RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-numbers-show-that-mit-has-a-free-speech-problem-controversial-education-students-college-self-censor-11674514243?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Twenty-one years as an executive in the National Basketball Association has taught me to start with the data when confronted with a problem. Now, I am asking my alma mater to do the same on the important issue of free expression.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has suffered several embarrassing incidents regarding free speech in recent years. These include the cancellation of Prof. Dorian Abbot’s John Carlson Lecture on climate change in October 2021 and the institution of a March 2022 policy that students may not ask others to wear masks.

The data point to a growing problem: According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, MIT ranks an abysmal 181st out of 203 universities when it comes to students’ belief that the administration will protect their speech rights. FIRE reports that the mistrust extends to MIT faculty: 38% say they don’t believe the administration would defend a speaker’s rights during a controversy. Forty percent of MIT faculty said they were more likely to self-censor as of summer 2022 than they had been before 2020. Among students, 41% aren’t confident in the administration’s ability to protect controversial speech. Those are disheartening statistics for one of the world’s best research institutions.

If MIT faculty, who are at the cutting edge of science and technology, can’t count on their employer to defend open inquiry, it might prevent them from taking innovative risks. This, in turn, would stymie technological progress and the education of the next generation of innovators.

ttps://graboyes.substack.com/p/overcoming-college

If you wish to squander your children’s potential and incinerate any appeal they might hold for employers, America is chock-full of colleges and universities anxious to harness their vast infrastructures to help make them unemployable. These services, refined over many decades, won’t come cheap. But America’s student-loan complex will happily offer tuition money by the wheelbarrow. Decades hence, when you tire of progeny residing in your attic, politicians will squeal at the opportunity to foist their student loan debts onto other Americans who made better decisions.

Mind you, not all colleges and universities—or programs within those institutions—fit this description. And regardless of where and what said progeny intend to study, you and your children have the capacity to make higher education a worthwhile experience. But in general, the task of making college worthwhile cannot be entrusted to colleges. I’ve spent much of my adult life in and around universities and always took great pleasure in helping students to navigate employment markets. Here are five bits of advice from my experience.

Check under the hood before shelling out the money.
Make sure your children understand that their merits are not obvious.
Master at least two things.
Begin the job search no later than the beginning of freshman year.
Reinvent yourself when necessary.

I’ll elaborate below on all five points.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-lawmakers-can-reform-higher-ed-critical-race-theory-diversity-statements-bureaucracies-11673978891?mc_cid=831e02f7cf&mc_eid=9bde3e8efb

Many Americans despair of reforming the culture of higher education. But a substantial majority of college students attend public institutions, and these schools are subject to state law. If legislators are determined to restore free speech and academic freedom, there’s a lot they can do. In cooperation with the Goldwater Institute, we’ve developed model state legislation based on four reform proposals:

• Abolish “diversity, equity and inclusion” bureaucracies. These offices work actively against norms of academic freedom and truth-seeking, advance primarily political aims, and fuel administrative bloat that raises costs and exacerbates student debt. Administrators at public institutions should maintain official neutrality on controversial political questions extraneous to the business of educating students. Leave compliance with federal and state civil-rights laws to the university counsel’s office.

• Forbid mandatory diversity training for students, faculty and staff. Even when DEI officials claim their training is “voluntary,” it’s often required for faculty who wish to perform basic extracurricular roles, such as serving on hiring committees. Typical diversity training includes unscientific claims about “microaggressions” and “implicit bias” and rejects the basic American principle that everyone should be treated equally. It indoctrinates an ideology of identity-based grievance, guilt and division.

• Curtail the use of “diversity statements” as a means of political coercion. These serve as litmus tests in employment processes to exclude applicants who don’t adhere to critical race theory and other radical beliefs. Although the Supreme Court has long held that requiring loyalty oaths in public education is unconstitutional—as are other forms of compelled speech—universities increasingly require that applicants state their belief in the importance of DEI, cite prior personal efforts to promote DEI and pledge to integrate DEI into their teaching. Applicants for many positions have been eliminated on the basis of diversity statements alone and many universities condition their hiring decisions on the applicant’s ideological conformity.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/what-is-dei-spread-college-campuses

The phrase diversity, equity, and inclusion may appear to be benign, but it has quietly become the latest frontier in the culture war against woke education .

