RUTHFULLY YOURS

The diversity bureaucracy has finally swallowed an entire college. San Diego State University has just named to its presidency a vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity, hired from the University of California, Davis. The new SDSU president, Adela de la Torre, is a peerless example of the intersection of identity politics and the ballooning student-services bureaucracy.

As vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity at UC Davis, de la Torre presided over a division made up of a whopping 28 departments—not academic departments, but bureaucratic and identity-based ones, such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Resource Center; the Center for African Diaspora Student Success; the Center for Chicanx and Latinx Student Success; the Native American Academic Student Success Center; the Middle Eastern/South Asian Student Affairs Office; the Women’s Resources and Research Center; the Undocumented Student Center; Retention Initiatives; the Office of Educational Opportunity and Enrichment Services; and the Center for First-Generation Student Scholars. This gallimaufry of identity-based fiefdoms illustrates the symbiosis between an artificially segmented, identity-obsessed student body and the campus bureaucracy: the more that students carve themselves into micro-groups claiming oppressed status, the more pretext there is for new cadres of administrators to shield them from oppression. (The causation runs in the opposite direction as well: the very existence of such identity-based bureaucracies encourages students to see themselves as belonging to separate tribes.) The admission of students who do not share the academic qualifications of their peers also creates a vast bureaucratic genre of retention services, one now taking aim at traditional pedagogy said to handicap underrepresented minorities.

WASHINGTON – Actor Tim Allen has joined the cast of new movie aimed at disrupting the liberal and PC culture in Hollywood, on college campuses and in comedy.

Allen’s “Last Man Standing” sitcom was canceled last year and outraged fans believe ABC pulled the plug because the family comedy highlighted conservative values. ABC denied it was over politics.

Allen has signed onto the docudrama “No Safe Spaces” that’s expected to hit theaters in the fall.

Fellow comedian Adam Carolla and conservative radio show host Dennis Prager are making the movie to promote free speech at a time they say the entertainment industry, media and college campuses too often shut down or blackball controversial viewpoints.

“Nothing kills comedy quite like people who are constantly offended,” Carolla told The Post. “It’s impossible to be funny if we’re not allowed to poke fun at each other and that’s what’s happening with a new generation of people who seem to be offended for a living.

“If we can’t have fun with one another than we lose our humanity. If free speech goes, then our basic freedoms will follow soon after.”

In a movie clip released to The Post, Allen joins a roundtable discussion with fellow comedians about how the PC culture is hurting comedy.

For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and students increasingly fear bullying and persecution.

The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the “All for All” strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to “racial equity.”

“Equity” in this context does not mean “equality” or “fairness.” It means racial identity politics—an ideology that blames minority students’ academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s color-blind ideal, and focuses on uprooting “white privilege.”

The Edina school district’s All for All plan mandated that henceforth “all teaching and learning experiences” would be viewed through the “lens of racial equity,” and that only “racially conscious” teachers and administrators should be hired. District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina’s racial achievement gap, which they attributed to “barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.”

As a result, the school system’s obsession with “white privilege” now begins in kindergarten. At Edina’s Highlands Elementary School, for example, K-2 students participate in the Melanin Project. The children trace their hands, color them to reflect their skin tone, and place the cut-outs on a poster reading, “Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone elses!-[sic] Everyone is special!”

Highlands Elementary’s new “racially conscious” elementary school principal runs a blog for the school’s community. On it, she approvingly posted pictures of Black Lives Matter propaganda and rainbow gay-pride flags—along with a picture of protesters holding a banner proclaiming “Gay Marriage Is Our Right.” On a more age-appropriate post, she recommended an A-B-C book for small children entitled A is for Activist. (Peruse the book and you find all sorts of solid-gold: “F is for Feminist,” “C is for…Creative Counter to Corporate Vultures,” and “T is for Trans.”)

At Edina High School, the equity agenda is the leading edge of a full-scale ideological reeducation campaign. A course description of an 11th-grade U.S. Literature and Composition course puts it this way: “By the end of the year, you will have . . . learned how to apply marxist [sic], feminist, post-colonial [and] psychoanalytical . . .lenses to literature.”

