RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/the-decline-of-higher-education

In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, academic-freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape. In a small town, somewhere in the heartland, there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople.

Someone like the local mayor would lean on the college president (probably a personal friend), the president would then lean on the department chair, and the young professor was soon gone. The American Association of University Professors would then intervene, and the individual would be reinstated, because the AAUP would in effect threaten blacklisting. Reports of cases like this were reasonably common.

The AAUP would always insist that college campuses must be the one place with unfettered freedom to discuss and analyze issues of all kinds, no matter who might be offended. The analytical function of academia must never be shut down by a shallow local moralism. This was then the consensus of academic life.

If we fast forward to the present, one feature of what’s happening on the campuses looks similar: that crucial analytical function is still getting stifled whenever it offends an equally shallow local moralism. But there’s a startling difference: the actors have changed places. It’s now the professors who do what the small-minded small-town worthies used to do, shutting down analysis whenever it offends them, which is often.

In fact, they do it on a vastly larger scale. Those old AAUP cases were aberrations affecting a tiny minority of campuses, and the infractions were soon corrected. But today, the suppression of debate and analysis happens almost everywhere, and the perpetrators—both professors and administrators—represent a controlling majority of the campuses.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/the_futile_quest_to_protect_racial_diversity.html

In June of 2023 the Supreme Court will render its decision regarding the legality of racial preferences in higher education. Considering recent rulings, the Court is likely to ban outright or at least severely limit these preferences. Will the Court thus end racial preferences? Unlikely — the passion for “diversity” (i.e., admitting less-qualified minorities) — seems hard-wired in today’s elite universities and, more telling, American higher education has long prepared for this dreaded day. Their strategy is straightforward:  since legal proof of discrimination depends on statistical evidence across racial groups, just eliminate tests like the SAT that expose biases.

The latest installment of messenger shooting is a pronouncement from the American Bar Association permitting law schools to drop the LSAT in the admissions process beginning in fall 2025. No doubt, other subterfuges, for example, eliminating class rankings, are being contemplated. University administrators thus resemble criminals scrubbing the crime scene for any evidence of their wrongdoing. How can you sue universities for racial discrimination if everything is murky and ill-defined? For schools prizing diversity über alles, mission accomplished, or it would seem.

Will hiding statistical evidence of preferences ensure that blacks and Asians finally be on equal footing when it comes to pursuing careers in law or medicine?  The answer is “no,” and, if anything, banning these indicators will only acerbate racial bias. Abolishing quantitative criteria will restore the earlier era when schools freely indulged prejudices. Recall that one of the purposes of SAT-like tests was to overcome the racial/ethnic unfairness that came with subjective admission standards.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-devastating-education-schemes/

Little did I know that when I was teaching in the 1990s and “multicultural education” became all the rage, that it was just the beginning of an onslaught of radical endeavors that shows no sign of abating. As 2022 winds down, let’s take a glimpse at a small sampling of the schemes that have been inflicted on America’s children over the past few years.

Critical math

 As a former teacher, I loved teaching math because there was clearly a right and wrong answer. Feelings, opinions and political dogma didn’t matter. Now however, with the ascendance of racialism, if you insist on right and wrong answers, you just might be considered a racist. Really.

In fact, in 2021, the proposed California math framework recommended eight different times that teachers use “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction ” as a resource. This radical drivel insists that addressing student errors, focusing on getting the right answer, and requiring students to show their work is a form of white supremacy. Objectivity, you see, is now racist.

Another iteration of the framework stressed “student-led instruction.” But it’s been shown repeatedly that direct instruction led by a qualified teacher is more effective in teaching the subject.

However, due to citizen outrage during the “public comments” period, the state walked back some of its wackier ideas, notably dropping the over-the-top “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction.” The battle still rages, and now the state won’t be adopting a framework till some time in 2023.

But whatever is ultimately decided, 2+2 still equals 4.

https://quillette.com/2022/12/02/at-canadian-universities-race-and-gender-quotas-have-become-a-way-of-life/

On March 21st, the University of Waterloo—a Canadian public research university renowned for its STEM programs—published an unusual job posting for a professor in the Faculty of the Environment. “This opportunity is open only to individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, non-binary, or two-spirit,” read the announcement. The rationale? “Improving the representation, participation and engagement of equity-deserving groups within our community is a key objective of Waterloo’s Strategic Plan.”

A worthy goal, one might suppose. But you’d be excused for being unsettled by the way the university was pursuing it. Perhaps you’re surprised by the unusual specificity of the listed groups (including “two-spirit,” a term that recently has become popularized in Canadian academic and government circles to signify Indigenous people whose identity “predate[s] colonial impositions, expectations, and assumptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation”). Or perhaps you simply thought such explicitly discriminatory hiring was illegal.

And so it is—in the United States. But in Canada, where such practices are protected under the nation’s constitution, they’ve increasingly become mandated by governments, human rights commissions, and major funding bodies. Academic institutions such as the University of Waterloo not only tend to enthusiastically comply with these affirmative-action mandates, but also top up the officially prescribed requirements with their own initiatives.

