RUTHFULLY YOURS

Recently, conservative author Ann Coulter canceled a speech at UC Berkeley because of Berkeley’s ham-handed response to radical students’ threats. In February, Berkeley had been the scene of violent riots that prevented a Breitbart News editor, Milo Yiannopoulos, from speaking. Berkeley is the nation’s leading public university, according to US News, and ironically, it was the birthplace of the free-speech movement of the 1960s.

Berkeley professor and former secretary of labor Robert Reich has concocted a conspiracy theory that avers that Yiannopoulos himself was responsible for the riots. However, Reich needs to explain how the supposed conspiracy has traveled back and forth between Berkeley, California and Middlebury, Vermont, where in early March rioting students physically injured Professor Allison Stanger, who was accompanying IQ expert Charles Murray to his car after demonstrators prevented him from speaking.

Fox News has reported that in anticipation of further riots, police from 40 schools have taken part in special response training.

Despite ongoing campus intolerance and violence, over the past few weeks I have participated in campus debates and discussions at Brooklyn College, where I teach, and at Lafayette College, where I gave an invited talk as part of the Wilson lecture series. Both institutions are dominated by left-oriented faculty and students, yet the interactions that I witnessed were respectful, collegial, and enlightening.

At Brooklyn College I have run a lecture series funded by the John Templeton Foundation and administered by the Institute for Humane Studies. My speakers have included Donald Trump’s executive vice president, George H. Ross, who was co-star of The Apprentice; Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Committee; and two economists, Oren Levin-Waldman and William T. Alpert, respectively of Metropolitan College and the University of Connecticut, who took different positions on the minimum wage issue. Students who are critical of Trump, who are opposed to the activities of the National Right to Work Committee, and who are in favor of a minimum wage were able to debate vigorously, rationally, and respectfully both with the speakers and with each other.

At Lafayette, I discussed my research findings concerning the preponderance of Democratic and left-oriented faculty in elite universities. Both left-oriented and conservative students debated with me and each other in a lengthy question-and-answer session. All three of the Brooklyn College events as well as the Lafayette event went overtime, and the students expressed enthusiasm for ideas without rancor.

What’s the difference? Why are elite institutions like Berkeley and Middlebury ridden with intolerant extremism and violence, with a leading faculty member attempting to rationalize such violence with a conspiracy theory?

The University of California at Los Angeles boasts a winning tradition and student Keith Fink was something of an academic Johnny Wooden. Fink won three consecutive National Collegiate Debate championships, went on to complete law school, then returned to UCLA to teach in the same department as his college debate coach Thomas Miller.

Professor Fink, also a practicing attorney, began teaching at UCLA in 2008 and proved popular with students, particularly on the subject of free speech. The courses, on the other hand, did not earn respect from politically correct campus bosses who have restricted access to his classes and now, he says, seek to have him fired. As professor Fink told Frontpage:

“They are all afraid of a vocal, rational intelligent conservative who can provide a check on the progressive narrative they seek to indoctrinate the students with and empowers the students with knowledge of their rights on how to fight against the UC when their rights are being violated.”

The campaign against professor Fink is relatively recent and duly turned up in the student newspaper. In January, Evolet Chiu wrote in the Daily Bruin, “Dozens of UCLA students are frustrated with their inability to enroll in a communication studies class this quarter, despite receiving a permission-to-enroll number from their instructor.” The PTE numbers were not honored for Communication Studies 167: “Sex, Politics and Race: Free Speech on Campus.”

Professor Fink handed out 41 PTE numbers but the next day “received several emails from students who were unenrolled from the course by the UCLA Registrar’s Office.” It was the first time such a thing had happened “in a decade of teaching at UCLA.”

One of those unenrolled was fourth-year student Taryn Jacobson, who told the Daily Bruin “This class is of utmost importance to me, being that I want to go to law school and (Fink) has so much knowledge to offer.”

As Chiu noted, new department chair Kerri Johnson also restricted professor Fink’s class size for Communication Studies M172: “Free Speech in the Workplace.” Johnson construed it as an issue of class size to ensure a “productive learning environment.” For professor Fink, “This is a violation of academic freedom, a violation of (UCLA’s) own rules and students’ rights. Students are not being treated with equity here.”

