RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-graves-of-academe-a-job-announcement/

A job announcement posted at H-Net on January 19, 2023:

The Department of History in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Simon Fraser University, respectfully acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), qiqéyt (Qayqayt), qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen), Səmyámə (Semiahmoo), and sc̓əwaθən (Tsawwassen) Peoples, on whose ancestral, traditional, and unceded territories Simon Fraser University’s three campuses stand. We are committed to reconciliation through decolonization and Indigenization, telling inclusive stories about the past, and acknowledging different historical epistemologies.

The Department of History invites applications for a full-time tenure-track appointment in History at the rank of Assistant Professor, to start as early as July 15, 2023. We seek a scholar with expertise in the history of the Black Americas, broadly conceived. We especially welcome scholars whose research and teaching focuses on Canada, the Caribbean, or Latin America, while also welcoming comparative, transnational, and cross-regional approaches.

The successful candidate must have research and teaching interests and lived experience in Black communities, including a demonstrable history of community involvement. Ideal candidates will have experience teaching a diverse student body.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/27/a-21st-century-high-school-movement/

From 1910 to 1940, the soaring demand for educated workers to staff new white-collar jobs in the manufacturing sector created the American high school movement. It led to “a spectacular education transformation” that raised enrollment of 18-year-olds from 19 to 71 percent, and graduation rates from 9 to more than 50 percent. This lifted the United States to the forefront of educational attainment in the world. 

Today, we see the beginnings of a 21st-century high school movement, created by efforts in K-12 education to connect high school students to work through career pathways partnership programs. 

These programs acquaint students with the demands of the workforce and employers by engaging them in work with adult mentors from backgrounds different from their own. Such connections produce new cross-class friendships, social networks, and information sources among students, teachers, employer mentors, and other program supporters. These relationships with young people help shape their expectations, aspirations, and behaviors by showing them worlds previously unseen and opportunities not imagined. They allow students to build social capital and gain workforce experience. 

Finally, these programs nurture civil society by creating new social networks and forms of community for the young people and adults who participate in them. While the full fruits of this growing movement have yet to be reckoned, cumulatively they suggest a sea change in education that will enable people to thrive in the 21st-century workforce.   

https://www.wsj.com/articles/utah-school-choice-bill-iowa-education-savings-accounts-kim-reynolds-spencer-cox-11674860799?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

School choice is gaining momentum across the country, and this week Utah joined Iowa in advancing the education reform cause. Both states passed expansive education savings account (ESA) legislation that will make private schools accessible to many more families, and other states are moving too.

Utah’s bill, which the Senate passed Thursday, 20-8, makes ESAs of $8,000 available to every student. There’s no income cap on families who can apply, though lower-income families receive preference and the program is capped at $42 million. The funds can be used for private school tuition, home-schooling expenses, tutoring, and more. The bill passed the House with a referendum-proof majority last week of 54-20. Gov. Spencer Cox has suggested he supports the bill, which includes pay raises for teachers.

This follows the Monday passage of Iowa’s ESA bill, which we have previewed, with a 55-45 vote in the state House and 31-18 in the Senate. Gov. Kim Reynolds was quick on Tuesday to sign the new law providing more than $7,500 for any student to use toward private-school tuition and other education expenses.

It’s a promising start to a year in which many states are eyeing school choice: About a dozen other state legislatures have introduced bills to create new ESA programs, and several want to expand the ones they have.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-desantis-ap-african-american-studies-curriculum-florida-education-critical-race-theory-11674831789?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

When parents complained that Critical Race Theory was creeping into their children’s classrooms, the left argued that CRT is strictly college material and isn’t actually taught in K-12 schools. So how can progressives object now that Gov. Ron DeSantis is blocking a new high-school AP course in Florida on grounds that it’s stuffed with CRT?

Florida rejected a planned Advanced Placement class in African-American Studies because it “lacks educational value” and “is a vehicle for a political agenda.” In response, NPR quoted an academic “involved in creating the curriculum,” who explained again that CRT is too advanced for high-school students. “There’s nothing particularly ideological about the course,” he added, “except that we value the experiences of African people in the United States.”

The chattering class had already committed to that narrative by the time a draft of the AP framework leaked. It starts innocuously enough, with topics on Africa’s linguistic diversity and the history of the Songhai Empire. But keep reading until Unit 4, which includes:

• “The Reparations Movement,” a topic that “explores the case for reparations,” in which students “may examine House Bill H.R. 40 and a text by Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/26/desantis-college-appointees-like-chris-rufo-show-the-battle-for-americas-academies-is-far-from-over/

Fixing education has to start sometime, and it has to start somewhere; it looks like that time is now, and that place is Florida.

