RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/double-standard-free-speech-vanderbilt-richard-l-cravatts/

On February 23rd, Vanderbilt’s Chabad hosted a speaking event by Rudy Rochman, who describes himself as a “Jewish & Israel Rights Activist,” “with the intention,” as Chabad put it, “of creating a productive conversation around the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the history of Judaism, and antisemitism.”

Rochman, who was a founder of Columbia University’s chapter of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) when he was a student there, is known to be a pro-Israel activist so his audience would naturally be anticipating that sentiment from him. Additionally, Rochman had recently traveled to Nigeria where he had been imprisoned for three weeks, and, as Chabad explained in an Instagram post after the event, Rochman used “his personal traumatic experience in order to call attention to the systemic antisemitism against the Igbo tribe in Nigeria.”

Normally, if someone is discussing bigotry against minority groups and human rights violations in third-world countries, he would enjoy commiseration by the virtue-signaling identity groups on campus, but not in Rochman’s case due to his Zionist identity and his vigorous defense of Israel.

To challenge his unforgivable support of what is alleged to be an apartheid, racist regime, some activist students, members of The African Student Union (ASU) and the Indigenous Scholars Organization (ISO) attended the event, seemingly with the express purpose to challenge and debate Rochman. “A group of roughly 30 students mostly all of color,” the ASU and ISO wrote in a statement after the event, “planned to attend the event and ask Rudy questions during the Q&A section as a form of protest.” [Emphasis added.] So, clearly, the students were expecting, and hoping, to be offended by Rochman’s speech, and so they were.

https://www.city-journal.org/kentucky-summer-camp-teaches-sex-liberation

The principles of queer theory have escaped from the college campus and made their way into a summer camp for children in rural Kentucky. Last year, a nonprofit coalition called Sexy Sex Ed organized a series of “Sexy Summer Camp” events targeted toward minors that included lessons on “sex liberation,” “gender exploration,” “BDSM,” “being a sex worker,” “self-managed abortions,” and “sexual activity while using licit and illicit drugs.”

The program is the brainchild of Tanya Turner, who calls herself a “femme, fat, queer, magical pleasure worker” who was raised by “a host of witchy women” in a “coven-like mountain matriarchy” and uses “crystals,” “sex toys,” and “tarot” in her teaching. She founded Sexy Sex Ed in 2012 and has run dozens of events across the Appalachian region, recruiting LGBTQ youth and working with a number of regional philanthropies, including the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, Southern Power Fund, Chorus Foundation, and Rise Healthy for Life, which is affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist church. According to the organization’s promotional materials, the purpose of Sexy Summer Camp is to teach “teenagers and people of all ages to openly discuss personal and political consent, sexual safety, and anatomy.”

https://www.city-journal.org/medical-school-accreditation-body-solicits-dei-initiatives

The University of California–Davis School of Medicine has developed a mandatory anti-racism course and introduced a webinar series with talks on “Addressing Structural Racism” and “Moving from Ally to Advocate.” At Louisiana State University Health Shreveport School of Medicine, faculty must undergo annual training on cultural sensitivity, diversity, and bias. The University of Minnesota School of Medicine collaborates on its curriculum with the Medical Education Reform Student Coalition (MERSC), an offshoot of the activist organization White Coats 4 Black Lives.

All these measures exist, at least in part, to help the medical schools meet their accreditation requirements. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accredits medical schools in the United States, and has long required schools to bolster student and faculty diversity and teach cultural competence. Increasingly, however, these requirements appear to carry more weight, as schools have implemented far-reaching diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies with the express goal of satisfying them.

The Oregon Health and Science University, ranked first in the nation for family medicine, was reaccredited in the summer of 2020, but the LCME found it “unsatisfactory” in the area of “faculty diversity.” In response, the school’s senior associate dean for education promised a “concerted effort and sustained commitment at the highest levels of the institution.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/wisconsin-teachers-instructed-to-hide-students-gender-identities-from-parents/

Teachers at a school district in Wisconsin are being instructed to hide their students’ changing gender identities from parents on the grounds that “parents are not entitled to know,” and that it is “knowledge that must be earned,” according to leaked training documents.

