RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/27/the-plague-that-besets-our-schools-is-extensive/

The year, now a quarter old, reveals that the country’s rapid slide into educational purgatory is moving apace. Leading off the grossness parade is a school in Oklahoma where students lick and suck the armpits and toes of their fellow students in the name of charity. (This may garner a shrug in San Francisco, but Oklahoma?!)

While no district personnel were directly involved, video footage from Deer Creek High School in Edmond, OK, showed mid-teens participating in and watching the disgusting events unfold.

Getting caught with their pants down—so to speak—the school leaders assured us that no staff or faculty were involved in the cringeworthy event. But then the school became upbeat about the happenings. It celebrated the fact that the licker/suckers raised $152,000 for charity, asserting, “We would like to thank all of the patrons, businesses, and sponsors who contributed to the success of this year’s Wonderful Week of Fundraising.”

In other pervy news, Elk Grove, CA, parents discovered in January that a 3rd-grade teacher was inviting all the 3rd through 6th-grade classes to a new LGBTQ club he was starting. The “UBU Club” was for “boys who crush on boys” and “girls who crush on girls,” but anyone could come, the kids were told. Yet, most tellingly, parents weren’t notified about the club.

Also, in California, a bill introduced in January is now going through the legislative process. If passed, it will require that public high schools notify students where they can get free condoms on campus and allow schools to distribute condoms during sex education classes for middle and high school students.

https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/65704/professors-at-embattled-rutgers-center-call-for

Palestinian Arabs “have sought a future of liberation from the river to the sea for all peoples,” claimed Noura Erakat, a Rutgers University associate professor of Africana studies during a late February webinar. Although she tried to whitewash this

Palestinian Arabs “have sought a future of liberation from the river to the sea for all peoples,” claimed Noura Erakat, a Rutgers University associate professor of Africana studies during a late February webinar. Although she tried to whitewash this well-known call for the genocide of all Israeli Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, her comments to Rutgers’ Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR) remained objectively horrifying.Erakat addressed the webinar on the topic of “Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine,” the title of her 2019 book. Israel’s ongoing campaign to destroy the jihadist terrorist organization Hamas following its brutal Oct. 7 massacre was the background for her discussion.

Sahar Aziz, the factually challenged director of CSRR and its jihadist apologetics, moderated the webinar. CSRR recently drew the scrutiny of Washington lawmakers in the wake of revelations that Adeel Mangi, nominated by President Joe Biden to the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, formerly served on the Center’s advisory board.

Moreover, recent research revealed that Aziz received $143,000 from anti-Israel billionaire George Soros’s network and that Erakat “participated in an online workshop along with senior Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad.”

Their comments on law and “Palestine” confirmed lawmakers’ concerns about the Center.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-union-dues-are-being-used-against-israel-mit-grad-school-d106b26a?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Cambridge, Mass.

“Your objection to paying dues or fees is based on your political views and not your religious belief.” That is what my union told me when I objected to paying dues to a union that seeks the destruction of Israel.

I came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021 to get a doctorate in computer science. I consider myself a student, but the National Labor Relations Board in 2016 brushed aside decades of precedent and ruled that graduate students are employees subject to unionization. A plurality of MIT graduate students (46.7%) voted to install the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, known as UE, as our exclusive bargaining agent, and the university capitulated to its demand for a contract with mandatory dues.

UE endorses the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and “urges the union at all levels to become engaged in BDS.” Minutes of a meeting in 2020 of the MIT Graduate Student Union confirm that the UE local is engaged in BDS. The GSU website uses Squarespace , according to a member of the union organizing committee, because “Wix is an Israli-owned [sic] company, which conflicts with BDS.”

Since Oct. 7, Jewish students at MIT have been terrorized by anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate on campus. When the university warned unruly protesters who were occupying a building that they risked suspension, the GSU backed the protesters and condemned “MIT’s threats against students exercising their basic First Amendment rights.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/christina-cross-plagiarism-accusations

Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article title “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”

Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.

