RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/03/politics-and-merit-in-the-academy/

We want judges who know the law and whose primary motive is the desire to do justice without fear or favor. We would like judges who are incorruptible, and to ensure that they are not corrupted in practice, we pay them salaries that exceed what all but the top echelon of lawyers make from the practice of law, for duties that give judges plenty of time for golfing, writing books, or watching Frozen XIV with their grandchildren. When judges enter their courtrooms, we stand up for them, we speak in their presence only when called upon, and even outside the court, their presence inspires fear and respect.

We might think that to get such judges, we would rely on the judgment of judges themselves. Most US states, however, elect judges by popular vote. And even where judges are appointed rather than elected, the final say on the appointment of judges is in the hands of politicians. In many US states, merit panels make formal recommendations to state governors, and in the US Federal System, the president and his advisors consult informally with sitting and retired judges before making the most senior appointments. Similar mixtures of merit and political selection, with the politicians having the last word, exist in every country regarded as a democracy except India and Israel. In India, politicians ignore judges (who are entirely self-appointed) when they feel they have to, and in Israel, judges in fact have final say over every supposedly political or legislative decision.

Judges are thus, in actual democracies other than India, either elected or appointed by the elected. Therefore, judges, by and large, reflect the various opinions of the voters who pick the politicians. They are, in democracies, widely respected, highly professional, and, on the whole, honest and decent. Some judges are liberal, some are conservative, and a small minority (like a small minority of the voters) are extremists, but hardly any are legal incompetents or personally corrupt.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/harvard-hosts-gathering-to-breathe-and-heal-event-to-help-students-grieve-claudine-gays-ouster

The Harvard Divinity School’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging hosted a “Gathering to Breathe and Heal” event on Thursday to help students grieve the resignation of disgraced former President Claudine Gay.

“For this gathering, we will create a space for us to discuss and process the departure of our former president, Claudine Gay,” the office wrote in a newsletter announcing the event, obtained by The Daily Wire. The event was intended to give participants the opportunity to “gather to breathe and to heal.”

Gay was forced to resign from her position last month amid allegations of plagiarism in various academic works that came to light while she was already under immense pressure for her failure to address the rise of antisemitism on campus.

The newsletter stated that many students are feeling grief upon their arrival to campus.

“This grief and loss may be connected to our personal lives; national and global unrest, harm, and violence; storms and natural disasters; or these increasing times of tension and divide on our campus and in our communities,” it said. “For many of us, this grief and loss also includes the resignation of former President Claudine Gay after her short tenure.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/02/go_woke_go_broke_college_edition.html

October 7th, when Israel came under a major terrorist attack, was a horrible day for the victims, their families, and all of us who do not believe that young women should be raped at a music festival. 

It was also a bad day for institutions like Harvard which showed us just what the students are being taught.   

In comes Harvard donor Ken Griffin and out go donations, or, the latest version of go woke, go broke. 

This is the story:

Billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin ’89 said he is pausing donations to Harvard over its handling of antisemitism on campus, a move that comes less than one year after donating $300 million to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Griffin announced his decision to stop donating to Harvard during a keynote talk at a conference hosted by the Managed Funds Association in Miami. Griffin, however, left open the possibility that the University could win back his support.

“I’d like that to change and I have made that clear to members of the corporate board,” he said. “But until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role as educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution.”

He added that Harvard students were “whiny snowflakes” caught in a misguided ideology of oppressor and oppressed during his remarks.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nyu-professor-suspended-after-being-recorded-denying-hamas-atrocities-denouncing-israel/

New York University recently suspended an adjunct professor, who’s been outspoken about his antisemitic views for years, after a video released online showed him denying that Hamas terrorists raped Israeli women and committed other atrocities on October 7.

In the video, Amin Husain is seen defending Hamas’s actions and denouncing Israel at a teach-in organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at The New School, a private research university located in New York City. The informal lecture took place on December 5, the Free Press reported Thursday.

“Don’t take what the media says,” Husain said in the video, which the Free Press obtained from S.A.F.E. Campus, an organization that combats antisemitism on college campuses in the U.S. “It’s really important. . . . Because these kind of questions try to put you on the defensive. They try to say . . . ‘Oh my God, you’re supporting rapists and people that behead babies,’ both of which, you know, whatever, we know it’s not true.”

“We live in a Zionist city,” Husain added, referring to New York. “No, let’s be real about this, let’s be f***ing real.”

On the same day that the Free Press published the story, NYU announced that Husain had been suspended.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-regis-high-school-endures

The late journalist Christopher Hitchens grew up middle class in the economically sclerotic England of the 1970s. “If there’s going to be an upper class in this country,” he reports his mother saying, “Christopher is going to be in it.” He won a scholarship to a good “public” school (meaning private and exclusive, in the British parlance), went on to Oxford, and launched a dazzling literary career. Hitchens’s mother did not herself grow up in privilege, but she had figured out how the world worked.

