with weights assigned to each variable. Out will pop a score that students won’t be able to see or challenge before it goes to colleges.

Some schools have been seeking ways to quantify student socioeconomic challenges, and the adversity score would be superior to the blatant use of race. It could also help them compare similarly situated students. High-performing low- and middle-income students could likewise benefit from being compared to peers with similar means.

Yet the new score will make college admissions even less transparent. Notably, the variables that go into the score will be based on census and proprietary College Board data. So the scores won’t take into account individual circumstances and character, which is supposed to be the purpose of “holistic” admission assessments.

CUNY College Disgraces Itself By Giving Honorary Degree To Al Sharpton Craig Traiinor

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/16/cuny-college-disgraces-giving-honorary-degree-al-sharpton/

The indictment against Al Sharpton is public record. For more than 35 years of public life, he has proven himself a charlatan and a race hustler. The evidence is irrefutable.

The City University of New York is a lifeline to the examined life and the middle class for generations of poor and working-class students, from Irving Kristol to Colin Powell to me. Medgar Evers College, a senior college within the City University of New York system, intends to confer an honorary degree on Al Sharpton at its June 5, 2019, commencement. Sharpton is many things; a doctor of humane letters is not one of them.

Medgar Evers was a World War II veteran who organized fellow Mississippi NAACP members to obtain the civil rights being denied to black Americans in the 1950s and ’60s. As dangerous as it was noble, he coordinated voter registration drives and boycotts of segregated businesses. Thurgood Marshall said Evers had “more courage than anybody I’ve ever ran across.” Evers gave his life for the advancement of black Americans when a Klansman shot and killed him in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963.

By contrast, Sharpton’s greatest achievement has been avoiding criminal prosecution. Sharpton has spent a public career enriching himself under the banner of advancing civil rights. He didn’t calm racial tensions; he inflamed them. He didn’t work for racial healing; he rubbed the wounds raw. Evers was a genuine civil rights leader; Sharpton played one on TV. Simply put, Sharpton is not a good man. He is unworthy of this honor.

SAT to Give Students ‘Adversity Score’ to Capture Social and Economic Background New score comes as college admissions decisions are under scrutiny By Douglas Belkin 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-score-to-capture-social-and-economic-background-11557999000

The College Board plans to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT to try to capture their social and economic background, jumping into the debate raging over race and class in college admissions.

This new number, called an adversity score by college admissions officers, is calculated using 15 factors including the crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s high school and neighborhood. Students won’t be told the scores, but colleges will see the numbers when reviewing their applications.

Fifty colleges used the score last year as part of a beta test. The College Board plans to expand it to 150 institutions this fall, and then use it broadly the following year.

How colleges consider a student’s race and class in making admissions decisions is hotly contested. Many colleges, including Harvard University, say a diverse student body is part of the educational mission of a school. A lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants by holding them to a higher standard is awaiting a judge’s ruling. Lawsuits charging unfair admission practices have also been filed against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California system.

Muslim groups apologize for video of children singing about decapitation see note

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/05/16/muslim-groups-apologize-for-video-of-children-singing-about-decapitation/

Oh Puleez!!! They apologized? The kids were singing what they learn and hear everyday. rsk

Declaring “the mistake is ours to own,” Muslim leaders in Philadelphia said and apologized Wednesday for an event last month, where children were captured on video speaking in Arabic about beheading Jews and the liberation of Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site.

The Muslim American Society’s Philadelphia chapter and the Leaders Academy, a gathering place for homeschooled children that rents space at the site, issued a joint statement on Wednesday that sought to explain how the questionable material found its way into an annual event meant to celebrate diversity in Muslim communities.

A video uploaded to the group’s Facebook page showed children dancing to a revolutionary anthem often used by Islamist groups, and two young girls reading from a prepared text. One said, “We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate … Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

The contested site, revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The compound is the holiest site for Jews and the third-holiest site in Islam. It has been a flashpoint of violence in the past.

The Humanitarian Hoax of Pearson Education: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 30 by Linda Goudsmit

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22688/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-pearson-education

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Pearson plc, a public limited corporation, is a British multinational multi-billion dollar publishing powerhouse and the largest education company in the world. Pearson Publishing’s reported 2017 share in global revenues was $8.2 billion with a staggering 60% control of U.S. textbooks sales. It listed the Libyan Investment Authority as its largest financial contributor. Pearson is an anti-American, pro-globalism, antisemitic, pro-Muslim globalized education provider that is indoctrinating our American children.

Pearson is the premier global educational humanitarian huckster hawking its anti-American message of globalism to K-12 students and teachers in America. Its globalized curriculum comports to Obama’s pet Common Core Initiative Standards (CCIS). Globally, Common Core originated from the One World Education concept, a global goal orchestrated by the Connect All Schools program. Its origin is funded by the Qatar Foundation International (QFI) and supported by the United Nations Agenda 2030. This is how it works.

Obama appointed Vartan Gregorian, board member of the Qatari Foundation International (QFI), to the prestigious and influential President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. The Qatar Foundation International partnered with the Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education in 2011 to integrate classrooms in the U.S. and international schools through a program called Connect All Schools.