According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”

I have obtained a copy of the complaint, which documents a pattern of misappropriation in Cross’s dissertation and one other academic paper. The complaint begins with a dozen allegations of plagiarism related to the dissertation that range in severity from small bits of “duplicative language,” which may not constitute an offense, to multiple passages heavily plagiarized from other sources without proper attribution. (Cross did not respond to a request for comment.)

The most serious allegation is that Cross lifted an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Stacey Bosick and Paula Fomby titled “Family Instability in Childhood and Criminal Offending During the Transition Into Adulthood” without citing the source or placing verbatim language in quotations. Here is the paragraph from Bosick and Fomby:

We use data from the PSID and two of its supplemental studies, the Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS). PSID began in 1968 as a nationally representative sample of approximately 4,800 households. Original respondents and their descendants have been followed annually until 1997 and biennially since then. To maintain population representativeness, a sample refresher in 1997 added approximately 500 households headed by immigrants who had entered the United States since 1968. At each wave, the household head or the spouse or cohabiting partner of the head reports on family household composition, employment, earned and unearned income, assets, debt, educational attainment, expenditures, housing characteristics, and health and health care in the household. In 2015 (the most recent wave available), the study collected information on almost 25,000 individuals in approximately 9,000 households.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dismantling-leftist-indoctrination-on-campus

Americans rightly see former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as an intellectual lightweight who ascended to her position because academia now values identity over merit. Gay was the avatar for the governing ideology of American higher education. Until Gay’s downfall began with the now-infamous congressional hearing in December 2023, campus diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) commissars saw their positions as morally and administratively unassailable. Even after her ouster, Gay’s colleagues have every right to feel secure in their posts. Sure, Americans, acting through their elected representatives, can exert enough pressure to get Harvard’s president replaced. But with so many anti-Semitic ideologues inside and outside DEI bureaucracies, whacking a mole or two won’t make a systemic difference, right?

Wrong. Americans can decide in 2024 whether to allow our universities to remain structurally anti-Semitic. Consider the case of Middlebury College. Last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that shortly after Hamas murdered more than 1,000 Israelis, raped an untold number of women, and beheaded babies on October 7, 2023, Jewish students at Middlebury asked the college to host a vigil for the victims. Shockingly, Middlebury refused to permit the students to hold the event in the campus chapel, refused to provide police protection, asked them not to display Israeli flags, and insisted that they not identify the victims as Jewish. All in the name of “inclusivity.” (The vigil ended up being held outside.)

Shortly thereafter, Middlebury provided access to the chapel and police protection for an event titled, “Vigil for Palestine.” It began with a sectarian Islamic prayer and featured remarks from Middlebury’s vice president of equity and inclusion, Khuram Hussain, who conveniently did not attend the Jewish vigil. The director of StandWithUs’s Center for Legal Justice, the legal arm of the well-known Jewish advocacy organization, told the Free Beacon that “the Middlebury administration seems to think they’re off the radar and can get away with the disparate treatment of Jewish students because everyone is focused on Harvard.” The center filed a federal Title VI civil rights complaint, arguing that “there’s not just a hostile environment for Jewish students; the administration also seems to be directly complicit.”

THE $20 MILLION COST OF DEI AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.
Last week we launched our investigation highlighting that the University of Virginia – a public institution funded by the taxpayers – was sinking $20 MILLION every year to pay 235 staffers in roles related to far-left Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) philosophy.

(DEI is a race-essentialist, neo-Marxist world view that creates division based on skin color, perceived privilege, gender identity and an oppressed-oppressor model).

Those millions went to professors, administrators and student employees – 235 of them – in overlapping departments. Aside from the official DEI Department, there’s an Equity Center, an office for Multicultural Student Services, and plenty more.

Our investigation spread like wildfire. Elon Musk tweeted “wow” replying to our findings. The U.S. House subcommittee on Higher Education and the Workforce Development cited it.