On January 23, Regis High School, a small Jesuit institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, sent acceptance letters to approximately 135 eighth-graders in and around the five boroughs. The letters will change the trajectories of these students’ lives, and perhaps the destinies of their families in the bargain. Regis, which operates tuition-free owing principally to the largesse of a wealthy Catholic philanthropist (known to Regians as “The Benefactress”) who endowed the school in 1912, gives priority in admissions to promising young men who otherwise would not be able to afford a Jesuit education. (The school continues to raise additional money privately.) Its hope is that scholarship recipients will become leaders in their communities—in the words of the school’s mission statement, “men for others.”

Regis achieves extraordinary results. Former Marine officer and recent National Book Award winner Phil Klay is a Regis graduate, as was legendary book publisher Robert Giroux, Nobel Prize in Medicine winner John O’Keefe, several federal judges of the Southern District of New York and Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and current Houston Astros pitcher Declan Cronin. Nearly 20 percent of Regis graduates are accepted by an Ivy League college; many more attend highly ranked “Ivy-adjacent” schools. Such access to elite college education may be purchased elsewhere in New York City for $50,000 a year or more in private school tuition. At Regis, it may be had by achieving a high score on a scholarship exam, along with excellent grades and letters of recommendation—and in no other way. Regis turns away calls from alumni, donors, prominent New Yorkers, and anyone else trying to put a thumb on the scale in the admissions process.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/25/subliterate-readers-and-media-literacy/

Per Assembly Bill 873, media literacy skills must now be taught in California schools. The law requires that it not be done in a stand-alone class but rather must be woven into existing English language arts, science, math, and history-social studies classes.

Assemblymember Marc Berman, who authored the law, claims, “Teaching media literacy is a key strategy to support our children, their families, and our society that are inundated with misinformation and disinformation on social media networks and digital platforms. From climate denial to vaccine conspiracy theories to the January 6 attack on our nation’s Capital, the spread of online misinformation has had global and deadly consequences.”

It’s not only California that has a media literacy law. Texas, New Jersey, and Delaware have also passed this kind of legislation, and more than a dozen other states are moving in that direction. However, according to Media Literacy Now, a nonprofit research organization that advocates for media literacy in K-12 schools, California’s law falls short of its recommendations. The group explains that California’s approach doesn’t include funding to train teachers, an advisory committee, or any way to monitor the law’s effectiveness.

As noted by Berman, the rush toward media literacy is a priority because young adults are more likely to believe information from social media than traditional news outlets. While I am hardly a proponent of getting news from social media, is the mainstream media really any better?

The New York Times, aka the “newspaper of record,” may be, historically speaking, the worst, most deceitful media outlet in the country. Most notably, the Times and its writer, Walter Duranty, colluded to knowingly overlook the Stalin-led starvation of Ukraine in 1931. The newspaper also went all in for the great Duke University lacrosse team hoax of 2006, which centered around an alleged rape that never happened. Additionally, The Times also embraced the disgraced 1619 project in 2019. And in 2021, the newspaper referred to the blatantly satirical Babylon Bee as a “far-right misinformation site.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/01/23/public_educations_alarming_new_4th_r_reversal_of_learning_1006226.html

Call it the big reset – downward – in public education.

The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.

Four years later, the money is almost gone and students haven’t made up that lost academic ground, equaling more that a year of learning for disadvantaged kids. Driven by fears of a spike in dropout rates, especially among blacks and Latinos, many states and school districts are apparently leaving in place the lower standards that allow students to get good grades and graduate even though they have learned much less, particularly in math.

It’s as if many of the nation’s 50 million public school students have fallen backwards to a time before rigorous standards and accountability mattered very much.

“I’m getting concerned that, rather than continuing to do the hard work of addressing learning loss, schools will start to accept a new normal of lower standards,” said Amber Northern, who oversees research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a group that advocates for academic rigor in schools.

The question is—why did the windfall of federal funding do so little to help students catch up?

Northern and other researchers, state officials and school leaders interviewed for this article say many districts, facing staffing shortages and a spike in absenteeism, didn’t have the bandwidth to take on the hard work of helping students recover. But other districts, including those that don’t take academic rigor and test scores very seriously, share in the blame. They didn’t see learning loss as a top priority to tackle. It was easier to spend the money on pay rises for staff and upgrading buildings.

The learning loss debacle is the latest chapter in the decade-long decline in public schools. Achievement among black and Latino students on state tests was already dropping before COVID drove an exodus of families away from traditional public schools in search of a better education. Although by lowering standards and lifting the graduation rate districts have created the impression that they have bounced back, experts say that’s the wrong signal to send, creating complacency when urgency is needed.