RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.weeklystandard.com/andrew-ferguson/supreme-court-on-cue-yale-law-school-students-freak-out-about-kavanaugh?mod=article_inline

When President Trump announced last Monday that he had chosen Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy, his little speech rang out like a starter pistol. Instantly every activist, party hack, and ideological mainchancer bolted from the blocks, issuing petitions and press releases and formal statements with astonishing speed and at maximum volume. This includes Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Yale Law School, and a contingent of his fellow Yalies.

It took only an hour after Trump’s announcement for the law school’s flacks to announce the news that Trump had chosen one of their own: “President Donald Trump today nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh ’90 . . .” etc., etc. The rest of the school’s press release was a series of testimonials from acquaintances about Kavanaugh’s overall magnificence. One professor called him “a terrific judge.” Another said that “Kavanaugh commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers, judges, and justices.” A man with the impressive job title “John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence” summed up: “We are proud that he is our graduate.”

We? Speak for yourself, Herr Professor. By the next day a collection of not-proud and indeed horrified Yalies had posted a rebuttal to the school’s press release, with the title “Open Letter from Yale Law Students, Alumni, and Educators Regarding Brett Kavanaugh.” They were, they wrote, “ashamed of our alma mater.”

The letter, which is twice as long as the press release, is a masterpiece of pure scold. The signers criticize the “press release’s focus on the nominee’s professionalism, pedigree, and service to Yale Law School.” What the hell, they ask, do professionalism and pedigree have to do with anything? Especially when “the true stakes of his nomination” are so high? Kavanaugh’s nomination is an “emergency,” they tell us, and the school’s implicit embrace of him raises a “disturbing question: Is there nothing more important to Yale Law School than its proximity to power and prestige?”

Disturbing or not, it’s the kind of question that answers itself. And the answer is no sir, there is not—absolutely nothing whatsoever. The reason Yale Law School exists is to convey its “students, alumni, and educators” as close as possible to power and prestige. You can’t charge $255,000 for a law degree unless you throw in a healthy portion of P&P. This is why all those people who signed the open letter went to Yale and not to Oklahoma City School of Law. Nothing against OKC. I’m sure it’s terrific.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270679/affirmative-action-ropes-bruce-thornton

A case is currently under litigation that however it is decided, will likely reach the Supreme Court. There the diversity industry may face a challenge that brings the institutional racism of affirmative action and its baleful effects to an end.

In 2014, an organization called Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard University for excluding Asian students who were far better qualified than other applicants who had been admitted. Last November the Justice Department opened an investigation into Harvard’s admission practices, and is threatening to sue the university, throwing its support behind the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs have viewed admission records through discovery, and want them publicized because the evidence for arbitrary and discriminatory evaluations is so obvious no trial is necessary. More recently, the Trump administration has rescinded Obama’s 2011 rule advising universities to use race as a criterion in admissions. Finally, the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy creates an opening for a Constitutionalist judge who will not, as Kennedy has serially done, subordinate the law to politics or social engineering.

Such portents are heartening, for race-based policies of the last forty years have rested on a preposterous justification on the basis of “diversity,” the “compelling state interest” used to violate principle and law. Indeed, the word recurs like a mantra in Supreme Court decisions. In the 2016 Fisher vs. University of Texas case, for example, Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion wrote, “It remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/save-the-sat-writing-test-1531074658

Princeton and Stanford last week became the latest schools to drop the SAT essay requirement. The College Board made the section optional in 2016. Skeptics will applaud this essay’s demise as a return to a test that measures real aptitude. But the essay, introduced in 2005, turned out to be useful. Ditching it is another plan by colleges to make all standards of admissions subjective and easily rigged.

The writing test began in 2005 in order “to improve the validity of the test for predicting college success,” according to the College Board. A pilot program found that “scores on the new SAT writing section were slightly better than high school grades in predicting first-year college grades.”

There were problems with the exam. One MIT professor found students were rewarded for sheer length. Another criticism was that it wasn’t graded on accuracy. Students could make factual errors, or make things up.