Additional coverage included:

Jesse Waters’ Primetime and The Ingraham Angle at Fox News Channel (2 million viewers each)
nightly news segments and my five minute interview aired on the 200 ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox local affiliates of Sinclair Broadcast Group (1.4 million viewers)
my interview at Newt Gingrich podcast; Men’s Journal Everyday Warrior Podcast
my interviews on local Virginia talk radio in Charlottesville and across the state
Washington Examiner; Washington Times; Instapundit; Real Clear Politics; The Federalist; American Thinker; and many more.
Our story led coverage across the nation and aired on FOX News Radio Rundown with Tomi Lahren, a comprehensive story at the Daily Mail, and on the editorial page of The New York Post.

Thursday, Washington Examiner investigative journalist Gabe Kaminsky published a stunning follow-up.

Just days after October 7, UVA Professor Tessa Farmer offered students extra credit to attend an event hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine.

(A group that had openly cheered the vicious attacks, and its chapter at Columbia University was eventually suspended for threatening rhetoric).

READ: U of Virginia DEI Staff Privately Downplayed Professor’s Pro-Hamas Rally Extra Credit Offer.

Kaminsky published the emails from DEI staffers. What did students and taxpayers receive for our $20 MILLION annual investment into their payroll?

Confusion about how to respond. An obvious lack of moral clarity. Not one of the DEI staffers lamented promoting an event from a radical group.

I sat with Gabe this week to discuss the waste of tax dollars that’s been sunk into this mess – for which students and taxpayers deserve some answers and recourse.

VIDEO: THE COST OF DEI AT UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA WITH INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST GABE KAMINSKY

Virginia is for Lovers is the popular state tourism catchphrase – but on campus, the university seems to be for conflict and division.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/columbia-university-professor-jeffrey-sachs-u-s-is-complicit-in-israeli-genocide-in-gaza/

Columbia University’s Director of the Center for Sustainable Development said Sunday that U.S. support for Israel makes America complicit in genocide.

Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia professor and Harvard-educated climate activist, joined Al Jazeera‘s “The Bottom Line” this weekend to discuss Hamas’s war on Israel, which he said could end if the United States stopped supplying munitions to its longtime ally.

“Of course, what the government of Israel doing, is unconscionable. World opinion is united against Israel,” Sachs said. “The problem is the United States remains complicit in these war crimes because it’s traditional in U.S. politics that politicians show no space between the United States and Israel.”

“It is, I think quite likely, that the International Court of Justice is going to find that Israel is in violation of the genocide convention. And does the United States want to be complicit in genocide?” he added. “This is a pretty straightforward question.”

Sachs called Israel’s campaign in Gaza “absolutely inhumane,” and blasted Israeli Defense Forces for destroying universities, mosques, and hospitals — civilian hideouts Hamas terrorists are known to take cover in. Nations should also resume and increase funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), a Palestinian aid agency that houses thousands of Hamas affiliates, Sachs added.

“UNRWA does heroic work in a war zone,” he said. “And it has lost a huge number of staff to this war. Israel targets the United Nations. Israel uses the United Nations as its punching bag, and UNRWA has taken the brunt of this.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/14/teacher-pay-half-truths-and-reality/

Benjamin Franklin once famously quipped, “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” Today, however, we can alter that to “death, taxes, and a slew of myths about teacher pay.”

Leading the half-truth brigade, on March 4, a headline in My eLearning World read, “New Teachers Are Earning 20% Less Than They Were 20 Years Ago.” The piece informs us that if starting salaries for new teachers had kept pace with inflation over the last 20 years, a teacher just starting out would currently be making $53,303 per year. Instead, using data from the National Education Association, the website asserts that the average annual income for a new teacher is $42,844.

The California School Boards Association laments that California teachers make more than the national average but less than a living wage.

A National Center for Educational Statistics table shows that, using constant dollars, the average teacher salary in 2022 was $66,397, compared to $72,050 in 2010.

However, the above assertions are essentially meaningless when assessing what teachers really make. As Just Facts notes, in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher in the U.S. made $66,397 in salary but received another $34,090 in benefits (such as health insurance, paid leave, and pensions) for a total compensation of $100,487.