RUTHFULLY YOURS

Protests against free speech in the name of free speech have become the political flavor du jour. Although the MSM tends to avoid covering these unseemly episodes, anyone with a computer and the interest to go with it can witness online these totalitarian irruptions at universities, colleges and libraries across the continent: Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley, Jordan Peterson at Queen’s University, Heather Mac Donald at Claremont-McKenna, Gavin McInnes at DePaul, Charles Murray at Middlebury, and so on ad vomitatum. But one gets a different perspective — obviously more immediate, more appalling — when one is present at these public displays of doctrinaire belligerence and repressive violence so dear to the Left. One cannot shake a sense of disbelief and moral shock, at least at first.

Just the other day and not for the first time, I experienced this feeling of helpless rage and moral incredulity when my wife Janice Fiamengo was invited by a newly formed undergraduate group, the University of Ottawa Students for Free Speech, to give a lecture titled “Is the University about the Pursuit of Truth or about Protecting Approved Ideologies” at the Ottawa Public Library. When we arrived, we found the doors blocked by a crowd of Antifa offshoots calling themselves, variously, the Revolutionary Student Movement and Ottawa against Fascism, pre-programmed automatons wearing masks, carrying placards and blaring slogans through bullhorns. One of these slogans was paradoxically apt: No Platform for Hate. No Debate.

The tuition at those schools now averages $75,000.00 per year for the total re-education of students into group think “progressives” incapable of debate or respect for dissenting opinions. rsk

The odds of getting into Harvard and other elite universities are slimmer for students who apply in the regular pool than for those who apply in early rounds.

This harsh reality will be driven home when Harvard, Yale, Penn and other Ivy League institutions release their regular-decision admission notices Wednesday evening: Large proportions of their incoming first-year classes were locked in months ago under early-admittance programs.

High-school seniors desperate for a leg up in the brutal competition for spots at selective colleges have increasingly been applying through binding early-decision or more flexible early-action programs, rather than meeting Jan. 1 application deadlines and waiting until spring for an answer.

The admission rate for early-round candidates, who typically learn their fates in December, is often two or three times that of regular applicants. Harvard last year admitted 14.5% of early-action applicants and about 3.3% of regular-decision applicants. At Yale, those rates were 17.1% and 5%, respectively. Many institutions fill 40% or more of their incoming classes with early applicants.

Dartmouth College expects students admitted through its early-decision process to make up nearly half its first-year class next fall. The school received 2,270 early applications, compared with roughly 20,000 in the regular cycle. Early-decision applicants make up 53% of Northwestern University’s current freshman class, and just over half at Vanderbilt University.
​The Early Bird Gets AcceptedIvy League schools take a much higher shareof applicants during early-admission rounds.Admission rates for class of 2021Source: the schools*Columbia’s admission rate combines early- andregular-round admission figures.
Early admitRegular admitBrownColumbia*CornellDartmouthHarvardPrincetonPennYale0%102030

“It’s staggering,” said Brennan Barnard, director of college counseling at the Derryfield School in Manchester, N.H. This year, 62 of his 65 seniors submitted an application by Dec. 1 and about three-quarters of the class had an acceptance coming out of the early rounds. Many apply early not necessarily because they are attached to one particular school, but because they fear missing out on the chance to get in somewhere, he said.

Students see schools’ single-digit acceptance rates, worry about their chances and apply early, perpetuating the rush for another year, says Stephen Friedfeld, chief operating officer at Newton, Mass.-based admission-consulting firm AcceptU.

Early-round applicants are either accepted, rejected or deferred to be reconsidered in the general pool. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continuing its campaign to expose the campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine as neo-Nazis, the David Horowitz Freedom Center placed posters this week on the campuses of the University of Texas-San Antonio and the University of Texas-Arlington. The posters document comments that student activists affiliated with SJP have made on social media praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and calling for the extermination of the Jews. The posters also expose Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of SJP, as an anti-Semite and supporter of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas.

Statements shared by SJP activists on social media, which are documented on the posters include:

“How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough”

“Wow White Jews are so entitled LMFAOOO Please die.”

“Had to write about a leader for DCL class. Wrote about Hitler. Cuz he’s a boss.”

Students for Justice in Palestine was co-founded in 2001 by Hamas-supporting Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian who has openly called for an intifada, or violent uprising, in America, and has shared anti-Semitic memes on social media. One of the posters placed on the campuses exposes Bazian’s recent anti-Semitic tweet which featured a caricature of an Orthodox Jew with the caption “MOM LOOK! I IS CHOSEN! I CAN NOW KILL, RAPE, SMUGGLE ORGANS & AND STEAL THE LAND OF PALESTINIANS *YAY* ASHKE-NAZI.”

SJP employs funds from the terrorist party Hamas—funneled to American campuses through an intermediary group, American Muslims for Palestine, chaired by Professor Bazian—in order to launch an all-out political assault on the Jewish state and to create a climate of hatred towards Jews and students who support Israel on campus.

As a result of this support and funding from Hamas, SJP has become the principal collegiate organization in the Hamas terror network and the campus propaganda war against Israel. It heavily promotes the Hamas-endorsed and funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, a form of economic terrorism which seeks to weaken, delegitimize, and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.

‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” observed― Philip K. Dick in “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.”

Somewhere deep in a file drawer, or on a computer server humming away in a basement, are thousands upon thousands of numbers, with names and identities attached. They’re called grades. They represent an objective reality, which exists independent of what people want reality to be. They sit silently, completely indifferent to indignation, angry petitions, irritable gestures, teachers’ removal from classrooms—all the furor and clamor of institutional politics.

Those numbers are now solely within the control of the individual students who earn them and the educational institutions that generate them—powerful entities ruled by bureaucracies that serve as gatekeepers to privileged positions in our society. They are jealously guarded, protected by cloaks of confidentiality and secrecy. But they are what they are. Hiding facts is not the same as changing them.