In 2014 the College Board revised the essay test, asking students to read a passage and then answer a question with a persuasive argument using evidence from the text. Test-takers, their parents and guidance counselors criticized this new approach as well. There was too little time. It stressed students out. It raised the cost of preparation and of the test itself.

Princeton cited cost as its reason for eliminating the exam. But taking the essay part of the test adds only $14 to the registration fee, and poor kids can get waivers.

It is true that 25 minutes is not much time to write an essay, but one can discern a few things about a student’s command of grammar, vocabulary and logic from three paragraphs. True, grading a writing test is more subjective than scoring a multiple-choice test. But writing is a real skill, and colleges should measure it.

https://nypost.com/2018/07/03/trump-to-revoke-obama-era-guidelines-on-race-in-college-admissions/

The Trump administration is set on Tuesday to revoke a series of Obama-era guidelines that encourage considering race in the college admissions process as a means of promoting diversity, according to a report.

Two sources told the Wall Street Journal that the move comes as the Justice Department investigates whether Harvard University illegally holds Asian-Americans to a higher standard in the admissions process.

The guidelines — put in place during the Obama administration in 2011 and 2016 — laid out legal recommendations that Trump officials argue “mislead schools to believe that legal forms of affirmative action are simpler to achieve than the law allows,” the paper reported.

Anurima Bargava, who led civil rights enforcement in schools for the Justice Department during Obama’s presidency, disagreed with that assessment, saying the documents simply offered guidelines to schools looking to continue using affirmative action legally.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/marquettes-black-eye-1530916646

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has given Marquette University a bracing refresher on contracts and academic freedom. In a decision overturning a lower court’s dismissal of the case, the court on Friday ruled that Marquette breached its contract with political science professor John McAdams when it disciplined him “for exercising his contractually protected right of academic freedom.”

The case stems from a blog post by Mr. McAdams about a graduate instructor who had told a Marquette student that opinions against same-sex marriage would not be tolerated in her ethics class. The university says Mr. McAdams proved himself unfit by naming the graduate instructor, Cheryl Abbate, and linking to her publicly available website in his post on the encounter, so it suspended him. Even after losing the case Friday, the university continues to accuse Mr. McAdams of having used his blog to intentionally expose “her name and contact information to a hostile audience that sent her vile and threatening messages.”

The court is categorical in rejecting this argument. “Our review of the blog post,” reads the majority opinion, “reveals that it makes no ad hominem attack on Instructor Abbate, nor does it invite readers to be uncivil to her, either explicitly or implicitly.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270593/assault-learning-academia-jack-kerwick

As I show in my latest book, Higher Miseducation: A Dissident’s Essays on the Attack Against Liberal Learning (Stairway Press), matters are not all that well in academia.

This is but another way of saying that at institutions of higher learning all across the country the left has substituted training in their political ideology for a classical liberal arts education. Nor should anyone be misled into thinking, as so many people continue to assume, that this is happening only within Humanities and Social Science departments.

STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics) has been infected as well.

At the University of Washington, a computer science professor, Stuart Reges, wrote an op-ed with the title, “Why Women Don’t Code.” Reges, who admits to having taught over the years hundreds of women on how to code, reveals the extent to which universities, like his own, have buckled under Politically Correct pressure when it comes to the issue of the gender imbalance that is found in STEM disciplines.

“Ever since Google fired James Damore [who wrote an internal memo delineating his views of gender differences while complaining that Google will not tolerate any deviations from leftist orthodoxy] for ‘advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace,’ those of us working in tech have been trying to figure out what we can and cannot say on the subject of diversity.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/stanford-u-teaches-male-privilege-with-its-men-and-masculinities-project/

Stanford University is pushing the myth that male identity is a “social privilege,” despite numerous studies indicating that men disproportionately suffer from unique issues that circumvent their economic, educational, and social pursuits.

The claim was made by the school’s Men and Masculinities Project. The project aims to convene male students with counselors to help them develop “healthy and inclusive male identities,” almost as if male students oppress women by their very existence.