SARASOTA, Fla. — In early January, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed a group of six conservative academics and activists to the board of trustees of the New College of Florida in Sarasota. Some of the individuals nominated to the small liberal art school’s board include Chris Rufo, who has led the charge against the proliferation of critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology in America’s classrooms and boardrooms; renowned constitutional scholar Charles Kesler; and Matthew Spalding, the current dean of Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government.

Shortly after the announcement was made, DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, indicated that a priority of the new trustees would be establishing a curriculum specifically dedicated to “classical” education, giving New College further distinction from the rest of the institutions of higher learning that are currently a part of Florida’s state university system.

Speaking with The Federalist, Rufo suggested that by embracing classical education, New College could stave off the bureaucratic materialist bloat that has come to characterize and bog down much of higher education. Colleges have “adopted this kind of empty materialist enterprise that has squashed the more significant spiritual and intellectual enterprise of learning,” he said. “And I think classical schools are really at the forefront of saying, ‘we’ve lost our way, let’s look to the past to try and make a more meaningful present.’ Maybe then we’ll actually have something that matters to people.” 

New College’s approach to learning would become similar to that of classical schools like Hillsdale College in Michigan. As Uthmeier said earlier this month, “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/british-universities-putting-trigger-warnings-shakespeare-greek-tragedies-being-too-dark

British universities have reportedly begun putting trigger warnings on great Greek and Shakespearean tragedies for students who may be sensitive to their dark content. 

U.K. outlet The Telegraph reported Wednesday that the University of Derby and several other British universities have deemed celebrated tragedies like Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as “potentially upsetting” for students.

As such, university staff have attached “trigger warnings” to a school literature module that covers classic tragedies, cautioning students that the works are “obsessed” with suffering.

One British university has placed a “trigger warning” on a class featuring works of Shakespeare, thanks to the stories’ dark content. (The Associated Press)

The Telegraph added, “Athenian dramas concerning the deaths of mythical kings, and Arthur Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman, are also on the reading list for the module, which has been given a blanket advisory on how the tragic could be troubling.”

The outlet provided the text of the warning provided by professors for their students, which stated, “Tragedy is a genre obsessed with violence and suffering, often of a sexual or graphic kind, and so some of the content might be triggering for some students.”

The “trigger warning” provided an additional note from the class instructor: “If you feel that your engagement with particular texts or themes is going to present challenges, do speak to me in advance of the class.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-of-north-carolina-school-of-civic-life-and-leadership-board-of-trustees-11674773696?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Progressive politics has dominated elite universities since before the term woke was coined. But one university is trying to revive the academic ideal of a campus as a haven for free inquiry and debate. On Thursday the University of North Carolina board of trustees voted 12-0 to create a new school committed to free expression in higher education.

UNC will establish the School of Civic Life and Leadership and plans to hire professors from across the ideological spectrum to teach in such academic departments as history, literature, philosophy, political science and religion. These disciplines have become enforcers of ideological uniformity at most schools. Board Chair David Boliek and Vice Chair John Preyer tell us that the idea is to end “political constraints on what can be taught in university classes.”

Rather than replacing current professors or creating faculty turf battles, UNC plans to create a discrete program with its own dean and at least 20 new professors to build a syllabus free from ideological enforcers. Students will be able to choose the new classes to fulfill university core requirements. Those who aren’t interested can stay in the existing courses.

According to a College Fix survey of 14 humanities and STEM departments at UNC, Democratic professors outnumber Republicans 16 to 1. In the English department, the ratio is 23 to 1 and in Chemistry 28-1. At private and Ivy League schools the ratios are often steeper. By comparison, at Ohio State the faculty ratio is 7 to 1 and University of Nebraska-Omaha 5-1. Partisan affiliation isn’t always a measure of intellectual conformity, but it is indicative.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/01/26/the-morning-briefing-good-news-school-choice-is-back-on-the-agenda-for-republicans-n1665175

When I first began writing about politics, I had two areas that I focused on more than any others: liberal media bias and school choice. In fact, the first political conference I ever attended was focused on school choice.

A dozen or so years ago, the Republican party was focused on it too. Somewhere along the way, that focus was blurred. The support for school choice was still there, the issue just wasn’t front and center.

I wrote in September of 2021 that the pandemic gave the GOP a chance to “get serious” about school choice. The teachers’ unions peeled back their masks and showed how truly evil they are during the worst of the COVID shutdown days. Well, a lot of us already knew that they were evil, but COVID made that plain to even the naivest among us.

The issue appears to be on the menu again for some in the GOP, especially in Iowa. Rick has the story:

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds was in an ebullient mood on Tuesday when she signed into law the most sweeping and revolutionary school choice program in the nation.

“What an amazing day for our children!” she exclaimed to the crowd of kids, parents, and lawmakers who had gathered in the Iowa Capitol rotunda to witness the historic signing.

Indeed, the new law, which will take effect this year, is a game changer for parents. The law will allow any Iowa family to use taxpayer funds to pay for private school tuition — at a cost of $345 million annually to the state once fully phased in.