The instruction was part of several recent staff development sessions for teachers in the Eau Claire Area School District in central Wisconsin that focused on safe spaces, gender identity, microaggressions, and oppression. According to one of the trainers, parents who disagree with their kids about gender identity issues are guilty of a form of “abuse.” The trainers also encouraged the teachers to be activists: “to vote, to demonstrate, to protest.”

Critics of the training sessions called the instruction “blatant disregard for the parents and guardians of our community’s children,” and they said it sends the message that schools are in control of children, not parents and families.

The fight over teacher training in Eau Claire is the latest skirmish in the national debate over the role of schools in promoting activism, and teaching “woke” concepts about race, gender, and sex.

The training sessions were held in late February, hosted by diversity and multiculturalism staffers from the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. The training was first reported by the conservative media group Empower Wisconsin, and by Parents Defending Education, a national nonprofit that fights classroom indoctrination and activists agendas in schools.

One of the slides in the training session reads, “Remember, parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned. Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student.”

As part of the discussion on the topic, Chris Jorgenson, director of UW Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center, said that “teachers are often put in terrible positions caught between parents and their students. But much like we wouldn’t act as stand-ins for abuse in other circumstances, we cannot let parents’ rejection of their children guide teachers’ reactions and actions and advocacy for our students.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/big-money-behind-push-1619-project-education-mary-grabar/

Many people have become aware of how Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Technology and Life nonprofit foundation influenced the 2020 elections.

But few are aware of how his company, Meta, and other far-left companies are also underwriting 1619 Project educational indoctrination programs for future voters. Taxpayers help subsidize these efforts. Those who profit are the world’s largest publisher, Penguin Random House, and the global media company, the New York Times, whose newspaper has the second-highest circulation in the nation.

The New York Times, a for-profit company, had its product promoted by a nonprofit company, the Pulitzer Center, which designed the prepackaged curriculum and pushed it, unvetted, into 3,500 schools immediately after the 1619 Project was published as a special issue of the August 18, 2019, New York Times Magazine. Coincidentally, Sam Dolnick, New York Times assistant managing editor, sits on the board of the Pulitzer Center. The Pulitzer Center also posts promotional materials, such as editor Jake Silverstein’s op-ed touting the 1619 Project books and webinars on teaching the 1619 Project, where subscriptions for the newspaper are pushed to teachers.

Penguin Random House, which published The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, a picture book, and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a pseudo-scholarly, 500-page neo-Marxist expansion of the magazine (copyright held by the New York Times) also enjoys the services of the Pulitzer Center to market its books to educators and librarians, and to fight laws intended to keep it away from students.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/why-george-washington-university-must-oppose-chinese-communist-oppression/

It seems like a no-brainer, but on one American campus, critics of a campaign against a tyrannical regime charge racism.

I n early February, posters criticizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for their subjugation of the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hong Kongers emerged on the campus of George Washington University. The posters, put up anonymously and highlighting the CCP’s reprehensible actions, soon turned controversial.

Student groups complained to university president Mark Wrighton that the posters were offensive and depicted racist caricatures. In a leaked email, Wrighton responded by saying that he too was “personally offended” by the posters. This email received significant press coverage, leading to a statement from Wrigthon in which he clarified his prior ignorance of the posters’ true meaning and reaffirmed his and the university’s commitment to free speech.

Throughout this time, I, along with a number of other students and student groups, have been pressuring the university to divest all of its endowment holdings from companies that enable the CCP’s genocide and persecution of the Uyghur people. Without the exposure of this initial email, we would never have known the extent of the uphill battle we face with the administration.

Universities are supposed to be forums of open and free exchanges of ideas and opinions. On too many campuses across the country, we’re seeing free speech and expression discouraged and even stifled.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/12/its-time-to-decolonize-anti-semitic-jewish-stu

When I was an undergraduate at Northwestern, I took a class in Jewish Studies primarily because I thought it would be easier for me since I had gone to Jewish Day School. In addition, my other classes had reputations for being tough that quarter. I also thought it might be interesting. It was neither. The class, in part, dissected the Bible according to its many supposed authors and their political proclivities. It was mostly based on the hypotheses of German Protestant scholars. The fact that the Bible has long been read by Jews and Christians as a source of wisdom, and by social leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a source of inspiration over millennia, was apparently irrelevant.  

