RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/did-scotus-green-light-racial-discrimination

The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it would not hear Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, a case concerning revised admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, an elite magnet school in Alexandria, Virginia. The school has adopted a new admissions policy that, while race-neutral on its face, effectively penalizes Asian American applicants. The Court’s denial of certiorari practically endorses efforts to discriminate against Asian American students and may lead other schools to follow suit.

Before 2020, TJ’s admissions process was strictly merit-based. Any student who had completed or was enrolled in Algebra I and held at least a 3.0 grade point average was eligible to apply. Applicants were required to take a standardized test, similar to the SAT/ACT, and those with the highest scores advanced to the process’s second round, in which they had to submit two teacher recommendations and complete three writing prompts and a problem-solving essay. TJ’s class of 2024 (the last admitted under the old, merit-based system) is 73 percent Asian, 17.7 percent white, 3.3 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent black.

The high number of Asian American students at TJ—and the correspondingly low number of black and Hispanic students—troubled education officials in Fairfax County. TJ principal Ann Bonitatibus, for example, said in October 2020 that she wanted a student body that “more closely aligns with the representation in Fairfax County Public Schools.” One school board member wrote in an email that she was “angry and disappointed” with TJ’s racial makeup. Other education officials in Fairfax County stated that TJ’s entrance exam had led to too many “students who had been in test prep since second grade.”

Apparently in response to these objections, the school board crafted a new admissions policy in December 2020. The new scheme limits how many students each area public middle school can send to TJ (the equivalent of 1.5 percent of its eighth-grade enrollment). It also calls for applicants to be evaluated on several criteria, including GPA; a “portrait sheet” where they must demonstrate “graduate attributes” and “21st century skills”; a problem-solving essay; and “experience factors.” These “experience factors” include whether a student is economically disadvantaged, an English language learner, participating in a special-education program, or attending an underrepresented middle school. Notably, the school board struck the standardized-testing requirement.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/16/elite-colleges-reconsidering-sat-score-requirements/

Several elite universities are considering reversing recent decisions to reduce or even eliminate requirements for application that include standardized test scores such as the SAT exams.

According to Axios, multiple colleges used the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to weaken the importance of SAT and ACT test scores in most student applications. But in recent weeks, several schools have reversed course; Yale is considering repealing its prior policy of making SAT/ACT requirements optional, with Dartmouth already reinstating the requirements earlier this month. MIT reversed a similar policy back in 2022.

Other schools that have eliminated SAT/ACT requirements include Harvard and Columbia. Harvard, along with Cornell and Princeton, have extended their policy of making the scores optional, while Columbia’s policy remains permanent.

One of the motivating factors behind the reversal is ongoing research showing a clear correlation between students’ standardized test scores, and their subsequent academic performance and graduation rates in college. Some schools had previously opposed the test requirements for reasons of “diversity,” baselessly accusing the tests of being “racist” and against minority students.

Dartmouth pointed to a study that had been commissioned by the university’s president, which “confirms that standardized testing — when assessed using the local norms at a student’s high school” is crucial in evaluating an applicant’s potential.

In a statement, Yale’s undergraduate office said that they “expect to announce a decision on its long-term testing policy in the next few weeks.” In the meantime, students applying for the Fall of 2024 will still fall under the “not optional” category when it comes to standardized tests.

Brown University is currently awaiting a committee’s recommendations on how to move forward with standardized testing, as well as other practices such as legacy admissions and early decisions. The committee is expected to finish its report in the next few months.

There are still over 2,000 schools in the country which remain either optional or completely free of standardized test requirements ahead of the 2024-2025 academic year. Meanwhile, the National Education Association (NEA) has demanded that all colleges eliminate testing requirements, with NEA president Becky Pringle declaring in a statement that “All students deserve and have the ability to demonstrate knowledge in many ways that are measurable by those who know them best: Their educators.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/harvard-students-try-fasting/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second

The student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, reports that “more than 30 Harvard students hunger strike for 12 hours in solidarity with Brown protestors.” The 17 students at Brown University refused to eat for eight days “to pressure the Brown Corporation to divest from Israel.”

“To send solidarity to @browndivestcoalition for their incredible hunger strike, 30+ Harvard students committed to a day-long hunger strike to prove to university corporations that we will not back down,” the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Coalition wrote in an Instagram post on Friday.

Hmm. If a hunger strike is “a day-long” commitment, then presumably you’re “backing down” at the end of the day?

Traditionally, for a hunger strike to be effective, it has to pose at least the threat of death or serious injury to the protester who, through striking, is making clear that he or she is willing to die for the cause.

Being willing to skip lunch is rather underwhelming.

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/pentagon-secretly-institutionalized

In a Congressional hearing last spring, Gil Cisneros, then-Under Secretary for Military Readiness, announced that the Pentagon was closing its newly formed Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion within its K-12 school system and reassigning its controversial DEI chief after a ten-month internal investigation.

The Pentagon’s climb-down was a big win for OpenTheBooks.com. We had worked alongside whistleblowers, journalists, other investigative non-profits, and ranking members of Congress to expose alleged conflicts of interest, violations of military ethics policies, and radical ideologies being forced on the kids of servicemen and servicewomen.

Today, we are announcing Cisneros was actually faking. The radical curriculum was not dismantled. Instead, it was stealthily embedded into the lesson plans and classrooms throughout the entire school system.

