RUTHFULLY YOURS

An American University student has launched a website where people can sign up to have their ashes mailed to a Republican member of Congress as a way to protest the Republicans’ health-care bill.

Yes, seriously.

MailmetotheGOP.com, which was created by AU junior Zoey Jordan Salisbury last week, contains a simple “Send my ashes to the GOP” form with six questions: “First Name,” “Last Name,” “Email,” “Zip/Postal Code,” “Congressperson(s) to be mailed to,” and, finally, “Why will you die because of the Republican health care bill?”

“Will you die because of AHCA?” the homepage asks. “Let them know.”

According to an article in the Washington Post, the website already had hundreds of submissions as of Saturday. And although it isn’t clear how many of these people are actually intending to go through with sending their ashes to Republicans, Salisbury told the Post that she would be talking with estate planners and helping people who do want to go through with it to write their wills.

Now, I am certainly no fan of the Republicans’ health-care bill in its current form. After all, one reason that medical care has become so expensive is that it’s a market that’s almost entirely controlled by the government and big insurance companies, and this bill keeps it that way. What’s more, it could easily make some of the problems that have occurred under Obamacare even worse. For example: One reason that premiums have been rising under Obamacare is that the individual mandate has not done its job of convincing a large enough number of people to sign up. And the Republicans’ replacement for the mandate — allowing insurance companies to charge the people who have been out of the market more money if and when they do decide to re-enter it — is hardly going to solve this problem. It’s not rocket science: If you’re trying to convince people who have been out of the market to get into the market, charging those people more is not exactly the best way to convince them to do so.

But all legislation technicalities aside, the larger and more important point when it comes to people like Salisbury is that knee-jerk alarmist tactics against entitlement reform scare us away from finding the best solutions to problems — because it completely eliminates consideration of the solutions that come from the free market.

The idea that the only way people can get the things that they need is through the government is a false one.

As Ira Stoll explains in a article for Reason, the OMG-we’re-all-gonna-die attitude that we’re hearing from opponents of Obamacare repeal sounds a lot like the “warnings . . . against throwing poor mothers and children off welfare and into the streets” that we were hearing from opponents of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996. But what actually wound up happening? As Stoll notes, it was far from the gruesome carnage that the alarmists had predicted. Some of the welfare recipients started working, others turned to charities to receive the services that they had been receiving from the government, and “infant mortality, crime, and domestic violence all declined” — leading Stoll to conclude that “some mix of government and market-based solutions will no doubt similarly rise to meet the needs of those who had been receiving health insurance coverage via the Obamacare exchanges or Medicaid expansion.”

Black students at Harvard University are holding their own graduation ceremony away from white students in what BET says is “the first of its kind” and “took nearly a year to plan.”

One of the graduates who helped plan the blacks-only graduation, Michael Huggins, said, “This is an opportunity to celebrate Harvard’s Black excellence and Black brilliance. It’s an event where we can see each other and our parents and family can see us as a collective, whole group. A community.”

However, Huggins ensures this segregated event is anything but segregation:

“This is not about segregation. It’s about fellowship and building a community. This is a chance to reaffirm for each other that we enter the work world with a network of supporters standing with us. We are all partners.”

The BET notes that Harvard reports a 96% graduation rate for its black students “who remain in school for an average of six years.” This ceremony is modeled after blacks-only ceremonies held at Stanford, Temple, and Columbia.

Another black graduate, Courtney Woods, told The Root, “Harvard’s institutional foundation is in direct conflict with the needs of black students. There is a legacy of slavery, epistemic racism and colonization at Harvard, which was an institution founded to train rising imperialist leaders. This is a history that we are reclaiming.”

Over 125 graduate students are registered for the ceremony and were able to raise $27,000 to cover the costs and a reception. The Root notes:

The ceremony, which will focus on graduate students, comes at a time when the experiences of many black students, undergraduate and grad, on college campuses in America have been marked by incidents of overt racism, microaggressions, passive racist comments, and the marginalization of minority experiences in both reading assignments and learning materials.

Remember, kids, there is no “overt racism” in segregating as long as it’s not a whites-only ceremony.

Recently, conservative author Ann Coulter canceled a speech at UC Berkeley because of Berkeley’s ham-handed response to radical students’ threats. In February, Berkeley had been the scene of violent riots that prevented a Breitbart News editor, Milo Yiannopoulos, from speaking. Berkeley is the nation’s leading public university, according to US News, and ironically, it was the birthplace of the free-speech movement of the 1960s.

Berkeley professor and former secretary of labor Robert Reich has concocted a conspiracy theory that avers that Yiannopoulos himself was responsible for the riots. However, Reich needs to explain how the supposed conspiracy has traveled back and forth between Berkeley, California and Middlebury, Vermont, where in early March rioting students physically injured Professor Allison Stanger, who was accompanying IQ expert Charles Murray to his car after demonstrators prevented him from speaking.

Fox News has reported that in anticipation of further riots, police from 40 schools have taken part in special response training.

Despite ongoing campus intolerance and violence, over the past few weeks I have participated in campus debates and discussions at Brooklyn College, where I teach, and at Lafayette College, where I gave an invited talk as part of the Wilson lecture series. Both institutions are dominated by left-oriented faculty and students, yet the interactions that I witnessed were respectful, collegial, and enlightening.

