RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/upenn-laws-race-inquisitors-seek-to-silence-amy-wax/

When he wryly observed that “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,” Orwell may well have had academia in mind, where challenging prevailing ideology can have a calamitous effect on one’s reputation and career—something especially true of faculty.

One ubiquitous ideology in academia now is an obsession with race, manifested in the relentless pursuit of recruiting and retaining minority students as part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion, (DEI) campaign. The campaign for diversity is based on an assumed, but unproven, assumption that diverse student populations are automatically superior to non-diverse ones, and that diversity not only benefits minority students but all students and the university as a whole. This belief is accepted by woke virtue-signaling administrators and diversocrats as a given, but it is certainly still a topic that can be questioned, critiqued, and challenged, and a faculty member has the right to not accept it as settled doctrine.

DEI bureaucracies have also had another unintended, negative side-effect, namely, that minority students are counseled to see themselves as victims of systemic racism—both in their own universities and in the country as a whole. Students have quickly realized that once they are designated as victims and given a bucket of accommodations and benefits not enjoyed by their white and Asian peers, they have become emboldened to demand further concessions—one significant one being the “right” not to be challenged or offended by the views of others that question the prevailing dogma on liberal campuses.

Actual racism—from faculty, students, and administrators—is so rare and benign that in order to identify cases where racism reveals itself, university diversocrats and the student victims they serve must assiduously ferret out examples of racist thought and behavior—including accusations of systemic racism, invisible racism, triggers, microaggressions, white privilege, and, recently, instances when faculty or students have defended law enforcement or criticized the motives and tactics of Black Lives Matter. Any challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy of these victim students and their administrative enablers are stamped down, attacked, and deemed racist and indicative of white supremacy. And when it is faculty members who dare to question affirmative action, diversity, systemic racism, and white supremacy, the wrath of the woke mob is immediate and unrelenting.

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/when-anti-racism-comes-for-the-anti

Earlier this month, Vincent Lloyd, professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, published an article in Compact that ought to make “anti-racists” everywhere think long and hard about what they’re doing. While leading a summer seminar last year at the Telluride Association entitled “Race and the Limits of Law in America,” Vincent found himself accused of the very forms of anti-racism his course was designed to interrogate. Under the influence of a Telluride-appointed anti-racism workshop leader Vincent refers to as “Keisha,” his students turned against him. No longer able to teach effectively in an environment turned hostile, Vincent ended the seminar early.

The irony is that Vincent is a committed anti-racist. He is the director of Villanova’s Africana Studies program, he leads anti-racist workshops, and he publishes on the topic of anti-racism. And, not for nothing, he’s black. One would think that those bona fides would insulate him from charges of perpetuating white supremacy. Indeed, even after being treated so shabbily by Keisha, Vincent remains a staunch anti-racist. As John notes in the following excerpt from our conversation with Vincent, all of this was, in some ways, predictable. The anti-racist mindset divides the world into victims and oppressors. When no true oppressor can be found, one will be conjured from the materials at hand in order to reestablish the phantom social order that anti-racism requires to justify its existence.

In our conversation, Vincent says that, while he was a victim of anti-racism run amok, he views Keisha as a victim, too. Perhaps she is. But if so, then the oppressor is the very worldview that seeks to lock people those two very narrow, inhuman roles. A true commitment to social justice would demand that we relinquish any paradigm that operates by reducing intelligent, kind, dedicated people like Vincent to mere nodes in a structure of domination. If anti-racism truly defended the full humanity of black people, then its own premises would require it to wink out of existence. Vincent’s story ought to be proof of that. Unfortunately, consistency seems too much to ask in this case.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-the-diversity-industry-is-so-homogenous_5071781.html?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=rcp

It’s one of the great ironies of our time that the word “diversity” is repeated everywhere, while the opposite, a stultifying homogeneity, is the reality that’s enforced “on the ground.”

Our educational institutions offer the classic example.

Is there any self-respecting college or university that doesn’t tout its commitment to “diversity” these days?

You can’t peruse a college’s promotional literature, let alone set foot on its campus, without being inundated by assurances that diversity is its most cherished value, the cynosure to which every other pursuit is subordinated.

But when you look at what they actually teach and preach, it turns out that rigid conformity is the order of the day.

We used to titter that there were people whose title was some variation on “dean of diversity.”

“You’re kidding, right?” was the response.

No one is laughing now.

On an increasingly wide range of subjects, only one opinion is granted the patent of diversity. Those deans are there not to invigilate academic excellence but to enforce social and moral conformity.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-school-can-remedy-pandemic-brain-drain-covid-closures-students-charter-public-philanthropy-bloomberg-af4b2278?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The crisis in American public education caused by the pandemic has settled into a dangerous new phase: resignation. The disastrous effects of remote instruction are still with us. Students continue to lag behind where they should be—sometimes by multiple grade levels—and little is being done to help them. The good news is that we know how to overcome learning loss.

Last year, when it became clear that a nationwide expansion of summer school would not be happening, I led a group of philanthropists in creating Summer Boost in New York City. The program focused on math and English and was open to struggling K-8 students in the city’s public charter schools, most of which did not have the resources to run robust summer school programs.

We didn’t know if the program would succeed. But letting struggling students languish was out of the question. The U.S. can’t move on from the pandemic until we address student learning loss.