Ironically, this example shows how Jewish Studies Departments have been colonized. Jewish Studies have always examined Jewish culture and history through the prism of Western thought (using whatever narrative had come to dominate academia at a given time), though it obscures this bias and its antisemitic effect. Most other “studies” departments tend to extoll the identity of their subjects. In contrast, American taxpayers and Jewish donors unwittingly continue to pay for degrading and even demonizing—Jews. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/princeton-walks-away-from-chicago/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

In 2015, Princeton University adopted the “University of Chicago principles” on free speech. Edward Yingling and Stuart Taylor Jr. have an article lamenting the way the university has been betraying those principles lately, and in an underhanded way. It has been punishing a professor for expressing his conservative views and then reinterpreting its rules to allow those actions.

For more, see this letter decrying the university’s behavior from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Dear Member of the Board:

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, now in its 26th year, has
unwaveringly advocated for robust academic freedom and strong
protection of campus freedom of expression. It is for this reason that we
once more bring to your attention and to the attention of the public the
way in which the Princeton administration has violated its own stated
commitment to free speech in the matter of Cotsen Professor in the
Humanities Joshua Katz. At stake is whether Princeton University will
maintain the principles of freedom of expression that it has publicly
announced and celebrated.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/florida_parental_rights_in_education_bill_given_the_old_democrat_histrionics_treatment.html

It’s getting to be a pattern with Democrats. A statehouse passes an extremely popular common-sense bill with voters, and Democrats immediately brand it with extremist distortions and say it’s something it’s not. We saw this with voter rights bills, dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0” by the left. We saw it with measures opposing mask and vaccine mandates, dubbed ‘people will die’ laws on the left. We see it with anti-illegal immigration bills, dubbed racist, and with the branding of parents protesting objectionable policies and failure to protect vulnerable students from sexual predators by school boards, as “terrorists.” The histrionics of the left are getting pretty baroque now, but they’re also entirely predictable.

Case in point: Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, expected to be signed by Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, states this:

The two bills in the state legislature, HB 1557 and SB 1834, state that a school district “may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” 

Democrats have branded it with the catchy slogan “don’t say gay,” which is found nowhere in the bill. The bill clearly permits age-appropriate discussion for students if there’s a need to use the word ‘gay’ or explain it, but that’s unimportant to the hysterical opponents on the left.

The left is on a tear:

“This would erase LGBTQ+ history and culture from lesson plans and it sends a chilling message to LGBTQ+ young people and communities,” said Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, the executive director of the national LGBTQ youth advocacy group GLSEN.

Apparently, this activist believes that if five-year-olds or seven-year-olds still learning their ABCs aren’t studying and thinking about the Stonewall Riots or the life of Harvey Milk at that tender age, they’ll be scarred for life. 

There’s also the health angle to the hysteria:

“We have to create a learning environment where they feel safe and healthy, or it’s not an effective learning environment,” said Heather Wilkie of the Zebra Coalition, a Central Florida LGBTQ advocacy group.

“When you have laws like this, that directly attack our kids for who they are, it prevents them from learning,” she said. “It prevents them from being able to be healthy.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/silencing-disfavored-speech-richard-l-cravatts/

As further evidence that the campus woke persist in trying to determine what may, and may not, be said on university campuses, activist students at UC Hastings School of Law shut down the appearance of conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro at a March 1st event organized by the Federalist Society.

Shapiro, incoming Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, it will be remembered, experienced the collective wrath and opprobrium of his own school when he tweeted comments criticizing Joe Biden’s pledge to nominate a black woman as the new Supreme Court justice. In a now-deleted January 26th tweet Shapiro remarked that, in his view, “Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog & v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman. Thank heaven for small favors?” 

The reference to a “lesser black woman” proved to be a most unfortunate choice of words, which Shapiro later admitted, and was interpreted by many on the Georgetown campus as being particularly egregious, racist, and indicative of the type of white supremacist ideology which assumes the inferiority of black people and questions both affirmative action and campaigns for equity and inclusion. For his tweets, Shapiro was denounced by the law school’s dean, fellow faculty, and students, including members of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) to call for Shapiro’s firing.

So, in March, when Shapiro arrived to speak with liberal Hastings faculty member, Rory Little, at the event entitled “The Breyer Vacancy: The Rise of Contentious All or Nothing Battles for Supreme Court Nominations,” activist students associated with Hastings’ BLSA had already planned to express their dissatisfaction with Shapiro’s views by shutting down the event and utilizing the “heckler’s veto” to silence him for his ideological transgressions.