“We acknowledge that male identity is a social privilege, and the aim for this project is to provide the education and support needed to better the actions of the male community rather than marginalize others,” explains Stanford officials.

Instead of aiming to help men regain parity with women in academia — men nationwide are less likely to attend college, and less likely to graduate in four years than women — the school instead aims to help men “redefine masculinity.”

College men should be “active agents of positive and sustainable change on campus and in the community, striving to understand male privilege, redefine masculinity, [and] dismantle systemic structures of power and oppression,” the program states.

Of course, men do enjoy certain privileges in society. They don’t have to worry about sexual harassment and stalking to the same extent as women, and they are far less likely to find themselves victims of sex trafficking.

But privilege isn’t a black and white issue. To acknowledge the plight of women — especially regarding sexual abuse — shouldn’t preclude a discussion of the issues that men face. Yet that is precisely what the Stanford University program does.

The issues that men face start young. Men are significantly more likely to face issues in K-12, and are significantly less likely to graduate from high school, a disparity that is even more pronounced in minority and working-class communities.

Men also are less likely to attend college, disproportionately less likely to graduate, less likely than single women to become homeowners by age 30, far more likely to be in dangerous fields of work, and significantly more likely to be homeless. Men are also far more likely to remain homeless — nonprofits and state services prioritize women and their children. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.city-journal.org/

The Supreme Court’s recent Janus decision ends mandatory fees for public-sector employees who don’t want to belong to a union. Previously, in 22 non-right-to-work states, such employees had to pay these fees for the union’s services on their behalf, which could include collective bargaining, but also a host of political activities to which many employees objected. Most of the debate in the case, appropriately, focused on legal questions, not the ramifications for higher education. Yet hundreds of thousands of professors teach at public universities in the 22 states affected by Janus; the example of one of New York’s largest higher-ed unions, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), shows how relevant the Court’s ruling might prove to be.

In her Janus dissent, Justice Elena Kagan maintained that “everyone knows the difference between politicking and collective bargaining.” Yet a lawsuit against the PSC brought by my Brooklyn colleague, David Seidemann, demonstrated how difficult it is to draw these lines in the higher-education context. In a 2009 Second Circuit decision, a unanimous three-judge panel noted a lack of clarity about the PSC’s political expenditures in a wide variety of activities common to higher-ed unions—a contract campaign, donations to the parent union, lobbying of the state legislature, and paying salaries of union employees. (That the union listed political expenditures as office supplies, while claiming that a Woody Guthrie concert shouldn’t count as a political expense, did little to enhance its credibility.) The Second Circuit judges held that “courts must examine union activities carefully to ensure that dissenters are not charged for ideological undertakings not related to collective bargaining.” Rather than allow that careful examination of its expenditures to occur, the union settled with Seidemann.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-war-on-admissions-testing-1530481487

The “test optional” movement has won its most high-profile convert in the University of Chicago, which announced last month that applicants to the school would no longer need to submit ACT or SAT scores.

The University of Chicago has become known in recent years for its commitment to academic rigor and resistance to coddling and group think. But in this decision it has increased the momentum of a fashionable but damaging ideology overtaking elite education: That standardized metrics of any kind are discriminatory and elitist, and that each student is so special that he or she can only be evaluated according to uniquely personal traits.

No test is perfect, but the ACT and SAT are powerful predictors of college performance. As psychology professors Nathan Kuncel and Paul Sackett wrote in The Wall Street Journal in March: “Longitudinal research demonstrates that standardized tests predict not just grades all the way through college but also the level of courses a student is likely to take.”

Standardized tests are especially important in a time of severe grade inflation, especially in more affluent high schools. That doesn’t mean students who don’t test well can’t succeed, or that students with high scores are guaranteed to graduate summa cum laude. But it’s clear scores are at least as valid a predictor of college performance as a students’ roster of carefully selected extracurricular activities or “personal essays,” which may be rewritten by tutors.

So what’s behind the campaign against standardized assessments? A University of Chicago spokeswoman says the test “may not reflect the full accomplishments and academic promise of a student.” This is true but could be said of any single part of a college application, including high school grades.