RUTHFULLY YOURS

Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea from Encounter Books. You can preview the book here.

Retired Professor Armando Simon offered us his thoughtful reflections on the rotten state of American universities and colleges in “A Professor Looks at the College Racket.”

Racket, indeed. We are indebted to Professor Simon for outing his colleagues. Like victims of the numbers racket or the drug racket, undergraduate students in America are being fleeced and harmed instead of given the opportunity to acquire a real education. Even the serious, career-oriented engineering or pre-med student, in order to graduate, must submit to courses that are part of what Roger Kimball has called “the vast cornucopia of absurdity that is university life today.”

Surveys show that most college graduates don’t know what you would expect an educated person to know – and how could they?

Professor Simon also offers this thought:

It did not always use to be like this. One of the most intelligent things that the United States Congress ever did (and, yes, sometimes it does something intelligent; not lately, though) was to provide returning veterans of World War II with the opportunity to go to college in order to go to a university in order to get a career instead of giving veterans the traditional “war bonus.” Thus began the rise of universities and community colleges. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, over a third of the population has a bachelor’s degree or higher, whereas in 1940 it was 4%.

Here again Professor Simon’s words no doubt meet with widespread agreement. Praise of the G.I. Bill is about as universal as condemnation of the deplorable state of higher education. But there is a problem here: those “universities and community colleges” are the epicenter of the racket Professor Simon is exposing. What if that explosion – 4% to over a third of the population – was not a good thing? What if that was what destroyed higher education in America?

Three months ago, riots broke out at the University of California at Berkeley over a planned talk by the provocative journalist Milo Yiannopoulos. Last month the outspoken polemicist Ann Coulter cancelled her planned talk on that campus after the university said it couldn’t guarantee her safety. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/universities-have-caved-in-to-dogma-and-thuggery-ndcvfw57h

I was invited to Berkeley last week to talk about the Arab-Israel conflict at its Hillel centre for Jewish students. In the light of the uproar over controversial speakers, however, Hillel decided it was too dangerous for me to speak there. So I was disinvited.

I ended up speaking with no advertising or publicity in a “safe house” to which students were invited individually. In effect, they had to be coaxed to venture out. This is because reaction against pro-Israel speakers on campus is now so violent that many Jewish students at Berkeley are too frightened to attend any such presentations.

I’m in America on a speaking tour, talking to a variety of groups about the assorted political convulsions taking place throughout both the West and the Middle East.

In the US, one campus after another is now being dragged into a spiral of violence, intimidation and censorship. When Heather Mac Donald, a distinguished academic and critic of Black Lives Matter, tried to speak at Claremont McKenna College in California last month students ringed the building chanting abuse and banging on the windows. She eventually fled through the kitchen into an unarmed police van outside. At Middlebury College in Vermont in March a professor was hospitalised after being attacked when she tried to shield the social scientist Charles Murray, the author of a study on racial differences in intelligence, who was being driven out of a lecture hall by a violent mob.

According to a survey by Spiked magazine, more than nine out of ten British universities restrict free speech in some way, clamping down on ideas, literature or guest speakers that fall foul of one shibboleth or another. The Wall Street Journal reported that in a survey of 800 US college students, 51 per cent supported speech codes. Dozens of people invited to speak on campus have had their invitations withdrawn or their presentations disrupted, while university staff have been harassed with accusations of racism, micro-aggression or cultural insensitivity.

Overall responsibility for this anarchy rests with faculty members and university authorities. Many universities have stopped being crucibles of reason and knowledge and turned instead into ideological battlegrounds on which protected groups promoting the demonisation of white society or other presumed “oppressors” suppress any challenge to their dogma.

University authorities have actively assisted the culture of zero tolerance for opposing views. Lecturers have been disciplined for teaching ideas that fall foul of prevailing orthodoxies. Universities have cravenly given in to violence and intimidation. On many US campuses students are limited to small “free speech zones” in which to exercise the right to express their views. Failure to observe the limits of such zones can result in disciplinary action and even arrest.

This week I spoke on the Berkeley campus. A transcript of my remarks follows below the video.

I’m on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, where conservative speakers are being systematically censored by violent protests designed to prevent them from speaking. I am on Sproul plaza in the centre of the campus, where free speech was supposedly enshrined back in the sixties but where it is now appallingly being suppressed.

This is the campus where conservative views are called fascism and shouted down. As you can see from these posters on this campus noticeboard.

This is where Jewish students in particular are being intimidated by threatening pro-Palestinian demonstrators. I was originally asked to speak at Berkeley Hillel, the Jewish student centre here. But remarkably, even that was considered too dangerous for me.

So I spoke instead to Jewish students at another, more discreet centre. These students had to be personally coaxed to attend my meeting – because Jewish students at Berkeley are now too frightened for their own safety to attend pro-Israel presentations. That is the truly shocking state of affairs in this prestigious seat of learning today.

I was invited to speak to Jewish students here in order to provide facts about the Arab-Israel dispute that even many pro-Israel people may not know. So this is what I told the students.

Should we support a two-state solution? If the Palestinians were to accept a state of Palestine living in peace alongside the State of Israel, whose existence as a Jewish state they would accept, I would certainly accept that and I guess most Israelis would accept it too. But when you look at certain facts, which most people either deliberately ignore or suppress or don’t even know, you realise the question itself is a tremendous red herring.