The Pentagon, under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, is preventing details of their DEI policies from coming to light by abusing the Freedom of Information Act. They bamboozled the public with window dressing in Congressional hearings while forcing woke extremism on the roughly 70,000 children of our military service members.

It’s critical that taxpayers understand the scope of the DEI philosophy within the DoD’s schools – deployed servicemembers often have no alternative but to use the Pentagon-run school system, called the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA).

https://unherd.com/newsroom/jonathan-haidt-abolish-dei-to-save-academia/

Abolishing DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, Jonathan Haidt told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, on Wednesday.

Those words mark a dramatic departure for Haidt, who has been known as a restrained, moderate voice on the subject of cancel culture, identity politics and what he calls the obsession with “safetyism” that has gripped Gen Z in the past decade. Haidt, a professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” and founder of the Heterodox Academy, an academic organisation committed to the ideals of viewpoint diversity and academic freedom. 

On Wednesday the professor said that he no longer has confidence that universities can reform themselves. The reason for his volte-face: the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews. Indeed, the antisemitic eruptions on campus, and subsequent Congressional testimony of three elite university presidents who waffled on genocide, was “probably the most important turning point in the history of American higher education,” Haidt stated. 

Haidt characterised those events as the logical consequence of DEI, or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which emphasises one’s identity and encourages people to think in terms of power dynamics between the privileged and the oppressed. The professor described people who see the world exclusively through the lens of power dynamics as “monomaniacs,” and said they are the ones who run the campus DEI apparatus. 

He said he used to think that some parts of DEI might make sense, but now it’s clear that DEI does not work, and often makes things worse by exacerbating racial hostilities.

https://www.thefp.com/p/diversity-equity-inclusion-nebraska-john-sailer

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s College of Engineering might sound like one of the last places in higher education where you’d expect to find evidence of DEI orthodoxy influencing big decisions. Nebraska is a red state and UNL is a public school. Plus, you’d expect hiring at an engineering school to be based on, well, scientific criteria. 

But through a public records request, I reviewed every diversity recruitment report created by the school over the last four years. And I’ve discovered that even here, DEI has been central to hiring decisions. 

For example, in 2020, when the school set out to hire a professor of National Defense/Computer Network Security, the search committee made its priority clear: each candidate’s “diversity” score—assessing how well applicants understand things like “many intersectional aspects of diversity”—was given equal weight to factors like research and teaching experience. 

Another search in 2021, for a professor of Big Data/Cybersecurity, stated: “the weight of the ‘diversity’ scores were equal to the other scored areas that contributed to the candidate’s overall score.”

And applicants have been ruled out for failing to clear DEI hurdles. According to one report, from 2021, “a small number of candidates” in a search for a professor of thermal sciences “were eliminated based on absence or weak diversity statement.” In another case that year, three applicants for a role in environmental engineering “did not include diversity statements and were disqualified from the search.”

Per the college’s diversity and inclusion plan, which is still in place, the reports carry high stakes: a search that fails to show “a serious consideration” of DEI-related issues risks being canceled, resulting in no hire at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/islamic-indoctrination-101/

In the late 1990s, I was beginning the second semester of my freshman year at a small liberal arts college in Virginia. At this particular school, all first-year students were required to take a “freshman seminar.” This was a smaller class than the introductory “survey” classes that students typically took before declaring a major. Graded on the basis of in-class discussion and papers rather than exams, these were intended to provide students with an opportunity to focus in greater depth on a narrow topic and to hone their skills in research and writing. There weren’t too many options for such classes when I registered, but I managed to get a spot in a freshman seminar on the promising topic of “Music in Religion.” I wasn’t thinking of majoring in either field, but I’d been a Christian all my life and was interested in other religions. I’d also studied music theory and performance (voice and piano) for many years, so it seemed like a good fit.

There were six of us enrolled in the class. On the first day of class, we met the professor, an ethnomusicologist originally from Bosnia, and received the syllabus. We’d be studying music within two religious traditions – Islam, during the first half of the course, and then Christianity in the latter half. In addition to participation in class discussion, we would be graded on the basis of two papers: a text-based research paper that we would write at mid-term about music in Islam and a longer one making comparisons of the use of music in both traditions and drawing upon field-work that we’d do at a local Christian church of our choosing in addition to textual research that would be submitted at the end of the semester.

We were told to think of ourselves as “participant-observers” during our fieldwork, which is a methodological concept used within the field of anthropology. The idea was that we should be loosely participating in religious services in order simultaneously to make mental observations of those rituals and practices.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dartmouth-becomes-first-ivy-league-university-to-reinstate-standardized-testing-requirement/

Dartmouth College will restore its SAT requirement for admissions beginning with the Class of 2029, making it the first Ivy League university to reinstate the testing requirement after doing away with it after Covid.

In an email to the university community, Dartmouth president Sian Beilock wrote that the decision to reimplement the standardized test was made in response to a faculty study which found that “standardized test scores are an important predictor of a student’s success in Dartmouth’s curriculum” regardless of a “student’s background or family income.”

Professors involved in the review included Elizabeth Cascio, Bruce Sacerdote, and Douglas Staiger of the economics department and Michele Tine of the sociology department, Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Lee Coffin told the Dartmouth.