Of course the numbers can be ignored. When it comes to grades—which measure students’ knowledge, proficiency and achievement—we can declare they don’t matter and that complete nondisclosure is therefore a wise course.

The problem is that students, including law students, go out into the real world. They are hired, paid and expected to perform, and their actions have real consequences for others. Whether we like it or not, grades help predict future performance. Some social actors acknowledge this, implicitly or overtly. As a law professor, I observe, for example, that federal judges unapologetically select clerks based on academic record and rank, and that elite law firms are also highly grade-conscious.

The diversity imperative demands dissimulation and evasion. The academic-achievement gap, the behavioral differences that produce socioeconomic disparities, and the ubiquity of racial preferences must all be suppressed in public discourse, since they undercut the narrative that white racism is the driving force in American society. This dissimulation was on display last week at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, when Dean Ted Ruger announced that law professor Amy Wax would no longer teach mandatory first-year law courses at the school. In a memo announcing his decision, Ruger accused Wax of “conscious indifference” to truth. It is Ruger, however, who has distorted facts.

Ousting Wax from her first-year civil-procedure class has been a desideratum of the academic Left since she published an op-ed last August celebrating bourgeois virtues like the work ethic, respect for authority, and sexual temperance. Wax was deemed a “white supremacist” for suggesting that not all cultures were equal in preparing people for participation in a modern economy.

In December, Dean Ruger asked her to desist from teaching first-year students and to take a leave of absence, in the hope that the controversy spurred by her op-ed would die down. As a “pluralistic dean,” he said, he needed to accommodate all factions in the school. Wax declined the request and reported the details of the conversation immediately thereafter to friends. (I was one of the people to whom she spoke.) Wax later described the conversation in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Ruger denied her account through a spokesman, claiming that he had merely engaged in a pro forma discussion of her sabbatical schedule, such as he would have done with any other professor. Ruger’s version is not credible, though: in an informal survey, no law professor polled reports ever having a dean drop by his office to discuss a routine sabbatical. This alleged bureaucratic convention does not exist, unless Dean Ruger has only recently introduced it.

In August 2017, Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Larry Alexander, a law professor at the University of San Diego, wrote an article arguing that we are paying the price for the loss of values that we had up to the mid-60s. They listed those values as:

“Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

They argued that these values are superior to what we have today such as “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks and the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

One could hardly imagine a more innocuous article, yet the blowback has been escalating ever since and Black Lives Matter plans to sow chaos on Penn’s campus if Dr. Wax is not fired.

Note that while single parenthood is a bigger problem in the black community than in the white community, Amy Wax and Larry Alexander went out of their way to describe it as a characteristic of the white community, because they wanted to stress that people from all segments of our society have lost the values of the past. Wax emphasized that “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” and that “bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead” in an interview about her article with the Daily Pennsylvanian.

The efforts of Wax and Alexander to be evenhanded didn’t protect them from false accusations of racism and white supremacism from organizations at Penn. It didn’t stop 33 Penn Law faculty members from publishing a letter in the Daily Pennsylvanian condemning Amy Wax.

There’s something horribly wrong with the world when language is policed to such a degree that calling a woman a woman is controversial. However, that’s the world we live in.

The most recent example comes from Mount Holyoke College.

For those unfamiliar with Mount Holyoke, it’s a small college in Massachusetts with an enrollment of just over 2,200. All students are women.

That’s right. Mount Holyoke does not allow men. So you might think they would not have the absurd SJW issues with gender that you see at co-ed universities, because Mount Holyoke clearly believes that gender is a fact.

Nope. A school-produced guide titled Supporting Trans and Non-Binary Students instructs professors: “When discussing the student body, say ‘Mount Holyoke students’ rather than ‘Mount Holyoke women.'”

It adds: “Avoid making statements like ‘We’re all women here … ‘, or referring to ‘… the two genders.'”

Hold on: why might someone who does not identify as a woman be at an all-women’s school?

The guide continues: “[M]any students spend the first day of class braced against various types of disrespect … professors who mispronounce their names, call them by the wrong name entirely, misgender them, and so on.”

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Until last week, I’d never heard of Amy Wax. She is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who landed in hot water after she co-authored a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed last August 9 with Larry Alexander, who teaches law at the University of San Diego. Under the headline “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture,” Wax and Alexander began their piece by listing some of the sociocultural pathologies currently plaguing America – low job skills, widespread opioid abuse, inner-city gang violence, one-parent homes, and high-school and college students who lack basic skills. They went on to attribute these problems to “the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.”

They recalled the precepts by which Americans lived in the mid twentieth century: get married before you have kids; try to avoid divorce; get educated; work hard; be patriotic, neighborly, charitable, respectful, and law-abiding. Yes, they admitted, mid-century America was hardly perfect. There was racism; there were rebels who broke the rules. But the rules themselves were good. They resulted in “productivity, educational gains and social coherence.” Now they’re gone, replaced in many subcultures by “antisocial habits,” “rap culture,” “anti-assimilation ideas,” an obsession with group identity, and other destructive forces that do a terrible job of preparing young people for responsible adult lives.

Every word of that op-ed was sheer common sense. (As NYU professor Jonathan Haidt observed, Wax’s concerns about the black subculture were expressed in the 1960 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who at the time “was roundly condemned as a racist” but whose analysis is now echoed by countless sociologists.) Yet the op-ed was widely seen as scurrilous. The very next day, the Daily Pennsylvanian ran an interview with Wax in which she declared that “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms” were “superior” to others. “I don’t shrink from the word, ‘superior,’” she said. “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” She underscored that Western norms “aren’t just for white people” but “can help minorities get ahead.”