Often billed as necessary programs and trainings to ensure racially diverse and successful institutions, diversity, equity, and inclusion, also known as DEI, has been decried for stoking racial resentment and prioritizing physical characteristics over merit.

The commonplace programs, which opponents say are just another example of the prevalence of critical race theory in contemporary institutions, have forced college students and many corporate employees to sit through hours of discussions on maintaining a diverse and “inclusive” space.

The expansion of DEI has proved financially lucrative for some, as it has created an entirely new class of employee. In 2022, LinkedIn ranked diversity and inclusion manager as the second-fastest growing job over the past five years.

In higher education, the programs continually rolled out of DEI offices are changing the entire collegiate experience by requiring a host of trainings and programs for students and faculty, beginning with freshman orientation.

In 2021, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, released a report highlighting what it called “DEI bloat” in university administrative offices. The report found that the 65 universities that made up the “power five” conferences had an average of 45 employees tasked with “promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The University of Michigan took the title for the most DEI employees with 163, far more than the University of Virginia and the Ohio State University, which both had 94.

https://www.city-journal.org/ralston-college-and-the-rejuvenation-of-higher-ed

Joseph Conlon looked out over the 24 students in his care, said “Let’s begin!” and launched into a discussion of the rhetoric and imagery of the depiction of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in chapter 11 of the Gospel of John. Not remarkable in itself—except that nearly every word Conlon spoke for 90 packed minutes, starting with arxōmetha (“Let’s begin!”), was in John’s language: ancient Greek. And except that, just four months earlier, almost none of the students would have understood so much as a syllable. Whatever word was in the beginning for these students, it was not logos. Now, however, their sense of Greek is magical: for the most part, they use it themselves when responding to Conlon’s questions and speaking with one another in class.

Since last summer, Conlon has been professor of Classics at Ralston College, a new educational enterprise based in Savannah whose webpage proclaims in large letters, “TO THINK IS TO BE FREE.” After an initial eight-week term in Greece, the members of the first student cohort in the master’s program in the humanities are spending the year in Georgia, where, from October through early December, they immersed themselves in Homer, Aristotle, and Iamblichus and continued their studies of both ancient and modern Greek. In the coming months, they’ll further deepen their knowledge of the languages while moving on to Shakespeare, Descartes, and Goethe. The overarching theme of the year is “the human self”; next year it will be “the whole.”

Some of the students came straight from college; others had jobs but decided to go back to school. All were selected from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants, which makes admission to Ralston more competitive than to Harvard College.

https://www.city-journal.org/recapturing-higher-education

The most significant political story of the past half-century is the activist Left’s “long march through the institutions.” Beginning in the 1960s, left-wing activists and intellectuals, inspired by theorists such as Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, made a concerted effort to embed their ideas in education, government, philanthropy, media, and other important sectors.

This process came to spectacular fruition following the 2020 death of George Floyd, when it seemed that every prestige institution in the United States got busy advancing the same ideological line on race, gender, and culture—which, whether they knew it or not, mimicked the precise themes that the old radicals had originally proposed. 

The long march through the institutions, in other words, was complete.

But conservatives, too, have updated their playbook. They have read their Gramsci and have begun to understand that ideological capture poses a grave threat to the American system. President Donald Trump shook conservatives out of their complacency with instinctual, if sometimes crude, cultural countermeasures. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has built on this approach, offering a sophisticated policy agenda for protecting families against captured bureaucracies.

Last week, DeSantis raised the stakes and proposed, for the first time, a strategy for reversing the long march through the institutions, beginning with what Marcuse believed was the initial revolutionary institution: the university. The governor appointed a slate of new trustees to the board of the New College of Florida, a notoriously left-wing campus, similar to that of Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington. DeSantis tasked the new board with transforming it into, to quote the governor’s chief of staff, the “Hillsdale of the South”—in other words, a classical liberal arts college that provides a distinctly traditional brand of education and scholarship.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/2-american-revolutions/

Evidently, the Chinese are actually not the source of the curse “May you live in interesting times.”  But whatever its source, that curse seems to have landed on us in double strength.  Our time is more than interesting—it is revolutionary.  The revolution you and I are living through is a counter-revolution; it is un-doing the America which was made at the founding.