The primary vehicle in the indoctrination effort is a year-long English course—required of all 10th-graders—that centers, not on reading literature and enhancing writing skills, but on the politicized themes of “Colonization,” “Immigration” and “Social Constructions of Race, Class and Gender.”

One student characterized the course this way on the “Rate My Teachers” website: “This class should be renamed . . . ‘Why white males are bad, and how oppressive they are.’” (The negative review has since been deleted from Edina High’s “Rate My Teachers” page; but this is a screenshot from before it was memory-holed.)

Namaste, brownshirt.!!!!

When it comes to exercise, yoga is one of the more unique practices. Hailing from Hindu religious tradition, it focuses on flexibility, balance, and awareness. It has been popular in the United States for decades, growing into a robust industry.

However, the bigoted Leftist ideology that condemns “cultural appropriation” has led one professor to lecture people of the “wrong” DNA for doing it.

Shreena Gandhi, a professor of religious studies at Michigan State University, recently co-wrote an article where she claims the practice of yoga by white people contributes to white supremacy. Her co-author, Lillie Wolff, is a self-described “antiracist white Jewish organizer, facilitator, and healer.” The article begins: “To the so many white people who practice yoga, please don’t stop, but please do take a moment to look outside of yourself and understand how the history of yoga practice in the United States is intimately linked to some of the larger forces of white supremacy.”

Insanity.

Basically, they’re rehashing the claim that partaking in activities not invented by your ancestors can somehow damage people who trace their lineage to that activity’s founding culture. If you do not practice the activity with sufficient reverence — say, you do yoga for fitness but ignore the Hinduism — you might be a racist.

There. I saved you the hassle of having to read a whole lot of nonsense.

A political-science professor who says Marquette University violated his employment contract’s guarantee of academic freedom will get his day in court. Though a judge for a lower state court earlier ruled for the university, last week the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to John McAdams’s request that it bypass the appeals courts and take up his suit directly.

Professor McAdams is now in his seventh semester outside the classroom because of a November 2014 post on his Marquette Warrior blog. The post criticized a graduate instructor, Cheryl Abbate, for telling a student with more traditional views that she would tolerate no dissent on same-sex marriage in her class on ethics.

After the post Ms. Abbate received several ugly emails. Mr. McAdams was blamed and punished, though he had nothing to do with those messages. The university contends that Mr. McAdams’s offense is having identified a student by name—Ms. Abbate. The characterization is telling, because though Ms. Abbate was indeed a grad student she was also a paid employee of the university teaching a course. If any student was harmed here, it was the Marquette undergraduate who was told there was no room for his views in Ms. Abbate’s classroom.

No one forced Marquette to enter into an employment contract with Mr. McAdams. But it did. And that contract says he cannot be fired for exercising a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. By any reasonable standard that would include the First Amendment—even at a Jesuit university.

The Pennsylvania Gazette, my alma mater’s glossy alumni magazine, doesn’t stray far from institutional self-admiration. Or it didn’t, until this month’s issue.

The letters column featured the frank narrative of a class of 1973 undergraduate who says she was sexually harassed by a long-affiliated, greatly honored (and deceased) chairman of the Graduate School of Fine Art. Women in the program called him “the Silver Fox,” the correspondent reports.

She managed to evade an invitation to his island retreat to “model” for him: “Somehow I knew I would avoid him sleeping with me, and I was successful at that,” she writes. But one-on-one sessions to discuss her work were 90 minutes of navigating sexual advances and innuendo.

Sexual harassment has been the official term for this since before Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas in 1991. But in the 1990s, that decade of third-wave feminism, it was assumed that sexual harassment was something conservatives visited upon women to punish them for straying from traditional roles. When Bill Clinton was caught in the act, progressives from Gloria Steinem to Susan Faludi and Ms. Hill herself rushed to confer ideological immunity upon him.

That immunity ended with Hillary Clinton’s political career, as Harvey Weinstein and a host of figures in entertainment, the news media, politics and the arts have learned. The Gazette letter is a sign that progressive immunity is disappearing from an even more politicized zone: higher education.

Not that colleges and universities haven’t come under scrutiny for sexual harassment before. The Obama Education Department’s notorious 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter insisted that Title IX, which prohibits schools receiving federal money from engaging in sex discrimination, required them to abandon due process in adjudicating accusations of sexual misconduct. CONTINUE AT SITE