At Canadian universities (virtually all of which are public, state-funded bodies), the most prestigious positions are Canada Research Chairs (CRCs)—funded federally under a “national strategy to attract and retain leading and promising minds.” In order to benefit from this program, universities must “set and meet equity targets in recognition of the persistent systemic barriers faced by researchers who are women, gender minorities, racialized individuals, persons with disabilities and Indigenous Peoples.” The task of meeting such quotas has given rise to a burgeoning administrative bureaucracy, charged with documenting the personal characteristics of faculty members in excruciating detail.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/george-harbison/2022/11/27/the-babylon-bee-publishes-a-hysterical-spoof-of-a-college-english-course-description-oh-wait-n1648938

The Babylon Bee is far and away the leading source of conservative satirical content on the internet.  Its writers brilliantly skewer the entire spectrum of woke and PC nonsense on a daily basis.  Its pieces are shared widely in social media by clear thinkers seeking comedic relief in the face of the avalanche of increasingly crazy and dangerous ideas, positions, and rhetoric emanating by the American left.

If the Babylon Bee’s most creative satirists conjured up a parody of a woke college course description, it would probably read something like this:

Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5

How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/school-choice-tremors/

The election on November 8th was good for the school choice movement. As Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, explains, 76% of candidates supported by his organization won their election. Govs. Kim Reynolds (IA), Chris Sununu (NH), Kevin Stitt (OK), Bill Lee (TN) and Greg Abbott (TX) were victorious after making school choice a centerpiece of their campaigns.

In Florida, where there are four different private options for families, Gov. Ron DeSantis annihilated Charlie Crist, who drew a distinct line in the sand when he chose the president of Miami’s teachers union as his running mate. DeSantis not only won by almost 20 percentage points, he outperformed Crist by 13 points with Latino voters, according to exit polls. This should not come as a surprise, as 38% of students using the state’s largest private-school choice program are Hispanic.

While the above governors are all Republicans, some victorious Democrats had become education freedom advocates. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro was elected governor after campaigning hard for school choice. Also, Illinois J.D. Pritzker found religion and supported his state’s tax credit scholarship program during his campaign.

But the choicers weren’t the only ones claiming success on November 8th. After the election, the National Education Association crowed, “Educators, Parents, Students Won Big in Historic Midterm Elections.”

NEA President Becky Pringle triumphantly asserted, “Parents and voters explicitly rejected extreme politicians who engaged in the politics of division, politicizing our classrooms, banning books, dragging their culture wars into our public schools, and pushing failed privatization schemes.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2022/11/25/biden-education-dept-deputy-director-says-democracy-and-everything-else-is-white-supremacy-n1648648

“Kristina Ishmael [she/her],” a Biden deputy director to the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, made her Twitter account private after Fox News caught her claiming that democracy, “fatphobia,” and, well, pretty much everything else is “white supremacy.” Considering that Ishmael said she was tuning out white people, while she/herself is white, should we follow her example and exclude her from public expression?

Fox News reported that said she also tweeted, “Learning to be comfortable in my own skin & weight and really ready to reject the White supremacist ideal body? F*ck yes. Fatphobia is real. The ‘ideal’ weight, shape & look is white supremacy baked into our everyday lives. I’m so over it. We deserve more than diets.” Because apparently only white people have ever criticized fatness?

“[Democracy is] also built on white supremacy, which I see perpetuated in education circles when BIPOC folx are being told they’re too negative by addressing real issues instead of superlatives,” Ishmael tweeted. The Biden official also tweeted an accusation that the “white evangelical church” has “welcomed” both “White supremacy and hate.” Ishmael commented, “Amen.” Which would seem to lower her woke score, since she did not add “awomen.”

Over a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical, Fox News reported.

In 2019, Ishmael pontificated, “I walked away from a conversation because a white male dominated the conversation that was being facilitated by a woman of color. Sometimes walking away is the only thing to do.”

Ishmael also seemed to ponder if white homosexuals ought to be considered marginalized in school curriculum. Which is clearly a consideration of paramount importance for an educator. “In most ‘inclusive’ materials, the most dominant folx are still represented in the marginalized group (e.g. white, cis, gay men). This does not include the nuance of this group,” Ishmael whined. But she’s always focused on the most important aspects of education: “[M]ost of my curriculum was written from a very narrow and white perspective.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawyers-without-lsats-american-bar-association-11669157733?mod=opinion_trending_now_opn_pos3

The flight from merit continues across America, and it’s spreading fast in the legal profession. An arm of the American Bar Association (ABA), which accredits law schools, voted on Nov. 18 to end the requirement that prospective law students take the Law School Admission Test. And here we thought torturing prospective lawyers was a widely accepted public good.

The vote is pending approval from the ABA House of Delegates in February. If adopted, it would make standardized testing optional in preparation for a career that demands a lot of standardized knowledge.

The LSAT has long been a target of diversity advocates who argue that the use of the test has limited minority enrollment in law schools because the test questions are allegedly biased in favor of white test takers. Detractors also object to the LSAT because affluent students often pay thousands of dollars to prepare for the test that is supposed to predict their first-year law school performance.

The ABA decision is best understood as an attempt to get ahead of a possible Supreme Court decision against the use of racial preferences in school admissions. By making the LSAT optional, schools will be able to admit the students they want without lowering the average LSAT score that is one measure of elite status. But the schools need the ABA to move first.