Associate professor and new department chair Kerri Johnson is not an attorney. As she explains, her research includes: “How/why does the way that we move our bodies communicate whether we are a man or woman, gay/lesbian or heterosexual, angry or sad?” Johnson is also co-author of “Swagger, sway and sexuality: Judging sexual orientation from body motion and morphology.” Kerri Johnson is also listed in UCLA’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies department, not known for commitment to objective truth, intellectual diversity, freedom of speech and due process.

Teachers at Highlands Elementary, a school in Edina, Minnesota, are indoctrinating five-year-olds in order to radicalize them and encourage them to become activists obsessed with race.

Public school teachers across America already saturate students with information about racial injustice in America in a nonstop barrage of historic facts and ahistorical nonsense. And in the culture at large, the media, politicians, and the entertainment industry can’t stop talking about race. The last thing any young student in America needs is to be taught about is race. Race matters only to radicals.

Leftists believe you have to get ’em while they’re young and impressionable.

Marxist theorist Paolo Freire advocated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that schools be used to inculcate radical values in students so they become agents of social change. Freire held that the so-called dominant pedagogy “silences” poor and minority children and that there is no such thing as a neutral educational system.

Joining Freire in his desire to use the educational system to level institutions is unrepentant communist terrorist and education theorist Bill Ayers, who has long advocated poisoning the minds of the young so they can agitate to fundamentally transform American society.

“If we want change to come, we would do well not to look at the sites of power we have no access to; the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon,” he said in 2012. “We have absolute access to the community, the school, the neighborhood, the street, the classroom, the workplace, the shop, the farm.”

This brings us to Highlands Elementary, which is located in one of the most affluent cities in Minnesota. Its school district is among the best in the state, Daniel Lattier reports at Intellectual Takeout. Highlands students do well in standardized testing: more than 85 percent of its students are proficient in reading and math.

But racial and social justice indoctrination have found their way onto the Highlands curriculum over the past year, according to Lattier. The phenomenon is not limited to Highlands, he adds. “[A] large percentage of students in public schools today are being trained to view the world primarily through the lenses of race, class, and gender.”

Katie Mahoney, who took over as principal of Highlands last fall, is proud of the school’s “Melanin Project.” She tweeted April 26: “Kindergarten tackles the Melanin project! @edinaschools @LeslieStageberg[.]” (Leslie Stageberg is a teacher.)

A poster made of construction paper is shown that reads, “Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone elses[sic]! Everyone is Special!”

Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea from Encounter Books. You can preview the book here.

Retired Professor Armando Simon offered us his thoughtful reflections on the rotten state of American universities and colleges in “A Professor Looks at the College Racket.”

Racket, indeed. We are indebted to Professor Simon for outing his colleagues. Like victims of the numbers racket or the drug racket, undergraduate students in America are being fleeced and harmed instead of given the opportunity to acquire a real education. Even the serious, career-oriented engineering or pre-med student, in order to graduate, must submit to courses that are part of what Roger Kimball has called “the vast cornucopia of absurdity that is university life today.”

Surveys show that most college graduates don’t know what you would expect an educated person to know – and how could they?

Professor Simon also offers this thought:

It did not always use to be like this. One of the most intelligent things that the United States Congress ever did (and, yes, sometimes it does something intelligent; not lately, though) was to provide returning veterans of World War II with the opportunity to go to college in order to go to a university in order to get a career instead of giving veterans the traditional “war bonus.” Thus began the rise of universities and community colleges. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, over a third of the population has a bachelor’s degree or higher, whereas in 1940 it was 4%.

Here again Professor Simon’s words no doubt meet with widespread agreement. Praise of the G.I. Bill is about as universal as condemnation of the deplorable state of higher education. But there is a problem here: those “universities and community colleges” are the epicenter of the racket Professor Simon is exposing. What if that explosion – 4% to over a third of the population – was not a good thing? What if that was what destroyed higher education in America?