The response from students and schools was resoundingly positive. More than 16,000 students from 224 schools participated. At the end of the summer, we tested students to assess their progress, and the results were encouraging.

The percentage of students who met grade-level standards in math nearly doubled—and in English, it more than doubled. The share of students scoring below the most basic levels of proficiency fell by nearly half. By the end of the summer session, many students had caught up and were back on track for success. But in much of the country, students didn’t spend any of their summer vacations in classrooms.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2023/02/14/shock-23-baltimore-schools-produced-zero-students-proficient-in-math-n1670521

Project Baltimore, an investigative reporting initiative, analyzed the recent release of Baltimore City Public Schools 2022 test scores and made a shocking discovery: 23 of the city’s schools failed to produce a single student who was proficient in math. An additional 20 Baltimore schools had just one or two students who could do math at their grade level. These appalling failures account for over a quarter of the city’s 155 schools (elementary through high school) where students take the MCAP (Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program) tests.

FOX45 reports:

The Maryland State Department of Education recently released the 2022 state test results known as MCAP, Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program.

Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the state. Just 7 percent of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93 percent could not do math at grade level.

This, even though the Baltimore school district hovers around third place for per-capita educational spending. “Baltimore is often ranked in the top three per capita spending districts,” writes top attorney and academic Jonathan Turley. “The total budget for Baltimore public schools is roughly $1.2 billion. That is for a city with a total population of roughly 600,000 (The greater Baltimore metropolitan area is 2.8 million). In 2015, the school population was 84,000 kids.”

In a separate article, Turley had more to say on the subject:

What astonishes me is the lack of criticism of the school and political leadership of these major cities who have failed the African American community for decades. It is hard to imagine how the school system could possibly do worse while receiving some of the highest levels of federal and state expenditures per student.

This is not due to a lack of funding or support. It is a catastrophic failure that is not being addressed in the media despite occurring annually in cities like New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and other media hubs.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/02/12/why-65-percent-of-fourth-graders-cant-really-read-n1669964

On Saturday, I wrote about the 230,000 children who failed to show up for class when public schools reopened after the pandemic. It’s a tragedy without parallel in American history as many of the no-shows are very young — K through 3rd grade. Critical skills learned in early education were not taught to these kids, who are now hopelessly behind.

The pandemic didn’t necessarily cause the problem. It exposed problems that already existed and were exacerbated because of incompetence and, as it turns out, wrongheaded teaching.

Consider the fact that 65% of American fourth-grade students can barely read. This is a result of a radical shift to a new way of teaching children how to read.

What was wrong with the old way? Well, it was old.

The Free Press:

American Public Media’s Emily Hanford uncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.

It’s incomprehensible to me. The good and blessed nuns who taught us to read made us “sound out” words, which not only drilled good habits into our heads but exercised our minds so that the more we read, the quicker we were able to “sound out” words.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-university-of-north-carolina-fight-escalates-unc-belle-wheelan-sacs-higher-education-college-accreditation-free-expression-d2077882?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The kerfuffle we reported two weeks ago over a new school for free expression at the University of North Carolina keeps getting more complicated, and not in a good way. Opponents are now suggesting that UNC’s accreditation could be in jeopardy over the board of trustees’ plan to create the new School of Civic Life and Leadership without the blessing of the faculty.

At a meeting Tuesday of the Governor’s Commission on the Governance of Public Universities in North Carolina, accreditation official Belle Wheelan declared that the UNC board would be getting a letter from her agency. Ms. Wheelan is president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACS), which accredits UNC, and she referred to “a news article that came out” on the plan to create a new school.

“We’re waiting for them to explain that, because that’s kind of not the way we do business.” she said, according to a report by HigherEd Works. “We’re gonna . . . either get them to change it, or the institution will be on warning” with SACS. Ms. Wheelan also brought slides to illustrate “What a Board Member is NOT,” including “Solver of all problems” and “One who runs the institution.” Instead, the role of board members should be “Eyes in, hands off.”

In a phone call with UNC Trustee Marty Kotis the following day, Ms. Wheelan said that her agency would be sending a letter to UNC because she was encouraged to do so by Margaret Spellings, who was Secretary of Education under George W. Bush, “I was asked to mention it . . . I will tell you it was Secretary Spellings who asked me to mention that.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/desantis-calls-the-bureaucrats-bluff/ar-AA17jGOb

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has a plan for freeing public universities from the stranglehold of their diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies. Before DeSantis launched this effort, it was widely believed, even among those who recognized the dangers of DEI, that there was really nothing public officials could do about the problem. Just like the weather, it was simply something we would all have to learn to live with. Public universities were thought to be outside of political control, and academic culture was thought to be too committed to DEI goals. But DeSantis is proving that something can be done. His plan is likely to make significant progress in dismantling DEI in higher education.

DeSantis is showing that DEI is not beyond the reach of elected officials, at least not at public universities. In most states, public universities are state agencies, just like the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Game and Fish Commission. They may have their own boards of trustees, but those boards were created, and can be modified, by legislation, and their activities are governed by state laws and regulations. States can reorganize how public universities are structured to achieve public purposes better, just as they can reorganize the DMV. Lawmakers may alter the size and composition of the Game and Fish Commission, as well as the process for appointing those officials, and they can do the same with the boards of public universities.