A serious scholar has presented the un-making of America with startling clarity in a Frontpage article, and another serious scholar has told the story of the making of America with unprecedented precision and in astonishing detail.  Together, they tell the tale of where we are, where we came from, and, unless we manage to change America’s direction, where America is headed.

If you missed Bruce Thornton’s recent posting here at Frontpage about what has happened to education in America, I encourage you to read it.

“Today our educational institutions are grubby, rent-seeking businesses, and propaganda organs for illiberal, incoherent ideologies based on the “higher nonsense” that has captured “higher education,” and from there trickled down into K-12 schools.”

That was not the case when Thornton’s university teaching career began in 1977. Today, a serious scholar like Bruce Thornton is no longer welcome.  Real scholars have been replaced by propagandists, as America’s universities abandoned their reason for existing.

What is astonishing about this transformation is how quickly it happened.  In the span of a single career, America’s educational institutions were transformed.  The “higher nonsense” replaced the best that has been known and thought so rapidly that it was fully accomplished before most people noticed.  Americans continued donating to their alma mater without realizing it was no longer even the same kind of place it had been when they were there.

The consequences of this revolution are grim, terrible, horrific: the un-making of America. 

https://pjmedia.com/culture/lincolnbrown/2023/01/10/dear-young-people-college-is-lame-get-a-job-n1660538

Young people, are you ready for success? Want a career in a rewarding field that will lead to a fulfilling life? Don’t go to college. Be an electrician, be a plumber, be a welder,  be a carpenter — hell, learn to code — but for heaven’s sake and for that matter, your own, don’t go to college. I know some of you are months or even years away from high school graduation, but: Don’t. Go. To. College. Okay, so if you want to be a doctor, lawyer, or physicist (more on that below), maybe look for a college that does not double as an asylum. Other than that, treat college campuses like the radioactive waste depots that they have become.

Back when I was your age, everybody had to go to college. “Get a liberal arts degree,” my mother said. “You can do anything with a liberal arts degree.” You can’t do much with a liberal arts degree in the 21st century. Actually, you couldn’t do much with one in the 20th century, but no one seemed to know that. We were all supposed to go to college. One person told me to skip it and be a plumber. Not a day goes by that I do not rue failing to heed that advice.

Today, oh young people, college is likely to be a monumental waste of time and money: time you could have spent learning how to do something that people need; and money you could have been earning instead of waiting to see if Biden’s magical student loan forgiveness plan will take root and blossom. (Hint: the election is over. You won’t hear anything more about that until 2024.)

If you do go to college, you may be looking for a challenging atmosphere, an exchange of ideas, and opportunities to grow and craft a future. Instead, like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, you will find yourself on a tiny raft, adrift on a cold, gray, featureless sea with a rotting albatross of a student loan hanging on your neck. And if you don’t get that reference, find someone with a liberal arts degree. Once they explain it, ask if that explanation was worth all the money they paid.

College is lame and depressing. For example:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has appointed a number of conservatives to the board of the uber-left New College of Florida. One student said, “I got really sad and then just, like, laid down.” Just, like, laid down. It’s a board, kid, you didn’t get a terminal diagnosis. Students are also concerned that their personal safety is at risk, according to The Daily Caller. At risk from what? A different idea?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/leaving-the-land-of-lincoln-11673296644?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Instead of Cancelling, Ivy School Hires Election Denier
Columbia University announces in a press release that a longtime friend of school president Lee Bollinger is joining the faculty:

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former U.S. Secretary of State, will join Columbia University as professor of practice at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and presidential fellow at Columbia World Projects (CWP).

The Columbia release alleges that the new hire “will be helping” to “explore the fundamental questions on how to advance efforts to renew democracy.”

Imagine how much good Mrs. Clinton might have done for our republic if she had chosen not to spend years promoting bogus theories about the 2016 presidential campaign and instead had simply accepted defeat?

Campus Cancel Culture
In the New York Times, Vimal Patel reports:

Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.

In the syllabus, she warned that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and she said no one did.

In class, she prepped students, telling them that in a few minutes, the painting would be displayed, in case anyone wanted to leave.

Then Dr. López Prater showed the image — and lost her teaching gig.

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