First fact. The two-state solution is actually part of the problem. It is not a modern solution at all. It dates from before the State of Israel even came into being.

In 1922 the British accepted a Mandate to administer Palestine and to settle the Jews throughout that land. When they found themselves up against sustained Arab terrorism against both themselves and the returning Jews, the British offered the Arabs in 1937 a slice of Palestine, to create an Arab state alongside the Jewish homeland.

The Arabs refused, as they have refused every such subsequent offer of a state alongside Israel — offers made in 1947, 2000 and 2008. While the Jews have accepted every such proposal for a two-state solution, the Arab response has been instead to wage yet more war or terrorism against the Jews.

But the point is that the two-state solution was always from the start an attempt to appease terrorism. The British response to the Arabs’ murder campaign was in effect to reward them for it — by offering them part of the Jews’ own legal entitlement to the land, and thus breaking the terms of the Mandate.

In a short, remarkably (particularly for San Francisco State University) neutral piece titled “Campus posters allege student group ties to terrorists,” the school’s student-run Golden Gate Express reported on the David Horowitz Freedom Center campus campaign to distribute posters on campus identifying student group connections to anti-Israel terrorism. The article is reposted below:

The David Horowitz Freedom Center distributed posters on campus today as part of a campaign criticizing Students for Justice in Palestine of being puppets for Hamas terrorists.

The posters, also posted on Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus website run by the Freedom Center, portray the SJP as servants to Hamas.

The campaign comes as part of the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s fight against schools that provide “financial and institutional support” to student members of Students for Justice in Palestine and other campus organizations that “support the agendas of these terrorists and spread their propaganda lies,” according to the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s public statement. Both posters contain the hashtag #NoSupportForCampusTerrorists.

“Our poster campaign has a dual purpose,” said Freedom Center founder David Horowitz in a public statement. “It exposes the truth about SJP’s ties to anti-Israel terrorism and its glorification of terrorists like Rasmieh Odeh and it challenges the administration at San Francisco State to defend speech that deviates from the typical anti-Israel narrative that dominates on campus.”

The David Horowitz Freedom Center ranked SF State seventh in a “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment” list last Fall. The report accused the University of “continuing to promote SJP on their campuses while actively working to suppress speech that exposes the truth about SJP and its ties to terrorism.”

The website claims that the posters will be distributed at all 10 of the listed campuses including nearby University of California, Berkeley.

A California appellate court has unanimously rejected an attempt by the Anaheim Elementary School District to throw out a petition by parents to convert a failing school into a charter using the state’s parent trigger law. The district wasted two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting parents. Can the parents sue for damages?

California’s 2010 parent trigger law allows a majority of parents whose kids attend a failing school to catalyze reforms. In January 2015, Palm Lane Elementary School parents with the help of the law’s author Gloria Romero and education activist Alfonso Flores filed a petition with the school district. The teachers’ union abetted by district officials then used dirty tricks to thwart parents, including accusations of bribery. When intimidation failed, district officials tried to reject the petition on technical points, every one of which was dismissed by the appellate court.

The district claimed Palm Lane didn’t qualify as failing because California had obtained a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education that exempted schools from Adequate Yearly Progress benchmarks for the 2013-2014 school year. Yet Palm Lane had failed to meet those benchmarks for nine of the prior 10 years.

The appellate court affirmed the findings of Orange County Superior Court judge Andrew Banks who in July 2015 ruled in favor of the parents on all counts and blasted the district for being “unreasonable, arbitrary, capricious and unfair.” The school district appealed.

Maybe district officials were hoping that parents, who were represented pro bono by Kirkland & Ellis, would drop the case once their kids moved to middle school. But in the two years that the case has sat on appeal, the district and parents have racked up more legal expenses. And students have continued to be deprived of a quality education.

The appellate court ordered the district to cover the parents’ legal fees, but that won’t make up for the lost education. The district will merely pass on the costs to state and local taxpayers including Palm Lane parents who own homes in the district. The outrage is that this disgrace generates no outrage.

It’s so normal now for universities to surrender when confronted with the fear of force coming from the left that what follows is only local story on Channel 8 in Salinas:

Students protesting what they believe is a “hostile climate” toward black students at the University of California Santa Cruz were locked inside an administrative building for three days until they scored a sweeping victory Thursday.

Members of the university’s African/Black Student Alliance organization took over Kerr Hall Tuesday, locked all of the doors, covered the windows with slogan-filled posters, and vowed to not leave until their demands were met.

“If the university fails us, there will be no business as usual,” A/BSA told the university’s newspaper.

That’s a pretty explicit threat of disruption by force.

But don’t worry: a heroic surrender was on the way.

Despite fearing for his safety, Chancellor George Blumenthal sat down at a negotiating table with 10 protesters at 4 p.m. Thursday.

Blumenthal declined to meet protesters inside Kerr Hall because he had received threats. Instead, the meeting was moved to the biology building, and Blumenthal agreed to meet all four of the group’s demands.

The student’s primary demand was over the Rosa Parks African-themed house, as well as combating racism at the university.

As far as the Rosa Parks residence house, some of what was demanded could have been discussed and probably achieved with much less trouble. They wanted control of the lounge. Fine. Just ask. They wanted the university to repaint the house in their own bright colors. How about offering to repaint it yourselves, instead of demanding that the university spend a lot of money hiring people to do it? You’ll get it done the way you want it, and self-reliance is a virtue that even Kwanzaa pays lip service to.