At Brooklyn College I have run a lecture series funded by the John Templeton Foundation and administered by the Institute for Humane Studies. My speakers have included Donald Trump’s executive vice president, George H. Ross, who was co-star of The Apprentice; Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Committee; and two economists, Oren Levin-Waldman and William T. Alpert, respectively of Metropolitan College and the University of Connecticut, who took different positions on the minimum wage issue. Students who are critical of Trump, who are opposed to the activities of the National Right to Work Committee, and who are in favor of a minimum wage were able to debate vigorously, rationally, and respectfully both with the speakers and with each other.

At Lafayette, I discussed my research findings concerning the preponderance of Democratic and left-oriented faculty in elite universities. Both left-oriented and conservative students debated with me and each other in a lengthy question-and-answer session. All three of the Brooklyn College events as well as the Lafayette event went overtime, and the students expressed enthusiasm for ideas without rancor.

What’s the difference? Why are elite institutions like Berkeley and Middlebury ridden with intolerant extremism and violence, with a leading faculty member attempting to rationalize such violence with a conspiracy theory?

The University of California at Los Angeles boasts a winning tradition and student Keith Fink was something of an academic Johnny Wooden. Fink won three consecutive National Collegiate Debate championships, went on to complete law school, then returned to UCLA to teach in the same department as his college debate coach Thomas Miller.

Professor Fink, also a practicing attorney, began teaching at UCLA in 2008 and proved popular with students, particularly on the subject of free speech. The courses, on the other hand, did not earn respect from politically correct campus bosses who have restricted access to his classes and now, he says, seek to have him fired. As professor Fink told Frontpage:

“They are all afraid of a vocal, rational intelligent conservative who can provide a check on the progressive narrative they seek to indoctrinate the students with and empowers the students with knowledge of their rights on how to fight against the UC when their rights are being violated.”

The campaign against professor Fink is relatively recent and duly turned up in the student newspaper. In January, Evolet Chiu wrote in the Daily Bruin, “Dozens of UCLA students are frustrated with their inability to enroll in a communication studies class this quarter, despite receiving a permission-to-enroll number from their instructor.” The PTE numbers were not honored for Communication Studies 167: “Sex, Politics and Race: Free Speech on Campus.”

Professor Fink handed out 41 PTE numbers but the next day “received several emails from students who were unenrolled from the course by the UCLA Registrar’s Office.” It was the first time such a thing had happened “in a decade of teaching at UCLA.”

One of those unenrolled was fourth-year student Taryn Jacobson, who told the Daily Bruin “This class is of utmost importance to me, being that I want to go to law school and (Fink) has so much knowledge to offer.”

As Chiu noted, new department chair Kerri Johnson also restricted professor Fink’s class size for Communication Studies M172: “Free Speech in the Workplace.” Johnson construed it as an issue of class size to ensure a “productive learning environment.” For professor Fink, “This is a violation of academic freedom, a violation of (UCLA’s) own rules and students’ rights. Students are not being treated with equity here.”

Associate professor and new department chair Kerri Johnson is not an attorney. As she explains, her research includes: “How/why does the way that we move our bodies communicate whether we are a man or woman, gay/lesbian or heterosexual, angry or sad?” Johnson is also co-author of “Swagger, sway and sexuality: Judging sexual orientation from body motion and morphology.” Kerri Johnson is also listed in UCLA’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies department, not known for commitment to objective truth, intellectual diversity, freedom of speech and due process.

Teachers at Highlands Elementary, a school in Edina, Minnesota, are indoctrinating five-year-olds in order to radicalize them and encourage them to become activists obsessed with race.

Public school teachers across America already saturate students with information about racial injustice in America in a nonstop barrage of historic facts and ahistorical nonsense. And in the culture at large, the media, politicians, and the entertainment industry can’t stop talking about race. The last thing any young student in America needs is to be taught about is race. Race matters only to radicals.

Leftists believe you have to get ’em while they’re young and impressionable.

Marxist theorist Paolo Freire advocated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that schools be used to inculcate radical values in students so they become agents of social change. Freire held that the so-called dominant pedagogy “silences” poor and minority children and that there is no such thing as a neutral educational system.

Joining Freire in his desire to use the educational system to level institutions is unrepentant communist terrorist and education theorist Bill Ayers, who has long advocated poisoning the minds of the young so they can agitate to fundamentally transform American society.

“If we want change to come, we would do well not to look at the sites of power we have no access to; the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon,” he said in 2012. “We have absolute access to the community, the school, the neighborhood, the street, the classroom, the workplace, the shop, the farm.”

This brings us to Highlands Elementary, which is located in one of the most affluent cities in Minnesota. Its school district is among the best in the state, Daniel Lattier reports at Intellectual Takeout. Highlands students do well in standardized testing: more than 85 percent of its students are proficient in reading and math.

But racial and social justice indoctrination have found their way onto the Highlands curriculum over the past year, according to Lattier. The phenomenon is not limited to Highlands, he adds. “[A] large percentage of students in public schools today are being trained to view the world primarily through the lenses of race, class, and gender.”

Katie Mahoney, who took over as principal of Highlands last fall, is proud of the school’s “Melanin Project.” She tweeted April 26: “Kindergarten tackles the Melanin project! @edinaschools @LeslieStageberg[.]” (Leslie Stageberg is a teacher.)

A poster made of construction paper is shown that reads, “Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone elses[sic]! Everyone is Special!”

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.