Harvard Magazine Apologizes for Lewd Lampoon of Holocaust Icon Anne Frank -Allyn Fisher-Ilan

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/harvard-magazine-apologizes-for-lewd-lampoon-of-holocaust-icon-anne-frank-1.7242672

The incident followed a sharp rise in anti-Semitic violence in the United States, punctuated by two synagogue shootings in the space of six months.

Following social media outcry and protests from students and Jewish officials, The Harvard Lampoon, a campus satirical magazine, apologized Tuesday for printing a doctored photograph mocking one of the most iconic of Holocaust victims, Anne Frank.

The caricatured picture featured a headshot of Frank, who died at 15 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after her family’s Amsterdam hideout was divulged to the Nazis, photoshopped atop a buxom bikini-clad woman.

A headline above the picture blared: “Gone before her time: Virtual aging technology shows us what Anne Frank would have looked like if she hadn’t died.” A caption continued, “Add this to your list of reasons why the Holocaust sucked.”

Paulette Schuster, a student at Harvard whose grandfather survived the Holocaust, lashed out at the magazine in a Facebook post. “What a feeling it must be to be part of an organization in which sexualizing a victim of genocide is not surprising,” Schuster wrote.

“I’m appalled at that such an unfunny, hateful, ignorant, pedophiliac, and dehumanizing image could be published,” Schuster added.

Harvard professor out as dean amid backlash for representing Harvey Weinstein Joey Garrison

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/11/harvard-professor-representing-harvey-weinstein-out-faculty-dean/1175463001/

BOSTON – A Harvard Law School professor who became a lightning rod on the Ivy League campus for working on the legal defense team of Harvey Weinstein has been let go as a faculty dean.

Neither Ronald Sullivan Jr. nor his wife, Stephanie Robinson, will continue as faculty deans of Harvard’s Winthrop House when their terms end next month, the university said Saturday.

Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College, announced his decision in an email to residents of the school’s Winthrop House, calling the situation “untenable” and saying it was “informed by a number of considerations.”

Sullivan has been under fire from students since January when he emerged as one of the attorneys representing Weinstein in the media mogul’s upcoming trial where he faces multiple sex-crime charges.

Oregon Elementary School Teacher Tried to Convince 8-Year-Old Student He’s Transgender By Michael van der Galien

https://pjmedia.com/trending/oregon-elementary-school-teacher-tried-to-convince-8-year-old-student-hes-transgender/

It doesn’t get much crazier than this. According to KPTV-TV, an Oregon elementary school teacher tried to convince an 8-year-old student that he was transgender. The schoolteacher did this without involving the parents. The result? The boy is now aggressive, depressed and confused.

The teacher at Nellie Muir Elementary School in Woodburn targeted the boy for transgender indoctrination when he started using the staff restroom after a stomach issue made him feel uncomfortable about using the boys’ toilet. The teacher took the 8-year-old aside, spoke shortly to him, and then proceeded to share all kinds of transgender literature and videos with him. The teacher asked the boy several times whether he thought he was a girl and even held him out of recess in order to read transgender books and watch transgender videos. Oh, and to top it off, there were one-on-one conversations about transgenderism.

All this was done without the parents’ consent or even their knowledge. It only came out when the boy came home with a book about transgenderism and when he talked to a therapist (while crying his eyes out).

As The Blaze reports, the effects of the transgender propaganda on the boy have been significant:

“He feels different now, he feels confused,” the mother told the station, which didn’t reveal her identity or the father’s identity…

“Still today, a year later, if he plays with my niece, he’s a girl in that moment … if he plays with my nephew, he’s a boy,” the mother added to the station.

Also, the boy now shies away from playing with “girl” toys or playing “girl-related” games and underwent personality changes, becoming more depressed, aggressive, and isolated.

ON CAMPUS, THOU SHALT NOT SUPPORT ISRAEL BY RICHARD BAEHR

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/on_campus_thou_shalt_not_support_israel_.html

Hatred of Israel, and its close cousin, hatred of Jews, have been commonly held and expressed sentiments on college campuses in the US, Canada, and Europe in recent years. Anti-Israel speakers are invited to speak, paid handsome fees, and draw large audiences of enthusiastic students, faculty and administrators. Anti-Zionist groups, often dominated by Arab or Muslim students, proliferate and ally with groups representing other minority groups in an effort to create an intersectionality of interests, where various minority groups all rally in support of any of the causes any of the individual identity groups support. Groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and the misnamed Jewish Voices for Peace, regularly taunt and harass pro-Israel students, disrupt meetings and talks by pro-Israel groups, and try to prevent pro-Israel speakers from appearing on campus.

Even at schools with a large percentage of Jewish students, university administrators appear to endorse actions directed at Jewish students or pro-Israel students though they never would allow similar activities directed against other minority groups they care to protect or favor.

Recently, Emory University gave its administrative stamp of approval to the posting of eviction notices by SJP on student dorm rooms (many of them with Jewish residents), meant to scare students and attempt to link the eviction threat to actions taken by Israeli authorities they falsely claim are routine in Israel and the West Bank.  In one of the lamest defenses ever offered for blatantly anti-Semitic activity on a college campus, a high-ranking Emory administrator offered this defense of the school’s approval of the eviction notice posting:“Emory interim vice president and vice provost Paul Marthers issued the initial statement. In justifying the posting of the flyers, Marthers stated they were “posted as part of a communication campaign by a student organization concerned with human rights in the Middle East.”